Where did Jesus go when he died on the cross?

That doesn't make any sense.

Dr. Matt Emerson, thank you so much for joining me today.

So what is your initial reaction to this question, not just for this kid, but for people in the church in general? Where did Jesus go when he died on the cross?

We all go to the place of the dead, and we either go to the place of the righteous or the unrighteous, and obviously he's righteous, so he goes to paradise.

It's just human souls depart from their bodies, and they are still conscious in the afterlife. That's what we're talking about.

And so that's what we mean by paradise, this righteous place or the place of the righteous dead.

Do we know anything about that? But let's start with the first one, because even if people aren't wondering this, I do think pulling out some of the theological importance of this could be really helpful. Maybe not even necessarily for this kid, but for the grown-up. that's like, well, I don't even think it matters if we have a right answer to this question. But instead to say like, no, it does matter that we have a good answer to this question.

Why is this something that's important?

So you know, after the fall, what it means to be human is to experience death as the penalty for sin. And so that's the second part of the answer that we'll get to in a second. But part of what it means to be human is to have a human body and a human soul, and part of what it means to be human after the fall is for that human body and soul to be separated at death.

And so those two actions are not only, and I'm going to use a big word, they're not only vicarious. That is, he's not just experiencing them with us. They're also victorious. He's experiencing them for us and to defeat our enemies of sin and death. And so on, the cross, as he dies for sin, and then in Holy Saturday, when he remains dead, those are victorious actions as well.

He's achieving victory over sin, is what Paul says in Colossians 2, 14 and 15. And he's bringing about victory over death. He goes into the place of the dead, and he's king. even there. Even in a place that's totally rebellious against him, he's king.

So I mean, there's a lot there too, but I'll stop there and say that's why it's important. We want to affirm his full humanity, and we also want to affirm his full victory over all of the enemies that we have, especially sin and death.

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Can you talk a little bit to the people who might be nervous about this idea, this belief that Jesus went to the place of the dead, because it sounds unfamiliar to them? I've heard people say, like, oh, that's a Catholic doctrine when I talk about the descent to the dead, even though, as you've said, something Christians have believed very early in the church. So first, is this a universal Christian belief that we share with our Catholic and Orthodox brothers and sisters? And then related to that, this goes back to this earlier question of what was he doing while he was there, because there are lots of opinions about that. Are there parts of this doctrine that we don't all share?

And just like Catholic and Orthodox Christians, we all share a common ancestry that is older than that, that goes back before the Reformation, to the beginning of the Church.

Of course, if you have Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox listeners, they're going to say, well, what's problematic about that? We're Protestant. I think these are problematic. So in Roman Catholicism, which is particularly what many of the reformers are responding to, in Roman Catholicism, you have the doctrine of purgatory. that's attached to this doctrine.

Emerson is saying is that the medieval idea of purgatory got combined with a much older idea of Jesus descending to the dead. And so some of the reformers wrongly thought they needed to get rid of both of these ideas.

But the problem became that in Roman Catholicism, they developed this, first of all, tiered view of hell, which you can see in Dante's Inferno, which is a great book, but it's reflective of this doctrine of hell, where the first level of hell is limbo. And this is where the righteous Jews and or pagans, potentially, plus infants who die and childbirth, et cetera, would have been. And Roman Catholics said, okay, when Jesus descends into hell, he descends to limbo. And then, when he leaves, he opens the door from limbo to go out of hell and into purgatory. And so there's this very developed doctrine, both of limbo and of purgatory that get attached to the doctrine of the descent.

And that's, in part, what the reformers are rejecting. And, of course, if you think about that, is it something that all Christians have believed? In one sense, yes. In another sense, you find more and more Protestants today rejecting it and opting for one of those other two Protestant views that developed in the Reformation instead. And I just want to say, we don't have to take the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox developments and, what I would say, mistaken developments.

We don't have to take those and affirm them, to affirm the more basic affirmation that is more historic and, of course, I would say, more biblical.

So I don't know if that answers your question.

talk about this? Because I can imagine, again, someone saying, well, I can understand logically the beginning of your answer of righteous people, go to paradise, Jesus is a righteous person. But is there anything in Scripture that tells us what's going on on this day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday?

And then you'd have to start talking about, well, what does the Bible say about death? And so I'm going to kind of run through that very fast. But in the Old Testament, you have a singular place of the dead. All the dead go there. If you're a human being, you die, you go to the place of the dead.

