1 Peter 4:7

But the end of all things is at hand. The mention of the judgment turns St. Peter's thoughts into another channel. The end is at hand, not only the judgment of persecutors and slanderers, but the end of persecutions and sufferings, the end of our great conflict with sin, the end of our earthly probation: therefore prepare to meet your God. The end is at hand: it hath drawn near. St. Peter probably, like the other apostles, looked for the speedy coming of the Lord. It was not for him, as it is not for us, "to know the times or the seasons" ( Acts 1:7 ). It is enough to know that our own time is short. When St. Peter wrote these words, the end of the holy city, the center of the ancient dispensation, was very near at hand; and behind that awful catastrophe lay the incomparably more tremendous judgment, of which the fall of Jerusalem was a figure. That judgment, we know now, was to be separated by a wide interval from the dale of St. Peter's Epistle. But that interval is measured, in the prophetic outlook, not by months and years. We are now living in "the last times" ( 1 Timothy 4:1 ; 1 John 2:18 ). The coming of our Lord was the hennaing of the last period in the development of God's dealings with mankind; there is no further dispensation to be looked for. "Not only is there nothing mere between the Christian's present state of salvation and the end, but the former is itself already the end, i.e. the beginning of the end" (Schott, quoted by Huther). Be ye therefore sober ; rather, self-restrained, calm, thoughtful. The thought of the nearness of the end should not lead to excitement and neglect of common duties, as it did in the case of the Thessalonian Christians, and again at the approach of the thousandth year of our era. And watch unto prayer; rather, be sober unto prayers. The word translated "watch" in the Authorized Version is not that which we read in our Lord's exhortation to "watch and pray." The word used here ( νήψατε ) rather points to temperance, abstinence from strong drinks, though it suggests also that wariness and cool thoughtfulness which are destroyed by excess. The Christian must be self-restrained and sober, and that with a view to perseverance in prayer. The aorist imperatives, perhaps, imply that St. Peter's readers needed to be stirred up ( 2 Peter 1:13 ; 2 Peter 3:1 ), to be aroused from that indifference into which men are so apt to fall. The exhortation to persevere in watchfulness would be expressed by the present.