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Did Jesus Christ Descend into Hell?

Writer's picture: Randall BrewerRandall Brewer

‘Now this expression, “He ascended,” what does it mean except that He also descended into the lower parts of the earth?’ 

- Ephesians 4:9 -


God takes false teaching seriously. After all, it’s His holy Word being twisted or denied. Recall Peter’s frantic tone when he said: ‘I am warning you ahead of time, dear friends. Be on guard so that you will not be carried away by the errors of these wicked people and lose your secure footing’ (2 Pet. 3:17). Peter realized false teachers wish to trip us up so we stumble in our walk with the Lord. They don’t run around wearing red capes and wielding pitchforks. They are among us. What’s tragic is many false teachers aren’t willful slaves of Satan. If social media teaches us anything, it’s that many don’t know any better. They sincerely teach false doctrine, but they’re also sincerely wrong.


 

It isn’t shocking Satan targets Christianity’s very foundations: the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Nobody disputes that Jesus died on the cross and ‘descended into the lower parts of the earth’ (Eph. 4:9), but the devil and his wolves don’t want us to know just where He went and what happened while He was there. It was commonly taught it church history that when Jesus died His soul descended to pay the penalty for sin. Pillars like Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyril of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, Athanasius the Great, and Thomas Aquinas all believed this. Even the two greats of the Reformation – Luther and Calvin – taught the same. It’s only in recent times that people began rejecting this crucial biblical truth.


The story of the rich man and Lazarus tells of two compartments in the lower parts of the earth. The first compartment is ‘Sheol’ in Hebrew, ‘Hades’ in Greek, and ‘hell’ in English. It is a place of torment where the wicked go when they die. The second place is ‘Abraham’s bosom’ (Luke 16:22), where the souls of Old Testament saints went in death. It is elsewhere called ‘paradise.’ There is a chasm between these places that cannot be crossed. But the problem we run into is that false teachers claim ‘Hades’ refers to both Abraham’s bosom and hell, leaving interpreters to decide on which place a given verse refers to. This is plain wrong. Hell is hell and Abraham’s bosom is paradise. On this, Scripture is clear.



An opposing argument comes from Jesus’ words to the thief on the cross: “Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:42). This is often misquoted, with translators inserting a comma in the wrong place. The original Greek contains no periods or commas. With all punctuation removed, the verse reads: “Assuredly I say to you today you will be with Me in Paradise.” If you put a comma after the words, “I say to you,” then yes, the verse means that that day the thief would be in Paradise with Jesus. But put a comma after “today” and you change the whole meaning. What Jesus would then be saying is: “Today I’m telling you that at some point in the future you will be with Me in Paradise.” See the difference? Pretty massive, right?


In truth, Jesus couldn’t have gone to Abraham’s bosom the second He died. When all the sins of the world were placed on Jesus, a separation took place between Father and Son. Jesus cried: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46), and moments later died, separated from God. If, as many falsely teach, Jesus didn’t suffer in hell but spent three days preaching in Abraham’s bosom, this means He was only briefly forsaken by the Father. What makes more sense is that Jesus died separated from the Father, then went where people separated from the Father go. “For He made Him who knew no sin to be made sin for us” (2 Cor. 5:21). Did you hear that? Jesus became sin. He was sin personified, and so He went where sin goes. Hell.



Jesus said of His death: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:14). Serpents always represent sin, so this is the equivalent to sin being lifted up. Jesus said the serpent raised up on a pole (Num. 21:9) represented Him raised on the cross. The serpent symbolized sin just as did Jesus when the Father made Him to be sin. He died a spiritual death, so for three days and three nights He suffered and paid the price for the sin. Since sinners are spiritually dead due to sin (Gen. 2:17), Jesus’ physical death was not enough. He had to die a spiritual death. If this wasn’t the case, the Father wouldn’t have forsaken Him.


See how the risen Christ said in Revelation: “I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore” (1:18). He called Himself: “The First and the Last, who was dead, and has come to life” (2:8). He was dead but is now alive. Yet the Old Testament saints in Abraham’s bosom were never considered dead. Yes, they were physically dead, but they were spiritually alive. Therefore Jesus said: “Concerning the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matt. 22:31-32).


So if Jesus drew His last breath and immediately went to Abraham’s bosom, where all were asleep in death but spiritually alive, exactly when was Jesus dead? The only explanation is that He didn’t go to Abraham’s bosom, at least not at first. When Jesus died on the cross, His spirit went to the place of spiritual death. Jesus descended to hell, where He suffered on our behalf for three days and three nights.



John Calvin said in The Institute of Christian Religion: “Nothing had been done if Christ had only endured a physical death. In order to intervene between us and God’s anger, and satisfy His righteous judgment, it was necessary that He should feel the weight of divine vengeance. Whence also it was necessary that He should engage, as it were, at close quarters with the powers of hell and the horrors of eternal death.”


