Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Peter 1:9

"receiving the end of your faith, [even] the salvation of [your] souls." — 1 Peter 1:9 (ASV)

Receiving the end of your faith.—The “end of our faith” means the object to which our faith is directed, the thing we believed for. And “faith” connects with the “believing” of the previous verse, so that, in reading, the accent of the sentence falls on “end,” not on “faith.” The whole clause is added to justify the statement that we rejoice with a joy that has already attained its full perfection. The reason is, he says, because we already receive, in the present life, the object of all this trusting without sight; we do not need to wait until the next world to attain our glorification.

The salvation of your souls.—It might be simply, salvation of souls, including other people’s besides our own, but the context is against it, and the absence of articles is characteristic of St. Peter. It seems at first sight not a very exalted object for our faith to pursue—the deliverance, or safety, of our own souls.

And yet our Lord fully recognizes the instinct of higher self-preservation as that to which the ultimate appeal must be made (Matthew 16:25–26). He could give His own soul a ransom for many (Matthew 20:28); He could save others and not Himself (Matthew 27:42); St. Paul could wish himself accursed from Christ for his brethren’s sake, that they might be saved (Romans 9:3; Romans 10:1); Moses could ask to be blotted out of the book (Exodus 32:32); and yet the fact remains that, in seeking our own welfare in the highest sense, we are fulfilling a primal law of our being, imposed upon us by the Creator. We are bound to make that our first object, if only to gratify Him who has no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, even if we could possibly divest ourselves of all “selfish” interest in the matter.

“A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify;
A never-dying soul to save,
And fit it for the sky.”

The Buddhist longing for Nirvana is as far as possible removed from the healthy spirit of Christianity. “Salvation” here seems to have widened its meaning since 1 Peter 1:5; while there the main thought was final deliverance from the afflictions of life, here the salvation is said to be received in the very midst of all these afflictions. The addition of the word “souls” appears to make the difference.

For the soul, there is present salvation, because persecutions, etc., do not touch it, and it is capable of the most complete emancipation from the evils of sin (Matthew 1:21; Luke 1:69; Luke 1:71; Luke 1:75; Romans 6:14; Romans 7:24–25). Salvation, then, is the restoration of man to the ideal excellence from which he fell; it contains—here, at any rate—no allusion to “damnation” as an opposite.