A Clear Conscience
Notes
Transcript
We are getting near the end of this series on the letter of 1 Peter and as you may have picked up by now, the central theme of this letter is living a Christian life in the midst of hostility and suffering.
Peter is writing, for the most part, to Gentiles believers who are finding that their faith in Christ is resulting in hostility and suffering from their neighbors.
Peter instructs them on how to respond. As we have heard in the last few Sundays, Christians are to live peacefully with others, obey authorities, do good deeds, rejoice in faith, and be holy in conduct. Typically, no one is going to harm you if you are doing good.
But this is no absolute. We live in a broken world filled with sinful people. As we discussed last week, Christ is a stumbling block for many - so as followers of Christ, it should not surprise us when we face hardship and persecution.
Peter teaches them, if suffering does occur do not be afraid or worried, for Christ suffered for us and therefore, we look to him as our example. Keep your heart set on Christ.
When Jesus walked among the people and taught his disciples, he prepared them for this. Remember the Beatitudes at the start of the Sermon on the Mount - in them Jesus said,
“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Peter experienced this himself over the years, and he reminds his readers:
For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.
We may suffer in the moment, but if we keep our hearts on Christ we can be assured that in the long run, in the end, we will be victorious.
In the passage we are examining today, Peter instructs us,
But even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.
This is so important for a disciple of Jesus to understand. If your suffering is because you are being faithful, you are doing what Christ has led you to do, and you are operating with a clear conscience - i.e. your behavior is morally good - then you do not need to fear others, you don’t need to be troubled, you are in fact blessed. Blessed in this context is not - “feeling good”, you are probably not if you are suffering, but you have - as Peter Davids writes - “a deep joy when one looks on life from the perspective of God.”
As the hymn proclaims “It is well with my soul.” Blessed.
This gives you the ability to share with others why you have joy in the midst of suffering. This is the gift of life in Christ. Peter also emphasizes, any answer you give must match your life - you respond with meekness and respect - again following the example of Jesus.
At this point, Peter’s teaching may be hard to carry out, but it is fairly easy to follow and understand.
But now we get to a tricky part. Peter intent is for us to understand that we can do all this because Christ is victorious and powerful and therefore, so are his disciples. Yet to prove his point, he will be drawing from a 1st Century Jewish worldview that sounds strange to modern ears and requires some careful interpretation.
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water.
What is with all this talk about Jesus preaching to spirits in prison and what does Noah have to do with what he has been teaching?
I’m going to try to walk us through this one.
The first concept we need to grasp to understand this passage is what is called typology.
Typology is a nonverbal kind of prophecy. It is predictive prophecy - it is not a prophet saying “thus saith the Lord” and predicting some future event.
Instead, typology, as described by the late OT scholar Dr. Michael Heiser, “It's an event, a person, or an institution that foreshadows something that will come, but which isn't revealed until after the fact.”
Something happens. We don’t immediately recognize that it is a prophecy, but later we see that it served as a precursor to something greater.
For instance, the story of the first Passover in Exodus 12. God is delivering the Hebrew people out of slavery. They were to sacrifice a lamb and spread the blood of the lamb on the door posts of their home so when the final plague hit, when the Angel of Death passed through Egypt and killed the first born male of every household, the angel would passover the homes of the Jews - they would be spared judgement and live. It was a defining event in Israel’s history - one celebrated every year since. But It wasn’t until Jesus died on the cross and rose again, that Christians realized that He was the fulfillment of the Passover Lamb. By His blood, the wrath of God passes over us who in faith turn to Christ, and we are set free from slavery to sin and death.
When we examine Peter’s passage about spirits in prison and Noah, we encounter another example of typology.
Peter is saying that in some way, Noah’s flood described in Genesis 6-8 foreshadow the power of the gospel and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To understand Peter’s typology we are going to enter into the worldview of 1st Century Jews.
So how did 1st Century Jews view what was going on in the days of Noah leading up to God’s judgment and the Great Flood?
