Big Healing Book - What Happened Between the Cross and the Throne?

What Happened Between the Cross and the Throne?

I decided to make this a whole separate article rather than just part of the objection reply concerning Jesus dying spiritually, as it is a very complicated topic. I am convinced that much of the teaching that circulates about this subject is unsupportable by Scripture. Although there are famous teachings by prominent teachers with the same name as this article, this is NOT a rehash of their teachings with my name on it – I actually reached some different conclusions based on my own research.

A LOT of questions pertain to this matter, and I’ll do my best to answer them all!

I don’t think you’re a bad person if you disagree with anything I say. To say that this topic is controversial would be a major understatement! However, I will be far more courteous than many “attack sites,” which usually paint anyone who disagrees with them as an unsaved heretic who is deceiving the Church, even if that person has confessed Jesus as Lord and believes that God raised him from the dead, which are the qualifications for salvation (Romans 10:9-10).

We have quite a task on our hands. We need to try to settle the following questions, some of which depend on the answers to other ones. I’ve put what I consider the easier ones first, and be warned: The answers that I back up with Scripture may shock you!

1. Did Jesus have to pay for our sins in hell to complete the plan of redemption?

2. Did Jesus defeat Satan and his principalities and powers in hell or on the cross?

3. Did Jesus take the keys of hell and death from the devil in hell?

4. Were Abraham’s Bosom and Paradise synonymous terms before Jesus rose from the dead?

5. Who were the “spirits in prison” and what was the nature of the message Jesus preached to them?
A. Fallen nonhuman beings to whom Jesus proclaimed His victory over them.
B. Fallen Old Testament sinners to whom Jesus preached the gospel so they could go to heaven.
C. Old Testament saints to whom Jesus preached the gospel so they could go to heaven.
D. Fallen men in Noah’s day; He preached righteousness through Noah.

6. What did Peter mean when He said that the gospel was also preached to them who are dead?
A. Jesus preached the gospel to all dead Old Testament people so that they could get saved.
B. Jesus preached the gospel to only Old Testament saints in Abraham’s Bosom so that they could get saved.
C. People preached the gospel to other people (in general) who are now dead.
D. People preached the gospel to martyrs who are now dead.

7. Where was Jesus for 3 days and 3 nights?
A. In heaven.
B. In hell.
C. In Abraham’s Bosom, which was the good part of Hades.
D. Initially in hell (Hades) and then in Abraham’ Bosom.
E. Initially in hell (Hades), then in Abraham’ Bosom, then in heaven.
F. Both in heaven and in hell because of the way heaven is timeless.

8. When did Jesus sprinkle the heavenly holy of holies with His blood?
A. Before He rose from the dead.
B. After He rose from the dead, but before He ascended to heaven in front of His disciples.
C. After He had ascended to heaven in front of His disciples.
D. He didn’t do that in the literal sense; what He did on the cross was deemed to have done it.

9. When did Jesus lead the Old Testament saints to heaven?

Okay, let’s start our wild ride through the difficulties of the questions above!

1. Did Jesus have to pay for our sins in hell to complete the plan of redemption?

The idea that Jesus paid for our sins in hell can be disproved easily in many different ways.

First, NO ONE will ever pay for his sins in hell! No sinner goes to hell to pay for his sins; he goes to hell to be punished for his sins forever! If you could pay for your sins in hell, it would be like the Roman Catholic fiction of Purgatory, where you can work your way out eventually by paying for your own sins. Jesus could not have “paid off” sins in hell as anyone’s Substitute.

Second, the only payment for sin is the shedding of blood (Hebrews 9:22). Jesus shed blood on the cross and even before then while He was whipped. He certainly did not shed any blood in hell because His body was in a tomb on the surface of the earth for three days and three nights! So He could do nothing to obtain forgiveness for sins in hell. (This is the awful thing about hell – the person in hell has forever separated himself from the blood of Jesus, which was his only hope of having his sins paid off. Thus, he is punished eternally for his forever-unpaid-off sins.) Ephesians 1:7 says, “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins…,” so redemption was accomplished when Jesus shed blood, not in hell.

Third, if going to hell were “payment” for sin, hell is forever! Therefore, for Jesus to fully bear our punishment in hell to continue to “pay for” our sins after the cross, He would have to have been sent to hell forever, not just for three days and three nights.

Fourth, if you subscribe to the teaching that Satan “dragged Jesus into hell” and tormented Him there for our sins in our place, that would give Satan a prime role in the plan of redemption! If redemption depended upon Satan punishing Jesus in hell, we should all thank Satan for doing part of what needed to be done so we could get saved. I don’t plan to do that, do you? Besides, no Scripture portrays Satan as a torturer in hell; he is only one of the tortured! God has not subcontracted the punishing of sin to someone who will himself be punished for sin. It wasn’t Satan who punished Jesus on the cross for your sins; it was God!

Fifth, your peace with God was accomplished on the cross, not in hell, as explicitly stated in this verse:

Colossians 1:20:
And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.

Sixth, Paul made a lot of other references to “the cross” in relation to our redemption, not to “the cross and Jesus’ subsequent visit to hell.” It is clear that Paul thought that the cross alone was sufficient. Here is just one example:

Ephesians 2:16:
And that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby:

Seventh, Jesus said “It is finished” on the cross before He died and went anywhere. While we can debate what was finished and where He went after He died, whatever was “finished” obviously did not require him to make a trip to hell to be finished. If you believe the popular explanation that “It is finished” meant “It is paid in full,” you cannot also believe that Jesus had to continue to pay for our sins after that.

It is notable that the plan of redemption was inevitable but not finished because of what happened on the cross. Jesus still had to rise from the dead. Otherwise, we would still be in our sins (1 Corinthians 15:17). This lends more credence to the idea that everything was paid for on the cross even though other events had to happen to finish the plan of redemption.

Eighth, it is clear from the verses below that forgiveness of sins and redemption were both secured by Jesus’ blood, which would only refer to what He did on the cross, not in hell, since He shed no blood in hell because His body was never there:

Ephesians 1:7:
In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace;

Colossians 1:14:
In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins:

Ninth, the following verse makes clear that you died to the law because of what Jesus did on the cross, not in hell:

Romans 7:4:
Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.

Jesus’ body did not go to hell, therefore, you died to the law only because of what happened on the cross.

So Jesus did not “pay for” our sins in hell. That does NOT prove that Jesus did not go to hell at all, but only that whatever time He spent there, if any, did not involve atoning for our sins.

2. Did Jesus defeat Satan and his principalities and powers in hell or on the cross?

This looks like an easy question with an obvious answer. It would seem that He defeated them on the cross, regardless of what “revelation” any popular Bible teacher claims to have, because Scripture seems to say so explicitly:

Colossians 2:14-15:
Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross;
And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.

What is “it?” Clearly “it” is not “hell,” as hell is nowhere referenced in this passage.

There are three prior references to which “it” could refer – the Law, the cross, or Jesus Himself. The Greek word autos at the end of the passage can mean either “it” or “Himself,” among other things.

Several popular translations use “Himself” in place of “it,” which could be justified grammatically given that “he” is the most recent noun or pronoun to “it.” The more Greek-faithful translations (KJV, NKJV, Young’s Literal Translation) use “it” while the New Living Translation and the New International Version both explicitly say “the cross” but this is a linguistic judgement call as opposed to something that can be proved from the original language. Some translations that say “it” have a footnote saying “or Himself” and that some translations that say “Himself” have a footnote saying, “or it (i.e., the cross).” The issue is that these are all justifiable translations.

At least no translation says “the Law” as far as I know, but we shouldn’t make decisions just based on translations. The Law is referenced in this passage, just “farther away” than the cross and “he.”

In general, the farther back from a pronoun something is, the less likely it is what is referred to. A classic case is Ephesians 2:8, where most people think that “you are saved” is the “it” that is the gift of God, not of works. But “faith” is closer to “it,” making the preferred reading that you are saved by grace through faith that is not of yourself but the gift of God. But you can’t make that an ironclad rule. If you did, when “Jesus was come into Peter’s house, and saw his wife’s mother laid,” (see Matthew 8:14-15) it would mean that Jesus saw His wife’s mother lying down with a fever, which could lead to a ridiculous unscriptural doctrine that could be the core of a false but best-selling book! (The ONLY real “marriage supper of the Lamb” will be in the future, and His bride will be the New Jerusalem.)

However, that same logic makes “triumphing over them Himself” the preferred translation, so it seems that we should settle this one by checking the Greek a little more. Does the Greek literally contain the word “in?” If so, it would make it a harder sell to accept that this passage says that Jesus triumphed over them IN Himself instead of that Jesus triumphed over them HIMSELF. And yes, there is the Greek word en in this passage, so if we think that autos means Himself, we have to read this as “triumphing over them in Himself.”

That still could be defensible, though. But now that we know that the Greek word for in (en) is used, it creates another problem if we think that “ít” means the cross. Jesus did not die IN the cross; He died ON the cross. But the Greek word for “on” is epi, not en! If this meant “on it,” meaning “on the cross,” a different Greek word would have been needed, unless we assume that Paul meant “in the matter of the cross,” which seems thin. In John 19:31, “upon the cross” has the Greek word epi translated as upon. If Paul meant the cross, it seems he should have said that triumphed “on it” or “upon it” rather than “in it.”

Now it appears that “Himself” would work better after all, but “in Himself” (since there is the word in there) sounds a little strange. How would He triumph over principalities IN Himself? Well, perhaps because they were no doubt waging war against Him until His last breath, trying to thwart His plan, and Jesus won that battle “in Himself” the same way you must win “in yourself” when Satan comes at you with thoughts opposed to the Word.

So much for this question being simple! If Jesus defeated the principalities and powers “in Himself,” that still could have happened in hell or on the cross, and we’re no closer to answering the question!

Now we may have to consider the strange-sounding explanation, found in no popular translation, that Jesus triumphed over principalities IN the Law that was referred to in the previous verse. It actually makes sense that what Jesus did was IN the Law. The Law prescribed punishment for sin. Jesus used that very Law to set us free by accepting our Law-mandated punishment. With the price for sin paid, the Law has no further claims on us. The Law did not have to be abolished; it had to be fulfilled, and that’s what Jesus did. Suddenly this sounds like the best explanation, and the fact that Bible translators have not seen that should not stand in our way if this is has no issues while the other explanations have serious issues.

Reading on to the next two verses, we see:

Colossians 2:16-17:
Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days:
Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.

Here Paul continues his theme about the Law no longer applying to us, which could further support the idea that he was talking about the Law in verse 15, as He was discussing the Law in verses 14, 16 and 17.

We still need to answer the original question, so let’s consider the impact of all three explanations on the issue of whether Jesus defeated Satan and his minions in hell or on the cross. If all three explanations point to the same answer to the question, we don’t have to have a final resolution of what the last word of Colossians 2:15 means.

While we’re on the subject of Colossians 2:15, we can note that the only other place the exact Greek word translated for spoiled (apekdyomai) occurs is Colossians 3:9, where we have “put off” the old man and his deeds. The Greek word can mean “to strip off”, so this would give you the liberty to say that Christ stripped off principalities and powers as opposed to spoiling them. In fact, Young’s Literal Translation of the verse says, “having stripped the principalities and the authorities…,” which paints an interesting graphic picture. I don’t think the different translations matter much, but I like to be thorough.

Let’s keep in mind that spiritual death was not part of the punishment for sin under the Law. The people to whom the Law was given were already spiritually dead – that’s why they needed the Law to keep them in line! No one would die spiritually for breaking the Law because everyone was already dead spiritually. And keeping the Law had no possibility of making any spiritually dead person spiritually alive. Therefore, spiritual death, while it was a consequence of Adam’s original sin, was not required by the Law as punishment for sin. We will have to return to that matter later when we look at other questions.

If Jesus triumphed “in the cross,” no further triumph was needed in hell, so Jesus did not defeat principalities and powers in hell.

Galatians 3:10-14 makes it clear that Jesus was cursed in our place on the cross (hanging on a tree). If Jesus triumphed “in the Law” by being bearing the Law’s curse for us on the cross, that was all that was needed. He did not nail the Law to a hunk of brimstone in hell; He nailed it to the cross because that is where our accounts under the Law were forever settled. Therefore, Jesus did not defeat principalities and powers in hell; He defeated them on the cross.

