Spurgeon Commentary Series

1 Peter

Charles Spurgeon

Elliot Ritzema and Jessi Strong

Editors

Lexham Press, 2014

Spurgeon Commentary: 1 Peter

Copyright 2014 Lexham Press

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

http://www.lexhampress.com

You may use brief quotations from this content in presentations, books, or articles. For all other uses, e-mail us for permission: permissions@lexhampress.com.

All Scripture quotations are from the Lexham English Bible (leb) unless otherwise indicated. Copyright 2013 Lexham Press.

The persons whom Peter addressed were in great need of comfort. They were strangers, strangers scattered far from home. They had in consequence to suffer manifold trials and therefore needed plenteous consolations. Such is our position in a spiritual sense. We, too, are strangers and foreigners. We are pilgrims and sojourners below, and our citizenship is in heaven. We also require the word of comfort, for while our banishment lasts we look for tribulations.

—Charles Spurgeon, “A String of Pearls”

Foreword

When 19-year-old Charles Spurgeon was called to the New Park Street Pulpit in 1854, London newspapers derided him as a brash upstart. Critics complained that his plainspoken, direct speaking style was too edgy—and dangerously innovative. A secular magazine referred to his colloquial speech as “slang.” A newspaper editorial categorized his preaching as “ginger-pop sermonizing.” One particularly harsh critic wrote:

He is nothing unless he is an actor—unless exhibiting that matchless impudence which is his great characteristic, indulging in coarse familiarity with holy things, declaiming in a ranting and colloquial style, strutting up and down the platform as though he were at the Surrey Theatre, and boasting of his own intimacy with Heaven with nauseating frequency. His fluency, self-possession, oratorical tricks, and daring utterances, seem to fascinate his less-thoughtful hearers, who love excitement more than devotion.1

During that first year, pundits regularly predicted an early end to Spurgeon’s ministry in London: “He is a nine days’ wonder—a comet that has suddenly shot across the religious atmosphere. He has gone up like a rocket, and ere long will come down like a stick.”2

Secular newspapers were not the only ones to voice their disapproval of the young preacher. One distinguished older minister published a vitriolic critique of Spurgeon in an evangelical periodical. Among other things, he wrote, “I have—most solemnly have—my doubts as to the Divine reality of his conversion.”3

Of course Spurgeon was in no way callow or reckless. On the contrary, for someone so young he was uncommonly well-read, discerning, sober-minded, articulate, and profound. (The record of his published sermons easily substantiates that assessment.) Years later, Spurgeon himself would reflect on his earliest years of ministry, saying, “I might have been a young man at twelve, but at sixteen I was a sober, respectable Baptist parson, sitting in ...