Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight we're going to talk about what the early Christians believed about Christ's descent into hell. Now, that very title might sound a little bit strange to you. Yet many Christians, probably the majority of Bible-believing Christians today, have grown up in churches that, either every Sunday or once a year or something like that, have recited one or more of the ancient creeds, particularly the Apostles' Creed.
Now, that creed, which dates back to the second century, it's simply a statement or expression of faith that was used for baptismal candidates. It says this: "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.
He descended to hell, on the third day rose again from the dead, ascended to heaven, sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Thence He will come to judge the living and the dead." Now, if you were to ask the average Bible-believing Christian today what that means, what does it mean that Christ descended into hell, I can assure you that the vast majority would not be able to give you a correct answer or an orthodox answer. In fact, my guess is the majority wouldn't even venture a guess. They'd say, "Huh?
What? I've never heard of that." And yet this was a core doctrine of the early Christians. I mean, the things that are mentioned there in the Apostles' Creed, they are just fundamental basic tenets of the Christian faith. If you don't believe those, you could hardly claim to be a Christian. You could hardly claim to believe the New Testament because these are just basic things that are brought out in the New Testament.
So it's so strange that something that was part of the historic faith that was considered a basic belief, that the majority of Christians today are totally unfamiliar with it or at least don't have an accurate understanding of it if they've heard of it. So what I want to do tonight is to explain to you exactly what that phrase, what that doctrine meant to the early Christians. And then we're going to see how what they believed is exactly what is set forth in the New Testament.
So I think by the end of this evening, you yourself are going to accurately understand what this means, Christ descended into hell. And you should be able to explain it to any other Christian whoever asked you about it. Now, it's not accidental that this doctrine has been lost.
That is, it's not a matter of, "Hmm, I don't know what happened to it, just disappeared." We can pretty accurately pinpoint exactly why this teaching disappeared, even though it's still in the Apostles' Creed, people said it, why it no longer meant anything to anybody and why any doctrine associated with it was pretty well dropped.
Now, I guess I should say before going any further, I assume that those of you listening to this message have already listened to and grasped the message on what the early Christians believed about life after death. Because if you don't understand what they believed about life after death, what the New Testament teaches about life after death, you're not going to be able to understand this doctrine because it's built on that primary doctrine.
So if you've never listened to that message, I would say go ahead and just stop your tape recorder or CD player right now, go listen to that one, and then come back and listen to this or else I'm afraid I may lose you in here. This may not make much sense to you. Now, for those of you who have heard that message on life after death, let me just summarize again the points that we covered in there.
We saw that the early Christians and, more importantly, the New Testament teaches that when we die, we do not go straight to heaven or to the lake of fire. Instead, we all, good and bad alike, go to an intermediate place called Hades, where we all await for the resurrection. Then, after we are resurrected, united again with our bodies, then we stand before the judgment seat of Christ, and then we go on to either heaven or to the lake of fire. Now, Hades is divided into two regions.
There's the upper region called Abraham's bosom or paradise, and this is where the righteous await in glory and bliss and joy until the resurrection. You have not only faithful Christians there, but all of the righteous men and women who've lived on the earth from the time of Abel forward. The rest of mankind who have lived ungodly lives or who have not believed are in the lower parts of Hades, awaiting for the resurrection, but their time in waiting is not a pleasant one like that of Christians.
They know the fearful judgment that lies ahead of them. Okay, so now that's the basic belief. And what happened to that belief that the church originally taught was that the Roman Catholic Church altered it and turned it into purgatory, that you go to purgatory and your sins are purged, then you go straight to heaven not waiting for the resurrection. And so that's, you know, number one why the doctrine got lost because of the false teaching of purgatory.
Well, when the Reformation came, the first generation of reformers like Luther went back to the doctrine of the intermediate state. They threw out purgatory and they restored the doctrine of the intermediate state, but they didn't dwell on it very much. But by the time you get to the Puritans in the 17th century, you find that they've just eliminated the doctrine that when you die, you go straight to heaven or you go straight to hell, meaning the lake of fire. And there isn't any way. There's no intermediate state.
There is no Hades to speak of. And this doctrine was unfortunately reflected then in the translation of the King James Bible. Now, Puritans were not the only translators of that Bible. You had a mixture of different Christians. And in general, they did an admirable job, an outstanding job in their translation. But they did make either one terrible mistake or they let their bias alter their honest translation, whichever it is. It's a terrible defect, whether it was purposeful or not.
