Hello brothers and sisters,
Last time we stood beside David’s tomb with Peter on the morning of Pentecost and heard him say the thing most of us skim right past: David did not ascend into the heavens. Then we followed the dead down and drew the map.
If you’ve missed any of the previous posts, you can get caught up HERE
A realm beneath the earth called שְׁאוֹל (Sheol), the Greek Bible’s ᾅδης (Hades), with gates and bars and a throat stretched wide. Nations lying in their districts. Giants among the dead kings. And in Enoch’s mountain, hollow places for the spirits of everyone who has ever died, the righteous beside a shining spring and the rest in the dark, all of them waiting for the day of judgment.
That was the map. Today we find out what it is like to be on it.
Because there is one night in the Old Testament when a dead man comes back up and speaks. He is not pleased about being woken. He knows things. And he tells a king exactly where he will be by this time tomorrow.
From there we will face the verses that seem to say the dead know nothing at all, and the word Scripture keeps reaching for when it speaks of death. We will meet the few people Scripture says never went down. And we will end where this whole series has been pointing: the three days when the Son of God went where the dead go.
Let’s dig in.
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The Night at Endor
Start with the one place in the Old Testament where we actually watch someone come up out of Sheol.
Samuel is dead. The narrator reminds us before the scene begins: all Israel mourned him and buried him in Ramah, and Saul had driven the mediums out of the land (1 Samuel 28:3). The Philistines are camped at Shunem. Saul is terrified. He inquires of the Lord, and the Lord does not answer him, “in dreams or in the symbols of revelation or in the prophets” (28:6, LES).
Heaven has gone silent.
So Saul does the very thing he outlawed. He disguises himself and goes by night to a woman at Endor.
The Hebrew calls her אֵשֶׁת בַּעֲלַת־אוֹב (eshet ba’alat-ov), “a woman who is mistress of an ‘ov.” What exactly an ‘ov is has been debated for a long time: a spirit of the dead, or perhaps the ritual pit through which such a spirit was summoned. The Greek calls her an ἐγγαστρίμυθος (engastrimythos), literally a “belly-talker,” someone whose voice seems to come from somewhere other than her mouth. It is the ordinary Greek word for a ventriloquist.
Keep that in mind. It is going to matter.
1 Samuel 28:11-15 (LXX/LES)
And the woman said, “Who should I raise up for you?” And he said, “Raise up Samuel for me.” And the woman saw Samuel and cried out a loud voice. And the woman said to Saul, “Why have you deceived me? You are Saul!” And the king said to her, “Do not fear; say who you see.” And she said to him, “A god I see, coming up from the earth.” And he said to her, “What do you perceive?” And she said to him, “A man, upright, coming up from the earth and wrapped in this cloak.” And Saul knew that this was Samuel. And so, he bowed on his face on the earth and honored him. And Samuel said, “Why have you disturbed me by raising me?”
The Hebrew tells the same story with a few differences worth noticing.
In the NRSV, the woman says, “I see a divine being coming up out of the ground.” Asked what the figure looks like, she says, “An old man is coming up; he is wrapped in a robe.” (The Hebrew sees the old prophet Saul remembered. The Greek sees him standing tall.) And Samuel’s first words are the same in both: “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?”
Three details deserve a slower look.
The word she uses. She calls what she sees אֱלֹהִים (elohim), and in the standard edition of the Greek the word is plural, θεούς (theous), “gods.” I will say here what I said in the Divine Council series. This is the vocabulary of a pagan practitioner, describing a spirit with the only category she has. It is her theology, not the narrator’s.
The robe. Saul recognizes Samuel by what he is wearing, and that is no throwaway detail. The Hebrew word is מְעִיל (me’il), and it has a history in this book.
When Samuel was a little boy serving at Shiloh, Hannah made him a little me’il every year and brought it up at the time of the sacrifice (1 Samuel 2:19).