So the first two explanations both conclude that Jesus beat Satan on the cross, not in hell. If Jesus triumphed only “in Himself,” the phrase “in Himself” does not clarify the location of that triumph, so this could be an exception. Might there be any other clue?

The majority of translations start verse 15 with “Having disarmed,” “Having stripped” or “Having spoiled” would indicate that He had already done something. However, the verb is Aorist in the Greek, which give liberty to other tenses, which some translations use. But if what He did was in the past already (as most translations indicate), it seems that He must have already nailed the Law to the cross and defeated Satan’s agents there. Thus, His spoiling of principalities and powers still had to have taken place at the cross.

Based on the evidence above, I think we can state confidently that Jesus’ triumph over Satan and his minions took place on the cross, not in hell.

That still doesn’t mean that Jesus didn’t go to hell at all; it just means that He didn’t have to go there to defeat Satan. Satan was defeated already because of what took place on the cross.

3. Did Jesus take the keys of hell and death from the devil in hell?

The “faith preacher” reflex answer is, “Of course, the Bible says so!” Except that it doesn’t. That reads something into a verse that isn’t there.

Revelation 1:18:
I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.

The only certainty from this verse is that Jesus HAS the keys of hell and death. It is not stated that He took those keys from Satan in hell. He could just as well have gotten them from God. I believe that Scripture proves that He did NOT get them from Satan in hell.

Despite popular misconceptions, teachings and even music videos, Satan does not live in hell and never has lived there. We can prove this in multiple ways.

First, Satan roams the earth, seeking whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8).

Second, Jesus named a location on the earth where Satan dwelt, at least at the time (Revelation 2:13).

Third, hell was created as a place of punishment and torment for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25:41), so Satan would have no reason to be in a place designed to make him suffer.

Fourth, when God asked Satan where he had been twice, both times Satan said that he was “going to and fro on the earth and from walking up and down in it” (Job 1:7, Job 2:2), as opposed to saying, “In HELL, of course!”

Fifth, certain angels who sinned are in chains of darkness today (2 Peter 2:4, Jude 6). It makes no sense that Satan would have ever had the keys of hell and death to hand over to Jesus. If Satan had held the keys to the place, he could have let his fallen comrades out! It also makes no sense that God would hand the keys of a place for the devil to be tormented over to the devil in the first place!

Sixth, Satan is the accuser of the brethren (Revelation 12:10). There are no “brethren” in hell for him to accuse. The “brethren” are either in heaven or on the earth where Satan obviously is.

I’m sure we could find more reasons, but those should be enough to establish that Jesus did NOT have to visit hell to take the keys of death and hell from the devil because the devil was not IN hell.

4. Were Abraham’s Bosom and Paradise synonymous terms before Jesus rose from the dead?

As we will see, a LOT hinges on this question, given the famous “thief on the cross” passage:

Luke 23:42-43:
And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.
And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.

The classic understanding of this is that Abraham’s Bosom was paradise back then, but now heaven is paradise and that Jesus said that the thief would be with him there that very day, certainly not three days later. (This is cited as proof that Jesus went to the “good part of Hades.”)

Now we need to know something from the original (and unpunctuated) Greek. Could this be also taken to say, “Verily, I say unto thee today, thou shalt be with me in paradise?” Notice the subtle transposition needed to make that work in English. “Verily I say unto thee today, shalt thou be with me in paradise” would not seem to work grammatically so we have to flip “shalt thou” in the original to “thou shalt,” as well as move the comma to make this work. What exactly does the Greek say?

It says “Verily I say unto thee today with me shalt thou be in the paradise” where the word ese (from esomai) is one word from which “shalt thou be” is translated. So it appears that you could move the comma and flip the English word order and still remain faithful to the Greek. (Interestingly, Young’s Literal Translation is the only English translation I found that acknowledged the Greek word “the” – which DOES appear in that verse – though multiple Spanish Bibles and a French Bible picked up on the word the.)

Why split hairs over this? Because this alternate rendering solves some problems with the idea that Paradise was Abraham’s Bosom and that the thief would therefore be with Jesus in Abraham’s Bosom that day.

First, the word paradise only appears three times in the New Testament, and the other two places where it appears definitely define paradise as being “above” in heaven, NOT under the earth.

2 Corinthians 12:2-4:
I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.

And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;)

How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.

Revelation 2:7:
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.

To accept that paradise in Luke 23:43 above means Abraham’s Bosom is inconsistent with its usage elsewhere and therefore suspect.

Second, Jesus referred to Abraham’s Bosom and paradise using different words. If they were actually the same place, He could have said that the thief on the cross would be in Abraham’s Bosom or that the beggar Lazarus went to paradise. He didn’t say either. If anyone knew to make a distinction between paradise and Abraham’s Bosom, it would have been Jesus.

Paradise Relocated?

Third, the only way to assert that the thief on the cross went to paradise is to assume that paradise was relocated from the heart of the earth to heaven later on. We can understand souls and spirits, which are invisible, moving from one place to another when Jesus “led captivity captive” without being noticed on the earth. But relocating an entire physical place would be hard not to notice. After all, John saw New Jerusalem descend to the earth (Revelation 21:1-3), so it seems to be a stretch that a paradise-like place could be moved from under the earth to high above the earth without anyone seeing anything.

Fourth, what sense would it make to “relocate” paradise to heaven? Was heaven not already a place of bliss before the Old Testament saints showed up? Could heaven have been improved by moving something that was temporary and under the earth to become a permanent part of the landscape? Would not heaven offer something far better than Abraham’s Bosom? For starters, heaven has gold streets and there is no mention of such a nice arrangement in Abraham’s Bosom.

So why would an inferior place be a permanent part of a superior place? I can’t make that work logically. If I were an Old Testament saint, I would not want to stay in “paradise” if it were Abraham’s Bosom relocated to heaven, as heaven at large would be much nicer.

Fifth, what is now called Paradise has the Tree of Life in it, and Abraham’s Bosom could not possibly have had the Tree of Life in it! If spiritually dead people could have partaken of the Tree of Life, they could have lived forever in their fallen state! It was God’s mercy that the way to the Tree of Life was blocked so that Adam and Eve could not eat from it and live forever as sinful, fallen people.

Genesis 3:24:
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

If paradise were relocated, we would have to assume that whatever was in paradise when it was Abraham’s Bosom was still in paradise when it was relocated to the third heaven. But the Tree of Life was not in Abraham’s Bosom, but it IS explicitly part of “the paradise” that is in the third heaven (Revelation 2:7 above). If paradise was relocated from under the earth to heaven, the Tree of Life would have had to be then be relocated from heaven to the relocated paradise. I don’t see how that makes any sense, but this whole matter is so complicated that we have to consider farfetched ideas.

Thus, “Abraham’s Bosom” is NOT the paradise that is now in the third heaven, and never was. Heaven IS paradise.

So the only way to deal with Luke 23:43 is as I’ve already mentioned – that Jesus said that day that the thief would be with Him in heaven. He wouldn’t be there that day, but Jesus said it that day.

Now you may object that this would be a redundant or over-obvious rendering because Jesus would not have had to say, “I say to you TODAY you will be with me in Paradise.” Obviously, it was “today” when He said it – He wasn’t saying it “yesterday” or “tomorrow” at the time, as pointed out by many present-day commentators.

But “I say to you” would be equally redundant and unnecessary. Jesus could just have said, “You will be with Me in paradise” instead of “I say to you today you will be with Me in paradise.” Obviously, He was saying it to him. No one else said it, and there was no one else He would have said it to.

And once you go down that logical road, you can also conclude that “verily” is redundant because if Jesus said it, it was true anyway without the need to say “verily.” However, Jesus used the expression “verily I say to you” 77 times, and it would make no sense to think that each time was a waste of breath. Jesus said some things for emphasis, especially in statements like John 14:12 when He knew that people would have a hard time believing His words.

A reason within the context shows why it would be appropriate to “say today.” The thief asked Jesus to remember him when He came into His kingdom, but Jesus could logically have said, “Verily, I say to you TODAY, you shall be with me in paradise.” In other words, “I won’t make you wait until I come into My kingdom to tell you that you will be with Me in paradise. I’m telling you TODAY.”

Did Jesus Ever Say “Verily I Say to You Today” Anywhere Else?

We should check to see if Jesus’ use of the phrase “Verily I say to you” ever included today immediately after it anywhere other than in Luke 23:43. If this were a normal phrase for Him, it would highlight that TODAY refers to when He said it, not when something else would happen. We discover that He never used today immediately after “Verily I say to you” the other 76 times.

Based on that, it looks like Jesus MUST have meant that He would be in paradise with the thief that very day. In fact, it seems we should declare that to be the case and let that interpretation take a victory lap and be done.

But since we’re good detectives, we always have to consider that there might be “one more thing,” and we want to be sure about this matter. We should see if there is another “verily I say to you” Scripture with “today” in it, just not immediately after the phrase. It turns out that there is.

Mark 14:30:

And Jesus saith unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this day, even in this night, before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice.

It is remarkable in Mark’s quote that Jesus used the extra word “that” when He meant, “I’m telling you that today something will happen.” It’s hard to build a castle on a single quote, but this scant evidence would point us in the direction of concluding that “today” was when Jesus said something to the thief, not when He said that it would happen, as He did not say, “I say to you that today you will be with Me in paradise.”

Of course, our reflex should be to check the Greek, and we find that it matches the English – there is the word hoti – the Greek word for that – in Mark’s verse but not in Luke’s verse.

Jesus’ Use of “I Say to You That” Elsewhere

This piques our interest. How often in the Greek did Jesus say, “Verily I say to you THAT…” when He went on to say what He was verily saying? It turns out that the Greek word hoti from Mark 14:30 is also used the same way in Jesus’ “verily I say to you” quotes in Matthew 13:17, Matthew 19:23, Matthew 19:28, Matthew 21:31, Matthew 24:47, Matthew 26:34, Mark 9:1, Mark 11:23 (a very familiar verse from elsewhere in this book), Mark 12:32, Mark 13:30, Luke 12:37, John 13:21 and John 16:20.

If Jesus really meant, “I say to you THAT today you will be with me in paradise,” He could have made that indisputably clear if He had said it the same way He did in the many verses above. The lack of the Greek word hoti in Luke 23:32 stacks things against the idea that Jesus meant that He would be with the thief in paradise that exact day.

Taking Sides with an Adverb

We’re running out of direct Greek things to check, but the following comes to mind as something that could settle this. The adverb TODAY appears between two verbs (SAY and WILL BE). When the New Testament says “today” in ANY context, how often was “today” before the verb to which “today” referred, and how often was “today” after it? For this study, we have to ensure that the same Greek adverb for “today” (semeron) was used in each case, and we also have to look at the word order in the Greek manuscript, not the English translation of it, as the two can differ, sometimes subtly. For example, the latter part of Luke 19:5 says, “Zaccheus, make haste, and come down, for today I must abide at thy house” while the Greek word order is “Zaccheus, make haste and come down today for at the house thy must I abide.” (This is why Greek texts make poor bedtime reading.) Also, in the Greek there might not even be a verb, as in Matthew 16:3 where a KJV reader can pick this up by noting that the verb is italicized (“And in the morning, It will be foul weather today”) – “today” does not modify an explicit verb because there isn’t one. The Greek in Luke 12:28 includes “If then the grass in the field today which and tomorrow into the oven” – again there is no explicit verb, even if one is understood, so we can’t count that in our “before-and-after” counts. In some cases, the presence of other words makes the verse not count – I won’t bore you with the details, as they may already be boring enough so far. After taking all this into consideration, here is my breakdown, leaving out Luke 23:43 itself:

The adverb TODAY appears after the verb being modified 14 times (Matthew 6:11, Matthew 21:28, Matthew 27:19, Luke 2:11, Luke 5:26, Luke 13:32, Luke 19:5, Luke 22:34, Acts 13:33, Acts 20:26, Acts 22:3. Acts 24:21, Acts 26:2 and Acts 26:29).

