"Swimming Elephants"
1 Peter 3:17-22
October 25, 1998

v. 18        "flesh…spirit" Spirit should probably not be capitalized. The NIV editors took "spirit" to be a reference to the Holy Spirit, but the contrast with flesh perhaps more likely suggests a contrast between two modes of existence -- the earthly and the heavenly, the physical and the spiritual (not in the sense of body vs. soul but in the sense of temporal and eternal, mortal and immortal).

Peter himself, in his second letter will admit that there are some things in Paul's letters difficult to understand. Well, here we have before us this morning in Peter's first letter one of the most difficult texts in all of the Bible to understand. Difficulties of understanding can be one of two kinds. It can be, as I suspect Peter found it in Paul often enough, that the subject being discussed is very deep and hard to understand in itself, such as Paul's discussion of the sovereignty of divine grace in Romans chapter 9. But it can also be, as it is here, difficult to tell exactly what the biblical author, in this case Peter, meant to say. What truth he intended to convey by the word he uses. What does Peter means for us to understand by the words that he uses in vv. 19-20? Through the ages these verses have baffled commentators and produced a bewildering array of interpretations.

But, if that is the case, and if this is the Word of God, then as Bernard of Clairvaux put it, "what is difficult to understand ought to be for Christians delightful to inquire into." And as Augustine wrote long before, "Just as there are shallows where a lamb may wade, so there are depths in the Scripture where an elephant may swim." [Cited in Packer, Quest for Godliness, 99] After talking about swimming elephants for the sermon title, Mike Simpson produced for my inspection an article from a 1991 National Geographic with a picture of an Indian elephant actually swimming in the ocean with his trunk up. But, that is a different kind of elephant and a different kind of swimming that we're interested in today.

As I said, there is a wide variety of interpretations of vv. 19-20. John Calvin held, for example, that the "spirits in prison" were the faithful dead of the OT who were awaiting the completion of their redemption by Jesus Christ, who after his resurrection came to proclaim his triumph to them and to lead them to heaven. He gave the word "prison" a very benign sense, a place like a watchtower where they stayed watching for Christ's work and his coming.

Others have held that the "spirits" are the souls of those who died in Noah's flood and that the preaching to them in the prison of hell was either by Christ himself between his death and resurrection or Christ through Noah at the time of the flood -- an announcement of their doom on account of unbelief on the one hand or perhaps simply the preaching of the good news of salvation to them which they did not believe and for which they perished.

Others have held that the "spirits" are the fallen angels who are thought to have been referred to in Genesis 6:1ff. --in that account, you may remember, of the sons of God who married the daughters of men and by that marriage so completely corrupted the human race spiritually that it had be destroyed in the flood -- and that Christ preached his triumph and their condemnation to these demons in the prison of hell where they had been consigned after their sin.

And so on. In other words, there are difficulties identifying "spirits" -- are they men or are they fallen angels? And if they are men, which men? The "prison" -- what kind of prison is it? The "preaching" -- is it doom or is it salvation that is proclaimed? The place and the time in which this preaching was given, and by whom it was given -- Noah, Christ, or Christ through Noah at the time of the flood?

And here is just a sampling of the problems.

1. "Spirits" as used here, without qualification (such as you find in Hebrews 12:23 where you read the "spirits of just men made perfect". When "spirits" is used without any qualification in the NT it always refers to non-human spiritual beings, angels or demons. This word tends to lend support to interpretations that identify the spirits with the demons, especially the fallen angels who were apparently referred to as "sons of God", in Genesis 6 who married the daughters of men, corrupted the human race, and led to the judgment of the flood. But their sin, according to that interpretation of Genesis 6, was committed long before the days when Noah was actually building the ark. Yet in v. 20 we read that the disobedience of these spirits took place while the ark was being built.

2. Another problem -- the word "preach" almost always in the NT refers to the proclamation of the gospel -- the good news. In only a few instances does it retain its general sense of "proclaim" or "announce" a message. This word -- the presence of this word -- tends to lend support to interpretations that have Christ or Noah preaching the gospel, the good news of salvation, which, in turn, lends support to those interpretations of vv. 19-20 that have "spirits" identified with "men", because we don't know of any gospel preaching to fallen angels. "Preach" is not the word, on the other hand, that we would expect if what was being announced was the demons' judgment and doom.

3. The reference to the days of Noah is a grand complication for all interpretations that understand "spirits" as referring to human beings, because it then has to be explained why Christ should preach only to those particular men, from that one single moment in human history.