Years later, when Samuel told Saul that God had rejected him, Saul grabbed the hem of that me’il as Samuel turned to go, and it tore. And Samuel turned the torn robe into a prophecy on the spot:
“The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this very day” (15:27-28).
Now that robe rises out of the earth. And at the heart of what Samuel tells Saul is this:
“The Lord has torn the kingdom out of your hand” (28:17).
The Greek carries the same thread with its own word, διπλοΐς (diploïs), a doubled cloak, in all three scenes. The LES calls it a “small double cloak” when Hannah makes it, the “cloak” Saul ripped, and “this cloak” at Endor. In Hebrew and in Greek alike, the garment that clothed the boy, the garment Saul tore, is the garment Saul now hears about rising out of the ground.
The word “disturbed.” In Hebrew, Samuel asks לָמָּה הִרְגַּזְתַּנִי (lammah hirgaztani), from רָגַז (ragaz): to stir up, to agitate, to rouse. It is the same verb Isaiah uses when “Sheol beneath is stirred up” to meet the king of Babylon (Isaiah 14:9), a verse we read last time. Samuel was at rest, and Saul roused him.
That is not the language of a man who was wide awake and busy. Nor is it the language of a man who had ceased to exist. It is the language of someone who was resting and got woken up.
Then comes the prophecy, and with it one of the most important divergences in this entire series.
1 Samuel 28:19 (NRSV)
Moreover the Lord will give Israel along with you into the hands of the Philistines; and tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me; the Lord will also give the army of Israel into the hands of the Philistines.
1 Samuel 28:19 (LXX/LES)
And the Lord will hand Israel over with you into the hands of the foreigners. Tomorrow you and your sons with you will fall. And the Lord will place the camp of Israel into the hands of the foreigners.
The Hebrew: tomorrow you will be with me. The Greek: tomorrow you will fall.
The Greek tells Saul how. He will fall in battle, his sons with him, and three chapters later we watch it happen on Mount Gilboa (1 Samuel 31). The Hebrew tells Saul where. By tomorrow night, the rejected king will be in the same realm as the prophet who anointed him.
Sit with that. Samuel, faithful from childhood. Saul, rejected by God, committing the very sin that seals his death. “With me.” Not in the same experience, as we will see next week, but in the same realm. The Hebrew of 1 Samuel 28:19 is the Old Testament’s own statement of what we saw last time: the righteous and the wicked go down to the same place.
Was It Really Samuel?
Christians have argued about this scene for nearly two thousand years, and there are three serious answers.
It really was Samuel. This is the oldest Christian reading we have. Justin Martyr, in the second century, cited the scene as evidence that the soul survives death: “the soul of Samuel was called up by the witch, as Saul demanded” (Dialogue with Trypho 105).
Minor aside, we need to recognize here that Justin is using “soul” (psychē) in the sense of a surviving individual identity or consciousness in Sheol, not in the platonic sense of an immortal soul having escaped the body.
Origen, in the third century, preached an entire homily defending the same view. His point was simple. The narrator keeps saying “Samuel.” The woman saw Samuel. Saul knew it was Samuel. Samuel said. The narrator is Inspired, and he’s not lying to us.
It was a demon impersonating Samuel. Tertullian put it bluntly: “God forbid, however, that we should suppose that the soul of any saint, much less of a prophet,” could be called up by a demon (On the Soul 57).
Gregory of Nyssa argued along similar lines a century and a half later. This view has real force. God had refused to answer Saul through every legitimate channel. Would He then answer through a forbidden one?
The Law calls consulting the dead an abomination (Deuteronomy 18:10-12), and Paul warns that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14).
It was the woman’s trickery. This is where that Greek word returns. The Septuagint translators called her a belly-talker, and they used the same word for the mediums Isaiah mocks: “Seek the ventriloquists and those who speak from the earth, the empty talkers who speak from the belly” (Isaiah 8:19, LES).
