Christ, then, having suffered for us in [the] flesh, do *ye* also arm yourselves with the same mind; for he that has suffered in [the] flesh has done with sin,
Peter points back to Christ suffering in the flesh, and turns it into a command: take up the same mind as a weapon. Two questions follow. Which of Christ's sufferings are we meant to share? And how does suffering in the flesh make a person cease from sin?
The verse looks back to the cross. Not every part of the cross can be copied. Commentators mark carefully which sufferings we are to imitate.
Christ's suffering in the flesh is held up to us as an example. Not His sufferings for us in atonement, which were His alone, but His sufferings in a world set against Him, in precious, lowly grace. We are to arm ourselves with the same mind. That means at least a careful, settled readiness to suffer wrong willingly. To suffer in the flesh means refusing what sin offers, and so ceasing from sin. It is the heart's decision to live no longer under natural desires, but under the will of God. This is normal Christianity.
Christ's sufferings do more than one thing. Here Peter has one of them in view.
The results of His suffering are great, varied and endless. Yet here the apostle is not speaking of it as the effective means of bringing us to God, as blameless and spotless as Himself. He is speaking of its practical power against sin, day by day.
Peter's first readers had been taught to read hardship as a verdict from God.
They were Jews, and they had been taught that blessings in this life were the only marks of God's favour. Trials, sufferings and persecutions, in Jewish thinking, were signs of His disfavour. So they lost heart and were badly confused when persecution came and they had to suffer. But these sufferings were the evidence that they followed Him who also suffered in the flesh.
To arm yourself implies an enemy. It also implies a decision made before the pressure arrives.
The enemy's constant great effort is to trap believers into sin by tempting us to gratify the flesh in some form or other. He knows the particular kind of pleasure that will appeal to each one, and tempts each person there. To meet his temptations we are told to arm ourselves against sin by having the same mind as Christ — the mind to suffer rather than yield to sin. If we yield, the flesh does not suffer; it is gratified instead: but we sin… If we refuse to yield to sin, the flesh suffers, but we cease from sin, and live to the will of God, and enjoy the blessedness of doing so.
The phrase is not about pain in general. It describes what happens when you refuse your own will instead of feeding it.
The will of the flesh is the practical principle of all sin. Self-will is not obedience to God, so in its very principle it is sin; and because it is the will of the flesh, it shows itself in the flesh's desires. It does not turn towards God, but towards what the flesh wants. It is a nature at work that is hostile to God's nature. Suffering in the flesh is the opposite of this will, this working of the nature. It applies both to Christ and to us; but in Christ's case it applies to His death.
Read this way, the second half of the verse is no longer a puzzle. It offers a simple choice.
If you yield to nature, you gratify it. But if you suffer by refusing what it wants, then "whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin." It is practical, and holiness costs suffering in this world. Suffering is the way we find practical power against the flesh.
Paul writes about the same truth in different words. One commentator sets the two side by side.
It is similar in 1 Peter 4:1, "whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin," while with Paul it is "one who has died". It is the same truth. One gives the principle, and the other the outward, practical working out of it.
The same writer draws the conclusion for daily life:
Peter's side is the practical, lived-out reckoning of self as dead. There I arm myself with the same mind. If I always reckoned myself completely dead, Satan could do nothing with me at all.
- The mind — copy Christ's sufferings in a hostile world. His atoning sufferings were His alone.
- The armour — arm yourself by deciding in advance to suffer rather than yield. The enemy knows which pleasure appeals to you.
- The suffering — to suffer in the flesh is to refuse your own will. That will is the practical principle of all sin.
- The ceasing — yield, and the flesh is gratified. Refuse, and it suffers, and sin stops. Holiness costs suffering.
- The result — you live no longer under natural desires but under the will of God. Grant calls this normal Christianity, not a higher level.
no longer to live the rest of [his] time in [the] flesh to men's lusts, but to God's will.
Peter has just pointed to Christ suffering in the flesh, and now draws the conclusion for those who follow Him. Two forces can rule the time a believer has left — human desires, or the will of God — and this verse asks which one will fill it.
The phrase "the rest of the time" only makes sense if something has already ended.
Before we were converted, we lived to satisfy our natural desires, with no thought of the will of God. Now we are on exactly opposite lines, as verse 2 shows. We do well to remember that God divides our lives into two parts: "the time that is past" and "the rest of the time in the flesh." The hour of conversion is the boundary between them. In the earlier part we carried out the will of the nations who never were put under the law of God. Now we are to carry out the will of God, which has been made known to us not merely in the law but in Christ.
