1 Peter 2:7-10

The central thing in the preceding paragraph was the Stone with the structure erected on it. The sudden transition from the figure of babes growing to that of stones built up, is by no means characteristic only of Peter. In Paul we have even bolder instances of apparent confusion of metaphors, as when in one breath he represents believers as at once walking, rooted, and built up in Christ (Colossians 2:6-7). This disregard of the ordinary congruities of figurative speech, however, is not due to mere rhetorical vehemence overleaping the accepted proprieties of style. It has its reason in the nature of the realities of grace, which language is strained to express, and in which things meet which are otherwise distinct. As Paul's seeming mixture of the similes of walking, rooting, and building has its explanation in the spiritual fact that the union with Christ, which his phrase ‘in Christ' denotes, is at once the sphere within which the life of the Christian moves, the soil in which it is rooted, and the foundation on which it stands; so Peter's seeming confusion between growth and building is but a reflection of the fact that the edifice of which he speaks is a living one, which increases by the living process of growth. How much this injunction to be built up on Christ by coming ever to Him involved for these readers will be understood, however, only if it is remembered that to come to Christ in those days meant for the Jew expulsion from the Temple and the fellowship of the ancient Church of God, and for the Gentile the disruption of the bonds of national religion and ancestral social usage. It is not without reason, therefore, that at this point the writer pauses to exhibit the more than compensation for all such loss and dislocation to be found in the honour which accrues through that attachment to Christ which has been depicted as the coming of living stones to be built upon a living foundation. This he does in a remarkable series of descriptive terms transferred from the Old Testament Israel to the New.