And that is they took two different Greek words, Hades and Gehenna, and translated them by one English word, hell. Now, Hades, as I've mentioned, is the intermediate place where the dead, good and bad alike, await for the resurrection. And so it's not a lake of fire. It's not a horrible place to be in. It's a place that you and I hopefully, well, one way or the other, we're going to be in waiting for the resurrection unless we are alive when Jesus returns.
As I said, part of Hades is paradise where the righteous live in joy and bliss until the resurrection. Now, Gehenna is the lake of fire, the one described in Revelation of fire and brimstone where the wicked are cast in. I mean, it's a place of punishment. No righteous person is thrown into there. So here you have two very different places, and these translators translated them by one English word, hell.
In fact, they took a third Greek word, Tartarus, which we're not even going to get into, but it would be a third place dealing with angels, and they translated that hell as well. Totally confusing readers. And as a result of that, the whole doctrine of the intermediate state and, of course, Christ's descent into hell has been lost because when a Christian reads his Bible, if he's reading from the King James, he only sees two places, heaven or hell. There's no mention of a third place.
There was in the original New Testament, there is in the Greek text, including the Textus Receptus, but not in the King James translation. Now, I'm not, as I said, I think that I'm not jumping on the translators. Overall, they did an admirable job. In fact, I think they did an outstanding job with their translation. But in this one regard, they let either bias or ignorance affect their translation.
This would be like somebody translating a book written about the United States and Russia and all the political things, say, back during the Cold War era. And they're translating it into Spanish and having to come up with a word for these two countries. Let's suppose there wasn't a word in Spanish. They decided, "Well, we'll call the United States El Grande. It's a big, big country. El Grande. What about Russia? Well, it's a big country too.
We'll call it El Grande." So you have two different places translated by the same Spanish phrase, El Grande. So you're reading and it says, "Well, El Grande did this, that, you know. Down with El Grande. What are you talking about? The United States, Russia, whatever." And over the centuries, someone reading that book would think, "Well, there's only one country he's talking about." Well, you see the point I'm getting at.
It's no more absurd to take two different words, Hades and Gehenna, that are two entirely different places, very different from each other, and translating them with one English word, hell. Now, I'm getting into this because we can't understand what it means Christ descent into hell unless we understand what the word hell means. And I've already told you that it can mean two different things because there wasn't one word in Greek. There were two different words.
Now, it appears that linguistically, our word hell, its roots go back to the Hebrew word Sheol. And the Greek word Hades is the word that was used to translate Sheol. So then hell would appropriately mean Hades. And in itself, it would be a correct and good word. The problem, though, is when they translated Gehenna as hell, it changed hell from being the grave, the intermediate state of the dead, into a place of torment. And it mixed the two together.
And so the one, just the abode of the dead, got lost and it simply became the place of punishment for the wicked. And it's really inexcusable for the translators to have done this. If we believe in the inspiration, the verbal inspiration of the New Testament, which I do, it means that we believe that God chose particular words for a good reason.
So if he chose two different words, Hades and Gehenna, that did not mean the same thing to the first century, the New Testament Christians, or to any Christians after that, what right do we have to take his word and then confound it by taking two different things and making them one English word? And so the result is when you read the King James and you read hell, you don't know if it's talking about Hades or if it's talking about Gehenna. Now, most modern translations, they usually just leave Hades untranslated.
They may have the word hell in there, meaning the lake of fire, and then they just call Hades Hades. And that's certainly a vast improvement. At least you see that there's two different places and then three counting heaven. I think even better are ones that leave both of them untranslated where you have Hades and you can have Gehenna. And that's because, like I say, hell, the root word that hell comes from meant Sheol, meant Hades. So you're taking a word that meant one thing and now giving it another sense.
Like I say, we've gone into a bit of detail about that because unless you understand that about the word hell, there's no hope of understanding the doctrine. And it's why people don't understand the doctrine today. Talk about Christ descending into hell, what does that mean? And you're going to get all kinds of answers because of that confusion caused by the King James translation. So I think the next logical question is, all right, there's two different Greek words, Hades and Gehenna.
Which one was used in the Apostles' Creed? Did Christ descend into Hades or into Gehenna? Well, the Apostles' Creed was, of course, originally written in Greek. It dates back to the second century. And the Greek word that is used is Hades. Christ descended into Hades. In fact, for the rest of this message tonight, I'm going to be talking about his descent into Hades, not into hell. So erase from your mind any thought that Christ descended into Gehenna.