The New Testament uses the word "flesh" in several ways. Here it means life in the body on earth, not the evil nature inside us.
The human race is called "all flesh"… someone living in the body on earth is in the flesh (1 Peter 4:2), and earthly relations are called relatives according to the flesh… Besides all this, we meet the term flesh in a moral sense, describing the evil nature within us.
The verse hangs on the clause before it: the one who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin. The link between them is what suffering costs the will.
It is the same with us in daily life. If I suffer in the flesh, the will of the flesh is surely not in action. In that I suffer, the flesh is dead in practice — I have nothing more to do with sins. We then are freed from it, have done with it, and are at rest. If we are content to suffer, the will does not act, and sin is not there as a fact. To suffer is not will. It is grace acting in keeping with the image and the mind of Christ in the new man.
The reverse also holds. Gratifying the old nature costs nothing; the suffering starts when you refuse.
If the Christian gratifies the old nature and yields to it, this will not involve any suffering. But if the believer lives as "dead to sin," and walks in separation from this evil age, the result will be that he has to suffer in some way.
If suffering keeps sin out, sin gets in when the heart looks away.
If by grace our mind is set on God's will at all cost, sin does not enter. It is suffering in flesh, and in that is separation from sin. This is the simple, normal state of the Christian: the heart rests on Him who went down below all depths for him. When the heart loses sight of Him, one avoids suffering. Then the will asserts the activity of the flesh, and actual sin follows.
Peter does not stop at a prohibition. The second half of the verse gives something to live for, and you reach it by deciding in advance.
To cease from sin, however right, is only a negative virtue: the Apostle therefore goes on to speak of the positive side of Christian life… We arm ourselves against Satan by making up our minds to suffer rather than sin, and by setting our faces toward God with the desire to do His will.
Living to God's will has another name: being set apart, or consecrated, to Him.
He is to know not only that he is cleansed by that blood, but set apart for God by it… He is now to be fully awake to this: he is consecrated to the service of God. The ear is to listen to His word, the hand to serve Him, and the foot to walk in His ways.
No one knows how much of that time is left.
How long it may be, none can say. It may be years, or months, or weeks or days. The coming of the Lord may end it suddenly any day, and that is our blessed hope. But whether long or short, this is all the time we shall have in which to live either in the lusts of men, or in the will of God.
- Divided. God cuts a life in two — the time past and the rest of the time — with conversion as the boundary.
- Decided. You arm yourself in advance by making up your mind to suffer rather than sin.
- Costly. Yielding to the old nature costs nothing. Refusing it brings suffering, and that refusal is where sin stops.
- Guarded. Sin returns the moment the heart loses sight of Christ, and the will starts acting again.
- Consecrated. The time left is not merely emptied of lusts but given away — ear, hand and foot set apart for the will of God.
For the time past [is] sufficient [for us] to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, walking in lasciviousness, lusts, wine-drinking, revels, drinkings, and unhallowed idolatries.
Peter draws a line across his readers' lives. Everything before their conversion goes in one column, and over it he writes "enough." The verse then names what that old life held. The shock is that these readers had known God's name all along.
One writer contrasts the two halves of a believer's life, split by a single moment.
In our unconverted days we lived to satisfy our natural desires, with no thought of the will of God. We do well to remember that God divides our lives into two parts. There is "the time that is past," and there is "the rest of the time in the flesh." The hour of conversion is the boundary between them. In the earlier part we did the will of the nations, who never came under the law of God. Now we are to carry out the will of God. God has made that will known to us not only in the law but in Christ.
One writer hears urgency in that verdict.
There is no time to lose. The end is at hand, judgment is at the doors, and it begins with us who belong to the house of God. "Holiness befits your house, O LORD, forevermore." Living for the lusts of men ought to be utterly hateful to us. We have travelled that fearful road long enough. Giving in to our own will is lust. Lust comes from the flesh, so it is flesh. The will of the flesh is the will of the Gentiles; how can we run "with them"?
Another writer applies it to the days you have left.
Let this expression, "the rest of the time," come home to every one of us in its full force. How long it may be, none can say. It may be years, or months, or weeks or days. The coming of the Lord may bring it to a sudden close any day, and that coming is our blessed hope. Whether it is long or short, this is all the time we will ever have to live either in the lusts of men or in the will of God.
