Well, I want to read verses 3 through 6 here in 1 Peter 4.
For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you; but they will give an account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does.
I love this passage! Well, I love the whole Bible, but sometimes passages just jump out at you. Peter makes it very clear here that a gospel-formed worldview tells us that nobody gets the last word but God; God gets the final word! By the world's standard of normal, normal, that means you are free to do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it, whoever you want to do it with, by the world's standard of normal, it's assumed that you and I would join them in doing whatever pleases us to do. So, it will surprise the people around us that we say, "No, we don't want to live that way." What is normal to the world is not normal to us; God has given us a brand-new standard of norm-we've been talking about that.
And so, you'll be maligned, you'll be mocked, you'll be misunderstood. And so, how do you deal with this? How do you deal with the fact that your neighbors won't understand you, that people at work may mock you, that your choices that are actually holy in the eyes of God will look evil to the surrounding world? Well, Peter says, here's how you deal with this.
Remember that the mocking world never has the final word, God does! There will be a final judgment; there will be a final judgment because there is an ultimate Judge, and evil will be punished, and God's children who have faced mockery and mistreatment and misunderstanding and rejection will be given a crown of honor and will reign with their King forever and ever and ever in utter peace and utter righteousness and full acceptance forever. God gets the final word!
Listen, this period of misunderstanding that every believer is going to face because the world assumes things about us and when we don't participate, they deride and malign and mock, is just a flash of time in comparison to the honor and glory that awaits us in eternity because the One who is your Savior is the ultimate Judge, and He gets the final word!
I want to say something about this statement that "the gospel was preached to the dead" that has created a lot of controversy. And people think, "Well, does this mean the dead have a second chance?" All Peter's arguing is, it's always been this way, that the gospel has always been God's means of bringing people to Himself. It always meant the preaching of the gospel, that no one is able to earn or deserve or work his way into relationship with God. So, all those people, believers who are dead, they came to God in the same way by His grace, just like we do. That grace meets us now, even in this moment of hardship, and that grace is a big finger pointing to the fact that God gets the final word, and honor and reward and glory is to come!