Because you may remember from the message on what the early Christians believed, nobody has been thrown into Gehenna yet. There would be no purpose to descend there because no one is thrown into there until after the judgment day. Well, let's look at the verses in the Bible that talk about Christ after he died before he was resurrected. There's not a lot of scripture that discusses that, but there are three passages.
And like I say, sometimes these are just kind of skipped over today, but these were very important to the early Christians. The first one is Acts chapter 2, verses 25 and 27. It says, "For David says concerning him, 'You will not leave my soul in Hades, nor will you allow your Holy One to see corruption.'" So when Christ died after he was buried, he was in Hades. But the scriptures say, as was prophesied, that the Father would not leave his soul in Hades, would not abandon him in Hades.
But rather, he brought him out on the third day, as we know. Okay, so he was in Hades. We can establish that from Acts 2:25 and 27. What did he do when he was there? Well, 1 Peter 3:19 tells us this, "He went and preached to the spirits in prison who formerly were disobedient when once the long suffering of God waited in the days of Noah." Again, that's 1 Peter 3:19. So what did he do? It says he's preached to the spirits in prison, the ones who were disobedient back in Noah's day.
So he's not talking about people who were in prison in his day, in a literal prison, but rather these would be the ones who were locked up, shut up in Hades. And then 1 Peter 4:6 continues on that. It says, "For this reason, the gospel was preached also to those who are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the Spirit." So he actually preached to people who were in Hades. As we said, good and bad alike, go to Hades.
And of course, the ones who were there at the time Jesus died, the vast majority of them never heard about Jesus, never had an opportunity to. Most of them would have died before Jesus was even born. And so they had the gospel preached to them. Now, if any of this sounds strange, this is in the Bible. It's not something David Bercot is making up. But have you ever heard that before? Is that preached in your church that Jesus preached to the dead in Hades? I know I never heard it in any church I attended.
You might be saying, "Well, yeah, David, but maybe you're reading something into those passages that wasn't intended by the Bible writers." And you could go and look up those passages in a Bible commentary. And I think you'll find some of the commentaries will tell you exactly what the verse says that Jesus preached to the dead. I mean, that's what it says. But others of them will skirt around that by saying, "Well, that's figurative. He's preached to the dead.
That means that he's preached to those who were spiritually dead." In fact, that's what I grew up believing. But tell me now, how does a commentator know what Jesus meant? What gives somebody the right, a 20th-century writer or 19th-century writer, to sit back and say, "Now, Jesus meant this or the scriptures when it says this. This is what it means." I think my question is, well, how do you know what it meant? Were you there? Did you ask one of the apostles what was meant? No, of course not.
So what other basis do you have? If you want to write a commentary and say, "I don't know what this means, but this is my guess," okay, fine, I have no problem with that. But that's not what commentators do. They always speak so authoritatively, like somehow they have an inside edge on what things meant, that there's a whole vast volume of writings out there somewhere that they've read that none of the rest of us have seen. Well, actually, there are quite a lot of writings.
Those are the writings of the early Christian writers, and that's all we have as far as a historic basis to say this is what was meant and understood in the beginning. We do have the writings of those who came right after the apostles, and that's what we're going to look into today. I have no interest in sharing a message on what David Bercot believes about Christ descending to Hades. Who cares? My opinion isn't worth anything.
And I'd say the same thing, the opinion of some 20th-century scholar, what does that mean? I want to know, what did people who had received the gospel from the apostles, who read their New Testaments in the original Greek, which most of us are not able to do, what did they understand by these verses?
Well, as you already know, if you've heard other messages of mine, my basic thesis is if you take what the scriptures say and give them a very literal, serious application, you'll find out what the early Christians believed. Well, we have three verses. There's a fourth one we're going to look at a little bit later. And these are the only biblical verses that deal with the subject. And we find he was in Hades because the prophecy is, "He will not leave me in Hades." He was not in Gehenna.
He was not in heaven for sure. And then we have two passages that say he preached to the spirits who were in prison. And in case we're not sure what does he mean by the spirits in prison, just the next chapter of 1 Peter says, "He preached to the dead." I think that eliminates any question. So I mean, that's what the early Christians believe, that he was in Hades and he preached to the dead. I mean, what else would there be to believe? Now, let me read to you some passages from them.
And so you can see that what I'm saying is exactly true. This first passage I'm going to read to you was written by Hermas, whose writing probably dates to around the year 150. It may be earlier than that. Find it in volume 1, page 49 of The Ante-Nicene Fathers, where he wrote, "These apostles and teachers preached the name of the Son of God.
