Beside the places before cited, one remains to be noticed. It is 1 Peter
iii, 17-22. There are some various readings in the MSS., although none
that materially affect the interpretation. Adopting what seem the best,
the passage is as follows:—“It is better, if the will of God be so, that
ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing. For Christ, also, once
suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to
God, being put to death as to the flesh, but quickened as to the Spirit.
By which also he went and preached to the spirits in prison, formerly
disobedient, when the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah,
while the ark was preparing, in which few, that is, eight, souls were
saved by water. You also now antitype baptism saves (not the putting
away of the filth of the flesh, but [conformity to] the demand of a good
conscience toward God); by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the
dead; who is at the right hand of God, having gone into heaven, angels
and authorities and powers being subjected to him.”
Both Peter and those to whom his epistles were addressed, were familiar
with Paul’s writings. (2 Peter iii, 15, 16.) In the passage here cited,
the preacher of the day of Pentecost speaks of that Spirit baptism the
beginning of which he had then witnessed, in a style which constantly
reminds us of the language and manner of Paul, on the same subject. If
Peter speaks of Christ as having been “quickened by the Spirit,” or
rather “quickened as to the spirit,” Paul tells us that thus he became,
“a quickening spirit.”—1 Cor. xv, 45. If Peter states that “antitype
baptism now saves us,” the baptism, that is, of the Spirit, of which
water baptism is the type,—Paul says that “He saves us by the washing of
regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost, which he shed on us
abundantly through Jesus Christ.”—Tit. iii, 5. Peter represents this
baptism as saving us “by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the
dead;” and Paul, to the same effect, testifies that “even when we were
dead in sins God hath quickened us together with him and hath raised us
up together” (Eph. ii, 1, 4-6); and that we are “buried with him in the
baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him, through the faith of the
operation of God who hath raised him from the dead.”—Col. ii, 12. To the
account which, on the day of Pentecost, Peter gave of the exaltation of
the Lord Jesus to God’s right hand, he here adds,—“angels and
authorities and powers being subject to him,”—language in which we
recognize the style of Paul’s repeated descants on the same theme. (Eph.
i, 20, 21; Col. i, 16; ii, 10.) As Peter’s language is so thoroughly
imbued with the style of thought and expression of Paul, we need not
hesitate to interpret the passage by the doctrine of the great apostle
of the Gentiles.
The design of Peter is, to encourage the people of God in the endurance
of injustice and persecution for righteousness sake. His first argument
is the example of Christ, who suffered patiently the just for the
unjust, “being put to death as to the flesh,” that is, “as to his
natural life,” “but quickened as to the Spirit,” inasmuch as his death
was to him the exhausting of the curse under which he died, and was,
therefore, the release of the Spirit of life which was in him, from all
restraint upon his quickening energies, by which, therefore, he rose
from the dead. Thus, the very sufferings of his death were his door of
entrance into life. Unexpressed, but latent in the apostles’ argument is
the fact which, on the same subject, he states, in his second epistle,
that “the longsuffering of the Lord is salvation” (2 Peter iii, 15),
that having so pitied the ungodly as to die for them, praying for his
enemies on the very cross, he now spares the persecutors of his people,
if possibly they may repent (2 Peter iii, 9), and that, in the end, “the
Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations” (or
persecutions), “and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be
punished.”—Ib. ii, 9. This, he illustrates by the case of Noah and the
old world. The question as to “the spirits in prison” (Vs. 19), does not
belong to the present inquiry. The point of interest is the eight souls
“saved by water.”—Vs. 20. To understand this, it is necessary to keep it
distinctly in mind that the point to which the apostle’s argument is
directed is,—the righteous suffering persecution, and the persecutors
spared. He assumes what can not but have been the fact, that during the
one hundred and twenty years of the building of the ark, Noah, “a
preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter ii, 5), was exposed to bitter
persecution. If we consider that “the earth was filled with violence”
(Gen. vi, 11-13), that Noah’s preaching could not but be exceedingly
offensive to those whose wickedness he reproved, and that his holy life,
as “he walked with God,” and his building of the ark, by which he
“condemned the world” (Heb. xi, 7), combined to intensify the hostility,
it must be evident that nothing but the almighty protection under which
he was sheltered could have saved him and all his from speedy
destruction. It also seems to be implied by the language here, and by
the connection in which Peter elsewhere introduces the same matter (2
Peter ii, 5-9), that when the flood came, the enmity and hatred had
reached a crisis; so that the call to enter the ark was like the
bringing of Lot out of Sodom, a rescue from present destruction by the
wicked. Thus, the very waters which purged the world by sweeping away
the ungodly, were the salvation of the eight persons, who shut up in the
ark, were upborne upon their bosom. They were “saved by water,” while,
as it rose, the world ready to perish would, in mad and impotent
despair, have wreaked a blind vengeance upon the prophet and his family,
for the terrible judgment of God; like Ahab with Elijah, in the days of
the famine. But “the Lord shut him in” (Gen. vii, 16), and the waters
bore them up, safe amid their perishing enemies.