The adverb appears TODAY before the verb being modified 9 times (Matthew 6:30, Luke 13:33, Luke 19:9, Acts 4:9, Hebrews 1:5, Hebrews 3:7, Hebrews 3:15, Hebrews 4:7 and Hebrews 5:5).

So if we laid odds on Luke 23:43 based on this, they would be 14:9 in favor of Jesus saying “I say unto you TODAY, you shall be with Me in paradise” as opposed to “I say to you, TODAY you shall be with Me in paradise.”

When we restrict the same sample to only words Jesus spoke (which seems reasonable), the ratio is 5:3 in the same direction as before.

Since Luke 23:43 is one of the two books Luke wrote (the other was Acts), we should see what happens if we restrict the sample to Luke’s writings. The ratio is now 11:3 in the same direction as before! If we include only Jesus’ quotes in Luke’s works, the ratio is 3:2 in the same direction.

I think we have to conclude that a straight linguistic check of “today verses” actually leans toward Jesus saying “I say to you TODAY” to the thief on the cross.

Can We Use the Old Testament to Confirm This?

Since things can “run in the family,” we could ask whether God the Father used a “today-after-the-verb” construction when dealing with people. In the KJV, He did so 30 times in Deuteronomy alone, mostly, “I command you this day.” But to be thorough, we have to see if the original Hebrew text really has the word today after the verb all those times. It doesn’t! There are verb-first cases, but the original Hebrew is typically “this day you command I” or something similar where “this day” actually precedes the verb in the original Hebrew despite what the English translation says. This is why you don’t do linguistic deep-dives using an English Bible. Since you won’t sell many English Bibles transliterating Hebrew to “this day you command I,” the translators sometimes change the word order to make the result readable to English speakers.

Only One Witness

Standard Bible interpretation takes a dim view of building a complex theology based on only one verse. Yet those who insist that Jesus went to Abraham’s Bosom immediately after He died seem to pin everything on one verse (Luke 23:43) where supposedly Jesus said that on that very day the thief would be with Him in paradise – a verse that cannot be cited as a slam-dunk proof of that even by itself, as we have seen. We need to go with the preponderance of what Scripture says about such a matter.

Conclusion

I realize that basically redefining Luke 23:43 from the way that everyone understands it is a big stretch. But I believe I’ve proved above that it could be an even BIGGER stretch to believe that Abraham’s Bosom was paradise and that paradise got “moved” to heaven, and I’ve also shown that analysis of the original language actually leans toward the nonstandard reading “I say to you TODAY, you will be with Me in paradise.”

This will become important when we get to question 7, which may be the most contentious of all of them.

This question refers to this passage:

1 Peter 3:18-20:
For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit:

By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison;

Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.

Let’s start by going to the Greek for any light on what Jesus did. The word preached is the Greek word kerryso. This word is used in too many verses to list conveniently in conjunction with the word gospel, so it is definitely used in the context of “preaching the gospel.” On the other hand, kerryso is also used of preaching circumcision (Galatians 5:11), preaching that a man should not steal (Romans 2:21), preaching Moses (Acts 15:21) and preaching what John the Baptist proclaimed (Matthew 3:1), which was not the plan of salvation. So kerryso means only to preach, but to determine what is preached, it has to be qualified. Most of the time in the New Testament, it was “preaching Christ” or “preaching the gospel” where Christ and gospel were explicitly mentioned in the verses. Unfortunately, we do not know what Christ preached to the spirits in prison because Peter didn’t include that detail. The Greek does not tell us what Jesus preached, so any assertion about it is in the realm of speculation.

We can determine what Jesus DID NOT preach, though. There is a separate Greek word euangelion associated with evangelizing, and this is NOT the word kerryso that was used in 1 Peter 3:18-20 above.

Jesus did not preach the gospel to any spirit in prison, which rules out answers (B) and (C) where Jesus preached the gospel to dead people.

I understand the appeal of answer (C) because it seems logical that Jesus preached the good news of what He had just done to Old Testament saints. But there is a subtle issue with that. No one could be born again until Jesus rose from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:17), which he hadn’t when He was still in the earth for three days and three nights. So He couldn’t have led any Old Testament saint into the new birth during that time, and these people did not yet belong in heaven for that reason. Thus, He could not have led them to heaven at that time either! (I realize that’s a bombshell for many of you.) They were still fallen sinners with a sin nature until Jesus rose from the dead. That’s just another argument against both (B) and (C), at least if you think that either event happened between the cross and the empty tomb.

The only grasp at a straw to the contrary is that Enoch and Elijah were apparently taken to heaven without being born again first. (They could not be born again first before Jesus became the firstborn from the dead after those two men were taken to heaven.) However, it should be obvious that they would have joined the other dead Old Testament saints in being born again when Jesus took captivity captive after He rose from the dead.

The remaining choices are both popular in different circles, so we’ll have to look into this some more.

At first glance, (D) looks like a tremendous stretch, so maybe we can knock that one off and settle on (A). Christ was clearly not walking the earth in the days of Noah. The argument for (D) is that the Spirit of Christ preached through Noah to fallen people who were “in prison” in the sense that they were condemned and about to be punished by the Flood. Thus, Christ supposedly preached by the Spirit to those who were on “death row” so that they would have a chance to repent. Of course, He could not have preached what we know as New Testament righteousness, so doesn’t that rule out this theory immediately? Not quite.

2 Peter 2:5:
And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly.

Here Noah was called a preacher of righteousness. That had to be divine revelation to Peter, because nowhere in the Old Testament account in Genesis chapters 6 through 9 is Noah seen preaching to anyone! Perhaps it could be said that his actions did the preaching, but Noah’s “preaching of righteousness’ is vague at best because Peter provides no details. And, of course, this could not have been New Testament righteousness, but rather the same Old Testament version of righteousness that was imputed to Abraham:

Romans 4:3:
For what saith the Scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.

Galatians 3:6:
Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.

James 2:23:
And the scripture was fulfilled which saith, Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness: and he was called the Friend of God.

So we could allow for the preaching of “righteousness” in the Old Testament. But what about Christ doing the preaching in the Old Testament? Surprisingly, there IS a reference to the “Spirit of Christ” speaking through Old Testament prophets of His sufferings and the glory that was to follow, and it’s in the same book that Peter wrote.

1 Peter 1:10-11:
Of which salvation the prophets have inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you:
Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow.

Although Peter said that some things Paul said were hard to understand (2 Peter 3:16), Peter was no stranger to difficult sayings himself!

It’s starting to look like (D), which used to look like it stood for “dubious,” actually has a leg to stand on. Saying it doesn’t seem sensible is not the same as proving it wrong. Can we go anywhere else to get another slant on this to determine whether He preached to fallen nonhuman beings or fallen men?

Let’s take another look at the passage. A couple other things stand out.

First, it says that Jesus was put to death in the flesh and then quickened by the Spirit, by whom he went and preached to the spirits in prison. The timeline seems fairly clear that His preaching to the spirits in prison had to be after He was put to death in the flesh, which certainly would not have happened back in Noah’s day. It is also fairly clear that the preaching to the spirits in prison was subsequent to, and because of, His justification in the Spirit. This seems to take all the wind out of the sails of answer (D) as this timeline doesn’t fit preaching to fallen men. Jesus was certainly not raised in any sense of the word back in Genesis!

Second, the passage says that the Spirit of Christ testified of Christ’s sufferings and the subsequent glory. There is certainly no indication that Noah preached anything prophetic about Christ’s sufferings and future glory, though other prophets did cover those matters. It seems that anything that foreshadowed Christ through the prophets was recorded for everyone to read, but we see nothing of the sort through Noah. So if that was the message that the Spirit of Christ preached through people, Noah wasn’t one of the ones doing it. That would seem to rule out (D) and make us wonder how anyone could even suggest it.

Going back to 1 Peter 3:18-20 above, there is an explicit reference to the days of Noah and it appears that the “spirits in prison” were disobedient in Noah’s day in particular. This is cited as evidence that Jesus preached through Noah in Noah’s day.

However, it seems like another huge stretch to refer to men as “spirits.” Angels are referred to as “spirits:”

Psalm 104:4:
Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire:

Hebrews 1:7:
And of the angels he saith, Who maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire.

The best way to interpret Scripture is through other Scripture.

So we now have the test by which we can knock out (D). Are people referred to simply as “spirits” anywhere else in Scripture? If not, we have no authority to conclude that the “spirits in prison” were people, and we can knock out (D) for good.

We find that there are hundreds of references to “spirit” and “spirits” in the Bible, so we painstakingly go through all of them. In no case is there a clear reference to people where “spirit” or “spirits” are stand-alone words referring to people. We see instances of “spirit of…” and “spirits of…” but those are different.

We look up “souls” and find that people are referred to as “souls,” not “spirits” in Acts 2:41, Acts 7:14, Acts 27:37 and 1 Peter 3:20.

Hey, wait a minute! 1 Peter 3:20 is part of the passage we’re trying to interpret!

We’ve just found a Scriptural disproof of (D)! Where Peter clearly meant people, he said souls in that very same passage, not spirits. The “spirits in prison” were not human spirits. Based on the various pieces of compelling evidence above, we can finally drop option (D). in passing, we can note that the biblical use of the word “spirits” also rules out choices (B) and (C), as it is yet another disproof of them.

So choice (A) is the correct answer. This is consistent with Jude’s statement about fallen angels:

Jude 6:
And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.

Peter agrees with this statement:

2 Peter 2:4:
For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment;

Since angels are irredeemable, what Jesus preached had to be a message of His victory and their sealed doom; it could not have been any kind of salvation message, and we already confirmed this through the Greek word used for preached.

The question remains which fallen angels these “spirits in prison” were. It is unnecessary to determine this to answer the question at hand because it’s already answered, but it makes for yet another interesting side journey that we’ll look at below.

A Giant Misinterpretation?

One popular explanation is that the “spirits in prison” were fallen angels who begat children with the “daughters of men” and produced giants, sometimes referred to as the Nephilim. The so-called Book of Enoch talks about this, but the Book of Enoch is NOT Scripture and does not have the authority of Scripture. (Also, I don’t know at this writing of any scholar who believes that Enoch was the actual author of it, though maybe some such scholar is out there.) The fact that Jude quoted from the Book of Enoch does not mean that the rest of it is accurate. Paul quoted other non-biblical writers who said that bad company ruins good morals (1 Corinthians 15:33), all Cretans are lazy, gluttonous liars (Titus 1:12), and that we are God’s offspring (Acts 17:28). That doesn’t validate any of the other things those writers said.

The account in Genesis 6 that is used to prove this theory could also be used to try to disprove it.

Genesis 6:2-4:
That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

First, notice the phrase after that. It shows that there were already giants on the earth BEFORE the “sons of God came in unto the daughters of men.” So whatever union is discussed here was NOT when giants started. The last verse above does NOT actually say that the Sons of God and the daughters of men bore giants. It says that these children become mighty men which were of old, men of renown – there is no reference to the size of these men. Claiming that they were also like the giants who were already around is reading something into the verse that isn’t explicitly there.

Thus, this passage rules out the idea that giants had to be the offspring of angels and women.

Second, the Lord said that His Spirit would not always strive with man. He made no mention of any form of judgment on angels at this time.

Third, the judgment had to be for some reason, so if it wasn’t angel-human relationships, what was it for? Consider that they “took them wives of all which they chose.” This sounds like polygamy. This shows how things had deteriorated from the days when this was stated:

Genesis 2:24:
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Note that this doesn’t say wives; it says wife. It doesn’t say that a man and his multiple wives would become one flesh, which doesn’t even make sense.

However, God’s judgment did not fall on the earth because of polygamy. If that were grounds for a total wipe-out, the earth would not have been able to withstand Jacob, David, Solomon or any other polygamist. So we’re back to putting some stock in the idea that the judgment had to do with the issue with fallen angels.

So what could proponents of the “Nephilim were children of fallen angels” theory stand on in REAL Scripture? It is this passage we’ve already looked at:

1 Peter 3:19-20:
By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison;
Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.

