Holy Week (Saturday) - ‘He Descended'

Welcome back to Saturday, our final day of our Holy Week study before we celebrate

Easter on Sunday at Trinity Bible Church.

We don't know a ton of what happened on Saturday.

We know that at this point Joseph has taken him down and wrapped him in a shroud

and placed him in the tomb.

Jesus' last breath was crying out, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit to you.

What happens during Jesus' death is up for much debate, and I'll be honest,

this episode, if you want to call it that, is a little more technical than some

of our others, but I think it's worthy of discussion.

And I think if you'll bear with me a bit, it'll be edifying to consider what

Jesus has accomplished and what He is accomplishing even on Saturday as He is,

for all intents and purposes, dead.

Now, when we talk about death, what is death in the Bible? I think fundamentally,

I love this expression of it.

Death is a separation, a dividing of things that ought to be united.

Fundamentally, it's a separation from God. This is the curse in Genesis that we find.

Paul says this in Ephesians 2, You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which

you once walked. talking to Christians.

He's explaining their pre-Christ life as people who were the walking dead.

To be in sin is to be dead and enslaved to dark powers, to be separated from

God, to be children of God's wrath. That is what the Bible attests to.

But of course, death is more than just separation from God. Death also marks

the separation of the soul from the body.

We talk about this often at church, but you are a spirit, you're a soul that has a body.

Those two things have been joined together.

God made human beings to be embodied souls and ensouled bodies,

and death seems to rip this union apart.

But what happens to those two parts? Psalm 1610 gives us a window into that biblical teaching.

It says, you will not abandon my soul to Sheol or let your Holy One see corruption.

This passage, I think, instructs us as the normal account of what happens when someone dies, right?

The soul is in one sense dealt with and sent to Sheol and the body sees corruption.

Jesus says that he goes to the place of the dead, to Sheol.

In Acts 2, 29-31, Peter tells us that David, in writing that psalm,

foresaw the resurrection of Christ that he was not abandoned to Sheol.

That is, his soul wasn't, nor did his flesh see corruption.

So, Christ dies, and he goes to Sheol, to the place of the dead.

So I would argue that the Bible lays out a place, especially pre-Christ, called Sheol.

Sheol, that is the place of the dead. Sheol is the place of the souls of the

dead, both the righteous, like Jacob from Genesis 37 and Samuel from 1 Samuel 28, and the wicked,

as talked about in Psalms 31.17.

In the New Testament, the Hebrew word Sheol is translated as Hades,

and the description of Sheol in the Old and New Testament bears some resemblance

to the Hades of even Greek mythology.

There's certain things, certain clues we hear about this. It says it's under

the earth in Numbers 16, that it's a city with gates, Isaiah 38, has bars in Job 17.

It is a land of darkness, a place where shades and the shadowy souls of men dwell.

It is a land of forgetfulness, Psalm 88, where no work is done and no wisdom

exists, Ecclesiastes 9.

Most significantly, Sheol is a place where no one praises God, from Psalm 6, Psalm 88.

Psalm 115 and Isaiah 38.

In the New Testament, we get an extended depiction of the afterlife,

Luke 16, 19-31, where we have these two compartments,

Hades, where the rich man is sent in this story, and Abraham's bosom,

where the angels carry Lazarus in this story.

Again, I would encourage you to go read that story for our sake today.

We don't have a ton of time to go into all of these things.

But Hades is a place of torment where fire causes anguish to the souls in prison there.

Abraham's bosom, on the other hand, while within shouting distance,

it seems, of Hades is separated from it by a great chasm.

While much mystery, again, still remains, and I would encourage you again to

go back and read those passages I mentioned to slow down and think about them,

and I certainly don't contend to be an expert on the topic,

the picture begins to take shape.

All dead souls go down to Sheol, or in the Greek, Hades.

But Sheol, this place of the dead, is divided into two distinct sides,

one for the righteous, redeemed by God, and one for the wicked.

