Quote:
Originally Posted by meerkat2
Brakelite
I believe that you have half of the story of salvation.
There is also verses that say that the last enemy to be destroyed is death --- you have it that death is victorious for the majority of humanity.
The gospel is also preached to the dead
1Pe 4:6 For to this end the gospel was preached also to the dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the Spirit.
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Not just the verse you quoted, but this also....
1 Peter 3:18-20 ¶ For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.....have been badly misunderstood and used as false evidence to support not just UR, but life after death in general, and the truth is that it teaches neither.
There are 3 main claims from the above passages:
1. That Peter here must refer to
disembodied spirits of people who lived before the flood.
2. That these disembodied spirits must have been conscious or else Christ would not have gone to preach to them. Therefore it is claimed the dead are conscious.
3. That the time when Christ supposedly carries out this preaching mission was during the 3 days His body was in the tomb.
Suppositions such as the above can never be made to harmonise with the rest of scripture which in numerous places clearly tells us that there is no consciousness in death.
Back to the verses in hand however.
The scripture states that the preaching was done, when??? "when once the longsuffering of God
waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was preparing" , not thousands of years later in hell.
And how was this preaching done??? The scriptures state, "....quickened by the Spirit
by which also He went and preached...". That is, Jesus, through the ministry of Noah, preached to the antideluvians for 120 years while Noah worked on the ark. Noah was Christ's representative. Noah preached in precisely the same manner as Peter described other prophets
"through the Spirit of Christ which was in them". (See 1 Peter 1:10-11) Peter elsewhere calls Noah a preacher of righteousness (2 Peter 2:5).
1 Peter 4:6 does not mean dead people have the gospel preached to them. Read carefully: "For this cause
was (
past tense) the gospel preached to them that
are (present tense) dead."
The gospel was preached to them while they were alive,
by the Spirit through the preaching of Noah, but after having rejected the message, were killed in the flood.
A question must be asked if your take on these passages is true...why was this preaching done? Why them? What was so special about them that Jesus visited them and no other generation? Does God play favourites?
The spirits who were preached to were living beings, just as living as were the eight 'souls' that were saved.
The prison house is the prison house of sin. Not purgatory or hell or any other place of after life. Jesus quoted Isaiah 61:1,2 as a fulfillment of His claim to Messiahship:
1 ¶ The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;
2 To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn;
Jesus said, after reading the above...21 And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.
Jesus was talking to sinners, not dead people.