The juxtaposition of spirits in prison and the days of Noah could be used to “prove” that their disobedience was illicit angel-human relationships, which are then assumed to be what Genesis 6 describes.

Then there is the difficult point that the phrase “sons of God” also appears in Job and appears to refer to angels, not people, as people would have been unable to present themselves in heaven and were not on the earth when God laid its foundations.

Job 1:6:
Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.

Job 2:1:
Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.

Job 38:4-7:
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof;
When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

If we follow the rule of letting Scripture interpret itself, it would seem that we have to assume that the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 were angels as well, which would appear to confirm that some people were born from illicit angel-human relationships.

Then there is the fact that that MEN were not called sons of God until the New Covenant. No Old Testament verses other than ones cited in this section contain the phrase “sons of God.” Given that people BECOME sons of God when they receive Jesus, no person in the Old Testament qualified to be called a son of God.

John 1:12:
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:

Several other NEW Testament Scriptures describe born-again people as sons of God. Of course, that does not mean that we become angels! But it certainly appears that the Sons of God have to be angels in the verses in Job above. It seems that these couldn’t be just regular people, because regular people were commanded to multiply and fill the earth, which would involve taking wives, which would not offend God.

Also, why would there be a distinction between the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men?” Why doesn’t Genesis say “the sons of men” or “the daughters of God?” This is another argument for the “illicit angelic offspring” theory.

This could be the explanation for the puzzling account Jude gives of angels who “did not keep their proper domain.” Unfortunately, Jude never elaborated on this statement.

Jude 6:
And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.

Based on the next verse (Jude 7), we might conclude that these would be the ones who had intercourse with humans and incurred judgment on the human race that only Noah and seven others escaped:

Jude 7:
Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

While the events in Sodom were well after the Flood, the words “even as” could be taken to mean that these angels had engaged in prohibited sexual acts just as the people in Sodom had done. However, I would not consider this verse ironclad proof of a difficult theological matter.

If the “sons of God” were angels, they are the one who had offspring through women in Genesis 6. But might the “sons of God” have been something else that would lend itself to an easier explanation?

Were the Sons of God Seth’s Offspring or Fallen Angels?

If the “sons of God” doesn’t mean what it seems to, we’re hard-pressed to explain who these sons of God were. The main alternative theory is that they were sons of Seth, which was considered a righteous bloodline, as opposed to the bloodline of Cain, who was an evil murderer. But there was nothing righteous about the descendants of Seth either in Noah’s day – they were evil too and were killed by the Flood along with the descendants of Cain! If they were actually righteous, God would have spared them along with Noah’s family. Noah’s family consisted of the only “righteous” people left on the earth!

Another problem with the “righteous sons of Seth” theory is that if they were so “righteous,” what were they doing marrying the (supposedly) ungodly women descended from Cain? They would have been making the same mistake Solomon made, corrupting themselves with ungodly wives and becoming ungodly themselves to the point that they also qualified for the judgment of the Flood.

However, those promoting the idea that the Sons of God were sons of Seth believe that they WERE righteous (as much as one could be in the Old Testament) but sinned and became unrighteous.

One would also think that God would have referred to the sons of Seth and the daughters of Cain if He meant the sons of Seth and the daughters of Cain.

Also, there is NO evidence that there was any prohibition by God for Seth’s line to marry Cain’s line. When God didn’t want intermarriage with the wicked, He was explicit about it, and even judged Israel for intermarrying with heathens. So the Sons of Seth theory looks shaky at best.

Yet another major whole in the “daughters of men were the daughters of Cain” supposition is that while Lamech was quite a rough dude, there is NO indication that all of Cain’s descendants were wicked. When the first cattleman, the first musician and the first toolmaker are mentioned, all of them were from Cain’s lineage, and nothing is said about them being evil. The “sons of Seth” theory banks on a supposition about Cain’s “wicked” lineage that is nowhere supported by Scripture. The only reason to want to believe it is to avoid the difficulties of considering the possibility of angel-human hybrids in Genesis 6.

One might argue that the sons of God were people who presented themselves before the Lord on the earth twice in Job. But it’s harder to consider people as being the ones who shouted for joy when the foundation of the world was laid before there were any people!

But if we conclude that these sons of God were angels after all, there are still issues.

Gigantic Problems

There are two obvious issues with the theory that giants had to come from angel-human relationships (which would be a weird kind of “virgin births”).

The first (which we’ve noted above) is that the passage in Genesis 6 indicates that there were giants around BEFORE the incident described, so where would THEY have come from? They would have to have been begotten by two human parents. But if human parents can produce giants, there is no need to assume that fallen angels must have sired them.

The second is that if indeed the Nephilim were the offspring of fallen angels, and those particular fallen angels were thrown into hell in everlasting chains to await judgment, there would have been no more Nephilim after the Flood. Yet there were! The Hebrew word napil, translated giants appears only three times in the Old Testament – once in the passage in Genesis 6 above, and twice in this verse:

Numbers 13:33:
And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.

The obvious issue is that Numbers is about a time period long after the flood. (Of course, the giant Goliath showed up long after the Flood, too.) If angels sinned sexually in Genesis 6 and were cast into hell, where did these giants in Numbers come from? You have to assume that they were born of human parents or that they were also illicit angelic offspring, but why would only the illicit angelic fathers in Noah’s day be singled out for judgment in that case? We have proven that angels are not necessary to beget giants. And if those “fornicating angels” were not locked up in hell with the others, they would still be on the earth today. And if they are still on the earth today, there should be more “virgin births” of giants by those same fallen angels, but I have yet to hear of any such account in our day and have never met giants. Have you?

Also, there are multiple references to these Numbers giants as the “sons of Anak.” Anak himself could not have been a fallen angel, because Anak was referred to twice as the son of Arba:

Joshua 15:13:
And unto Caleb the son of Jephunneh he gave a part among the children of Judah, according to the commandment of the LORD to Joshua, even the city of Arba the father of Anak, which city is Hebron.

Joshua 21:11:
And they gave them the city of Arba the father of Anak, which city is Hebron, in the hill country of Judah, with the suburbs thereof round about it.

These giants had a known earthly father. They could not have been descended from the Genesis 6 giants, who all died in the Flood.

So the presence of giants does NOT prove that angels had babies with women. The Numbers account does a number on the “fallen angels must have sired the giants” theory.

Then there is Jesus’ statement that angels in heaven do not marry.

Matthew 22:30:
For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.

Mark 12:25:
For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven.

However, “fallen angel theory” proponents can point out that these angels who sinned wouldn’t have been in heaven at the time. Still, Genesis 6:2 (cited above) says that the sons of God took wives, and if angels were taking human women, God would never recognize such a thing as marriage, which has always been between a biological man and a biological woman.

Yet if it were only people involved, there would be nothing special about the sons of God coming into the daughters of men and bearing children, as that is the way all the other people since Adam and Eve showed up!

Were the Daughters of Men Really the Sons of God’s Wives?

So a logical step back would be to reconsider what Genesis 6:2 says. Does it really say that the sons of God married the daughters of men? In the King James Version, it clearly says that the sons of God took wives, which clearly means they were married. However, I looked up the Hebrew word (issa) and found that it is translated as both women and wives in the Old Testament. This word does NOT prove conclusively that there was a marriage relationship.

What do other translations say? Of all the English translations I checked, all of them agreed with the King James Version that these women were wives – except for Young’s Literal Translation, which bucks all the others and uses the word women instead of wives. So at least one other person agrees with my statement.

Also, the Spanish Bibles I checked used a word that could be translated either wives or women, similar to the Hebrew word – they did not use the explicit word for wives.

We can’t prove that these women were legitimate wives, so we can’t bank on the “angels can’t marry women in God’s eyes” argument against these angels siring children.

Rulers

By now, it seems that there are insurmountable problems as well as wonderful proofs on both sides of this issue! Is there any other way out of this? A third theory holds that the “sons of God” were mighty rulers of civilization at the time. But there were no rulers around when the foundation of the earth was laid, and it’s hard to picture these human rulers appearing before God with Satan, so it seems that we can rule that out, too.

Where Did They Go?

We never see any Bible evidence that angels can die. But if some angels took on human form, where did they go? Could not they be around forever? Could they have just “dematerialized” until later to avoid drowning in the Flood and come back later? Not if they were banished to everlasting chains in hell, which would eliminate that problem.

Two Issues, Not One

We have something else to consider here.

Most people make a false assumption that the “sons of God” being fallen angels and the “sons of the sons of God” being the Nephilim are part and parcel of the same theory, when those are actually two separate assumptions. We have only disproven the second assumption (that the Nephilim had nefarious angelic fathers).

As far as the fallen angel issue goes, I’ve heard an explanation that Adam is called the son of God (Luke 3:38), but even then, he is not called a son of God among plural sons of God, so I don’t think that disproves anything.

Luke 3:38:
Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God.

Actually, the fact that only ADAM was called a son of God and his descendants were not called sons of God bolsters the view that the “sons of God” were not human!

Taking the “sons of Seth” view creates the need to explain what Jude meant by the angels who did not “keep their first estate.” If they did not interbreed with women, what was so special about this class of angel that forced them to be locked up while the other fallen angels are free to roam the earth for now? There doesn’t seem to be anything else in Scripture that points to an alternative answer.

DNA

One plausible-sounding defense (at first) is that it is preposterous to think that fallen angels could create DNA and thus human life. However, the Egyptian sorcerers produced a snake out of a stick, and snakes have DNA, so that actually proves that fallen beings CAN produce DNA. Another side note for those interested – the Hebrews word for snake is usually translated dragon, so these snakes were not cute little garter snakes; they were more technically monsters of some kind!

Spirits in Prison Conclusion

Based on the weight of all the evidence on both sides, I conclude that the spirits in prison were the angels who sinned in the days of Noah by producing offspring with human women, outlandish as that seems. These spirits were taken off the earth and chained in a part of hell called Tartarus awaiting judgment, and after Jesus was “quickened by the Spirit” and no longer had our sins attributed to Himself, He went to Tartarus and preached judgment to those fallen angels.

And I still love anyone who takes any other side of this difficult matter. (I hope that sentiment is mutual.)

Giants Aren’t a Big Deal

Regardless of which side you take, it doesn’t affect your ability to get healed or walk with the Lord. I’ll probably never preach a sermon on the topic and haven’t to this day in decades of ministry because it isn’t anything essential that people need to hear from the pulpit. Still, I admit that I am fascinated by Bible mysteries like this one and I enjoy digging into them. Besides, someone should look into these difficult matters. Occasionally, like with the similar issue of the origin of demons, I think we should stop short of making a final “I’m definitely right and you’re definitely wrong” pronouncement based on what little we see in Scripture. This is just a topic where very little information is presented to us, and we have seen that there seems to be enough evidence to support different conclusions that we can’t accuse someone taking another view of being a bad Bible scholar.

Let’s start by pointing out what this verse does NOT say explicitly. Peter did not state that JESUS preached the gospel to any dead people. That is something that people have read into this verse that is not there. In fact, in the previous chapter of Peter’s letter, when Jesus was doing the preaching to the spirits in prison, Peter said so explicitly.

In fact, both explanations where Jesus preached are subject to same issue we covered above – He could not tell anyone how to be born again until He was risen from the dead, because if Christ were not raised, they would have to still be in their sins.

1 Corinthians 15:17:
And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.

This case is even more severe, because unlike a generic preaching to spirits in prison, Peter said that the gospel was preached to those who are dead. This would have necessitated sharing a plan of salvation that the verse above proves could not have been in effect before Jesus rose from the dead. Thus, this cannot be something Jesus did between the time He died and the time He rose from the dead. No one could be born again before Jesus physically rose from the dead because no one at that time could meet the Romans 10:9-10 salvation requirement of believing that God raised Jesus from the dead!

However, something like this still had to happen for the Old Testament saints to go to heaven. This leads to the conclusion that leading captives out of the heart of the earth took place AFTER His body rose form the dead. We’ll revisit the details in Question 8, which is about that very issue.

Someone had to be doing the preaching to the dead, but no one other than Jesus would have gone in to the “heart of the earth” to do that. This leads to the inevitable conclusion, reached by multiple translators, that the gospel was preached to those who are now dead. These are people who heard the gospel from man and then died.

