Preaching to the Dead?
By Rev. Chandler Wiley
This article is part of our Clarifying Confusing Verses series.
THE ROCK DELIVERS (“Peter” means “rock”)
Peter littered his first epistle with memorable and soul-satisfying verses. The letter starts off with a bang: “According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1:3). Peter then unpacks the Christian’s inheritance in Jesus Christ and then assures us that God is protecting this imperishable reward purchased by His Son. The inheritance is ours by faith in Jesus; a gift of mercy - not to be earned, but received by belief.
Later, in the same chapter, the text reminds us of the “precious blood of Christ” that was given up for our salvation (1:19). The chapter concludes by emphasizing the immeasurable worth of the Word of God, the “living and abiding word of God” that “remains forever” (1:23, 25).
Chapter two has bangers, too. Peter unpacks the theological and applicable truth that in Jesus Christ we are a “spiritual house” and “a holy nation” set apart by the blood of Christ to be a “holy priesthood,” living every day as a “spiritual sacrifice” to God (2:5). Encouraging believers, Peter declares, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God” (2:9a). Then he adds one of the most memorable moments in the letter. Our being made a spiritual home and a royal priesthood is so “that [we] may proclaim the excellencies of him who called [us] out of darkness into his marvelous light” (2:9b).
I could continue. For example, I could point us to 3:18 and the simple explanation of Christ’s substitutionary, atoning death for our sins, but we get the point. 1 Peter has Christian-catch-phrase-poster, Christ-centered-motivational-poster stuff in it. Print it on a mug, plaster it on a t-shirt, and commit it to memory phrases.
THE ROCK CAN CONFUSE (Peter, what do you mean?)
However, you’ll also find some confusing passages in 1 Peter. For example, what does Peter mean by calling women “the weaker vessel” (3:7)? Oh, and why does he suggest women call their husband “Lord” (3:6)?
Did I just stir the pot? Oh well.
You get the point. The Rock leaves us feeling unsteady at times.
One verse that makes us wish we had a text thread going with Peter, so we could ask him all the questions we want, that I have thought through, is in the fourth chapter. Without further ado, here it is:
For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does (4:6).
If you grasp Peter’s meaning, skip the article. You need not continue - press on in the Lord!
If you’re curious about Peter’s comments concerning preaching to the dead, judging the flesh, and God’s spirit residing within a person, I invite you to continue reading.
Lord, be our helper.
WHERE TO BEGIN?
You know what to do whenever you encounter a challenging verse, right? Go to the Bible to clarify the unclear verse in…the Bible. Welcome to a reformational principle: Scripture interprets Scripture. We look at the Word to bring clarity to the Word. In the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion (our Anglican Confession), Article XX says that we cannot “expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.” The Bible clarifies itself. This is a reformational hermeneutical principle - understanding the Bible like the reformers did. [1]
The first step is grasping context. “Context is king,” goes the saying. Surrounding verses always illuminate the meaning of a single verse.
Context clarifies confusion.
HOLY CONDUCT/CONTEXT
Throughout Peter’s letter, he calls Christians to live according to Jesus’s “marvelous light” (2:9). Peter is theological throughout the letter, but always theologically practical as well. His theology breeds practic-ology. The gospel he preaches is a gospel that teaches. So, as Peter unpacks the message of Christ, he continually calls followers of Jesus to live as “God’s people” in the present world (2:10). He says that the revealed Jesus requires that we “prepare our minds” to avoid being “conformed to the passions of former ignorance” (1:13, 14). And, since “He who called [us] is holy, [we] must also be holy” (1:15).
Throughout his letter to the “elect exiles” (that’s all of us in Christ), Peter shows us that all theology is practical theology. Every truth about God shapes the life we live for God.
Chapter 4 begins with Peter continuing to call Christians to live in the light of Christ by seeking holiness. His particular focus in the chapter, though, is encouragement. He encourages the Christians toward holy living even if and even when it brings suffering.