The righteous, who died prior to Christ's resurrection, dwelled in Sheol with Abraham.

Though they were cut off from the land of the living, they were not tormented as the wicked were.

Well, that bears the question, where did Jesus go when he dies?

Based on Jesus' words to the thief on the cross in Luke 23, 43,

some Christians believe that after his death, Jesus' soul went to heaven to

be in the presence of the Father.

But Luke 23, 43 doesn't say that Jesus would be in the presence of God.

It says He would be in the presence of the thief.

He says, Today you will be with me in paradise.

Based on the Old Testament and Luke 16, it seems likely that the now repentant

and redeemed thief would be at Abraham's side, a place of comfort and rest for

the righteous dead, which Jesus here calls paradise.

Following his death for sin, then Jesus journeys to Hades, to the city of death,

and rips its gates off of the hinges.

He liberates those who were redeemed and saved before his death,

paying for their sins, securing their righteousness.

People like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and David, and even John the Baptist,

who was beheaded not long before Jesus' his death, all of the Old Testament

faithful, ransoming them from the power of Sheol.

For more on that, I would read Psalm 49.15, Psalm 86.13, Psalm 89.48.

They had waited there for so long, not having received what was promised,

so that their spirits would be made perfect along with the saints of the new covenant.

See Hebrews 11, 39-40 and 12-23.

After his resurrection, Jesus ascends to heaven and brings those ransomed dead

with him, so that now paradise is no longer down near the place of torment,

but is up, the highest heaven where God dwells.

See 2 Corinthians 12, 2-4.

Now, in what we would call the church age, I would say the post-Christ age,

when the righteous die, they aren't merely carried by angels to Abraham's bosom and Sheol.

They depart to be with Christ, which is far better.

Paul tells us that in Philippians 1.23.

The wicked, however, the unredeemed, remain in Hades until the final judgment.

When Hades will give up its dead who dwell there and they are judged according to their deeds.

Now, there's the good news. I know this, again, had been a little technical,

and I pray that it's been at least somewhat edifying, made you think a little bit.

But at the end of all of this, what we learn is that those in Hades,

in those places of torment, will be judged by their deeds. And so it is with us.

We will, too, have our deeds judged.

The only difference between someone in Hades and someone that would have gone

to Abraham's bosom or for us to be with Christ is not that their deeds will or will not be judged.

It's that when we are judged, we are judged on the basis of what Christ has done for us.

His deeds, His righteousness is ours.

Our deeds, our sinful deeds that rightly deserve judgment, that rightly deserve

Hades, that rightly deserve an eternal hell have been placed on Jesus' body.

His blood has been shed for that, and His righteousness has been given to us.

Ultimately, Christ's journey to Hades demonstrates that He was indeed made like us in every way.

Not only did He bear the wrath of God on our behalf on the cross,

He endured death, the separation of His soul from His body.

His body was in Joseph's tomb, and His soul was three days in Sheol, the place of the dead.

But as Psalm 16 makes clear, Jesus is not only like us, but different than us.

Jesus' body was buried like ours, but it did not decay.

Jesus' soul went to Hades, like the Old Testament saints, but wasn't abandoned there.

God raised him from the dead, reunited his soul with his now glorified body,

so that he is the first fruits of the resurrection.

This is good news for us, because those in Christ now bypass the land of forgetfulness,

where no one praises God.

Instead, when we die, we join with the angelic choir and the saints of old to

sing praises to the Lamb who was slain for us.

The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed.

I would encourage you for more on this topic. I've been extremely helped by

the writings of a guy named Marshall Siegel.

Feel free to Google him and look him up. I think he gives a lot of great helpful

thoughts on thinking about Sheol, a place of the dead, and Hades,

and heaven, and how those things worked. Again, there's always mystery.

God hasn't given us all the answers

to those questions, nor do we need the answers to all those questions.

But I hope that this was helpful for you, if not maybe a little technical.

But if nothing else, again, what we take away is that Christ has died and Christ is risen.

We too will rise with Him in the end.