for Christ indeed has once suffered for sins, [the] just for [the] unjust, that he might bring us to God; being put to death in flesh, but made alive in [the] Spirit,
Peter has been urging believers not to fear when they suffer for doing good. He then points them to the one death no believer can copy: Christ suffering once for sins, to bring people to God.
Peter points to the cross to mark off a suffering that is Christ's alone.
This leads to another important point: if we do suffer, it should never be for sin, and for the moving reason that Christ has once for all suffered for sins. Let that be enough. Christ has suffered for sins; He has had there, if we may say so, a monopoly, and there let it end. Why should we? He alone was competent to suffer for sin. We ought never to suffer except for His name, unless it is for righteousness, as is said here.
The cost of that suffering shapes how a believer treats sin.
Our sins caused the unspeakable agony of the Lord of glory. He suffered that agony to take our sins away completely, and to present us in righteousness before His God and Father. Why then should a believer go back in the smallest degree to what gave Christ His agony?
Believers share in suffering, but not in punishment, and the word "once" is why.
The suffering that fellow heirs share has nothing of punishment in it. It is not suffering from the hand of infinite justice because of sin. The cross fully met all of that, when the divine victim bowed His sacred head under the stroke. "Christ also suffered once for sins," and that "once" was on the tree and nowhere else. He never suffered for sins before, and He never can suffer for sins again.
Christ's suffering here is not an example we can follow.
His sufferings, as this verse presents them, were in a class by themselves and altogether beyond us. He suffered for sins as a Substitute — the Just for the unjust ones. The actual word substitution does not appear in our English version. But what the word stands for is very clearly in this verse.
The two descriptions also mark a change of position for everyone who believes.
He was alone in that one act of suffering supremely at God's hand. It was for unjust or unrighteous men. Sadly, here all were unrighteous, all sinned. Those who by grace benefit through faith would be the first to admit it of themselves. From now on they are righteous, and they live by faith, since it was through faith that they became righteous.
The stated aim of the cross is not a place but a Person, and not a future arrangement but a present one.
His own testimony assures us that Christ suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, so that He might bring us to God. He does not just bring us to heaven when we die. He brings us to God now. How does He bring us to God? Tied and bound with the chain of our sins? With an unbearable burden of guilt on our souls? No indeed. He brings us to God without spot or stain or charge. He brings us to God in all His own acceptableness.
God's rescue of Israel from Egypt shows the pattern.
Long ago, God did not shelter Israel in Egypt through the blood of the Passover lamb just to leave them in Egypt. He took them right out of Egypt and brought them to Himself... The great object our blessed Lord set before Himself in dying for us was to introduce us to God, His Father. He sets us before Him in the closest of relationships, and so establishes the happiest communion between our souls and Him. Are we really enjoying this?
Commentators differ over the last clause. One reading settles "made alive" by its contrast with death.
What does "made alive" mean in itself? It should be plain that it stands in sharpest contrast with being put to death. Set against death, it means "being brought to life." It cannot carry the sense of "preserved alive," as some would make it; the word is never used that way. And it is the One who was put to death who was made alive. One would say He could only be "made alive" in regard to that in which death had come in. So if He was put to death in flesh, He must be made alive as to what suffered death. In that case there is no question that this speaks of resurrection. It is not the state between death and resurrection, but the resurrection itself.
Both halves of the clause carry gospel weight.
His death rolled away the evil before God, and His resurrection proclaimed the victory to faith.
- Once — the suffering for sins happened on the tree and nowhere else; never before, never again.
- The just for the unjust — substitution in fact, even though the word is absent: the sinless One took the place of the unrighteous, and those who believe are righteous from then on.
- Made alive — the One put to death in the flesh was raised, and His resurrection proclaims the victory to faith.
- To God — the goal is nearness to God now, in Christ's own acceptability, not only heaven later.
