The Stone-Rejecting Builders (1 Pet 2)
In 1 Peter 2, Peter quotes Psalm 118 about the Stone the builders rejected becoming the cornerstone. He contrasts these builders with his own audience: “They stumble, being disobedient to the word … but you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people….”
Who are these builders? Commentary after commentary tells me something like this:
One can see in the NT use of the stone passage a broadening in the identification of the rejecters. In the Gospels and Acts (Matt. 21:42; Mark 12:10; Luke 20:17; Acts 4:11), the rejecters are the leaders of first-century Jerusalem, and the stone is identified as Jesus. In Rom. 9:32-33, where Paul conflates Isa. 8:14 and 28:16, those who reject Christ the cornerstone are the people of Israel as a nation. Here in 1 Pet. 2:8, the rejecters are any and all people, whether Jew or Gentile, who reject Christ” (Karen Jobes, 1 Peter, 154).
In Beare’s words, Peter is speaking now of “all human destiny and … all endeavour,” and “‘The builders’ now is taken to mean all who attempt to build human society or their own lives” (cited in Jobes 154). Goppelt speaks of building “a future” (cited in Jobes 155).
But what was the building project in Psalm 118 and in the citations in the Gospels? What building project is in view in 1 Peter 2, for that matter? Surely it’s the building of the Temple, not of “a future” or of “human society” or of people’s “own lives.” Peter speaks of his audience as being “built” into a “spiritual house,” and then immediately talks about them as priests offering spiritual sacrifices.
In the Gospels, Jesus cites this Psalm in his confrontation of the Jewish leaders in the Temple on the great day of controversy that ends with Jesus leaving the Temple and declaring that it will be leveled to the ground, with not one stone standing upon another. The temple’s leaders — the builders (who were at that time literally engaged in a building project) — had rejected the Cornerstone and therefore their building would not remain standing.
The builders, then, are not “any and all people, whether Jew or Gentile, who reject Christ.” What Peter says about them and their stumbling and destruction may apply more broadly to other unbelievers, including pagan ones, but Peter is not speaking about unbelievers in general.
Rather, the builders are specifically those who are endeavoring to build the Temple, to build God’s house, without Christ the Cornerstone. In 1 Peter 2, it seems to me, we should take the builders to be unbelieving Israel, rejecting Jesus and persecuting the church (or stirring up such persecution, as we see throughout Acts). But Peter’s readers, scattered as they are (1:1) due to the attacks of “Babylon” (5:13), are the heirs of all the titles and privileges of Old Covenant Israel (2:9-10). They are the temple, being built by God with Jesus as the Cornerstone.
The builders may continue with their Temple project, but they stumble and will, together with their temple, be destroyed. But the “spiritual house” made of “living stones,” built on and united to Jesus the “Living Stone,” will stand.