The Harrowing of Hell

The Harrowing of Hell (Going Deeper Still)

For those of you deciding to go deeper into the topic with me, in this section I will explain my current musings and theories on The Harrowing of Hell.  I will outline few basic assumptions and questions to be addressed and then present my current hypothesis.

The assumptions I begin with include:

1. The canonical Bible is my authoritative reference.
2. Tradition, creeds, and extra-biblical works may be informative but do not carry the same weight as the Bible.
3. Jesus was fully God… and fully human (body, soul, and spirit).
4. Hell is real even if it’s not like a location like New York City or Paris.

Specifically the questions investigated are:

1. Where does the idea of a “descent into hell” come from?
2. What are theological ideas to preserve in any discussion of Christ’s descent into hell?
3. Which connected issues contribute to our understanding of the purpose of any “descent into Hell”?
4. Conclusion of where did Jesus go after He died and what did He do?

Where does the descent into hell come from? 

Certain Scriptures have been identified as possibly informing a descent into hell (principally 1 Peter 3:18-20).  However, the clearest statement regarding Christ’s descent into hell came from the Apostle’s Creed.  Creeds are not Scripture, but they cause us to ask questions why the early Church made it part of the liturgy.  The Apostle’s Creed states:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
the Maker of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:

Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;

He descended into hell.

The third day He arose again from the dead;

He ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost;
the holy catholic church;
the communion of saints;
the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body;
and the life everlasting.

Amen.

What are the theological ideas to preserve in any discussion of Christ’s descent into hell?

God’s holiness, Christ’s full humanity and divinity, the truth of the Bible, Christ’s sinlessness, God’s goodness, the completed will of God and completed act of salvation are among the ideas to preserve.

In every complicated concept, there are connected ideas that need to be pulled away far enough from the topic to see how they contribute, but not so far away as to remove their influence.  What are the connected ideas?

The timing of a descent into hell.

In order to determine what “He descended into hell” means we must first recognize that it comes between “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried” and before “He arose again from the dead.”  In a timeline of events, this early creed positions the descent into hell as being post-burial and prior to the Resurrection of His body.  It’s something the Creed places in the sealed tomb…the grave.

Hell. 

We can admit that hell, Sheol, Hades can mean nothing more than “abode of the dead” in some instances while in other cases and to various theologians, it will mean the flames of eternal punishment.  The Bible speaks of hell often and Jesus taught its reality.  We need to see beyond our caricature of hell and accept the range of what Scripture says about it.  Hold that thought while we introduce another dimension.

Time. 

Time is not a fixture of the spiritual realm the way it is for the earthly, physical realm.  We see this at Creation where Scripture says, “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years,  and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.’ And it was so”  (Genesis 1:14-15).  But we must also acknowledge “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Peter 3:8).  Once Jesus broke free from the earthly realm at His death, our three earthly days were not His spiritual limitation.  Hold that thought while we introduce another dimension in addition to Hell and Time.

The Uniqueness of Jesus Christ. 

We cannot have either the error of viewing Jesus as just a man like anyone else or viewing Him as not really human.  In some mysterious way, Jesus was both fully God and fully human.   As fully God, He did not die (as in cease to exist even though He tasted death), but as fully man, He would have died as a human being.

Jesus (fully God and fully man) suffered/tasted death.  “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Hebrews 2:9).

But Jesus (fully God and fully man) could not be held by the power of human death.  “This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him” (Acts 2:23-4).

Jesus, as fully God and fully human, changed the outcome possibilities for mankind because of His human death.  Therefore, He paved the way for the rest of us.  As Adam paved the way for sin to result in death, Jesus—the last Adam—paved the way to victory over death and therefore, is the giver of eternal life.

“So it is written: ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45).

Because Jesus is this life-giving Spirit, all who place their trust in Him have this hope of immortality.

“Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed–  in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’ ‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:51-57).

While admittedly we are still in-process (i.e. death still happens to the physical body), something has changed.  We have freedom instead of slavery.  We have hope instead of fear.  We have victory instead of destruction.  “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy 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 2:14-15).

At the death of His physical body, He gave up His spirit…not His divinity.  His death was unlike any other human death because He was also fully God.  What about His soul?

Presenting a theory on the interaction between body, soul, and spirit.

Every human being is both spiritual (spirit) and physical (flesh/body).  Additionally, when God gave us life, we had a connecting bond between our spiritual aspect and our physical body.  That connecting bond is our soul.   I continually have a hard time figuring out exactly what is the soul because I’d assumed it was a “thing.”  Thinking of it as a bond is helpful.

