Original Meaning

THESE VERSES FORM the fourth and final section of Peter’s exhortations to various social groups (2:11–4:11). Here he provides general instructions for the entire family of God. In essence, these exhortations can be summarized as eschatological ethics. That is, Peter exhorts believers to pray (v. 7b), to love one another (v. 8), to be hospitable (v. 9) and to exercise their spiritual gifts (vv. 10–11a) in light of the End. The foundation is stated in verse 7a: “The end of all things is near.” Put differently, believers ought to govern their lives by the perception that since the end of the world is near, they should live in light of God’s judgment.1

This paragraph is not to be seen as some tag-on at the end of a section.2 Rather, it pulls together some important themes in the letter, highlighting the dominance of eschatology for Christian ethics (cf. 1:3–5, 7, 9, 13; 2:12; 3:15; 4:5–6, 13, 17–19; 5:1, 4, 6). It also recapitulates the centrality of the church in Peter’s understanding of Christian ethics (1:1–2, 10–12, 22; 2:1–10; 3:8–12; 5:1–4). The people of God is the church and the church is the people of God, which should live with integrity, love, and holiness as it awaits the Lord’s return. The church is the eschatological people of God, and it is dominated by the hope of the Last Day as much as it lives in the awe of God’s final discerning judgment (4:17–19).

The Coming Day: The Foundation of Ethics (4:7a). To say that “the end of all things is near” is to say that Peter believed, in some sense, that the end3 of history was imminent.4 That End involved the Final Judgment (4:6), and it was “near.”5 It is important for us to realize that Peter roots his ethical exhortations in 4:7b–11 in this perception of history and the judgment.

However, the history of scholarship has been dotted with scholars who have argued that because Peter (and others) believed that the end of history was imminent but did not take place as they thought it would, they were therefore wrong and the Christian conception of history is wrong. The weaknesses of this position cannot be addressed here in depth, but several considerations are important here. (1) A belief that the next event would usher in the end events was typical of Jewish prophecy. Jewish prophets always envisioned the next big event on their “prophetic calendar” as the event that would usher in the last days—and it never did. (2) When the next event did not usher in the last days, no one thought the Jewish prophets were wrong. (3) The reason they thought this way was not some kind of psychological denial but because the people of God recognized that a Jewish prophets’ vision was shortsighted in that they could not see the entire chronology of God’s plan.6 Thus, while I do think Peter presented his ethical exhortations in light of a view that the end of history was imminent, I do not think such a view was mistaken. Rather, it was how Jewish prophecy worked.7

Exhortation Number 1: Pray (4:7b). Like 1:13, Peter’s first bit of advice is that Christians keep themselves mentally and spiritually alert: “Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray.” The expressions here are to be understood as a twofold injunction to mental alertness, with the goal of having an effective prayer life. As was the case with the alert husband (3:7) and the obedient community (3:12), so here with the entire church: If they stay alert, they will be effective in prayer (cf. Eph. 6:18; Col. 4:2). Thinking that the end of history is at the door and the Judge is about to enter through it can energize one’s prayers and lead to a specially effective focus in those prayers.

Exhortation Number 2: Love (4:8). Earlier in the letter Peter’s ethics found one of their core values in “love” (cf. 1:22–25; 2:17; 3:8); now this communal ethic rises powerfully to the top.8 When the church is being threatened by persecution and takes comfort in the coming end of history because God will judge justly, that same church strengthens its faith by relating to one another in love. Peter’s exhortation is that they are to love one another “deeply” (cf. 1:22); that is, they are to work at loving one another because doing so in the midst of stress is difficult. Since familial, business, and social relationships tend to become frayed and tested when difficulties arise, Peter urges them to love one another with great effort because he knows how much work it takes with the dark cloud of persecution and stress hovering above.

Loving one another when things are tough is important “because love covers over a multitude of sins.”9 We have all probably heard this statement bandied about to justify many kinds of behaviors, but what does this saying mean for Peter? That loving others now will procure forgiveness from God at the end10 (cf. Matt. 25:31–46)? That loving others leads a community to holier and more forgiving behaviors11 (cf. 1 Cor. 13:7)? Or, developing this second view, that loving others is the sure sign that they have put away sinful behaviors12 (2:24; 4:1–2)? The essential ambiguity of the proverb, as well as the lack of substantial parallel ideas in 1 Peter, means that we are not able to know for sure. But in light of how the saying came to be connected in the early church with the second view, I contend that we are probably better off understanding the saying to be a social one by Peter: The community that loves one another is able to forgive one another more rapidly when minor issues arise.