Over the course of God's revelation to His people, we begin to see that that place is distinct in terms of there's righteous dead, unrighteous dead, that sort of thing. And so, you know, by the time you get to, as I mentioned earlier, Luke 16, you have a very clear sense that this singular place of the dead, where all the dead are, is divided between righteous and unrighteous. And then, of course, you have Jesus saying to the thief on the cross, today, that is right, after we die, you're going to be with me in paradise, which is a very clear reference to this righteous place of the dead. So that's one way to get at. how do we know that the Bible really teaches this?

I mean, we don't have time to go through all those Old Testament texts. But, you know, by the time we get to Luke, the first century, this would have been clear. Other New Testament texts that affirm that Jesus really died, like all humans do, and even seem to make reference to the place of the dead, would be like Peter's sermon in Acts 2.. He quotes Psalm 16 and says, you know, you won't let my body see corruption. You won't abandon my soul to Hades.

This appears to be a very clear reference to both bodily and soulish experience of death. Romans 10, 9 and 10 make a reference to Jesus descending to the abyss, which, again, would have been a metaphor or a synonym, I guess I should say, a synonym for the place of the dead. And so, you know, those are the kinds of texts that we would talk about and say, oh, and one other really important one I usually start with is Matthew 12, the sign of Jonah, specifically verse 40, where Jesus compares his own impending or upcoming death where he will stay in the grave. He compares that to Jonah's time in the belly of the fish. And if you go back and read Jonah 2, in Jonah 2, Jonah compares his own time in the belly of the fish to being in Sheol or the place of the dead.

And so, Jesus is making this very clear analogy, like, I'm going there, but for real. You know, Jonah was kind of there. He was in the belly of the fish. It felt like he was there. He wasn't really in the place of the dead.

I'm actually going. there is what Jesus tells us in Matthew 12.. So all those texts, I would say, teach that Jesus really experiences death like all human beings do. When you start talking about the victorious element, other things that are attached to the descent doctrine, Revelation 1.18 is very important. where Jesus says, you know, I now hold the keys to death and Hades.

It's indicating that Jesus has taken them from death and Hades and now possesses them. And so, there's this victorious element in Revelation 1.18.. It's also present in, like, 1 Peter 3, 18 through 22.. He went in his spirit and proclaimed to the spirits in prison. So, you know, there's this element that between Jesus's death and resurrection, he is proclaiming his victory to the dead.

And in this case, you know, as I've said over and over again already, the place of the dead is all the dead. And in the Old Testament, as well as in the New Testament, you also have this, like, very bottom layer, which is evil angels. And so, in 1 Peter 3, he's proclaiming his victory over death to the spirits in prison. That is the evil angels, and basically saying, what's up, y'all? I win.

And for, you know, the righteous dead, that's good news. For the unrighteous dead and for the evil angels, that's terrible news. And so, there's this proclamation element to it in 1 Peter 3.. Those are some of the major... Those are the major biblical texts.

And obviously, we can talk about any one of those, for, you know, quite a while. And if you have other questions about any of them, we can go back to them. But that's kind of the sketch of a biblical case for it.

And then we can uncover all these texts and have, you know, learn, like you've said, about the grammatical debates and the theological questions. But we also get this concise language that comes out of people wrestling with all of these texts from these different books.

And in the crowd is a woman who has been bleeding for 12 years. No one can help her or heal her. And she believes Jesus can heal her. So she gets as close to him as she can, and she touches the edge of his clothes, and she's immediately healed. And Jesus, Mark tells us, can tell that the power has left him.

And so he asks, who touched me? And this brave woman says, I did. And Jesus says to her, daughter, your faith has healed you. And after this, someone comes and tells Jairus that his daughter has died. But Jesus tells him it will be all right.

He can still heal her. So they go to Jairus' house, and Jesus takes the little girl by the hand and says, little girl, get up. And she does. And one beautiful thing about this story is the contrast between this little girl who has a powerful father to advocate for her and this woman who was alone and probably ignored since she was considered unclean by her bleeding. But Jesus stops along the way to an important man's house and sees this woman as a daughter, as someone worth advocating for and healing.

So I asked the kids in Children's Church, how do you think the woman felt when Jesus called her daughter? And one kid immediately said, uh, confused. He is not her dad. And then another kid said so quickly, no, actually, he's everyone's dad. And then another kid said, no, it's God, that's everyone's dad.

And then another kid said, Jesus and God are the same. And just as I'm starting to get nervous about explaining Trinitarian theology to five-year-olds when we only have a few more minutes before their parents pick them up, another kid says, Miss Caitlyn, God, the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are all God, right? Yes, sometimes it turns out they really are learning something. Before we get into what your answer to a kid would be, could you just briefly, you've mentioned this already, but tell us a little bit about, maybe, why this matters. It matters for our understanding of what's happening in the crucifixion.

