Such it has been for me in regards to the activities of Jesus just after His death, whether in or out of His Body I don't know. Tonight I had to address the passage in I Peter 3 that talks about the Saviour visiting spirits in prison.

The identity of the "prisoners" is given by the apostle: persons who rejected the message of Noah during that saint's prolonged preparation of the ark. The nature of the message is given in chapter four: the good news! And the location of the prison we may possibly glean from Paul in Ephesians 4:9: the "lower parts" of the earth.

What are we to make of it all?

1. Those who die outside the grace of God are separated from their bodies and go to a holding place, a prison. Satan himself is confined to a spirit-prison for 1000 years. No problem there.

2. Jesus is Lord of living and dead. He seems to have given these ancient peoples a chance to hear the Good News about Himself. They never would have heard it any other way. Noah's message was "repent of your sin." So they were judged in the flesh, but through the preaching, made to live in the Spirit. Neverthyeless, no response is recorded and we don't know where this all leads.

3. All other doctrines about the future are still intact: It is appointed to man to die, and after this the judgment. Without the Son, a person will not see life, but only the wrath of God. Those whose names are not written in the Lamb's Book of Life are damned forever. But these rare insights into the interior of our own planet, the place of the dead, the intricate plan of God, cause us to desire to study more and more this record of His dealings with us.

Never do we wish to be herded into a particular mindset. Those who take verses like this to imply that Jesus suffered in hell are way off base. But those who try to cover up the activity by saying the Spirit of Christ was really given to Noah, and the "dead" only means "spiritually dead" etc. are equally misleading. No fair explaining Scriptures away just because we don't comprehend their depths!