3933 — Spirits in Prison
By Editor
This is one of the difficult and obscure texts that Mormons use, and others, to try to make people believe that when Jesus died upon the cross He went down to limbo, or a sort of purgatory, and preached to disembodied souls who were there shut up, and had been since the days of Noah. We do not believe the text teaches anything of the kind. The plain declaration of the Scriptures is that "the dead know not anything;" that "his breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish;" and therefore we can not believe that there ever did exist, or does still exist, any place in God's universe where there are disembodied souls in torment, or torture, or suffering of any kind. Let us paraphrase the text: "Because Christ also suffered for sins once, 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," that is, at the time of His resurrection. See Rom. 8:11. Then we are told that it was in that Spirit also He went and preached to the spirits in prison. That is what He came for. Read Luke 4:18; Isa. 61:1. Christ manifested in His flesh just what His Spirit had been doing through all past ages. He preached to the antediluvians also, but He preached to them through Noah, a preacher of righteousness. 2 Peter 2:5; Heb. 11:7. And He preached to them when they were aforetime disobedient, "when the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing." That was the time that Christ through His Spirit preached through Noah to the souls that were shut up in the prison of sin. He did it when the long-suffering of God waited. He did it while the ark was preparing.