QUESTION AND ANSWER 12/2/07 PM 1. When Jesus was dead for 3 days was He in Hell? 1 Peter 3:18-20a For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit; 19 in which also He went and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison, 20 who once were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark People have interpreted this passage several ways. The three most common are: 1. Christ descended into Hades between His death and resurrection to offer certain people a second chance at salvation. Proclamation- kerusso not euagglizo- to heard, not to preach the gospel Notice that this only refers to those who were alive in the days of Noah. But we have no other scriptural support for this. 2. Christ simply announced of His victory over sin to those in Hades, without offering them a second chance. Some take this proclamation to be to people that died in the flood. Others take it to refer to fallen angels from the time of Noah who are now imprisoned. Cf 2 Peter 2:4-5 3. Christ’s pre-incarnate spirit preached through Noah to these people before the flood. Now they are spirits in prison awaiting the final judgment. We see this idea expressed in another situation in Nehemiah 9:30 Nehemiah 9:30 "However, You bore with them for many years, And admonished them by Your Spirit through Your prophets, Yet they would not give ear. Therefore You gave them into the hand of the peoples of the lands. 2. There are people who say that by laying out the Word of God in chapters and verses we Americans have lost the true meaning as written in Hebrew. What say you? a. The laying out of the Bible in divisions is neither recent nor American. The Jews began to divide the Old Testament into sections before the Babylonian Captivity in 586 BC. The five books of Moses were divided into 154 sections. By 536 BC the OT law was divided into 54 sections with 669 subdivisions. Verse divisions within these sections appear around 200 AD. By the time of the Counsel of Nicaea in 325 AD the New Testament had been divided into paragraphs. The present chapter divisions in our Bibles were devised in 1205 by a professor in Paris named Stephen Langston and was put into the Latin Vulgate. He later became the Archbishop of Canterbury They were put into the Latin Vulgate In 1330 the Jews adopted these chapter divisions for the Hebrew Old Testament Rabbi Issac Nathan added verse divisions around 1440. The verse divisions that we find in our Bibles were devised by a Parisian book printer named Robert Stephanus. In the Old Testament, he assigned numbers to the verse divisions already found in the Hebrew Bible. 2 He affixed his own verse divisions to the New Testament and numbered them within Langston’s chapter divisions. In 1557 William Whittingham published the first English translation of the New Testament to include both chapter and verse divisions. In 1560 The Geneva Bible became the first complete English Bible to have chapter and verse. b. The current confusion Just this year (2007) the International Bible Society released a version of the TNIV entitled The Books of the Bible. It is the complete Bible with: Chapter and verse divisions removed Books in a different order, with the purpose of making the books more understandable in historical context Some books that are divided in modern Bibles are being combined. (1&2 Samuel and 1&2 Kings are combined into a single book) Some Psalms have been recombined. (For example, it is thought that Psalm 42 & 43 were originally one poem.) c. The advantages of having our Bibles divided into chapters and verses It aids in remembering where a given passage of scripture is found. It aids in finding the same lines for discussion or Bible study. d. The dangers of these divisions The verse divisions of Stephanus frequently do a disservice to the sense of the text. 3 The verses sometimes coincide with a single sentence Sometimes they include several sentences Sometimes a single sentence is divided into two verses. It is easy to view verses as independent isolated units. Interpretation of isolated verses can lead to misunderstandings that would be cleared up if they were studied in context. We must be careful look at the entire context and ignore the chapter and verse distinctions when go about interpreting a passage. 3. You read so many books covering so many subjects in order to keep us correctly informed and educated. How do you keep the fallacies from creeping into your subconscious? I read slowly marking the books with a 4 color pen and trying to analyze what is being said What are the presuppositions that underlie that concept? If you buy the presuppositions, then what they say will usually make sense. How does it line up with what the Bible says on that topic? In psychology for instance, how does it line up with what the Bible says about the nature of man, the sources of our problems, what is necessary to have 4. Where in the Bible does it say that “His word will not return void”? KJV Isaiah 55:11 So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. NAS Isaiah 55:11 So shall My word be which goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me empty, Without 4 accomplishing what I desire, And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it. 5.