TEACHING OF THE GENERAL EPISTLES

I

THERE is an added attraction to the study of our subject in the General Epistles because they bring before us again, and from a different point of view, the mystery of the fallen angels dealt with earlier.

This is done in i Peter III. 19, which speaks of Christ preaching to "the spirits in prison." At that point the inspired writer is using the example of Christ to encourage and comfort Christian believers in their suffering for righteousness' sake, saying:

"For Christ also hath 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 unto the spirits in prison."

The words "spirits in prison" have sometimes been employed to teach the false doctrine of the "second chance" or a probation after death. In such cases the theory is advanced that Christ went into the place of the wicked dead and preached the gospel to them giving them another opportunity to believe and be saved.

If this were indeed the teaching of the passage, every true Christian preacher surely, would wish to proclaim it; but aside from the fact that it is taught in no other place in the Bible it certainly is not taught here.

For example, the Greek word for "preached" in this instance is not that which the New Testament commonly employs for the preaching of the Gospel, but a different word. It means to proclaim after the manner of a herald. Grimm, the philologist, quoted by E. W. Bullinger, says that the word is always used with a suggestion of formality and an authority which must be listened to and obeyed.

Moreover, if the subject of the proclamation is not clearly implied in the context of this word when it is used, then it must be distinctly stated if we are to know what it is. That is to say, if it is the proclamation of the Gospel that is intended, then the word "Gospel" must be used to insure that application, which is not the case here.

In the next place, the word "spirits" does not apply to men. It is never so applied in the Bible when it stands alone and without any qualifying words, as it does here. A possible exception is Hebrews XII. 23, but there it is expressly said that "the spirits of just men" are meant, "the spirits of just men made perfect." As Bullinger says, "man was made, and up to the time of his death he continues to be, a 'living soul'." It is so also after death (Revelation VI. 9; XX. 4) and until the resurrection, when the word "spirit" is used as a brief term for man's spiritual body ( 1 Cor. XV. 45).

But the word "spirits" by itself and without any qualifying description is used always of supernatural beings, higher than man and lower than God. When there is any doubt as to the kind of spirit referred to, some defining word is employed like "unclean spirits," "evil spirits," etc. The defining words in this case are "spirits in prison," very evidently therefore, evil spirits.

But do we inquire just what evil spirits are meant, the nature of their offence and the time of its perpetration? The information is furnished in the next verse, where we are told that they were those

"Which aforetime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water."

Very clearly this points back to the record in the sixth chapter of Genesis, and recalls what was considered previously as to the fallen angels and the "sons of God" marrying the "daughters of men."

There remains therefore only the inquiry as to what it was that Christ went thus and proclaimed to them in prison? The answer to which is found in the particular purpose of this epistle, which is to comfort Christian believers under persecution for righteousness' sake, and to encourage and strengthen them in their witness bearing for Christ.

In other words, Peter is here using the example of Christ in that connection. He suffered and died as to His flesh, but He was quickened as to His spirit, that is to say, He had a glorious resurrection in a spiritual body. And He had more than this, He had a glorious triumph also! God raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory (I. 21).

So complete was this triumph, and so far-reaching the proclamation of it, that it extended even to the spirits in prison. He "spoiled principalities and powers and made a show of them openly" ( Col. II. 15). "And He is now gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God, angels and principalities and powers being made subject unto Him" (III. 22).

II

The thought is carried forward in Peter's second epistle at chapter two.

False prophets are there being warned against "whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not and their damnation (or destruction) slumbereth not."

The General Epistles 123

"For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment;

"And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly;

"And turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that after should live ungodly;

"And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked.

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"The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished:

"But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government."

What angels are here referred to? Are they those who fell with Satan anterior to the creation of man, or those spoken of, as we before showed, in Genesis VI, just prior to the flood?

If the former, why is not Satan mentioned with them? As Kurtz remarks, "whenever else allusion is made to the tempter and those who were associated with him in his fall, mention is expressly made of Satan, and for the most part, of him only."

That it should be otherwise in this place is the more remarkable because it is Peter's aim to show that God punishes not only men who sin, like these false prophets, but beings who are the most eminent in rank. If therefore he had in mind a reference to the angels who fell at the first with Satan, would he not have named the latter, the chiefest and the leader of the apostates?