It matters for understanding of who Jesus is. But I can also imagine, and having read your book, I have read you on this, that it matters on a pastoral level for people. Can you talk a little bit about, for example, the person who might next week in church read these words in the creed, how they might think about, how that might comfort them or how that might shape their understanding of themselves and their lives and their family?

And what the doctrine of the descent affirms is that when we face death or we are facing the death of a loved one, we say that He walks through the valley of the shadow of death with us, because He literally has been in the valley of the shadow of death. He has actually gone to the place of the dead before us. And He's there with us now as someone who's victorious over it. And so I think when we preach funerals or hear funerals preached or whatever, I mean, it's obviously right that our final ultimate hope is in the resurrection. And we don't want to forget that, that the hope for someone who has died in Christ is that one day they will be raised with Christ.

But I think the descent gives us some intermediate and not ultimate, but still, I think, present hope that not only whenever Jesus comes back, whenever that is, will we be raised with Him, but also He's with us right now and has already gone through what we're about to go through or our loved one is about to go through or is going through right now. And, you know, that's a comfort to me. I mean, it's, I don't know about you and I don't know about your listeners, but like sometimes I think about I could be dead for a really long time. And then I think about that and it gives me a little bit of anxiety.

I mean, to put it in kind of, I don't know, figurative terms, like this is enemy territory. This is the enemy stronghold. This is the place where He puts up shop and has His own kingdom. And Jesus has gone in there and just absolutely busted the doors down. And now He is in charge.

And so this is an enemy that we all face. But now, because Jesus has gone into that place and has, because of His full divinity and also His righteous life as a human being, He's kicked the doors down and now He's in charge of it, and death no longer has sting. And so this is a doctrine that's intricately tied to the resurrection. So we can't really talk about one without the other. And it's also intricately tied to the cross.

I mean, all three of these things are all tied together. And so I think it's.

really pastorally important as a way to give people comfort when they're facing death, which is a truly frightening enemy for all of us. But because of Jesus, because of His death, His descent and His resurrection, it no longer holds sting or sway.

Let's imagine, like I said, I had some kids on Good Friday that didn't, none of them asked this exact question, but they did have some questions along these lines. Imagine that we get out of children's church and I point one of my kids in your direction and say, that guy has an answer to your question. Where did Jesus go when He died on the cross? What would?

He's the only truly good person. We are good because He's good and He gives us His goodness when we trust in Him, but He's good by Himself. And so He goes to heaven. And I think, depending on the age of the kid, if they're a little bit older, then we might start getting into the other elements that we talked about. This is the place of the dead.

He's victorious over it, this sort of thing. But I'm at least going to start with. He went to paradise and probably use different words than.

Dr. Emerson, thank you so much for your time today and for taking this kid question really seriously with me. Absolutely. And thanks for having me on. I became obsessed with the descent of the dead a couple of summers ago, when I was studying medieval art and spirituality in Italy.

We saw so many beautiful mosaics or paintings of this story of Jesus going to the realm of the dead and proclaiming his victory over death and taking the saints from across all of time out with him. There was one image that was particularly striking. It was a mosaic in a church in Torcello, Italy, a tiny island in Venice. It was a huge image. And at first it looked like lots of the last judgment images you might have seen from medieval times, when artists love, colorfully representing hell and judgment and frightening ways.

But the real star of the show of this mosaic was the descent to the dead, the harrowing of hell, as it is sometimes called. The crucifixion itself was depicted, but it was actually pretty tiny compared to this giant image of Jesus pulling Adam and Eve out of the realm of the dead, crushing the doors of hell under his feet. And in this image, just like so many others across Italy that we looked at, Jesus has grabbed Adam and Eve, not by their hands, but by their wrists. Some of the images even show their hands falling limply on the other side of Jesus's hand. It's an image of total, complete grace.

The people in these images aren't grabbing up for Jesus, exerting any effort themselves to get themselves saved. No, they are pulled out by the grace of God, who knocks down the gates of hell to rescue his people. As Dr. Emerson showed, Christians have some disagreements about what Jesus was doing on the day between Good Friday and Easter. We have some disagreements about how to think about what happens when people die, but we agree on this.

Jesus has defeated death and sin and rescued us, and we did nothing to deserve it. He has pulled us out from our captivity to sin, grabbing our wrists when we were not strong enough to even grab his hand. Curiously, Caitlyn is a production of Holy Post Media, produced by Mike Strelow, editing by Seth Corvette, theme song by Phil Vischer. Be sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review so more people can discover thoughtful Christian commentary, plus cute kids, and never any butt news.