He Descended into Hell

In his Pentecost sermon the Apostle Peter tells us, speaking of our Lord, that His soul was not left in Hell (Acts ii. 27, A.V.). In this he quoted Psalm xvi. 8, “Thou wilt not leave my soul in Hell, neither wilt Thou suffer Thine Holy One to see corruption.” Clearly we must infer that Christ’s soul must have entered the sombre precincts of the region, thus designated, or there would have been no thought of His being left there.

When the Authorised Version was made, the word hell had not acquired those dread associations which now gather around it. It meant simply “‘a covered place,” “the dark hole into which a tailor might fling his waste shreds, or some shady nook hidden by leafy boughs.” The. translators used the word to render two Greek ones, Hades and Gehenna, and so the confusion of thought has become still more confounded.

There was a considerable difference in the mind of the Hebrew people between the places denoted

by these two words. They had no idea that the

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world was round, and there was no necessity for Divine illumination on this point. God’s Spirit does not inform us on matters which we are able to discover for ourselves. The chosen race was Divinely taught and inspired as to the Infinite and Eternal world which is concealed by but the thinnest veil of gauze, but their notions of cosmogony and astronomy were crude and elementary. They thought of the earth as a vast plain, floating through space as a broad leaf floats through the air, the upper side lit by the sun and inhabited by the living, the underside sunless and gloomy and reserved for the souls of those who have died. This underside was called Hades — the Unseen.

Therefore, we meet frequently with the threefold designation of ‘‘ things in heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth” (Phil. ii. 10). And we are told that “He descended into the lower parts of the earth” (Eph. iv. 10). As you can only fill a vessel from the bottom upwards, so, says the Apostle, in the process of filling all things with His glorious Fulness, our Lord began at the very bottom. “Shout, ye lower parts of the earth, for the Lord hath done it.’ In this immense Kingdom of the Unseen, the disembodied spirits of the departed awaited their final award, but not all under the same conditions; for Hades consisted of two provinces, Paradise and Gehenna. In one of our Lord’s most memorable parables, we are told that Lazarus was borne to the bosom of Abraham, that is, in the Paradisaical world, whilst the rich man lifted his eyes from the torment of Gehenna.

The Revisers use our English word hell as the equivalent of Gehenna, leaving the word Hades wherever they find it. For instance, in our Lord’s pathetic apostrophe to Capernaum, instead of the A.V., “Thou shalt be brought down to Heil,” the R.V. gives the rendering, ‘‘ Thou shalt be brought down to Hades;” i.e., all the gay and busy crowds that now throng thy streets will soon have passed into the world of the Unseen, and will have no successors. Again, the old version of the memorable prediction of the stability of the Church ran thus, “The gates of Hell shall not prevail against it,” but the latter version is the more accurate, which asserts that the Gates of Hades, 1.e., the principalities and power of the unseen world, from whatever quarter they may emanate, shall never overthrow the Church, which avows, as Peter did, the Divine Sonship.

When we recite this clause in the Creed, we therefore affirm our faith that He who was very

God of very God, not only conformed to the laws of our humanity in His Birth, but in His death also; and that when His soul left the sacred body, which it had tenanted for three-and-thirty years, and which was not destined to see corruption, it went forth, clothed in that psychical body which it had woven for itself, to visit those further kingdoms which lie on the other side of this brief span of human existence.

On the one hand, He said to the dying thief, “This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise”; whilst, on the other, the Apostle Peter tells us that being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit, he went and preached unto the spirits in Prison, bearing them tidings of an accomplished salvation. The Apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus adds that on entering Gehenna, our Lord took our forefather Adam by the hand, and said to the vast crowds of imprisoned spirits, “Come ye with me as many as have died through the tree which he touched, for behold I raise you up through the Tree of the Cross,” so by the Cross as a bridge the inhabitants of Gehenna passed over into Paradise. But this is a legend only.