1 Peter 2:11

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims This is manifestly the beginning of a fresh section of the Epistle. Somewhat after the manner of St Paul, the Apostle, alter having allowed his thoughts to travel through the mysteries of redemption, reaches, as it were, the highest region of the truth, and then pauses in the act of writing or dictating, and takes a fresh start. In doing so, however, he goes back to the opening words of the Epistle (see note on chap. 1 Peter 1:1). Those to whom he wrote were "strangers and pilgrims" (the English reader must remember that "pilgrim" is but another form of peregrinus), not only as belonging to the Jews of the dispersion, but as being, like the patriarchs of old (Hebrews 11:13), men who, in whatever country they might be, felt that their true home was elsewhere. In the LXX. version of Psalms 39:12 we find both the words and the thoughts to which St Peter now gives utterance. It is obvious that the special local position of the disciples, though not, it may be, altogether excluded, is now thrown quite into the background.

abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul The negative aspect of the Christian life is put forward first, as being prior, both in order of thought, and often in that of time, to its more positive development. The entreaty rests upon the character implied in the previous words. Travellers in a strange land, yet more in the land of enemies, do not care commonly to adopt all its customs. They retain their nationality. The exiles who hung their harps by the waters of Babylon did not forget Jerusalem, and would not profane its hymns by singing them at idolfeasts (Psalms 137:1-3). The citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem were in like manner to keep themselves from all that would render them unfit for their true home. The words "fleshly lusts" have, perhaps, a somewhat wider range than the English term suggests, and take in all desires that originate in man's corrupt nature, as well as those directly connected with the appetites of the body: comp. St Paul's list of the "works of the flesh" in Galatians 5:19-21. In the description of these as "warring against the soul," we have another striking coincidence of language with St James (James 4:1) and St Paul (Romans 7:23). "Soul" stands here, as in chap. 1 Peter 1:9, for the higher element of man's nature which, in the more elaborate threefold division of man's nature, adopted by St Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and elsewhere, includes both "soul and spirit."