1 Peter 4:1–6
In 1517, Johann Tetzel traveled through Germany selling indulgences under a slogan that has been quoted ever since: "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs." Business was brisk. The system had run for centuries, and most people accepted that this was how things worked.
Martin Luther had accepted it too, until he couldn't any longer. When he posted his Ninety-Five Theses that October, he had begun to see that the old arrangement had already taken more than it was owed. He hadn't yet worked out everything that followed, but he knew he couldn't keep living inside it.
Peter says something like this to believers scattered through Asia Minor, the people he calls exiles living in "Babylon" (5:13). Enough time has been spent in the old pattern of life. An accounting is coming. Live accordingly.
A Mind Armed With Christ's Suffering Has Already Broken With Babylon
Peter reaches for military language: "Since Christ suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same mind, for he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin" (4:1). The verb ὁπλίσασθε means to equip yourself for battle, and the weapon Peter hands us is a settled conviction about Christ.
He isn't saying that pain makes people holy. The suffering he has in view is suffering accepted in conformity to Christ, who left us "an example, that you should follow His steps" (2:21). The believer who takes up that pattern, at cost, has broken with the flesh as the ruling principle of his life, so that he no longer lives "for the lusts of men, but for the will of God" (4:2).
Thomas Bilney learned this slowly. A young Cambridge scholar in the 1510s, he came to faith reading Erasmus's new edition of the New Testament, at Paul's words that "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief" (1 Tim. 1:15). He later told Bishop Tunstall that his "bruised bones leaped for joy."
His courage didn't arrive all at once. Arrested in 1527, he recanted under pressure and spent the next years in an anguish he described as worse than any prison. He returned to preaching, was arrested again, and this time he didn't recant. He was burned at Norwich in 1531.
The mind that had once organized itself around academic respectability had been re-armed with a conviction that held when the first resolve failed. That's what Peter asks of us. An armed mind isn't a feeling or a New Year's resolution; it's a settled conviction that Christ's suffering has transferred your life to a new Master.
So identify one area where you're still negotiating with the old pattern. The armed mind doesn't negotiate with Babylon. It has already broken with it.
Babylon Has Already Had Enough of Your Time
Peter's next words are blunt: "For we have spent enough of our past lifetime in doing the will of the Gentiles" (4:3). Then he names it: "lewdness, lusts, drunkenness, revelries, drinking parties, and abominable idolatries." That's a specific inventory, six items long, of the life these believers had left behind.
Their neighbors noticed. "They think it strange that you do not run with them in the same flood of dissipation, speaking evil of you" (4:4). Peter doesn't treat that bewilderment as a public-relations problem to fix by blending in. It's the expected response to people who have changed masters, not merely changed habits.
Samuel Hopkins, a student of Jonathan Edwards, came to Newport, Rhode Island, in 1770 after twenty-five years of pastoral ministry in Massachusetts. Newport was a leading port of the American slave trade, and much of the town's prosperity rested on it. Hopkins's Reformed credentials were impeccable, but what set him apart was his willingness to let that theology cost him something.
By the mid-1770s he was preaching against the slave trade in a town built on it, and he kept preaching when many made clear they didn't want to hear it. In 1776 he published a dialogue against slavery addressed to the Continental Congress. It changed little politically, but it showed that he had decided the time spent accommodating Babylon's most profitable institution was already more than enough.
Run Peter's list against your own life this week. Not every item will fit every reader, but each of us has a version of it: the pattern that consumed our time before Christ, or the one still consuming it now.
Peter's point isn't "try harder." It's that the past is enough. Every hour you give the old pattern now belongs to a life God has already claimed, so stop giving Babylon hours it's no longer owed.
The Judge Will Settle Babylon's Accounts
Those who malign believers for no longer running with them "will give an account to Him who is ready to judge the living and the dead" (4:5). Peter doesn't say the Judge might come someday. He says the Judge is ready, with the authority and the knowledge to settle every account correctly.
Then Peter widens the frame: "For this reason the gospel was preached also to those who are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit" (4:6). Believers who heard the gospel and have since died may have been condemned by human courts, but God's verdict stands, and they live.
Hugh Latimer knew which verdict mattered. A bold preacher before Henry VIII, he was forced into a humiliating submission in 1532, resigned as Bishop of Worcester in 1539 rather than accept the king's Six Articles, and spent time in the Tower of London more than once. When Mary I came to the throne, he was condemned and burned at Oxford in 1555 alongside Nicholas Ridley.
His last recorded words urged Ridley to "play the man." The fire was meant to settle the account against him, but the men who lit it held only titles. Latimer knew the difference between a judge with a title and the Judge with authority.
Name the person or group running an account against you for your faith: the coworker who mocks your convictions, the relative who calls you judgmental, the friends who stopped calling when you stopped running with them. Peter's word is plain. They will give account, not to you, but to the One ready to judge the living and the dead.
You don't need to settle that account yourself. The Judge is coming, and He doesn't need your help.
Live the Rest for God
Peter doesn't ask us to scale back our investment in Babylon gradually. He tells us that enough time has been spent there, that the mind armed with Christ's suffering has already made the break, and that the Judge will settle what Babylon refuses to settle.
So stop negotiating with a pattern that has no claim on your time. Stop trying to manage the fallout of being different, and stop waiting for Babylon to vindicate what only God can vindicate.
You have lived enough of Babylon's life. Live the rest of it "for the will of God" (4:2).