1 Peter 3:5

1 Peter 3:5. For thus in old time also did the holy women who hoped in God adorn themselves, submitting themselves to their own husbands. The example of the women whose lives are recorded in the ancient history of God's people furnishes another incentive to the cultivation of the kind of attraction just explained. They were accustomed to seek in the beauty of wifely character their best adornment, and one chief evidence of their being women of this spirit was the respect and subordination which they exhibited in relation to their husbands. These women are called ‘holy' here (as the prophets are also designated, 2 Peter 1:21; Luke 1:70; Acts 3:21; Ephesians 3:5) not merely in regard to their personal character, but in a semi-official sense as ‘women of blessed memory' (Fronmuller), occupying a distinct position among the people whom God had separated for Himself. The personal character is then more definitely described when it is added that ‘they hoped in (or, literally, toward) God.' Their eye turned Godward, not earthward; their life drew its inspiration not from the present, but from the future; their expectation looked to the performance of God's promises, not to what things as they were could yield. Hence those material adornments which had such transient worth as they did possess only in men's sight, not in God's, were not to them what the contagion of custom and fashion threatened to make them to the godly women of Peter's own time.