On this reading the whole thing was a performance, a voice thrown low, “like those who call from the earth” (Isaiah 29:4, LES). And notice that Saul never sees anything himself. Twice he has to ask her what she sees. Everything we learn about the apparition comes through her mouth.
In the fourth century Eustathius of Antioch wrote an entire treatise against Origen pressing exactly that point: only the woman claims to see anything, and the narrator is simply reporting her claims. (Eustathius believed a demon was at work in her, so his view blends the second answer with the third.)
All three are serious. All three have been held by serious people.
I believe it really was Samuel.
Part of that comes from the scene itself. The woman screams. Whatever she expected, it was not this; a performer does not shriek at her own trick. The figure delivers a prophecy that is precisely true, down to the day, and it comes to pass. And the narrator, who elsewhere has no trouble telling us when a spirit is sent to deceive (1 Kings 22:19-23), calls this figure Samuel without the slightest qualification.
But the real weight, for me, rests on the Greek of Chronicles. Here is how the Chronicler sums up Saul’s life.
1 Chronicles 10:13 (NRSV)
So Saul died for his unfaithfulness; he was unfaithful to the Lord in that he did not keep the command of the Lord; moreover, he had consulted a medium, seeking guidance,
1 Chronicles 10:13 (LXX/LES)
Saul died in his lawlessness, in which he had acted wickedly against God, against the word of the Lord, since he had not kept it; for Saul had inquired by the one who speaks from the belly to seek advice, and Samuel the prophet had answered him.
“And Samuel the prophet had answered him.”
The Hebrew of Chronicles tells us Saul consulted a medium. The Greek of Chronicles tells us who answered. Not a demon. Not a voice thrown from a belly. Samuel the prophet.
And there is a second witness. Sirach is not in the Hebrew canon or in most Protestant Bibles, but it was part of the Greek Old Testament the early church read, and it passes the same test I described in Part 5 and applied to 1 Enoch last time. Ben Sira wrote it in Hebrew around 180 BC (his grandson carried it into Greek about fifty years later), and he closes his portrait of Samuel in the Praise of the Fathers with these lines.
Sirach 46:19-20 (LES)
And before the time of his eternal sleep, he bore witness before the Lord and the anointed one, “I have received no possessions, not even so much as a sandal, from any flesh,” and no person accused him. Even after he fell asleep, he prophesied and showed the king his death and lifted up his voice from the earth in prophecy, to blot out the lawlessness of the people.
“Even after he fell asleep, he prophesied.” Ben Sira had no doubt who spoke at Endor. (He clearly knew Samuel’s story well, too. That line about the sandal matches the Greek of 1 Samuel 12:3, where Samuel asks the people whose sandal he ever took; the Hebrew has him ask whose bribe he ever accepted to blind his eyes.)
Augustine noticed Ben Sira’s witness. In his short work On the Care of the Dead, he pointed to this very passage, and he saw the objection coming: Sirach is not in the Hebrew canon. His answer is worth hearing. Set Sirach aside if you must, and the Gospel itself still shows us a prophet who had died appearing to the living: Moses, on the mountain of the Transfiguration (On the Care of the Dead 18).
Hold onto Moses. He’ll be back.
So how did a forbidden practice produce a true prophet? I do not think it did. I think God overrode it, just as He did with Balaam, a professional diviner (Joshua 13:22 calls him exactly that) hired to curse Israel, whose mouth God filled with blessing instead (Numbers 22-24). The medium of Endor did not have the power to drag Samuel up. God sent him. And what God sent was not help.
It was a verdict.
What the Dead Do Not Know
Of course, if the dead can be roused and can speak, we have to reckon with the verses that seem to say the opposite.
Ecclesiastes 9:5-6, 10 (LXX/LES)
For the living will know that they will die, and the dead are not knowing anything; and there is no reward for them anymore, for their memory has been forgotten. And also their love and also their hate and also their jealousy have already perished, and also there is no share for them any longer for eternity in all that has been done under the sun.
