1 Peter 1:18

1 Peter 1:18. Knowing that not with corruptible things, silver or gold, were ye redeemed. The injunction to a walk in godly fear, which is sustained by motives of this strength and variety, was implicitly enforced (as Huther rightly notices) by the relation which the cognate terms of 1 Peter 1:15; 1 Peter 1:17 indicate between the God who calls them and the elect who respond by ‘calling on' Him. It is now more explicitly enforced by a positive statement, the terms of which are difficult to construe, but the scope of which is that the thought of what it cost to help them to break with the old walk of heathenism should be argument enough for cultivating now a walk of gravity and circumspection. A redemption is in view which is expressed by a verb that is found in the N. T. only in other two passages (Titus 2:14; Luke 24:21), although several terms connected with it occur not unfrequently. It has radically the sense of redeeming by payment of a ransom price. Of the three New Testament occurrences one has the political or theocratic sense of delivering the kingdom of Israel, and the specific idea of price recedes into the background (Luke 24:21). The other two keep the idea of the ransom price in the foreground. In the Old Testament, the term and its cognates are used in a variety of cases, e.g. of recovering something which has been devoted by substituting an equivalent in its place (Leviticus 27:27), of buying back something that has been sold (Leviticus 25:25), of ransoming souls by a money payment to the Lord when Israel was numbered (Exodus 30:12-16), of redeeming the first-born by a price paid to Aaron (Numbers 3:44-51). The terms apply in the New Testament to ransoming from the bondage of evil (Titus 2:14), as well as from the penalty of evil. Here the ransom price is stated first negatively as not ‘corruptible' (or ‘perishable') things, not even the most valuable of these, such as silver or gold. The form of the words here used for silver and gold is that used generally, though not invariably, for the coined metals, pieces of money; hence some think that the writer has in mind here the sacred money paid for the redemption of the first-born or as the expiation-money for those who were enrolled by being numbered. But the contrast with the ‘precious blood' makes such a limitation inept. The A. V. here gives ‘and' for ‘or,' which is the case also in one or two other passages (Mark 6:11; 1 Corinthians 11:27), and is due (as is suggested by Lillie) probably to following the Genevan and Bishops' Bibles.

from your vain walk handed down by your fathers. What they were ransomed from is a particular manner of life which formed a bondage too strong to be broken by any ordinary ransom. This manner of life is described as ‘vain,' the adjective here selected as the note of ‘vanity' implying not so much the hollowness of the life as its futility and resultlessness the fact that it missed its aim, and that nothing of real worth issued from it. It is further described by a term meaning ‘ancestral,' ‘hereditary,' or ‘traditional,' which indicates how mighty a spell it must have wielded over them. It was a life ‘fortified and almost consecrated to their hearts by the venerableness of age and ancestral authority' (Lillie), and thereby entrenched the more strongly in its vanity. Both these terms suit Gentile life. The ‘vain' expresses what a life is which has no relation to God. It rules the other phrase ‘ancestral,' or ‘handed down from your fathers,' and makes it descriptive of a Gentile life rather than a Jewish (see also the Introduction). What could set them free from the despotism of a life, poor as the life might be, which not only ran the course of natural inclination, but laid upon them those strong bonds of birth, respect for the past, relationship, habit, example? Nothing but a new moral power, Peter reminds them, which it cost something incalculably more precious than silver or gold to bring in, namely, the sinless life of the Messiah.