The third line of The Apostles Creed reads in part, “… and He descended into hell”.
There has been much debate concerning this subject throughout church history. There are three main schools of thought.
1. Christ spent his three days suffering the wrath of God
2. Christ spent his three days proclaiming his victory over the Satanic kingdom
3. Christ spent his three days preaching the Gospel to the Old Testament believers who dwelt in a separated portion of hell called Paradise (Abrahams’s Bosom).
Virtually all Bible scholars including those I trust disagree on this issue, and fall somewhere in the three schools of thought.
What is not debatable is that Christ did descend into hell as we read in Matthew 12:40 “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth”. The Apostle Paul reinforces this statement in Ephesians 4:9 “Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth?” Hell is in the heart or center of the earth.
The big question that is hotly debated is where in hell (Paradise or the torment side as seen in Luke 16) did Christ descend, and what did He do there? I have to admit that I never gave it much thought. I knew that Christ descended, but as to the details… well, I pretty much ignored it. So, as we do with all biblical questions, we search the scriptures. We compare scripture with scripture. We look at the passages that address this subject within its’ context without any personal biases getting in the way. We will try to just let the scriptures speak for themselves. By the way, this in itself is not an easy task.
Here is where I have landed on the matter.
When Jesus the Son of Man died, his soul left his body and traveled to the “heart of the earth”.
1. “The sorrows of hell surrounded” Jesus. 2 Samuel 22:5-6 “When the waves of death surrounded me, the floods of ungodly men made me afraid; The sorrows of hell surrounded me; the snares of death confronted me”. This speaks of David as he fled from King Saul. Compare this same language with Psalm 18:4-5 “The sorrows of death surrounded me, and the floods of ungodly men made me afraid. The sorrows of hell surrounded me: the snares of death confronted me”. As I look carefully at the context, it appears that these events of death are occurring on the earth. Read these chapters and see if you agree.
Ok… good so far. Let’s continue.
2. Let’s consider Isaiah 53:10-12 “Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he has put him to grief: when you shall make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand. He shall see the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he has poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors”.
This familiar passage clearly has Jesus on the cross. We see that Jesus was bruised and put to grief. His soul was made an offering for sin in great travail. He bore the iniquities and the sins of many. This coincides with 1 Peter 2:24 that exclaims, “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree (cross), that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed”. My point is that Isaiah 53 occurred on the cross which is witnessed by 1 Peter 2:24.
3. Now, it gets very interesting when we consider what Psalm 16:10 says. “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.” Verses 8-11 in this Psalm is related to Jesus when Peter quotes it in Acts 2:24-28. For time sake, we will only look at verse 27 which says, “Because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption”. Now we have Jesus’ soul in hell facing corruption. Luke 16 reveals that there were two compartments in hell; the torment side for the lost, and Paradise for the old testament believers. There was no corruption in Paradise. It was a place of blessing and comfort in “Abraham’s bosom”. But Jesus did not face corruption because He Himself never sinned. By the time Jesus died, the work of the substitutionary sacrifice had been “finished”! If He did go to the torment side, He was not affected by it. No suffering.
In the above verses we see NO WRATH. We see NO SUFFERING! What do we see? We see two very important phrases from Psalm 16:10 and Acts 2:27 which are;
1. The “sorrows of hell surrounded me” – these sorrows surrounded Jesus but had no effect on Him. Being surrounded does not mean being affected.
2. “neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see corruption”. Why? Because the sorrows of death had NO effect on the soul of Jesus. He never experienced corruption; deterioration of the soul which is the result of being separated from the Presence of God. Unfortunately, this is the plight of every lost soul.
Jonah chapter 2 goes a little further and provides us some additional detail. Jonah is a type of Jesus in the depths of the heart of the earth. In Jonah chapter 2 we see that he was; vs. 5 “surrounded about by waters even to his soul”, vs. 6 he went “down to the bottom of the mountains” which is in the recesses below the surface of the earth. Also “the earth with her bars were about me forever”. Finally he says, “yet you have brought up my life from corruption”. This is the same language we see in Psalm 16:10 and Acts 2:27. Again, Jesus did not see the corruption of His soul. Corruption means degeneration; to go from a sound state to a rotten state as the lost do.
Here’s the bottom line. From the above passages of scripture, we see that Jesus experienced the snares of death, the travail of his soul, in both the physical realm and the spiritual realm. He experienced what all lost people experience; the treacherous travel to the underworld alone. Yet, death could not hold Him because He was righteous. His sacrifice on the cross completed the work when He cried out in John 9:30 “…It is finished”. We could look at many more scriptures that illustrate this same point.
The controversy on this point is; did Jesus go to the torment side of hell as well as Paradise? From my reading of the scriptures that we have considered, if Jesus did go to the torment side of hell He was there as a victor. I believe His main focus was Paradise. He was there to lead “every captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:8). Jesus went from the highest heaven at His birth to the lowest part of the earth at His death. He ascended again to the highest heaven following His resurrection. Do you know what this means? The Lord Jesus Christ demonstrated absolute victory in all realms of God’s creation! In Matthew 27:51-53 we see many old testament saints raised from the dead as a forerunner of the coming resurrection. Jesus lead those captives in the heart of the earth into the Presence of God in Heaven to await the resurrection in the future.
The conclusion; Jesus finished the work of atonement on the cross and descended into hell in VICTORY!
So, exactly what did Jesus do when in the heart of the earth? Maybe a bigger question is; what does this have to do with me today? We will consider this next time in the context of…
Up From the Grave!
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen!