Meaning of "dead and live not again" in 1 Peter 4:6 and Revelation 20:4.

Spiritually dead and live not again.

In what sense are they dead and not living again, when they are standing on the Day of Judgement? Look at Matthew 8:22. Jesus said. Let the dead bury the dead.’ And also look at Romans 8:10, where Paul expresses that because of sin our bodies are ‘dead.’ He describes it as ‘dead’. And in 1 Corinthians 15:2,2 he also says. ‘Because of Adam, all men are dying.’

Clearly, Adam is regarded as one of the first to die from that day onwards, because he ate the fruit of the forbidden tree. God had warned him that he would die. (Genesis 2:17) From these verses, it can be said that all men are regarded as dead, and indeed in the presence of God, they are dying because of the sins they inherited from their ancestors.

Christians are baptised in water to signify their death to sin and the flesh, which is said to indicate that Egyptian troops suffered destruction when they were pursuing Moses and the Israelites.

1 Corinthians 10:1 Moreover, brethren, I do not want you to be unaware that all our fathers were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, 2 all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea,

1 Peter 3:21 There is also an antitype which now saves us--baptism (not the removal of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God), through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,

1 Peter 4:1 Therefore, since Christ suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same mind, for he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, 2 that he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh for the lusts of men, but for the will of God. 3 For we have spent enough of our past lifetime in doing the will of the Gentiles--when we walked in lewdness, lusts, drunkenness, revelries, drinking parties, and abominable idolatries. 4 In regard to these, they think it strange that you do not run with them in the same flood of dissipation, speaking evil of you. 5 They will give an account to Him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. 6 For this reason the gospel was preached also to those who are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.

Therefore, to be sinful in the world but to live in Christ is to be judged ‘against the flesh’. The Greek word for ‘let the dead bury the dead’ as stated by Jesus and ‘preaching to the dead’ as stated in 1 Peter 4:6 are the same original word nekros. 

In verse 4, it is said that when a Christian lives a sober life for God, it is as if he is being judged in the flesh, because from a human point of view he is living away from the joys of this world of Satan as Christ commands us to take up our cross daily and live, we need to die to ourselves.

So we can theoretically conclude that. The status of the righteous approved by God in Revelation 21 is that they can stand on the Day of Judgement before God (they have come back to life) because their spiritual walk with God during their lifetime is rewarded and they are granted a glorified body.

Furthermore, as a promise of Jesus, people are also regarded as already live again even before the resurrection. See Jesus' words in John 5:24. ‘I tell you well. Whoever hears me and believes in God who sent me has eternal life. You will never be punished for your sins. You have already passed from death to life.’ So it is clear that from the time a person is written in the Book of Life, he is no longer considered dead.

In John's scripture, it does not mean never dying In physical terms, but spiritually alive to God's eyes, and does not mean the maintenance of physical life activity.

This is clear in relation to what Jesus also said in Matthew 22:32. When God said, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob’ [if Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who had already died, were not now alive before God, He would have said, ‘I was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’], He directly spoke to you as well. Do you not understand that God is not the God of dead men, but of living men? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.’

On the other hand, those who stand before God on the Day of Judgement but are not ‘live not again’ are precisely the unrighteous who are not regarded as righteous by God. They will have to choose whether or not to accept Jesus as Lord by God on the Day of Judgement (the millennial reign, where a thousand years is like a day).

Interestingly, the KJV renders it as "live not again", but adds the word "again" on its own. This expression would seem to imply a resurrection as a living organism with a body once more, but in Greek the word simply means anazaō (to return to normal, to come back to life) and does not strictly mean ‘again’. There may be cases where the addition of the notation again may be easier to understand in some scriptural passages, but a more unprejudiced reading of this revelation 20:5 than accompanying it, taking into account the resurrection of Lazarus at the first coming of Jesus, who is called Lord of the Sabbath, etc., it is possible to see a spiritual person, other than a spiritual person as a martyr, who has been spiritually living to God's perspective. It is also an easily deducible fact that the ‘rest of the dead’ do not include the righteous living on earth who have been resurrected from God's perspective.

Those who died without knowing Jesus and who lived a righteous life will certainly be resurrected, without exception. (The kind Samaritan is an example of a pagan, but a righteous one, so he is in the resurrection as a righteous person and does not fall into the ‘live not again’ category.)

As the scripture in Revelation prophesies, ‘The rest did not come back to life until the end of the thousand years [the day of judgement]’, the unrighteous who did not know the Bible have not come back to life in a spiritual sense because they have not proved themselves to be eternally living souls with a loyal love for God and neighbour at the time of their forgiveness and resurrection, They are given the opportunity to accept Jesus, i.e. to live again. Those who have spent time in sin in those Satan's world will be given a period of up to a thousand years of reign before they eat of the fruit of the tree of life. Since the creation of the earth, it has taken seven thousand years to eat of the fruit of the tree of life for unrighteous.

Preached before a person's death.

The Sinai Codex does not seem to have the phrase ‘did not come back to life until the end of the thousand years’ in Revelation 20:4. If we take it as it is, we don't have to search for what it means that he did not come back to life.

And 1 Peter 4:16 says that it was preached to ‘those who are dead’, which is also in the past tense, ‘preached’ to those who are dead now. This means that it was preached in the past so that those who were alive to God's eye (who are now dead) could be saved.

1 Corinthians 5:5 deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

1 Corinthians 11:32 But when we are judged, we are chastened by the Lord, that we may not be condemned with the world.

Certain members of the congregation of Corinth died out of the wages of sin, signifying their deliverance from sin. As Romans 6:7 says, ‘the dead are freed from sin’, it is natural to interpret this as meaning that the sound of salvation was properly preached in the past to those ‘who are dead’ (those who were alive before their death), including the Corinthians.

What Peter is saying is that the gospel has been preached to both the living and the dead (those who were alive before death) in the past, and that the dead in particular will be spiritually justified by God and resurrected and made alive in the future, even if they die in the body after receiving the wages of sin.