Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Peter 3:22

"who is one the right hand of God, having gone into heaven; angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto him." — 1 Peter 3:22 (ASV)

Who is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God.—This verse (which has the character of a doxology) serves two purposes. First, it carries on the history of Jesus Christ. How carefully, in spite of what at first seem to be irrelevant digressions, Saint Peter holds his threads. Christ’s passion and death, activity among the dead, resurrection from among them, ascension into heaven, and perpetual session in glory, follow one another in proper order. The second purpose of the clause runs parallel to the first. Saint Peter is teaching the entire conformity of the believer to the Lord. If the believer will only retain his good conscience, he may hope for a precisely similar experience.

The Latin and several other good versions, together with several Latin Fathers, add a curious sentence after the words “on the right hand of God,” which runs: swallowing up death, that we might be made heirs of eternal life; but there is no sufficient authority for the sentence. The first notion of being “on the right hand of God,” taken, probably, from Psalms 110:1, seems to be that of occupying the highest post of honour possible, next after that of God—i.e., the Father—Himself. It is not necessary here to consider what else may be implied in the phrase regarding the conditions of our Lord’s human existence; but when we compare Saint Paul’s statement, in Ephesians 4:10, about His now filling all things, we feel that these pictorial words, such as “heaven” and “right hand of God,” are intended to convey the notion that His humanity is now entirely without conditions, though still retaining all that is truly essential to humanity.

It may be observed that, assuming (as even most sceptical critics do) the genuineness of this Epistle, we have here firsthand the deliberate evidence of one who had been perfectly familiar with Jesus Christ as man with man. By what stretch of imagination can we suppose that such a person could ever have invented, or have accepted from others, this mode of speaking about his former Teacher, had he not been conscious of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus as simply historical facts, of the same order as the fact of His death?

Angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto him.—There can be no doubt that this whole verse is coloured by recollection of the circular letter which Saint Paul had sent to the Churches of Asia, which we call the Epistle to the Ephesians. Perhaps the heresy which Saint Paul lamented in that Epistle may still have lingered in existence, in cabalistic Jewish circles, among those same Churches when Saint Peter thus wrote to them. He may, for the moment, be glancing away from his faint-hearted Hebrew brothers, who, in fear of persecution, were slinking back into Judaism, and turning rather to those Gnosticising Jews who began to abound in Asia, who made “genealogies” of aeons, and gave Christ a place among them.

In favour of such an opinion, one might appeal to the vivid picture of licentiousness in the next chapter, and its development, manifestly under Gnostic influence, in the Second Epistle and in the Apocalypse. From the expression “being made subject,” or, literally, having been subdued (or subjected), we may infer that Saint Peter meant evil spirits, this being a crowning triumph of Christ, and not only a mark of His exaltation. We need not think that Saint Peter, any more than Saint Paul, is distinctly teaching that there are such grades of spiritual beings; he is probably only borrowing the titles from the heretics alluded to, and saying that whatever unseen powers there are, whatever they may be called, they are now subdued to Christ.