The Glory of God in Creation

I love taking pictures of God's creation and I thought I would share a few. Take a look at these and remember what a glorious and creative God we serve.

1 Peter 3:18-22: Noah, Spirits, and the Risen Christ Part 1

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            For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him. (1 Peter 3:18-22 ESV

Introduction

In preaching through the book of 1 Peter I knew that I would inevitably have to deal with these verses. I dreaded them, yet I also grow excited about them. I loved the challenge they presented; I loved the idea of solving this great mystery of 1 Peter. But I also know that if I was unable to solve this mystery that I would have to stand before God’s Church as a teacher who doesn’t know what he’s teaching, and for that reason I dreaded it.

Martian Luther said this about these verses, “A wonderful text is this, and a more obscure passage perhaps than any other in the New Testament, so that I do not know for a certainty just what Peter means.” These verses are clearly unclear. It is very hard to understand what they mean. So I decided that I would not be mastered by these five verses, I studied, I read, I diagramed, and I learned many Greek words. I read the experts and I read those who thought they were experts. For weeks I thought about this text and now I can say with confidence that I don’t know what it means. Of course I have ideas, but they’re just that, ideas. Maybe no one has the answers to this riddle. Maybe only Peter and the all-knowing God understand exactly what these verses mean. And maybe that’s okay.

Maybe we don’t need to know everything now, maybe we do just see dimly as a reflection, maybe the secret things really do belong to the Lord, or maybe I’m just too unintelligent to figure it out. The point is this; no one is going to know everything, at least not on this side of eternity. Does this give us an excuse to just jump past things we don’t understand? Never! We are called to love God with all of our minds and a part of that is thinking hard about what His word says. We must think hard about the Bible but we also must be willing to say, “I don’t understand.” We can have many good ideas but in the end we need to remember that humility means we may be wrong.

All of that being said I would like to share what I’ve learned about these verses. I will share what God has taught me in the hopes that it might help some else get one step closer to their understanding of these verses. But before I really get in to what Peter wrote I would like to give a few warnings:

1.    Guard against pride

Pride is a very real and deadly enemy. The reason I want to warn against this is because we can easily have the tendency to think that my view is right and everyone else’s is wrong. We become so convinced that I’m infallible and we think every other view is of the Devil. We must avoid this type of thinking. It is true that only one view can be right but it is also true that the right view might not be yours. We need to guard against pride when looking at tough passages   

2.    Be cautious of false teaching

When we a dealing with passages that are confusing or controversial we must be careful that we don’t base our doctrines upon it. It can be very easy to take a tough passage and make it the difference between eternal life and eternal damnation. An example of this is the Mormon teaching on the baptism of the dead. They took a confusing passage and made it something everyone must live by. Do not let your uncertainty become false teaching.

3.    Think Biblically about disagreements

When someone disagrees with your point of view what do you do? How do you react? We can be so self-righteous. This issue goes right along with pride. It’s good to know what you believe but on some issues there is something that matters more then being right and that thing is unity. If your interpretation of this passage causes a fight with other Christians then something is fundamentally wrong. Just skim the New Testament and you will see how important unity is. John Piper, in a sermon on this text makes a very good point about this very issue, “Controversy is essential where precious truth is rejected or distorted. And controversy is deadly where disputation about truth dominates exultation in truth.” We need to stand up for the truth. We need to be very careful that we don’t let the truth be destroyed or twisted, but we also need to fight for unity. The truth of God’s word is supposed to cause us exult Him; it is not supposed to make us fight and divide. We must walk a very fine line when it comes to disagreements.

4.    Remember where wisdom comes from

The next thing I want to warn against is something that I found myself falling into. There is a danger in careful study, and that is that we forget that God has more answers then our books. What I was doing in my study was all very good. I was meticulous, looking at the text from every angle I could think of. I read and thought very deeply but what I forgot to do was pray. For some reason I got it into my mind that I could find out more from reading books then I could talking with the living God. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Remember where wisdom comes from; remember to pray.

