self, and let
Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread, and He shall be for a
sanctuary.' Peter was in similar circumstances. The gathering storm of
persecution of the Christians as Christians seems to have been rising on
his horizon, and he turns to his brethren, and commends to them the old
word which long ago had been spoken to and by the prophet. But the
variations are very remarkable. The Revised Version correctly reads my
text thus: 'Fear not their fear, neither be troubled, but sanctify in
your hearts Christ as Lord.'

I. We have first to note the substitution, as a matter of course,
without any need for explanation or vindication, of Jesus Christ in
place of the Jehovah of the Old Testament.

There is no doubt that the reading adopted in the Revised Version is the
true one, as attested by weighty evidence in the manuscripts, and in
itself more probable by reason of its very difficulty. The other reading
adopted in Authorised Versions is likely to have arisen from a marginal
note which crept into the text, and was due to some copyist who was
struck by Peter's free handling of the passage, and wished to make the
quotations verbally accurate.

Now, if we think for a moment of the Jew's reverence for the letter of
Scripture, and then think again of the Jew's intense monotheism and
dread of putting any creature into the place of God, we shall understand
how saturated with the belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, and how
convinced that it was the vital centre of all Christian teaching, this
Apostle must have been when, without a word of explanation, he took his
pen, and, as it were, drew it through 'Lord God' in Isaiah's words, and
wrote in capitals over it, 'Christ as Lord.'

What does that mean? Some of us would, perhaps, hesitate to say that it
means that He who was all through the growing ages of brightening
revelation of old, named 'Jehovah,' is now named Jesus Christ. I believe
that from the beginning He whom we call, according to the teaching of
the great prologue of John's Gospel, the 'Word of God,' was the Agent of
all Divine revelation. But whether that be so or no, whether we have the
right to say that the same Person who was revealed as 'Jehovah' is now
revealed as 'Jesus Christ,' the 'Word made flesh,' or no, we distinctly
fail to apprehend who and what Jesus Christ was to the writer of this
epistle, and fail to sanctify Him in our hearts, unless we say: 'To Thee
belongeth all that belongs to Go