1 Peter 1:17

1 Peter 1:17. And if ye call on him as Father, who without respect of persona judgeth according to each man's work. The A. V. misses the point by failing to notice that there are two distinct predications, namely, that He whom all believers invoke in prayer is Father indeed, but also and none the less Judge. If it is right to discover, as most do, a reference in this to the Lord's Prayer, Peter would seem to remind them that the God whom Christ had taught them to look to as Father is One in whom there is no breach between parental love and judicial rectitude, and with whom there is none of that partiality on which it is natural to presume in the case of earthly fathers. The verb, meaning (as the A. V. correctly translates it) to ‘call on,' or invoke, and not merely to name, suits in any case the idea of prayer. The ‘judgeth' is in the present tense, not as predicating a Divine judgment which goes on now in distinction from the judgment of the future, but simply as denoting the prerogative or function of judgment which belongs naturally to this Father. The qualifying term, ‘without respect of persons,' occurs nowhere else in this particular form, although similar forms are used in reference to God by Peter himself in the discourse following the visit of Cornelius (Acts 10:34), as well as by Paul (Romans 2:11; Ephesians 6:9; Colossians 3:25), and, in reference to men, by James (1 Peter 2:1; 1 Peter 2:9). The Old Testament formula,' to accept the countenance of any one,' on which they found, is used indeed both in the good sense of being well inclined to one, and in the bad sense of showing a partial favour. But in the N. T. it has only the bad sense. The standard of this judgment, which is oftener said to be our works, is here described as each man's work, the singular ‘work' pointing to the unity which each man's life with all its particular acts presents to God, while the significant ‘each' indicates that this impartial judgment of God takes men not in the mass, but individually, and every man for himself, whether son or not.

in fear pass the time of your sojourning (or, more simply, and with obvious reference to the ‘walk' of 1 Peter 1:15, walk during the time of your sojourning). The fear (in the original set emphatically first in the clause) which is so characteristic a note of Old Testament piety, occupies also no small place in the N. T. It appears there both in the large sense of reverence, or the feeling which makes it a pain to the child to dishonour or grieve the Father, in the general sense of the feeling which a man has who is on his guard, knowing that he may err (which Schott thinks is the point here), and in the more specific sense of the feeling which the Judge inspires, and which, as Calvin observes, is here opposed to the sense of security. Thus motives to a walk of serious circumspection are drawn from these various considerations that to God belongs of necessity the attribute of judgment, which reflects itself on every man individually and without exception, that He sees men's scattered acts in the unity which is given them by their determining principle, and judges each man's life, therefore, as one work which must stand as a whole on one side or other, and that He judgeth impartial judgment which can extend no exemption and indulge no favouritism towards the sons whose privilege it is to appeal confidently to Him as Father. The character of the time, too, should itself be a motive to the same a time of sojourning, of separation from the true home, and therefore a time when there is about us, both in pleasure and in persecution, so much to tempt us to forget the Father's house and resign ourselves to the walk of the children of this world.