Faithful to the End
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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.
However, suffering for Christ is a demonstration that we are done living life for ourselves and doing what we want when we want.
When we willingly identify ourselves with Jesus when it is costly, we show that we are done with our old, selfish way of living.
What have we replaced it with? Look at verse 2...
Instead of living for ourselves, we have set a plan in motion that we will live out the rest of our lives to follow God’s will.
That means we are committed to doing what God wants, even when that isn’t what we want or what the world around us tells us we should do.
Here’s a great place to pause and take inventory:
Have I actually trusted Jesus?
Am I living life for what I want, or am I making sure that I am doing what he wants? Am I trying to bring my plans, my patterns, and my dreams into alignment with what he says in the Bible I should be and do, or am I just trying to wing it?
How ready am I to suffer for Jesus? Am I braced, armed, and ready to respond when it happens? Do I expect to be treated better than Jesus was treated?
This is a different way of living, which is what he shows in the next part of the passage.
Keep Noah and what was going on in the world in mind while you read the next few verses with me (verses 3-6).
In Peter’s day, just like ours and just like Noah’s, sin was running rampant.
Our world is still full of these same sins listed.
Before you move on, don’t dismiss this list too quickly.
At first glance, you might think you are good and don’t struggle with any of these sins. I mean, several of them are pretty obvious, and you have them under control.
Look a little more closely, though—notice that phrase, “evil desires?” The word “desire” is the same word used back in 2:11, where we mentioned that distorted desires can be good things that we make into god things that make them bad things.
Not only that, but some of these sins are sexual in nature.
It is tempting to think that surely no one in this church struggles with that, and perhaps they aren’t participating in public expressions of these things, but current statistics indicate that 64% of Christian men and 15% of Christian women view pornography at least once a month.[1]
We may not physically go to these kinds of things anymore, but we are watching them and engaging with them in ways that do not honor Christ.
Listen: there has already been enough time spent in doing that. Stop it—you are finished with sin! If you are struggling with pornography use, find another Christian brother or sister you can trust and work through it together. You can reach out to me, to Randy Marshall who leads our men’s ministry, to our other deacons, to a Sunday School teacher—find someone.
Our men will be starting some small groups soon, and that would be a great place for you to start getting connected with others who can help you.
People who don’t follow Jesus aren’t going to understand why you won’t join them.
Isn’t the word choice interesting here? “join them in the flood of wild living”?
Other translations render this as “excess,” but it literally is the word used in Classical Greek for tides that fill the hollows.
The flood of wild living in Noah’s day led to the physical flood of God’s judgment.
Now, look at verse 5—those who engage in this flood of wild living and are without Christ will stand before God and give an account.
That’s why Noah preached—to show people that God could save them from judgment, yet they chose to reject.
However, just like in Noah’s day, God preaches righteousness to us. Unlike Noah, though, we have the full picture: Jesus suffered for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, so he might bring us to God.
Surrender to the one who can carry you safely back to God, the one who sits exalted in heaven at the right hand of God with everything else subject to him.
In doing so, you find life for your spirit as you surrender to live according to his standards with the time you have left.
You might be ridiculed by the world, judged by human standards and thought of us as crazy, bigoted, backward, or the like, but you will live in the spirit.
Now, bring it full circle: Jesus was judged by human standards while he was in the flesh. They said he was a blasphemer, and they accused him of trying to cause unrest. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit.
He may have been put to death physically, judged by human standards, but he was doing exactly what God the Father called him to do and completely fulfilled the standard of God.
Because of that, he has been raised by the Spirit to new life, he is exalted over creation, and he can save you.
Again, surrender to him.
What are you supposed to do if you already have surrendered?
Arm yourself for suffering - settle in your mind that suffering is going to happen, and you may be a unique candidate for suffering because you honor Jesus.
Not only that, but don’t live for your fleshly desires anymore. Don’t do what everyone else does; don’t try to just stay happy and healthy and wealthy and wise. Instead, spent whatever time you have left in this life trying to do God’s will, suffering with him, talking about him, obeying his word, honoring him as Lord.
People may hate you, they may think you are weird or dangerous or whatever; don’t let it bother you, because you don’t have to live up to their standards.
You serve the one who let himself be judged, beaten, and crucified so you could be right with God.
Endnote:
[1] https://www.covenanteyes.com/pornstats/ Accessed 3 August 2022.