5.    Don’t miss the forest for the trees

We need to be very careful that we don’t get so distracted by these verses that we forget the main truth of this text. Jesus is the victor, He has won, and through His suffering and His triumph we can be saved, we can be brought to God. That statement is the main point; don’t miss the glory of this truth.  

Five Different Views

            Now that I’ve given my warnings I want us to examine the words of Peter. As I said before, this is a hard text. One of my good friends, Bryan Nix, said that, “There are so many explanations of 3:18-22 that it makes my head spin.” In a sermon I heard by Mark Driscoll he said that, “there are 180 different views.” As is often the case with a hard text, people simply do not agree on what it means. Although there are many different views it seems like there is about five main ones. Wayne Grudem lays these five views out very nicely in his commentary on 1 Peter, and I’m indebted to him for the information I’ve gotten from his book. His list of each basic view goes something like this:

View 1: When Noah was building the ark, Christ, in the spirit, was preaching repentance through Noah to the unbelievers who died in the flood. These people were on earth then but they are now in prison.

View 2: After Christ died He went and preached to the spirits of people in hell, offering them another chance to repent

View 3: After Christ died He went and preached to the spirits of people in hell, proclaiming that He had triumphed and that their condemnation was final.

View 4: After Christ had died He proclaimed release to the spirits of people who had repented just before the flood and led them from their prison into heaven.

View 5: After Christ died went into hell and proclaimed triumph over fallen angels who sinned by marrying human woman before the flood.

            I’ve been looking into these different views for a long time now and one thing that strikes me is that it is very easy to argue for just about any one of these views. I read Grudem’s commentary and went away thinking that View 1 was correct. I listened to John McArthur and thought that View 5 was correct. I could probably close my eyes, pick a view, and then proceed to explain why it is in fact the right one.

What I want to do at this point is not go into detail about each individual view but instead take a good long look at the words that Peter wrote down. One principle that we need to keep in mind is that we interpret the unclear parts of the Bible by the parts that are clear. If you don’t understand something then you should focus first on what you do understand.  

What We Do Know

            Let’s examine this text and ask the question, “what can we plainly see from what Peter is telling us?” In other words, what is clear about this passage? We will start in verse 18, Peter writes, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit…” So what is clear in this verse? It’s clear that Christ suffered and died once, for our sins. Christ suffered as a righteous man to pay for the sins of the unrighteous. It’s also clear that the whole reason for doing this was to bring us to God. That is a glorious truth. Christ went through all the pain and suffering so that sinful humans might be brought to God.  Don’t skip over this amazingly clear and wonderful truth. The last thing we can say from this verse is that Christ was made alive in the spirit. Christ was made alive and he is still living.

            Next we have verse 19, “in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison…” This verse is far less clear but before we jump into all of our questions let’s ask what is clear in this verse. It starts out saying, “in which he went…” What does that mean? It means that Christ, in the spirit, went somewhere to do something. Christ in the spirit went and proclaimed or preached. So we know for a fact that Christ went somewhere in the spirit and he proclaimed something, that’s very good, but we also know who he preached to, He preached to the spirits in prison. And you probably thought you didn’t have clue what this verse meant.

            Peter continues this thought in Verse 20, “because they formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water…” We know something more about these spirits in prison; we know that they formally did not obey. The Greek term for this carries a stronger more active sense. We could translate it disobey or we could say that they refused to believe. The point is they did not obey and we can safely say it was not an accident. Notice what Peter says next, “when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared…” So we not only know that the spirits disobeyed but we also know when they did. The spirits disobeyed in the days of Noah, specifically while the ark was being built. So now we know what they did and when they did it, but we also learn something about God, He waited patiently. The whole time these spirits were disobeying, God was waiting patiently. The last thing we can be certain of from this verse is that God saved eight people (Noah and his family) by bringing them through the water of the flood on the ark.

