Peter admonishes every soul baptized into Christ Jesus to strive for the new life by the Spirit, resulting in a radically new morality, the ethic of Christ’s Kingdom. That is the new normal.
This is the account God has been directing to accomplish the recovery of His global Kingdom and reestablish its rule through Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit.
In prayer, hymns, and readings we hear the great paradox of our faith: Christ is proclaimed the mighty King who reigns, not by way of the so-called “triumphal entry,” but from the cruciform tree of life, the Cross of Calvary.
We know how we stand before God, justified, or made just by Jesus’ blood. But there is a future reality too. We certainly will be saved in His judgment because we are justified.
Paul says he would inherit the entire world, not merely a little plot of land between Egypt and Syria. This is what God is after in the Messiah: All people and the entire Earth.
The Corinthians were making mud pies, playing with imaginary friends, and blindly following know-it-alls who were leading them into theological and moral pitfalls.