Casting All Your Care Upon Him

The letter is addressed to people who did not live where they were from.

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia1 Peter 1:1, King James Version

Five provinces, all in what is now Turkey, and the word for the readers is strangers, which in that world meant resident foreigners: people living somewhere with no citizenship, no standing, and no protection to speak of.

And the letter is about suffering from beginning to end. It talks about a fiery trial, about being spoken against as evildoers, about servants under harsh masters, about being reproached for the name.

So this is a letter to displaced people under pressure, from a man who had himself been in prison and would be executed.

That is the address on 1 Peter 5:6-7.

Verse seven is not a separate sentence

Here is the pair, and I want you to notice where the punctuation is.

Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time: Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.1 Peter 5:6-7, King James Version

Casting is a participle. It is not a new command with its own full stop in front of it. It hangs off verse six, describing how the humbling is done.

Read them as one sentence, because that is what they are: humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, and the way you do that is by throwing your care onto Him.

Which changes the whole thing. The casting is not a separate spiritual technique to be mastered alongside humility. The casting is what humility looks like in practice.

You are not the one who has to keep it down. 1 Peter 5:7 hangs off 1 Peter 5:6 as one movement rather than two, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps them attached when a reader tries to take the second one on as another job.

Now that has an implication that I find genuinely freeing, and it is the reason I picked this passage for the person who prays it over and takes it back.

If casting is how humbling is done, then keeping hold of it is not primarily a failure of trust. It is pride. Not the loud kind. The quiet kind that believes the thing will not be managed properly unless it stays in your hands.

And that is much easier to repent of than a failure of faith, because it is an ordinary thing rather than a spiritual one.

You have been carrying it out of a habit that has a name, and 1 Peter 5:6 names it before verse seven describes it. The written word puts the humbling first and the casting as its method, and the same Spirit who fixed that order is the reason this is not another test of your believing.

Then the word all, and the word care.

All your care. Not the appropriate ones. Not the properly spiritual ones. The old word here is a word about being pulled apart, distracted, divided by anxiety, and the instruction covers every single one of them.

And then cast, which is a physical verb: to throw something onto something else, the way a load goes onto an animal's back. It is not a word for putting something down gently and standing near it.

You have been asked to throw something rather than to set it down carefully. 1 Peter 5:7 uses a verb about hurling a load onto a back, and it is His Spirit who makes that a bodily instruction rather than a mental exercise.

And then the reason, which is four words and the whole warrant.

For he careth for you.

Not because casting works. Not because worry is unproductive, which is true and which is not what it says. The reason given is a statement about His disposition toward the person doing the casting.

And Peter is writing this to people who had every reason to conclude the opposite. They had lost their places, they were being spoken against, and the letter warns them about a trial that had not finished.

You have been given a reason that is about Him and not about the effectiveness of the technique. 1 Peter 5:7 says for he careth for you and offers no other ground, and the same Spirit who kept it that short is the reason the warrant does not depend on how well you do it.