Materials
What We Believe
#3
To Hell and Back
I Peter 3:18-22
by R. Todd Bouldin
I am continuing a series today on the core beliefs of our church,
and those doctrines affirmed since the first century of Christian
faith. The New Testament contains several early hymns and affirmations
of faith that became prevalent in the New Testament church. Because
of the many conflicts and struggles over the identity of Jesus in
the first centuries of Christianity, the church wrote creeds to summarize
their faith into precise formulas and doctrines. One of the earliest
of these was the Apostle’s Creed, which may date as far back
as the second century. When the Apostle’s Creed speaks of Jesus,
it says that He was born of a virgin, was crucified, and that He
descended into hell. That phrase has been a subject of controversy
for two thousand years because it is a hard phrase to understand,
but I believe it speaks an important word that the New Testament affirms,
and that we must hear if we are to make any sense of our suffering.
God in Jesus Christ has gone to hell and back.
Prayer - O God, give us Your Spirit to understand
the heights of Your love for us, and on this day, the depths of Your
love for us. Believing in that love, may we understand ourselves and
our suffering through the cross of our Savior. In His Name, Amen.
One of the most natural and common questions of life is “why?”
I’ve asked myself that many times when I see people with thin
bodies who never work out and eat what they want. We always wonder
why some people seem to have it better than us. I have heard it in
hospital rooms when someone experiences illness after illness. I have
heard it from those who have experienced the loss of something or
someone important in their life. I’ve heard it as grief-stricken
family stands around the casket of a loved one who has died suddenly.
I imagine that many of us asked “why” this week when we
heard of the tragic death of a whole family in their mini-van on Highway
118 near Camarillo. I’ve heard survivors of the Holocaust, tribal
groups in Rwanda, and Christians in Sudan ask this question. We also
question why God doesn’t intervene to stop the spread of AIDS,
or to prevent the horrors of 9/11 or the London bombings. It is a
question we all ask at some point in our lives. Why?
Scripture surprisingly does not answer this question. Rather than
answer the question of why, Scripture talks about who.
The question why is important in the book of Job, but not
because the question is answered, but because it leads Job in facing
the great whirlwind to ask the question of God. And that is ultimately
what suffering does to us. Eventually the why question leads
us to ask the God question. Who is this God? The cross tells us
that God is the One who is powerful enough to enter our suffering
and redeem it for His purpose.
Philippians 2:8 tells this story in the language of humiliation and
exaltation, going down and coming up. “[Jesus] being found in
human form, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of
death – even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted
Him . . . .” Central to understanding what God has done in Jesus
Christ is understanding what Christ did for us on the cross. There
are several dimensions to the cross, and I will deal with only one
of them today. At the cross, Christ took on our suffering, death and
even our descent into hell.
To be alive is inevitably to suffer. For some reason, some seem to
suffer more than others. Some suffer because of some social or personal
injustice. Others suffer because of abusive parents, or disease, or
poverty. But eventually all of us suffer because we are vulnerable,
especially to death. One day your family and friends will gather around
a hole in the ground and place your dead body inside it. Then they
will go home, but you will not. Your body will decay into nothingness,
and in a hundred years, the memory of most of us will evaporate into
nothingness too. You can distract yourself from this grim reality
with many comforts, achievements, or entertainment, but you cannot
prevent its coming. Dreams, relationships and life itself will come
to an end.
But there is a higher reality than death, and that is God. God would
not abandon us to this ultimate form of suffering and alienation,
death and nothingness. So He took death upon Himself, not to destroy
its reality (which still will happen to us), but to destroy its power.
Jesus suffered. He experienced the total absence of God in His suffering
when He cried out from the cross, “My God, My God, why have
You forsaken Me?” God in Jesus died and was buried. He experienced
the reality of death and hell for you so that you would never have
to. I Peter 3:18 says, “For Christ also suffered for sins once
for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you
to God.”
But how did He descend into our hell? Peter says in his sermon at
Pentecost, quoting from the Psalms, “God will not abandon my
soul to Hades.” (Acts 2:27). Paul says in his letter to the
Ephesians, “When it says that He ascended, what does it mean
but that He also descended to the lowest parts of the earth?”
(Ephesians 4:5). Peter again writes in our text for today, “He
was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit, in which
also He went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who
in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days
of Noah.” (1 Peter 3:19-20).
What does this all mean? I have no idea. They are confusing texts.
