1 Peter 4:17 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

For the time is come, &c.— 'Ο καιρος, the time; the signal time prophesied of, Matthew 24:9; Matthew 24:21-22. Mark 13:12-13. By το κριμα, judgment, seems here to be meant the particular distress which was to happen before Jerusalem should be utterly destroyed.—The Christians were to expect to feel some of the first effects of that general calamity: it was to begin with them, as our Saviour had plainly prophesied in the text already referred to. It was God's way of old, to begin with sending calamities on his own people; and indeed a state of trial seems highly proper before a state of recompence. See ch. 1 Peter 1:6. The present verse looks like an allusion to Ezekiel 9:6 comp. Jeremiah 25:29. By us here seems to be meant the Christians of that age, whether formerly Jews or Gentiles; for they appear now to have been persecuted generally every where. See ch. 1 Peter 5:9. They who obey not the gospel of God, is a proper description of the unbelieving Jews: they were not chargeable with idolatry; they acknowledged and worshipped the true God; but they rejected the gospel which God revealed by his Son;—and therefore they came to so dreadful an end. See 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16. Whoever compares the accounts in the Scriptures, or ancient fathers, concerning the persecutions which befel the Christians about this time, with the sufferings of the Jews as related by Josephus, will easily see, that the distress only began with the Christians, and was light compared with what afterwards fell upon the Jews: for, when Jerusalem was destroyed, the Christians escaped with their lives, and enjoyed more peace and tranquillity than they had done before. God delivered Noah in the time of the flood, Lot out of Sodom, and the Christians at the destruction of Jerusalem. See the next note.