At Creation, we were physical bodies (shaded in diagram) in which the spirit of life was breathed by God (Genesis 2:7).  By virtue of being created in the Image of God, we have a connecting bond between spirit and flesh.  The connecting bond, our soul, held us together at creation.  We were obedient to God and our spirits and our bodies were not at odds.  Think of it as the attracting force between two magnets (body and spirit) and it joined us together.

At the Fall of Man, death entered the picture and our bodies go from dust to dust (Genesis 3:19).  The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).  We are cut off from direct spiritual access to God by our sin.  The Image of God in us has been broken but not lost.  Therefore, our soul is in a place of constant decision-making (Romans 7:19).  Instead of remaining the bond between body and spirit, it is now the battleground…with far greater affinity for the body and its fleshly desires .  The soul is filled with evil inclinations (Genesis 8:21).  We cannot comprehend the spiritual on our own.  Sin blocks our spiritual relationship with God.  We have a one-way arrow, apart from the finished work of Christ.  The spiritual part of us, though, because of His Image in us…has an indentation, a memory of attachment from the soul to the spiritual.  A bond existed but has become “demagnetized.”

Following this analogy/explanation, when Jesus came as the unique Son of God (fully God, fully man), He is the very Image of God.  Not made in the image.  He IS the Image—the new Adam.  Therefore, He didn’t have the body’s break from the spiritual.  By His obedience and sinlessness, He kept His spiritual purity even to the death of His earthly body.   His soul was (by perfect willful obedience to the Father) oriented solely toward the spirit and He restored the bond between man’s flesh and a spirit in relationship to God.  He “re-magnetized” what had been demagnetized.  He is the author and perfecter of our faith.

The work of God at the Cross was reconciliation of the human condition with the pre-Fall spiritual condition.  Jesus’ break at death was not a mere human death which would have been between soul and spirit.  Jesus was not just fully man.

Rather His break was between body and soul and He was “made alive in Spirit.”  Since what makes us living beings is our spirit, and what makes us human is our soul and body, when Jesus died and His blood was shed, there was a taking back of the keys of death that mankind handed over to Satan in the Garden of Eden when we made the decision to abandon God in favor of the flesh.

Jesus’ body lay in the ground as Evidence A (demagnetized, if you will, from the soul).  Jesus’ soul and spirit transcended death as Exhibit B.  In light of the evidence of Jesus’ break (victory over death), hell was “harrowed” as the righteous whose faith lay dormant and experienced “soul sleep” while their bodies lay in the ground were—at the Cross—freed from bondage of body to soul.  By faith, their souls experienced the life-giving spirit of Christ and in Him, their arrows were realigned/reconciled to God.

The prince of this world had no hold on Jesus because sin had no part in Him.  Death couldn’t keep Him.  Death was swallowed up in victory.  While that worked for the perfect Son of God, why would that be allowed to help us?

Since there is no forgiveness without shedding of blood, Jesus had to die in order to restore the harmony of body, soul, and spirit for us.  Death, therefore, was no longer tied to sin because complete forgiveness had been added to the possibilities.  Therefore, death no longer formed a block from body to soul to spirit.  In this way, He became a life-giving Spirit.

Conclusion:  So where are we now?

Apart from Christ, we still have a block and a separation…and an inclination toward fleshly desires.  This is the sin nature and carrying this nature to our physical death is what makes it permanent (i.e. hell as the lake of fire of Rev 20:15 and the “second death” of Rev 21:8; see also Mt 10:28).

In Christ, however, there is forgiveness of sin and that block is no longer there.  In Christ, we have peace with God because His sacrifice was perfect and accepted by God.

As long as we are alive, our soul is still a battleground.  However, with forgiveness now in the mix, we have a whole new nature (2Cor 5:17-18) because Jesus Christ was victorious over death.  See also Romans 8:3-14, 1 Corinthians 15:22, and Colossians 2:11-14.

“For this is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead, so that they might be judged according to men in regard to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit” (1 Peter 4:6).

In this way, Christ “harrowed hell” in principle because His body remained in the grave for three days demonstrating a complete death.  With hell as the “abode of the dead” and with Jesus truly dead, He paved the way for a whole new nature and authored forgiveness for all who would trust in Him.  His Resurrection and the empty tomb proved in earthly time what existed at the moment of His death in the spiritual realm: victory.

Jesus says, “I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades” (Revelation 1:18).

I began researching this with skepticism.  I held a caricature of a physical Christ walking into the flames of hell to take the physical keys out of a physical Satan’s hand, grabbing the physically dead by their chained hands, unlocking the handcuffs, and marching them visibly out of hell (i.e. a divine jailbreak).  But now, trying to see with spiritual eyes the importance of what Christ did as the last Adam, it makes more sense to believe it…and to wonder if the Apostle’s Creed is a clearer cut-and-paste of Scripture than I thought in the beginning.

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