...
Anything that your hand finds to do, as is your power, do it, for there is no work or calculation or knowledge or wisdom in Hades, where you are going.
The Psalms and Isaiah add their own laments. “In Hades who will confess you?” (Psalm 6:6, LES). “The dead will not praise you, O Lord” (Psalm 113:25, LES). “Those in Hades will not praise you” (Isaiah 38:18, LES).
Read in isolation, those sound like the dead are simply switched off. Sincere Christians read them exactly that way.
But read them inside their own frame. Ecclesiastes tells us precisely what the dead no longer share in: “all that has been done under the sun.” That phrase is the Teacher’s signature. It means life in this world. The dead have no part in it anymore. Their loves and their feuds up here are finished. Job says the same thing with an even sharper focus.
Job 14:21 (LXX/LES)
And though his sons become many, he does not know; and if they become few, he does not perceive.
That is the shape of the not-knowing. The dead father does not know how his children are doing. He is not watching. The world of the living has closed behind him.
And the silence of praise is the silence of the congregation. Hezekiah’s prayer goes straight on: “The living, the living, they thank you, as I do this day; fathers make known to children your faithfulness” (Isaiah 38:19, NRSV). What the dead can no longer do is stand in the temple courts and tell the next generation what God has done. These are the prayers of people who want to live, so they can keep praising God where praise is heard.
Meanwhile the very same Old Testament shows us the dead in Sheol talking. The kings rise from their thrones to greet the king of Babylon. The mighty speak from the midst of Sheol. Samuel speaks at Endor. And as we saw last time, Abel still pleads inside Enoch’s mountain.
The silent texts and the speaking texts do not contradict each other. The silence runs one direction. The dead know nothing of what happens under the sun. That does not mean they know nothing at all.
Asleep
Last time I asked you to hold onto a word Paul used of David. He “fell asleep” (Acts 13:36, NKJV).
The language is everywhere. The kings “sleep with their ancestors.” Daniel speaks of “those who sleep in the dust of the earth” (Daniel 12:2).
Jesus tells His disciples, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep,” and when they misunderstand, He says it plainly: “Lazarus is dead” (John 11:11-14).
Stephen, as the stones fall, “fell asleep” (Acts 7:60).
Paul comforts the Thessalonians about those who have “fallen asleep” (1 Thessalonians 4:13).
In those last two, the NRSV simply says “died,” and the NKJV keeps the Greek’s sleep.
The Greek verb is κοιμάω (koimaō), and the early Christians loved it so much they named their burial grounds after it. A κοιμητήριον (koimētērion) was a sleeping place, a dormitory. It is where the English word cemetery comes from.
Some Christians take all of that as proof that the dead are entirely unconscious until the resurrection. And while I understand why, I have never found the argument convincing.
My reasoning is simple:
Calling death “sleep” was one of the most common ways of speaking about it anywhere in the ancient world, including in cultures that were certain the dead were conscious.
Homer, whose Hades we met in Part 2, fills the underworld with shades who talk, remember, grieve, and argue. And Homer also pairs death with sleep. When the fallen Sarpedon is carried from the battlefield, he is handed to “the twin brethren, Sleep and Death” (Iliad 16). In Homer’s world, Sleep and Death are brothers, and the dead are still awake enough to speak with Odysseus.
So the word, on its own, describes how death looks from the outside. A body lying still. Eyes closed. A rest you expect someone to wake from. That is why the Christian use of it is so full of hope. You only call it sleep if you believe there is a morning.
But the Septuagint gives us more than that. Think back over what we read last time. In Ezekiel 32 the Greek has the dead nations “sleep” with the uncircumcised and “sleep” with the giants, and in that same chapter the giants speak.
In Proverbs 21:16 the Hebrew’s “rest” becomes the Greek’s “sleep.” And Ben Sira says Samuel went to his “eternal sleep,” and then, “even after he fell asleep, he prophesied.”
