1 Peter 3
McGeeCHAPTER 3THEME: Suffering produces Christian conduct in the homein the church; Christ’s suffering preached by the Spirit in Noah’s dayIn chapter 3 Peter teaches that suffering will also produce Christian conduct in the life of the believer. This conduct will be manifested in two different places, in the home and in the church.
1 Peter 3:1
CONDUCT IN THE HOME"Likewise" means “in the same manner”; thus verse 1Pe_3:1 ties right back into chapter 2 which discussed separation. “Conversation” would be better translated as “behavior.” Separation and conduct are blended and molded together here. In Ephesians 5 we find this same theme of the position of the wife in the home. However, Peter is presenting an altogether different situation from that which Paul discussed in Ephesians. Paul dealt with the relationship between a Christian wife and a Christian husband who were both Spirit-filled believers. That entire section in Ephesians begins with “…be filled with the Spirit” (Eph. 5.Eph_5:18). When you are filled with the Spirit, what are you to do? Paul says, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord” (Eph_5:22), and “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Eph_5:25). He is speaking of a Christian home in which both the husband and wife are Spirit-filled believers, and the relationship is one in which the man loves his wife and is willing to die for her. Now for the sake of order in any situation, there must be headship. In marriage, that headship has been given to the husband. When the wife is told to submit, however, it is not like the obedience of a child. Many men when they marry think of their wife as being a sort of first child and that she is to obey them like a child is to obey. That is not true at all. As we have suggested before, submission has to do with that which is voluntary. Paul is saying to the wife, “Submit yourself. This man loves you, and you are to submit to him.” The better word, because it means more, is respond. Respond to this man. If he comes to you as your Christian husband and puts his arms around you and says, “I love you more than anything else,” then certainly you should respond, “I love you.” Down through the years I have counseled a great many young people who have asked me to unite them in marriage. I never majored in trying to marry as many as I could; very frankly, I always did it with fear and trembling. I would like to mention very briefly some things I have told them. Marriage is made on three different planes. The first is the physical plane, and that is important. It is the thing which the world talks about a great deal, the sexual relationship. It is a wonderful thing to have a wife whom you can put your arms around and love. Between two believers, sex can become the most precious, most beautiful, most wonderful thing there is in this world. It is my conviction that believers are the only ones who can really enjoy the physical relationship to the fullest. There is no question that the physical relationship is a wonderful thing. When I got married, my wife felt she was not cut out to be a preacher’s wife. She had been brought up in a little town in Texas and had seen how the preacher’s wife was expected to do so much work in the church. I took her over to talk with Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer one day, and I explained her fears to him. Neither of us will ever forget what Dr. Chafer said. He told my wife, “I am out speaking in Bible conferences a great deal. When I come home, I am not looking for an assistant pastor, I’m not looking for an organist, I’m not looking for a soloist, and I’m not looking for the president of the missionary society. I want a woman there to meet me who is my wife and whom I can put my arms around and love.” The physical relationship is an important relationship. The second plane in a marriage is the mental or psychological relationship, which is also very important. It is nice when the husband and wife enjoy doing the same things. On one of our tours to Bible lands, there was a very wonderful couple who were in their fifties. They would get up early in the morning and take a hike, and again at night they would walk together. They would visit certain places which were not included in the tour. They enjoyed doing things together, and it is wonderful to have that kind of relationship.