ATTENTION ON THE SINLESS AND WATCH SIN CEASE
Peter writes,
Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin (4:1)…
While we are dealing with challenging verses, we might as well tackle verse 1, right?
Peter makes a startling claim that there is a way to “cease from sin.” Peter’s words seem like an outlandish fairytale to some - like an impossibility this side of glory. Romans 7 rings in our ears. We feel that “sinful passions…[are] at work in our members” (Rom. 7:5). With Paul, we know we ought not sin more so that grace can abound, but, alas, we keep sinning and keep calling out for more grace. Paul’s words are ours. “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15). Sin besets us, seeking to derail. Holiness is the goal of sanctification, but the presence of sin is a present enemy. [2]
So, what is the Apostle saying?
We note that whatever he is saying about sin flows from the reality of Christ’s suffering. He begins with “Since therefore,” or, “Because Christ suffered in the flesh.” Sin ends in the suffering of Christ! And our suffering in the flesh, resisting sin, is akin to the suffering that Christ went through.
Let me explain.
In 3:18, Peter talks about Christ’s suffering “once for sins.” At the cross, Jesus suffered death as a payment for the sins of the world. Jesus was the “righteous” given for the “unrighteous” (3:18). By believing in Christ and His life, death, and resurrection, we become one with Him. He nailed our sins to the cross, removed them, and buried them in the grave.
The Apostle Peter, in 1 Peter 4, asserts that Christ’s suffering is both the source of power and the path to holiness. If our sin is really vanquished, then we can deny the sinful flesh that wages a war against our new life in Christ and walk in holiness. And for Peter, if sin ceases in our lives, then the cross crucified it and the Spirit of the Risen Christ lives in us.
How, though, does the suffering of Christ in His flesh move into our lives and help us deny the flesh?
Peter tells us to “arm [our]selves with the same way of thinking.” Think like Christ. He said “no” to sin and at the cross, He told sin to “stop!” By faith, we receive the mind of Christ. Karen Jobes says that here, “Peter’s reference to ‘the one who suffers is through with sin’ is the Christian believer armed with the same resolve as Christ.” [3] When the mind of Christ is the weapon used by the Christian in his or her fight against human passions that lead away from God, then sin stands no chance and it ceases. Every soldier that finds victory over sin knows the weapon that brought success is the mind of Jesus.
“There is but One good,” writes C. S. Lewis, “that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” [4] A mind turned to Christ and His cross is the path to holiness.
WILLING SUFFERERS
But what about the suffering that leads to the termination of sin? Remember that Peter says, “Whoever has suffered in the flesh,” it is he or she that ceases to sin. What does he mean?
When we deny the sinful flesh and align our lives with the holy conduct of Christ, the conduct that is in line with the will of God, the world, controlled by human passions and guided by the sinful flesh, is “surprised [that we] do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign [us]” (4:4).
The world wants affirmation from everyone! The corrupted society, giving free reign to all things sinful, wants to be unleashed to pursue all human passions and all obstacles must be silenced! If you will not affirm, you get branded as some type of phobic. Those living in the flesh resist and reject all forms of accountability. When men and women live for the exaltation of the self and seek to express their individuality no matter what, they hate to be told “no.” Life in the flesh does not want to have to answer questions or defend its actions. Sinfulness, when fully birthed, wants unhindered allowance.
Christians who oppose the “sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry” of the fallen world become enemy number one to the anti-God cultural movement (4:3). Even the act of abstaining from the fallen rampages is a threat. If we do not affirm, then the world thinks that we are denying. The flesh will definitely demand its desire.
Therefore, Christians, armed with Christ’s mind, choosing by the power of Spirit to live “no longer for human passions but for the will of God” (4:2), are “maligned.” In other places in the New Testament, scholars translate the word “maligned” using the word “reviled” (Acts 3:45). If we do not seek to be “conformed to the passions” of this world, then the world casts us away, persecutes us, despises us, and belittles us (1:14). The world hates us because we follow Jesus.
