He Descended to the Dead
Not to Hell, and Not to Fight

Section IThe Question Was the Right One

Chad Bird tells that story in a recent entry of his Bible in One Year series, and he tells it honestly. He did not shrug the line off. He went looking for it, found 1 Peter 3, and did the work: he asked about the sequence, the place, the verb, and the content of the proclamation. That is exactly the order a careful reader should ask them in, and he asked them in public where the rest of us could watch.

Several of his conclusions are simply correct, and they should be said plainly before anything else is said. He is right that the descent is not a fiction the church invented to fill a gap in the story — something happened between the Cross and the empty tomb, and Scripture tells us about it. He is right that Peter's verb is proclaim, not evangelize: a herald announcing a verdict is not a missionary offering terms. He is right that Colossians 2:15 belongs in this conversation. And he is right that the whole thing ends in comfort rather than curiosity.

Where the reading goes wrong is one word — and it is not a word Peter wrote. It is a word our English Bibles and our English Creed have been carrying for four hundred years, and it has three different places packed inside it. Unpack the word, and the passage lies down quietly. It also turns out that the Creed the young man was nervous about is not the problem. The Creed is fine. The translation is what needed help.

Section IIOne English Word, Three Real Places

English has one word where the Bible has three, and the collapse of the three into the one has probably caused more confusion in the modern church than any other translation decision still standing in our pulpits.

Hold the middle line steady, because everything turns on it. Gehenna is not occupied. Revelation is explicit about the order of operations: at the end, Death and Hades give up the dead who are in them, and then Death and Hades themselves are thrown into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:13–14). The grave is emptied into the fire. That means the fire cannot be the grave, and it means nobody has yet been sentenced there. If our English word "hell" means the lake of fire — and in ordinary usage it does — then no one has been in hell yet. Not one soul. Not one demon. Not the devil himself, who is to be thrown there last of all (Revelation 20:10).

So the question is not whether Jesus went to hell and won. The question is whether there was anything there to go to.

The Creed never said what we think it said

Here is the part that ought to bring relief rather than argument. The Latin line is descendit ad inferos — He descended to those below, to the lower regions, to the dead. It is not descendit ad gehennam. The clause appears first in the creed of Aquileia, and the man who first comments on it, Rufinus, around the turn of the fifth century, reports that the Roman and Eastern forms of the creed did not carry the words at all — and says the force of the phrase is the same as the word buried. In his form of the creed it stands where "and was buried" stands in ours. The old Latin renderings behind it are the standard translations of the Greek phrase in Psalm 16, the very psalm Peter preaches at Pentecost.¹

The English word "hell," when the Prayer Book and the King James translators used it, still carried the old sense of the covered place, the hidden place, the grave. It has since narrowed to mean the fire. The Creed did not change. Our language did. A believer standing in that sanctuary can say the line at full volume with a clear conscience — he is confessing that Jesus really died, really went where the dead go, and really came back. That is not a strange doctrine hiding in the corner of the Creed. It is the burial clause, said twice.

Section IIIPeter Already Told Us Where He Went

We do not have to reason our way to the destination from a single hard verse, because the same apostle preached the destination in the open air, in the first Christian sermon ever preached, to thousands of witnesses. Peter takes up Psalm 16 and applies it to the resurrection of the Christ:

Hades. Not Gehenna. Peter had a word for the place of fire available to him — the Lord used it a dozen times in the Gospels — and Peter did not reach for it. He said the soul of the Messiah was in the realm of the dead and was not abandoned there. Scripture interprets Scripture, and the safest interpreter of Peter is Peter. When we come to his letter and find "spirits in prison," we already know what neighborhood we are standing in, because he has already told us and told us publicly.

The Lord Himself fixed the timing from the Cross. To the thief He said: today you will be with Me in Paradise (Luke 23:43). Not in three days. Today. And Paradise, in the language of that moment, is not a euphemism for the tomb — it is where Lazarus is carried in Luke 16, the comforted side of the realm of the dead, Abraham's side, with a fixed chasm between it and the place of torment. One realm. Two conditions. Both occupied. Both aware of each other. Neither of them the lake of fire.

This bears on the sequence question directly. The devotional reads Peter's put to death — made alive — went and proclaimed as placing the proclamation after the resurrection, and grammatically that reading can be defended; the Greek relative clause is genuinely ambiguous and honest readers have divided over it for centuries. But the clock is not set by that clause. It is set by Luke. On Wednesday afternoon the Bridegroom told a dying criminal that they would be together, that day, among the departed. Whatever the proclamation was and whenever it was made, He was among the dead before the stone ever moved.