Exhortation Number 3: Be Hospitable (4:9). Hospitality is a specific example of loving one another—this time by receiving others into our homes, making them feel welcome, meeting their needs, and providing for them a place of fellowship and acceptance. But Peter knows that people are better at conforming externally than at doing something from the heart. Accordingly, he adds “without grumbling.” Hospitality formed the foundation of the Christian movement.13 When Jesus sent out the Twelve, they were to find places to stay that offered hospitality (Matt. 10:11–13). When he needed a place for the Last Supper, he assumed a place of hospitality would be found (26:17–19). And the early church’s practice of celebrating the Lord’s Supper together (1 Cor. 11:17–34) is rooted in Jesus’ practice of eating with his disciples (Matt. 9:9–13). Thus, the early church regularly expressed its love for one another within the context of hospitality.

Exhortation Number 4: Exercise Your Gifts (4:10–11a). That the End is near prompts Peter to exhort believers to love one another beyond the idea of hospitality; they are to use their gifts “to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace14 in its various forms” (4:10). Loving one another enables one to put up with others (4:8), instigates hospitality (4:9), and means using one’s gifts to help other people (4:10–11). Spiritual gifts is a special topic in Paul’s letters (cf. Rom. 12:6–8; 1 Cor. 12:8–10, 28–30; Eph. 4:11), and some maintain that Peter is echoing Paul’s ideas here. Whatever the origin of Peter’s ideas—and a Pauline or an early Christian tradition is likely—the purpose of Peter’s use of the theme of spiritual gifts is to illustrate the importance of loving one another in the Christian community. Thus, as in 1 Corinthians 12–14, love is the context for the exercise of spiritual gifts in the church.

Whatever Christians are gifted to do, those gifts are to be exercised in such a way that they reflect their divine origin and purposes: “If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ.” That is, if someone is called on to speak in the presence of believers or if God’s Spirit prompts a person to speak to the congregation, that person ought to take the opportunity so seriously that the words spoken be considered with reverence.15

To God Be the Glory! (4:11b). Peter concludes his exhortation to use all gifts from God in a way that brings him glory with a doxology. This is a short prayer of praise to God—or is praise ascribed to Jesus Christ? Because it would be unnecessarily redundant to ascribe praise once again to God (4:11a does that), it seems more probable that this doxology has Jesus Christ as its object.16 God glorifies himself through his Son, and the Son is at work in the prayer and loving ministries of the church.

Bridging Contexts

THESE VERSES CONTAIN both difficult and specific directives for Peter’s churches. In what follows I have chosen to focus on the larger pattern of his thought—the eschatological context for ethics. In so doing, however, I do not want to minimize the importance of other considerations. If Peter’s primary thrust here is to drive home the urgency of the hour and the consequent need for prayer (4:7b) and love (4:8–11), then there is much that needs to be done to bring this text into our world because our world has almost no belief in a “divine end” to history. In fact, even Christians today seem to have lost much of their moral nerve about the end of history climaxing in a judgment that will decide the fate of all people. Such ideas are clearly found in the Bible, but they have sometimes become an outright embarrassment to Christians.

In the place of the final judgment, the modern Westerner has substituted what sociologist Christopher Lasch has called the “Myth of Progress.”17 What once drove Christians to look forward to final justice and impelled them to holy living has dissipated today into a feeble idea that somehow, through better methods, better techniques, better therapy, better self-development, better science, and better computer know-how, the world is actually getting better. Whether it is the myth that the rural is better than the urban, or that the frontier will get us to the promised land, or that childlike innocence needs to be recaptured, our Western world is somehow caught in a web of believing that if we can only take a different road, we will somehow arrive at the Celestial City of Optimistic Dreams.

Indeed, in science things get better. We can now heat things quicker, more effectively, and with less fuss because the old wood stove has given way to the microwave. As I sit typing away (now called “word processing”) at a portable computer, I am conscious of the typewriter I grew up with (a Royal manual typewriter, which my dad told me was a superb machine!), of the electric typewriter I once owned, of its newer form in an IBM Selectric (which had a “ball” that could be changed so I could type in Greek and Hebrew!), of a Macintosh 512K that jump-started me into the computer world, of the external drives that doubled my capacities, and now of a portable computer—with 12 megabytes of RAM and 160 megabytes of memory, a battery that makes the machine portable, and all kinds of new gadgets on screen that make the work easier.

