The Commentary | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 2, 1867

The Commentary.

Tell me the meaning of Scriptures. One gem from that ocean is worth all the pebbles of earthly streams.—M'Cheyne.

The Spirits in Prison.

QUESTION: Please give me an explanation of 1 Peter iii, 19, which says, “By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison.” M. A. P. M. of Mich.

ANSWER: The whole passage, verses 18-20, reads thus: “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: by which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.”

A paraphrase of this passage will, we think, make all plain. Thus, Being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit, by which, also, he went [not when he died, but] when once the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was preparing, &c., and preached to the spirits, or persons, in prison.

Dr. Clarke remarks on this passage, “He went and preached] By the ministry of Noah, one hundred and twenty years.” Thus he places Christ’s going and preaching by his Spirit, in the days of Noah, where it evidently belongs, and not during the time that his body lay in the grave.

Again, he says, “The word πνευμασι, spirits, is supposed to render this view of the subject improbable, because this must mean disembodied spirits; but this certainly does not follow, for the spirits of just men made perfect, Heb. xii, 23, certainly means righteous men, and men still in the church militant; and the Father of spirits, Heb. xii, 9, means men still in the body; and the God of the spirits of all flesh, Num. xvi, 22, and xxvii, 16, means men, not in a disembodied state.”

But, it may be asked, does it not speak of the spirits’ being in prison? and does not that expression denote a state of death, and show that men are conscious, and can be preached to, in death? Answer. We have seen that the preaching took place in the days of Noah, to men in this present state; and if the spirits, or persons, were in prison while they were hearing the preaching, that expression must mean their detention under the arrest of divine justice, their days being limited to a hundred and twenty years. Thus detained, and their doom appointed, they might be represented as being in prison, the judgments of God waiting either for their repentance, or for the expiration of the time allotted to them, that they might suffer the threatened doom. But if the preaching to them did not take place while they were in prison, and this expression denotes the state of death into which they have since fallen, and now are, then the passage furnishes no sort of proof for the conscious state; for it simply affirms that Christ, by his Spirit went in the days of Noah and preached to those who are now in prison, or in a state of death.—Which? pp. 62, 63.