The character of God according to YEC

Faith & Science Conversation
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To us, “spirits” may seem to be a strange way to refer to dead people. But Hebrews 12:23 does much the same thing, and it’s also the implication of James 2:26. Further, when Jude speaks of demonic beings in chains, they are called angels, not spirits. So it’s doubtful 1 Peter is using the same sort of Enoch-styled imagery found there.

But the demonic reading has been quite popular for a few centuries since the traditional reading has fallen out of favour. I think the best argument against it is that it requires treating the passages in isolation rather than reading them as part of a flow of thought. The demons view only makes sense of chapter 3, not chapter 4, and doesn’t explain why Peter would go on to say what he does in chapter 4 if his previous paragraph was just about demons.

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Some of us strive for coherence within a framework of basic biblical integrity. Just because you may have dismissed yourself from that particular constraint doesn’t mean the rest of us have any intention of following to wherever it is you’ve then gone. In order to really ‘enter back into the conversation’ in any meaningful way may mean you need to come back in to where the others are - even if it is for you just to ‘play along’.

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I beg your pardon? My framework of basic biblical integrity is no less than yours at least. Hence my response, which is entirely due to treating the text with the intellectual respect that it deserves.

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I’m sure there are many who would say I deserve that.

Very good! May it be reflected going forward!

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Could I have been more pompous Mervin?

1 Peter 3 ILG 18-20
18 because indeed Christ once for sins suffered
[the] righteous for [the] unrighteous
that us he might bring to God
having been put to death indeed in flesh
having been made alive however in [the] Spirit
19 in which also to the in prison spirits having gone he preached
20 having disobeyed sometime
when was waiting the of God patience
in [the] days of Noah
[while was] being prepared [the] ark

The NIV is a reasonable paraphrase.
The indentation is correlated with time.

1 TIME

… Christ … was … made alive by the Spirit,
through whom also he went and preached
to the spirits in prison
– who disobeyed long ago
– when God waited patiently in the days of Noah
– while the ark was being built.

This is the interpretation implicitly used to say that while He ceased to exist, i.e. was dead during Tenebrae 1990 years ago, Jesus preached to those killed by the Flood and their ancestors of the 1656 years, 2378 years before His death. Despite the fact that it doesn’t say that. It’s about Jesus’ resurrection, not zombiehood. Nobody had drowned yet (apart from by accident, murder, manslaughter, suicide in the previous 1656 years). The ark was being built, prepared. That would have been 10-100 million people. Why didn’t He preach to the billions who died in the intervening 2378 years? Weren’t they spirits in prison too? Or are all the billions of dead from 2348 BCE to 30 AD not that bad? It is utterly incoherent.

2 TIMES

… Christ … was … made alive by the Spirit,
------ through whom also he went and preached
------ to the spirits in prison
------ who disobeyed long ago
------ when God waited patiently in the days of Noah
------ while the ark was being built.

In this scenario Jesus preaching to the demons in Tartarus (2 Peter 2:4 - a bit of the framework of basic biblical integrity for you Mervin), sorry Flood victims, happened 2378 years before His death.

Or He went back in time…

3 TIMES

… Christ … was … made alive by the Spirit,
------ through whom also he went and preached
------ to the spirits in prison
------------ who disobeyed long ago
------ when God waited patiently in the days of Noah
------ while the ark was being built.

Only this interpretation makes any sense.

Jesus was resurrected by the Spirit just as He had gone to preach to the demons in Tartarus (where they had been imprisoned for ages already) in the 55-75 years it took to build the Ark before the Flood, 2378 + 55-75 = 2433-2453 call it 2443 years before His resurrection.

Not that the story makes any remotely accessible external sense, but hey, the past is another country.

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I would also include honesty, integrity, and choosing love and freedom over power and control.

I would also say that honesty, integrity and choosing love and freedom over power and control is likewise consistent with the history recorded in the Bible including the flood survived by Noah. What these are not consistent with is the use of extreme literalism (which Jesus condemns in Matthew 13) in order to force parts of the story in Genesis to contradict both the demonstrable evidence of science and other parts of the story in Genesis.

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How do you reconcile God’s abuse of power and control in murdering millions, with love and light and honesty and integrity and freedom? And what demonstrable i.e. scientific evidence is there of other parts of the story in Genesis?

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Hi Everyone (I haven’t figured out how to post without using the reply button),

I am not going to get involved in the debate about the passage in 1 Peter (far to difficult, but it does seem to suggest a way out for the people who were threatened with the flood).
Going back to Genesis 6: we read that:

Noah, however, found favour (or grace) with the LORD.