The list runs from sensuality to idolatry. One commentator explains how Jews living far from home picked up these habits.
There is no doubt that these wicked ways belonged to the Gentiles, not to the Jews. But the Jews scattered abroad lived among the nations, and were likely to be corrupted by their surroundings. Like their fathers of old, these descendants were drawn too easily into gross lusts and passions, especially when far from the sharp watch of eyes back home in Palestine. From there, with a bad conscience shutting out God and His judgment, they adopted unholy idolatries, such as amulets and charms. This is what the apostle charges as a fact in former days, on those who now bore the Lord's name. It was natural for the nations to live that way. It was shocking that people who owned the Lord as their God had walked in it. They now knew that they were no better than anyone else.
The phrase "what the Gentiles want to do" is not first about nationality. It is about whose will was in charge.
In the time that is past, our life was marked by doing our own will, and our walk showed what that will was like. These Jewish believers had walked according to the will of the Gentiles and committed the same excesses. That shows that the will of an unconverted Jew is the same as the will of an unconverted Gentile.
Commentators here read the letter as written to believing Jews scattered among the nations, and they note that this verse describes how far those readers had sunk.
The exhortation is similar to 1 Peter 4:3 — "The time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles" — only there the apostle of the circumcision was writing to believing Jews, who had in their former days sunk to the level of the Gentiles around them.
Kelly notes that some scholars read this verse the other way — as evidence that Peter was writing to converted heathen — and he answers that the language points instead to Jews who had lived like the nations around them.
One writer sets the two ways of living side by side. Only one of them costs anything.
That is the contrast between the lusts of men and the will of God. If I give way to the lusts of men, I do not suffer — not in the sense in which Christ suffered, doing God's will.
- Divided. Conversion cuts life into "the time that is past" and "the rest of the time in the flesh" — one boundary, two columns.
- Enough. One word closes the past column: it has had all the time it will ever get.
- Exposed. The list of sins shows what your own will produces when it rules. An unconverted Jew's will proved the same as an unconverted Gentile's.
- Shameful. Idolatry was expected from those who never knew God; it was shocking in people who bore His name.
- Remaining. Whatever time is left — years or days — is all you will ever have for living to the will of God.
Wherein they think it strange that ye run not with [them] to the same sink of corruption, speaking injuriously [of you];
When someone stops joining in, the old crowd is first puzzled, then hostile. Peter names both reactions — surprise and abuse — then points to the One who will settle the account.
The world cannot see what has replaced the pleasures it treats as normal. So it looks for a hidden motive.
The men of the world wonder that believers hold back from the indulgences of the flesh. Believers refuse to join them in pouring their life into the sink of corruption, which is what the world without God has become. These men know nothing of God. They know nothing of the desires and affections of the new nature, which make the lusts of the flesh repellent to the believer. So they can only assume that some evil motive is driving those who refuse to join their life of self-indulgence. The devil could not appreciate goodness either. He suggested to God that Job's piety was not real. Job held back from evil, he said, not because he hated evil or loved God, but because he found that holding back from excess paid.
Set this verse beside the chapter before it and a pattern appears.
In the previous chapter we learnt that the world falsely charges the believer with evil, and then condemns him for doing evil. Here the world condemns the believer because he refuses to do evil. So whatever the believer does or does not do, the fallen nature of man stands convicted: it opposes everything that is of God.
The attack also went after the name Christians carried.
Christians bore the name of God. The mind of men, hostile to His name, tried to bring disgrace on it. They blamed Christians for the evil conduct which they themselves practised without remorse. At the same time they complained (1 Peter 4:4) that Christians would not go along with them in the same excesses and disorder.
"Run with them" is how older translations read it. The picture is a crowd all moving the same way, and Peter's readers had stepped out of it.
The apostle urges the saints to live in a way that matches that holy name. He reminds them that their non-Jewish neighbours counted it strange that they do not run the same common race of impure and selfish indulgence. That race was so often tied to the worship of idols. Instead of approving the change, they threw out damaging accusations, as the world still does today in its Christian form. In this they only follow the prince of the world, who is a liar and a murderer.
The believer has lost the appetite for the old life. One writer pictures a pig that receives the life of a lamb.
Now the pig loathes and hates the filth and the mud. The other pigs think it strange that this pig does not run with them to enjoy the mud and filth (compare 1 Peter 4:4). They speak evil of it. They say, This is not a true pig; it does not have the nature of a pig. They speak rightly, for this pig has a new nature. The spotless lamb is its life. It delights to be clean, and to keep away from filth of every kind. That is the nature of the lamb.