But it may be that the reference to Noah is a metaphor to speak of
the time when humans had so abandoned God that God abandoned them
to the hell of living without Him. The Bible does not say much about
hell, and the descriptions of it are in symbolic language, so it is
hard to know. But what does seem obvious to me is that hell is
anywhere where God isn’t. It is the place of separation
from God, the place where we are given our wish to be on our own apart
from the Presence and will of God. I do not know what it means that
the spirits of those independent people who wanted to live apart from
God’s presence in Noah’s day were in prison – but
Peter announces what seems like some good news: Jesus descended even
to the depths of judgment and hell to announce the news that God had
not abandoned them, even there in hell.
The Hebrew word for this place is Sheol, or a place of nothingness.
I mentioned the last two weeks that God formed the world from nothingness,
and that God created us from nothing but dust. When we seek to find
life apart from this God who made us, then we do not become something
different but we return to our nothingness. Hell is the place
of non-being, of death, a place where we are separated forever from
our Maker and live as a no – thing, a nothingness. Hell
may come after you die, but you don’t have to wait until you
die to get there. You can make choices now to live life apart from
God that will return your life to that same nothingness. There is
no greater hell than to experience life’s disappointments and
suffering in the midst of nothingness – because you will see
no purpose in it or any hope beyond it.
God had something totally different in mind than this. He intended
a paradise, a place without suffering and death, and alive with His
presence. But when the world turned away from His presence, paradise
was lost. That is why Christ came – to return us back home to
God and to God’s intentions for us. He could only do this if
He experienced everything it means to be human, and even a fallen
human being. There is nothing you will experience as a human being
that God has not experienced already in Jesus. That is why the
writer of Hebrews says, “For we do not have a high priest who
is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have One who in
every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.” (1
Peter: 4:15)
Jesus even went down to Sheol to proclaim a new word: nothingness
will not prevail. As on the first day of creation when God spoke
a word over nothingness and it became a paradise, so God in Jesus
spoke a word even in the pits of hell, and even over your hell, to
forever proclaim that in Jesus Christ death and hell will not have
the last word. There is no place so far from God that God will
not go to save you. Even to hell itself.
Nothing then is outside the realm of God’s redemption. It does
not matter how low or how high life takes you. Even the Savior is
there. Even if you descend into hell – the hell you’ve
made of your own life apart from God, or into the hell someone else
has created for you, or even to Sheol itself – Jesus has been
there too.
Humiliation and identification with our hell would be good news itself,
but ultimately that would amount to no more than God saying, “I
feel your pain.” But God does more than this. Philippians 2
says that God also raised Jesus up and highly exalted Him.”
That can be the story of your life too. It doesn’t matter what
dark place you find yourself in today, Jesus is waiting there too
to lift up your life with Him into the heavenly places. We have been
raised to the right hand of God and given the power to triumph over
sin, death and the devil.
If you understand this story and trust in it, you will respond to
your own hell on earth in a different way. In his wonderful book The
Man’s Search for Meaning, Vicktor Frankl describes the
lessons he learned in a Jewish concentration camp. The lessons began
when he noticed that some men who were starving still chose to give
some of their bread to others, and these were the ones who survived.
The last of all human freedoms, he wrote, is the freedom to determine
your response to life.
In the face of overwhelming suffering, how do we choose a response
for life? Frankl said that it is by discovering something greater
than yourself, greater than even your desire not to suffer. Something
that is so great that you can assume your responsibility to keep going
and giving. Frankl found that “something” when his coat
was torn from him and, along with it, a manuscript he had written
for a book. He was given the ragged coat of another prisoner who had
been gassed. In the pocket he found a tattered copy of the Shema,
the Jewish creed from Deuteronomy 6:4-5, “The Lord is our God,
The Lord alone. You shall love The Lord your God with all your heart,
with all of your soul, with all of your might.” Frankl found
his meaning, not in his life’s work which was lost, but in The
God he could not lose.
If you are to make it through hell, you will need a new story for
your life. The Gospel of Jesus is a story that proclaims, even
in the midst of hell itself, that hell does not have the last word.
There is another word. It is The Word that spoke out on the first
day of creation and created a paradise, and it is The Word that spoke
again in Jesus Christ, the one Word who went all the way to hell for
you and back so that you can know that no matter how far you descend,
God can exalt your life.
How do you start to live out that new story? You have to own it, trust
it and identify with it. You do that in baptism. That is why, after
announcing that Jesus has suffered for sins once for all and descended
into a place of God abandonment, that he then says, “And baptism
. . . now saves you – not as a removal of dirt from the body,
but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection
of Jesus Christ.” (I Peter 3:21-22). Death, burial, resurrection.
Humiliation and exaltation. That is the story of Jesus, and in baptism
you come to act out and live within that story too. Jesus descended
into hell so that He can raise up your life to the highest place.
That is a story that will keep you going, even in hell.
August 21, 2005
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