human
He descended into Hell. I need not translate that clause. Every well taught Sunday-school child knows its meaning.
gpt
He descended into Hades,
human
To heaven, of course, somebody says.
gpt
No, says the Lord Himself after the resurrection,
human
I have not yet ascended to My Father. Where, then, did His spirit go?
gpt
Nobody can tell, you say. Yes, one person could tell, and only one--the Lord Himself. He only could have told of His solitary temptation in the wilderness, and He evidently told it. He only could have told of the solitary scene in Gethsemane, it would seem that He told it. He only could have told of His visit to the world of the dead, and I think that He told it. You remember that after the resurrection He was with them
human
I think He must have told them then of those three days. Why? Because the knowledge of it was so wide-spread in the early Church, and there was no one else to tell it. Some people seem to think that there are only some obscure verses of St. Peter and a few references of St. Paul in favour of such teaching. Not at all. It was the belief of the whole Church. St. Peter and St. Paul were only two in a crowd of teachers of early days who proclaimed triumphantly the visit of the Lord into the world of the dead. St. Peter seems to be thinking of it in his first sermon when he quotes:
gpt
His soul was not left in Hades (Acts ii. 31). Therefore St. Peter knew that it was into that intermediate life--not into that final Heaven--that our Lord went at death. This statement by itself would not prove much, but when I find the same St. Peter long afterwards telling so circumstantially in his first epistle (iii. 18) that when his Master was put to death in the flesh He was made more alive in the spirit, in which spirit He went and preached to the spirits in prison who had been disobedient at the flood.
human
For which cause (chap. iv. 6) was the gospel--the glad news--preached to them that are dead, I think it is a fair inference that St. Peter had some definite information. And then I find St. Paul, in Eph. iv. 9, when he is writing of the gifts bestowed on the Church by her ascended Lord. The word
gpt
causes him to pause abruptly. Men must not think that His work in the unseen was limited to that work for us in Heaven after His ascension.
human
Now that He ascended, what is it but that He descended first into the lower parts of the earth (_i. e._, the world of the departed) that He might fill all things.