I am also aware that I can instantly send my current screen to my secretary, with a message attached, so she can make copies for my classes. I can send letters to my professor in northern England, I can gain access to the major newspapers of the United States and the holdings of major libraries, and I can carry on conversations with millions of unknown users of various on-line services. As I stare at this technological marvel, I can ask, along with the rest of the users of computers, “What next? Can it really get that much better?” The answer of scientists and technicians the world over is that everything will get better, faster, and easier until the whole world is at our fingertips.

This fact about the world of technology constantly improving has been transferred by the majority of Westerners to moral and social realms. That is, from the infinite progresses of science moderns have inferred that, given time, techniques, and the right people, we can make the world a better place. Thus, our modern musicians sing utopian songs about making the world better, and the modern listeners believe them. It is a fact, of course, that my computer is better (in every way—except when the electricity goes out!) than my old manual typewriter. Yet however nice technological advances are, it is not a fact that our society is getting better.

In fact, in my judgment, society remains about the same. We still have massive discrimination against other races, the poor, the powerless, and the uneducated. The myth of progress may form a solid core to the way most middle-class people perceive the world around them, but that theory is but a myth; our world is hardly getting “better” in every way. This optimistic outlook, I am contending, conditions the way Westerners as a whole read the Bible. Moreover, it has virtually stripped us from a capacity to understand and apply the significance of the biblical outlook on the End as a violent event of judgment and salvation. In other words, the “Myth of Progress” has replaced the “Fact of Final Judgment” in our modern perception of what is coming down the road. Because of this replacement, there is little urgency in our exhortations and even less backbone in our moral warnings.

What shall we do? Above I mentioned that many Bible readers today are embarrassed by the popular presentations of eschatology. I am thinking here of the countless preachers and teachers who have gone on public record, especially since World War I, asserting that the end of history will be soon, only to be disappointed to discover that history kept moving on.18 I can think of one preacher who, when I was a teenager, proclaimed to our church that the Rapture would occur before 1973. What ran through my mind was not whether he was right (he seemed so compelling and confident), but whether I should even bother to apply for admission to college. My pastor, a wiser man than the prophet, suggested I ought to prepare, “just in case the prophet is wrong.” Twenty-three years of preparation and study have made me wiser and more temperate about prophets and their predictions.19

Examples of this type of prophecy preaching and belief could be offered at length. To aid us in seeing what has caused many to become either despondent or cynical, we should mention a few items. Prophecy preachers and those who follow such ideas have fastened onto many events or people in the current world scene as direct fulfillments of biblical prophecies, only to be proven false over time. Included in such would be Hitler and Mussolini, Kissinger, Gorbachev—each presented as fulfilling the requirements for the Antichrist. Others have pointed to the reestablishment of Israel as a nation (1948) and argued that within a generation,20 usually calculated to be 30–40 years, the End will come. Still others have become convinced that the development of nuclear weapons, or the world oil crisis, or the recent war in the gulf states, or the cryptic signs read into the bar codes of stores are all signs of the End.

Christians might be forgiven if they become despondent or even cynical about our actual knowledge of the future; the endless suggestions and flexibility of these prophets have become more a measure of their ingenuity than their faithfulness to interpreting the Bible correctly. As Christians, we want to sustain the grand vision of Bible: the establishment of God’s will on earth, while we counsel the prophets to keep themselves to what can actually be known. Sadly, our tendency has been to abandon belief in prophecy or belief in the ultimate establishment of God’s will. In the place of such a conviction, many Christians have instead embraced, unreflectively, the myth of progress, or they have simply despaired of knowing anything substantial about the future by reading the Bible.

These are the two contexts in which our modern readers encounter a statement like that of 4:7 that “The end of all things is near”: either a context in which the optimism of our age21 drowns out the tunes of a final judgment that is absolutely just, or a context in which we are cynical about knowing God’s scheme of history because we have been burned by (false) prophets who spoke well beyond a sense of moderation and temperance.