After falling asleep in the power and faith of the Son of God, the apostles not only preached it to those who were asleep, but they themselves also gave them the seal of the preaching there." The seal of the preaching means baptism. "Accordingly, the apostles descended with them into the water and ascended again.
For such ones slept in righteousness and in great purity, only they did not have this seal." You know, what he's saying there is that just as Jesus preached to the dead, that when the apostles died, they likewise preached to the dead and even baptized people there. Now, I'm going to get a little ahead of myself, but I want to tell you that was not a universal belief of the early church. I'm going to read to you a number of quotations here, and then let's see what was universal, okay?
Next one I have is from Melito, who was an overseer or bishop in the second century, writing about the year 170. Find this in volume 8, page 757 of The Ante-Nicene Fathers, where he said, "Christ rose from the place of the dead and raised up the race of Adam from the grave below." So that the dead who were there received some benefit when Christ went into Hades. Okay? I'm going to learn a little bit more, all right?
Irenaeus, writing about the year 180, another overseer, a personal disciple of Polycarp, who was a companion of the apostle John. This is in volume 1, page 494. It says this, quoting from scriptures, as for their benefit, quote, "He also descended into the lower parts of the earth," end quotations, "to behold with his eyes the state of those who were resting from their labors.
For Christ did not come merely for those who believed on him in the time of Tiberius Caesar, nor did the Father exercise his providence only for the men who are presently alive. Rather, he exercised it for all men altogether who from the beginning have both feared and loved God." So again, the teaching that Christ descended into the lower part, which we're going to read that particular passage in a few minutes, and that there he preached to the dead.
Now, Irenaeus seems to understand that the ones who were raised from the lower parts of Hades, whom Christ took with him to paradise, which is still within Hades, that these were the righteous ones of all. They were not the wicked who then were given a chance to repent. I'm saying this is what Irenaeus is seeing there, okay? And then again, from Irenaeus, volume 1, page 455, "The Lord was made the first begotten of the dead.
Receiving into his bosom the ancient fathers, he has regenerated them into the life of God." And Jesus made it very clear, unless one is born again, he shall not inherit the kingdom of God. Well, what about all of those who died then before Jesus Christ? Well, it seems to have been the general understanding of the early Christians that Jesus gave them that opportunity, preached to them, baptized them, or whatever equivalent would be in Hades, and that they were born again and able to enter into his kingdom.
These would be the men and women of faith of old. And again, Irenaeus writes, "He gathered from the ends of the earth into his Father's fold the children who were scattered abroad. And he remembered his own dead ones who had previously fallen asleep. He came down to them so that he might deliver them." Okay, so it's not like, oh, Jesus was dead for three days, and then he came out of the grave, now he's here to help us. He was carrying on a very important mission when he descended into Hades.
And that was to bring the power of his blood to those who had already died before him. Irenaeus again wrote, "For three days he dwelt in the place where the dead were, as the prophet said concerning him. And the Lord," and he's quoting from scripture, "and the Lord remembered his dead saints who slept formerly in the land of the dead.
And he descended to them to rescue and to save them." Irenaeus continues, "The Lord himself said," quoting now from the Gospels, "As Jonah remained three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth." Or some translations would say the belly of the earth. So you see, the scriptures are very clear. Jesus made it explicit, "I'm going to be in the belly of the earth for three days." So he wasn't in heaven during those three days.
And what was he doing in the belly of the earth? Just sleeping? No. As we read in 1 Peter, he was preaching to the dead. And he rescued those who had died formerly before Jesus had the keys of death and Hades. And he freed them from the lower part of Hades where they were and took them with him to paradise. I mean, Jesus even told the thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in paradise." So it sounds like he immediately preached that very day they were taken up to paradise.
But paradise, again, is not heaven. Clement of Alexandria, writing similarly, this is in volume 2, page 490, 491. He wrote about the year 195. He said, "The Lord preached the gospel to those in Hades. Does not the scriptures show that the Lord preached the gospel to those who perished in the flood, or rather had been chained as to those kept in ward and guard? And it has been shown also that the apostles following the Lord preached the gospel to those in Hades.
If then the Lord descended to Hades for no other reason but to preach the gospel, as he did descend, it was either to preach the gospel to all or else to the Hebrews only. If accordingly he preached to all, then all who believe will be saved on making their profession there, even though they may be Gentiles. For God's punishments are saving and disciplinary, leading to conversion. He desires the repentance, not the death of a sinner.
