I Peter 3:18-22
The Savior Who Reigns
Now turn with me if you would to I Peter chapter 3 and to the 18th verse and we’ll be reading through to the end of the chapter. I was intrigued on the Lord’s Day morning when Ligon began a very interesting and complicated section in Romans 11, wondering what interpretation he was going to take. And then it suddenly dawned on me that I also was going to have to deal with a very difficult and complicated passage this evening and I’m still wondering what interpretation I’m going to take. So turn with me now to verse 18 of I Peter chapter 3.
Amen. May God add His blessing to the reading of His holy and inerrant word. Let’s pray together.
Our Father in heaven, we ask now that you would again be our teacher. Instruct us from your word. Grant that by your Spirit this word of Scripture might be written upon our hearts that we might not sin against you, for Jesus’ sake, Amen.
There are those who think that I Peter was a sermon before it was an epistle and that perhaps it was a sermon delivered during an occasion of baptism. Now I doubt that very much but it is one of the fads and fashions of contemporary scholarship that that might be the case and it provides a great deal of things for some people to do to speculate about things like that. But certainly there is in this epistle some remarkable teaching that would be very appropriate at the time of a baptism, some elementary instruction about the nature of the Christian life and who Jesus is and what Jesus has accomplished and what we might expect in following closely after our Lord Jesus Christ.
This particular section beginning in verse 18 is a notoriously difficult section of Scripture. Luther said of it that “this is a wonderful text and a more obscure passage than any other in the New Testament so that I do not know for certainty what Peter means.” “Where angels fear to dread” of course, “fools will now rush in.”
Now, you’ll notice that in the course of the passage, in the middle of verse 19, Peter seems to make what looks like a little bit of a digression. He has paused to make comment about baptism and then goes on, as you can see, to the end of verse 21. You could almost put all of that in parentheses and still get the gist of what Peter is saying, and what Peter is saying is a number of things about Jesus Christ. If that were the case, and let me do it that way, omitting all of the section this evening about baptism and about Noah, and we’ll come back to that in two weeks time because it seems to me that Peter gives us some instruction here about baptism that we don’t hear a great deal of and isn’t, in fact, stated much elsewhere in the New Testament. Let me devote an entire sermon to that section but now concentrating on the four things that Peter is saying in verses 18-22 about Jesus Christ in particular.
And what he says about Jesus is that He died, that He was raised, that He went and preached to spirits in prison – hold all the questions, just hold the questions for a second – and then fourthly that He ascended to God’s right hand; four things then about Jesus Christ. The context, as you will remember, is about suffering. He has just mentioned that in the previous verse, in verse 17: “For it is better, if God should will it so, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong.” And that leads into a discourse now about the sufferings of Jesus Christ. He is the one that you are going to follow as your example and there are four things about Jesus that you need to appreciate and those four things are: that He died, that He rose again, that He went and preached to spirits in prison, and that He ascended to the right hand of God; four wonderful statements, then, about our Lord Jesus Christ. Let’s look at them one-by-one.
I. Christ conquered sin.
In the first place, he says, that by crucifixion Christ reigns over
sin. Verse 18, “Christ died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, in
order that He might bring us to God.” It’s a brief and wonderful explanation of
what Jesus Christ has done for us. And if you look back in the context of I
Peter, you will see that Peter has encouraged these Christians to be ready to
give a reason for the hope that lies within them, with meekness and with godly
fear, and Peter gives us answers to fundamental questions that people may ask.
Questions like “What is the first thing that you need to know about Jesus
Christ?”
And the first thing that you need to know about Jesus Christ is that by His crucifixion, by His death, He reigns over the power of guilt and sin. Now, he says two things about the nature of Jesus’ death. He tells us, in the first place ,that it was a penal death. He was put to death, literally, Christ also died for sins, the just for the unjust but notice later on that he goes on to say, “having been put to death in the flesh.” That is to say that the death of Jesus wasn’t a natural death. He didn’t die of natural causes; He was put to death. It was a penal death; He was put to death for our sins.
And the marvel and beauty of the gospel is this: the sins of those who trust in Christ were place upon Him and the goodness and the right-standing and the fellowship that was His with God is reckoned to our account. He was put to death for our sins that we might incur, that we might have the righteousness, the right relationship with God that He enjoys. It’s the great exchange, isn’t it? “God made him,” Paul says in II Corinthians 5, “God made Him to be sin for us that we might be reckoned the righteousness of God in Him.”
It was a penal death, but it was also a successful death. “Christ died once for all,” Peter says, unlike you see with all the Old Testament sacrifices that had to be repeated, some of them on a daily basis and some of them on an annual basis. You and I don’t need to go to purchase a lamb and to slit its throat and to have its blood poured out on an altar on a daily basis because Jesus has died once for all. It’s the language that we find repeated in the epistle to the Hebrews, isn’t it, that He died once and in His death in which He bore our sin, there was something in that death that satisfied divine justice so that God looked upon the death of Jesus and saw in it that which was perfectly acceptable for the salvation of sinners like you and me.