            Look at the next verse, “Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience…” What’s clear in this verse? Well, it’s clear that the flood corresponds with baptism, the flood, and the salvation of Noah’s family, is a symbol or a type that represents baptism. The next thing that is clear is that baptism does not save but simply removing to dirt from the body, but it does save us as an appeal to God for a good conscience. This is only possible because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

            The last verse is verse 22, “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.” Jesus is in heaven. He has won. Jesus is reigning and angels, authorities, and powers our all subject to Him.

What We Don’t Know

            As you can see, we know a whole lot about these verses. There is much that is very clear. So what’s the problem? Why is it that no one can agree on what these verses mean? It’s because there are some pretty hard questions. There are some things that are uncertain and they cause us some trouble. So we are going to do the same thing we just did and we’ll pull out what we don’t know for sure.

            Let’s take another look at verse 18, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit…” This verse is really very clear, and I think that God did that because it is such a foundational truth. Our faith depends on this verse. But there is a question that I see. The question is this: what does it mean to be made alive in the spirit? We will come back and attempt to answer the questions later, but for now we will just state them.

            Verse 19 is the most confusing verse in this whole passage. It says, “in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison…” So what don’t we know? Just about everything. Here are the questions: When did Christ go and proclaim? What did he go and proclaim? Who are the spirits? And what is the prison?

            There are most questions we can ask but these are the ones I want to focus on. There is a lot going on in this text, but for now let’s just focus on the issue at hand. Maybe there will be a another article on baptism down the line, but let’s just focus on the task at hand.

What We Know Vs. What We Don’t Know

            I want us to notice these two lists. The first is all the things that we do know and the second is all the things that we don’t know.

What we do know:

1.     Christ suffered/died once for our sins

2.     Christ suffered to bring us to God

3.     Christ was made alive in the spirit

4.     In the spirit Christ went and proclaimed/preached to the spirits in prison

5.     The Spirits formally did not obey in the days of Noah, while the ark was being built

6.     God waited patiently while the ark was being built

7.     Noah and his family (8 persons) were brought safely through the water in the ark

8.     Baptism corresponds with Noah and his family being brought safely through the water

9.     Baptism does not save as a removal of dirt from the body

10. Baptism does save as an appeal to God of a good conscience

11. This appeal is through the resurrection

of Christ

12. Christ is in heaven, at God’s right hand, reigning over everything

What we don’t know:

1.     What does it mean to be made alive in the spirit?

2.     When did Christ go and proclaim?

3.     What did we proclaim?

4.     Who are the spirits in prison?

5.     What is the prison?

As you can see we know far more then we don’t know. That is a tremendous blessing. So the challenge we have before us is to look at the things we don’t know and ask what they mean in light of what we do know. We need to be very careful here because if we don’t remember the plain things then we will not be able to interpret the less clear parts correctly.

What Does It Mean?

            At this point in my study I realized something. What I realized is that many people get caught up in word studies and in far-fetched theories and completely abandon any sort of natural reading of this passage. I am convinced that the most natural reading of this passage is the best one. We should accept the most simple and clear explanation of this text. I don’t think that the New Testament writers wrote in such a way so that only the intellectual giants could understand. I think that the Bible was written so that anyone could know God.

            So when you read this passage what does it say? What is the simplest and most natural interpretation? It says that Christ went in the spirit to some other spirits in prison; these are spirits who formally disobeyed in the days of Noah while God waited patiently. To me it sounds like these verses say this: After Christ died he went in the spirit and proclaimed the good news to the people who formally died in the flood. That’s what the most natural reading seems to convey. Here is how I would paraphrase this text:

           

           

Christ suffered and died for our sins, as a righteous man for us who are unrighteous, He was put to death in the flesh but God made Him alive in the spirit, in this spirit he want and proclaimed (the good news) to the spirits in prison. These spirits formally disobeyed in days of Noah while he was building the ark. During this time God was waiting patiently (for them to repent). When the flood came a few, that is 8 people, were brought safely through water. The salvation of Noah and his family is a type for baptism, which now saves you. Baptism does not save by cleaning the body, but it saves because it is an appeal to God for a clean conscience. This is only possible because it is though the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christ is now in heaven, at God’s right hand, reigning in triumph and glory with angels, authorities, and powers subject to Him.