This is especially so since souls, although darkened by passions, when released from their bodies are able to perceive more clearly, for they are no longer obstructed by the paltry flesh. Did not the same dispensation obtain in Hades? For even there, all the souls on hearing the proclamation could either exhibit repentance or confess that their punishment was just because they did not believe. And it was not arbitrary that they could obtain either salvation or punishment.
For those who had departed before the coming of the Lord had not had the gospel preached to them, so they had been given no opportunity to either believe or not believe." Okay, so Clement, in discussing this, everyone agreed that Christ descended into Hades and that he preached to the dead there. I mean, that's straight in scripture. The only question that scripture does not answer, and therefore the early church left open, was to whom did he preach?
Well, Peter, it sounds from Peter to me, it says he preached to the spirits who were disobedient. So it certainly sounds like it wasn't only to the righteous. And I think Clement makes a very good point, although we can't accept it as dogma that this is fact. But why would God now extend his grace to all mankind, people of all nations, not just to the Jews?
And yet those who died before Christ came, it's only the Jews who had any opportunity to be saved and that he preached only to the faithful Jews of old, or Hebrews as Clement puts it, which would extend back before the time of Moses or Judah himself. I think Clement makes a very good point. If we're saved by grace and by faith, then someone who never heard the gospel could not possibly be saved. And yet that would be due to no fault of their own. And so wouldn't we expect that?
Wouldn't that be consistent with a God of mercy and love that they would hear the gospel as well? Like I say, it makes perfect sense, and it certainly contradicts nothing in scripture, but we do not have scriptural certainty of that. I think that's a question we have to say we don't know absolutely the answer. Clement wrote again, volume 2, page 492, "He preached the gospel to those in the flesh so that they would not be condemned unjustly.
So how is it conceivable that he did not for the same reason preach the gospel to those who had departed this life before his coming?" One more quote from Clement of Alexandria, volume 2, page 575, he writes, "However, he saves with dignity of honor others who voluntarily follow.
This is so that," according from scripture, "that every knee should bow to him of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth, that is, angels, men, and souls who had departed from this temporal life before his coming." Tertullian, writing about the year 210, wrote this, this is in volume 3, page 231, "Hades is not supposed by us to be a bare cavity nor some subterranean sewer of the world. Rather, it is a vast, deep space in the interior of the earth.
For we read that Christ in his death spent three days in the heart of the earth. He did not ascend into the heights of heaven before descending into the lower parts of the earth. This was so that he might there in Hades make the patriarchs and prophets partakers of himself." Hippolytus, writing about the year 200, volume 5, page 209 of The Ante-Nicene Fathers, said, "Christ is Lord of things under the earth because he was also reckoned among the dead. For he preached the gospel to the souls of the saints.
Through death, he overcame death." And finally, another quote from Hippolytus on page 213 of volume 5, "John the Baptist also first preached to those in Hades, becoming a forerunner there when he was put to death by Herod. So even there too, John revealed that the Savior would descend to ransom the souls of the saints from the hand of death." Okay, so we've read now from most of the major writers of the second-century church. And we do see some divergence, and we see points in common.
The thing in common that they all believe is that Christ was dead and buried for three days in the heart of the earth, that is, he was in Hades, and that while he was there, he preached to the dead. And that the faithful Jews and patriarchs of old and their families, that among these people were saved and rescued out of their prison there in the lower part of Hades and taken up to paradise or Abraham's bosom. Every one of the writers believed that. And that's exactly what the scriptures say.
Every single statement in that set of beliefs I just mentioned is straight out of the scriptures. Now, there's some variation among them. Several of them believe very strongly that John the Baptist prepared the way down there just as he did here on the earth, that he died before Christ, and that one of the reasons why God had him put to death first was that he could do the same kind of preparation work in Hades. But of course, that's not dogma. That's not something you had to believe.
It was something that apparently some of the early Christians believed. But you could not prove that from scripture. Only it makes sense, but we don't know. Some of the writers believe that both the godly and ungodly were preached to, like Clement of Alexandria believed that, and so that those who had never heard the gospel were given a chance. But again, not all the writers say that. We could not say that was a doctrine of the early church, only that it was one of the views. But nobody calls that view heretical.
It's not like, "Oh, that's terrible. That's heresy." Just, "Okay, that's an interesting view, but we don't know." And then a couple of them mentioned that the ones there were baptized in Hades, which would have been simply based on a logical deduction of scripture. Jesus said that unless you're born again, unless you be born of water and the Spirit, you shall not enter the kingdom of God. Well, obviously, for him to redeem people in Hades, they had to enter the kingdom of God. And so they had to be born again.
