"Hold Fast Against the Flood" - 1 Peter 2:11-12

"11 Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul. 12 Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation." - 1 Peter 2:11-12

     Here Peter admonishes his readers to fight their fleshly passions.  There is a sense of tension in the words he uses.  A sense that their is "something on the line," that there is something to lose.  The verb he uses which the NASB translates as "abstain" is "apecho."  There is more to this word than just not doing something.  He doesn't just say, "hey, don't do that bad stuff," he really wants to communicate, "he, don't lose your innocence, don't give up on what's right."  Apecho means, "to hold back, keep off, to have one thing by separating from (letting go of) another."  There is a sense that to give in to these fleshly lusts, there would be a sacrifice of something else, a trade off.  It is the same sense in which we use the term "losing one's virginity," you are losing by addition.  You didn't have sex before, but now that sex has been added to your life, virginity has also been taken away from your life.
     He uses this language because the whole point of these few verses is about being immersed in a culture that is doing nothing but chasing their own fleshly lusts.  Peter's audience here are Jews in exile, living among Gentiles, many of them Greek or Roman or some other form of Pagan.  These cultures were all about fulfilling every carnal nature.  We've all heard the saying, "Eat, Drink, for tomorrow we die," these were indeed the words that many lived by, and a large part of the popular culture at the time.  Orgies, drunkenness, gluttony... The vomitoriums of Rome come to mind: rooms dedicated to purging oneself after over-indulging at a feast for the purpose of gaining a second wind so that the revelry could resume.  (Ok, actually through a bit of googling I just found out that what I just said is a misinterpretation of the vomitorium, which was actually a large hallway or exit from the Colosseum which "vomited" out mass amounts of people at the end of an event.  But, the specific binge and purge practice of eating mass amounts at feast, and vomiting to continue to do so, was practiced by at least two Roman emperors according to documented sources.) Anyway, Peter is talking about living in a way that glorifies God even in the midst of a culture that seems to do everything in their power to do the opposite.  That sounds not at all different from today.
     And so, Peter calls for the abstaining from all these things; to live among these people but to not live like them.  This is a long haul thing.  Peter mentions Christ's return at the end of verse twelve, so the timetable here is basically, live like this - abstaining from the fleshly lusts you see everyone else around you doing - until Jesus comes back.  So he's talking about consistency.  That is the only way that verse twelve will come about.  If you keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, if there is a noticeable difference in the way you live, then these people, even those that slander and mistreat you, may catch on that there is something different about you.  You have something they don't have because you have abstained, because you have not traded it for the things that your flesh desires.  And Peter says that some will see this and acknowledge God because of it, and that will bring Him glory.  So hold fast against the flood around you.  Don't give in.  And if you do, remember God can and will restore you if you are humble and repentant.  God has left us in this world because we reflect Him to those who don't yet know Him, so with His help, resist the call of the flesh.