And so on. That, as I said, is but a sampling of the problems. There are many others. No wonder, that through the years, different people should take such different views of the texts. Roman Catholics have found support here for their doctrine of the limbus patrum -- a region bordering on hell where the righteous dead of the OT -- Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Jeremiah, etc. -- awaited the completion of their atonement when Jesus died and rose again. And once the price of that redemption had been fully paid, Christ descended to that limbus patrum -- this limbo of the fathers -- proclaimed his victory and their deliverance to the people waiting for him and led them out of there to heaven. Lutherans have found here support for their doctrine that Christ, between his death and resurrection, went down to hell, there to proclaim his triumph and the justness of their doom to the evil spirits who had so bedeviled his ministry during the three years of his public work. Either of these doctrines, by the way, could be meant by the phrase "descended into hell" in the Apostles' Creed. "Crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell, the third day he rose again…."

[I should say as an aside that the grammar of vv. 18-19 is decidedly against the notion that the preaching that was done, whatever preaching it was, was done between Christ's death and his resurrection. After his death he was made alive in the spirit and it was in that state, his resurrection state, subsequent, therefore, to his resurrection, that he did this preaching.]

Liberal Protestants, on the other hand, have found in these verses support for their doctrine of a second chance, that the gospel will be preached again to men after they die and they will have another opportunity to believe in Christ and be saved.

And we still have not considered what point this has for the argument that Peter is in the middle of making in these verses. He is encouraging his readership to be willing to suffer for Christ's sake, even to suffer injustice on behalf of their Savior. How do vv. 19-20 fit into that argument?

Well, I could thoroughly confuse us all by trying to sort out all of the possibilities. So, let me tell you what I have come to think Peter meant and the Holy Spirit means by the statement that Christ went and preached to the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.

Let me say, at the outset, that I preferred, going into this study an interpretation of these verses that identified "spirits" with men and not with demons and the "preaching" that was done to have been done in the days of Noah and not by Christ in person subsequent to his resurrection. I have long resisted the interpretation of Genesis 6 that took the sons of God who married the daughters of men to be a reference to evil spirits. I have always preferred the interpretation that takes the sons of God to refer to the holy line, the descendants of Seth and its continuation who committed the sin of intermarrying with unbelieving wives and so spiritually speaking polluted the human race and brought on the judgment of the flood. I mention that, simply as a reminder that we all come to the Bible with certain expectations, certain desires; we hope indeed to have confirmed certain prejudices. And knowing ourselves to be so weak-minded at best and so sinfully thinking about things at worst, we can fully expect, I think, especially knowing God and the infinity of his wisdom that from time to time the Bible is going to disappoint our desires and require us to bow our minds to unwelcome truth.

That is true at a much more important level, for us all, in regard to the Bible's central teaching that we are all guilty sinners in desperate need of a righteousness with a holy God that we ourselves cannot supply. If we are to be at peace with God, we must have a perfect righteousness, and that can be found alone by trusting ourselves into the hands of the Lord Jesus Christ and availing ourselves of the great work of salvation that he performed. Any genuine faith and any genuine trust in Jesus Christ must involve the surrender of our lives and wills to him, as well, as our Lord and master.

But this is also true in respect even to matters of interpretation such as that of these difficult verses of 1 Peter 3. I didn't want these verses to be about demons or about Christ proclaiming something to them. But, at the last, that is what I think these verses are in fact describing. And it will become clearer to you that they are if you turn over just one page to 2 Peter 2:4-5 and compare what Peter has written there with what he has written here in his first letter.

"For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah a preacher of righteousness, and seven others…"

Now, it is true, that we might seem to find there some support for the long-established opinion that the preaching being done and described in 1 Peter 3:19 was preaching done by Noah -- or, at least, Christ through Noah -- in Noah's own day. After all, Noah is here in 2 Peter 2 called a "preacher of righteousness" and that's a striking parallel with what Peter writes in 1 Peter 3:19: "preach" in 1 Peter 3 and "preacher" in 2 Peter 2. But, be that as it may, the text from 2 Peter 2 seems now to me virtually to demonstrate that the "spirits" to whom Christ preached in prison must be the angels who sinned and, in particular, the angels who sinned in the events described in Genesis 6, when the sons of God married the daughters of men and so, which was their intention, corrupted the human race and brought it almost entirely under the thrall of unbelief, apart from Noah and his seven relatives. Not only do we have the mention of fallen angels specifically, fallen angels in close connection with the history of Noah, but as well angels that were consigned to a prison. (You have the same thought, by the way, in verse 6 of Jude, an indication of the interest in this history on the part of Peter and Jude, who, as you remember, share material in their letters. A large part of 2 Peter 2 is found already in the letter of Jude.)