And if you listen to the tape on what the early Christians believed about salvation and about baptism, you understand that baptism by water and Holy Spirit, they considered essential to salvation in the normal course of things. Of course, Hades is not the normal course of things, so we don't really know if the dead there have the same requirement we do. So then that in a nutshell is what the early Christians believed. Let me just go over it again.
So if someone asked you what they believe, just very simply, and each of these is based on scripture, scripture say Jesus was in the heart of the earth three days before he was resurrected. So he didn't go up to heaven when he died to be with the Father. He was in the earth. Acts said that God said he wouldn't leave them there in Hades. So he was in Hades. Okay, so that's point one. He was three days in Hades in the center of the earth. Number two, what did he do? Sleep? No, it says that he preached to the dead.
So he brought the gospel of salvation to those who were in Hades, perhaps the unbelievers of old, or perhaps only to the faithful men and women of old. Number three, those who believed, those who he did save in Hades, were taken up with him into paradise or Abraham's bosom to wait there until the resurrection. Then the end of three days, God resurrected him as the firstfruits from the dead, then he ascended to heaven. It's really pretty simple, a basic teaching of scripture.
Now, what about this, I'll call it speculation on Clement's part and perhaps Hermas and some of the others, that those who have never heard the gospel will get preached to in Hades or were at least one time preached to there by Christ? Does this mean that he and maybe some of the others believe that everyone will get a second chance? No. He never says that.
I don't see that in anybody, any writer, any speculation whatsoever that we can hear the gospel, reject it, or that we can become a Christian and live a godless life and then get a second chance, a chance to make things good in Hades. Now, see, that's what the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory did, that as long as you did not commit a mortal sin, but you lived not a holy life, well, then when you die, you go to purgatory.
And there you're going to suffer for a while, but then you've paid for your sins and you then immediately go to heaven. You don't wait for the resurrection. So that corrupts two basic principles: one, that someone can go to heaven before Christ returns, and second, that we can get a second chance if we don't live by the scriptures here. None of the early Christians taught that. Rather, they said that those who believed it, that everyone will get a first chance.
Those who've never heard the gospel will have it preached to them in prison. And like I say, I think that's a wonderful thought. I hope that that's true. But we don't know positively it's true. And there's maybe a reason why God has not told us positively. If we knew that for a certainty, we would feel little urgency to evangelize, would we? To take the gospel to other countries. Oh, well, that's fine.
Don't worry about reaching this people group, some primitive group on this island out somewhere in the Pacific Ocean or Indian Ocean or something. Because when they die, they're going to get preached to in Hades. And so let's not worry about it. Well, that's not what God wants. He wants the gospel to be preached throughout the world. So he's given us no guarantee that they will get an opportunity in Hades.
On the other hand, I think it's very wrong when Christians dogmatically state that, "Oh, these people who didn't hear the gospel, they die and go into eternal torment, never having had a chance to hear the gospel." Well, you don't know that either. The scriptures are silent in that regard. All we know is that to be saved, a person does have to believe in Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior and has to be born again.
So if there is salvation open to ones in Hades, and at least at one time there was when Jesus died, at least to the faithful men and women of old. Now, the second part, I think, of this coin, the other side is we certainly don't know for sure that people will get a first chance in Hades. On the other hand, we certainly do not know that they will not get that.
So we don't need to be dogmatic saying, "Oh, they'll get an opportunity." But we don't need to be dogmatic saying, "If they don't hear it from us, they're eternally lost." Like our failure or our inability or impossibility to reach them with the gospel means that they lose eternal life when they never even had an opportunity for it. I know I'm convinced God is going to do what is fair and just and merciful, and I'm content to leave that in his hand.
Now, when I first read all these things in the early Christian writings, it really blew me away. I'd never heard of anything like this. Either I grew up a Jehovah's Witness, I never heard anything like that from them, and certainly never heard that in the evangelical church I belong to. But when I reread the New Testament, I saw, "Oh, yeah, this is right here. Sure, Jesus was in Hades." And yeah, it does say he preached to the dead. And I realized, "Oh, this was in my Bible all along. How come I never heard this?