Peter next points out that analogous to this is the salvation of
Christ’s people,—that as the waters of the deluge were the destruction
of the old world, but life to the new, to Noah, and his house,—so the
baptism of the Spirit is death to the old man, but life to the new,
through union with the Lord Jesus and participation in his life. “You
also, now, antitype baptism saves, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ
from the dead. Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the
flesh, arm yourselves with the same mind; for he that hath suffered in
the flesh” (that is, as stated immediately after, he that hath become
“partaker of Christ’s sufferings”), “hath ceased from sin.”—Ch. iv, 1,
13. Here we recognize perfect identity of thought and argument with what
has already appeared in Paul’s writings. “So many of us as were baptized
into Jesus Christ, were baptized into his death. Therefore, we are
buried with him by the baptism into his death, that like as Christ was
raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also
should walk in newness of life.”—Rom. vi, 3, 4.
The conclusion of Peter’s argument is found, a little farther
on,—“Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is
to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you. But rejoice,
inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings, that when his glory
shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.”—1 Peter iv,
12, 13. So Paul says, “If so be that we suffer with him, that we may be
also glorified together.”—Rom. viii, 17. It is evident that the two
great apostles are perfectly united in their testimony concerning this
baptism and its relations to the plan of salvation.
In the foregoing exegesis, I have regarded both forms of the pronoun in
the beginning of the twenty-first verse, as alike spurious; at the same
time that the language of that verse is understood as containing a
reflex allusion to Noah and his family “saved by water.” The phrase
“antitype baptism” does not, it is true, necessitate the previous
mention of a type baptism. But it certainly does invite us to look for,
and expect such mention, an expectation confirmed by the presence of the
particles, “_also, now_.” “You, _also, now_, antitype baptism saves.”
Here seems to to be an allusion to something in the past, corresponding
to the antitype baptism of the present. And when we find the immediately
preceding mention of the salvation by water of Noah and his family, we
can not be mistaken in recognizing this as the type to which, in the
phrase “antitype baptism,” Peter refers. The salvation, therefore, of
Noah by the waters of the deluge was a baptism. Dr. Dale asserts the ark
and not the water, to have been the instrument of the salvation, and
quotes examples to justify the translation of _dia hudatos_, by
“_through_ the water,” as a medium and not an instrument. But (1.) it
is, of course, true that this is one meaning of _dia_. (2.) One of his
examples, “faith tried by fire” (1 Peter i, 7), shows that it may also
express instrumental relations. (3.) More pertinent would have been a
citation of the parallel clause which immediately follows the phrase in
question. As Noah is stated to have been saved “by water” (_dia
hudatos_), in the typical baptism, so “antitype baptism saves us _by the
resurrection_ (_dia anastaseōs_), of Jesus Christ.” The parallel, here,
between type and antitype, requires that in both clauses, the
preposition should be understood in the same sense; and, as in the
antitype, _dia_ certainly points out the resurrection of Christ, as
being the instrument or means of our salvation, so in the type, must we
understand it to designate the waters of the flood as the means of
Noah’s deliverance.