The thing that makes the comic strip “Maggie and Jiggs” so funny is that Jiggs wants to go to Dinty Moore’s where they have corned beef, cabbage, and beer, and Maggie wants to go to the opera where they have champagne. Their interests and their appetites are altogether different. That, of course, does not make for a healthy relationship. Because so many husbands and wives do not share the same interests, there are many clubs and lodges today where each can get away from the other and do what they want to do. How tragic that is! The third plane in a marriage is the spiritual relationship, and this applies to a marriage between two believers. When problems and trouble and sorrow and suffering come, a husband and wife should be able to kneel down, come to God in prayer, and meet around the Word of God together. You can break the other two ties, but “…a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecc_4:12). When you have all three, you have a wonderful marriage. The first two cords can break, but if the third one will hold, the marriage will hold. However, when the third one is broken with the others, the marriage has gone down the tube, my friend. I have to admit it, there is very little hope for a marriage like that. We have been discussing marriage between two believers. Suppose, however, that the wife is married to a man who is not a Christian. To begin with, she should not have married him, if that was the situation before they married. Any man or woman who marries a non-Christian is in trouble. Scripture forbids marriage between a believer and an unbeliever. In Deuteronomy we read, “Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together” (Deu_22:10). There are a lot of them yoked together today, and it is a big mistake. One young lady came to me and said, “Dr. McGee, my fiance is not a believer, but I am going to win him for the Lord.” I said to her, “Have you won him yet?” “No,” she said, “he won’t even come to church with me yet.” So I told her this: “Your greatest influence with that young man is right now. The day you get married, your influence to win him for the Lord will greatly diminish. You’ll never be able to preach to him again. You are going to be living with him, and he’s going to be watching you very carefully from now on. If you can’t get him to church now, you’re in trouble.” She didn’t like what I said.
In fact, she went and got another preacher to perform the ceremony because I would not perform it. I do not marryand have never knowingly marrieda saved and an unsaved person; I believe that is entirely wrong. She got someone else to marry them, but she came back in two years weeping and wanting to talk to me because she had gotten a divorce from him. That marriage was headed in that direction even before it started, my friend. In this passage here in 1 Peter, we have that unfortunate relationship in which there is a saved wife and an unsaved husband; apparently, the wife became a Christian after they had married. Is she to change after her conversion and become a sort of female preacher in the home in order to lecture her husband and to present the gospel to him? No, she is to continue on in the same position of being in subjection to him. To be in subjection means to submit yourself. This is a voluntary step; it is not a command. The wife is to continue on in this relationship of voluntarily being in subjection, letting her husbandthough unsavedcontinue to be the head of the house. Suppose, however, that her husband wants her to go with him to the nightclub and drink cocktails? Is she to do that? I would hope that even these most rabid folk who say that she should obey her husband would agree that she should not do such things. However, there are those who are giving that kind of counsel today. A lady who attended my church when I was a pastor in downtown Los Angeles had an unsaved husband who wanted her to go to a nightclub, which apparently was a sort of burlesque. Some evangelist had counseled her that she was to obey her husband even in this, and so she went. It offended her sensibilities, and she was under great conviction about it. She actually came to the place where a doctor told her that she would have to enter an institution for psychopathic treatment because she could not go on under that type of pressure. Well, she heard me speaking on the radio, and it was evident that I had a little different idea about it. When she came to talk to me, I told her that I did not believe that Simon Peter intended for her to do these things.
I said that after her conversion she was to try to win her husband and to be subject to him. But I went on to ask her what she would do if her husband wanted her to go out and commit a robbery. Would she have to join him in that and drive the car for him? She said she was sure that the evangelist would not want her to go that far. May I say to you, her submission was to be voluntary. God certainly did not command her to engage in sinful or questionable activities which would spoil her testimony. A Christian wife must live very carefully before an unsaved husband. Her preaching is not going to do a bit of good. “That, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the behavior of the wives.” In other words, she is to preach a wordless sermon by her pure life which she lives before him. And that has nothing in the world to do with submission to him.
1 Peter 3:2
Peter says that your husband will recognize that you have now changed and want to live a pure life for God and that you no longer want to indulge in the things of the world. Therefore, that is the testimony which you can give to him. Another lady came to me when I was a pastor and said, “Dr. McGee, I bring my husband to church every Sunday.” (She was the kind of woman who could bring her husband; she was a dominant personality.) She continued, “He is not saved, and every Sunday I think he will make a decision for Christ but he doesn’t. On Monday morning I sit at the breakfast table just weeping and telling him how I wish he would accept Christ. When he comes home from work in the evening, again I just sit there at dinner and weep and beg him to accept Christ.” I got to thinking about what she had said. How would you like to have dinner every evening and breakfast every morning with a weeping woman? I wouldn’t care for it myself, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want that either.
