Sermon Tone Analysis

UNIT 8

Baptism as Spiritual Warfare

31.

Issues in 1 Peter 3:14–22

32.

The Context of 1 Peter

33.

Typology

34.

The Baptism Element

Learning Objectives

After this section, you should be able to:

• Identify some of the significant questions emerging from 1 Pet 3:14–22

• Discuss the interpretive issues in 1 Pet 3:14–22

Introduction

First Peter 3:14–22 is one of my favorite passages in the nt.

I’ll admit, though, that it’s really odd, and frankly it’s avoided by many.

I actually had the experience, when I was in graduate school, when my wife and I were looking for a church to attend in Madison, Wisconsin—we went to a particular church where the pastor was a graduate of a pretty well-known seminary.

He did a great job.

He was in 1 Peter.

We went away for few weeks and came back, and I thought, providentially we showed up on the day when he’s going to go through 1 Peter 3:14–22.

Again, it’s one of my favorites.

And he actually walked into the pulpit and looked at us and said, “This passage is just too weird.

I have no idea what it means, so we are just going to skip it,” and he did!

He was serious.

I mean, I’ve never seen that happen before.

Needless to say, we didn’t go back.

First Peter 3:14–22 is not that difficult.

It’s not really a conundrum if you have a certain background to it in your head.

In other words, if you thought like the writer was thinking, the passage actually is parsable and understandable and actually has a significant theological payoff.

Let’s just take a look at it.

Beginning in verse 14, we will read it.

The Text

“But even if you might suffer for the sake of righteousness, you are blessed.

And do not be afraid of their intimidation or be disturbed, but set Christ apart as Lord in your hearts, always ready to make a defense to anyone who asks you for an accounting concerning the hope that is in you.

But do so with courtesy and respect, having a good conscience, so that in the things in which you are slandered, the ones who malign your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame.

For it is better to suffer for doing good, if God wills it, than for doing evil.”

Here is the odd part, coming up in verse 18: “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, in order that he could bring you to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, who were formerly disobedient, when the patience of God waited in the days of Noah, while an ark was being constructed, in which a few—that is, eight souls—were rescued through water.

And also, corresponding to this, baptism now saves you, not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is at the right hand of God, having gone into heaven, with angels and authorities and powers having been subjected to him.”

Emerging Questions

This passage raises all sorts of questions.

Fundamentally, how in the world are all these ideas connected?

Who are the spirits in prison?

Why bring up the flood?

Why bring up Noah?

What does it mean that these spirits were formerly disobedient?

Why is baptism connected with these spirits?

It just seems like a catchall, a blender passage where you have all sorts of seemingly disparate theological ideas and points from passages in the ot just thrown into one and then out comes 1 Peter 3:14–22—at least, this section from 18–22.

How in the world are we going to parse this?

Fundamentally, one of the questions that always pops up is, what about the outcome?

What does it mean that baptism saves?

And why does it end up that Jesus is exalted above angels and powers and so on and so forth?

It just doesn’t seem that any of this belongs together.

But in Peter’s mind, it all belonged together, and that’s the end to which we have to work.

How do these things fit together?

What is Peter thinking?

The Context of 1 Peter

Learning Objectives

After this section, you should be able to:

• Explain why the flood is significant for interpreting 1 Pet 3:18–22

• Explain the identity of the disobedient spirits

• Discuss how typology provides an interpretive key for this passage

Introduction

Most of the initial focus when approaching 1 Pet 3 is really the disobedient spirits.

We are going to focus on verses 18–22 because that’s where all the odd stuff starts to happen in the passage.

There are a couple of options.

A lot of commentators think that the spirits that were disobedient, that are mentioned in 1 Pet 3, were the people who died at the flood, the human beings.

That’s a very common interpretation.

I don’t think that’s the case, because of what Second Temple Jewish literature does, and really, how it creates the background to understand the passage as a whole.

The Disobedient Angels

In the Second Temple period (that is, the intertestamental period), when Jewish writers there were talking about disobedient spirits, they don’t use that phrase of the people who died.

They use it of the disobedient angels, the disobedient sons of God of Gen 6:1–4.

If you remember that story, this is when they transgressed heaven and earth, and we have the issue with the human women and the Nephilim and all that stuff.

In the Second Temple period, those were the disobedient spirits, or the disobedient angels.

This is the way to go, because 2 Peter, the second epistle that bears Peter’s name, actually talks about this same episode, connected with the flood that we’re looking at in 1 Pet 3, and it refers to the angels that sinned.

Even more specifically than that, the idea that these angels that sinned (or these “disobedient spirits,” to quote 1 Pet 3) are imprisoned nails down what Peter is thinking about, because in all of the Second Temple Jewish traditions, the angels that sinned, the disobedient spirits (referring back to the sons of God who sinned in Gen 6:1–4)—in all the traditions, they are put in prison, in an abyss; they are locked away, so to speak.

The Flood Background

When Peter uses this language in both of his epistles, that’s significant.

It tells us what the identity is, or who the identity belongs to, as far as the disobedient spirits.

They are not the spirits of the human dead, they are the spirits who sinned, back as a precursor to the flood, and participated in God’s reason for sending the flood.

That backdrop actually leads us to the key to how to understand this passage.

If you don’t have that backdrop in your head and you don’t understand what I am going to go into now, you will never understand what’s going on in 1 Pet 3.

Typology: The Interpretive Key

The key, and where this leads—the key to understanding the passage is a concept called typology.

You may have heard of typology before, because it is something that is used in the nt: this ot person or place or event is a type of something that [would] come later, in the nt time.

Typology—I think it’s best to compare it with prophecy.

We think of prophecy as, The prophet says something back in an ot book, it’s a verbal utterance that gets written down, and then it has a fulfillment.

Typology is a nonverbal prophecy.

It’s not a statement that has a fulfillment; it’s an event or a person or some institution that has a nt future counterpart.

Illustration: Romans 5

For instance, I think the best way to illustrate it is Rom 5. Paul very clearly thinks of Adam as a type of Jesus.

What Adam did, who he was, prefigures, foreshadows what’s going to happen with Jesus later on, so Adam is a type of Jesus, a type of Christ.

We have other instances in the ot that might be just as clear.

Paul talks about the rock that yielded water in 1 Cor 10.

That was a type of Christ.

We have Passover being a type of the sacrifice on the cross, an event or an institution in the ot that prefigures or foreshadows something yet to come.

It’s a nonverbal prophecy.

Jesus as the Second Enoch

Let’s take all that to 1 Pet 3. What is Peter thinking?

Believe it or not, what Peter is thinking of is the person of Enoch from the ot.

That is going to be his type for Jesus.

He is thinking of Enoch, and specifically the Enoch story and the flood story as articulated and as written about in Second Temple Jewish literature—even more specifically, in the book of 1 Enoch.

What it comes down to is, just as Jesus was the second Adam for Paul, Jesus is the second Enoch for Peter.

Enoch is a foreshadowing—for Peter—of Jesus, and that is what is in his head when we get to 1 Pet 3.