It is notable that the KJV says “to them that were dead.” If there is really a present-tense Greek verb there, the verse must be talking about present-day evangelism of spiritually dead people and not to anything between the cross and the resurrection! If it says they were dead, you can reach the opposite conclusion. (You can feel the “tense” excitement building here!) Ready for the verdict? There is no verb at all in that phrase, only the adjective nekros (dead)! Young’s Literal Translation correctly bears out the lack of a Greek verb corresponding to were: “for for this also to dead men was good news proclaimed, that they may be judged, indeed, according to men in the flesh, and may live according to God in the spirit.” Any verb of any tense was added by the translators with no Greek to back it up.

But what about the verb live? There IS a Greek verb there and we can be sure of its tense. It is a present-tense verb. The words preached and judged are Aorist, which is a tense-less Greek verb form that does not exist in English, indicating only an action without signifying the tense of that action. (Greek scholars used to say that the Aorist only denotes momentary past action, but that is no longer the prevailing opinion in Greek academic circles, and I disprove it elsewhere in this book.) So those two verbs offer no clue to the timing of the event. But the fact that the only verb with a time-specific tense is present-tense makes it look like something that happens now, not something that happened between the cross and the resurrection as many people assume.

Can any BIBLE clue sort out this dilemma for us?

It’s always good to consider the immediate context, and the preceding verse says:

1 Peter 4:5:
Who shall give account to him that is ready to judge the quick and the dead.

This sounds more like it is present-tense than a reference to a long-ago event. Who are these dead people? If we look back at 1 Peter 4:6, it appears that they may actually be martyrs! Otherwise, we have another difficulty. Verse 5 says that God is ready to judge the living and the dead, but verse 6 says “that they might be judged according to men in the flesh.” Verse 6 does not speak of God judging these people; in fact, it says the opposite! It says that these dead people might be judged according to men in the flesh, not according to God. A martyr would have been judged according to men in the flesh the opposite way that God would have judged Him.

So it appears that this “preaching to the dead” refers to martyrs and not to Old Testament saints at all.

I think we have to conclude that (D) is the best explanation with the more general (C) as the runner-up.

But the important point is that this verse is definitely not about JESUS preaching the gospel to dead people in the heart of the earth, as assumed by many people. Thus, this verse actually has nothing to do with what happened during those three days and three nights, even though many people think so.

7. Where was Jesus for 3 days and 3 nights?

A. In heaven.

B. In hell.
C. In Abraham’s Bosom, which was the good part of Hades.
D. Initially in hell (Hades) and then in Abraham’ Bosom.
E. Initially in hell (Hades), then in Abraham’ Bosom, then in heaven.
F. Part of Him was in heaven and part of Him was in hell.

This question is the biggie and has been the subject of great controversy for a long time.

The idea that Jesus was in heaven comes mainly from the fact that He told the thief that he would be with Him in paradise, and we have rightly determined above that paradise is NOT Abraham’s Bosom and never was. So this seems to lead to the inevitable conclusion that Jesus was in heaven, or paradise, with the thief that same day – at least according to how people interpret that passage. Thus, He would have to have spent three days and three nights in heaven. However, this whole matter of “Verify I say unto you shall be with Me in paradise” was covered in the answer to a previous question in this section.

Another argument is that Jesus committed His spirit to His Father before He died, and some take that to mean that He was giving up his spirit to go to heaven to be with His Father.

Luke 23:46:
And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.

The word commend doesn’t mean what it would mean today; the Greek word used there is translated commit or entrust in almost all other translations. Thus, we can also interpret this to mean that Jesus was leaving the outcome with His Father. In fact, His use of the phrase “into thy hands” confirms this, as it would be dubious to state that He was placing His Spirit literally in God’s hands in heaven. His place in heaven was destined to be a throne at God’s right hand, not in God’s hands on God’s throne.

There are other serious Scriptural problems with the idea that Jesus was in heaven before He rose from the dead. We’ll start with something Jesus said after He rose from the dead.

John 20:17:
Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.

Jesus Himself said that He had NOT yet ascended to the Father. If He had been hanging out with the Father for three days and nights, perhaps sipping tea on a veranda in heaven waiting for three days to go by, this statement would make no sense!

The idea that Jesus was in heaven flies in the face of too many other Scriptures. Jesus Himself said that He would be three days and three nights “in the heart of the earth,” and no one describes heaven as being deep down in the earth.

For example, Colossians 3:1 tells us that “above” is where Christ is seated at the right hand of God – so heaven is “above” and not “below.” On the other hand, hell is repeatedly referred to as “below.” For example, see Proverbs 15:24: “The way of life is above to the wise, that he may depart from hell beneath.” and Isaiah 14:9: “Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming…” and Isaiah 5:14: “Therefore hell hath enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without measure: and their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth, shall descend into it.”

Then there is Paul’s statement about bringing Christ back from the deep, which in the Greek means the abyss.

Romans 10:7:
Or, Who shall descend into the deep? (that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead.)

The same Greek word for “deep” (abyssos) is translated bottomless pit in Revelation 9:1, Revelation 9:2, Revelation 9:11, Revelation 11:7, Revelation 17:8, Revelation 20:1 and Revelation 20:3.

The verse below is the only other place where abyssos appears.

Luke 8:31:
And they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the deep.

Again, deep in the verse above is the same word abyssos used in Romans 10:7 about bringing Christ again from the dead.

I realize that some people will argue, “This is part of what Paul said NOT to say,” but the point Paul made is that the Word is near us, not in heaven and not in hell, so we don’t need to bring Jesus down from heaven or up from hell because the Gospel by which we are saved is near us.

So it appears that Christ spent some time in what would be such an abysmal place that demons beg not to be sent there. So where He was could not be Abraham’s Bosom, paradise, or any other nice place.

The Right Way to Interpret Left

Other verses make it seem like Jesus was in what we would think of as hell between the cross and His resurrection due to statements about His soul not being left in hell, being in the abyss, and the fact that He preached to “the spirits in prison” where “prison” was not “paradise.” But first, let’s dismiss one school of thought you’ll also encounter – that Jesus spent those three days and nights in heaven.

Luke 23:46:
And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.

The word commend doesn’t mean what it would mean today; the Greek word used there is translated commit or entrust in almost all other translations.

There is no doubt that He said it, but the traditional idea that Jesus was going to the Father immediately because He committed His Spirit to him clearly doesn’t match the rest of what the Bible says, as we will see below. The statement could also mean (and I believe it does) that Jesus was leaving the outcome of His spirit in God’s hands, knowing that He would be going down to “the lower parts of the earth” and trusting that God would raise Him up. Think about this for a minute – if Christ did NOT die spiritually, He would have just gone wherever He wanted after He died and He would not have had to trust His Father with the outcome! The very fact that He committed His spirit to God showed His own powerlessness at that moment. He knew that the outcome would have to be up to God because He would not be able to raise Himself out of hell, or even out of Abraham’s Bosom for that matter.

Are there any other reasons why would we NOT believe that Jesus was in a state of bliss between the cross and the resurrection?

Well, for starters, when Peter preached Jesus, he quoted Psalm 16:10 as a prophecy that Jesus fulfilled:

Psalm 16:10:
For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.

Acts 2:27:
Because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.

Acts 2:31:
He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption.

So these Scriptures refer to Jesus’ soul not being left in hell, indicating that He was in hell but that He did not stay there.

What does “left” mean? It always pays to check the Greek in cases like this when so much is on the line. The word used for “left” (kataleipo) is used the way we would use it in English. For example, it is the word used when Paul “left” Titus in Crete (Titus 1:5). It also denotes in multiple places a man “leaving” his father and mother and cleaving to his wife.

Because the negative is used in Acts 2:31, some interpret the verse to mean the Jesus never went to hell (Greek hades) at all. But we have more evidence we’ll look at.

Some people believe that because the word hell in the two Acts verses above was hades, not gehenna, it could not be taken to mean a place of punishment. The “Greek word” part of that argument is correct; the word is indeed hades and not gehenna. However, the English part of the argument doesn’t work. Biblical usage of the word hades proves that it is NOT a distinct and better place than gehenna. The Hebrew word sheol used in Psalm 16:10 is used to refer both to the grave in general (even for the righteous) and to a place of torment, and some contend that the same is true for the Greek word hades. But I’d hope that EVERYONE would agree that hades refers to a place of torture and punishment in these verses:

Luke 16:23:
And in hell [hades] he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

Revelation 20:14:
And death and hell [hades] were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.

Given that Hades will be cast into the lake of fire, it can’t be a good place! But the theory that Jesus was in paradise (which supposedly at the time was Abraham’s Bosom or Good Hades) says, out of necessity to be consistent, that paradise WAS part of Hades, but isn’t anymore. In other words, “Good Hades” and “Bad Hades” were separated by a gulf and were both technically Hades. Thus, if Jesus went to Good Hades, He still fulfilled the Scriptures above.

However, the idea that paradise was “Good Hades” has already been disproved earlier in this article, as is the idea that there was any such thing as “Good Hades” as opposed to Abraham’s Bosom, which is not called part of Hades in Scripture, although some modern commentators make that claim.

Actually, I believe that Jesus DID go to where the Old Testament saints were and led captives out of there to heaven after His ascension. I also believe that Jesus DID go to the section of hell called Tartarus where wicked spirits who sinned in the days of Noah were (when He “preached to the spirits in prison”). But those are separate issues.

So we know that Jesus was NOT in heaven right after He died, as some assert, because heaven is not in the “lower parts of the earth” and never has been there. Doesn’t this prove that Jesus suffered in hell? Well, not quite. If Hades is in the heart of the earth and the Lazarus the beggar saw the rich man across a gulf, Abraham’s Bosom would also have to be deep in the earth to be close enough to Hades for that fact to be true. Thus, we could still opine that Jesus was deep in the earth but in Abraham’s Bosom. Let’s see what else Scripture says.

Ephesians 4:9:
(Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth?

Some commentators claim that the earth itself is the “lower parts” to which Christ descended, but we dealt with that already in this article. Paul didn’t say in that verse that Jesus descended to the earth, but to the lower parts of the earth. We also know that Jesus spent time in the abyss – a place where demons belong – a place of misery, not comfort.

One could argue that His only business in the abyss was a brief visit to preach to wicked spirits there who sinned in the days of Noah. But that is a losing argument because the demons who were NOT sentenced there in the days of Noah begged Jesus not be sent there. Thus, the abyss was a place of torment and misery distinct from Tartarus where the wicked spirits from Noah’s day were chained. It was a place where demons belong. Jesus was not in the “abyss” to preach to any beings. The only other reason He would be there is that He judicially belonged there as a result of taking on our sins.

Raised from the Dead Ones

You may have overlooked your whole life that Scripture repeatedly affirms that Jesus rose from the dead. It does NOT say that Jesus rose from death although that is implicit. There is a big difference! “The dead” refers to dead people that He was among. This is one case where I enjoy preaching from a Spanish Bible (RVR 1960), which makes it clear that Jesus rose from “los muertos” (the dead ones) as opposed to “la muerte” (death). The distinction is also glaring in the Greek. The word for “the dead” is nekros, while other words, mostly thanatos, are translated death. Jesus did not just rise from death; He rose from the dead ones. So He had to be with the dead ones before He rose! The dead ones weren’t in heaven yet, so Jesus couldn’t have been in heaven while He was dead! This is another proof that settles that Jesus was not in heaven for three days and nights after He died.

Furthermore, Jesus was raised from the dead ones. If He and the dead ones had been in heaven, it would have been written that He descended from the dead ones!

The Heart of the Matter

Matthew 12:40:
For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

So we know that Jesus was NOT in heaven right after He died, as some assert, because heaven is not in the lowest part of the earth and never has been there. Doesn’t this prove that Jesus suffered in hell? Well, not quite. If Hades is in the heart of the earth and the Lazarus the beggar saw the rich man across a gulf, Abraham’s Bosom would also have to be deep in the earth to be close enough to Hades for that fact to be true. Thus, we could still opine that Jesus was deep in the earth but in Abraham’s Bosom. Let’s see what else Scripture says.