For this, let start with...
When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.
In describing the pre-flood world, the Bible indicates that some angels (sons of God) hooked up with human ladies - and a species call the Nephilim were their offspring. To modern ears, this is a strange story.
Yet for Peter, this was not so strange. He would refer to this ancient story again in 2 Peter 2:4-5
For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly;
then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority. Bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones,
And before I begin to unpack this further, it is not only Peter who refers back to this strange story. Jude, one of the original twelve disciples, also called Thaddeus, speaks of these transgressing angels in his Epistle:
And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day—
Peter and Jude, and probably all the Apostles, were very familiar with Jewish tradition and writings surrounding the Great Flood that we are not as familiar with. In fact, it sounds very strange to modern ears, but Peter and Jude saw the world through an ancient understanding - through a different lens.
It is evident from their writings that Peter and Jude were accustomed with the book of Enoch. This is not a book that made it into the canon of scripture we know the Bible, but it was a highly regarded ancient book that first century Jews would have been familiar with.
Enoch was the grandfather to Noah and we encounter the person of Enoch in Genesis 5:21-24
When Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah. Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.
The book attributed to Enoch tells the story of the sons of God, called Watchers, who indeed came down and impregnated earth women. Their offspring were violent giants of men called Nephilim. Enoch would go on to explain that demons are the spirits of the Nephilim who roam the world. When the Watchers transgressed their boundaries and committed their sinful acts, God bound them up in chains and imprisoned them in the underworld.
According to this ancient text, Enoch was asked by the locked up Watchers to write a legal appeal to God on their behalf - asking him for his forgiveness. God’s response, given in the 1st person, is found in 1 Enoch 13,
“And Enoch, go and say to Azazel, "You will have no peace." A great sentence has gone forth against you to bind you. You will have no relief or petition because of the unrighteous deeds that you have revealed, because of all the godless deeds and the unrighteousness and the sin that you revealed to men. And then I [Enoch] went and spoke to all of them [the spirits in prison] together, and they were all afraid, and trembling and fear seized them.
This is the story that Peter was familiar with and, apparently his readers would have been familiar with since he does not try to explain it to them.
So taking some creative license here, and pulling from the work of Dr. Michael Heiser, I understand Peter’s point here to be this:
Just as those angels who led humanity to suffer greatly did not get away with it but have chained up and imprisoned in the place of the dead, to await final judgement, and just as Enoch proclaimed their guilt and sentence, so to do we see...
“Jesus descending to these same spirits in prison—the fallen angels—to tell them they were still defeated, despite his crucifixion. God's plan of salvation and kingdom rule was still intact. In fact, it was right on schedule. The crucifixion actually meant victory over every demonic force opposed to God. The spiritual war was won at the crucifixion.” - Dr. Michael Heiser
And just as God during the Flood delivered those who believed in Him, meaning Noah and the few with him, safely through the flood water in the Ark, so to does our water baptism mark our deliverance from death into life. When we appeal to God through Jesus for a good conscience, to be made morally pure, to receive salvation - we can receive it because of the resurrection and because Jesus now sits at the right hand of God with all power and authority.
Peter reminds us of the doom facing the fallen angels and the pledge of loyalty that we, as believers, give to Christ at our baptism. This is spiritual warfare - it is why in our Baptismal Covenant, we declare the following:
On behalf of the whole Church, I ask you:
Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness,
reject the evil powers of this world,
and repent of your sin?
I do.
Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you
to resist evil, injustice, and oppression
in whatever forms they present themselves?
I do.
Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior,
put your whole trust in his grace,
and promise to serve him as your Lord, in union with the Church which Christ has opened
to people of all ages, nations, and races?
I do.
It is in our loyalty, obedience, and faith in Jesus Christ that we called to suffer well, to keep a clear conscience, and proclaim the gospel. You have been saved from judgement and delivered to eternal life - therefore do not conform to the ways of the world, instead BE HOLY.
Amen.
