Is it true that Jesus descended into hell and preached to its lost inhabitants? Someone asked me that the other day, having heard it preached by a televangelist that it was so. I answered that it’s a popular belief within Christianity that originated from a misreading of 1 Peter 3: 18-20…

“For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit, by whom He also went and preached to the spirits in prison, who were formerly disobedient, when the patience of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight souls were saved through the water.”    

From this passage, a popular erroneous narrative has evolved that Jesus didn’t really die. Instead, the Spirit took Him into hell where He preached the gospel to the devil’s prisoners in order to give them another chance.

The Bible doesn’t support that narrative. It says the penalty for sin is death. Jesus took on our sins and actually became sin itself. He really did die the second and ultimate death so that those who believed in Him wouldn’t have to. In this way, the Law was fulfilled.

Furthermore, the 1 Peter 3 passage is simply saying that the Spirit that raised Jesus is the same Spirit through whom Jesus preached to the spirits in prison.

(We get an understanding of what “spirits in prison” means from Isaiah 42: 6, 7 and Luke 4: 18.  Those passages indicate that “spirits in prison” are referring to living people on the earth who are spiritually imprisoned by sin.)

The 1 Peter 3 passage then goes on to tell us when and where Jesus preached to the spiritually imprisoned. It was during the time that Noah was building the ark on the earth. During that span of time, Jesus, through the Spirit, patiently preached to those who ridiculed and/or ignored the call of salvation.

The bottom line is that when Jesus died and before He was resurrected, the only place He went to was Sheol, as prophesied by David in Psalm 16: 9. Sheol in Hebrew means the grave as Hades in the Greek means the grave. Bible translators with preconceived ideas, though, have translated both words as the popularly conceived hell of eternal torture.*

Before concluding, I need to point out a related verse to 1 Peter 3: 18-20. It’s 1 Peter 4: 6. Some have taken it to also mean that Jesus preached to the tormented in a fiery hell.

“For the gospel has for this purpose been preached even to those who are dead, that though they are judged in the flesh as men, they may live in the spirit according to the will of God.”

In context, this is simply saying that the gospel was preached to the dead during their lifetimes when they were then able to follow God’s ways.

Finally, the teaching that Jesus went and preached a second chance to dead people in a burning hell is not only unbiblical, but dangerously so. The Bible says that this life is the only chance we get. Hebrews 9: 27 reads, “It is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment.”

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*Pls. read my article, Hell-Fire, for the true meaning of hell. Click here.