Our city has become a gathering place for refugees. Some escape political persecution. Some have abandoned countries ravaged by decades of war. Some, seeking to provide for their family, have come to a place they didn’t know with the hope they would find peace. In a neighborhood just a stone’s throw from my house, you discover a beautiful collage of ethnicities, languages, stories, and flavors. There’s also much tragedy, however. They’re all far from home.

Peter used precisely this imagery for scattered Christians, ones who were “living as foreigners” (1 Peter 1:1). Today, Christians are living in exile, between the redemption God has promised (and commenced in Jesus) and the beautiful moment when that redemption comes in full. The notion of exile was familiar to the Jewish people. For much of their history, they had wandered in deserts and suffered slavery and waited for God to release the oppressor’s grip. They waited for a land. They longed for home.

Hearing this, it may be tempting to read Peter and assume he was suggesting that Christians should hunker down and wait for the opportunity to escape—to get to some future celestial abode. Rather, he instructed them in the way they were to live, how they were to “show sincere love,” how they were to “be holy in everything [they] do,” and how they were to “think clearly and exercise self-control” (1 Peter 1:13,15,22).

Peter instructed exiles to live well because redemption wasn’t an escape, but a call to engage. For Peter, heaven wasn’t a place of evacuation, but rather the place where God’s perfect rule is in full bloom and where all God’s promises are “kept” for us until our world is transformed into the “new heavens and new earth” (1 Peter 1:2-4; 2 Peter 3:13). We are exiles, living between—but not forever.

NLT 365-day reading plan passage for today: Judges 4:4-24