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It is important to realize that when a person dies that the scripture says that the body returns to the earth, which means that without the use of modern day preserving that it will go to decay and eventually becomes dust again. This is undisputed because it is common knowledge with all of us. We know this because it is seen with the human eye in our natural world but it is the spiritual part of us that goes unseen. This causes much debate and different beliefs in the Church, it shouldn't but it sometimes does.

The scriptures go on to tell us that the spirit returns to God who gave it. This means that our spirit will return to God at the moment of death to remain in his presence until the resurrection. This is true as long as we are born again Christians. Let's read the following verse from the Bible.

The Apostle Paul goes on to tell us in the New Testament that as long as our spirit is in our body that we are absent from God but once we leave the body we will be present with him. This is the same teaching as Ecclesiastes and basically says the same thing. The following scriptures reveal and confirm this.

By understanding this it is easier to understand what happened to Jesus at the time of his death on the cross. At the time of his death after Jesus had said that it is finished Jesus then gave up his spirit into the Fathers care. He said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.

Jesus literally laid down his own life after he had completed everything that he had to complete to fulfill God's promise to save us. This Jesus did in order to fulfill the law and to redeem us along with justification, imputed righteousness, the atonement, everything that was needed for the saving of the soul. There was nothing else for him to do but wait in the Father's presence until it was time for him to be resurrected on that Sunday morning that we all hold dear. He had just told one of the thieves on the cross that he would be with him that day in paradise. Paradise was not someplace under the ground but was Heaven itself. There is not and has never been this invention of man; paradise is in Heaven. The spirit of the thief just like us and as it was in the Old Testament and New Testament returned to the God that gave it to remain in His presence until the times of restitution of all things, then we will be changed. To believe or teach anything else would be to error in a very serious and destructive way.

The spirit can live without the body but the body cannot live without the spirit. The spirit of Jesus was in the very soul of Jesus. Jesus had a soul and it is who he is, his own spirit from eternity was the very life of his soul and is inseparable. The spirit and the soul are so intertwined that they cannot be divided. The spirit and soul is who you are, whether in the body or not. After Jesus left his body he was in the form that he had before he came to this earth to be born of woman. He was and will always be the Son of God, His body was dead that's all. God had given him a body or tabernacle to live in while he was in the world, just as God has provided us a body to live in, but this body is just the house that we live in. Christ was God and therefore cannot change. He will always remain the same. You cannot change who he is or what he is but God gave him a body in order to save us from our sins. His body became the sacrifice for our sins. Just as our bodies affect our souls so it was with Jesus. Our souls feel suffering when our bodies suffer pain. We feel discouragement; depression, fear and everything that goes with it in our souls as our bodies are affected with the things that it has to endure. This is the reason that a person will say that they are tired when their body is tired; it affects the whole person. As we look at the words of Isaiah we get a clearer picture of the sufferings of Jesus and what happened to him on the cross.

Isa:53:10: Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.
11: He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.
12: Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

It was the body of Jesus that suffered the pain but it was Jesus himself, his soul that suffered with it. He felt and experienced this suffering throughout his whole person. He was God's perfect, spotless lamb in his body as well as his spirit and soul. His whole person became a sacrifice for our sins but it was his body that was to die for them. His soul was an offering for sin as well as his body but his soul would never die. God would see the travail of his soul and would count it a sacrifice as well as the death of his body as a sacrifice. Our sins were placed on the body of Jesus not his soul but the soul felt the pain from the penalty of the law that was placed on the body. It was the travail of his soul that caused the Father to be satisfied. He was spotless from the beginning and will remain spotless from sin for eternity.

Verse 12 of these scriptures says that he poured out his soul unto death. This does not mean that his soul died as some would have us to believe but his soul was poured out in suffering and pain until the death of his body. His soul would cease to suffer when the body died. It did not mean that his soul would have to die. God saw the travail or suffering of the soul of Jesus and was satisfied with what Jesus suffered on the cross.

