Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

We're going to go ahead and get started.

When we get started, we're going to pick up in the first epistle of St. Peter

chapter four, verse 12, as we left off with verse 11 last time.

The place where we left off is actually kind of a transition, so I'm not going to spend

a tremendous amount of time going back over, right, to catch us up.

But just to sort us get us caught up, at least in a general sense.

For most of chapter 3 and the beginning of chapter 4, St. Peter was talking about the sufferings that the communities that he's writing to were facing for being Christians.

And those were sort of multi-fold, as we said.

It seems that, based on the likely time that St. Peter would have written this,

and based on the particular communities to which he's writing,

that these are probably Jewish Christian communities that have

resettled in a series of Roman colonies.

They're named at the beginning of the letter.

In Asia Minor, what's now Turkey, they had settled there because Claudius had expelled

the Jews from the city of Rome.

And so there is obviously that having to relocate as a difficulty they face, but also as

Christian members of the synagogue, there was already friction there, as we saw throughout the

Book of Acts. And then there's we saw throughout the book of acts.

And then there's the issues with the surrounding sort of pagan community in these cities where they face the same tensions they faced in Rome.

Because as we've said, we have as sort of modern people this idea that there is sort of religion, sort of off by itself in this little sphere.

...