This is also why the misunderstanding is so complete. What marks the believer out is exactly what the onlooker cannot read.
The world cannot understand the secret of our joy, of our strength, of our growth, of our separation; for we are sealed, marked as belonging in a special way to our blessed God, and understood by Him.
Peter does not tell his readers to defend themselves. He tells them who is listening.
Here he is giving them comfort. The Gentiles say you are strange; never mind, the apostle says. Suppose you did go along with them — they would think you inconsistent; and now that you do not, they think it strange. But, says Peter, we are walking not to please them, but to please the Lord. And we must remember this: God is ready to judge the living and the dead. They will have to give an account to Him.
The refusal carries a price.
If the Christian gratifies the old nature and gives in to it, it will not bring any suffering. But suppose the believer lives as "dead to sin" and walks in separation from this evil age. Then he has to suffer in some way. The life he now lives is no longer lived for human passions, but for the will of God. Such a walk brings the opposition of sinners and the hatred of the world — the very sufferings Christ Himself passed through.
- Strange — The world cannot understand a believer who stops joining its excess. It knows nothing of the new nature that makes those things repellent.
- Suspected — The world cannot see the real motive, so it invents a false one. The devil did the same with Job: he claimed that Job's piety just paid.
- Slandered — Surprise hardens into abuse. The world blames the believer for doing evil and for refusing evil, so the charge was never about his conduct.
- Separated — The refusal is not effort but appetite. A new life inside loathes what it once loved, and that walk will cost something.
- Settled — The accusers, not the accused, will give account to Him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. So the believer walks to please the Lord, not them.
who shall render account to him who is ready to judge [the] living and [the] dead.
Old friends mock these believers for the life they no longer share. Peter does not defend them. He points instead to a courtroom, and everything hangs on one word: "ready."
Their old friends found the change in them strange, and said so. Peter points them past the insult to the Judge, and he puts himself and his readers in the same court.
Godless Gentiles no doubt think it strange that believers have no desire to indulge the lower passions in the same wild excesses as they do. That is why they speak against them. But both we and they will give account to a higher Judge, He who is ready to judge both the living and dead. These judgments are far apart in time, but Christ is already prepared for both. God has exalted Him, and nothing can hinder the judgment He will carry out at the exact time.
Peter says the Judge is ready now, not that He will one day be ready. One writer explains what makes that possible.
In what sense ready? If a judge has a prisoner before him, evidence is given on both sides, and he has to weigh that evidence before giving judgment. There is nothing like that with the Lord. He knows everything perfectly, He reads the secrets of the heart, and hence He "is ready" to judge the living and the dead.
The same word has another side.
On one side it is true that salvation is ready to be revealed, for the everlasting joy of God's redeemed. On the other side it is just as true that judgment is ready to take its course, for the everlasting misery of those who neglect the salvation God offers… There is nothing to wait for in respect to the judgment, any more than there is in respect to the salvation. The one is as "ready" as the other.
Peter names two groups. Commentators see two separate events here, under one Judge, far apart in time.
Here he is giving them comfort. The Gentiles say you are strange; never mind, says the apostle… We are walking not to please them, but to please the Lord. And we have to remember this: God is ready to judge the living and the dead, and they will have to give an account to Him. The judgment of the living was clearly the one a Jew was familiar with. The apostle is bringing out here that God is going to judge both the living and the dead — the living, according to Matthew 25, at the start of the kingdom, and the dead, as the final act of the kingdom, at the end of the millennium — at the great white throne.
The Judge did not appoint Himself. And the same event that fixes the day also frees the believer from fear of it.
It is a certain, solemn, yet simple truth: God has definitely appointed the Lord Jesus Christ to this office… God has set a day in which He will judge the inhabited earth by the appointed Man. He has given all men a pledge of this by raising Him from the dead. To the believer Peter taught in 1 Peter 1:21 that His resurrection is to give him faith and hope toward God, delivered from all fear of judgment.
Nothing stands between now and that day. So the verse puts a choice in front of every reader.
Do not forget that Christ is the Lord of both life and death. If you are not willing to accept Him as your Saviour now, you will meet Him someday as your Judge. All authority has been given to Him and He is ready to judge the living and the dead. Those who have been raised with Him to new life have nothing to fear… So take refuge in Christ, the Source and Giver of life, before it is too late.
