Easter 2025
[The video of this message can be found here.]
Prayer: Father, we are gathered here before Your Word. And we are asking that You would make this Word a living word. We know it is a living word, but we so easily deflect it and make excuses. So we are asking that Your Spirit would drive this Word all the way into our souls. Do whatever it takes, so that we may have the fullness of the Risen Christ reigning in our lives, in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Introduction
Every Lord’s Day, in the Apostles’ Creed, we confess that Christ “descended into Hades,” although some of you may come from churches where you said, “descended into hell.” In Old English “hell” referred to the “underworld” or the place of the dead, which is what the original Latin and Greek words in the Creed referred to. However, over time “hell” has come to refer in common parlance to the place of eternal punishment of the damned, what Revelation calls the “lake of fire” or Gehenna, where the Devil and “death and Hades” are cast at the end of history (Rev. 20:10, 14).
This can create confusion: how could Jesus go to “hell?” The answer is that He didn’t. While it is true that He suffered the “hellish” torment due our sin on the Cross, when He cried “it is finished,” it really was, and as He told the dying thief next to Him, when He gave up the ghost, He went to “Paradise,” or what ancients would have understood as the place of the dead or Hades.
So as we celebrate the resurrection, it is fitting to ask, what does it mean that He “descended into Hades”? And the answer is: having fully suffered for the sins of all His people, Christ went down to that lowest place to release His people there and so prove that nothing can stop Him from bringing all His people to God in the highest place: “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: by which also He went and preached unto the spirits in prison” (1 Pet. 3:18). Christ is Lord. Nothing can stop Him.
The Text: “…When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men. (Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth?…” (Eph. 4:7-10).
Summary of the Text
Paul is in the process of summarizing our great unifying inheritance in Christ, and in order to do that, explains that when Christ ascended into Heaven, He led captivity itself captive and gave gifts to men (Eph. 4:7-8, cf. Ps. 68). But Paul pauses here and points out that before Christ ascended, He also descended, not merely to earth but even into the “lower regions” of the earth – and that is the Greek word that appears in early versions of the Apostles’ Creed (Eph. 4:9). And Paul explains that Christ has descended that far and ascended above all heavens in order to fill all things (Eph. 4:10). He has done this because He is the Lord.
A Biblical Cosmology
In the Old Testament, the word for the grave and the place of the dead was “Sheol.” In Homer, the “underworld” was a literal place called “Hades” that Odysseus traveled to, but even in Scripture, God forbids necromancy (trying to communicate with the dead) and when the Witch of Endor summoned Samuel’s spirit, it came up out of the ground and Samuel foretold that Saul and his sons would be joining him shortly (1 Sam. 28:12-19). David prophesied, “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell [Sheol]; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption” (Ps. 16:10). When the Apostle Peter quoted that verse at Pentecost, he translated “Sheol” as “Hades,” using the traditional Greek name for the place of the dead, and said it was talking about the resurrection of Jesus (Acts 2:27).
In the parable that Jesus told about the rich man and Lazarus, He pictured Hades as a place of torment for the wicked but a place of rest for the righteous: “And in hell [Hades] he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom” (Lk. 16:23). The ancients also refer to this as “paradise,” which Jesus referred to on the Cross: “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Lk. 23:43).
A Protestant “Harrowing of Hell”
The traditional name for this teaching is called the “harrowing of hell.” Harrowing means “to raid, harass, cause distress, or lay waste.” The Church Fathers sometimes allowed their imaginations to run away on this point (and some of this is probably the origin of the Roman Catholic notions of purgatory and praying for the dead, which we reject), but putting all of this together: before the death and resurrection of Jesus, all people went in spirit at death to the same place called “Sheol” in Hebrew and “Hades” in Greek, which was divided between a place of torment and a place of restful waiting (Abraham’s bosom/Paradise). But the saints of old could not enjoy the fullness of the presence of God until their sins were actually paid for, which is suggested in Hebrews: “And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect” (Heb. 11:39-40).
