possession, acquired property
Peripoiesis carries the image of something actively seized, secured, and kept close. The root verb peripoieo means to preserve something by keeping it around oneself, to acquire and then guard what you have gained. So peripoiesis is not passive ownership, like inheriting a piece of land you've never visited. It is the result of decisive, costly action. You went out, you obtained it, and now it is yours in a way that reflects the effort spent.
In secular Greek, the word described the acquisition of spoils, the gaining of advantage, or the saving of one's own life. That last use is telling. To peripoieo your life is to come through danger and emerge with yourself still intact.
Biblical authors pressed this word into service for something far weightier. When Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:9 that God appointed believers to obtain salvation, he uses peripoiesis. When Peter calls the church a people for God's own possession in 1 Peter 2:9, the same word stands behind it. The Septuagint uses it in Malachi 3:17 for God's treasured possession, translating the Hebrew segullah, which itself meant a king's personal treasury, not state property but what he kept close to himself.
So peripoiesis sits at the intersection of cost, ownership, and intimacy. What God calls his peripoiesis, he paid to obtain and now keeps as his own cherished property. The word pulses with both transaction and tenderness.
Most of us read the phrase God's own possession and picture a storage room. Something shelved. Something catalogued and left alone. I did for years. The word felt like a legal term, cold and bureaucratic, as if God filed paperwork on us and moved on.
But peripoiesis is not a filing cabinet. It is a treasure chest a king opens. It is what someone rescued from a burning building and pressed to their chest on the way out. The word carries the memory of what was spent to secure it.
When you feel unclaimed, when the days make you feel like background noise in someone else's story, this word does not offer you a pep talk. It offers you a fact. You are the thing God went out and obtained. You are what he kept.
Peripoiesis comes from the verb peripoieo, built from peri, meaning around or about, and poieo, meaning to make or do. The compound idea is to make something stay around you, to secure it to yourself. The noun form peripoiesis then names the result of that action. Its semantic family includes poiema, God's workmanship in Ephesians 2:10, and ktisis, creation or creature. All three circle the idea of something made, obtained, and belonging to its maker.
Where peripoiesis appears in Scripture, and why each verse showcases it.
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
The phrase translated his own possession is peripoiesis. Peter stacks four identity titles here, and peripoiesis is the capstone, naming not just who believers are but whose they are and at what cost.
For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.
The word obtain here translates peripoiesis. Paul frames salvation not as something stumbled into but as the appointed end God secured for his people, which gives the believer's assurance its backbone.
who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.
Peripoiesis appears as possession of it, pointing forward to the full redemption of what God has already claimed. The Spirit functions as a down payment on a transaction God will complete.
But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.
Preserve their souls translates peripoiesis psyches, literally the peripoiesis of the soul. Faith here is the means by which the soul is secured and kept, not lost in the shrinking back.
They shall be mine, says the LORD of hosts, in the day when I make up my treasured possession, and I will spare them as a man spares his son who serves him.
The Septuagint uses peripoiesis here for the Hebrew segullah, the king's personal treasury. This Old Testament anchor shows that the New Testament writers did not invent the concept; they inherited and deepened it.
Words in the same semantic family.
Every video where Adam teaches on this word, in publication order.
