Q.  What are the spirits in prison mentioned in 1Peter 3:19? Aren’t they condemned souls suffering in hell?

A.  That is the common interpretation, but a closer look reveals otherwise. If the widely-held understanding is correct, what would be the point of Yahshua’s going to hellfire to preach to them?  Are they not already lost? In Yahshua’s parable of Luke 16:26, He has Abraham saying that in “hell” there is a “great gulf fixed, so that they which would pass from here to you cannot.” Being that they would be forever stuck in hell, to preach to them would only be torturing them further.
            The Bible tells us that the dead are just that:
            “For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.” (Ecc. 9:5).
            “For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?” (Psalm 6:5).
            “His breath goes forth, he returns to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.” (Psalm 146:4).
            Hell – sheol in Hebrew and its equivalent word hades in Greek – simply means the grave.  The pagan Greeks gave it the meaning of an unseen world, not Yahweh.
            The passage does not say that Yahshua Himself preached to the spirits in prison, but “by which,” meaning by the Spirit. It was the Holy Spirit, the same that Yahshua had, that was in Noah and by the Holy Spirit, the same that Yahshua had, that was in Noah and by the Holy Spirit Noah preached to the “spirits in prison” in the days that the ark was being prepared (verse 20).  Noah is called a preacher of righteousness in 2Peter 2:5.  “Spirits in prison” simply means people in bondage to sin and death (see Isa. 42:6-7; 61:1).
            If the dead never die, then Yahshua never died and we have no sacrifice for our sins. Sin requires a sacrifice that dies, not one that lives on in another form. The wages of sin is death, Romans 6:23.  If Yahshua didn’t pay that debt with literal death, then you and I must pay for our sins with our own deaths and taht would mean we have no hope for everlasting life.
            The notion that the dead live on in a tortured state is right out of Greek paganism and from the writings of Plato and thirteenth century poet Dante Alighieri.

 
                   
         
     
                   
               
                         
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