1 Peter 4:1-6

This paragraph brings to an end the series of counsels which began with chap. 1 Peter 2:11, and have dealt with what is essential to a becoming ‘conversation among the Gentiles.' Christian duty in relation to the impurities of heathen associates is now enforced in the strongest terms and with a gleam of gravest irony. Christ's example in suffering is still the key-note. That example, having been already used at length to point the blessedness of suffering for righteousness sake, is now made the ground for enforcing absolute separation from the vices of paganism, a separation as absolute as if one were dead to them. The terms in which Peter expresses this resemble, more than anything else in his writings, Paul's method of speaking of the believer as dead, dead with Christ, dead to the law, dead to sin, freed from the law by death as the woman is loosed from the husband's law by the husband's death, freed from sin by becoming dead. The section is not a mere resumption of a statement (that, namely, in 1 Peter 3:18), which has been lost sight of for a time in another train of reflection. It is the natural continuation of a train of exhortation which has not been broken, but has turned, and still turns, on the necessity of seeing that, if we suffer, it be only for well-doing, not for evil-doing. It contains one great difficulty, the declaration (in 1 Peter 4:6) about a preaching of the Gospel to them that are dead. That passage has seemed to some interpreters so intractable that they have given it up in despair. Luther imagined that some corruption had crept into its text. Others have been driven to regard it as the gloss of some copyist or annotator. It is undoubtedly akin, however, to the former paragraph in 1 Peter 3:19-20, and the results reached on the one should throw some light on the other.