Now I know that I’ve made a lot of assumptions here. The question now is this: are the assumptions true? Is my interpretation correct or am I in error? Is there even any way to tell? We need some answers. We cannot just accept whatever we hear. We need to ask if the Bible supports whet we believe. So does a deeper look at this text support my view? We will dig into this in the second part of this article, so please check back soon for part 2!

Perfect salvation for us to see

Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised

Glory and strength to Him ascribe

He is ruler over every nation and tribe

Yet who into His glory has gazed?

Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised

Worship the LORD in the splendor of His holiness

It is He who reigns as King on high

Without Him not one bird can fly

He will judge the earth with righteousness

Worship the LORD in the splendor of His holiness

Yet He who was, who is, and who is to be

Came on to earth to show thus:

The God who cannot be seen by us

He became a man for us to see

He who was, who is, and who is to be

And all those who through His blood believe

Have now seen His glory

And have a new end to their story

Perfect salvation for us to see

All those who through his blood believe

Stuck On Milk

Paul writes theses words in 1 Corinthians,

    But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready,
   
(1 Corinthians 3:1-2 ESV)

Christians can be very immature people. We all know this to be true. We've all seen someone who claimed to be in Christ but seemed to be stuck on milk. Likewise we've all seen people who seem to be these spiritual giants. I believe there is a big problem in our churches when it comes to finding the latter. The Christians who really seem to get it aren't as common as we'd like to think.

What jumped out to me in these verses is that it kind of goes against our assumptions. Here's what I mean; we all seem to think that the mark of spiritual maturity is being able to know and understand the Scriptures. We think that spiritually mature people are the ones who know their Bibles backwards and forwards. We think the people who have all the answers must be the ones who are mature. While I think this is part of it, I don't think this is the main thing Paul is getting at.

What does Paul say an infant in Christ is? A new Christian? A person who doesn't know the Bible? Someone who doesn't understand deep theology? No, he says an infant in Christ is a person of the flesh. The mark of a spiritually immature person is that they are living for themselves, or the flesh, instead of living in God through the Spirit.

This is confirmed if we read on: 

    I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human?
(1 Corinthians 3:2-4 ESV)

The reason they couldn't handle solid food was because they were still in the flesh. If you are a person who is living for yourself instead of for God, you are a spiritually immature, fleshy, Christian. We need to be people who not only know our Bibles and rejoice in God's Word, but also people who put off the old self and put on the new self. We need to be people who walk according to the Spirit not according to the flesh. We need to be people who grow up and stop living as children.

Let us be a people who no longer lives like the world but lives like Christ! Let us reach, "....mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love."   
(Ephesians 4:13b-16 ESV)

Know You're Saved

I believe that those of us in the Church of Christ have reacted a little too extremely to some things. We see the people who claim to have the Holy Spirit acting all crazy so some of us have decided to deny the fact that the Holy Spirit lives in us. We see people getting caught up in emotional hype instead of true worship so we forget what a true passion for God in worship looks like. But the problem I want to address today is our reaction to the "once saved, always saved" doctrine.

I'm not going to argue for or against this doctrine here. There are many scriptures you could use to argue either side. What I want to talk about is the effect this teaching has had on many of us Christians who don't believe this to be true. You see, so many of us believe we can lose our salvation, and I believe we can as well, but because of this belief we act as if we have no confidence at all. I hear the way people talk and pray; they say things like, "I hope I'll get to heaven when I die." Or they say ,"I hope I've been a good and faithful servant." It's a wonder we can even sing Blessed Assurance on Sundays.

