As I said in an earlier podcast series on the Letter to the Hebrews, one of the biggest mistake that any Christian can make, when studying the Scriptures, is to jump around from verse to verse in the Bible, trying to gain an understanding from a single verse or passage.

I likened that to trying to understand the whole picture of a jigsaw puzzle by studying just one piece of it. A single jigsaw puzzle piece cannot help you understand the entire picture. All the surrounding pieces must give context to the piece in the middle.

The only way to really understand the Scriptures, especially passages like 1 Peter 3:18-22 , is to read this entire letter from beginning to end, and to read Second Peter as well as the little letter of Jude, so you can see the whole context – the surrounding puzzle pieces and that way see the larger picture.