Why didn't anyone teach this?" And I was just curious. I thought, "Well, I'll look in one of my reference books." I was an evangelical at that time, attended an evangelical church. And one of my reference books that I had was entitled The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. It's a conservative Bible-based work, but it's very biased towards evangelical thinking. Its contributors are men like J.I. Packer and Charles Ryrie, F.F. Bruce, Norman Geisler, men like that, very educated men and very evangelical.
Well, to my great surprise, they basically acknowledge everything I've told you. I want to read just some excerpts to you. This is from, again, The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, which I assume is still in print. You could, I'm sure, find it at any seminary library. This is what it says. It has a heading, "Descent into Hell," and in parentheses, "Hades." It says, "In the New Testament, Hades indicates the abode of the dead and is roughly equivalent to Sheol in the Old Testament.
It was believed that upon death, both good and bad go to Hades. Though in later biblical thought, the good are seen to be in a higher compartment of Hades called Paradise." Isn't this everything I've been telling you? It's like, "Wow, well, these men know it. How come you don't hear this anywhere?" In the intertestamental and New Testament periods, there was disagreement among the rabbis as to whether Paradise was to be included in Hades or was indeed a separate realm altogether.
Paul maintained that we are closer to God in Paradise than in our earthly, bodily existence. The wisdom of Solomon and Maccabees spoke of the righteous as being in the very presence of God. Tertullian reflected the viewpoint of many church fathers in his contention that Paradise is not yet heaven, but is higher than hell, affording an interval of rest to the souls of the righteous. It's an odd statement to put the word hell in there after what I've just explained to you because what does he mean? Hades or Gehenna?
Anyway, it continues, "Hades as the intermediate state of the dead is to be distinguished from Gehenna, the future abode of the damned, the eschatological hell, as well as from Tartarus, the realm of darkness inhabited by the devil and his angels." Though these distinctions were not always made in the early church.
Now, all of that is, like I say, everything I've just told you earlier, except for one thing that is just a false statement, saying, "Though these distinctions were not always made in the early church." I take issue with that. The distinction is very clear in the early church. If you've read any of the Ante-Nicene fathers, you know that. The quotations I've read to you, they never confound Hades and Gehenna.
And they have also left out all the many writers who did view Paradise or Abraham's bosom as being part of Hades. It only mentions the alternate view that it's not in Hades, but it's not in heaven either. And it makes it look like, "Oh, that's what the church in general was saying." Then also throwing some doubt, "Well, they didn't always make that distinction." No, they always made that distinction. For one thing, they didn't use the word hell. They either used Hades or Gehenna.
So how could they not help but make the distinction? Okay, let me keep reading. Christ's descent into Hades after his crucifixion and death has a solid foundation in both scripture and the early church. In the New Testament, it is attested to in Acts 2:31, Ephesians 4:9 and 10. We're going to go back and read that Ephesians in a minute. And 1 Peter 3:19 and 20.
The passages in Ephesians and 1 Peter seem to indicate the extension of the saving work of reconciliation and redemption to the souls in the nether world of Hades. Well, I guess to me, it isn't a matter of they seem to do that. I think they're fairly clear that they do. But I'll continue. In the gospels, reference is made to the saints in the tombs, and then in quotations, they say, or parentheses, the nether world, who were raised with Jesus. Jesus also spoke of forgiveness in this world and in the world to come.
He confidently expected that the gates of Hades could not prevail or hold out against the church. In the book of Revelation, it is said that Christ possesses the keys to the underworld and can open its gates. Similarly, an angel is given the key to the bottomless pit in order to open it.
Christ's descent into Hades, I'm still reading from this, was almost universally affirmed by the church fathers, including Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Origen, Hermas, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria, Athanasius, Ambrose, and Augustine. The earliest patristic references to the descent occur in the Epistles of Ignatius about the beginning of the second century. There was disagreement among the church fathers on who benefited from Christ's descent.
Many restricted Christ's redemptive activity in the realm of the dead to the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets. And he says among those are Ignatius, Irenaeus, Tertullian. Others hold that those who had died before the great flood were likewise redeemed. He says the Alexandrian theologians, well, that would be Clement and Origen. Some thought that Jesus Christ redeemed all the dead with the exception of the very wicked. And now here he quotes Melito. I did not certainly get that view from Melito.
Gregory of Nazianzus, who's post-Nicene Marcion, who was a heretic, Cyril of Alexandria spoke of Christ spoiling all Hades, emptying the insatiable recesses of death and leaving the devil desolate and alone. Again, Cyril is a post-Nicene writer. We'll end of quotation. Again, that's from a conservative evangelical reference work. It's basically everything that I've told you. So again, my question is, okay, evangelical scholars know this. They know it's in the Bible.