- Ready — because He knows. A human judge must weigh evidence first. Christ knows everything and reads the secrets of the heart, so He is ready now.
- Ready — both ways. Salvation is ready to be revealed and judgment is ready to take its course. Neither is waiting on anything.
- Ready — for both groups. He judges the living at the start of the kingdom and the dead at its end. The two are far apart in time, yet He is prepared for both.
- Ready — because God appointed Him. God raised Christ from the dead as His pledge that this day will come. That same resurrection frees the believer from all fear of it.
- Ready — so answer now. Mockery is not the verdict; the mockers must give account. Meet Him as Saviour now, or meet Him as Judge then.
For to this [end] were the glad tidings preached to [the] dead also, that they might be judged, as regards men, after [the] flesh, but live, as regards God, after [the] Spirit.
Peter has just said that those who mock believers must answer to the One who is ready to judge the living and the dead. The next words explain how the dead come into it. Readers take this verse in very different directions, so start with a simple question: were these people dead when they heard the good news, or alive?
The first question is what kind of death Peter means. The answer comes from the verse just before it.
"Those that are dead" — is this spiritual or bodily death? The answer, if correct, is that the apostle speaks of those who are dead as to the body. The context points to the same conclusion. In verse 5 Peter declares that the sinners he has been talking about "shall give account to Him who is ready to judge the living and the dead." Those two classes, the living and the dead, are the ones liable to judgment at the appearing of the Lord. An interval of a thousand years will separate the judgment of the dead from the judgment of the living. And "the dead" in verse 5 are without doubt "the dead" in verse 6.
The tense of the verb settles much of the argument.
"The gospel was preached to them that are now dead" would be a proper paraphrase for the thought of the writer. Note that he does not say, "For this cause is the gospel preached to them that are dead," but "for this cause was the gospel preached."
Some use this line to teach that people who never heard get a chance after they die. One writer answers by asking where else in the Bible such teaching appears.
It is a thing of the past and means that those who are dead now had heard the preaching of the gospel while they lived… If there were such a thing as preaching to the physically dead, we should find it in the letter to the Romans, that great document of the gospel, or somewhere else in Paul's letters. But we find nothing about this anywhere.
Commentators differ on the words "judged in the flesh the way people are." One reading applies them to those who refused the message. Their end stands against the life of those who received it.
The aim of preaching the gospel is this. Men who receive the glad tidings come out from under the condemnation they lie under, for "whoever does not believe is condemned already." Through the power of the death and resurrection of Christ they receive the forgiveness of their sins, together with a new and divine life… If instead they refuse the gospel preached to them, they are left in their condition as sinners, and remain for judgment before the great white throne, "according to men in the flesh."
The other reading keeps both halves true of one believer. Men pass their verdict on him while he lives to God.
We have just seen the effect of the death of Christ on those who grasp it by faith. It is ceasing from sin, ceasing from the will of the Gentiles; and for this the Gentiles judge them. The gospel here has the very same effect: a life "according to God in the Spirit." That is simple. But it should be just as simple that such a life always goes with a judgment by men after the flesh. That fleshly judgment falls on those who have now learned to live a spiritual life.
God had good news for people long before Christ came. Everyone who heard it along the way carried more responsibility for it.
From the hour that man fell by sin under death and judgment, God had in His grace a gospel to shelter and give life according to God… Faith clung to this from the first. God added to it and made it clearer all through the Old Testament, until the death, resurrection, and glory of Christ gave it fulness. And those now dead who heard it down the ages had their responsibility so much the more increased.
The verse weighs man's verdict against the life God gives.
The object of the preaching was that, while they might be judged according to men in the flesh (as men speak evil of a believer), yet they might live according to God in the Spirit. This would be the normal, proper result of the preaching received. Noah's family received it and suffered from men, but lived, while others died. Man's callous judgment counts for so little next to living according to God in the spirit!
- Context first. Verse 5 names the living and the dead as the two groups Christ will judge; verse 6 explains the second group.
- Tense decides. "Was preached," not "is preached" — the hearers were alive then and are dead now.
- No later chance. The verse offers no message to people after death. Its two results, life or judgment, belong to the living.
- Two outcomes. Those who refuse stay under judgment as men in the flesh. Those who believe receive forgiveness and a new life toward God. Some writers read both halves of one believer: judged by men, yet alive to God.
- Old gospel, real responsibility. God has had good news for man since the first sin, and it grew clearer until Christ. Everyone who heard it answered for it.