The People of God (1 Peter 2:9–12)

Peter uses terminology that once identified ethnic Israel as the sole people of God. For example, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession” (1 Peter 2:9). The reference is Exodus 19: 5, 6: “You shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” It would appear that Peter was writing this letter to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He referred to his readers as “the elect exiles of the dispersion” (1:1). A wrong understanding here can lead to confusion when it comes to correctly interpreting Peter.

Most commentators lean towards Hebrew Christians as Peter’s target audience. He was the apostle to the circumcision as Paul was to the Gentiles, was he not (Gal. 2:7, 8)? However, Peter also uses language informing his readers that salvation brought them into a new covenant relationship with God that so they were no longer to “be conformed to the passions of [their] former ignorance” (v. 14). Ignorance was a term used of Gentiles outside the old covenant community (Ephesians 4:18; Acts 17:30). Also, note that verse 9 is followed by this: “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people” (v. 10, citing Hosea 6:9, 10). Paul cites the Hosea passage in Romans 9 to argue that Gentiles were also being called as a people for His name (vv. 24–26). The gist of the Hosea text is that Israel’s unfaithfulness made them like the Gentiles, “not a people of God.”

The confusion of many is due, quite frankly to dispensational error that insists that God has two separate and distinct peoples: the nation of Israel and the church of Jesus Christ. They teach that while Jews are being saved in this gospel age, most will not have God’s particular attention until the end times when He will remove the church and focus again on the nation of Israel. (I do believe that God will save a remnant of the Jewish nation when Christ returns as per Zechariah 13:8, 9.) This confusion is particularly noticeable in interpreting end-time prophecy.

Paul’s discussion in Romans 9 is key and pertinent to defining who the people of God are. In verse 6, Paul’s problem is stated: God’s promise and covenant to the seed of Abraham seems to have failed and His Word voided because, save a few, God’s people rejected their Messiah. Paul’s response is that God never intended to save all of ethnic Israel (vv. 6–13). He will save a remnant, but not all ethnic Israel is to be included into spiritual Israel, the true people of God.

The purpose of ethnic Israel was to bring in the true Israel, Jesus Christ. The gospel privilege was never intended to be limited to the Jewish nation but to include Gentiles as well (Eph. 2:11–22). The New Covenant people of God are not an extension of the Old Covenant community but a new creation in Christ Jesus (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:5).