There is no
other good enough to pay the price for sin
He only can unlock the gate of heaven and let us in
And that’s precisely what He does, and He’s done it once and for all. There’s something final about it, there’s something complete about it; there’s something about Calvary that can never be repeated. It’s an accomplished act on the behalf of our Savior; it is redemption accomplished. It is redemption done; it is righteousness purchased for us; it is sin dealt with; it is guilt dealt with.
That’s the first thing that Peter wants us to know about Jesus Christ, that by His crucifixion He has dealt with our guilt and our sin. You know, if there’s nothing else that you get out of this sermon then, if you get bogged down, and you will in a minute, that’s something to go home and to rejoice about and to give glory to God for. He has paid my debt; He has paid everything that I owe that I could never pay and He did it in His death upon the cross of Calvary.
II. Christ now reigns over death.
But there’s a second thing that Peter wants us to see about Jesus and that
is that by his resurrection, He reigns over death. Verse 18 again, Christ was
put to death in the body but he was “made alive in the spirit.” Now I quibble a
little bit with the New American Standard which is a small “s” and I think I
want to put a capital “S.” I think that’s not just made alive in a spiritual
sense, but made alive by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit that
caused the birth of Jesus, the Incarnation of Jesus, the Holy Spirit that upheld
Jesus day by day as He met temptation, as He performed the miracles that He did,
the Spirit that was with Him in the hour of His greatest agony in Gethsemane,
it’s by that same Spirit that He rose again from the dead that He conquered
death and the grave by the power and the majesty and the glory of the Holy
Spirit; the same Spirit that’s in you and me who believe in Jesus.
You know the expression that “You can’t keep a good man down”? In a very real sense that’s the explanation for the resurrection: you can’t keep this Man down. There is something of supreme goodness about Jesus that the grave could not hold on to Him, the tomb could not surround Him forever. And in this wrestling with death that seems to have taken a period of three days to endure, Jesus triumphed over death; He triumphed over the grave and the resurrection of Jesus is the bill of receipt that God has accepted the work of Messiah; the work is finished. The wonderful word that Jesus uttered from the cross, “Tetelestai,” or “it is finished!” It has all been done, and God accepts that. It’s God’s signature that it is all gone; it is all well. And Jesus has shaken loose the mortal coils of death. Isn’t that a wonderful thought? When you visit a graveyard of one that you dearly loved, and you may have laid that person in the ground and you have some tombstone or maybe a simple little plaque with a name and some dates and maybe a verse of Scripture, but because that one was held in the arms of Jesus, the grave can no longer hold on to that person. Because just as Jesus rose from the dead, so all those who are in union with Jesus will rise from the dead. That’s the second thing that Peter wants us to know, fundamental truths about Jesus that He died to deal with our sin and guilt, but that He rose again so that we might no longer be held in bondage and fear to death as the book of Hebrews tells us.
III. Christ reigns over hell.
But there’s a third thing that Peter wants us to see and that is not only
that by His crucifixion He reigns over the guilt of sin, and not only by His
resurrection that He reigns over death, but that by His proclamation Jesus
reigns over Hell.
Now look again at verse 19 and at what appears to be some fairly strange language indeed: “in which also He went and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison.” One of the commentaries I was looking at again this morning consigned 38 pages of this commentary, and it’s a fairly small commentary, but 38 pages of this commentary was an attempt to explain just this verse.
Now you read these verses and there are all kinds of questions that pop into your head. Who are the spirits to whom Jesus preached? What did Jesus preach to them? When did Jesus preach to them? Where did Jesus preach to them?
And there are several views and let me summarize the views in three categories: the first I want to call the pre-existent Christ view, that is to say that Jesus was preaching in the days of Noah, that the preaching to which Peter is referring here took place in the days of Noah, through Noah himself, perhaps. That through the mouth of Noah, through the words of Noah, the pre-existent Christ was preaching to spirits in prison, understood metaphorically as those who are in spiritual darkness. That was Augustine’s view more or less, and I think it’s Ligon’s view. I think; I’ll hear afterwards.
A similar view to that is that these are the fallen angels of Genesis 6, a view which in itself is problematic of course, and along with this view that Jesus went and preached to those who had died before Noah’s time and were in Purgatory. And that what Jesus did was to go and preach to those who are in Purgatory before Noah’s time and that view was made popular by Cardinal Bellarmine in the 16th century and of course adopted by Roman Catholics because of it’s view of Purgatory. A second view I want to mention is the descent into hell view, that what this is essentially saying is that Jesus went and preached either in Noah’s time or between the resurrection and the ascension that He went and actually ravaged, as it were, hell itself, giving those who are in hell perhaps a second chance to believe in Jesus; perhaps that’s what Peter is saying. I know that you don’t believe that that’s what Peter is saying, but that is a view that has been held and has no Biblical support whatsoever.
