1 Peter 2:5

ye also, as lively stones Better, as living stones, there being no reason for a variation in the English, to which there is nothing corresponding in the Greek. The repetition of the same participle gives prominence to the thought that believers are sharers in the life of Christ, and that, in the building up of the spiritual temple, each of these "living stones" takes its voluntary, though not self-originated, part. It is an open question, as far as the Greek is concerned, whether the verb is in the passive or the middle voice, in the indicative or the imperative mood, but the sense is, perhaps, best given by the rendering, build yourselves up.

a spiritual house The words come as a secondary predicate of the previous clause. "This," St Peter says, "is what you will become by coming to Christ and building yourselves on Him." The "house," like the corner-stone, carries our thoughts back to the Temple as "the house of God" (1 Kings 8:10), which finds its antitype in that Ecclesiato which St Paul attaches the same glorious title (1 Timothy 3:15). We can hardly think that St Peter could write these words without remembering the words which had told him of the rock on which Christ would build His Church, and into the full meaning of which he was now, at last, entering (Matthew 16:18).

a holy priesthood The thought of the Temple is followed naturally by that of its ritual and of those who are the chief agents in it. Here also there is a priesthood, but it is not attached, as in the Jewish Temple, to any sacerdotal caste, like that of the sons of Aaron, but is co-extensive with the whole company of worshippers. As in the patriarchal Church, as in the original ideal of Israel (Exodus 19:5), from which the appointment of the Levitical priesthood was a distinctly retrograde step consequent on the unfitness of the nation for its high calling as a kingdom of priests, as in the vision of the future that floated before the eyes of Isaiah (Isaiah 61:6), so now in the Church of Christ, there was to be no separate priesthood, in the old sense of the word, and with the old functions. All were to offer "spiritual sacrifices" (we note the identity of thought with Romans 12:1) as contrasted with the burnt-offerings or meat-offerings of Jewish ritual. And, by what to a Jew must have seemed at first the strangest of all paradoxes, and afterwards the development of a truth of which germinal hints had been given to his fathers, in this new order of things the Temple and the Priesthood were not, as in the old, distinguished and divided from each other, but were absolutely identical. The Priests who sacrificed in the true Temple, were themselves the stones of which that Temple was built.

acceptable to God St Peter uses the stronger and more emphatic form of the adjective which was familiar on St Paul's lips (Romans 15:16; Rom 15:31; 2 Corinthians 6:2; 2 Corinthians 8:12). In the addition of the words "through Jesus Christ," we have at once the sanction for the Church's use of that form of words in connexion with all her acts of prayer and praise, and the implied truth that it is only through their union with Christ as the great High Priest and with His sacrifice that His people are able to share His priesthood and to offer their own spiritual sacrifices.