1 Peter 2:4

unto whom coming, a living stone, rejected indeed of men, but with God elect, precious,

Peter here combined the thought of Isaiah 28:16ff; Isaiah 8:14ff, and Psalms 122:18 in his presentation of Christ the Stone, living, elect, foundation, precious, rejected, the chief corner, and the stone of stumbling, in one of the most beautiful metaphors of the word of God. For a full discussion of this, see in my Commentary on Romans, pp. 352-357. It must surely be true, as Barclay said, that Peter could hardly have spoken of Jesus in this manner without thinking of Jesus' words to himself,"[12] "On this rock I will build my church, etc." (Matthew 16:13ff); and yet Peter, in this passage, made no connection with his own person, stressing the view that Christ is the foundation, not Peter. He did not use either of the words [@Petros] or [@petra], but "spoke of Christ as the [@lithos]."[13]

A living stone ... This is an appropriate metaphor for Christ who is the Lord of life. He is the eternally living one. "Rejected indeed of men ..." Jesus Christ the Messiah was the true and only foundation of this spiritual temple; but he did not fit the designs and purposes of the "builders" in Jerusalem who found him totally unsuitable for any use at all in the building they had in mind; therefore, they rejected him. Really, this should have been expected, because their concept of a temple for God was precisely like that of the idol temples which filled the world of that era, namely, a pile of stone, timber and gold. The idea of such an edifice being in any real sense God's temple was a human conceit from the very inception of it. See article on the True Temple, below.

But with God, elect ... The purpose of building a spiritual temple upon the Lord Jesus Christ was God's purpose from the beginning. He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). It was of Christ and the spiritual temple "in him" that Nathan spoke to David (2 Samuel 7:13); and in the light of that promise, it is clear enough that even the temple of Solomon was not God's plan for a temple. It was David's idea, not God's; God never gave a pattern for the building of it, as he did the tabernacle; and, if it had been truly God's temple, God would never have destroyed it.

Precious ... The ASV margin gives "honorable" as an alternate reading, the idea being that all honor and glory are due to Jesus Christ who is the cornerstone and foundation of God's true temple. The contrast is between the worthless status accorded Jesus by the Pharisees, who found no use at all for him in their plans, and the fact of our Lord's being God's most precious and only begotten Son.

The great prophecies of Isaiah which formed the background of the apostle's thought here, and which he would immediately quote, foretold, "The formation of the Christian church, for the spiritual worship of God, under the image of a temple, which God would build on Messiah as a foundation-stone thereof."[14] Both the foundation stone of Isaiah 28:16 and the rejected keystone of Psalms 118:22 are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. "He is both the Foundation on which the church is built and the Keystone into whom it grows up."[15]

Of that collection of Old Testament texts Peter was about to quote, Hart wrote, "This collection of texts can be traced back through Romans 9:32f to its origin in the saying of Mark 12:10f";[16] but such a view is totally wrong. The conception of Christ as the Stone goes back to the Saviour himself (Matthew 21:42f). That Peter who had heard the Lord use this very figure would have needed to borrow it from either Paul or Mark (who received practically all of his information from Peter!) is one of the little conceits of New Testament critics which true students of the New Testament view as preposterous. Long before this epistle was written, Peter had himself also used the same figure of the chief corner set at naught by "you builders" (the Jewish hierarchy) (Acts 4:11).

[12] William Barclay, op. cit., p. 195.

[13] A. J. Mason, op. cit., p. 400.

[14] James Macknight, op. cit., p. 451.

[15] David H. Wheaton, The New Bible Commentary, Revised (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970), p. 1241.

[16] J. H. A. Hart, Expositor's Greek Testament, Vol. V (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1967), p. 55.