Ephesians 4:9:
(Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth?

Some commentators claim that the earth itself is the “lower parts” to which Christ descended. But in light of Matthew’s account above, you can’t escape the conclusion that Jesus was under the earth that we walk on, not on top of it, after the cross. Besides, check out this other usage of the phrase “lower parts of the earth” and it becomes very clear that it speaks of a place to which one descends after death.

Psalm 63:9:
But those that seek my soul, to destroy it, shall go into the lower parts of the earth.

Besides, Paul didn’t write that Jesus descended first into the earth; he wrote explicitly that He descended first into the lower parts of the earth. It makes no sense to call “parts of” the earth “the earth!”

Another “try” is that Jesus’ grave was the “heart of the earth,” but I have never heard a grave referred to as such other than by Christians trying to explain away the obvious. Would anyone refer to a deceased relative’s body that is probably no more than six feet under the earth as “in the heart of the earth?” I doubt it. Besides, it appears that Jesus’ body was laid in a sideways tomb that one could walk into, not in a hole six feet under the ground. So His body did not “descend” at all to get into that tomb. The “descending” HAD to be talking about His spirit.

But we have at least determined that Jesus was in Hades, which is quite clear from what Peter said.

Acts 2:27-31:
Because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.
Thou hast made known to me the ways of life; thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance.
Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day.
Therefore being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne;
He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption.

In both cases where hell is used above, the Greek word is Hades.

A Brief Visit vs. Not Being Left in Hell

Jesus’ soul was not “left in hell (literally hades)”. If Jesus’ only time in hell was for a brief proclamation of His victory over evil beings aligned with the devil, the Bible’s fulfilled prophecy that His soul was “not left in hell” would not make sense. It WOULD make sense that His soul was not left in hell if that is where He was for three days and three nights.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

To settle between various explanations of where Jesus was, we need to go in depth about this place called Hades. Was Abraham’s Bosom a compartment of Hades that we might call Good Hades, and might that be where Jesus actually spent His time, rather than in Bad Hades where the rich man in Luke 16 was in torment?

Those who believe that Jesus went to Abraham’s Bosom assert that it was either paradise (disproved earlier) or a good part of Hades separated by a gulf from the bad part of Hades. What we need to

determine for sure is whether “Abraham’s bosom” where Lazarus was in could properly be referred to as Hades.

Those who believe so say that that Sheol in the Old Testament was the place of the dead in a generic sense and that Hades must be just the place of the dead in a generic sense without specifying which section of Hades (smoking or non-smoking) Jesus was in.

They further state that if Jesus meant a place of suffering (hell), He would have used the term Gehenna, as He in fact often did when referring to a place of eternal torment. Does this mean that Hades isn’t necessarily a bad place, and Jesus could have been there three days and three nights without suffering?

The best way to interpret Scripture is to let Scripture interpret itself. Therefore, we should check out every other place in the New Testament where the Greek word Hades appears, and see if it could describe a nice temporary abode for the Old Testament saints or anyone else.

Other than Acts 2:27 and Acts 2:31 quoted above, here are all the other places where the Greek word Hades is used in Scripture:

Matthew 11:23:
And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.

Matthew 16:18:
And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Luke 10:15:
And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted to heaven, shalt be thrust down to hell.

Luke 16:23-24:
And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.
And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.

1 Corinthians 15:55:
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

Revelation 1:18:
I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.

Revelation 6:8:
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

Revelation 20:13-14:
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.

Not once does the word Hades refer to a nice place. It still describes hell as we understand it.

Then we can remember that the rich man, while in torment in Hades, saw Abraham and Lazarus afar off. Abraham and Lazarus were not in torment, and where they were was not referred to as Hades. Obviously, it was visible from Hades, but that doesn’t mean that it was part of Hades. Every description of Hades is ugly – a place no one would want to be.

Thus, to be consistent, the King James rendering is correct – Jesus’ soul was not left in HELL – a place of misery and torment. It is implicit that He was there, but not left there.

Here’s another interesting side note. The Passover symbolized Christ. That point is not up for debate; Paul said that “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7). Jesus identified Himself as the real Passover Lamb when He said that the fruit of the vine and the bread during the Passover feast were His blood that was shed to ratify the New Covenant and His body that was broken for us. The Passover lamb symbolized Jesus, a lamb without blemish, who had to die to stop death from coming to us. But did you ever consider what had to happen to that Passover lamb after it was killed? It had to be roasted with fire:

Exodus 12:9:
Eat not of it raw, nor sodden at all with water, but roast with fire; his head with his legs, and with the purtenance thereof.

You might not consider Passover proof that Jesus went to hell, but it’s interesting to think about, isn’t it? (I think it’s a decent proof, but if you don’t think so, there are other proofs that He went to hell in this discussion.)

If you think that “Abraham’s Bosom” was part of Hades, there is a difficulty with the story of Lazarus going to “Abraham’s Bosom” while the rich man ended up tormented “in Hades.” It seems inconsistent if they were both in different compartments of Hades to make a distinction between Abraham’s Bosom (Good Hades) and Bad Hades, the latter of which was described as a place of torment. It would be like saying, “The beggar went to Los Angeles and the rich man went to California” while knowing that Los Angeles is part of California.

I have just proved to my satisfaction that Jesus went to hell.

What we have not proved is that Jesus was in hell for three days and three nights. Did He just stop there but leave in time to make it to “paradise” with the thief the same day? Was part of that time spent rounding up people in Abraham’s Bosom and taking them to heaven? And what about preaching to those spirits in prison?

That idea runs into the same snag we’ve seen before. It would not make sense to take everyone to heaven without them being born again, but the people in Abraham’s Bosom could not be born again until Jesus rose from the dead after the three days and three nights that He was in the heart of the earth.

So no, Jesus did NOT take the Old Testament saints to heaven from Abraham’s Bosom during the time His body was dead.

The Sign of Jonah

Jesus referred to the “sign of Jonah” being given to this generation. He elaborated on that sufficiently that there is no doubt what He was talking about – He would spend three days and nights “in the belly of the earth” – a location that is NEVER referred to as the location of heaven, which is referred to as “above.” (For example, Colossians 3:1 tells us that “above” is where Christ is seated at the right hand of God – so heaven is “above” and not “below.”) On the other hand, hell is repeatedly referred to as “below” (as proved earlier in this article).

Matthew 16:4:
A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed.

Luke 11:29-30:
And when the people were gathered thick together, he began to say, This is an evil generation: they seek a sign; and there shall no sign be given it, but the sign of Jonas the prophet.
For as Jonas was a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the Son of man be to this generation.

Matthew 12:39-40:
But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas:
For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

Here is what Jonah himself said:

Jonah 2:2:
And said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the LORD, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice.

Some people cite “sheol” in the Old Testament as being the place for both the righteous dead and the unrighteous dead, and conclude that the “hell” (sheol) that Jesus was in was actually Abraham’s Bosom and that He was there for three days and three nights. However, the belly of a whale was a dark and unpleasant place, so the only proper interpretation of the sign of Jonah is that Jesus was in a dark and unpleasant place for three days and three nights. This symbolism indicates that Jesus was in hell for three days and three nights. There is nothing in the sign of Jonah indicating that He moved between locations in the heart of the earth during that time. Jonah didn’t switch whales.

These other statements by Jonah don’t indicate a place of rest and pleasure while he was “under” for three days and three nights:

Jonah 2:3-7:
For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me.

Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple.

The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.
I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O LORD my God.

When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple.

So Jonah was in a place where his soul fainted within him – that certainly doesn’t sound like a symbol of Abraham’s Bosom.

Having Cake and Eating It Too?

Why would anyone think that Jesus switched locations from hell to Abraham’s Bosom? Answer: Because that theory tries to have one’s cake and eat it too. The idea would be that Jesus told the thief that he would be in paradise (which they assume to be Abraham’s Bosom) today, and the only way to make that work, while asserting that Jesus did go to hell, is to assume that Jesus spent a short time in hell – less than a day – so that He could still get to Abraham’s Bosom where the thief was before “today” was over.

However, that theory runs aground on the “this day have I begotten thee” verse (Acts 13:33). Jesus had to have been raised spiritually the same day He was raised physically. Someone who was identified with sin belonged in hell, but once He was no longer identified with sin, He did not belong in hell. This would point to three days and three nights in hell.

If the moment when Jesus was no longer “sin” was in hell, it makes sense that Jesus could still be in the same place – hell – and do what Peter said He did:

1 Peter 3:18-19:
For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit:

By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison;

There is a chronology here that Jesus was first put to death in the flesh, was later quickened (made alive) by the Spirit, and THEN went to preach to the spirits in prison. It appears that this was an exit speech as He was leaving hell. I realize that some people interpret “quickened by the Spirit” to mean “raised physically from the dead,” but the wording of the passage doesn’t fit that. The key is the phrase “by which.” This indicates that when He was quickened by the Spirit (in the sense that at that moment He was no longer “made sin” for us), by that Spirit He proclaimed His victory to the fallen spirits in hell.

At this point someone could object that Jesus went and preached to the spirits in hell, and if He went, He had to have been somewhere else (presumably nicer) until then. But there is a technicality that explains how He “went.” The place where the angels in chains are kept is literally called “Tartarus” in 2 Peter 2:4, despite the fact that almost all translations render the word as hell. Some have a footnote that the Greek says Tartarus. Young’s Literal Translation breaks with the others and translates it Tartarus, which befits a “literal” translation.

It behooves us to see where else in Scripture the Greek word Tartarus is used. That’s simple. It isn’t found anywhere else!

So we can see that the fallen angels are confined to a department of hell. Jesus could “go” from Hades to Tartarus, so that ruins any argument that “going” meant that He had to be somewhere nice before He went there. It appears that Jesus did go to the abyss based on Romans 10:6-7. Whether that means Hades or Tartarus, it certainly was not a place of rest and comfort!

At this point the only way to claim that Jesus didn’t go to hell for three days and three nights is to assert that Jesus only went to hell briefly for the purpose of proclaiming His victory to the wicked, disobedient spirits in Tartarus. However, that would still be inconsistent with the sign of Jonah.

Where Are the Lower Parts of the Earth?

The only “try” I’ve seen for a wider “tour” scenario where Jesus changed locations is to assert that Jesus was in the lowermost parts (plural) of the earth in Ephesians 4:9-10 and had to ascend from there. At first, this seems to indicate that He was in more than one “lower part” of the earth, but the following verse wrecks this assumption, as people who died in the Old Testament did not go on any tour of the underworld when they went to the “lower parts of the earth.”

Psalm 63:9:
But those that seek my soul, to destroy it, shall go into the lower parts of the earth.

Another contention is that the “lower parts of the earth” is only metaphorical as “proved” by this verse:

Psalm 139:15:
My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

Certainly, David was not literally in Sheol (the Hebrew word for the place of the dead) while in his mother’s womb, but using the lowest parts of the earth and a mother’s womb interchangeably was also stated the opposite way in this strange-sounding verse:

Job 1:21:
And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.

However, Job did not go back into His mother’s womb when he died, nor did Jesus go back into His mother’s womb after He died on the cross, so the “lowest parts of the earth” He went to did not use that particular metaphor.

But we have to consider a common alternative explanation of Ephesians 4:9-10 – that when Paul said that Jesus – “descended first into the lower parts of the earth,” he meant that Jesus descended from heaven to the earth when He was incarnated. This is the position taken by those who contend that Jesus was in heaven for three days and three nights. In fact, at least three of the less-literal Bible translations say that Jesus descended to the earth, as opposed to descending into the “lower parts of the earth.” However, that bakes in a supposition that cannot be proved in the Greek, as the word used (eis) is translated both as into and to as well as several other prepositions. (Into is the translated word more than twice as often as to.) However, the Greek is clear that He did not just descend to the earth but to the “lower parts of the earth.” (Some translations that say “the earth” or “our lowly world” at least have a footnote indicating the literal reading in the Greek as an alternative. At least they are being up-front that their translation is not what the actual Greek says.)

Despite the obvious Greek meaning, someone could argue that based on Psalm 139:15 above, Paul only meant that Jesus was willing to be in a mother’s womb as opposed to literally under the earth. Can we prove otherwise?

