1 Peter 4:11

1 Peter 4:11. If any man speaketh, as oracles of God. The words cover all the various gifts of speech, prophesying, teaching, exhorting, etc., which were known in the Church, whether official or non-official. They are enumerated in Romans 12:6-8, and 1 Corinthians 12:8; 1 Corinthians 12:28. Such gifts are a part of the stewardship. They who speak in the Church are to do so, therefore, as ‘oracles of God.' The term ‘oracles,' which in the Classics means oracular responses, is used in the New Testament to designate Divine utterances or revelations, specially those of the Old Testament (Acts 7:38; Romans 3:2). Once it is applied to those of the New Testament itself, viz. in Hebrews 5:12, where it seems to denote the Divine testimony to Christ, or Christian doctrine as derived from revelation. It is not meant here, however, merely that those who spoke should see that what they said was accordant with Scripture or the Word of God, but that they should speak as if they themselves were oracles of God, utterers not of thoughts of their own, but of thoughts which they owe to Him.

if any man ministereth. This gift, too, is not to be limited to the official ministry of the deacon. It includes all those kinds of service, in relation to the poor, the sick, strangers, etc., which are associated with the gifts of teaching in such passages as Romans 12:8; 1 Corinthians 12:28. Nothing more distinguished the primitive Church than its self-denying, enthusiastic attention to such interests. Tertullian of Carthage (A.D. 160-240) speaks of it as one of the chief felicities of marriages in Christ, that the wife was free to care for the sick and distribute her charities without hindrance, and as one of the greatest disadvantages of mixed marriages that the Christian wife was not allowed by the heathen husband to visit the house of the stranger, the hovel of the poor, the dungeon of the prisoner. (See Neander, Ch. Hist. i. 354, Bohn.) Such gifts, however, were to be used as of the strength which God supplies, that is, with the faithfulness of stewards, and with the humility befitting men who were conscious that they drew not from stores of their own, but from what God Himself furnished. The term, which the A. V. renders ‘giveth,' is the one which in Classical Greek expressed the munificent act of the citizen who undertook to bear the heavy expense of supplying the chorus for one of the great dramatic representations. It then came to be applied, as here, to other kinds of liberal ministering or furnishing.

in order that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. The object is finally added which the possessors of gifts are to set before them, and with a view to which they are to use these various gifts in the spirit already enjoined. It is that not they, but God Himself, may have the glory. God will be honoured ‘in all things,' i.e. specially in all the gifts and ministries within the Church, just as Christian stewards recognise that all these things come to the Church from God through Christ, and are therefore to be rendered to God again through Christ in the form of service to His Church.

to whom is the glory and the dominion onto the ages of the ages. Amen. The form of this sentence, and the addition of the ‘Amen,' lead some to suppose that Peter repeats here some familiar liturgical formula, perhaps one of those in use in the Jewish services. Whether that is the case or not, we have the same doxology in Revelation 1:6, and there it is applied to Christ. Here, however, most interpreters rightly recognise God, who is the principal subject of the whole sentence as also the subject of the doxology. The ‘glory' of the R. V. is a better rendering than the ‘praise' of the A. V., as the term answers to the former ‘glorified.' The idea of the everlasting is expressed according to the Hebrew conception of eternity as the measureless succession of cycles of time. If the whole is taken in the form ‘whose is' or ‘to whom is,' rather than ‘to whom be,' the sentence is introduced not as a mere ascription of praise, but as giving the reason why the glorifying of God should be the great object of the exercise of gifts. God is to be glorified in all things, because the glory in all belongs to Him, and it is the Church's honour to realize this.