What Does 1 Peter 1:8 Mean?

(8) **Whom, having not seen.**—Said in contrast to the word “revelation” in the last verse: “whom you love already, though He is not yet revealed, so that you have not as yet seen Him.” There seems to be a kind of tender pity in the words, as spoken by one who himself had seen so abundantly (Acts 4:20; Acts 10:41; 2Peter 1:16). In this and the following verse we return again from the sorrow to the joy, and to the true cause of that joy, which is only to be found in the love of Jesus Christ. There is another reading, though not so good either in sense or in authority, “whom, without *knowing* Him, ye love.” Bengel remarks that this is intended for a paradox, sight and knowledge being the usual parents of love. **Ye love.**—The word of calm and divinely-given attachment, in fact the usual word in the New Testament, that which Christ used in questioning the writer (John 20:15), not the word of warm human friendship with which St. Peter then answered Him. **In whom.**—To be construed, not with “ye rejoice,” but with “believing.” The participles give the *grounds* of the rejoicing: “because at present without seeing ye believe in Him none the less, therefore ye rejoice.” The word “rejoice” takes us back to 1Peter 1:6 : “ye greatly rejoice, I repeat.” Notice, again, the stress laid on faith: we have already had it three times mentioned. St. Peter, whose own faith gained him his name and prerogative, is, at least, as much the Apostle of faith as St. Paul is, though his conception of it, perhaps, slightly differs from St. Paul’s. The definition given by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Hebrews 11:1) might have been, perhaps was, drawn from a study of St. Peter’s writings. Our present verse gives us the leading thought of “faith” as it appears in both of these works addressed to Hebrews, viz., its being the opposite of *sight, “*the evidence of things not seen,” rather than as the opposite of *works.* And the main object of both these Epistles is to keep the Hebrews from slipping back from internal to external religion, *i.e., *to strengthen *faith.* (Comp. Hebrews 3:12.) The Apostle is full of admiration for a faith which (unlike his own) was not based on sight. (See John 20:29—an incident which may have been in the writer’s mind.) **Unspeakable.**—The beautiful Greek word (which means “unable to find expression in words”) seems to have been coined by St. Peter. **Full of glory.**—Literally, *that hath been glorified; i.e., *a joy that has reached its ideal pitch, and feels no further sense of imperfection; a signification of the word found, for instance, in Romans 8:30.