<p>1:4 <i>Whereby He has granted to us His precious and exceedingly great promises, that through these you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in that world by lust</i>- Just as &quot;faith&quot; is &quot;obtained&quot; or granted (:1), so too the promises which form the basis of the new covenant are likewise &quot;granted&quot; by the power of the Spirit (:3). The preciousness of the faith we have been given (:1; 1 Pet. 1:7) connects with the preciousness of the promises in which we have faith. The precious &quot;faith&quot; given is therefore specifically faith / belief in the precious promises. Whilst on one hand God will not force people to believe, on the other hand, our faith is so weak that without God's involvement in it we shall never believe enough.</p><p>The very fact we have received the promises should mean that therefore we separate ourselves &quot;from the corruption that is in the world&quot;. We will be happy to have a light hold on possession of property, knowing that this earth is ours, it's just that for now, we are just passing through it, surveying it, after the pattern of Abraham. Yet the corruption of lust has overtones of immorality, which we noted on 1 Peter were a problem for the Jewish converts.</p><p>The past tense &quot;having escaped&quot; suggests that partaking in the Divine nature is something we now experience. Peter will soon use the same word, again in the past tense, to speak of how we &quot;have escaped&quot; from the world (2:18,20). Those who have escaped are &quot;partakers&quot;. The same word is used by Peter in describing himself as a &quot;partaker of the glory&quot; (1 Pet. 5:1). Insofar as we escape the corrupting lusts of the world, we partake right now in the &quot;Divine nature&quot;. This is hard to define if we isolate the phrase, but it could be summarized as the essence of God, what by nature He stands for, His Name. And :5-7 go on to define what the characteristics of God's essential nature really are- the various aspects of the Spirit which we can now have in our own spirit. And we partake in those things as we disassociate or end our partaking / fellowshipping with the world of lust and corruption; we partake in His Spirit as we stop our partaking in the flesh. &quot;The Divine nature&quot; is put as the opposite of &quot;the corruption... through lust&quot;. The idea is as in Heb. 12:10, of being right now &quot;partakers in His holiness&quot;. The phrase broadly parallels Paul's idea of receiving God's holy Spirit into our hearts.</p><p>Partaking of Divine nature is therefore ongoing now. It is not correct to think that we live now as any other secular person does, but with our baptism guaranteeing some huge change to Divine nature for us at the Lord's return. We are on a process and path of partaking of that nature now, although it will be physically and materially expressed in the change of nature required for us to become immortal.</p>