Christ, the sinless one, suffered for those whose sins condemned them to an eternity in the fires of hell (1 Peter 3:18). Jesus, in dying for us, serves as an example of one who suffered for doing what was right. He was a righteous person suffering for those who are not righteous. He suffered “once for all” time, as the word “once” means. His only purpose in that death was to bring man back to God.
The “spirits in prison” would be the disembodied spirits of the disobedient God waited on in the days of Noah. Their prison would be the Hadean realm where they awaited the day of judgment (2 Peter 2:4-5; Jude 6). Just as Christ is said to have preached to the Gentiles through the apostles (Ephesians 2:17), he preached to the people before the flood through Noah (2 Peter 2:5). They were not in prison when preached to, but when Peter wrote. All will be judged based on their deeds, there is no second chance (1 Peter 3:19; 2 Corinthians 5:10).
Those spirits were disobedient during the period when God waited for the ark to be prepared. Noah was a preacher of righteousness, so God waited for them to repent. Multitudes drowned in the flood while eight souls were saved in the ark by the very water that destroyed the disobedient. Water was the instrument God used to exercise his saving power (1 Peter 3:20).
Noah and his family were taken from a world full of wickedness to a newly cleansed world through water, saved from the destruction brought on by man’s sin. Baptism in water is a figure, or “antitype,” of that. An “antitype” is “a thing resembling another, its counterpart; something in the Messianic times which answers to the type…prefiguring it in the Old Testament” (Thayer). How appropriate then that baptism should take one from his own sinful state to a new life (1 Peter 3:21; Romans 6:3-4), saving him from the destruction his own sin has earned (Romans 6:23).
Baptism is not a bath to take away filth from the body. It is “an appeal to God for a good conscience” (ESV). Thus baptism is our calling out to God with an intense desire for a good conscience. This is accomplished “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” which would stand for all involved in his sacrificial death, burial and resurrection. Man dies to sin in baptism, is buried and raised to walk in a new life (Colossians 2:12).
Gary C. Hampton