They know it's what Christians originally believed. Why isn't this taught? You just don't hear this in churches. Like I say, when I've talked on this subject, I mean, people open their eyes like, "What kind of weird thing is David talking about?" Even worse, I've seen books and things today by prominent evangelicals and charismatics that they have this thing so confused because of the confusion over the word hell. And they think that Christ descended into Gehenna, into the lake of fire.
And one person I read even said that he had to be tormented there to pay the price of our sins. That included going into the lake of fire and being tormented. I mean, that's just how ignorant the modern-day church has become. Losing understanding about the word Hades, the underworld, the place of the dead. Not understanding that the lake of fire, you don't read anyone being thrown in the lake of fire until in Revelation after the resurrection. Then they're cast into the lake of fire.
And then Hades, it says, is cast into the lake of fire. Before closing, I want to read one other scripture passage that is very germane to the subject. This is Ephesians 4:8 through 10. It says this about Christ. When he ascended on high, he led captivity captive and gave gifts to men. Now this, he ascended, what does it mean? But that he also first descended into the lower parts of the earth. He who descended is also the one who ascended far above all the heavens that he might fill all things.
Okay, so there it specifically tells us once again in the scriptures that he descended into the lower parts of the earth, into Hades. And so this, again, just supports what we've been saying.
Now, the reason I wanted to focus on this is that so many people have told me, once who have had some theological training, that, "Oh, yeah, it's true that people used to all go to Hades, but once Christ died and went into Hades, then he destroyed it and he led everybody free and all the righteous were taken with him to heaven." Of course, my response is, "Well, if that's in the scriptures, of course I'm going to believe it." Now, where does the scripture say that?
And they always quote Ephesians 4:8 to 10, the first part. When he ascended on high, he led captivity captive and gave gifts to men. Excuse me. Now, that says that he destroyed Hades. That says that he took all the righteous to heaven with him. It says nothing of the sort. We all agree he ascended on high. And as the Bible writer says, what does it mean that he ascended? First, he descended into the lower parts of the earth.
And we all know he was resurrected and we've all read the account of his ascension in the first chapter of Acts. So there's nothing new in that when he ascended on high. Oh, he led captivity captive. That says that everyone went to heaven with him. That says that Paradise no longer existed. Abraham's bosom was done away with. It says nothing of the sort. He led captivity captive is all it says. Admittedly, it's not a clear statement.
And I go into a little bit more detail on this in the message on what the early church believed about life after death. But none of the early Christians understood that or had any reason to understand that to mean that Paradise was done away with and everyone would go straight to heaven from there on out. And it says he gave gifts to men. And we all believe, I think, that he poured out his Holy Spirit and there were spiritual gifts that the church received and receives throughout the century.
So that passage says nothing of the sort about that, but it certainly corroborates what we've been saying about Christ descending into the lower parts of the earth. And yet, like I say, some Christians have even the notion that when Jesus died, he went straight to heaven. And somehow he came back for his body when he was resurrected, then he went back to heaven again. And there were witnesses to his ascension. We read that there in the first chapter of Acts. Does it say there was a whole bunch of people with him?
They all went up to heaven together? No. It only mentions Jesus by himself. He was caught away, not they were caught away. So again, that's been an invention by Christians who wanted to not believe in the intermediate state. And I think their only objection to it, why they had such opposition was because it had been turned into purgatory. And so to just defeat the whole thing, they just deny there is an intermediate state. We all go straight to heaven.
I think just about every funeral I've been to, the person's always been preached, "Oh, yeah, they're in heaven now," and all of this. And yet, like I say, reference works from evangelicals, from Bible-believing Christians acknowledge all of this, but somehow that never filters down to the messages we hear preached in church or at funerals. It's always they go straight to heaven.
Well, regardless of the issues that we don't have answers to on this whole subject, the good news is that God, in his mercy, did send his son, not only to us here on the earth that we might be saved, but he even sent his son to those who had already died so that they could hear the message of the gospel. And maybe the only ones who benefited were those who were men and women of faith of old. But maybe it was everybody who had died got a chance to hear the gospel for the first time.
And perhaps the same is true today that people who die without ever hearing the gospel have the gospel preached to them in Hades. We don't know the answers to all of these questions, but we can see from what the scriptures have revealed that we worship a loving God, an immersible God who cares about everybody, not only those of us who are living on the earth, but even those who are living under the earth in Hades.