Contemporary Significance

I STILL BELIEVE, no matter how disappointed I may be with modern-day prophets, in a climactic display of God’s justice and love that will bring our world to its knees and God’s people to their final reward of endless praise to God. And I still believe, no matter how optimistic our world might be, that this world is not getting better and that it will only “get better” as a result of God’s infusion of grace and justice. And I look forward to the Day when Christ will be praised by all, when God will be acknowledged by all to be God, when the lion will lie down with the lamb, when swords will be reforged to become instruments of peace, and when peoples of all races, tribes, and sexes will be eternally united and put millennia of hostilities and prejudices aside permanently.

But I believe all this will happen only as a result of God’s grace and intervention into history. I do not believe we have either the capacity (because we are sinners and limited) or the technology (because science cannot change human nature) to bring this about by ourselves. However hard we work for justice and peace, ultimately only God can bring the desired changes. And so we work and pray for God’s sovereign intervention: “May your kingdom come.”22

Looking forward to that Day, we need to hear the exhortations to pray, love, be hospitable, and exercise our spiritual gifts. And we need to do these things because someday we will be judged for how we did these things. I often wonder how frequently we examine our lives in the light of eternity or of God’s just and fair judgment. Once again, we find ourselves (most probably) in a situation where we have overreacted. The Christians of one and two generations ago, and beyond, were surely subject to far too many threats and sermons on hell-fire. Our response has been one of embarrassment, so that we have neglected the theme of judgment altogether. Yet that very theme is foundational to a Christian view of ethics—the foundation that God is the Judge and that we are accountable to him for our behavior.

If we keep moving in this direction, no doubt, we will eventually forget about the holiness of God in our perceptions of him and in our teaching-preaching ministries. But in reality, God’s holiness ought to lead us to confess our sins, repent, and live lives of fear before him (1:17). God’s judgment is rooted in his holiness: Because God is holy, he is Judge. That is, because God is holy and simply cannot tolerate sin in his presence, he must act as Judge in purging sin from his world and presence.

If we can raise Christian consciousness about sexual equality or racial unity, then surely we as Christians can unite to raise once again a Christian consciousness of God’s holy judgment. Recently, my son (Lukas) and I had a profitable conversation about what I will call “Christian conversation”—what we as Christians permit ourselves to say, what we permit ourselves to write, and what we permit ourselves to be involved in with others who are communicating. My point was this: Others may say certain things, tell certain kinds of jokes, and use certain kinds of communication devices, but we as Christians must learn to communicate in light of the fact that we will someday have to answer before God for how we communicate. We as Christian parents must begin to teach our kids how to live in light of the Judgment Day. We need to have Sunday school teachers who teach their charges that God is the Judge. We need to have pastors who preach the awful implications of falling into the hands of holy and angry God. And we need to stop being embarrassed by this message. This will raise Christian consciousness, and eventually social consciousness, about living now in light of the End.

As I read 1 Peter, I see a Christian community seeking to survive as a Christian community in the face of persecution. I see the importance of a loving Christian community for coping with unbelief and opposition to the gospel. Prayer for one another, love of one another, hospitality shown to one another, and exercising gifts so as to strengthen one another are clear methods for sustaining faith and for coping with opposition to the gospel. The effect of such ministries is, according to our text, the praise of God through Jesus Christ (4:11).

Particular attention needs to be given here to the prominence of love. Peter says, “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” The expression “above all” speaks to the priority and preeminence of love as a Christian virtue as we wait for the Day of the Lord and learn to live in light of that Day. It is the MVP of Christian virtues and deserves all the media’s attention. Furthermore, it needs to be worked at, for that is what “deeply” means. A love for others that transforms a society into a true church is more than a response to people we like; it is a virtue that dominates our thinking so that we ask, “How can I act lovingly to that person?” There are people in our church with whom we have disagreements; how do we respond lovingly to these people? Do we ignore them so as to avoid conflict? Do we gossip about them so as to strengthen our ego and damage their reputation? Do we pray against them and their ambitions? Or do we seek them out so as to create reconciliation? Do we pray for them and their ambitions? Do we speak kindly to them and of them? When love is preeminent among Christian virtues, then we behave differently.

And when we are dominated by love, we “cover over a multitude of sins.” As stated above, such a proverb implies that a loving community is able to tolerate more differences, forgive more wrongs, and grow into more effective prayers. It will inevitably be a community noted by its hospitality and warmth. Love is a perennial solution to problems in the Christian community. We do not call on it sporadically or occasionally to enter into the fray, nor do we pray for its presence only when things have gotten totally out of hand. Instead, love is what we ought to pray for all the time because it is the “above all” virtue.