1 Peter 3:19

19. By which Better, In which, namely, his pre-existent divine nature.

He went Literally, having gone. Alford supposes local transference and personal preaching; but the case is parallelled in Ephesians 2:17, “And came [by the Holy Spirit] and preached [through the apostles] peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh.” So Christ went by the Holy Spirit, and preached, through Noah, to the antediluvians. He is the Jehovah who sent his Spirit to do his office of awaking to repentance the ungodly of that generation, (Genesis 6:3,) and to speak through Noah.

Preached This is not ευαγγελιζω , the ordinary word for preaching the gospel, but κηρυσσω , to proclaim as a herald, to publish, to announce, to preach. It is used sixty times in the New Testament, and in every instance what is preached or published must be sought in the context. It never, in itself, means to preach the gospel.

The spirits in prison The disembodied spirits of men who had been disobedient… in the days of Noah, and were in prison at the time when St. Peter wrote. The object is to identify the men to whom Christ preached; and they are spoken of as they were at the time, not of the preaching, but of this identification. The word prison is always used in a bad sense, and denotes the department of hades in which the wicked are shut up, 2 Peter 2:4; Jude 1:6; Revelation 20:7. To these persons, when on the earth, Noah, “a preacher of righteousness,” (2 Peter 2:5,) under the inspiration of the Spirit of Christ, preached the law of repentance and godly living for a hundred and twenty years, and preached in vain. That the apostle never dreamed of them as enjoying in their prison a second day of grace, is plain from his mention of them as, like the fallen angels, a specimen of those who are reserved (guarded in prison) unto the day of judgment, and a proof as well of the certain perdition of the ungodly, 2 Peter 2:4-9. The purpose of this digression was to show that the Christ who suffered and rose again, strove, in the earlier ages of the world, to bring men to God, as well as in the days of his passion; and, perhaps, also, as Wordsworth suggests, to confute the notion of certain heretics that the God of the Old Testament was less merciful than the God of the New.

This passage has received very various interpretations, from Augustine downward; but the weight of interpretation seems to accord with that above given. The descent into hell, with its object, some have thought they found here; and the theories thence resulting very widely differ. Some hold that Christ entered paradise and triumphantly announced his completed redemption; others add to this, the release of the Old Testament saints; some hold that he went to Tartarus as conqueror and judge, denouncing condemnation upon the ungodly there confined; others, that, as redeemer and judge, he preached to both the good and the bad; and others still, as Alford, Fronmuller in Lange, and Wordsworth, that he preached the gospel of salvation to the ungodly antediluvians; the last insisting that it was a unique case, and not repeated or continued, and the first, that it is continued to others who die impenitent. Upon this we remark:

1 . That Christ “descended into hell,” (hades,) though not directly asserted in this passage, nor other scripture, appears plainly from the use of Psalms 16:10 by St. Peter in Acts 2:27-31. That his human soul, released from its connexion with the body by death, entered the world of departed spirits, as do the souls of all men, and was subject to all the laws and conditions of that world until the third morning, is a true doctrine. But let it not be made to carry what does not belong to it. The one important point in it is, that the soul of Christ did not remain in that world, but on the third day came forth for the resurrection. Yet, be it remembered, our Lord was in paradise, the blessed side of hades, whither the penitent thief accompanied him, as was promised on the cross.

2 . Of Christ’s employment in that world we have no intimation, unless in the present passage, which our interpretation, necessitated by the force of the word quickened, forbids. He entered that world as do other men, with the humble, prayerful cry upon his lips, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” (Luke 23:46,) and with the limitations of a man, as he had passed his whole earthly life. That saints and angels welcomed him as personally, though not yet officially, victorious, and that he partook of a higher bliss than when on earth, we can well believe. But not even his human soul could bridge over the awful, impassable gulf between paradise and the prison-house of hades, of which Father Abraham said to the rich man, “They which would pass from hence to you, cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.” Luke 16:26. This is one of the inexorable laws of the realm of the dead, which some of the above-mentioned theories forget when they imagine Christ’s human spirit crossing to preach to the lost, or the lost accepting salvation and passing the “great gulf” into paradise, which our Lord himself, in the words cited, declares impossible.

3 . If Christ, in person, preached in hades to the antediluvians there imprisoned, by the well-known law, exceptio probat regulam the exception proves the rule the specification of the persons to whom he preached, namely, the disobedient of Noah’s time, excludes all others from the message. This view suggests at once most serious difficulties. Why preach to the antediluvians of Noah’s time, whom St. Peter classes with fallen angels and Sodomites, reserved unto judgment, (2 Peter 2:4-9,) and not to all antediluvians? and, indeed, why to antediluvians alone, and not to all who have died disobedient? How should the selection be so effected as to exclude others from the hearing? What was the nature of the proclamation? Was it a message of wrath or of mercy? If salvation was offered, why to those particular sinners who had so persistently sinned against light and long-suffering, to the exclusion of all other sinners? And what would be the judgment of those excluded upon the partial goodness which made so limited an offer? These are pertinent questions that should be answered before the theory is accepted.

4 . These representations of Christ entering the world of spirits as a triumphant conqueror, and there doing the work of judge and saviour, overlook the important fact that he was still in his state of humiliation. “Being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” Philippians 2:8. He had voluntarily gone down to the lowest depths of self-humiliation in his death on the cross, and there he remained until the moment of his resurrection, the beginning of his exaltation. Death was conqueror, and still held him in its grasp. The shame of the cross was upon him. The curse which he took upon himself had crushed him in the sight of the universe; and he still lay under it where he fell. The atonement, in itself, was complete in his dying; but, however exultingly the wonderful story, soon to be made glorious, might be told in paradise, its application, and the proclamation of it as an accomplished and valid fact, required the precedent deliverance from the curse by the resurrection. Only so, as it seems to us, was the “all power” (Matthew 28:18) won to authoritatively condemn as judge, or to offer mercy as redeemer. Then, indeed, was he Conqueror and Lord; and with an authority to be gainsaid by none, his salvation could thenceforth be preached. Some, indeed, hold that his preaching in hades was after his resurrection; but not even that view can remove the difficulties, nor can it be gathered from this passage.

5 . The doctrine here dissented from is contrary to the whole tenor of Scripture, which confines its offers of salvation to the present life, and connects the decisions of the final judgment with the characters and acts of men as they are in this world, and not as they may be formed after death. See Matthew 7:21-23; Matthew 10:32-33; Matthew 25:31-46; Mark 8:38; Luke 16:25-26; Romans 2:6; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Hebrews 9:27; Revelation 2:10. An interpretation which is at war with the analogy of faith cannot be safe or true.