This is a surprise because we were already told that every inclination of the human mind was nothing but evil all the time. One must assume that Noah was the same. Yet God gave him grace and favour and then it seems that he

walked with God

Then God tells him what is going to happen and how to escape the flood by building an ark.
We are told (in 2 Peter 2 v 5) that Noah was a preacher of righteousness. It would seem reasonable to think that in his preaching to the people he would have told them why he was building a huge boat on land. He would have warned them, and told them that the only way to escape was to join him. Anyone doing that would have been saved. So yes God said he would punish their sin but he also provided a way of escape for all who would believe and follow his advice. And note that 1 Peter 3 v 20, tells us that God was patient. What was he waiting for? May I suggest that he was waiting for people to turn from their evil ways.

This is a picture of what is happening today. Judgement is coming (the earth and heavens will be destroyed by fire) but there is also a way of escape. If we turn from our sin and trust Jesus to save us, we too will escape the coming judgement. We are also told that God is waiting patiently today, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance (2 Peter 3 v 9 )

So the flood is a picture of the gospel and Jesus is the anti-type of the ark. So that is why I maintain that the flood shows God to be a God of love…etc.
Another event recorded in the old testament illustrates the fact that in judgement God always remembers mercy. Jonah was told to preach to the Ninivites, that in 40 days they would all be destroyed. They repented and God did not destroy them.
God is gracious and always offers a way of escape. Back then in Noah’s day and even today.
So far from seeing a nasty vindictive God, we find that the flood shows us God’s amazing grace.

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If you don’t want to reply to a specific post by using the grey ‘reply’ buttons, then you can use the blue ‘reply’ button at the very bottom below the last post. Either way - you do have to use a ‘reply’ button, but the blue one at the bottom means your reply is just a general addition to the whole thread (perhaps a reply to the Opening Post as it were).

And then if you do wish to respond to a specific snippet from any prior post, just highlight the text of interest and click the grey ‘quote’ button that pops up beside it. I’ll do that to a bit of yours right here:

Amen to that!

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Interesting Peter uses the word “Tartarus” (from Greek mythology) and not the usual “Gehenna”.

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The same way I reconcile a surgeon murdering billions of cells, seeing no conflict there with the honesty, integrity and values of the surgeon.

None. Neither is there demonstrable scientific evidence for the vast majority of events in my life. But my hold on reality is no so weak that I need such evidence in order to believe the events in my life actually happened. Such evidence is not required for something to be true. It is only required for a reasonable expectation that others should agree with you – and I have come to expect nothing whatsoever from you. I don’t need your agreement or the agreement of anybody else in order to believe things – my reasons are sufficient for me.

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That’s all we are to God. Riiiight. That makes him worse than useless: pathologically righteous. As for your subjective claim that there is no demonstrable scientific evidence for a tiny minority of events in your life, we all have those. Reason doesn’t come in to it. We are superstitious monkeys.

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I couldn’t follow your different ways of rearranging the verse to shift the sequence. If you agree that the NIV is a reasonable paraphrase, the time frames are clear. When did Jesus speak to the spirits in prison? “After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits.” This happened after Jesus’ resurrection. When did those spirits disobey? They are “those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.” They disobeyed before the flood, but that’s not when Jesus came to visit them. At least, that’s what the NIV translators think it says, and it’s also what is reflected in most other translations.

I’m suggesting it means that when Jesus was raised to life after his death, he first went to the abode of the dead (Hades) and proclaimed his victory over death there before rising to earth. So the dead were the first to see and hear from the resurrected Jesus!

The Bible often states things using an extreme example, using the logic of “if the greater, so also the lesser.” The generation of the flood became a biblical cliché for wickedness. So if Jesus appeared even to them, then so also all the other dead. (And when Peter continues this theme in the next paragraph, he generalizes it by speaking of how “the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead,” not just those before the flood.)

Yes, in 2 Peter that’s the word used. But it isn’t used in 1 Peter to describe where the spirits are that Jesus preached to. It’s just described as a prison, which fits well with Hades as the general abode of the dead. Jesus declares, “I have the keys of Death and Hades,” meaning those in that prison can still be reached by him.

I realize the biggest objection to this reading is that it all seems like Greek mythology, and it might make us uncomfortable to see the language of an underworld (Hades) in our Bible. I think we need to keep the baby even if we toss the backwater worldview. Just like when Paul speaks of how “every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (Philippians 2:10), we can accept the basic idea of Jesus reaching the dead even if we don’t take the imagery literally that locates the dead in an underworld.

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forgive me if i misunderstand, but the “problem” you site -

is simply inherent to the biblical text… YEC beliefs about the raw numbers don’t change the simple fact that, as the story is recorded in Genesis, God did execute judgment, and was selective in his mercy. This isn’t so much a YEC interpretation being foisted into or onto that text… these themes simply are right in the text itself. “I will blog out mankind that i have made from the face of the earth… but Noah found favor in the eyes of the lord.”

it sounds like your main quarrel is really with the author of Genesis, not so much with the YEC “interpretation” of it, no?

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