Section IVThe Prison in Revelation Is Not Yet Occupied

The strongest argument in the devotional deserves to be stated at its strongest before it is answered. Peter uses the Greek word phulake, prison. John uses that same word in Revelation 20:7 for the place Satan is confined. Same word, same idea, therefore — the argument runs — Peter's prison is the devil's prison, and Jesus went there.

Two things break that link, and either one is enough.

The first is that phulake is a common word for custody of any kind. It is Herod's jail where Peter himself sleeps between two soldiers (Acts 12). It is the cell the apostles are put in and walk out of (Acts 5:19). Revelation uses it for a haunt of unclean birds (18:2). It is the ordinary Greek word for a lock-up, and it is also the word for a night watch. Word-identity is not place-identity. Two buildings called "the county jail" are not the same building because they share a name.

The second is decisive, and it is a matter of the clock. Revelation 20:7 describes Satan being released from his prison when the thousand years are finished. That release presupposes the confinement of Revelation 20:1–3 — the angel with the key of the abyss, the chain, the sealing. And that confinement has not happened. Satan is not in the abyss. Peter, in the same letter under discussion, says the adversary is prowling like a lion looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8), and Paul says the wrestling is still against principalities and powers (Ephesians 6:12). A prison that will not be occupied until a future age cannot be the prison a first-century apostle describes Jesus visiting in the past tense.

And note what the two prisons actually hold. Peter's prison holds spirits from the days of Noah — a population, ancient, plural, connected in the same breath to the angels who sinned and were kept for judgment (2 Peter 2:4; Jude 6). John's prison, when it is finally used, holds one prisoner. Different inmates, different centuries, different jails.

Section VThe Duel Was in the Wilderness; the Triumph Was in Daylight

If the devil was defeated in a fight, we should be able to find the fight. We can. It is not underground and it is not after the resurrection. It is in a dry place, at the front end of the ministry, between a hungry man and an accuser who thought hunger was an advantage.

Three assaults, three answers, and every answer the same shape: It is written. Not a legion of angels. Not a display of raw power. Not a word of His own invention. The Son of God, starving, took up the written Covenant and used it as a blade, and the accuser left Him. Israel had forty years in a wilderness and failed; the Messiah took forty days in a wilderness and did not. The strong man was bound out there in the dust, by the Word, in the mouth of a man who would not eat.

The devotional quotes Matthew 12:29 in support of the descent, and that verse is worth reading slowly, because it says the opposite of what it is being asked to say. Jesus speaks it in the middle of His ministry, defending His authority to cast out demons, and His logic is that the plundering is evidence the binding has already happened. Nobody loots a strong man's house until the strong man is tied up. The Lord is not predicting a future victory in a future underworld. He is explaining a present one. The binding was accomplished; that is why the demons were coming out on the roadside in Galilee.

Then Colossians. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in it — and the "it" is the Cross, two verses after the nailing of the record of debt. Paul does not put the parade underground. He puts it on a hill outside a city wall in the middle of the afternoon, in front of soldiers and mockers and a centurion who figured it out. The Roman triumph image Paul is reaching for is a public procession by definition; a victory march nobody sees is not a triumph, it is a rumor. The open shame was open. The court was the Cross. The verdict was rendered where everyone could see it, and the sentence is still being carried out.

The Cross was the courtroom. The grave was only the receipt.

Ten Words Press

Section VIWhat He Actually Did Below: He Took the Keys

So the Messiah goes down among the dead. Not as a combatant. Read what He says about it Himself, standing in front of John on Patmos:

Keys are not a weapon. Keys are custody. A man who walks out of a jail carrying the keys did not have to beat the prisoners — he took the office of the jailer. That is the language of transfer of authority, and it is the only description the risen Lord gives of what He came back with. Not a trophy from a brawl. The keyring.

Paul adds the direction of travel. Taking up Psalm 68, he writes that when He ascended on high He led captivity captive and gave gifts to men, and that the ascending presupposes a prior descending into the lower parts of the earth (Ephesians 4:8–10). Captives were led. Out. Upward. That is not a raid; it is a release, and it is the same movement the psalm celebrates when the King comes home with the people He went to get.

