Again, this is another chapter that I wrote in The Battle: An Anthology of Spiritual Warfare, which is available in two volumes for Kindle.
What, exactly, happened between the moment that Jesus died on the cross
and his resurrection three days later? Your mind might instinctively go to thinking
of the rousing section of the song “The Lion Of Judah” – “he descended to hell
yet was raised up to reign at the Father’s side.” Or, if you are of a slightly older vintage,
you might think of the hymn which contains the words “he hell in hell
o’erthrew.” Is this poetic language
strictly correct from a theological perspective? One might think so if you simply looked at
the Apostles Creed which contains the words “he descended to hell.” But it is not as simple as that and this
chapter may perhaps remind us that we should not base our beliefs on songs or
hymns and not even theological statements that aren’t taken straight from the
Bible!
Let’s deal with the
Apostles Creed issue first. The
Apostle’s Creed was a theological summary which has been used by many
Christians as a statement of belief for over 1,500 years and right up to the
present day. However, unlike the Bible,
the content of the Apostles Creed was fluid for hundreds of years. The oldest available version is a Roman one from Bishop Marcellus of Ancyra
(around A.D. 337) and it does not contain the clause about “descending
into hell”. Apparently this clause first appeared
in the Eastern church with Sirmium's version of 359 A.D. The first mention of
the descent in the Western church appears in the writings of Rufinus of
Aquileia, who included it in his baptismal creed around 400 A.D. Over time, the
Latin church absorbed it and officially integrated it into the Creed in 750
A.D, over 400 years after the earliest version we have! It has also been said that this clause was
mistranslated from the original which makes the problem even worse! The only option is to look directly at the
verses in the Bible that could relate to this “alleged” event:
“’When he
ascended on high, he took many captives and gave gifts to his people.’ (What
does “he ascended” mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly
regions? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the
heavens, in order to fill the whole universe.)”
(Ephesians 4:8-10)
“by
his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is,
the devil — and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their
fear of death.” (Hebrews 2:14-16)
“He
was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit. After being made
alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits - to those who
were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while
the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved
through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not
the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience toward
God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven
and is at God’s right hand - with angels, authorities and powers in submission
to him.” (1 Peter 3:18-22)
“For David says concerning Him: ‘I foresaw the Lord always before my face, For He is at my right hand, that
I may not be shaken. Therefore my heart rejoiced, and my tongue was
glad; Moreover my flesh also will rest in hope. For You will not leave my soul
in Hades. Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption. You have made
known to me the ways of life; You will make me full of joy in Your presence.’
“Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the
patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to
this day. Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an
oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, He would
raise up the Christ to sit on his throne, he,
foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul
was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption. This Jesus God has
raised up, of which we are all witnesses. Therefore being exalted to the right
hand of God…”’ (Acts 2:25-33 NKJV)
“I am the
Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold
the keys of death and Hades.” (Revelation 1:18)
“When a strong man, fully armed,
guards his own house, his possessions are safe. But when someone
stronger attacks and overpowers him, he takes away the armour in which the man
trusted and divides up his plunder.”
(Luke 11:21-22)
“Jesus
answered him, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.’” (Luke
23:43)
These verses have been interpreted
in different ways by eminent theologians through history and here are just a
few of them:
- Augustine believed Christ literally descended into hell but he admitted several uncertainties over the meaning of the proclamation to “spirits in prison” in 1 Peter 3:19. Why, for example, should these people be singled out for such an honor, and who, if anyone, did Christ save with his preaching in hell?
- Thomas Aquinas said that Christ descended to two places—hell and purgatory—and that his purpose in each was different. In hell, he put unbelievers to shame, while in purgatory, he gave sinners hope for glory and the righteous deliverance.
- Martin Luther, though he believed Christ descended to hell, would offer no clear cut explanation for the event.
- John Calvin went so far as to describe the descent as symbolic, pointing to Christ's suffering at Gethsemane and the cross.
So
what are we to make of it all? The nineteenth-century
church historian Philip Schaff made an important distinction which really helps
to clarify things. He deemed the
translation “descended into hell” unfortunate and misleading saying: “we do
know from His (Jesus’) own lips that He was in Paradise between His death and
resurrection. The term Hades is much more comprehensive than Hell (Gehenna)
which is confined to the state of the lost.”
Precise
terminology in our use of Bible words is important here. “Sheol” and “Hades” and interchangeable
terms which are quite distinct from “tartarus”, “gehenna” or the “lake of fire”
– each of which refers to a permanent place of residence. Hades is a temporary holding place. We understand from the story of the rich man
and Lazarus in Luke 16 that there is a divide which we arbitrarily denote by
upper, also known as Paradise or Abraham’s bosom (a place of rest), and lower
designations (when it should actually be right and left!). Ephesians 4 makes it
clear that Christ did descend – but where exactly? Acts 2 tells us the part of
the answer – Hades, temporarily for God would not leave Him there. Luke 23 gets more specific – Jesus told the
thief on the cross that he would be with Him in Paradise - so we deduce that Christ
went to upper Sheol where Lazarus was - the (then) temporary abode of righteous
departed souls. (We will have to leave
aside the separate question regarding the detailed criteria to determine who is
sent to Upper or Lower Hades and trust to the sovereignty and justice of God).
The
next question to be tackled is what actually happened there and what do the
extremely cryptic verses in 1 Peter 3 relate to? The respected commentators, Gill, Clark and
Barnes, take the same view as John Miller in his “Notes”, with the following
general interpretation:
· Christ rose from the dead being made
in alive in the (Holy) Spirit in which He had (previously) preached in Noah's
time (through Noah) to those who were then ('once') disobedient to the
preaching
· As a consequence of this
disobedience, the spirits of these contemporaries of Noah were imprisoned in
(lower) Sheol.