Calvin goes on: “He undertook and paid all the penalties which must have been exacted from them, the only exception being that the pains of death could not hold Him. Hence there is nothing strange in it being said that He descended to hell, seeing He endured the death which is inflicted on the wicked by an angry God. Not only was the body of Christ given up as the price of redemption, but there was a greater and more excellent price that He bore in His soul, the tortures of a condemned and ruined man.” It seemed pretty clear-cut to no less a theologian than John Calvin.


God (through Isaiah) said: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are Mine!” (43:1). By Christ’s redemptive work, He is rightly called our Redeemer, so Job declared: “I know my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the earth” (19:25). The word ‘redeem’ carries the idea of exchange. Redeeming is not merely making something right, but paying a price. Just as money is exchanged to redeem a piece of land, a price is paid to redeem mankind from the evil that plagued us since our fall in Eden. In other words, Jesus had to experience all He came to redeem us from. Have you ever felt rejected, abandoned, betrayed, denied, or forsaken? Jesus bore it all. He was rejected by family, abandoned by followers, betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, and yes, even forsaken by the Father.



Jesus came to redeem us from going to hell. So it stands to reason that He would have to endure hell on our behalf. Some reject this due to Christ’s dying declaration: “It is finished!” (John 19:30). They say these three words mean He was done paying the price for sin on the cross. But if dying on the cross was the only thing Jesus had to do to pay the price for sin, why wasn’t He resurrected a few hours later? Even the next day? The question is what does “It is finished” mean? This is the Greek word ‘telelestai,’ which means to complete or accomplish. It’s the word you use when you climb Mount Everest, when you make the last payment on a car, or when you cross the finish line of a race. It means: “I did exactly what I set out to do.”


When Jesus died, His work on the earth is finished, but His work below was not. He still had to suffer for three days and three nights. This was Jesus’ part to play, just as raising Him from the dead was the Father’s part. Therefore Jesus said just before dying: “Father, into Your hands I commend My spirit” (Luke 23:46). He even told the scribes and Pharisees would happen after His death: “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:39-40). He would suffer like Jonah who wrote: “Out of the belly of Sheol I cried” (Jonah 2:2). But Jonah wasn’t talking about himself while he was preserved by God in the whale’s belly. The prophet spoke of Christ.



Isaiah 38:10 and Job 17:16 call Sheol a city with gates and bars. A land of gloom and utter darkness (Job 10:19-22). Even David prophesied Jesus’ suffering between the cross and resurrection, writing: ‘The pangs of death encompassed me, and the floods of ungodliness made me afraid. The sorrows of Sheol surrounded me; the snares of death confronted me. In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried out to my God; He heard my voice from His temple, and my cry came before Him even to His ears’ (Ps. 18:4-6). The ‘sorrows of Sheol’ is not Abraham’s bosom, as there was no sorrow there, only rest and comfort.

 

On Pentecost, Peter told the crowds: “God released [Jesus] from the horrors of death and raised Him back to life, for death could not keep Him in its grip” (Acts 2:24). The Greek literally says: “God freed Him from the travails of death.” What a thought! The word translated ‘travails’ often describes labor pains. Here, it’s a metaphor for the anguish Jesus experienced while dead. It can’t refer to the sufferings on the cross because He wasn’t dead yet. So Jesus didn’t just suffer in His body on the cross, but when He died, He suffered in His soul as a condemned man. He suffered in our place, which we all struggle to comprehend, so what do the false teachers do? They deny it ever happened.



Charles Spurgeon said: “It is clear that whatever those pains were, our blessed Lord Jesus Christ felt them. He was left without the sustaining help of God and the light of His Father’s countenance was hidden from Him. His death was a bitter one, indeed! He took the deepest draughts of wormwood and gall, for He had to taste death for every man.” But here’s the good news. On Pentecost, Peter put Psalm 16:10 on Jesus’ lips: “For You will not abandon My soul in Sheol; neither will You allow Your Holy One to see decay” (Acts 2:27). Jesus went down to Sheol, but the Father didn’t leave Him there.


Logic says Jesus’ soul couldn’t be left in the realm of death if He was never there. So Jesus did descend and suffer for our sins. Thankfully, when all our sins were paid for, God beheld His Son and saw a soul that never sinned, not even in becoming sin for us. It was then that Jesus left the torment of hell. He was the first to cross the wide chasm to Abraham’s bosom, wherein He preached the gospel to Old Testament saints and ‘led captivity captive’ (Eph. 4:8). His spirit then returned to His glorified body, the stone was rolled away, and the Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead for His glory and our grace.

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