The Preaching to the Spirits in Prison

A considerable part of this treatise is occupied with the discussion of many of the unsatisfactory theories which have at various times been based upon the passage. The discussion involves a certain amount of discursiveness, and it may be well therefore to insert as a preface a brief summary of the interpretation of the text, as expounded by the author.
First of all, it is desirable to note that in the immediately preceding verses (1 Peter 3:8-17) the apostle alludes to the considerable persecution to which these believing Jews were subjected because of their faith in an unseen and heavenly Christ. This fact evidently occasioned difficulties in their minds because such an experience was so definitely contrasted with the ordinary Jewish expectation, based on the Old Testament, of a Messiah who, by His personal presence, would introduce a state of earthly glory, accompanied by deliverance of the nation from servitude to the Gentiles. To help and enlighten his readers, Peter speaks first with relation to the problem of their present suffering, and secondly, concerning the absence of Christ corporeally.
First, then, the apostle explains that if they suffered for righteousness' sake they were a happy people: this was the mark of true disciples. It was therefore better, if the will of God should so will, that they should suffer for well-doing than for evil-doing. They ought not to suffer as evildoers, because Christ suffered once for sins that we might not suffer, though He was the Just One and we the unjust.
In referring to the suffering of Christ for sins, the apostle mentions the guilt of the Jews, namely, that He was put to death in the flesh (cp. Matt. 26:59; Matt. 27:1; Mark 14:55; same Greek word), but, he adds, quickened by, or in the Spirit.
The naming of the Holy Spirit brings the apostle to his second point, namely, the explanation of the power at work during the absence of the Messiah on high. He thereupon shows the present co-operation of God the Spirit with God the Son to be in analogy with what happened in antediluvian times. It was by the Holy Spirit that the gospel was being preached to them, as Peter had said before (1 Peter 1:12), and it was by that same Spirit that God strove with man before the flood (Gen. 6:3). The Spirit of Christ was in the prophets of old Peter had said in the early part of the Epistle (1 Peter 1:11). Now he says that by the Spirit Christ went and preached to the spirits in prison who were disobedient when the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah. As the Spirit of Christ was in the prophets, so we learn He was in Noah, the preacher of righteousness.
Then the great mass of the antediluvians were "disobedient" to the warning of Noah of the coming deluge, so the great mass of the Jewish people were "disobedient" (see 1 Peter 2:7, 8) to the warning of the Spirit to save themselves from that untoward generation, doomed as it was to judgment (1 Peter 4:17, 18; 2 Peter 2:9; 2 Peter 3:7). Then, too, a few, that is eight souls only, were saved through water, and, to continue the parallel, the Jewish believers found that only a small minority were being brought into the blessings of the gospel.