Without going into further detail, I will simply say that, it now seems to me that this interpretation is subject to the least difficulties and solves the most problems. It balances the thought best with 2 Peter 2, and, perhaps more importantly, with the final verse of this section in 1 Peter 3:22 where we read that Christ has gone into heaven and is at God's right hand -- with angels, authorities, and powers, in submission to him. Why would that point be made particularly except that the entire issue of evil spirits and Christ's triumph over them and proclamation of that triumph was raised just a few verses before? The NT, to be sure, never anywhere else mentions a specific encounter between the exalted Christ and the demons in prison. But it is entirely consistent with the NT emphasis on Christ's victory over the evil spirits, a point made many times, as you know.

There remain, to be honest with you, two outstanding difficulties with taking the two verses in this way. One is that the word "preach" is certainly not the ordinary word that would be chosen to describe the proclamation of doom and judgment upon fallen spirits. It is a possible translation, but it is somewhat unlikely, all things considered. The other is that the sin of the angels described in Genesis 6 cannot very easily be described as occurring during the days God waited patiently while the ark was being built by Noah though it is true that their sins with the daughters of men may have continued through this time. But every interpretation of these two verses, as I hope to show you, is beset with problems and these problems are, in my judgment, less punishing than the problems that beset the alternatives.

Well, then, if that is so, what is Peter saying to his readers, and so then to us? What is his point? If he means that subsequent to his resurrection, Jesus Christ proclaimed his triumph over the forces of evil to that assembly of fallen angels who had sinned in the days before the flood, how does that prove an encouragement to his readers in the face of their suffering for their loyalty to Christ in their own time and in their own place?

The answer seems to be this. These Christians to whom Peter is writing are a small, persecuted minority beset on all sides by a majority that is dismissive, if not outwardly hostile, to their faith in Jesus Christ. In all likelihood, Peter is also suggesting, as Jesus himself explicitly taught, as did the Apostle Paul, that in that hostility, those enemies of the Christians were doing the work of their father the Devil and, as Paul would have put it in Ephesians 2, following in "the ways of the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient." But Christ's triumphant proclamation to those fallen spirits reminds these persecuted Christians to whom Peter is writing, and us, that small and beset as we may be, we will be delivered just as Noah was. And we will have the victory, just as Christ did.

I realize that all of this discussion of the right interpretation of these verses may seem to some of you quite dull and uninteresting and irrelevant. But there are many ways in which we demonstrate our reverence for the Word of God and one of them is the care we take to understand it properly. And, the other is to study with an open heart the meaning of what we read in the Holy Scripture for ourselves.

And I want to conclude by elaborating at least some of the meaning that lies in these two verses we have studied, understanding them in this way.

We are all, in the individualism and in the inbred and sinful tendency to view the world almost entirely in terms of ourselves and our own lives and our own happiness, very often guilty of seeing this world and our place in this world in far to narrow a way, far too limited a perspective. We live looking at the world as it were through a telescopic lens, in which all that can be seen is ourselves and a little bit of the area immediately around us and the things that touch upon our lives and impinge upon our happiness immediately. If by the grace of God and the Spirit of God we replace that telescopic lens with a wide-angle lens and see ourselves in the larger picture, we discover, as the Scripture teaches us, that so much more is happening, our lives are being lived out in the midst of mighty developments, of catastrophic events everywhere, all the time.

This piece here about demons in Noah's day and Christ's proclamation of his victory over them and their judgment, let's be honest, sounds like a piece of ancient mythology to modern readers of the Bible. They are, whatever they may say, if you asked them about their belief structure and their worldview, they are functionally naturalists and materialists. The only things that seems genuinely real to them is the physical world that they inhabit every day, its laws, its principles, its events, its possibilities, its happiness, its sadness for themselves. The only thing genuinely real to them is this immediate physical world of sight and sense. Angels and fallen angels have no place in their scheme of things, no place at all in their understand of what their life means, what their existence means.

C. S. Lewis wrote in the preface to The Screwtape Letters:

"There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist and a magician with the same delight."

But for us, spiritual beings -- especially fallen and evil spiritual beings -- conquered by Christ as they have been, serve a most important purpose, in fact, this may be the most important purpose of the revelation of the existence of such beings that is given to us in Holy Scripture. They remind us of the great and cosmic struggle that is being waged in our world, of the powers of darkness ranged against the powers of light, and of the terrible conquest of those powers by our great Captain, the Lord Jesus Christ. Something mighty is afoot in this world. The life that we have been given is a life against which are arrayed supernatural forces that are terribly more potent and powerful than we are ourselves. We have adversaries far stronger than ourselves. Were it not for the power of Christ and the intervention of Christ we would be completely subject to those forces, and would gaily do the will of the Evil One, never once for a moment aware that that was what we were doing. But, Christ delivered us from his power, he who is in us is greater than he who is in the world.

