Welcome to Day 2389 of Wisdom-Trek. Thank you for joining me.
This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Day 2389 – OUR STRANGE LIFE – FOCUSING FULLY ON JESUS CHRIST 1 PETER 3:8-17 – Daily Wisdom
Putnam Church Message – 05/26/2024
Our Strange Life – Focusing Fully on Jesus Christ
1 Peter 3:18-22
Last week, we moved forward with our overall submission theme as we learned how to have
A Righteous Life and a Ready Defense utilizing the nine maturity checkpoints of our Christian faith.
Today, we switch the focus of why we,
| as Christ Followers,
| may suffer for our faith to the One who suffered all for us in a message titled,
Focusing Fully on Jesus Christ.
Today’s passage is
1 Peter 3:18-22, on page 1890 of your Pew Bibles.
18 For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit. 19 After being made alive,[d] he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits— 20 to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, 21 and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God.[e] It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, 22 who has gone into heaven and is at God’s right hand—with angels, authorities and powers in submission to him.
This passage of
1 Peter 3:18-22 is one of the most challenging passages to translate and interpret. Let’s look at this passage, focusing on its context to help us better grasp its content.
— 3:18 —
This section begins in the middle of a paragraph, a larger unit of Peter’s thought and argument. In the previous section, Peter referred to the believer’s appropriate response to unjust suffering (
3:14-17). Believers who conduct their lives virtuously (
3:8-12)
sometimes incur unfair treatment as a result (
3:14). Peter makes his point clear in
3:17:
Remember, it is better to suffer for doing good, if that is what God wants, than to suffer for doing wrong! At this point in the paragraph, Peter turns our attention to Christ, who exemplified unjust punishment. In
3:18-22, Christ alone is the focus of our attention.
Peter outlines in summary fashion the significant movements of Christ from His suffering and death on our behalf (
3:18) to His resurrection and exaltation to the right hand of God (
3:21-22). Sandwiched between the familiar recounting of Christ’s death and resurrection, we find a few brief statements about what Christ did amid His descent (
3:19-20) and how we publicly associate ourselves with Christ’s death and resurrection through our conversion and baptism (
3:21).
But before we follow Christ’s ultimate descent in verses
19-20, look closely at how His suffering is described (
3:18). Here, we have a clear and concise statement of the Gospel.
- Christ died for sins.
- Christ died once for all.
- Christ died in place of sinners, “the righteous for the unrighteous.”
- Christ died to bring us to God.
So, the central theme of the passage is Christ’s unjust suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension, which are part of our saving faith. This V-shaped work of Christ is meant to give us hope. We live and suffer as Christ's followers and strangers in a strange world. We have also been spiritually united to Christ’s death and resurrection on our behalf and physically identified with that spiritual reality through baptism. As such, we can look forward with absolute hope that—like Christ—we will be resurrected and glorified when this life is over.
The New Testament’s treatment of Christ’s death and resurrection generally focuses on Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday. Peter could have followed suit, and his explanation would have made perfect sense. But the Spirit moved him to discuss briefly the work of Jesus on Saturday, between His death and His resurrection.
(Bulletin Insert)
-
3:
19-20 —
What did Jesus do on the Saturday between His death and resurrection? Peter tells us in
3:19 that
After being made alive,[d] he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits—
Who are these “spirits"? To those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water. Peter's language and narrative reflect a common understanding among Jews and early Christians, based on their reading of
Genesis 6:1-4.
Then the people began to multiply on the earth, and daughters were born to them. 2 The sons of God saw the beautiful women[a] and took any they wanted as their wives. 3 Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not put up with[b] humans for such a long time, for they are only mortal flesh. In the future, their normal lifespan will be no more than 120 years.”
4 In those days, and for some time after, giant Nephilites lived on the earth, for whenever the sons of God had intercourse with women, they gave birth to children who became the heroes and famous warriors of ancient times.
