1 Peter3chapter 3

1 Peter 3:1-2

The address assumes a real and hard case, believing wives of unbelieving husbands in a world where a wife was expected to keep her husband's gods. The strategy is the letter's own suffering-and-glory logic brought home: if any obey not the word, they may without the word be won, kerdethesontai, gained, by the conversation of the wives, conduct preaching where speech has been refused. Chaste conversation coupled with fear is behavior with reverence, the life itself the argument.

1 Peter 3:3-4

The adorning contrast repeats 1 Timothy 2:9-10's frame: not the display wardrobe of the age, plaited hair, gold, apparel, but the hidden man of the heart, the inner person dressed in what is not corruptible. The named ornament is a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price, the same quietness word the Pastorals commend to the whole church. The verse regulates ostentation and locates beauty, and the exposition keeps it from becoming a dress code it never was.

1 Peter 3:5-6

The holy women of the old time are produced as the pattern, and Sara's calling Abraham lord reaches back to Genesis 18:12, the deference of her own speech taken as her adorning. Whose daughters ye are extends the matriarch's line to Gentile believers, daughters of Sarah as believing men are sons of Abraham. The condition is doing well and being not afraid with any amazement, fearless goodness, so the subjection commended is the furthest thing from cowering.

1 Peter 3:7

The husbands' verse balances the scale with three duties: dwell with them according to knowledge, considerate understanding; giving honour unto the wife; and the ground of the honor is double, the weaker vessel, language of physical frame and social exposure, never of worth, and heirs together of the grace of life, the inheritance held jointly with no weaker share. The sanction is startling, that your prayers be not hindered: a husband's treatment of his wife reaches his standing at the throne. The verse is the household code's own guard against every abusive reading of it.

1 Peter 3:8-12

The addresses close on the whole church: one mind, compassion, brotherly love, pity, courtesy, and the family resemblance to the Lord, not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing, but contrariwise blessing, called to bless and to inherit a blessing. The proof text is Psalm 34:12-16 quoted at length, the psalm of the hunted David tasting that the Lord is good, already cited at 2:3. The eyes of the Lord over the righteous and his ears open to their prayers is the letter's quiet answer to surveillance by hostile neighbors: a better watcher is watching.

1 Peter 3:13-14

Who is he that will harm you states the general rule, goodness disarms most malice, and the exception is immediately blessed: if ye suffer for righteousness' sake, happy are ye, the Lord's own beatitude from Matthew 5:10 in Peter's hand. Be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled quotes Isaiah 8:12, spoken first to a prophet told not to fear what a conspiring nation feared. The citation sets up the next verse, which takes its answer from Isaiah's next line.

1 Peter 3:15-17

Isaiah 8:13's sanctify the LORD of hosts himself becomes sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and the earliest witnesses read sanctify Christ as Lord, Isaiah's YHWH applied to Jesus, christology carried in a citation. The apologetics charge follows: be ready always to give an answer, apologia, a reasoned defense, to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you, and the manner is bound to the matter, with meekness and fear, a good conscience making the slanderers ashamed. The defense of the faith is every believer's work, evidence offered with gentleness, and suffering for well doing, if the will of God be so, remains better than suffering for evil.

1 Peter 3:18

The ground of all the letter's suffering counsel is the Lord's own: Christ also hath once suffered for sins, hapax, once for all, the just for the unjust, substitution stated in four words, that he might bring us to God, prosagoge, the court access of Ephesians 2:18. Put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit sets the two spheres, the body slain and the quickening that answered it. The verse is the letter's atonement summit, and the strange announcement that follows hangs on its final clause.

1 Peter 3:19-20

the spirits in prison: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison, disobedient in the days of Noah, is the letter's hardest text and the readings are old: the reading this site's posture receives first takes the spirits as the angels that sinned before the flood, the Genesis 6:1-4 Watchers, held in chains as the letter-pair's own words say at 2 Peter 2:4-5 and Jude 6, and the preaching as the risen Lord's proclamation of victory, kerusso, a herald's announcement, not a gospel offer; 1 Enoch, a labeled study resource this site teaches on its own shelf, carries the same imprisonment tradition Peter's readers knew. Augustine's line reads the preincarnate Christ preaching through Noah to men whose spirits are now in prison, and a third reading places the preaching in Hades between death and resurrection; each stands with its holders. On every main reading no second chance after death is taught, and the longsuffering of God that waited while the ark was a preparing remains the verse's own note of patience, eight souls saved by water.

1 Peter 3:21-22

The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us carries its own exposition in its parentheses: not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, no mere washing of the body, but the answer of a good conscience toward God, eperotema, the pledge or response of a conscience made good, and the saving power is located outside the water entirely, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The traditions read the clause differently, the sacramental lines hearing the instrument and the memorial lines hearing the sign, and both stand with their holders as at Titus 3:5. The chapter ends above the flood and above the prison: gone into heaven, on the right hand of God, angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto him, the very ranks of the unseen world under his feet.