A third view is what I want to call “the triumphant proclamation over the spirit world” view. That Jesus proclaimed His triumph to those who are in hell and to the demonic realm itself. It was a view widely held in the 17th century. Let me take that third view and expand on it just for a little. It’s clear at least it’s clear to me that Peter seems to be speaking here in a sequential, chronological way. He speaks about the death of Jesus, he speaks about the resurrection of Jesus, then at the end he’s going to speak about the ascension of Jesus. You’ve got the death of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, the ascension of Jesus, and in between mentioning the resurrection and the ascension, he mentions this preaching to the spirits in prison. Now, if Peter is indeed speaking chronologically, he preached to the spirits in prison sometime between the resurrection and the ascension and he did that in some way, in some fashion. Now I don’t think that it necessitates, in any way, thinking that Jesus literally went into hell to proclaim this victory. I don’t think that it necessitates that, but it is interesting that the word that’s used here for preaching is the same word that is used elsewhere in the gospels for the act of proclamation and preaching, the act of a herald declaring on behalf of a king, a message which the king wants his people to hear.
And it may be that what Peter wants us to understand here, and I’m tentative about it, but it may be that what Peter is saying here is that between the resurrection and ascension, Jesus proclaimed His victory; He proclaimed His victory to those who were doomed. He proclaimed His triumph over death, over sin, over the grave, over Satan himself, that the seed of the woman had indeed crushed the head of Satan. It would be on a par, I think, with the sort of militaristic metaphor that is being implied here that a declaration of victory is being given. You remember when Jesus exorcised those demons out of the man who was demon-possessed in Gadara, the Gadarene demoniac who ran, you remember among the caves, and do you remember what they said? As He exorcised those demons, the demons cried out, “Why do you torment us before the time? Have you come to torment us before the time?” And then as though they were asking for Jesus’ permission they said, “Don’t destroy us. Send us away into these pigs.”
But now, when Jesus rose from the dead and had finished the work, is it what Peter is saying that He went to those spirits that were in prison, held there until the Grand Assize of God, and at that assize they will be sent forever to the pit of destruction. And Jesus announces to them that there is no turning back, that victory has been accomplished, that He has subdued the powers that were arraigned against the gospel under His feet, that He is Lord of heaven and earth.
Wouldn’t that be an altogether grand thing to do? Why would that be so important to him, for Peter? And I think the answer to that is that for Peter this would be enormously important because Peter had had dealings with Satan, Peter had had dealings with the kingdom of Darkness. And I think pastorally, for Peter, he wants to give assurance to troubled Christians who like himself had felt the overwhelming power of temptation to say to them that in Jesus Christ there is victory over all the powers of the demonic forces, that even though Satan may prowl about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, he can never ever devour that one who is in the arms of Jesus.
And though this world with devils filled
Should threaten to undo us
We
will not fear for God has willed His truth to
triumph through us
The
Prince of Darkness grim We tremble not for him
His rage we can endure For lo his doom is sure
One little word (He is risen!) will slay him
IV. Christ reigns over all.
Well there’s a fourth thing that Peter is saying and I’ve haven’t answered
all the questions. There’s a fourth thing that Peter is saying and that is that
by His ascension He reigns over all. By His crucifixion He reigns over guilt
and sin, by His resurrection He reigns over death, by His proclamation He reigns
over hell, and by His ascension He reigns over all. Verse 22, “Who is at the
right hand of God, having gone into heaven after angels and authorities and
powers had been subjected to Him.” And you see what Peter might be doing here?
In particular, if this was a sermon at the time of a baptism and Peter was
giving the rudimentary fundamental principles of who is Jesus and what has Jesus
accomplished and for a pastoral point of view Peter is saying, “You need to know
that Jesus has broken the reign of sin. You need to know that Jesus has
conquered the reign of death. You need to know that Jesus has conquered hell
itself and you need to know that Christ reigns in all of His glory and all of
His majesty in all authority.” We sang it, didn’t we?
The head that once was crowned with thorns Is crowned with glory now
And Peter is saying, “I want you to look up and I want you to look beyond the stars and I want you to look to the furthermost parts of heaven itself and there you will see this resplendent throne of glory and majesty and sitting on that throne, surrounded by angels and archangels and cherubim and seraphim and the redeemed of God, is the Lamb of God, the Jesus that was crucified, the Jesus that was damned, the Jesus that rose from the dead, the Jesus that proclaimed His victory over hell, the Jesus that has now ascended to the very right hand of God Himself.”
And isn’t that a wonderful thought? That the one in whom we trust, the one with whom we have union, is one who sits at the very throne itself. Isn’t that a glorious thing? Well, as they say, “there’s more” and we’re going to come back to it and see what Peter is saying in the middle and kernel of this wonderful statement about Jesus. Let’s pray together.
Our Father in heaven we bless You and thank You for our Savior Jesus Christ. We want with all of our heart to know Him more and more, to know something of His beauty, to know something of His glory, to know something of His majesty, to know something of His triumph. And we bless you above all things that we are kept in the palms of His hands, and you will never let us go. Bless us we pray, for Jesus’ sake, Amen.