1 Peter 2:10

1 Peter 2:10. Who once were no people, but are now God's people. A solemn and summary conclusion, sketching in two bold strokes the vast contrast between their present and their past. The contrast is drawn in order that in the recollection of their past they may find an incentive to adhere at any cost to their prophetic vocation of telling forth to others the excellences of God. Once they were not only not Gods people, but ‘no people.' National connection they might have had, but the unity that makes a people worthy of the name of a people they had not. Their lack of relation to God involved lack of that relation to each other which merges differences of race, speech, worship, custom, opinion. Now they are not only a people, with the bonds of a true people's union, but God's people, owned of Him and administered by Him.

who once had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy. If they were in time past no people, the reason lay here, that God's mercy had not brought them into relation to Himself. Two participles briefly express this, and they vary in tense. The former is the perfect, as referring to a state in which they had long continued previously. The latter is the historical past, as referring to a definite act of God which changed the state. Once they had been in the condition of persons not compassionated; now they are persons once for all compassionated of God. The verse is a free adaptation of the prophetic passage (Hosea 2:23), in which Jehovah, reversing the ominous names, Lo-ruhamah and Lo-ammi, given in the first chapter (1 Peter 2:6; 1 Peter 2:9), says of Israel, ‘I will compassion Uncompassionated, and to Not-my-people I will say My-people, and he will say My God!' Peter's reproduction is of the most general kind, omitting the characteristic notes which apply specially to a people who had once been God's people, and had lapsed in order to be restored. Though in Hosea, therefore, the words are spoken of Israel, it does not follow that they must refer to Jews here, Paul applies them to Gentiles (Romans 9:25), and that Peter's view-point is the same appears from the form which he has given to the contrast, which is too absolute to suit those who, while originally God's people, had ceased to be true to that vocation, and had lost on that account God's favour. (See also the Introduction.)