The ancient writers had no trouble putting sleep and speech in the same sentence.
So here is where I land, and as with so many of my convictions, I hold it with an open hand.
The dead in Sheol are neither fully awake nor gone. They rest. Much of what they experience may be something very like sleep. But it is a sleep that can be stirred. Samuel was disturbed. Sheol was roused to meet the king of Babylon. Abel’s voice still rises. The bed David spoke of in Psalm 139, “if I make my bed in Sheol,” is a real bed, and the one who lies down in it is still someone.
And I believe that is true of the righteous and the wicked alike. The same rest. The same dim, partial awareness. What differs is what that rest is like: a bright hollow with a spring of water, or a dark one. Comfort, or torment.
Next week, we’ll take a much deeper look at the difference.
The Exceptions
Last time I promised we would look at the people Scripture says did not go down. There are three, and each proves the rule by how loudly the text marks it as an exception.
The Martyrs Under the Altar
Revelation 6:9-11 (NRSV)
When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given; they cried out with a loud voice, “Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?” They were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number would be complete both of their fellow servants and of their brothers and sisters, who were soon to be killed as they themselves had been killed.
These martyrs are in heaven, beneath the altar, conscious, crying out, clothed. That might look like it overturns everything I have said. But I don’t think it does, and the reason is when they died.
I believe the resurrection of those who belong to Christ, the moment Paul describes when “the dead in Christ will rise first” (1 Thessalonians 4:16), takes place before the breaking of the seals. If that is right, then by the time the fifth seal opens, the believing dead of Sheol have already been raised. These martyrs die afterward, in the tribulation itself, and there is no longer a waiting place for the people of God. They go straight to the altar.
So the breaking of the seals marks the end of the waiting for the believer, but not the manner of the dead. Look at what they are told: “rest a little longer.” Even beneath the altar of heaven, the posture of the dead in Christ is rest.
Enoch
Genesis 5:24 (NRSV)
Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him.
Genesis 5:24 (LXX/LES)
And Enoch was very pleasing to God and was not found because God transposed him.
Two small divergences, and Hebrews builds on both. Where the Hebrew says Enoch “walked with God,” the Greek says he “was very pleasing to God,” telling us what that walk amounted to. And where the Hebrew says “he was no more,” the Greek says “he was not found,” which sounds as though people went looking.
Hebrews 11:5-6 (NRSV)
By faith Enoch was taken so that he did not experience death; and “he was not found, because God had taken him.” For it was attested before he was taken away that “he had pleased God.” And without faith it is impossible to please God...
Hebrews quotes the Greek. “He was not found.” “He had pleased God.” And then it builds the most famous sentence in the chapter on top of it: without faith it is impossible to please God. That sentence exists because of how Alexandria translated Genesis 5:24. The Hebrew tells us how Enoch lived. The Greek tells us how God regarded it. Hebrews takes both and turns them into a definition of faith.
Hebrews also says outright what Genesis only implies: Enoch “did not experience death.” He did not go down. The Greek verb for what God did to him is μετατίθημι (metatithēmi), to transfer, to move from one place to another. God relocated him. As we discussed in my metatithēmi word study back in March.
Elijah
2 Kings 2:11 (NRSV)
As they continued walking and talking, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven.
2 Kings 2:11 (LXX/LES)
It happened as they were walking, they went along and spoke. Look, a chariot of fire and a horse of fire! And he separated between the two of them. Elijah was taken up in the air as into heaven.
Two differences again. In the Hebrew, Elijah “ascended,” an active verb. In the Greek he “was taken up” (ἀνελήμφθη, anelēmphthē), a passive one. Elijah did not go up. He was carried. The Greek brings the verse into line with how the chapter began, where in both traditions it is the Lord who takes him (2:1).
And there is a tiny word in the Greek the Hebrew lacks. Elijah was taken up “as into heaven.” ὡς (hōs). As it were. The translators put the same small qualifier into verse 1.
