Who is going to harm you?

I use the YouVersion app on my phone for daily Bible readings, and each day, as well as my reading for the day, there's a verse of the day (which is sometimes two verses). Today's was 1 Peter 3:12-13. I have a couple of issues with this. The first is that verse 12 is actually the second half of a quotation from Psalm 34. Call me picky, but as far as I'm concerned this is the problem with isolating particular Bible verses, whether it's to put up on your bedroom wall or to send out as a verse of the day. The reader doesn't get any context. They don't know that Peter was quoting a Psalm (which his hearers might well have recognised without the need for footnotes), they don't get the rest of the quotation and they don't get the distinction between what Peter quotes and what Peter comments. It's like cutting and pasting the last sentence of a blog post, along with the top two random comments and posting it as a continuous piece of text, attributed to the blog author. Yes, it's on his/her blog, but it doesn't help the reader much.

My other issue, related to this, is verse 13. There it is, in isolation, proudly asking "Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good?" And the answer comes back "Quite a lot of people, actually." Being harmed when you're eager to do good? It happens every day. Now this blog post is not the place to give a long answer to the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?", and the short answer[1] isn't that helpful.

If you read some more of the chapter, you not only get the whole quotation, but you also find Peter expanding his statement in verse 13. "OK," he says, "bad things are going to happen to you. People are going to be nasty. But remember two things: be ready to explain why you're doing good (WITHOUT putting the other person down), and remember that it's better to suffer for doing good than for doing evil."

Those are two important points that you just don't get from a verse of the day format. Firstly, people are going to be horrible to you, but when you're explaining why you believe what you believe and do what you do, don't do it by pointing out their horribleness to them. Secondly, bad things are going to happen to you anyway (I refer you to my short answer below), so it's probably better to do the right thing for a good reason.


[1]"For the same reason that bad things happen to bad people"