The Raising of Lazarus, Carl Bloch, 1870
An excerpt from the book Above the Sun
The Bible tells us that upon His death, Jesus “went and preached to the spirits in prison” (1 Pet. 3:18). This is the event referred to in the Apostles’ Creed as the descent to hell — not the hell of the damned, but rather the place of the dead, or hades in Greek, where the spirits of the just stood in waiting. In His descent to the dead we see the full extent of the Atonement, reaching from the highest heights to the lowest depths.
Passing through death’s door, Christ emerges alive again on the other side, rising from the grave on the third day. And He leaves open the way for us to follow Him through death into life, declaring, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25-26).
Resurrection is the reunification of body and soul: the complete restoration of the human person. This restoration is impossible apart from Christ; and without Him our hopes of rising again will go unfulfilled. As true God and true man, He brings the visible and invisible worlds together, the flesh and the spirit, and reconciles them. The One who is without sin suffers the penalty of sinners in their stead; and the One who knows not death surrenders His life so that the dead may live.
Christ’s entry into our lowly realm, the realm of sin and death we have forged for ourselves, takes away the futility of earthly life and restores meaning to all things, even to suffering (cf. Rev. 21:5). He has “swallowed up” death and removed its “sting.” Through Calvary, the very nature of death has been changed from an eternal sentence to a transitory condition.