I believe we can. The only other clue is the immediate context including the previous verse:

Ephesians 4:8:
Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.

The key is that He led captivity captive. I believe this refers to when He took the Old Testament saints to heaven, which would have required a literal descent into the lower parts of the earth to round them up. However, even if you think leading captivity captive means something else, He certainly did not lead captivity captive in any sense the day He was conceived within Mary or on any other day before His birth.

If taking captivity captive required a descent, that descent would have to be literally into the lower parts of the earth. I believe that these verses in Ephesians 4 go together to describe that. However, we shall see later that captivating captivity had to take place as a separate trip into the earth after He rose from the dead.

I think I’ve made a good case that the “spirits in prison” incident in Tartarus happened on Jesus’ way out of hell after He was “quickened by the Spirit” before He was united with His body. (The fact that “quickened by the Spirit is NOT the point at which He was united with HIs body is shown by the fact that what He did in Tartarus was by the Spirit who had already “quickened” Him, which must refer to a spiritual quickening.)

Peter and Christ’s Sufferings

One writer asserts that Jesus could not have been in hell because Peter was a witness of the sufferings of Christ, and Peter could not have watched Christ suffer in hell.

1 Peter 5:1:
The elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an elder, and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the glory that shall be revealed:

However, it should be obvious that Peter was only a witness to the physical sufferings of Christ. There was no way for him to see with his five senses the spiritual suffering He was going through as He took on all the filthy sins ever committed by anyone and was punished for them, then was forsaken by God the Father. Since Peter was not a direct witness of Christ’s spiritual sufferings anyway, I don’t see this as an issue.

Verses That Don’t Apply

Can any other verses prove that Jesus went to hell? What about these next ones?

Psalm 18:5:
The sorrows of hell compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me.

Psalm 116:3:
The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me: I found trouble and sorrow.

A look at the context of these verses shows that they are NOT Messianic prophecies but rather figurative speech on the part of David concerning tough circumstances in his earthly life. So these verses don’t apply or add anything to the discussion.

Two Places at Once?

We have one option left to clean up, mainly the one that Jesus was in heaven AND in hell at the same time because of the way heaven is timeless. Gasp. Is this heresy? Is this Nestorianism where we claim there are two Jesus-es, as “word-of-faith attackers” claim? No, it’s more like John 3:13, an admittedly difficult verse in its own right:

John 3:13:
And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.

The problem with this verse is that it puts Jesus in heaven and on the earth at the same time, and thus it would not be a stretch to say that He was in heaven and hell at the same time. God in heaven is beyond time, and we should assume we can say that about Jesus and the Holy Spirit as well. Are there two Jesus-es because one is in you and one is on a throne seated at God’s right hand? No, there is only one Jesus, but He is able to be more than one place at once. After all, He can indwell every Christian at the same time!

Some translations leave out “which is in heaven.” One could assume that this was a deliberate attempt to chicken out of the theological difficulty of leaving it in there, but actually, it is because it really ISN’T in the so-called NU Greek manuscript. This is a rare case where you can’t just ask “What does the Greek say?” because it matters which Greek manuscript you’re reading. For that reason, you would be entitled to sidestep the difficulty by just leaving it out. The problem is that it was the only manuscript among those considered reliable that omitted the phrase, so it was the exception rather than the rule. You’re usually safer sticking with the rule, so that, for example, you don’t write Mark 16:9-20 out of the Bible.

Heaven does not dwell in our earthly time-bound frame of reference. That is why God can say that He knew us before we were born and that Jesus was the lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8).

Thus, if you wanted to choose option (F), I won’t tell you it’s wrong, as it at least asserts that Jesus DID go to hell as a Man. Then He rose as a Man too, becoming the first to rise from the dead spiritually, as discussed elsewhere.

8. When did Jesus lead the Old Testament saints to Heaven?

Let’s start by stating that some Bible teachers would consider this a trick question, because according to their understanding, all Old Testament saints went directly to heaven. Based on that assumption, Jesus never led the Old Testament saints to heaven because they were already there – in Abraham’s bosom in paradise in heaven!

They raise the decent-sounding argument that Enoch and Elijah were both taken directly to heaven, and so supposedly that is where any other Old Testament saint would go.

However, I have demonstrated above that the Old Testament saints could not have been born again during Jesus’ three days and three nights “in the heart of the earth,” and thus they were not ready to be admitted to heaven.

And during Jesus’ lifetime, He said, “No man has ascended to heaven.”

John 3:13:
And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.

This would indicate that although Enoch and Elijah initially went “up” from an earthly perspective, they still were not in what we would consider heaven today.

Ephesians 4:8-12:
Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.
(Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth?
He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.)
And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers;
For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ:

The second and third verses above are in parentheses, and though the Greek was unpunctuated, the parentheses seem justified by the context. Some translations put parentheses there and some don’t. Thus, the “gifts” Jesus gave to men were apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. This is more evident when you see that verse 8 ends with “and gave gifts unto men” and verse 11 starts with “And he gave some.”

Why does this matter? Because the ministry gifts were given when Jesus “ascended on high.”

If we look at the time period between Jesus’ death and His final ascension to heaven, there is no indication of any of those five ministry gifts being “given” during that time period. Eleven of the twelve original apostles of the Lamb were still around, but there were no other apostles (like Paul), prophets, evangelists, pastors or teachers fulfilling the callings of those offices. But if Jesus took captives to heaven before He even rose from the dead, He would have to have placed the five “ministry gifts” into the church before He rose from the dead.

That is really problematic because there was no “church” or “Body of Christ” before Jesus rose from the dead! There were no “saints” in the New Testament sense until Jesus rose from the dead, as no one could be born again until Jesus was raised first. There was no one for the ministry gifts to minister to!

Now consider what else this passage in Ephesians says. The first verse says that He “led captivity captive” when He ascended up on high. The third verse says that He ascended up far above all heavens, that He might fill all things. This certainly does not sound like something He did while His body was still in a tomb.

There’s another serious problem with believing that Jesus “ascended” before His body came out of the tomb. After He came out of the tomb, He said this:

This proves that Jesus’ “ascension on high” could not have taken place before He rose from the dead.

Thus, we have to conclude that the mass relocation of saints from “Abraham’s Bosom” to heaven had not taken place between the cross and Jesus’ resurrection. Based on the “ministry gifts” point above, it seems that this point must have been after His final ascension into the clouds.

The important thing is that it happened, not when it happened, but it certainly was an interesting matter to investigate. This is yet another case where it seems that the general position of the church world is incorrect.

9. When did Jesus sprinkle the heavenly holy of holies with His blood?
A. Before He rose from the dead.
B. After He rose from the dead, but before His ascension in front of His disciples.
C. After He had ascended to heaven in front of His disciples.
D. He didn’t do that in the literal sense; what He did on the cross was deemed to have done it.

The verse we looked at above is sometimes considered proof that Jesus ascended on high between the time that He saw Mary and the time that He saw Thomas (whom He ordered to feel His body) eight days later.

John 20:26-28:
And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither they hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.
And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.

However, the time window wasn’t that generous, because in Matthew’s account, the disciples DID hold His feet very shortly after Jesus’ conversation with Mary.

Matthew 28:9:
And as they went to tell his disciples, behold, Jesus met them, saying, All hail. And they came and held him by the feet, and worshipped him.

At the point, Jesus did not forbid anyone from holding His body. This is why some assume that Jesus “ascended” between His encounter with Mary and His encounter with the other disciples shortly thereafter, which is choice (B).

Let’s consider the other choices to see if they make more or less sense than (B) given the evidence.

John 20:17 above rules out choice (A) because Jesus had not ascended before He rose from the dead, by His own words.

Choice (C) seems difficult if the reason that Mary could not cling to Jesus is that He had not yet ascended to present His blood in the heavenly holy of holies. There is another serious problem with choice (C). If Jesus’ blood had not been applied in the heavenly holy of holies, it is unclear how anyone could have been born again before Jesus ascended for the final time, as they would still be under the Old Covenant. Yet we know that Thomas in particular WAS born again before Jesus’ final ascension because He met the requirements for salvation in Romans 10:9-10. He believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead and addressed Jesus as “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28).

Thus, it seems that we are down to a choice between Jesus visiting the heavenly holy of holies in the brief time between His words to Mary and His meeting with the other disciples or concluding that the whole thing was figurative and referred to what Jesus did on the cross.

The proponents of explanation (D) assume that as Jesus bled on the cross, His blood was immediately applied to the heavenly holy of holies without the need for Him to make a special trip there. At least this sidesteps the difficult timing issue discussed above.

At first, it seems impossible to conclude that His blood was applied in the heavenly holy of holies without Jesus being physically present there.

On the other hand, have YOU ever been physically present in the holy of holies? No, yet you can still “enter” it by the blood of Jesus!

Hebrews 10:19:
Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus,

Hebrews 4:16:
Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.

So there is still a figurative aspect as far as the believer is concerned. This proves that you do not have to be physically present in the holy of holies to visit it in the sense that the writer of Hebrews described. You do NOT have to “ascend on high” to enter the holy of holies in the figurative sense used in Scripture.

Do the Scriptures say any more about this issue? Yes.

Hebrews 9:12:
Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.

This verse says that Jesus explicitly entered into the holy of holies. However, that verse says that He did it by his blood, not with his blood. Is that actually supported by the Greek?

The KJV says that He entered the Holy of Holies by His own blood, not with His own blood, which would be different. Does the Greek really say “BY” His own blood as opposed to “WITH” His own blood? Yes, the Greek word dia used in that verse is generally understood to mean “through” or “by means of” as opposed to “with.” Well, let’s check some other Bibles and see if others who translated the Greek agree. The NKJV and the New Living Translation both say that He entered with His own blood, but that is a minority opinion. The more Greek-accurate translations disagree. The Darby Translation says that He entered by His own blood and Young’s Literal Translation says that He entered into holy places through His own blood. I agree with those renderings of dia and therefore, I have to conclude that Hebrews 9:12 cannot mean what most “faith people” think it means, as it does not indicate that Jesus came with His blood and offered that blood on a heavenly altar. If this is so, then there is no “additional mini-ascension” between John 20:17 and Matthew 28:9, which would take out one of the ascension paradoxes.

Notice that when He entered into the Holy Place, He had ALREADY obtained eternal redemption for us. The writer of Hebrews definitely did not say that Jesus entered in once into the holy place to obtain eternal redemption for us. The words having obtained show that everything necessary for our eternal redemption had already been accomplished before Jesus made this appearance in the Holy Place and did any kind of sprinkling of blood there in person.

So we now know for sure that whatever Jesus did there was NOT part of the plan of redemption, as people would assume if they think He had to literally sprinkle the Holy Place with His blood.

Now what about the word once? If He entered the Holy Place once, did He do it “once upon a time,” once out of many times, or one time only in an act that was never to be repeated?

As usual, we want Scripture to interpret itself where possible, so let’s look for the other places where the same Greek word for once (ephapax) is used and see what it means there. It appears in only four other verses, and here they are:

Romans 6:10:
For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.

1 Corinthians 15:6:
After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.

Hebrews 7:27:
Who needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people's: for this he did once, when he offered up himself.

Hebrews 10:10:
By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

This word is clearly used to describe events that happened once as opposed to multiple times. So we must conclude that Jesus entered once into the Holy Place after He secured our redemption.

Given that Jesus is now seated at God’s right hand, we know that He entered the Holy Place. He had to do so to get to where He is now! But now we know that He entered the Holy Place once, so either he sprinkled His blood there after He ascended into the clouds in front of His disciples or He never sprinkled His blood there at all in a literal sense. He could not have appeared in the Holy Place with His blood, gone back to earth, then come back later. If He had, Hebrews would have to say that He entered the Holy Place twice, not once!

By the way, entering only once shows that His “preaching to the spirits in prison” could not have happened after Jesus went to heaven, as then He would have entered twice into the Holy Place, the second time being when He came back from a brief excursion to Tartarus.

