1 Peter 4:5 Commentary and Bible Study

Persecution also brings out very clearly the wilfulness of unbelief, its wilfulness and the necessity of it being judged. That also urges us to see the importance of the task of winning people. Consider a certain man or woman; the man is a gentleman, the woman is very mild. We speak about Christ and they seem to listen. They don’t respond, but they listen. But suddenly things catch fire. There is hostility, there is resentment, there is rejection and then you say, ‘I never saw that before in that person.’ I was in this position and probably so were you. It is grace alone that delivers us. We are compelled to admit our wilfulness and hostility against God and then we understand that God is just. There has got to be a final judgement, and so we have got to pluck people out of the burning by the help of the Holy Spirit before they reach that day unforgiven. These are serious things. People must be judged because God is holy and his wonderful, holy nature must judge. Holiness cannot live with sin and rebellion. God is filled with righteous wrath and indignation because of it, and so everyone must give account, must give an answer, a detailed statement, accounting for themselves before God. The disorder of earth will be replaced by the order of heaven, and the injustice of this world will be exchanged for the justice of the God when all must appear before him to give account for their lives. God allows injustice to briefly prevail on earth only because he knows that all such miscarriages of justice will be corrected on the final day. He could not allow his people to be evil spoken of by those who themselves are so unsavoury in his sight, if that false judgment was to stand for all eternity. Christians need to know this, and to take comfort from the promise of justice to come, waiting patiently for God’s action, for they do not have the strength on their own to resist evil forever if God is not himself active on the side of justice. By faith, we look forward to that day not as those who stand in their own righteousness, otherwise we too would tremble as the day approaches, but we are confident in the righteousness provided for us by the Lord and therefore we look forward to the day when all things will be brought to light. In that day, those who have striven to reverse the standards of the Lord will have nowhere to hide. Their speaking evil of the Lord’s people for not living as they do is nothing other than an attempt to replace the commandments of the Lord with their own fallen standards, but their covenant with hell will not stand.Christ will judge the living and the dead at his appearing, by which Peter means those who are still alive when he comes as well as those who have passed from the scene of this world. Although this is a general statement about judgment which covers both the righteous and the unrighteous, the focus is on the enemies of the church, for Peter tells us this for our comfort.