01.05.04. Where is Hades?
4. WHERE IS HADES? So the soul of our Lord was in Hades between His death and His resurrection on the third day. And Ephesians 4:9-10 shows beyond question (1) that the “soul” was the Lord Himself, the personality, and (2) where Hades is situate. It says: “Having ascended up on high he has led captivity captive, and has given gifts unto men. Now this, having ascended, what is it but that He also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same who has also ascended far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.”
1. The Person that ascended is the same Person that had descended, and from His own express words to Mary directly after His resurrection it is certain that He himself did not go to the Father at the hour of death, for He said to her: “I have (perf. ind., anabebeeko) not yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brethren and say unto them, I ascend to my Father” (John 20:17). As His ascent to the Father had yet to take place it is clear that His human spirit, which He had commended to His Father as He died, was not Himself. Nor would the words admit the thought; for a man cannot send his personality, his self, away from himself, but we read of Jesus that “he gave up the spirit,” or, breathed out the spirit, expired, as we say, the exact reversal of the act of creation when God breathes in the spirit. The spirit therefore was not Himself, but a part of His composite humanity that He could dismiss by an act of the will. Man does not possess the power to do this; he must use violence to terminate his life: but Christ had received this power specially from His Father, according to His statement that the Father had given Him authority to lay down His life by His own act (John 10:17-18).
2. The realm to which Christ descended, elsewhere, as we have seen, named Hades, is in this place in Ephesians stated plainly to be in “the lower parts of the earth.” Scripture always locates it there and nowhere else. So Jacob of old said: “I will go down to Sheol to my son” (Genesis 37:35); and so the great prophet Samuel, when permitted by God to come from the world of the dead to announce the doom of Saul (an exceptional permission and event) said: “Why hast thou disquieted me to bring me up?” (1 Samuel 28:15). And so Christ said of Capernaum: “Shalt thou be exalted unto heaven? thou shah go down unto Hades” (Matthew 11:23). As certainly as heaven is above the surface of the earth so certainly is Hades in the opposite direction.
Readers of the great classics will not need to be reminded that it was the common belief of the ancient world that the place of the dead was within the earth. We are not aware that any other opinion was then in men’s minds. Their details of that place and its conditions are not to be accepted without Scripture confirmation, even as those of mediaeval writers like Dante are not to be; but the general facts of the location of the world of the dead within the earth, and of its having two divided regions, one of pain and one of bliss, are plainly adopted in Holy Scripture (as in Luke 16:1-31), and so are confirmed as facts. And it could be shown that some details also are thus confirmed; as that the poets made visitors to and from that realm go and come through some cave or opening in the earth, and the Revelation similarly represents demon hordes as coming from the abyss through a shaft or opening therefrom (Revelation 9:1-11). We take the idea in each case to represent the conception that the realm of the dead is within the earth.