So I called her up and said, “Suppose that for a year’s moratorium you simply do not talk to your husband about the Lord at all?” She said, “Oh, you mean that I’m not to witness?” I said, “No, I didn’t say that. Peter says that if you cannot win your husband with the Word, then start preaching a wordless sermon. How about your life? What kind of life are you living before him?” I want to tell you, that put her back on her heels because she wasn’t living as she knew she should live. But she agreed to my suggestion because she did want to win him, and she was a wonderful woman in many ways. I was amazed myself when, in six months’ time, her husband made a decision for Christ one Sunday morning.
The wordless sermon had won, my friend.
1 Peter 3:3
Obviously, this verse does not prohibit all adorningif it did, it also would prohibit all apparel! In the Roman Empire a great emphasis was put upon the way women arranged their hair. If you have seen any pictures of that period, you know that the women loaded their heads down with all kinds of hair, not their own hair but someone else’s. They really built their hair up, and they wore jewelry in it. Today we have very much the same kind of emphasis upon hair and dress. If the unsaved man you are going to marry cannot be won to Christ by your sex appeal before you marry, you will never win him to Christ by sex appeal afterward. A wife can apply a gallon of perfume and wear the thinnest negligee there is, but I tell you, she will not win him for the Lord that way. I do believe, though, that a Christian woman should dress in style. At the Bible institute where I used to teach, someone had given the girls the notion that they should never use any makeup and need not give any care to the way they dressed. I used to tell those girls that we all ought to look the best we can with what we’ve got to work with, although some of us don’t have much to work with! I said, “Some of you would look a little bit better if you would put on just a little make-up, because you look like you came out of the morgue. That is simply not attractive, and it does not commend you to God.” Peter’s point here is that you cannot win an unsaved man by sex appeal.
1 Peter 3:4
A woman is to wear an ornament, but it is to be an ornament on the inside, the ornament of a gentle and quiet spirit. In the little Book of Ruth, we read that when Boaz went into the field and saw that beautiful maid of Moab, Ruth, he fell in love with her. But have you noticed something else? Boaz had heard of her character. He had heard that she had a marvelous, wonderful character, and he fell in love with her total person. We have many very helpful cosmetic products today, and I see nothing wrong in using anything that will make you look better. All of us want to look the best we possibly can. Alexander Pope has well advised: Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside. Be in style. Dress up in a way that is becoming, but don’t try to use that as the means of winning someone to the Lord. We need more inward adornment todaythat is the thing which is important.
1 Peter 3:5
There are a number of fine examples of such women in the Old Testament. I have already mentioned Ruth who was in the genealogical line that led to Christ. We are also told that Rachel was a beautiful woman, and Jacob fell in love with her. She was the one bright spot in that man’s life, which was a pretty dark life, by the way.
1 Peter 3:6
Sarah was such a beautiful woman that several kings wanted her as a wife, and Abraham had a great problem in that connection. But she called Abraham “lord.” She looked up to Abraham. It is wonderful when a wife can look up to her husband. Now Peter speaks to the husbands
1 Peter 3:7
Although this seems to imply that both the husband and wife are Christians, I believe that these instructions to husbands would be applicable either way. A husband is to treat his wife as the weaker vessel, and he is to give her honor because of that. I do not think the current women’s liberation movement is going to last very long. I think a woman wants to be a woman, just as a man wants to be a man. Because she is the weaker vessel, she is to be treated with honor. The man is to give first place to her. She gets into the car first as he holds the door for her. When they enter a room, she goes first. As they walk down the sidewalk, he walks on the outside for her protection. He is to treat her with honor. When a woman loses her place, she doesn’t go up; she goes down. When she takes her place, she can be treated with honor and given her rightful position. I think every husband ought to treat his wife as someone special. “That your prayers be not hindered.” Peter says that if you are not getting along as husband and wife, it will ruin your family altar, and there is no use praying together. If you are fighting like cats and dogs, well, God just doesn’t hear cats and dogs. But when you are in agreement, you can pray together and your prayers will not be hindered. Before we leave this particular section of Scripture, I would like to add one further word. Marriage is something which God has given to the entire human family, not only to Christians or to the nation Israel. In the Book of Genesis we are told that God made man, and at that time man was alone. I think the Lord let Adam be alone for a long time to let him know he was missing something. Then Scripture says that God took man and from man He made woman. Using the Hebrew words, Gen_2:23 reads, “She shall be called Isha, because she was taken out of Ish.” She is called “…an help meet for him” (Gen_2:18, italics mine); that is, a help that was fit for him.