· Christ never visited lower Sheol at
any time and there was no opportunity for these souls to repent (see Hebrews
9:27)
In
other words, 1 Peter 3 should not be linked with the descending of Jesus
mentioned in Ephesians 4 at all – they are not related. Why mention Noah in the first place? Perhaps Peter was trying to draw some
parallels between Noah’s experience and his readers experience – readers who
were going through a pretty tough time:
-
A
righteous minority surrounded by an unrighteous majority
-
God’s
judgement near or may be near (1 Peter 4:5,
7; 2 Peter 3:10)
-
The need to
witness boldly in the Spirit of Christ (1 Peter 3:14-17; 4:11)
-
Salvation
will come in the end (1 Peter 3:13-14; 4:13; 5:10)
-
The symbolic
value of water - made meaningful by Christ’s resurrection
But we digress. Having ruled out
1 Peter 3 as a commentary on the descent to hell, where next? Are we to believe the various members of the “Word
of Faith” movement who teach that
Jesus endured three days and nights of unimaginable abuse at the hands of Satan
and his hordes of demons?
Frederick
K.C. Price explains it this way: “Do you think that the punishment for our
sin was to die on a cross? If that were the case, the two thieves could have
paid your price. No, the punishment was
to go into hell itself and to serve time in hell separated from God...Satan and
all the demons of hell thought that they had Him bound and they threw a net
over Jesus and they dragged Him down to the very pit of hell itself to serve
our sentence.”
Kenneth Hagin teaches that: “He (Jesus) tasted spiritual death for every man. And His spirit and inner man went to hell in
my place. Can’t you see that? Physical
death wouldn’t remove your sins. He’s tasted death for every man. He’s
talking about tasting spiritual death.”
Kenneth
Copeland asserts: “When Jesus cried,
‘It is finished!’ He was not speaking
of the plan of redemption. There were still three days and nights to go
through before He went to the throne...Jesus’
death on the cross was only the beginning of the complete work of redemption.”
As ever, we have to go back to
what the Bible actually says – and when we do, we find that the above teaching
is wholly false. As a general point,
this erroneous teaching seems to overlook the important fact that Jesus is an
omnipotent being whereas Satan is not – the inequality in any “struggle” would
lead to a complete mismatch and any “referee” would stop the fight before it
had even begun. But, specifically,
Hebrews 2 makes it quite clear where the battle was won. It was won totally, utterly and once for all at
the cross – it was at the moment of Jesus’ death that Satan’s power was
completely destroyed – it was here, not later, that the “strongman” of Luke 14
was overcome. The work was done and he
was entering his rest.
It is Ephesians 4 which tells us
what was also going on in those three days and any reader in the first century
would have spotted the meaning of Paul’s picture language in an instant. Subjects of the Roman Empire would have seen a
victorious conqueror returning to their home base with a string of prisoners in
their train, proof and token of the victory just won on the battlefield – and
freely giving gifts in celebration. But
here, the scene is turned upside down – Jesus the Victor is not bringing His
prisoners with him on his return journey back to the base of heaven, he is
bringing those He has liberated from prison in two senses – the prison of the
fear of death which had enslaved them all their lives and the actual prison of
Hades which they had experienced once they had died.
And so we see this descent, in
part, as a victory parade where Jesus collects the trophies of grace that were
already won at Calvary, the gates of Hades having been opened by his victorious
death. And the victory parade has one
more set of gates to go through – the gates of heaven. What a scene for our minds to ponder on, as
F.A. Perigo did in the following extract from NT magazine in 1951:
“Consider
the welcome at the home-going of the Lord Jesus, so graphically illustrated in
Psalm 24. Here are angels upon angels - there are perhaps 100,000,000 (see Revelation
5) all rendering homage to this great and glorious Person. They had, with wonder and amazement, watched
His lowly, but holy, pathway on earth, while He mingled with the human race, supremely
perfect in word and work, so dignified in every way that it even calls our
cold, poor and unresponsive hearts to deep and glad worship! Yes, myriads of
these celestial beings - seraphim, those so near the throne that they become
the celebrants of God's holiness, and constantly cry, "Holy, holy,
holy;" cherubim, executants of God's governmental dealings with this
earth; these all, with welcoming joy, state how fittingly it is that the Son of
God should be granted the overlordship of creation, by virtue of: (a) Creatorial
right, (b) Redemptive right and (c) Right of birth. Perhaps the Spirit of God by the Psalmist
gave a hint of this, in the words:
“Lift up your heads,
you gates;
be lifted up, you ancient doors,
that the King of glory may come in.
Who is this King of glory?
The Lord strong and mighty,
the Lord mighty in battle.
Lift up your heads,
you gates;
lift them up, you ancient doors,
that the King of glory may come in.
Who is he, this King of glory?
The Lord Almighty —
he is the King of glory.”
His
entrance into heaven was majestic, and He is lauded as "the LORD strong
and mighty". Truly, the triumphant entry of the Victor! Nor did He enter
alone, for there were the spoils which He had won in His victory. Rising from among the dead, the glorious
Victor led forth a multitude of captives from Satan’s domain, the Old Testament
saints whose souls had been waiting in upper Sheol, to accompany Him in His
triumphant entry into the glory. What a profound shock to Satan and the wicked
spirits in the heavenlies as they witnessed the Son of God, His humiliation and
sufferings over, passing upward to the heavens to the right hand of God!”
We
thank God for the truth of this and also the wonderful reality that, due to the
cross-work of Christ we no longer have to face a temporary existence in Upper
Sheol when we die – it is now an empty place because post-resurrection, all
believers who die go straight to be “at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8)
– what a prospect! Hallelujah!
