1 Peter 4:19 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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1 Peter 4:19

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‘Commit the keeping of their souls.’ ‘Commit’ is a beautiful word. You could translate it deposit or entrust. It is a banking term, an accounting term. You would deposit your money then, just as you would do today, for safe keeping somewhere. Well, let Christian believers, when they are insulted, when they suffer, deposit their souls, lodge their souls with the Lord who will keep them and will see them through, and what a God and Saviour we have. And note the words, ‘in well doing’ – this is a condition; we have got to do well. It is a little term which the apostle Peter uses repeatedly through this epistle. Well doing, representing the Lord in the gospel, exercising our gifts one to another. We therefore submit ourselves fully to the Lord for safe-keeping. As we do so, we remember that he is our Creator and this gives us all the more confidence, for he who brought us into existence out of nothing, will not fail to keep our souls safe now that we do exist. This truth adds a certain quality to our trusting. As our Creator, God has had to consider issues which it is beyond our ability to conceive of, and he has resolved them all and reached a conclusion resulting in the world that now exists. He created it perfect in the first place and he has allowed it to come into its present fallen condition. He brought us into existence for a purpose and in the case of his children that purpose is not complete till we are brought safely to heaven. Why should we worry about our own circumstances, when we have so little power to do anything about them? On the other hand, how can we fail to trust the one who has already demonstrated such skill and power in creating us? We should therefore resign our case joyfully into the hand of God. We were entirely passive in our own creation. Before he created us, we did not exist and could not advise or cooperate or even resist our own creation. After our creation we simply found ourselves here and saw the evidence of what he had done for us. We are forced to trust him in a past work in which we could play no part; we must also trust him in a future work in which we can play only a small part. Often the answers we receive from the Lord for our protection involve events which we could not begin to imagine, and yet they provide the perfect solution. Peter therefore links the God of Creation to the God of Providence.

Application

We can trust our God. He created the world; he has limitless power. He designed everything; he sustains it. Think of those ancient hills and mountains, they have stood for centuries, millennia. What a powerful God. He creates, he keeps. When you were born again, he re-created you. He gave you a new nature, he made you a new person. You were a new creation, Paul says, in Christ and he will keep you also just the same. He put within you a living Spirit, eternal life, and he will keep it and maintain it now and for ever. Therefore – given the inevitability of suffering, not only because of the presence of a hostile world, but also because God is actively working in the lives of his children using their trials to prepare them for heaven, then do not fret at the hardships which, as Christians, you endure. Not all will suffer for their faith all the time, but let those who do suffer learn to view their sufferings in a positive way.

We need to be sure that suffering is no accident; it happens according to the will of God, and he does nothing unnecessarily. If God allows us to suffer, then it must be for our advantage. But he does not measure our advantage as we tend to do, by considering only the short-term earthly benefits. Measured by these alone we would say that suffering brings a decided disadvantage. But from God’s point of view, since all that we have in this life is temporary and is due to be taken away and replaced with something much more enduring, then if lessons in holiness and Christian character come at the expense of earthly loss, this is really no loss at all; it will all be made up for by something far better in the world to come. His wisdom sees it this way, and if God supplies us with all that we need on a day-to-day basis, then why should we complain.

Yes, we are to commit our souls to him – to the very one who wills that we should suffer. This is the strongest expression of trust and tells the Lord that we believe that, in spite of the unpleasant nature of suffering, he does it for our good. We are ready to believe that he has our good at heart and that his assessment of what is good for us is better than our own. Indeed, we would rather resign the management of our lives entirely into his hands since we lack the wisdom to design our own sanctification program.

At the same time we must continue to do good, in obeying all God’s commandments. Our sufferings do not give us an exemption from well-doing. This is true both because we cannot take revenge on those who may persecute us, and because we do not refuse to obey out of resentment at what the Lord allows. Our conduct is to be perfect towards those that are outside the kingdom of heaven, for we never cease to have a mission to the lost even among those who do us harm. The unreasonable way in which we return good for evil is a powerful testimony to them of the truth of the gospel, for they are forced to ask what motivates us so powerfully to do good. And why should we be angry with the Lord when the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us?

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1 Peter 4:19 Commentary and Bible Study