In other words, she was to be the other half of him. He was only half a man, and she was to be the other part of him. With that in mind, you can see that the marriage relationship is not to be one of a man insisting on treating his wife like a little child who has to jump every time he says so. She is there to help him. She is there to be a part of him. She is there to love him.
And he is there to love and protect her. That is the ideal relationship in marriage.
1 Peter 3:8
CONDUCT IN THE CHURCHBelievers are to be like-minded, sympathetic, tenderhearted, and courteous, which means they are to be humble-minded, not trying to lord it over one another. This is to be the attitude and action of a believer among other believers.
1 Peter 3:9
This is turning the other cheek. If another believer says something evil about you, something that is not true, are you to strike back? No. Commit him to the Lordthe Lord will take care of him. If we take this position it will break down all the little cliques and stop all the fighting within the church. Remember that we are representing the Lord.
1 Peter 3:10
All of us want to live, but unfortunately there are a lot of believers today who are not enjoying life. They are not living life to its fullest, not getting all they should out of life. When I was a pastor in Nashville, Tennessee, many years ago, a young medical studentwho was the president of the young people’s group in the church and not much younger than I wassaid one day, “Vernon, I want life to be like an orange to me, an orange out of which I can squeeze every drop. I want to live for God!” “For he that will love life"if you want to really live, here is a good formula, and here is the key to it. Peter says that we are to refrain from constantly speaking evil of others. And we are to refrain from speaking “guile,” from being deceptive and not telling the truth.
1 Peter 3:11
A child of God is not to sit back and act piously. Let’s live it up, my friend, but let’s not live it up by indulging in gossip and evil. Let’s live it up by turning away from evil and pursuing that which ministers to peace. Let’s live for God today. How important this is!
1 Peter 3:12
This is an amazing passage of Scripture. Peter is quoting here from Psalm 34: “The eyes of the LORD are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry. The face of the LORD is against them that do evil, to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth” (Psa_34:15-16). This is a strong statement as it is given here in this psalm. It is something the Word of God has emphasized a great deal. God has guaranteed to hear the prayers of those who are His own.
He has not guaranteed to hear the prayers of those who are not His own. The only prayer that a sinner can pray is, “Lord, I admit that I am a sinner, and accept Jesus Christ as my Savior, and ask that You accept me in Him.” That is a prayer that God will hear and that God will answer. Many people today have the idea that an old reprobate can live any kind of life he wants and then come to God in prayer when he is in trouble and expect God to hear and answer him. As the movies and the novels tell it, the old reprobate comes home to find his little girl sick in the hospital, and so he gets down on his knees and calls upon God to raise her up. How sentimental that is! May I say this very plainly: it is nonsense, and it is absolutely unscriptural.
Let that old reprobate get right with God, and then God will hear and answer his prayer. It is a false idea today to think that you can call on God under any circumstances whether or not you are His child. My friend, He has not promised to hear the prayers of those who are not His own. In Ecc_2:17 we read the statement of a man who has tried everything in life. He has lived like a reprobate, and he says, “Therefore I hated life: because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” How many men and women today who are involved in living for the things of this world suddenly wake up and find that it’s not worth it? Life is monotonous, and life is not worth it. No wonder they put a gun to their heads and blow their brains out. No wonder some of them jump off bridges. No wonder some take an overdose of sleeping pills. My friend, it is not until you come into a right relationship with God that you can live life to its fullest. Does that mean that a child of God is living on a pretty high plane above the problems of this world? Listen to Peter
1 Peter 3:13
Does that mean that God gives you an armor so that nobody can touch you at all?
1 Peter 3:14
Suffering for the right should bring joy to the child of God. Some Christians actually make themselves obnoxious in their witness to others, thinking they are taking a stand for the Lord. But if we have simply taken a quiet stand for the right and for God, we ought to rejoice if we suffer for that. I must repeat this again: you are not going to escape suffering in this world if you are a child of God. Someone has said, “Jesus often spoke of Christianity as a banquet but never as a picnic.” How true that is! He never said that we are going to have it easy down here. I truly wish that I could elucidate this next verse in such a way that it would bless your heart. I will do my best.