Matthew reports the disturbance from ground level. At the moment of death the veil tore, the earth shook, and the tombs were opened; and after the resurrection many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised and went into the holy city and were seen (Matthew 27:51–53). Whatever else that passage is, it is a report that the inventory of the grave was disturbed on those particular days. Something down there changed hands.

Where the record stops, and where I am reading

Now the honest corner, because the case is not helped by claiming more than the text gives. Scripture nowhere hands us a floor plan. There is no verse that says, in so many words, that the comforted side of the realm of the dead was emptied and relocated. Anyone who tells you the architecture in detail has left the page and gone into the medieval mystery plays — where, it should be said, most of our mental furniture on this subject actually comes from. The picture of Christ smashing the brass gates and dueling a personified Hell is not from Peter. It comes from the Descensus section of the Gospel of Nicodemus, an apocryphal text whose descent narrative took its developed form centuries after the apostles, and from the English mystery cycles that dramatized it for a thousand years of churchgoers.² It is vivid. It is memorable. It is not Scripture, and no article of faith should rest on it.

What the record does give is a change in address, and the change is documented. Before the Cross, the righteous dead are in Luke 16, comforted but held, on the far side of a fixed chasm, waiting. After the Cross, Paul says that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8), and that to depart is to be with Christ, which is far better (Philippians 1:23). Paul has no waiting room in his vocabulary. He has a destination. Nothing in Luke 16 would have let Paul write those sentences; something between the two changed what happens to a believer at death. That is my read, offered as a read: the keys changed hands, the captives were led up, and the waiting place for the righteous emptied out. The evidence for it is the difference between Luke's chasm and Paul's confidence. If someone can account for that difference another way, I will hear it.

Section VIIThen What Was Proclaimed, and to Whom

Peter does not tell us the content, and any answer here is inference. The devotional's answer — a conquering King announcing His victory to rebel spirits — is very nearly right, and here is the thing worth noticing: it does not require hell at all. It works better without it.

Peter's own second letter tells us where those spirits are and what condition they are in: cast down, held in chains of gloomy darkness, reserved unto judgment (2 Peter 2:4; Jude 6 says the same). Reserved. Held for trial. Not sentenced, not burning, not finished. That is a holding cell, and a holding cell is precisely the place where a herald belongs. You announce a verdict to prisoners who are awaiting sentencing. You do not send a herald into the lake of fire; the fire is the announcement, and it is the last one anybody gets.

So the proclamation makes better sense on the covenant reading than on the traditional one. The spirits from Noah's days had watched the long patience of God run out once before, and had every reason to think the flood was the end of the story. The announcement was that the Seed had come, the Covenant was sealed in Blood, the accusation was void, and the reservation they were being held under had a date on it now.

And He did not have to fight them to say it. The fighting had been done in a wilderness with three sentences and on a Cross in front of the whole city. He went down among the dead as a Man who had already won, walked through the place where every human being before Him had been held, collected the ones who were His, took the keys off the wall, and came back up.

Section VIIIThe Comfort, Made Better

The devotional ends where it should end, in comfort, and I have no quarrel with the destination. I want to argue that the comfort is larger than the version we were handed.

If the victory was won in a fistfight in hell, then the weapon was omnipotence, and omnipotence is not something you or I have been issued. It is a spectacle to watch and nothing to hold. But if the adversary was beaten in a wilderness by a starving man saying it is written, then the weapon is the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God (Ephesians 6:17), and it has been placed in the hand of every believer who owns a Bible. The Bridegroom did not win by a method we cannot copy. He won by the method He then handed us, and told us to stand.

And there is a second comfort in getting the geography right, which is that it keeps us honest about what is finished and what is not. The tombs are still full. The last enemy has not yet been destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26). Death still collects, and it collected somebody's mother this week. A theology that says every foe has already been mopped up cannot look at a graveside without flinching. The Covenant reading can. It says: the keys are in the hand of the One who loves you, the sentence on the grave has already been written, and the day of its execution is on the calendar. Death is not yet gone. It is only under new management, and the Manager was in there Himself and came out.

So say the line. Say it louder than the person next to you. He descended to the dead. Not to hell — hell is empty and waiting for its first occupant. Not to fight — the fight was over in a wilderness and confirmed on a Cross in daylight. He went down where every one of us is going, in the dark, in the silence, into the place that has never once given anything back.

And He came out. And He had the keys.