1 Peter 1:5

1 Peter 1:5. Who in God's power are being guarded through faith. A still better reason why they should lift a thankfully confident eye to the heavenly inheritance. The possession might be reserved for them, and the reservation be to no purpose, if they themselves were left to the risks of earth and their own weakness. All the more insecure of it might they seem in their present circumstances of danger and temptation. But if the inheritance is kept for the people, the people are also kept for the inheritance. The word indicates a different kind of keeping from that expressed by the reserved. It is the military term used both literally (of the keeping of a city as with a garrison, 2 Corinthians 11:32) and figuratively (of the keeping of the heart, Philippians 4:7, and of the keeping of the Israelite in ward under the law, Galatians 3:23). The perfect tense used of the reserving of the inheritance (where a past act abiding in its effect was in view) changes now into the present, as only a continuous process of protection can make the people safe against themselves. The efficient cause (so Huther, Gerhard, etc.) of this sustained protection, or, as the preposition may be more strictly taken, the sphere within which it moves, the force behind which they are shielded as by a garrison, is nothing weaker than God's power, a phrase to be understood here in the ordinary sense, and not as a title of the Holy Spirit (as Weiss, de Wette, etc., suppose on the false analogy of Luke 1:35). The instrumental cause of this protection, or the means through which the force works to guard us, is faith, not to be taken in any limited sense (such, e.g., as faith in the future, or a general reliance upon God, with Hofmann, Weiss, etc.), but in the specific Christian sense, the faith which grasps God's power, and which, while itself God's gift, is the subjective response to what is objectively offered. Thus, with the Lord Himself encompassing them as the ‘mountains are round about Jerusalem,' and with the hand of faith clinging to the shelter of His power, the people on earth are secure as is the inheritance in heaven.

unto salvation. This is dependent neither upon the immediately preceding term faith (as if the secret of their security was a faith which had this salvation as its specific object), nor with the remote begat us again (so Calvin, Steiger, etc.; as if the hope, the inheritance, and the salvation were three co-ordinate states into which God's regenerating act brought us), but with the guarded, our salvation being the object which all this protection has in view. This great word salvation, so often upon Peter's lips, and occurring thrice within half-a-dozen verses here, seems used by him preferentially in the eschatological sense. Occasionally in the N. T. it has the simple sense of deliverance from enemies (Luke 1:71; Acts 7:25), or preservation of life (Acts 27:34; Hebrews 11:7), but it occurs for the most part as the technical term for spiritual salvation, or the Messianic salvation (John 4:22; Acts 4:12; Romans 11:11, etc.), now in the limited sense of the opposite of perdition (Philippians 1:28), and again in the general sense of eternal salvation; now in the sense of a present salvation (Philippians 1:19; 2 Corinthians 1:6), again in that of a progressive salvation (1 Peter 2:2), and yet again in that of the completed salvation, which is to enter with Christ's return (Romans 13:11; 1 Thessalonians 5:8-9; Hebrews 9:28, etc.). Here it is the future salvation, and that not as mere exemption from the fate of the lost, but (as the underlying idea of the present distresses and fears of the readers indicates) in the widest sense, somewhat parallel to that of the inheritance, but with a more direct reference to the state of trial, of final relief from the world of evil, and completed possession of all Messianic blessing.

ready to be revealed. The expression points to the certainty of the advent of this salvation (in the term ready, stronger than the usual about to be, or destined to be, and indicating a state of waiting in preparedness), and perhaps also (in the tense of the verb) to the ‘rapid completion of the act' of its revelation in contrast with the long process of the guarding of its subjects (Alford). The word revealed has here the familiar sense of bringing to light something already existent, but unknown or unseen.

in the last time: that is, the time closing the present order of things, and heralding Christ's return. The N. T. writers, following an O. T. conception, regard all history as having two great divisions, one covering the whole space prior to Messiah's times, the other including all from these times. The former period began to fade to its extinction with Messiah's First Advent. The second period would enter conclusively with Messiah's Second Advent. The former was known as ‘this age,' to which, although Christ had once appeared, the apostle's own time was spoken of as belonging. The latter was called ‘the age to come,' the final reality of which (although in principle it began with Messiah's first appearing) was as near as was Messiah's glorious return. This Second Advent, therefore, was the crisis once for all separating the two, and the time which marked the end of the one period and ushered in the other was ‘the last day' (John 6:39; John 11:24; John 12:48), ‘the last time,' etc. The salvation needs but the lifting of the veil at God's set time, and that time is on the wing. Christ's return will announce the close of the ‘last time' of the old order, and in a moment uncover what God has prepared in secret. Peter does not measure the interval, or give a chronology of Messiah's comings. Yet if we compare this statement with others (1 Peter 4:5; 1 Peter 4:7) touching on Christ's return, we may say with Huther that ‘his whole manner of expression indicated that in hope it floated before his vision as one near at hand.'