Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

1 Peter 5:8

1 Peter 5:8. Be sober; see on chap. 1 Peter 1:13, where sobriety is noticed as a condition to the highest type of Christian hope. In chap. 1 Peter 4:7 it appears as a preparation for prayer. In this third recommendation, it is enjoined as a protection against Satan.

be watchful. The verb rendered ‘vigilant' here, and in 1 Thessalonians 5:10 ‘wake,' is elsewhere (in some twenty-one occurrences) always rendered ‘watch' by the A. V. Its use here perhaps indicates painful, personal recollection on the writer's part. It is the word which Jesus addressed to Peter and his comrades in the garden ‘What, could ye not watch with me one hour?' (Matthew 26:40).

your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom to devour. The ‘because' which is prefixed by the A. V., is not found in the best manuscripts. Its omission gives a nervous force to the whole statement. The word ‘adversary' means primarily an opponent in a lawsuit, and then an opponent generally. It is much the same as the O. T. term Satan. This is the only N. T. passage in which it is a name for man's great spiritual enemy, who is immediately designated also the ‘devil,' or accuser. While this adversary is elsewhere described as a serpent in respect of his cunning, he is here appropriately compared to a ‘roaring lion,' where threatenings and persecutions are in view. The Hebrews had several terms for the terrible roar of the lion. They had one (used also of thunder) which expressed in particular the roar of the hungry creature in quest of its prey. It is that one which seems to be represented by Peter's word here. There is great force also in the other descriptions, ‘walketh about' (cf. Job 1:7; Job 2:2), as if the wide earth were his range, and ‘seeking whom he may devour,' or, as it literally is, swallow, or gulp down, in his famished rage. The fury and vigilance of this enemy, the dread means which he employs and the end to which he applies them, make sobriety and watchfulness imperative on our side. The writer who pens these words, so bluntly expressive of his own belief in the existence of a personal spirit of evil, is the disciple to whom Jesus specially addressed the mingled warnings and assurances which Luke records (Luke 24:31-32) ‘Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not.'

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

1 Peter 5:8

Old Testament

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