Did Jesus Preach to Demons Between His Death and Resurrection?

Question 08087

The question of Jesus preaching to demons between his death and resurrection comes up more often than you might expect, usually after somebody has read 1 Peter 3 or recited the line in the Apostles’ Creed about descending to the dead. It sounds strange to modern ears, and it has been used to support some very odd teaching.

So let me give the short answer before the long one. Something was announced to imprisoned spiritual beings in connection with the resurrection, and I do think that is what Peter describes. But preaching to demons in the sense of offering them the gospel is not what happened, and the difference between announcing and offering is the whole ballgame.

Where Was Jesus for Those Three Days?

Start with what Jesus himself said. To the dying thief he promised, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). Not tomorrow. Not after a detour. Today. And his final word from the cross was a commitment of his spirit into the Father’s hands.

That already rules out the most lurid version of this question, the notion that Jesus went to hell to suffer further at the hands of Satan and was born again in the pit. That teaching has circulated in Word of Faith circles for decades and it is a serious distortion. The atoning work finished at the cross when he said so. Nothing was added to it afterwards.

His body lay in Joseph’s tomb. His human spirit was with the Father in Paradise. And at some point in that interval, according to Peter, he made a proclamation. The question is to whom, and whether we can properly call it preaching to demons.

What Peter Actually Describes

Peter writes that Jesus was “put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah.” The audience is described as spirits, in prison, disobedient in Noah’s day.

I take those spirits to be fallen angels confined since the Genesis 6 episode, not deceased human beings. If that reading is right, then something in the neighbourhood of preaching to demons did take place, though the word preaching is doing misleading work in English. I have laid out the full argument in my answer on who the spirits in prison are.

The critical detail is the verb. Peter uses kerusso, to herald or announce, not euangelizo, to bring good news. A herald in the ancient world proclaimed the decisions of his king. Whether the news was welcome depended entirely on which side you were on.

Announcing Is Not the Same as Preaching to Demons

This is where careless language causes real damage. When we say preaching to demons, most English speakers hear an evangelistic appeal. Somebody standing in front of an audience urging them to repent. That is not what the text describes and it is not something Scripture ever presents as possible.

There is no gospel for angels. Hebrews says that Jesus did not take hold of angels but of the offspring of Abraham. He took our nature, not theirs, and no substitute ever stood in their place. Preaching to demons in the evangelistic sense would require an atonement that was never made and an offer that was never issued.

What Peter describes is a verdict read aloud. Peter tells us the content himself a few verses later: Jesus “has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.” That is the announcement. Every rebel authority is now under his feet, and the beings who mounted the most audacious assault on God’s created order were told so directly.

The Roman Triumph Behind the Image

Paul gives us the same event from another angle in Colossians. God “disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him” (Colossians 2:15). The picture is a Roman triumph, the victory procession in which a conquering general paraded the defeated through the streets while heralds announced what had happened.

Read against that background, the language of preaching to demons stops sounding evangelistic and starts sounding military. This is not an altar call. This is a general riding through the captured city. The proclamation is a statement of fact addressed to those who have already lost.

And notice where the emphasis falls in both passages. Peter and Paul are not interested in the demons for their own sake. They are interested in the enthronement of Jesus. The defeated appear in the story only to make the scale of the victory visible.

What About Ephesians 4 and the Descent?

Paul writes that “he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth”, which some take as a reference to the underworld and others as a straightforward description of the incarnation, the Son coming down to earth. I lean towards the second reading, since the contrast in the passage is between ascending on high and coming down here, and the incarnation supplies that contrast neatly.

Either way, the passage says nothing about preaching to demons. It is about the ascended Jesus giving gifts to his church. Building a doctrine of the descent on that text asks it to answer a question it was not addressing.

As for the creedal phrase about descending to the dead, its history is complicated and its earliest sense may have meant no more than that Jesus genuinely died and entered the state of the dead. I have no quarrel with reciting it in that sense, and every quarrel with the elaborate mythology some have hung on it.

What the Gospels Show Us About Demons and Jesus

It helps to look at how Jesus dealt with demons during his ministry, because the pattern is consistent and it tells us what to expect. He never once reasoned with them. He never explained anything to them. He commanded them, silenced them, and sent them out. When a legion of them begged him for terms, he granted a request about pigs and nothing else.

Notice also that they never asked for mercy. They asked not to be tormented before the time, and they asked not to be sent into the abyss, but no demon in the Gospels ever pleads for forgiveness. They know the terms of their situation better than we do. James makes the same point in his own dry way when he says that the demons believe, and shudder. Correct theology and a settled fate can sit together.

Set that alongside the question of preaching to demons and the picture clarifies. Throughout his ministry Jesus addressed these beings with authority and never with an invitation. There is no reason to think the tone changed for three days and then changed back. The one who spoke to them at Gadara is the same one who spoke to them from the far side of the grave, and he was still speaking as their judge. You can see how carefully the demons Jesus cast out were handled in the Gospel accounts.

Why This Question Is Worth Answering Carefully

Loose talk about preaching to demons has consequences. If Jesus offered mercy to fallen angels after death, then someone will soon suggest he offers it to unbelieving human beings after death, and the urgency of the gospel quietly evaporates. Hebrews is blunt: it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgement.

There is also a pastoral cost. Christians who absorb a dramatic account of Jesus wrestling with Satan in the underworld end up with a smaller cross and a larger devil. The New Testament goes the other way. The cross is where the victory was won, publicly, in daylight, before witnesses.

So, now what?

Hold the two halves together. Yes, an announcement was made to imprisoned spirits, and if you want to call that preaching to demons then define your terms clearly before you say it in front of anyone who might misunderstand. No, it was not an offer of salvation, and no such offer exists for angels or for the human dead.

The practical weight of all this falls on the living. You have today. The rebels who heard that proclamation had nothing left to decide, and neither will anyone who dies without Jesus. If you have been putting off dealing with him, that is the sobering side of this passage, and it is the side Peter’s readers would have felt most keenly. For a related question, see my answer on what will finally happen to Satan.

If every authority in the universe has already been subjected to Jesus, what exactly are you still afraid of? That is not a rhetorical flourish. Name the thing, and then set it beside a risen Saviour with all rule and authority beneath his feet, and see whether it looks the same afterwards.

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.

1 Peter 3:18 (ESV)