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We are actually going to look at two different passages this morning, so open your Bibles to both Genesis 6:5-13 and 1 Peter 3:18-4:6 this morning.
We are going to start in Genesis for a few minutes and spend most of our time in 1 Peter.
As you turn over there, we are tackling the passage that Martin Luther said was the most difficult passage in the New Testament to interpret.
I am not going to answer every question you or I have about the text, but we are going to work through it together.
Because of that, this message will be a little different than most of the sermons we preach here.
I am going to spend time walking through the text, pulling on different threads of Peter’s arguments, and hopefully develop a coherent idea of what the text says by the time we finish.
In the middle, we will cover a few action items for us, and we will finish by looking at the reasons we should behave like he tells us to behave.
Peter is going to draw from what God did in Noah’s day as he explains how Christ rescues us and how we should respond, so we will start by looking briefly at what God did in Genesis to make sure we are all on the same page.
The story of Noah was really popular, even among non-believers in Peter’s day.
It is still popular in our day, and sometimes we get some details wrong.
With that in mind, let’s look at what actually happened.
Read through Gen. 6:5-13...
By the time Noah came around, people had become incredibly wicked.
In fact, Noah was one of the few (if not only) people who was following the one true God.
God told Noah that he was going to flood the earth to destroy all the human, animal, and bird life on the earth and start over.
He gave Noah instructions on how to build an ark, a large boat, that could hold his family and representatives of all the families of animals on earth at the time.
People back then lived for hundreds of years, and it is likely that Noah spent 120 years building the ark.
When the flood came, Noah and his family entered the ark with all the animals God brought to them, and God spared their lives because they trusted in him.
So, righteous Noah and his family were spared by trusting God.
Their trust was displayed by building and entering the ark.
The wicked, those who didn’t follow God, were judged by God and destroyed.
There is more to the story than that, but those are some of the primary details that Peter is going to reference.
Wicked people, righteous Noah, and God’s deliverance.
Got it?
Now, let’s dive into 1 Peter 3. Read verses 18-22 with me.
I know, that’s a lot to take in.
Let’s walk through it a piece at a time.
The whole section we are going to look at today keeps coming back to the idea of Christ suffering.
We begin by remembering the incredible truth that is core to what we believe as Christians.
Jesus was perfect and we were not.
He suffered on the cross to take my sin and yours, the righteous for the unrighteous, so he could bring us back into a right relationship with God.
With all the details of this passage, don’t lose sight of this key truth: Jesus suffered in your place to bring you back to God. Trust him because he died for you; let him be in charge of your life.
Even if you don’t understand anything else, that is one of the most crucial truths you can ever understand.
In the middle of that discussion, we find one of our other major themes: “In the flesh” vs. “in the Spirit.”
“In the flesh” is pretty straightforward.
Although it is used differently other places, Peter uses the term in this passage to refer primarily to our physical body and physical life.
So, right now, all of us are “in the flesh” in the sense that we are still living physically on earth.
“In the Spirit,” on the other hand, is a little trickier.
Sometimes, it has a capital ‘S’, and Peter is referring to the work of the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trinity.
Sometimes, it has a lowercase ‘s’, and the emphasis is on our spiritual life as opposed to our physical life.
The capitalization isn’t in the original Greek, so we have to figure out whether Peter is referring to big S or little s Spirit through this passage.
With that framework, then, look back at the end of verse 18...
Jesus was put to death in the flesh, but the Spirit raised him from the dead.
See the difference?
Keep that in mind, because this contrast is going to come back up later.
Now’s where we start looking at Noah.
Read verses 19-20 again.
This is where lots of people have different ideas.
With the research I have done, I have basically settled on this conclusion for what it is saying.
Remember the wicked people in Noah’s day?
When they were still alive, Noah preached to them about God.
Peter actually calls him a “preacher of righteousness” in 2 Peter 2:5.
Jesus, through the work of the Holy Spirit, was preaching through Noah during the days he was still alive—while they were “in the flesh,” if you will.
They were disobedient to what the Spirit said through Noah while God delayed in sending the flood.
This fits the context because Noah, as a preacher that no one would listen to and one of the only godly men alive, likely suffered persecution from the wicked people around him.
Yet even in those days, it was actually Jesus working through Noah, just like Jesus would be working through the believers Peter was writing to and just like he works through us.
After that brief focus on preaching in Noah’s day, we come back to the idea of how God saved Noah’s family physically.
They were physically saved by building and entering the ark - “in the flesh”.
The ark, though, is just a symbol of their trust in God, which was what saved them spiritually - “in the spirit.”
That becomes important when we get to the next verse.
Look at verse 21.
“I thought we believed that baptism doesn’t save us?”
We don’t.
I don’t believe that is what Peter is saying.
First, he makes the point that baptizing someone in water doesn’t have physical benefit.
When we are baptizing people in a few weeks, we will be using good old town water.
There is nothing special about it, and it doesn’t purify anyone ceremonially or anything.
Instead, following Jesus through believers’ baptism by immersion is an outward expression of the trust we have already put in Christ.
Although there are differences, that’s why he connects it to the ark—Going into the ark was a demonstration of Noah’s trust in God.
That relationship with God was what saved them spiritually, and the ark was the physical symbol of that.
In a similar way, Jesus’s death and resurrection is what actually saves a person, and baptism is the way Jesus gave us to demonstrate our allegiance to him.
So then, it is isn’t that actual act of baptism that saves us.
Rather, it is the relationship with Christ that is demonstrated through baptism that save us.
Building off what he said in verse 18, Peter is showing us that like the ark carried Noah and his family safely through the flood, Jesus carries us back to God.
Trusting in his death, resurrection, and lordship is like entering the ark, and that is how we are kept alive.
Let’s sum up what we have seen so far:
Jesus suffered and was put to death in the flesh but was made alive in the Spirit so he could bring us to God.
By that same Spirit, he preached through Noah to those who judged Noah according to the flesh but died in the flesh during the flood.
Noah and his family were saved physically in the ark, symbolizing their trust in God, who saved them spiritually.
Baptism doesn’t do anything to us physically but it shows what God has done in us spiritually.
Christ is like the ark who saves us, and we are saved by trusting in him.
We clear so far?
Great.
Pick back up in 4:1-2...
We come back to the idea that Jesus suffered in the flesh, and now we start seeing what we are supposed to do with that truth.
First, we have to arm ourselves with that knowledge.
What does that mean?
It means to grab your weapon and get ready to fight.
We have seen throughout this letter that standing with Christ is going to be a struggle.
If we are going to stand up, we have to arm ourselves with the mindset that Jesus suffered to bring us to God, and we are going to suffer like he did.
We brace ourselves like you do when you get ready to walk out in the wind or when you are standing in the waves at the beach.
We brace our mind with the understanding that this will be difficult, but it will be worth it.
After all, look at what Jesus has done for us!
Look at what he endured.
It is a privilege to be able to suffer with him.
Why?
Because the person who suffers for Christ is done with sin.
This doesn’t mean that once a person has suffered for Jesus, they will never sin again.
We will all wrestle with sin until we die.
The rest of the New Testament makes that clear.
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