According to that understanding, before the Flood, members of the unseen realm, which we generically refer to as Angels, chose to cross over to the human realm and sinned gravely by cohabiting with human women. Though not a part of the inspired biblical writings, both Peter and Jude quote from the ancient book of
1 Enoch, which also paraphrases the events of
Genesis 6:1-4, giving us a clear example of the prevalent view in Peter’s time:
And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: “Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children." (1 Enoch 6)
But is there any way we can be sure Peter had this common historical interpretation of Genesis 6 in mind when he wrote
1 Peter 3:19-20? When we compare parallel passages in
Jude and
2 Peter with language from
1 Enoch, we see that this is, in fact, in both Peter's and Jude's minds. Note the similarities in language and imagery as we compare these passages.
1 Peter 3:19-20
19 So he went and preached to the spirits in prison— 20 those who disobeyed God long ago when God waited patiently while Noah was building his boat. Only eight people were saved from drowning in that terrible flood. NLT
2 Peter 2:4
4 For God did not spare even the angels who sinned. He threw them into hell,[a] in gloomy pits of darkness,[b] where they are being held until the day of judgment.
Jude 1:6
6 And I remind you of the angels who did not stay within the limits of authority God gave them but left the place where they belonged. God has kept them securely chained in prisons of darkness, waiting for the great day of judgment.
1 Enoch 10:4, 6-7;
12:4
“Bind Azazel [one of the wicked angels] hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness.... And on the day of the great judgment he shall be cast into the fire”. . . . “[The angels] . . . have left the high heaven, the holy eternal place.”[52]
EXCURSUS: IMMORAL IMMORTALS? A detailed discussion of a particular point in a book, usually in an appendix. – Let’s take a short trip down a rabbit trail…
1 PETER 3:19-20
For centuries—even millennia—Bible scholars and students of Scripture have wrestled with various interpretations of the “
sons of God" and their sin described in
Genesis 6:1-4. Some say this refers to the righteous line of Seth (“sons of God") turning away from God and marrying daughters of the unrighteous descendants of Cain (“daughters of men”). Others say the “sons of God" were powerful human rulers—possessed by evil spirits or demons —who turned the world into an arena of polygamy, immorality, and bloodshed. In both of these interpretations, the sinfulness of the world reached such a height of severity that God judged the earth with a flood. There is little Scriptural evidence for either of these explanations.
Most ancient understanding of
Genesis 6:1-4 takes the “
sons of God" in its ordinary and original sense as a reference to angelic beings (see Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7). In this interpretation, these angelic beings produced superhuman offspring (called
Nephilim, or “giants," in
Genesis 6:4). These angelic beings chose to leave their assigned domain or realm in an attempt to corrupt the entire human race to thwart God's promise to send a Savior who was an offspring of Eve (
Gen. 3:15).
But is it possible for angelic beings to procreate with humans? Many point to
Matthew 22:30 as a text that rules out such a possibility: “
For when the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage. In this respect they will be like the angels in heaven. But note that this text limits the unmarried angelic beings to those “
in heaven,” their original domain, not necessarily to those who left their heavenly abode and fell into sin. Nevertheless, as bizarre and distasteful as it may sound, it seems the most probable and logical interpretation of
Genesis 6:1-4 is that the “
sons of God'' left their assigned domain and cohabited with human women. (end of rabbit trail)
So
, Peter referred to a general tradition passed down from the ancient Old Testament prophets—that because of the nature of their rebellion, these fallen angels have been kept in a distinct place of imprisonment in the spirit realm to this day. There, they await future judgment when they will be cast into the lake of fire, the place created for the devil and his angels (
Matt. 25:41).
