And this is the word that was preached to you

The last single verse this volume takes clause by clause is a quotation with a comment attached, and the comment is the point.

Peter has just called his readers born again through the living and enduring word of God — the seed from Week Five. Then he quotes Isaiah 40, the passage this volume met in Week Four.

All flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall.

That is Isaiah looking at a nation about to go into exile and telling it the truth about itself.

And then the contrast, and then Peter’s addition.

But the word of the Lord stands forever. That is Isaiah.

And this is the word that was proclaimed to you. That is Peter.

Take the sentence slowly, because it is doing something enormous in eleven words.

Isaiah’s word of the LORD that stands forever is being identified with the message these readers heard from a traveling preacher in a Roman province. Not something like it. The same word.

Twenty weeks have argued that the Book is God-breathed, living, active, settled in heaven, refined like silver, worth more than gold. Every one of those claims is about something grand and far away.

Peter says the grand and far-away thing is the thing somebody told you.

And note the audience. He is writing to scattered strangers in five provinces — people with no temple, no scrolls of their own, no scholarship, and in many cases no legal standing. Whatever reached them reached them by voice.

That was the enduring word. The same one that outlasts grass, flowers, nations and empires.

Which is the answer to a question a reader might reasonably ask at the end of a volume like this: is the Bible on my kitchen table the same thing all these verses are talking about?

Peter answers it in a subordinate clause, almost in passing, and then moves straight on to instructions about ridding yourself of malice and craving pure spiritual milk.

There is also a quiet claim in the tense. Peter says the word was preached to them — a completed act, in the past, by somebody they could probably name. The eternal thing arrived on a particular afternoon, in a particular room, out of somebody’s mouth. That is how it has always arrived.

He does not linger over it. He states it and gets on with the next thing to do — which is what a man does when something is settled.

Peter quotes Isaiah 40:6–8, following the Greek Old Testament closely. The passage stands at the head of the second half of Isaiah, immediately after comfort, comfort My people and the voice crying in the wilderness — the passage all four Gospels apply to John the Baptist.

The word Peter uses in his added clause is rhema, the spoken utterance, rather than logos, which he used two verses earlier of the enduring word. The shift is deliberate: the abiding word is what was said to them.

1 Peter 1:23–25 joins three images this volume has studied separately — the imperishable seed, the withering grass, and the enduring word — into one argument about new birth. Peter's compression is worth reading aloud.

The letter is addressed to the elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia — five Roman provinces covering most of what is now Turkey. The claim about the enduring word is made to people scattered across a large map and, as chapter 4 makes clear, under pressure.

Isaiah 40:6–8 is a dialogue: a voice says Cry out, and the prophet answers What shall I cry? The answer he is given is that all flesh is grass. The most comforting verse about the enduring word begins with a preacher asking what he is supposed to say.

Look it upG4487 ῥῆμα rhema, spoken word, utterance · G3306 μένω meno, to remain, abide · G5528 χόρτος chortos, grass · G2097 εὐαγγελίζω euangelizo, to proclaim as good news

Where this touches1 Peter 1:22–2:3 · Isaiah 40:6–8 · Matthew 24:35 (Week Four, Day Six) · Luke 8:11 (Week Five, Day Two) · 1 Peter 2:2 (Week Six, Day Two). The nineteen earlier single-verse days were Psalm 19, 2 Timothy 3:16–17, Isaiah 55:10–11, Matthew 24:35, Psalm 12:6, Matthew 5:18, Romans 15:4, Hebrews 4:12, Psalm 119:89, Joshua 21:45, Isaiah 66:2, Psalm 138:2, Jeremiah 1:12, Hebrews 1:1–2, Psalm 33:6, Deuteronomy 29:29, John 5:39–40, Romans 10:17 and Proverbs 30:5.