Why would they hedge? Perhaps because the Hebrew שָׁמַיִם (shamayim) means both “sky” and “heaven,” and they wanted to leave room for the difference. Or perhaps because they already felt the tension Jesus would one day put into words.
John 3:13 (NRSV)
No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.
So did Elijah go to heaven? Did Enoch?
People have handled this honestly in several ways. Some point out that the verb in John 3:13 is active (ἀναβέβηκεν, anabebēken, “has gone up”), while Enoch and Elijah were both taken, passively, by God; no human being has ascended under his own power.
Some point to the context, where Jesus is speaking about who can testify to heavenly things firsthand (John 3:12). And some take the Greek’s “as it were” at face value and suggest Elijah was carried into the sky and set down somewhere else on earth.
Even the prophets at Jericho wondered whether “the Spirit of the Lord discovered him and brought him to the Jordan or onto one of the mountains” (2 Kings 2:16, LES).
They searched three days and found nothing.
The relocation view leans hardest on a letter. Years later, “a message in writing from Elijah the prophet” reaches King Jehoram of Judah (2 Chronicles 21:12, LES). It arrives after Jehoram’s father Jehoshaphat has died, and it condemns Jehoram for murdering his brothers (21:13), which he did after taking the throne (21:4).
Meanwhile 2 Kings 3:11, set while Jehoshaphat was still alive, already describes Elisha as the one “who used to pour water on the hands of Elijah,” which suggests Elijah’s ministry was over by then. So, the argument runs, Elijah must have still been on earth, writing letters, after the chariot.
I don’t think that follows.
The arrival of a letter tells us nothing about when it was written, and in the ancient world a letter could take a long time to reach its reader. No text says Elijah wrote it after he was taken up. And the timeline is tighter than it first appears.
The last thing Elijah does before the chariot is dated by 2 Kings 1:17 to “the second year of King Jehoram son of Jehoshaphat of Judah,” so Elijah’s ministry and Jehoram’s reign overlapped. A letter written near the end of Elijah’s earthly life, foreseeing Jehoram’s crimes the way Elijah had foreseen Ahab’s end (1 Kings 21:19), and delivered after he was gone, fits everything the text says. Prophets wrote to the future all the time. That is part of the point of them.
So where did Enoch and Elijah go? What follows is my interpretation, and I want to flag it as exactly that. Nothing in the text says this explicitly.
Paul says that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50). A mortal body, as it is, cannot enter the presence of God. And yet Scripture says these two men were taken, without dying, to be with God. Something had to happen to them. Paul tells us what that something looks like.
1 Corinthians 15:51-52 (NRSV)
Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.
I believe Enoch and Elijah went through, ahead of time, what the living in Christ will go through at His return. Not raised, because they never died. Changed. They are the “not all die” of 1 Corinthians 15, early. That is how they could go where flesh and blood cannot. And John 3:13, as I read it, does not deny that God can take a man. It says no man has gone up on his own and come back down to tell us about it, except the Son of Man.
Yes, that means these two are in heaven right now. That is exactly why the Bible makes such a point of how strange their departures were. They are the exceptions. Everyone else went down.
Which brings us back to Moses, the one Augustine raised. Moses died, and was buried (Deuteronomy 34:5-6). And yet there he stands on the mountain of the Transfiguration, beside Elijah, talking with Jesus, the two of them appearing “in glory” (Luke 9:30-31).
Elijah we have just accounted for.
Moses is a harder case, and he belongs with the “with the Lord” question that we’ll take up next week.
Where Jesus Went
Now the question that matters most. Where did Jesus go when He died?
Last time we heard Peter’s answer: He was not abandoned to Hades. But Jesus gave His own answer long before Peter did, and He gave it by pointing at a prophet.
Matthew 12:40 (NRSV)
For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.
The heart of the earth. Not up in heaven. Down.