There are some today that are corrupting the Word of God by teaching that the soul of Jesus died and went into Hell in order to redeem us from our sins. That Satan and his hordes of demons grabbed the soul of Jesus and took it into Hell and tormented Jesus for three days. Then the soul of Jesus was reborn in Hell, it is supposed that Jesus then defeated the Devil in his own backyard and then returned to be resurrected as a born again person. It is taught among these folks that the cross was not enough to save us. That Jesus had to go to Hell as a sinner in order to pay the price. I know that to some that this makes sense but it is not what God did or would allow. Jesus was God as well as the Father is God. You cannot kill God, it was possible for the body of Jesus to die and only if he laid it down himself. He is God for eternity not God for only a season, If his soul or spirit could be killed he is not eternal and if he could be killed what would this say about our eternal life? It was the body of Jesus that died for our sins not his soul. It was the travail that he experienced in his soul while on the cross that satisfied God. Both of these became the sacrifice that the law of God required for the payment of our sins.

Col:1: 21: And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled
22: In the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight:
1Pt:2:24: Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.
Heb:10:10: By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

By looking at the scriptures above you will see that there is no mention of Jesus having to die and go to Hell in the spirit in order to save us. It seems to make sense to the human mind that if a sinner's punishment were to go to Hell that Jesus would have to go to Hell in our place in order to become our substitute. This seems logical but the reasoning is lost in the simple fact that a sinner goes to Hell for eternity not just for a short visit. If Jesus had gone to Hell as a sinner to be our substitute then he would have had to have go for eternity seeing that that is the complete punishment.

The truth of the matter is that the Law of Moses demands perfection. Because of this fact we are all found guilty before God. Jesus satisfied the Law on the cross in order that we would not have to stand in the final judgement as a sinner. What he did on the cross was to satisfy the Law to the point that the Law could not condemn you and I as sinners. By Jesus satisfying the demands of the Law he didn't have to go to Hell in our place seeing that at the cross we are justified from sin and there is no reason to go any further with the substitution in our justification. He only had to satisfy the Law, not Hell itself, if we are not found guilty by the Law then there is no reason to fear going to Hell. We are justified. It is the blood of Jesus that washes away our past sins; he paid the price by taking the blame for our sins from the past and the future by suffering for them. Our old man is nailed to the cross along with the law and the penalties of the law at the time Jesus was crucified. The cross is the only means of salvation and was all that God demanded to solve the problem with sin. We are now able to stand before God having the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, he sees us perfect because of the cross, not because he went to Hell. The preaching of the cross is the power of God unto salvation, not the preaching of Hell for salvation.

I am glad that God did it this way. By the death and resurrection of Jesus we are given the assurance that when we die our souls will not lie in the grave but will return to God. We will then be in his presence until the day that we are all changed and receive glorified bodies and live with him eternally in eternal bodies with God. This is his plan and I am glad that this is the way he chose to do it. When we die we can trust God to take care of our souls the same way he took care of the soul of Jesus.

But many will say; but the Bible gives clear proof that Jesus went to Hell believing that it clearly says so. Lets look at this a little closer. The following two verses out of the 2^nd Chapter of Acts seems too clearly say that Jesus went to Hell, but does it?

There is some debate over these scriptures because the word that is used in this text is "Hades" in the Greek. This word "Hades" in the Greek can be used several different ways. In some cases it means the nether world, others it means the realm of the dead, sometimes it is used for grave, death or hell. The King James Translators decided to use the word "hell." So for arguments sake lets use the word "hell." Going back to what happened on the Cross; remember what Jesus said at the time of his death; "Father into thy hands I commend my spirit." Jesus did this trusting his Father to take care of him until he was to resurrect on the following 1^st day of the week. Do we believe that God was willing to take care of the spirit and soul of Jesus? Do we believe that he did? The promise in these scriptures isn't that Jesus will go to hell and then be delivered, the promise is that God will not leave him there at all. You see a sinner's soul would be left in hell while a Christian's soul will leave this world and go to be with the God that gave it. This is exactly what happened, God refused to leave his soul behind in this world to go to hell like a common sinner and took his soul straight into his presence. The thief on the cross would be there as well. His soul wasn't left in hell either. The other part of this is that the body of Jesus would not start to decay and God preserved this as well. If a person's soul is not taken to Heaven then it will be left in Hell.

