After this fellowship, some may ask how God could die. Actually, God only passed through death. Scientifically speaking, none of us will die. What dies is only our body. Our spirit and our soul never die. When I die, it does not mean that my entire being dies. It means that only one of the three parts of my being dies. After our body dies, our spirit and our soul go to Paradise to await the resurrection of our body. Even when the unbelievers die, their body dies, and their spirit and their soul go to Hades. Luke 16 shows that with the poor man Lazarus and the rich man their body died, but their spirit and their soul went to Hades (vv. 22-26). In Hades there are two sections—a pleasant section called Paradise and a section of torment. This section of torment is like a jail where criminals are retained temporarily.
When Christ died on the cross, the part of Him that died was His human body. The divine essence was not in His body but in His spirit. When He was crucified on the cross, His entire being suffered death, but only His body died, not His spirit. His spirit only suffered death and passed through death. Strictly speaking, His spirit never died. First Peter 3:18 says, “Because Christ also has once died concerning sins, the righteous on behalf of the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in flesh, but made alive in spirit.” He was put to death in His flesh, in His body, but He was being made alive in His spirit.
When Christ was dying on the cross, He was being put to death not in His entire being, but only in His flesh. In His spirit He was made alive! Man put Him to death in His flesh, but when the Roman soldiers were putting Jesus to death in His flesh, the Triune God was making Jesus alive in His spirit!
First Peter 3:19-20 tells us that immediately after the death of His body, Christ was strong and active in His spirit and went to proclaim His victory to those disobedient ones at Noah’s time. “In spirit” (v. 18) does not refer to the Holy Spirit, but to the spirit which is Christ’s spiritual nature (Mark 2:8; Luke 23:46). Most versions capitalize the word “spirit” in verse 18. According to these versions, when Christ died He was put to death in the flesh, but He was made alive by the Holy Spirit. If we interpret the spirit in verse 18 as the Holy Spirit, this presents a problem because the following verses tell us that after He died, Christ in the spirit went to proclaim something to the spirits in prison, to those once disobedient at Noah’s time. Throughout the centuries, great teachers of different schools have had varying interpretations of these verses. The most acceptable interpretation of these verses according to the Scriptures is as follows:
The spirits here do not refer to the disembodied spirits of dead human beings held in Hades, but to the angels (angels are spirits—Heb. 1:14) who fell through disobedience at Noah’s time (v. 20 and Life-study of Genesis Message 27, pp. 363-364) and are imprisoned in pits of gloom for the judgment of the great day (2 Pet. 2:4-5; Jude 6). After His death in the flesh, Christ in His living spirit went (probably to the abyss—Rom. 10:7) to these rebellious angels to proclaim, perhaps, God’s victory through His incarnation in Christ and Christ’s death in the flesh, over Satan’s scheme to derange the divine plan (note 192 in 1 Peter 3—Recovery Version).
Based on this interpretation, I realized that the spirit in verse 18 does not refer to the Holy Spirit. It refers to the spirit of Christ, in which was the Spirit as His divinity. While Christ was being crucified on the cross, the Roman soldiers were putting Him to death in His flesh, and the Triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, was making Him alive, strengthening Him, and empowering Him in His spirit. In the conception of Christ, in the human living of Christ, and in the death of Christ, the Triune God was fully involved. The Lord must grant us a clear view of how the Triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, was fully involved not only in Christ’s conception and His human living on this earth but also in His death. The One dying on the cross was the Triune God-man. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit passed through the death of the Man Jesus on the cross.
The crucifixion put Christ to death only in His flesh, which He received through incarnation (John 1:14), not in His spirit. His spirit did not die at the cross when His flesh did; rather, His spirit was made alive, enlivened with new power of life, so that in this empowered spirit He made a proclamation to the fallen angels after His death in the flesh and before His resurrection. Death never put the Lord Jesus down in His spirit. Death only put His body down.