- Therefore — since He alone could suffer for sins, our suffering should only ever be for doing good.
in which also going he preached to the spirits [which are] in prison,
Commentary for this verse has not been generated yet.
heretofore disobedient, when the longsuffering of God waited in [the] days of Noah while the ark was preparing, into which few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water
The verse looks back to a moment when the whole world stood under warning and only one family listened. Peter uses it to steady believers who felt few and outnumbered, and to raise the question of what happens when God's patience ends.
Peter's readers were a small group under real suffering. He steadies them by pointing back to the days before the flood.
To sustain these Jewish believers in their special sufferings, the Apostle draws a parallel between their day and the days before the flood. Christ was not personally present then, yet He preached to men by the Spirit of God through Noah. Today Christ is no longer present on earth, but the Holy Spirit has come, and the Gospel is being preached by the servants of the Lord. In Noah's day the great mass was disobedient to the preaching, and their spirits are now in prison awaiting the yet greater judgment of the dead.
The people who did not obey are the ones who heard the preaching. Commentators place that preaching on earth, before the flood, in a human voice.
His Spirit was then on the earth. In His patience God waited one hundred and twenty years while the ark was being built. His Spirit preached then, but He needed an instrument. The instrument was Noah. The Spirit of Christ was in him, and as the preacher of righteousness he delivered the warning of a coming judgment to those around him. They paid no attention. They went on in disobedience, were swept away by the flood, and are now the spirits in prison.
Some take the verse to mean that Christ preached among the dead. William Kelly answers that the hearers were alive when the message came.
Christ's Spirit preached to them through Noah while they were still living men, before the flood came. But they rejected the Word, so their spirits now await the judgment at the resurrection of the unjust... They were sinners who disobeyed the message, not saints being comforted. The preaching was on earth, where the unbelief and rejection took place.
The years of building were themselves the message.
Here we see the patience of God. He bore long with the sinners before the flood and gave them room to repent. Every day that Noah worked at the ark, every plank, every nail, every stroke of his hammer, was a warning and a threat of the coming judgment. And God could do nothing until Noah was safe in the ark, after He Himself had shut him in. Even then there was a pause of seven days.
God named a limit to that patience then. He names none now.
Then in patient goodness He adds, "his days shall be 120 years." Was there not long patience in that? Was there not plenty of chance to repent? Can I promise you one hundred and twenty years of grace now? You have no such promise.
The parallel reaches the numbers as well.
The great mass of the people before the flood were "disobedient" to Noah's warning of the coming flood. In the same way the great mass of the Jewish people were "disobedient" to the warning of the Spirit to save themselves from that crooked generation, doomed as it was to judgment. At that time, too, only a few — eight souls — were saved through water. To continue the parallel, the Jewish believers found that only a small minority were coming into the blessings of the gospel.
Peter does not say they were saved from the water. He says they were saved through it.
All this adds weight to the point that, after all, only "a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water." The very judgment that fell on the world became in this way the means of saving those who escaped it. They were saved through water, the water itself lifting the ark so that it escaped the judgment.
Both the water and the ark point beyond the story.
The water of the flood leads to the meaning of baptism in verse 21. It is a picture of death under judgment — death for the world that perished in the flood, and salvation by grace for the believer, through Him who went down for our sins and rose again to be the true ark for us. The water was the instrument of God's judgment in destruction. Those in the ark were saved through it, but only because they obeyed God's word and the ark kept them safe. The ark was a picture of Christ, not of the church, as some wrongly imagine. The church did not exist then, and even if it had, it could not have saved anyone.
- Waiting. God's patience set the clock: 120 years of ark-building, and every hammer stroke was a warning of coming judgment.
- Preaching. During that wait the Spirit of Christ preached through Noah to living men on earth, not to the dead. Those hearers are in prison now because they refused then.
- Few. Eight people were the whole harvest of that preaching. Peter uses the number to comfort believers who felt like a tiny minority.
- Through. They were not spared the water but carried through it. The very flood that destroyed the world lifted the ark and saved them.
- Now. The ark stands for Christ. The same patience waits today, but this time with no promised length.