Now go back and read the prayer Jonah prayed from inside that creature. He does not call it the belly of a sea creature. He calls it something else.
Jonah 2:3 (LXX/LES) (2:2 in English Bibles)
I cried out in my distress to the Lord, my God, and he heard me; from the belly of Hades came my outcry, and you heard my voice.
The belly of Hades. The Hebrew says it too: “out of the belly of Sheol I cried.” And the prayer ends like this.
Jonah 2:7 (LXX/LES) (2:6 in English Bibles)
I went down into the earth where its bars are eternal barriers, so let the corruption of my life depart, O Lord, my God.
In the Hebrew of that last line, God brings Jonah’s life up “from the Pit,” and the word for the Pit is שַׁחַת (shachat). The very word from Psalm 16:10, the verse Peter built his Pentecost sermon on.
And what does the Greek do with it? Exactly what it did in Psalm 16. It hears corruption: φθορά (phthora), the simple form of διαφθορά (diaphthora), the Greek word in the psalm.
Think about the sign Jesus chose. A prophet who went down into the belly of Sheol, who prayed from behind its bars, and who was brought up out of the shachat, out of the corruption, alive. And that prophet’s prayer uses the same Hebrew word, and receives the same Greek reading, as the psalm Peter would preach at Pentecost.
Jonah, Psalm 16, and Acts 2 are telling one story. Down into the realm of the dead. Not left there. Not allowed to rot. Brought back up.
Then there is the thief.
Luke 23:43 (NRSV)
He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Most of us were taught to hear that as “today you will be with me in heaven.” But listen to Jesus on Sunday morning, risen, when Mary Magdalene clings to Him.
John 20:17 (NRSV)
Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father...”
Not yet ascended. Three days after telling the thief “today,” Jesus says He has not yet gone up to the Father. Wherever Paradise was on the afternoon of the crucifixion, it was not heaven. And Jesus had already told us where He would spend those three days: the heart of the earth.
I believe Jesus went where every human being goes. He went down into Sheol, to the side of it Enoch saw shining, the side with the spring of water. And He took the thief with Him. That is what Paradise could mean on the near side of the resurrection: a garden of rest inside the realm of the dead.
And don’t worry, we’ll be talking about Paradise in much greater depth next week, including the one Paul saw in the third heaven.
Peter’s sermon has one more phrase we should not walk past.
Acts 2:24 (NKJV)
whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that He should be held by it.
The Greek word for “pains” is ὠδῖνες (ōdines). Birth pangs. Labor. Peter borrowed it from the Greek of the Psalms, where David says the ōdines of death encompassed him and the ōdines of Hades surrounded him (Psalm 17:5-6, LXX). In the Hebrew of the same psalm, David says “the cords of death encompassed me” and “the cords of Sheol entangled me” (Psalm 18:4-5, NRSV), and the Hebrew word for “cords,” חֶבְלֵי (chevlei), is written with exactly the same letters as the Hebrew word for birth pangs. The Hebrew heard ropes. The Greek heard labor.
And Peter says God loosed them. You loose a rope. You do not loose a contraction. Yet Peter holds both pictures in a single phrase, and together they say something astonishing. Death had Jesus bound, and death was in labor with Him. It could not hold Him. It could only give Him up, the way a womb gives up a child.
Paul would later call Him “the firstborn from the dead” (Colossians 1:18).
Nowhere He Has Not Been
Let me bring this home.
For most of us, the word Sheol lands with a chill. Down. Dark. Gates and bars. A land where the living are forgotten. The saints of the Old Testament felt that chill too. Hezekiah wept against it. The psalmists pleaded to be kept out of it as long as God would allow. That fear was honest. Before the cross, Sheol was where every human story ended, and no one had ever gone down and come back up to stay.
Then the Son of God went down.
He went where David went. Where Abel went. Where Samuel went, and Saul. Where your grandmother went, and where you and I will go unless He returns first. He lay down in the same realm, on the restful side of it, with a forgiven thief beside Him. “If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.” David wrote that as a statement about God’s presence. Jesus made it literal.
