First Peter: Humility | Part 4: Suffering — What to do When You Suffer

What To Do When You Suffer

1 Peter 3:18-22

1 Peter 3:18,” For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit.”

1.Remember the Gospel.

“Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel has made him just a gardener.”

George Herbert

1 Peter 3:19, “by whom also He went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly were disobedient, when once the Divine longsuffering waited in the days of Noah.”

“A wonderful text is this, and a more obscure passage perhaps than any other in the New Testament, so that I do not know for a certainty just what Peter means.”

Martin Luther

“Spirits” in the New Testament always refers to nonhuman spiritual beings unless qualified.

2 Peter 2:4, For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment. 

Jude 6, And the angels who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, He has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day.

2. Relish in the victory. 

Colossians 2:15, Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it. 

1 Peter 3:22, “who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, angels and authorities and powers having been made subject to Him.”

Jesus declares his dominance to the demons.

1 Peter 3:20-21, “who formerly were disobedient, when once the Divine longsuffering waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water. There is also an antitype which now saves us—baptism (not the removal of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God), through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

3.Respond to the rescue.

1 Peter 3:22, “who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, angels and authorities and powers having been made subject to Him.

4.Rejoice in Jesus.