If this refers to these fallen angels, what kind of “
proclamation"
(kêryssõ) did Jesus make when He passed into this spirit realm? The Greek verb
kêryssõ refers to making an official pronouncement of an edict. It most likely refers to Christ's proclamation of victory over death, sin, and the power of Satan. Though the imprisoned angels once tried to wipe out the human race by genetic pollution, the Promised Offspring still arrived (see Gen. 3:15). And though Satan and his wicked spirits tried —by crucifying Him—to destroy the Offspring who was destined to crush the serpent's head, Christ's proclamation on Saturday revealed that their efforts were in vain and that
victory, not defeat, was achieved through that crucifixion (see 1 Cor. 2:8; Col. 2:13-14). In
1 Peter 3:22, Peter mentions this subjection of the spiritual realm to Christ's victory:
Now Christ has gone to heaven. He is seated in the place of honor next to God, and all the angels and authorities and powers (now) accept his authority.
With his mind on the pre-Flood era, when the spirits of wickedness committed their abominable sin, Peter focuses further on the contrast with the one beacon of righteousness in that age: Noah. Like Peter's own readers, Noah and his family lived in a strange and hostile world filled with wicked spirits and wicked humans who persecuted them because of their righteousness. But in the end, Noah and his family were saved when the judgment swept through in the form of a flood. All of those unjust persecutors, along with their world of rampant sin, were washed away, cleansing the earth and making way for a new world.
Peter then makes a clever analogy between the cleansing water of the days of Noah and the water used in baptism in Peter's day. The same waters that buried the earth in judgment and death also lifted eight humans (and the animals) to safety. This is why the early church often viewed the ark of Noah as a symbol of salvation. Membership in the ark and association with Noah could be compared with membership in the universal body and union with the victorious Christ. To complete the analogy, Peter points his readers to their act of association with Christ:
water baptism.
-3:21-22 —
Peter begins his compact statement concerning Christian baptism by tying it directly to the analogy of Noah's family being brought safely “
through the water.”
So how does “
the water” of Noah's day correspond to how baptism “
saves” believers in the New Testament? The waters of the flood were the means of judging the sinful human race, allowing Noah and his family to escape from that wicked world and begin a new life after the floodwaters receded. In the same way, the water of baptism represents a break from the old, sinful lifestyle and a new beginning as a believer in Christ. In the Bible, water baptism provides a vivid picture of our response to the gospel and the salvation it brings. Like the flood waters, the water of baptism portrays death, the penalty for sin. It is a magnificent object lesson, a sermon without words. The believer's descent into the water represents death and burial with Christ. The believer's ascent from the water illustrates the resurrection into a new kind of life.
The parenthetical explanation of baptism in
3:21 is complicated to translate. We know the first part attempts to remove the focus from the physical act of cleansing. Baptism does not cleanse us from our sins, but it is the outward display that we have been cleansed, that is, saved. Let me read this verse from the NLT:
21 And that water is a picture of baptism, which now saves you, not by removing dirt from your body, but as a response to God from[g] a clean conscience. It is effective because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The understanding of this second half of the phrase that makes most sense in light of the Bible’s whole teaching about the function of baptism seems to be
a response to God from[g] a clean conscience. That is, Peter views baptism as an outward ceremony—much like a wedding ceremony—that includes a public confession and commitment to live the new life redeemed from sin.
The water of baptism does not cause a person to have new life or a good conscience, but it is the response to God based on a conscience that the Holy Spirit has already purified through faith. This “
clean conscience” comes with new life because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (
1 Pet. 3:21).
So, just as Jesus Christ proclaimed His triumph over sin and death through His suffering and death on the cross when he went to the underworld, believers proclaim their triumph over sin and death through water baptism. The water of baptism itself does not save a person or cleanse the conscience. These are the works of the Holy Spirit, who baptizes and saves a believer by faith apart from water baptism, a distinction confirmed clearly in
Acts 10:44-48.
When sinners believe the gospel of Christ's person and work, they express their faith by reenacting their association with Christ through baptism. Christ's death and resurrection are vividly portrayed in that ancient rite. And when we come out of the water, (or poured over a person), we are committed to serving our Savior, who ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God (
1 Pet. 3:22).
APPLICATION: 1 PETER 3:18-22
Bringing Baptism to Life
Peter’s words in
1 Peter 3:21 echo the practice in the early church that closely associated a person's conversion to Christ by faith in His death as payment for...