Hebrews 2:14-15 (NRSV)
Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.
The word translated “destroy” there is καταργέω (katargeō). It means to render powerless, to put out of action. The devil is not gone. He has been disarmed. And the fear that has held humanity in chains since the day Abel died was carried down into the realm of the dead and broken from the inside.
So if you have buried someone you love who belonged to Christ, here is what the map says about where they are. They are not floating somewhere above you, watching you grieve. They are not gone. They are resting, on the bright side of a realm that lies naked before God, a realm the Lord Himself has walked. They are waiting for a morning already guaranteed by His. Their sleep can be stirred. And one day it will be, by a voice they will recognize.
That is not the end of the map. There is still a chasm to look at, a gate to break, an offer to be made, a resurrection, a judgment, and a new creation. But this is where the dead actually go.
And He has been there.
If you’ve found this work insightful, enlightening, or even challenging, the most direct way to share it is by restacking. But you can also share it directly with any friend who needs to see where the dead actually go and why Sheol is nothing to be afraid of.
Dig Deeper
If you want to follow these threads through Scripture yourself, here are more places to look, grouped by the word underneath.
Mediums and the ‘ov (Hebrew): Leviticus 19:31. Leviticus 20:6, 27. Deuteronomy 18:11. 1 Samuel 28:3, 7-9. 2 Kings 21:6. 2 Kings 23:24. 1 Chronicles 10:13. 2 Chronicles 33:6. Isaiah 8:19. Isaiah 19:3. Isaiah 29:4.
Death as sleep (Greek): Matthew 27:52. John 11:11-12. Acts 7:60. Acts 13:36. 1 Corinthians 15:6, 18, 20, 51. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-15. 2 Peter 3:4.
Taken by God (Hebrew): Genesis 5:24. 2 Kings 2:3, 5, 9, 10. Psalm 49:15. Psalm 73:24.
Remember the numbering offsets when you look up the Hebrew references in a Septuagint translation. Most of the Psalms will be one number lower, and 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings appear as 1 through 4 Kingdoms (or Reigns).
Questions for Reflection
Many Christians find comfort in believing that loved ones who have died are watching over them. If the dead know nothing of what happens under the sun, what changes about the way we grieve? Is anything lost, and is anything gained?
Saul went to a medium because heaven had gone silent. What do people reach for today when God seems silent? Are there versions of Saul’s temptation that look perfectly respectable inside the church?
The Chronicler says Saul died for consulting a medium, even though his motive seems to have been fear rather than defiance. Why might Scripture treat that act so seriously? What does it suggest about the difference between seeking God and seeking answers?
Our funerals, hymns, and sympathy cards almost always speak of the dead as already in heaven. Should churches change that language, or is it close enough to the truth to leave alone? What would be gained, and what would be at risk, if they changed it?
Peter pictures death in labor with Christ, unable to hold Him, and Paul calls Him “the firstborn from the dead.” If His resurrection was a birth, what does that suggest about that of your loved ones or even yourself? How might that image change the way you face death in the here and now?
What This Sets Up
Over these two posts we have drawn the map of the realm and learned what it is like to be on it. Down, gated, barred, sorted by nation and by destiny. Every human being gathered there, resting, waiting. And the Son of God among them, on the bright side, with a thief He had just forgiven.
Next time, we let Jesus give us the tour.
Luke 16 tells of a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus who die and wake on opposite sides of a great chasm. One is comforted at Abraham’s side. The other is in agony, begging for a drop of water.
Many read the story as a parable.
I do not, and I’ll tell you why.
Along the way we’ll take up the questions I promised not to forget: what Paul meant by being “with the Lord,” what to make of Moses on the mountain, and what Paradise actually is.
Until then, I pray the Lord blesses you with grace and peace.
~Kevin
Find the next (or a previous) post in the series HERE.
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