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.