Daily Manna · Day 64 · March 5
Chosen Generation
“But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light:”
Charles Wesley came to faith in May 1738, and one of the hymns he wrote about it is still sung today. The verse people sing loudest is about a prison: "Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature's night; Thine eye diffused a quickening ray; I woke, the dungeon flamed with light." He did not write that a candle was lit. He wrote that the whole dungeon flamed.
Peter was writing to believers "scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia," five regions in what is now Turkey. They had been pushed away from home, and their neighbours spoke against them as evildoers. Peter gives them four titles, and none of them rests on anything they had done: "a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people." In the English of 1611, peculiar did not mean strange. It meant belonging to one owner. These titles come from what God said to Israel, and at Sinai He called Israel "a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation." Now Peter gives those same titles, without apology, to churches that included Gentile believers. The next verse says how new this is: "Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God."
Then Peter gives the purpose: "that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light." God did this so that they would announce what He had done, and feeling special was never the goal. Three verses later Peter gets practical about where that announcing happens, and it is in ordinary life among their neighbours: "Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation." In the KJV, conversation means your whole way of living.
So here is something to hold on to. Your standing with God does not come from what you do, and it was never meant to sit still. Wesley did not write that God made the dungeon a little brighter. He wrote that a man asleep in the dark woke up, and from then on he kept telling people about the light.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 64 is The Old Paths (Jeremiah 6:16).