Therefore, when Christ cried out, “It is finished!” and breathed His last, His Spirit left His body and descended into Hades, the place where all spirits were waiting. But He went there in order to “lead captivity captive.” He went there to proclaim His victory over sin, death, and the Devil to the damned (1 Pet. 3:19) and to release the Old Covenant saints out of Abraham’s Bosom/Paradise in Hades and usher them into the presence of God in Heaven. This is why Jesus tells John in Revelation, “I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell [Hades] and of death” (Rev. 1:18). When Jesus rose from the dead, it proved that His soul did not remain in Hades, and if it could not remain there it is because He has the keys. And this is why God’s people who die on this side of the resurrection are immediately with the Lord in Heaven.
Applications
So this is the point: Christ is Lord. Christ is Lord of All. Christ went down to the lowest place to proclaim His victory (His Lordship) and bring all of His own directly to God in the highest place. He did this to prove that nothing can stop Him from bringing His people to God – He is Lord. If nothing could stop Him from bringing Adam and Abraham and David to God, there is nowhere you can wander where He cannot reach you. The Old Testament saints were heroes, but they were also deeply flawed heroes who had far less to go on. Think about the high-handed disobedience of Adam, and the adultery, murder, and rape that mark the families of God’s Old Testament saints, and Christ did not leave any of them in Sheol/Hades. And if He did not leave them, He will not leave you.
“He descended into Hades” means there is no sin so dark that Christ cannot save you. There is no prison cell of sin so secure that He cannot release you. Do you feel trapped in sin? Do you want to stop, but you don’t know how? Are you locked in some dark place? Hades was the one place (death) where you might have thought the God of Life could not go, but He is Lord of all.
Think of Jonah rebelling against the Lord fleeing to Tarshish into a great storm and swallowed by a great fish for three days and three nights – that’s high-handed rebellion and disobedience and it doesn’t get more trapped and lost than that, but Jonah prayed: “I called out to the LORD, out of my distress, and He answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and You heard my voice” (Jon. 2:1-2 ESV).
Have you run from God? Have you rebelled in your heart? In your mind? In your actions? Do you feel trapped? Are you lost? Are you locked up in sorrow, regret? Call out to the Lord in your distress. He will hear you from wherever you are.
But there is a huge difference between actually calling on the Lord and “doing the religious thing.” There’s a story in the New York Times a couple days ago about how many people in America left Christianity in the last generation but report feeling like nothing they have tried has replaced what they had. One woman who left Christianity because of its teaching on women said, “I would love to find a way to have what I had then without compromising who I feel I am now.” But that is simply a way of saying that she wants to remain her own lord, her own god, her own savior. She wants Jesus on the side, like a good diet, like a life hack.
But God isn’t interested in being your “life hack.” He sent Jesus so that every knee would bow and confess Him Lord: in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth. Calling on the Lord in your distress means honestly humbling yourself and acknowledging that He is your only hope for every area of life. Christ must save and Christ alone. Christ is Lord.
But even “Reformed” types can carve out areas where they functionally try to keep Christ out: entertainment, music, finances, politics, social media, etc. But wherever you have functionally excluded Christ, that is your personal Hades. But He is Lord, and He claims it all.
The Bible is clear that after death, there are no second chances: we will all stand before God’s judgment seat (Rev. 20:12, 14-15, Heb. 9:27). And Revelation 20 says that at the great judgment they will open the books of all our deeds. Everything you have thought, said, and done will be revealed – no lies, no spin, no excuses, no hiding. But there will be one other book at that judgment also open, and it is called the Book of Life. And Scripture says that if your name is written in the book of life, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done because it has been paid for by Jesus Christ. But anyone not found in the book of life will be cast into the lake of fire. So, is your name written in the book of life? Have you called on the Lord? Have you placed all your hope in Him?
If you trust your own deeds, your own righteousness, you will only sink down further, but if you place all your trust in Christ, there is no pit so deep that Christ will not find you there and bring you to God: “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Mt. 12:40).
And so He was, and He is risen from the dead.
Prayer: Father, we know that You are able to say the word and the dead rise, the sick are healed, the enslaved are set free. And that is what I am asking for – for everyone here – that no one would leave this place not knowing Christ and the power of His resurrection. And so we ask for it in His good name, and we pray the prayer that He taught us to pray…
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