above the flood

With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you; but they will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.

1 Peter 4:4-5

Christians live above the flood line. There really is a safe moral high ground in Jesus. It isn’t found in the good things we think we do though. Instead, it is rising firmly above a raging, murky flood of awful sin and it stands above it all because Christ is unstained by the filth of the world. In Christ, we rise above the flood.

And what is this flood of debauchery talked about in the text? It is made up of what the culture wants to do: living in “sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry” (1 Peter 4:3). And the world doesn’t like it when Christians won’t conform and join in such behaviors. But we know better. Nobody survives the muck of such a flood. We may be maligned for not swimming in the cesspool. But we know the end of such behaviors. 

God will hold every person to account for their choices. Did they choose to believe Jesus and find sins forgiven, rising above the flood? Or did the choose to slosh through the sewage flood of sinful debauchery this world offers up in rejection of Jesus? The same Jesus Who can save is also the One Who will judge. Everybody will answer to Him.

Christians should see the world for what it is. And we are overjoyed that Jesus lifts us above the flood. We live in the gospel, for the gospel, proclaiming the gospel so that Jesus Who is both Savior and Judge can lift even more above the flood!