1 Peter 2:24

The context

1 Peter addresses congregations in several provinces of Asia Minor facing hostility from their neighbors. Its strategy is not resistance but endurance, and its central section instructs slaves in unbelieving households to bear unjust treatment patiently.

Verses 21-25 give the ground for that instruction: Christ suffered, leaving an example. Verse 22 quotes Isaiah 53:9 almost verbatim, and verses 24-25 draw on the servant song's language of bearing and straying. The paragraph ends with the readers returned to the Shepherd, an image from the same passage.

The words

"He himself bore our sins" uses anēnenken, the aorist of a verb meaning to carry up or bring up, which Greek uses for bringing an offering to an altar. The aorist marks a single completed act; "he himself" is emphatic.

"On the tree" is xylon, the ordinary word for wood — the term used in Acts and in Galatians 3:13, where the curse of Deuteronomy 21:23 is applied to crucifixion. The choice carries a scriptural association, not merely a material one.

"Having died to sin" is an aorist participle, apogenomenoi, "having become away from" sin — a decisive break before the purpose clause "so that we might live to righteousness." "By his wounds you were healed" uses a rare noun for a welt or bruise, the same one the Greek Old Testament has at Isaiah 53:5, and an aorist passive describing a healing accomplished.

What this passage establishes

Christ's death was a bearing of sins — not sympathy with sinners — carried in his own body, on a cross, aimed at a changed life. The language is Isaiah's suffering servant, and the passage presents the cross as that script's fulfillment.

What it does not establish

It does not name an atonement theory. "Bore our sins" is the claim; whether that is best described as penalty borne, representation, or victory over the powers is a later decision. Sacrifice and curse both sit in the background, and the verse adjudicates neither.

It does not promise physical healing in this life. "By his wounds you were healed" is claimed as a blanket guarantee of bodily cure. Here it is tied to dying to sin and to the return to the Shepherd in the next verse, and Isaiah's own context is restoration after exile.

It does not make all suffering redemptive. Christ's suffering is unique in its sin-bearing and exemplary in its patience. Slaves are told their endurance follows a pattern; no one is told their pain atones.

How the church has read it

Luther and Calvin both treated "bore our sins" as the ground of imputation, and the verse is a standard support for penal substitution. It is also cited by those who lay the weight on "tree" and the Deuteronomic curse: the sentence against the guilty fell on the innocent. The passage does not adjudicate between the readings.

First pass, written October 2026. Corrections welcome.

Cited in these answers

• What is Salvation?
• Statement of Faith
• How exactly does the death of Jesus secure salvation for anyone when the deaths of countless others matter not a bit in this regard?
• How do Christians respond to eastern systems of thought such as Buddhism and Hinduism?
• Your all-powerful God created the devil and evil - simply to set up "the fall." He did this KNOWING that most souls would ultimately suffer eternal punishment. You call this a good God? I call it evil.

Part of Scripture, Opened — the exegetical layer behind every citation on this site. Scripture quotations are from the ESV.