J. C. Ryle says, “People reject Jesus because He interferes with the way they want to live.” People reject us because we seek to align our lives with Jesus.
This is the suffering that Peter talks about. Our refusing to go the way of sin results in suffering at the hands of the world. [5]
Verse 5 has something to say about this, too. Peter exhorts persecuted Christians, striving for holiness in a time of rampant immorality, to remember that when attacked, slandered, or reviled, “they [who malign us] will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead” (4:5). Judgment is coming against all ungodliness and sinfulness, and the punishment handed out will be in full measure according to the crimes committed against God and His people. No crime escapes punishment. God accounts for every sin. God’s wrath will consume ungodliness as Jesus Christ hands out His sentencing. Jesus will win.
Christians, we can have peace even in our suffering knowing that Christ will have the last word.
WE’VE ARRIVED
We have done some necessary work preparing to handle verse 6. We have the context in our grasp. Remember, the verse says,
For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does.
Peter is giving a defense for how the gospel leads “dead” men and women out of the grave and into life “in the spirit.”
The Rock says that gospel brings dead men to life, corpses out of the ground, when heralds preach the good news! Let’s consider two ways preaching the gospel occurs.
JESUS PREACHED THE DEAD TO LIFE
First, Jesus Christ preached the good news of God through His incarnation; He is Himself the gospel of God (Mark 1:1). He came to earth to proclaim good news to all men and women trapped in the prison of sin and destined to bear the wrath of God (Luke 4:14-22). All of us living on planet earth downstream from Adam and Eve and their rebellion against God were dead in our trespasses because of the sins in which we once walked (Ephesians 2:1-4).
But that’s Paul talking. Peter puts it like this: we were all “dead…judged in the flesh” as sinful (4:6). He explained earlier that, at one time, we were all “conformed to passions” of a “former ignorance” (1:14). We were all ignorant of the ways of righteousness, and our passions led us. Grudem explains that “Peter always uses [the word passions] in a negative sense of sinful desires which lead people to direct disobedience to God’s laws (2:11; 4:2, 3; 2 Pet. 1:4; 2:10, 18; 3:3).” [6] Peter tells us in chapter two that at one time we did not belong to God because we belonged to the “passions of the flesh, which wage war against [the] soul” (2:10, 11). Finally, Peter says that baptism washed our “dirt” (our moral impurity) away (3:21).
Peter agrees with Paul.
We were all, at one time, slaves to sin, led along by the passions of this world, following its course (Ephesians 2:1). It is this spiritual death that Peter is speaking about in this passage. Sin separates us from God who is Himself the source of life.
We die a spiritual death when we rebel against the Father and inherit eternal death without the washing of the “precious blood of Christ” (1:19).
So we can conclude that the “dead” in 1 Peter 4:6 are those who were spiritually dead but who are not fully alive in Jesus Christ.
Remember, Peter is addressing Christians who are seeking holiness. Christians can turn from death to walk in ways that are pleasing to God, only because of the “suffering of Christ” and only as they “arm” themselves with” His “way of thinking.”
Jesus came and lived according to the “will of God” and “in the spirit the way God does” (4:2, 6). Then He suffered in His perfect flesh (4:1), to consume our sinful flesh by His “once for sins” death (3:18). Christ vanquished all that buries us in the grave and holds us six feet under (all of our sin). Raise the casket because in Christ the body is no longer a corpse (see Ephesians 2:5). The flesh now has a “living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1:3). Now, by God’s mercy, we turn to Jesus Christ and “believe in Him” and we “obtain the outcome of faith, the salvation of our souls” (1:8, 9). Jesus is the gospel, the good news of salvation!