There is no record in Acts that Jesus was carrying a vial of His own blood when He ascended into the clouds. But that is when He would have had to have done it if He did it at all. The whole concept is rather farfetched to begin with. Jesus would have needed to go back to the site of His torture and death to get blood samples to take with Him to the heavenly Holy Place. There is no explicit record that He did that. In fact, there would be no such samples anyway! His blood would have soaked into other objects, but such soaked-in blood could not sprinkle anything in the Holy Place. This whole idea gets worse the more you think about it. Are we perhaps getting too literal with this?

Let’s look for any other “blood” reference in regard to the holy of holies.

Hebrews 9:19-28:
For when Moses had spoken every precept to all the people according to the law, he took the blood of calves and of goats, with water, and scarlet wool, and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book, and all the people,
Saying, This is the blood of the testament which God hath enjoined unto you.
Moreover he sprinkled with blood both the tabernacle, and all the vessels of the ministry.
And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission.
It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these; but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.
For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us:
Nor yet that he should offer himself often, as the high priest entereth into the holy place every year with blood of others;
For then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.
And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:
So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation.

This appears to possibly lead some credence to our now-ailing explanation (B). However, it begs three NEW issues. First, how could anything in the Holy Place in heaven be defiled in the first place and require purification by any means? Second, Jesus only made one sacrifice, so why did the author of Hebrews state clearly (borne out by the Greek) that the heavenly things had to be purified with better sacrifices in the plural? Third, is there really a lampstand, showbread, and so on, in the heavenly holy of holies? If there are, John didn’t see them in his account in Revelation. Fourth, it is plain in the passage above that when Jesus “entered into heaven itself,” it was “now to appear in the presence of God for us,” describing His present-day ministry, not a one-time historical event involving a brief visit! Sometimes it seems like the deeper you go, the more forks in the road you encounter!

If God says that “purification” was necessary even though the things were in heaven, we are not in a position to second-guess Him. Much of the whole unclean/clean business under the Law was what we could call ceremonial – something was ceremonially clean or unclean, not necessarily filthy in the literal sense. I’ve seen it argued that Satan still has not been thrown down from having access to heaven (Revelation 12:10) and therefore he could dirty up things in heaven, but I don’t subscribe to that explanation because if Jesus purified defiled things once, Satan could defile them again since he still has access there and there would be no way to re-purify them if it could only happen once. I think we have to assume that this is something ceremonial, as surely the items in God’s very presence in heaven were not defiled by sin. In fact, a veil was in place until Christ died to prevent sinful people from being where God was!

The “plural” issue at least has a plausible explanation. The Old Testament required different sacrifices for different things. The author of Hebrews seems to be saying that Christ’s one sacrifice was the counterpart of ALL those multiple Old Testament sacrifices. I admit that this explanation might seem contrived, but I don’t have a better one – if you do, please share it with the world! (“Explaining” that the Bible contradicts itself doesn’t count!)

Scripture actually does not teach that everything in the earthly temple was a copy of something in the heavenly Holy Place! Since we’re having to get technical, here is what God actually says about it:

Hebrews 8:4-5:
For if he were on earth, he should not be a priest, seeing that there are priests that offer gifts according to the law:
Who serve unto the example and shadow of heavenly things, as Moses was admonished of God when he was about to make the tabernacle: for, See, saith he, that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount.

The technicality here is that the earthly things were the example and shadow of heavenly things, not exact replicas of heavenly things. To use a similar illustration, Jesus is not and never will be a literal snake on a pole. That snake on a pole was a shadow of Jesus, not an exact replica of Jesus. So the items in the earthly tabernacle symbolized heavenly realities, but they were not literal replicas of a lamp, bread, and so on, which are never mentioned in John’s description of God’s immediate surroundings.

And of course, we check the Greek word for example (hypodeigma) and we find that is translated example (or in one case, ensample) everywhere other than Hebrews 8:5. It is never translated copy in the King James Version, though many other translations used the word copy. Our old standby, Young’s Literal Translation, uses the word pattern.

Also, in our subject passage, earthly things are called “figures of the true,” not “replicas of the true.”

Now consider this:

1 John 5:7-8:
For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.
And there are three that bear witness in earth, the spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.

According to this passage, the blood bears witness “in earth,” not “in heaven.” If Jesus’ blood were sprinkled in heaven, would it not also bear witness in heaven?

It looks like we should do a search for the words sprinkle, sprinkled and sprinkling and see what we find in other Scriptures. The following verses of interest include the word sprinkling. The first of these appears in a passage that looks like it might link sprinkled blood with heaven after all.

Hebrews 12:22-24:
But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels,
To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect,
And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel.

Mount Zion is on the earth, but the heavenly Jerusalem is not. Angels are found both in heaven and on the earth. The church has people in heaven and on earth whose names are written in heaven. God the Judge of all is present in both places. Spirits of just men have been made perfect both in heaven and on the earth. Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant is both here and in heaven. The question is where the “blood of sprinkling” is.

(By the way, most people mistakenly think that believers’ spirits are only made perfect in heaven, but Ephesians 4:24 states that our new spirits are created after God in righteousness and true holiness, so they are already perfect on the earth. It is only our souls and our bodies that are still imperfect.)

The following verse makes it apparent that Jesus’ blood cleanses us from all sin here on the earth.

1 John 1:7:
But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.

So according to God, Jesus’ blood is working on the earth.

This means that we cannot say that Hebrews 12:22-24 above is only talking about heaven, so it cannot be used to prove that Jesus’ blood was used to sprinkle things in heaven.

The next verse shows that Jesus’ blood sprinkles US from an evil conscience. Having a God-given conscience is not evil, but having your conscience bother you about past sins that you aren’t even doing anymore is evil because it negates the blood of Christ that was shed to forgive you for whatever you did.

Hebrews 10:22:
Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.

However, this “sprinkling by Jesus’ blood” takes place on the earth, not in heaven.

1 Peter 1:2:
Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ: Grace unto you, and peace, be multiplied.

This doesn’t refer to anything that happens or happened in heaven; it refers to what happens to YOU when you get saved. You are “sprinkled” by His blood.

Was Jesus’ Blood Simply on Him in Heaven?

Another side theory is that Jesus appeared in heaven with His own blood because His body was bloody. But there is NO evidence that Jesus still had blood all over Himself when His resurrected body came out of the tomb at the point where Mary saw Him and He said He had not yet ascended.

If Jesus’ body were still a bloody mess, He would have been instantly recognized as the One who suffered at the whipping post and the cross. There would have been no way Mary could have mistaken Him for the gardener!

John 20:15:
Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.

So that theory is “out.”

We have come up short with any proof that Jesus talked to Mary, made a quick trip to heaven and sprinkled His blood on things, then returned almost immediately to talk to other disciples.

Touchy Issue: Was Mary a Cling-On?

An oft-cited explanation of why Jesus told Mary not to touch Him but allowed others to do so is that the Greek word in John 20:17 supposedly means to cling, as opposed to just touch, while others just “touched” Him, and that therefore, He needed Mary to stop “clinging onto” Him to that He could ascend very temporarily to heaven with His blood.

However, that statement about the Greek word is completely false. (It pays to do your own studying so that you don’t spread other people’s errors.) Everywhere else in the New Testament where the same Greek word (haptomai) is used, it just means to touch. Out of 35 other instances, I couldn’t find even one instance where you could prove that the word means to “cling” instead of “touch” (despite what one popular lexicon claims). It appears often in relation to Jesus touching people and people touching Jesus or His clothing. So the explanation above is obviously wrong, and even more so when you consider this:

Matthew 28:9:
And as they went to tell his disciples, behold, Jesus met them, saying, All hail. And they came and held him by the feet, and worshipped him.

The Greek word (krateo) translated held in the at verse above actually means HELD elsewhere. So it was the later people who “held” (clung to) Jesus, not Mary. The idea that Mary clung while others only touched is completely backward!

The Literal Entrance by Blood Issue

Let me ask you a question. When you approach God, do you take a literal vial of Jesus’ blood with you to gain access to heaven? If not, how do you interpret the verse below?

Hebrews 10:19:
Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus,

I think it’s clear that your entry to God’s presence is based on what the blood of Jesus did for you, not by you having some of Jesus’ blood on hand in a vial when you approach God. You enter by the blood, not with the blood. But that is the same terminology we saw above describing Jesus’ entry into the Holy Place. It was by His blood, not with His blood. You can enter the Holy Place because of what Jesus’ blood did for you. If you don’t enter the Holy Place with His blood, why would you assume that Jesus entered the Holy Place with His blood? If He could enter because of what His blood did, He would not need to sprinkle His blood on heavenly objects after He entered.

The Blood of the Everlasting Covenant

Since we’re not afraid of difficult verses, we might as well look at this one while we’re at it!

Hebrews 13:20:
Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant,

Here Jesus’ very resurrection came about through His blood. Did He pass through blood on the way back into His body from the lower parts of the earth? I don’t know anyone who takes this verse that literally. It is because of what Jesus’ bloodshed accomplished before He died that He was able to rise from the dead – His blood was the blood of the New Covenant. The prophesied New Covenant had to include His resurrection, and His own blood sealed that covenant. Everything that followed was now inevitable.

Food for Thought

Jesus said that you had to eat His flesh and drink His blood.

John 6:53-54:
Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.
Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

Are we to take this literally? Some people in Jesus’ day stopped following Him after He said this, probably thinking that He was advocating cannibalism. However, it is clear that this “blood statement” was not intended to be taken literally, because people were born again after Jesus rose from the dead, and thus did have life in them without physically eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking His blood.

If this “blood statement” can be figurative, so can any statement in Hebrews about sprinkling blood in the heavenly holy place. But here’s the next shocker – even Hebrews doesn’t actually say that He did such a thing. That has been “read into” it, but it isn’t there.

When the Holy Place Was Sprinkled

In the context of Hebrews 9, it becomes apparent that the heavenly sprinkling was credited when Jesus died on the cross. Check out Hebrews 9:12 with the next two verses.

Hebrews 9:12-14:
Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.
For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh:
How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

This offering of the blood of Christ clearly took place when He “offered Himself” – on the cross, not later. Jesus’ sacrifice when He shed His blood was a one-time event that settled things for all time. He had no need to “offer Himself” again after the cross.

Hebrews 9 goes on to say that blood was applied to the tabernacle and the ministry vessels in the Old Testament. Here is the alleged “proof verse” that Jesus supposedly sprinkled the heavenly tabernacle with His blood in a literal sense after His resurrection:

Hebrews 9:23:
It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these; but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.

However, this states that the heavenly objects were purified with better sacrifices (we discussed that earlier), not with better blood, which is the way many people misinterpret it.

In fact, His ascension to heaven mentioned in Hebrews was His permanent one, not some extra trip on a day pass to offer His blood. The very next verse confirms this, as pointed out earlier!

Hebrews 9:24:
For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us:

The next two verses confirm my point further. We see only the “sacrifice of Himself” (on the cross), not any mention that He had to go to heaven to offer His blood:

Hebrews 9:25-26:
Nor yet that he should offer himself often, as the high priest entereth into the holy place every year with blood of others;
For then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.

Conclusion for This Question

Thus, I believe that (D) is the only correct answer – Jesus did NOT offer His blood on a special extra visit to heaven for that sole purpose. The “purifying” in heaven was symbolic and was credited when Jesus shed His blood for us on the earth. There is no technical evidence that Jesus literally sprinkled heavenly objects in person with His blood.

Feel free to disagree if you want.

A follow-up question now becomes obvious.

10. Since going to hell was not part of paying for our sins, why did Jesus have to go there?

We know that Jesus had to visit hell (the part called Tartarus) to preach to the spirits in prison, but we’re discussing why Jesus would have to spend any time in Hades where human sinners were suffering.

I believe the answer is that He had “become sin” and the only proper place for Him was hell until the moment he was not “sin” anymore. He did not belong in Abraham’s Bosom with the Old Testament righteous. It is evident that He was “quickened by the Spirit” and was no longer “sin” at that point, so He no longer belonged in hell.

If Jesus had become “spiritually alive” again before He drew His last breath on the cross, He would not have been able to die and then rise from the dead. Death only came through sin. This much bigger issue of when and if Jesus died spiritually needs – and has– a whole separate section in this book that you can click below to read!