Think of it as you would think about war. Many of you by now have seen the new Steven Speilberg movie, "Saving Private Ryan." It is salutary in reminding a weak and effeminate culture what war is really like, how terrible, how brutal, how cruel, how dehumanizing, how it tests the limits of a man, how brave men must be to function in combat -- not necessarily how good, but how brave --, and how brave they have often been in the wars of this world.

But, you see, war does not really change anything fundamentally. It doesn’t change the number of people who die. We all die. It probably doesn't change the percentage of people who die a painful death. Many in war die instantly and still many others do not suffer the agonies of months and years of modern medicine's effort to prolong life. No, what war does is to illuminate life, to concentrate its character and nature in a way that we can see it as we don't ordinarily see it otherwise. To make visible what otherwise and usually we see dimly or not at all. We maintain these pretenses about life, about our own lives, about what kind of people we are, about what we are living for, about what is important and good and bad and heroic and happy, all the while oblivious to what is really going on all around us all the time. Which is why, brothers and sisters, multitudes of human beings including vast numbers of people you know, live perfectly ordinary normal human lives and wake up in hell.

Here is Wilfrid Owen's great poem from the First World War.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick boys! -- an ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

In if some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro his mori. [It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.]

So you see. This is the way that war illuminates life. You can think of one thing about life and death, and good and evil, and war, and sacrifice, and heroism, and all the rest when you are faced with their true issue and forced to reckon with the real nature of war.The real thing is very different from the glorified, sanctified, sanitized, sentimentalized version that those tell who were never in a war. And it is in the same way that the demonic realm and Christ's conquest of it on our behalf illuminates our lives. We go on, you and I, far too easily, far too often, thinking silly, sentimental, vacuous thoughts about our lives because we forget what they are really about and what is really going on all around us all the time and what the terrible issue of all of that is.

The Bible has a great sympathy for sorrowing and suffering Christians. Christians suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in this world of suffering and death. It does. It has an immense sympathy for suffering Christians. It spends a great deal of its time in expression of that understanding and sympathy.

But there is another message in the Bible that, in some respects, is even more encouraging and more consoling and more nerving and more strengthening than that. And it is this. "You are suffering? You are facing some sort of opposition? You're finding your life as a Christian difficult in some particular way?" "Of course you are." There is a great battle underway in this universe and you are in the thick of it yourself. Everyone is on one side or the other. The Devil spends his troops with no thought whatsoever of their welfare; but even the Lord Christ, in this battle, must put his soldiers through harrowing ordeals, long wearying marches, fierce combat with powerful enemies. There is death all around you; the wounded and dying lie scatter on the landscape all around you where you live. There are terribly powerful armies colliding against one another everywhere everyday in this world. You are living your life on a battlefield that has become a virtual moonscape for all the destruction, the carnage, that has happened in that single place through many years.

No one in the thick of battle, with bullets whizzing above him as he grinds his head and face into the ground seeking shelter, with artillery shells churning up huge mounds of earth all around, with the grim sights and sound of death filling up his eyes and ears, I say, no soldier is surprised that in such a place, at such a time, his life should be difficult, even terribly difficult and terrifying. He does not stick his head up above the top of his foxhole or the bomb crater and whine, "Gee, why are they shooting at me? Was it something I said?"

He understands that his place on the battlefield explains his predicament, his belonging to a particular army under a particular commander. And Peter is as much as saying the same thing to all these Christians. But he adds this: you have this immeasurable advantage. You have the luxury of knowing that you are on the winning side, that you are going to see the end of this war and victory in this war with your own eyes. You're going to survive this and you're going to march in the great victory parade wearing the laurels that the Lord Christ, your commander, will bestow on all those who have faithfully fought his battles. The victory has already been announced, the defeat of his enemies already proclaimed to them by the King of Kings.

I don't know where the battle rages right now for each one of you. I know about some of you, but by no means all. I don't know what and how life is difficult and where your courage and your faithfulness is being most sternly tested at this particular moment. But I know that all of you are in the midst of a great war, are soldiers in that great war -- I hope that all of you are on the right side in that war -- and that you live amidst the carnage of war. And it's only to be expected that you will have difficult days before the victory is complete and all the fighting is done. I certainly hope that you will have difficult days! For the only one who passes through a great war without difficulty is the one who runs from the fight.

And, let this be said. If one is speaking merely of some nation of this earth, then it is as Wilfred Owen said, simply an old lie that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But when one's King is the Lord Jesus Christ and one's country is Heaven and the victory is absolutely certain and when the enemies are as purely evil and profoundly malevolent and cruel and destructive as are the demons of hell, "Dulce et decorum est pro his mori" -- "It is sweet and it is fitting to die for these" -- even if one must do so every day for many years before it is all said and done.