1 Peter 3:15
This means you ought to know more than a little about the Bible. The tragedy of the hour is that there are so many folk who say they are Christians, but the sceptic is able to tie them up into fourteen different knots like a little kitty caught up in a ball of yarnthey cannot extricate themselves at all. Why? Because of the fact that they do not know the Word of God. “Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts.” Oh, today, do you have a little sanctuary, a little chapel in your own heart? When you are riding along in the car or walking down the street or are in the shop or office or classroom,is there a little chapel in your heart where you can withdraw and sanctify the Lord God in your heart? If there is, folk outside will know that you belong to God, and you will not have to mouth it all the time or make yourself obnoxious by making some pious statement.
Oh, if in our lives today we would sanctify the Lord God in our hearts. How we need to do that! Habakkuk wrote, “But the LORD is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him” (Hab_2:20). On Sunday you may go to your church, but the world is passing you by, headed for the beach, headed for the mountains, headed for the desert, headed for places of amusement. The whole world is not keeping silence before Him. Why? Because we as individuals need to sanctify the Lord God in our hearts.
1 Peter 3:16
In other words, make sure that those who speak evil of you are in error. Shortly after I had come to downtown Los Angeles as pastor of a church there, I met Dr. Jim McGinley in Chicago at the Moody Founder’s Week conference, and he asked me, “How do you like being pastor of that great church?” I said, “It’s wonderful, but I find myself in a place where I cannot really defend myself. I don’t intend to get up in the pulpit every Sunday morning to explain all the things that have been said about me. My business is teaching the Word of God. Yet none of the things that have been said are true.” Dr. McGinley said to me, “Just thank the Lord that what they say is not true.” In this verse Peter is saying, “Have a good conscience so that when you hear these rumors about yourself, it will not bother you because you know they are not true.”
1 Peter 3:17
If you suffer for Christ’s sake, you can rejoice in that; but if you are suffering because you have played the fool, because you have gotten into trouble and into sin, then that is a different story altogether.
1 Peter 3:18
CHRIST’S SUFFERING PREACHED BY THE SPIRIT IN NOAH’S DAYIt is important for us to see that Jesus Christ became a human being, and it was in His humanity that He died on the cross. He died on the cross, and it was the Holy Spirit who raised Him from the dead.
1 Peter 3:19
This has been a most misunderstood passage of Scripture. The key word to this entire passage is in verse 1Pe_3:20; it is the little word when
1 Peter 3:20
When did Christ preach to the spirits in prison? “When once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah.” In Christ’s day, the spirits of those men to whom Noah had preached were in prison, for they had rejected the message of Noah. They had gone into sheol. They were waiting for judgment; they were lost. But Christ did not go down and preach to them after He died on the cross. He preached through Noah “when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah.” For 120 years Noah had preached the Word of God. He saved his family but no one else.
It was the Spirit of Christ who spoke through Noah in Noah’s day. In Christ’s day, those who rejected Noah’s message were in prison. The thought is that Christ’s death meant nothing to them just as it means nothing to a great many people today who, as a result, will also come into judgment.
1 Peter 3:21
“The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us.” To what baptism does this refer? It is not water baptism but the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is real baptism, and water baptism is ritual baptism. Now I believe in water baptism, and I believe immersion is the proper mode. However, the important thing here is to see that it is the baptism of the Holy Spirit which puts you into the body of believers. “Not the putting away of the filth of the flesh"it is not just by water, for that will not put away the filth of the flesh. “But the answer of a good conscience toward God, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ"that is, a faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ which brought the work of the Holy Spirit into your life and regenerated you.
1 Peter 3:22
This verse is speaking of the Lord Jesus Christ. You and I are little sinners down here, but we can come to Him, receive Him, and thus join the great company of the redeemed. We are baptized by the Holy Spirit into the body of Christ because He is raised from the dead and is today at God’s right hand.