Let's read the next scriptures that are often used to re-enforce the belief that Jesus went to hell at the time of his death at the crucifixion.

If we don't have a solid footing on what occurred at the cross it would be easy to believe that Jesus went into hell to lead people out of it. It would be nice but this isn't what happened. The scriptures that we are looking at take on a different meaning when we look at the choices we have to look at concerning what the Bible has to say about the lower or lowest parts of the earth. The Scriptures that you are about to read will be a total surprise unless you are already familiar with them.

This Psalm is a Psalm of David. It should help us to comprehend in a greater way what is being said and will reveal what is being spoken of in Ephesians concerning Jesus descending into the lower parts of the earth. In the above Psalm David is comparing his mother's womb to the inward or the lowest parts of the earth. Meaning that while he was in the secret places of his mother's womb that God was very aware of him and how he was to be formed. I believe that we are also looking at the humility of David in his comparison. The Bible says that we are from the dust of the earth. By comparing his birth in his mother's womb to being from the lowest parts of the earth he expressed his humanity.

But we have another choice to consider from scripture and that is the expression that David used calling the grave the lower parts of the earth in the following scriptures.

The grave is the meaning of this scripture. David was saying that his enemies would end up in the grave.

So this gives us two choices to consider when trying to come to a conclusion on Ephesians 4: 8-10. His descending to the lower parts of the earth had to either be speaking of being born of a woman or having to go to the grave. In either case it isn't speaking of going to "hell." Since this chapter is speaking about the ministry to the people I believe that Christ descending into the lowest parts of the earth is referring to his lowly birth from Mary. He became a little lower than the angels and was born of those that were made from clay. This speaks of his entire life on this earth. He first descended and born of a woman lived a sinless life and his last ascension into Heaven was the end of His work on this earth. In doing this he took the power of sin, which was the Law, captive and nailed it to his cross and by doing so he set us the captives of sin free from sin and death.

It is also commonly believed that Peter taught that Jesus went into hell and preached to the souls that were lost during the flood in the days of Noah. They believe that this happened at the time of his death and crucifixion.

1Pt: 3:17: For it is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing.
18: 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:
19: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison;
20: 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.

Contrary to what people draw from these scriptures is a very simple truth that if not understood can paint an illusion that did not happen. Peter is referring to the Holy Ghost that raised Jesus from the dead in verse 18. He continues in verse 19 saying that Spirit Christ went and preached to lost souls during the time that the ark was being built. Peter had just spoken of God using the Spirit of Christ just a little earlier in his letter.

Christ preaching to those spirits in prison is referring to the souls that were in bondage to sin at the time Noah and his sons were building the ark. Noah preached to these lost souls by the Spirit of Christ that was in him by the Holy Ghost to warn them of the wrath to come. Because they didn't believe the preaching of Noah they were destroyed. But this is not talking about Jesus going to Hell to redeem these souls at the time of his crucifixion.

Once again we must go back to what Jesus said on the cross. First, to the thief on the cross he told him that this day he would be with him in Paradise. If Jesus had gone to Hell there would be a problem with this statement. Secondly, as he was dying he commended his Spirit into the hands of the Father. God didn't leave the Spirit of Jesus behind to go to Hell but took it to be with him in Heaven. God took care of the Spirit of Jesus just as he does ours when we die. I am glad that we can trust him to do this. I also hope that this helps to clear up a lot of things that are being taught that is not true and is bringing destruction to the children of God through error.

Your Brother in Christ,
Tommie Spurgeon

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