1 Peter 4:3 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

For the time past of our life, &c.— St. Peter did not mean that it is lawful for men to satiate themselves with vice, and that they need not leave it off till they are weary of it; but he stirs up those to whom he wrote, to care and diligence for the future, in the practice of holiness, from the consideration of their having lived so long in the vices of the Heathens. It would have been the greatest shame for them, now that they were better instructed, to have continued in, or returned any more to such abominable practices: their future lives were to be consecrated unto the true God. There is no reason to interpret the word idolatries in a figurative sense, more than any other of the vices mentioned in this verse: on the contrary, St. Peter, by calling their idolatries abominable, seems to lay a particular emphasis upon this last expression; so as to make one ready to suspect, that those Christians had once been guiltyof some of the most cruel and debauched of the rites of the idolatrous Heathens. Some think that St. Peter joined the vices mentioned in this verse with abominable idolatries, because the Heathens were guilty of such horrible excesses, even in their religious worship. Surely Christianity was a most astonishing blessing to mankind in delivering them from such abominations!