1 Peter 4:4

wherein they think it strange It may be worth noting that the same word is used to express (1) coming as a stranger (Acts 10:6; Acts 10:18; Acts 21:16) and (2) as here, in 1 Peter 4:12 and Acts 17:20, counting a person or thing strange. The "wherein" points to the change of life implied in the previous verse. "In which matter, in regard to which." The words imply a change like that of 1 Corinthians 6:9-11. The heathen found that his old companions, even his Jewish companions, had acquired, when they became Christians, a new way of looking at things. Conscience was more sensitive. The standard of honesty, purity, and temperance was higher than before. It is not hard, even from our own experience, to picture to ourselves the surprise of the heathen when he found his friend refusing an invitation to a banquet, shrinking from contact with the prostitutes of Greek cities, or when there, passing the wine-cup untasted.

to the same excess of riot The Greek words are singularly forcible. That for "excess," not found elsewhere in the New Testament, means primarily the "confluence" of waters then the cistern, sink, or cesspool into which waters have flowed. The underlying metaphor implied in the words reminds us of Juvenal's (Sat. iii. 62)

"Jam pridem Syrus in Tiberim defluxit Orontes"

(Syria's Orontes into Tiber flows),

when he wishes to paint Rome as the meeting-point of the world's vices. That for "riot" is used, in the adverbial form, of the life of the prodigal in Luke 15:13, and as a noun here and in Ephesians 5:18; Titus 1:6. Compounded as it is of the negative particle and of the root of the verb "to save," it may mean either (1) the state in which a man no longer thinks of saving anything, health, money, character, in the indulgence of his passions, or (2) one in which there is no longer any hope of his being saved himself from utter ruin. The former is probably the dominant meaning of the word. In either case it indicates the basest form of profligacy.

speaking evil of you More accurately, reviling. The word is that which is more commonly translated "blaspheming" in direct reference to God. Even here, and in Acts 13:45; Acts 18:6, where it is used in reference to men, the other or darker sense can scarcely be thought of as altogether absent. Men blasphemed God when they reviled His servants.