But to quote Fleming once more, a still stronger argument that the angels before the flood are meant, is found in the fact that they have been "cast down to hell (Tartarus) and delivered into chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment."

This is not the state of Satan and his angels since the fall, for they are still permitted to move through the world, and to tempt and overcome those men who are not arrayed in the armor of God (Job I. 7; Eph. V. 12; 1 Pet. V. 8). Moreover, as if to preclude all doubt upon the subject, it is declared in Rev. XX. that Satan shall hereafter be chained, evidently therefore, he is not chained now.

The argument might be pressed further; for if the angels who sinned before the flood are not meant, why the allusion to the flood and the salvation of Noah in the next verse, the same as in 1 Pet. III. 19?

Nor should it escape the reader that there is significance in the reference to Sodom and Gomorrah in verse 6, and "chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government," in verse 10. The correspondence between these illustrations or examples and the conduct of the angels before the flood is too striking to be overlooked.

III

The subject is continued in Jude verses 4-8, which closely resemble those just quoted from Peter, so closely indeed as to preclude "all idea of entire independence." Some commentators suppose that Jude wrote the earlier of the two, and that Peter copied from him, omitting or adding under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, as suited his purpose.

However this may be, it is evident that both writers refer to the same apostasy of angels, and that it is the one identified as taking place just before the flood.

To the arguments above stated in proof of this, might be added one founded on the use by New Testament writers of the term "angels," which word, when used by itself, is never employed to denote the spirits who fell at the beginning with Satan. These are spoken of as "demons," just as their head is spoken of as "the devil" or "Satan".

Kurtz, who uses this argument, admits that there are some places which seem to contradict it, but their critical examination proves otherwise. It is his conclusion that "as the apostles have employed the naked term, neither they themselves intended, nor would their first readers have been likely to perceive, an allusion to the fall of Satan and his angels."

A close exegesis of Jude confirms this opinion. His design was to guard believers against the corrupt principles and the licentious practices of certain men whom he describes as "turning the grace of God into lasciviousness," and, as one of the old divines expresses it, "his whole discourse is pointedly and especially directed against that particular sin."

He therefore reminds them of the earlier instances in which that sin had brought down divine judgment. In the case of Israel for example, the angels, inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah and those of the cities round about them. "In like manner," or "in like manner to these" had they given "themselves over to fornication going after strange flesh."

The phrase "in like manner," or "in like manner to these" does not refer to the ungodly men nor to Sodom and Gomorrah, as some have supposed, but to the angels, for which we have the strong authority of Dean Alford, who says the manner of the sin of these cities was similar, "because the angels committed fornication with another race than themselves, thus also going after strange flesh." He names several other Greek scholars and Bible exegetes as holding the same view.

IV

We conclude this chapter with a reference to I John IV. 1-3:

"Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.

"Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that conf esseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God:

"And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world."

It may be doubted whether the word "spirits" in verse i has the objective application we have heretofore given to it. That is, we are not sure that John is now speaking of evil spirits, or demons, with an independent existence from the experience or thought of the prophets, but rather of the mental state, or the nature of the prophets themselves. Or to express it in another way, it is not a "familiar spirit" who controls the "medium" that is here in mind, but the medium's own spirit.

And yet there is a close relation between the two, and what the inspired apostle has to teach us about the spirits of the "false prophets" is to the point.

In Neander's expository lectures on this book, he observes that the point of transition at chapter four lies in what John had just said about the influence of the Holy Spirit in the lives of Christian believers, an influence which is the pledge of continued fellowship with Christ. In John's day much was falsely claimed to be from the Holy Spirit, just as is the case today in the teaching of Spiritism, and hence the apostle directs attention to the difference between His operations and the deceptive imitation of them.

Every spirit was not to be believed, but the spirits were to be tried as to whether they were of God. And the touchstone of the matter, the criterion by which they were to be tried was the Person and work of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Did these false spirits confess Him, i.e., did they openly acknowledge and proclaim Him? Did they confess Him as Jesus, the Christ? Not a Christ, not one out of many, but the promised one and the only one? Did they confess Him as having come in the flesh? Was He to them "the Eternal Logos in His humanization? The Divine Life-fountain letting itself down into human nature and revealing itself in visible human form -- the Divine and the human in harmonious union?"

