1 Peter 1:3

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ Here again we note the close correspondence with the opening words of two of St Paul's Epistles (2 Corinthians 1:3; Ephesians 1:3). It is, of course, possible that both have adopted what was a common inheritance from Jewish devout feeling, modified by the new faith in Christ; but looking to the reproduction of Pauline phrases in other instances, the idea of derivation seems on the whole the most probable.

which according to his abundant mercy Literally, as in the margin, "his much or great mercy." The thought, though here not the phraseology, is identical with St Paul's "being rich in mercy" (Ephesians 2:4). In the prominence thus given to the "mercy" of God, as shewn in His redeeming and sanctifying work, we recognise the conviction that those who were the objects of His favour were at once wretched, and unworthy of it through their guilt, and that His pity for that wretchedness was the source of the "grace" or "favour" which He had thus shewn to them.

hath begotten us again unto a lively hope Better perhaps "a living hope," a hope not destined, as human hopes proverbially were, to be frail and perishable, but having in it the elements of a perennial life. And this was brought about by God's regenerating work on and in the soul. The word which St Peter uses is peculiar to him among the writers of the New Testament, and meets us again in 1 Peter 1:23. The thought, however, is common to him with St James ("of His own will begat He us," James 1:18), with St Paul ("the washing of regeneration," Titus 3:5), and with our Lord's teaching ("except a man be born again") as recorded by St John (John 3:5). It is noticeable that St Peter, who elsewhere (chap. 1 Peter 3:21) lays so much stress on baptism, does not here refer to it as the instrument of the new birth, but goes further back to the Resurrection of Christ as that without which baptism and faith would have been alike ineffectual. In this also his teaching is substantially at one with St Paul's, who sees in baptism that in which we are at once "buried with Christ," and raised by and with Him to "newness of life" (Romans 6:3-4).