1 John is one of my favorite books. It's so rich with great themes like love, walking in light, giving up sin, and assurance. In fact, at the end of his book he writes,

    I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life.
(1 John 5:13 ESV)

He says he writes these things for two reasons 1) so that we may believe in Christ and 2) so that we may know that we have eternal life. Did you catch that? He said we can KNOW that we're saved. We don't have to wonder, guess, or speculate, we can just know. Maybe it would be a good idea for more Christians to study this little book...

I want to direct your attention to just one other verse. In this verse he gives us a surefire way to know that we have salvation:

      And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming.
(1 John 2:28 ESV)

  It's simple really, just abide with Him. Stay close to Christ. Make your life all about Him and then you have no reason to wonder if your saved. If you love Him with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, you can have confidence that you won't be put to shame. If you devote yourself to following and abiding in Christ, than what do you have to fear?

So here's what I'd leave you with. Don't just be a casual fan. Don't be a lukewarm Christian. You can't abide in Christ and be complacent; it just doesn't work. So, if you want to be sure of your salvation, abide in Him. Give yourself fully and completely to Jesus Christ.

Rejoice In Where Your Name Is Written.

    The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” And he said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
(Luke 10:17-20 ESV)

Jesus had sent out seventy-two of His disciples to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to perform these amazing signs. He sent these people out to be witnesses and to share their faith in who Jesus was. When these people came back, however, they were focused on the wrong things. They came back exclaiming over the fact that demons listened to them instead of over how many souls God had saved.

I love what Jesus says to them. He tells them that He saw Satan fall and that He gave them all their power.  He basically says, "look, all this power is great but it's not what matters most. Besides I'm the one who gave you this power and it's really not what you should be excited about. Instead, be excited that you are saved." That is powerful. Jesus tells us here that signs and wonders aren't nearly as amazing as a soul getting saved. What matters most to Jesus is people's salvation. I wonder what matters most to us?

Leap For Joy

I found this passage thought provoking this morning.

    “Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.
(Luke 6:22-23 ESV)

Now let's chew on this for a bit. People all around us want to be happy. I mean, who doesn't want to find lasting joy, right? Who doesn't want to have the kind of life that makes you rejoice? Everyone in this world wants to be happy. Now we all pursue it in different ways, but everyone wants to be happy.

God even wants you to be happy. It's true; God wants you to find true and lasting joy. Elsewhere in the Bible he calls it inexpressible joy. The God of the universe is interested in your happiness. This is awesome. I mean, the one true God who is in control of everything is concerned with your feelings. This is amazing and should stir up our hearts to worship.

Here's the problem we often run into though; you don't know how to be happy. You and I don't know how to find true joy. What we do is chase a bunch of shallow and often sinful desires to find happiness. We think that if God wants me to be happy, he will make an exception to the rule for me.

"I know Jesus said blessed are you when you're poor but I really think God wants me to be rich."

"I know God hates divorce but I really think God wants me to to leave my husband."

"I know God says that remarriage is adultery but I really think God wants me to marry that woman."

"I know God said to keep the marriage bed pure but I really think He wants me to move in with my boyfriend or girlfriend."    

"I know God wants me to share my faith but He must also want me to be comfortable."

"I know what God's Word says but I really think God wants me to be happy." 

Any of these sound familiar? The list could go on and on. Everyone thinks that if God wants them to be happy, He'll give them whatever they want. Well, as Larry the cucumber would say, "that couldn't be more wronger." Here's the point I want to make: we need to be finding joy in our reward instead of things of this world. What does the text say? You're blessed when people hate you. You're doing good when people exclude you. God is pleased when people revile you. Then you can jump for joy. When you suffer for Christ's sake, you truly have a reason to rejoice because your reward is great in heaven. The reward God has prepared for you far outweighs the things you think you want in this world.

So get out there and do something for Christ that makes people mad. Let them talk bad about you, let them mock you. So what if someone rejects you when you share your faith? You're storing up rewards in Heaven. Find true joy in doing the will of Christ, not in things of this world. The only joy that will last is found in Christ Jesus.