Note particularly the words, "is come" in verse 20. It is the Greek perfect, which implies not a mere past historical fact, as would be the case if another tense were used, but a present continuance of the fact and its blessed effects.

"Is come in the flesh," or "clothed with flesh." Christ's was not a mere seeming humanity, as some have erroneously taught, but a real humanity. And it is necessary to believe and confess this, in order to express the truth of the atonement for sin. Only by assuming our flesh could Christ die "the just for the unjust," to bring us to God. "To deny the reality of His flesh is to deny His love, and so cast away the root which produces all true love on the believer's part" (see verses 9-11 of this same chapter).

Now every spirit that does not so confess Jesus Christ is not of God, or as some authorities render verse 3, every spirit that "annulleth" Jesus Christ is not of God. And that is just what Spiritism does. It "annulleth" Jesus Christ, the Jesus Christ of the Bible is Whom we mean. Spiritism may speak of Jesus and of Christ, but it is not "Him of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write" (John I. 45).

In proof of this, we referred in our first chapter to Basil King's book, and now we would add something from Sir A. Conan Doyle's, "The New Revelation":

"Let us look at the light we get from the spirit guides on this question of Christianity," he says. "Opinion is not absolutely uniform yonder any more than it is here, but reading a number of messages upon this subject, they amount to this:

"That there are many higher spirits with our departed. They vary in degree. Call them 'angels', and you are in touch with the old religious thought.

"High above all these is the greatest spirit of whom they have cognizance -- not God, since God is so infinite that He is not within their ken -- but one who is nearer God and to that extent represents God. This is the Christ-spirit.

"His special care is the earth. He came down upon it at a time of great earthly depravity in order to give people, the lesson of an ideal life. Then he returned to his own high station, having left an example which is still occasionally followed.

"That is the story of Christ as the spirits have described it. There is nothing here of Atonement or Redemption. But there is a perfectly feasible and reasonable scheme, which I for one could readily believe." (Pp. 74, 75).

Observe that according to this teaching Christ is not God, but only represents Him as being nearer to Him than other spirits -- the very error with which Paul deals in his epistle to the Colossians.

Observe also that Christ came down to the earth not as a sacrifice for sin, in Spiritism there is "nothing of atonement or redemption," but simply as an example "to give people the lesson of an ideal life."

"People can see no justice in a vicarious sacrifice, nor in a God Who could be placated by such means," says Sir Arthur. "Never was there any evidence for a fall. But if there were no fall, then what became of the atonement, of redemption from original sin, and of a large part of the Christian mystical philosophy?

"It is no uncommon thing to die for an idea," he goes on to say. "Men die continually for their convictions. Therefore the death of Christ, beautiful as it is in the Gospel narrative, has assumed an undue importance."

As to the life of Christ, Sir Arthur tells us it was lived simply in order to afford men an ideal. "Christ," he says, was "full of easy tolerance for others." He occasionally lost His temper indeed, but He was ever ready to sweep aside texts and forms and "get at the spirit of religion" (p. 72). What blasphemy!

To the same purport, the transfiguration of Christ, according to this same apostle of Spiritism, was a "story of the materialization of the two prophets upon the mountain"; and the three tabernacles suggested by Peter were three "cabinets," in other words, "the ideal way of condensing power and producing materializations" I

Such is the attitude of the New Revelation towards Christ, and the apostle John says that "this is the spirit of Anti-Christ." The Anti-Christ when he comes will be a person in human flesh, a despot, political, ecclesiastical or both, who will arise in Christendom, and whom men will worship instead of God. But his spirit, the teaching that prepares the way for his full development, is already in the world, and Spiritism is an integral part of it.

It is comforting indeed to hear John say further, addressing true believers in the Lord:

"Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.

"They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them.

"We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error."

They that are of God are those who have confessed Jesus Christ in the manner John has indicated; and they have overcome the false prophets, or the lying spirits, in that they have not been brought into spiritual bondage by them. These spirits are of the world, in harmony with its feelings and opinions, therefore "the world heareth them," runs after them, and fills the air with its din.