THE GOSPEL PREACHED BRINGS LIFE
Second, the Apostles (Peter being one) took up the gospel message and began preaching the good news. When Peter proclaimed the message of salvation, when he spoke light into darkness, the Spirit stirred corpses; men and women dead in sin, opened their eyes, took deep breaths, and found new life in Jesus Christ. The gospel preached effectively restored life because the cross sufficiently covered the sins of men and women “living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry” (4:3). God poured the entirety of His wrath out on His Son for the sins of the world (see 1 John 2:2)
THE CROSS AS GOD’S JUDGMENT
There is more. At the cross, God made it known that our living according to “the flesh” and for “human passions” and not “for the will of God” is in direct violation against His holiness; sin is ultimately against the One who made us and rules over all - the God to whom all while “give an account” (4:2, 5). If our way of life in the flesh was not in violation against God’s righteous demands, then Christ Jesus need not die. So, the cross “judged in the flesh the way people are” (4:6). The cross declares God’s judgment out loud. Sin deserves punishment, and God will punish sin.
The gospel, then, removes all sin for those who turn to the mercy of God and believe in Christ - who place faith in Him, as Peter says in the opening chapter. We who were once dead now “live in the spirit the way God does” (4:6).
However, for those who insist on remaining in the grave, for those who do not believe, for those who resist the offer of mercy by refusing to place their faith in Jesus Christ, the benefits of the cross are not theirs to hope in. Though powerful enough to save all sinners who turn to Christ, the cross is only for those who repent and turn with belief in Jesus.
1 Peter 4:6 has nothing to do with an offer of salvation for those who are dead physically. This is no proof text for universalism. Those left in sin as this life passes to the next will “give account to him who is ready to judge” (4:5). Therefore, men and women who continue in “human passions” and “malign” Christians who walk in the Spirit-led passions will stand before the judgment seat of Christ with no defense and with only one choice to pay for their sins - their lives eternally bearing the wrath of God.
LIFE ON THE ROCK (and now “Rock” means “Christ”)
After working through the context of 1 Peter 4, we understand that when Peter explains preaching the gospel to those who are dead, he has in mind spiritual death. We’ve all been there. Spiritually dead, we shared a common fate with the rest of humanity, destined for eternal separation from God’s love.
As we live against the grain, alive in a world filled with death, we meet varying forms of suffering. Our spirit-led life surprises the culture. When Jesus lived to please the Father, the world persecuted Him to the point of crucifixion. We suffer with our suffering Savior but, when the final judgment comes at the return of the risen Christ and Jesus removes the presence of sin, suffering at the hands of sinners will cease. Until then, we embrace our new lives in Christ by arming ourselves with Jesus’s way of thinking. We pursue life with Jesus and not life controlled by “human passions.”
[1] Hermeneutics “focuses specifically on the interpretation, understanding and appropriation of biblical texts.” M. Higton, “Hermeneutics,” ed. Martin Davie et al., New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic (London; Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press; InterVarsity Press, 2016), 398. I call the process of allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture a reformational principle because during the time of the reformation a prevailing thought said that “tradition” was the key to understanding the Bible. In this way, tradition was king. Allowing the text to teach itself does not remove the need for tradition; instead, it places the Scriptures as the final and most important authority and allows tradition to take a supportive role.
[2] “Sanctification is the ongoing supernatural work of God to rescue justified sinners from the disease of sin and to conform them to the image of his Son: holy, Christlike, and empowered to do good works.” Susanne Calhoun, “Sanctification,” in Lexham Survey of Theology, ed. Mark Ward et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018).
[3] Karen H. Jobes, 1 Peter (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005) 265.
[4] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: HarperCollins, 1946.
[5] Jobes points out that in the First Century Roman culture, Christians were outcasts because of their stance against sinful practices in their day. “Christian lifestyle also condemned the ‘pleasures’ of an indulgent temper, sex outside marriage, drinking, slander, lying, covetousness, and theft. These attitudes toward contemporary Roman customs and morals, combined with the Christians’ refusal to burn incense to the emperor…earned Christians the reputation of being haters of humanity and traitors to the Roman way of life” (Jobes, 1 Peter, 262).
[6] Wayne A. Grudem, 1 Peter: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 17, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 83.