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.
which figure also now saves you, [even] baptism, not a putting away of [the] filth of flesh, but [the] demand as before God of a good conscience, by [the] resurrection of Jesus Christ,
Peter has just spoken of the flood. Then he says something that has troubled readers ever since: baptism "now saves you." Two questions follow — saved from what, and how can water do anything at all?
Peter links the flood to baptism with a word often translated "antitype." One writer says that word does not make baptism the reality itself.
The word plainly means, as in Hebrews, "figure," or, more fully, "answering figure." Older versions give it as "like figure." Its simple force seems to be a figure that answers to the facts. So we can understand why the apostle says that baptism, as such a figure, "saves." Baptism expresses the thing that does save — a matching reality in the soul.
The flood carried Noah out of a doomed world into a new one. Commentators read baptism the same way for Peter's first readers.
The flood cut off that little remnant of the age before it. Through the waters of death they left the old world behind and entered the new. The converted Jews to whom Peter wrote were in exactly that position. They too were only a small remnant. Their baptism separated them from the mass of their nation, which lay under wrath and judgment, so that they might come under the authority of their risen and glorified Messiah. Baptism is, in figure, separation by means of death, and in that sense it saves.
The same picture reaches past those first readers:
The baptism of the flood cut all Noah's links with the old world. For us Gentiles baptism has the same meaning. It separates us — if we understand it and are true to it in practice — from the world which is rushing on to judgment. Are we true to what baptism means?
Peter blocks the misuse of his own sentence. He adds that this is not about washing dirt off the body.
Peter is careful here, to guard against a superstitious twisting of his words. He says "not the putting away the filth of the flesh" — washing dirt away was all that water could do. What a good conscience asks God for is salvation by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For He was given up for our sins and raised again for our justification. So we have acceptance in Him.
Whatever baptism pictures, it does not give new life.
Baptism has its place of deep interest and importance. But Scripture never credits it with giving life. That is a very old and stubborn error in the Christian world.
Older versions read "answer of a good conscience." Writers here take the word the other way round: the conscience asks God for something, rather than answering Him.
The word is a little difficult, but I believe its force is this: it is what the conscience wants and asks God for. Now, when the Holy Spirit touches a conscience, what satisfies it? Nothing less than acceptance in righteousness before God. And that is the very position baptism sets out.
Another writer keeps the distinction practical. Baptism voices the demand; it does not supply the answer.
It expressed the desire or demand of a good conscience — it does not itself give a good conscience, but since baptism is "unto Christ," it points to Him who does give a good conscience.
The verse does not stop at conscience. It ends with the resurrection of Jesus.
We never see salvation stated in its real force apart from resurrection. You may find in death what meets guilt, but salvation is never less than the power of resurrection, and never separable from it. Peter did not mean the mere outward act of baptism. That could save nobody. But what baptism represents does save. It declares that the Christian has a new place and standing — not in the first Adam at all, but in the Second, in the presence of God — as man without sin, accepted according to the acceptance of Christ before God.
Notice too whom Peter is addressing.
Salvation does not work apart from faith. Peter may tell us that baptism "now saves you" (1 Peter 3:21), but note the word "you" — and the "you" are believers.
- Figure — the word behind "corresponds to this" means an answering figure, not the reality. Baptism pictures what saves.
- Separation — the flood cut Noah's every link with the old world. Baptism marks a person off from a world under judgment.
- Not water — Peter's own words rule out any power in the washing. Scripture never traces new life to baptism.
- Request — baptism asks God for a good conscience; it does not produce one. It points to the One who gives it.
- Resurrection — salvation is never stated apart from the risen Christ. That is where the verse lands.