What is Hades?

Question 10120.

The realm of Hades is the New Testament word for the place where the dead are held between dying and rising, and it is not the same thing as the lake of fire. That single distinction clears away most of the confusion people carry about this word, and it is worth getting straight before we go any further.

I find that most believers have absorbed their picture of the afterlife from paintings, poems and films rather than from Scripture. Hades has picked up horns and pitchforks along the way. What the Bible gives us is quieter, more sobering and far more definite than the folklore, so let us go and look at it.

The word itself

Hades is a Greek word, haides, and it is the word the Greek translators of the Old Testament chose when they came to the Hebrew sheol. That choice tells us a great deal. Whatever the Greeks meant by the term in their own mythology, the biblical writers filled it with Hebrew content. It is the unseen place, the gathering place of the departed, the grave considered as a realm rather than as a hole in the ground.

It appears ten times in the New Testament, and never once does it describe the final and eternal punishment of the wicked. That is a different word altogether, and the failure to distinguish them has done real damage. English translations that render both Hades and Gehenna as hell have not helped, though the older versions were not being careless so much as working with a smaller vocabulary than we have now.

If you have read my article on Sheol and the Old Testament realm of the dead, you will already have the background. Hades is the New Testament continuation of that same idea, now lit up by the resurrection of Jesus.

What the realm of Hades actually is

Think of it as a holding state rather than a sentence. The realm of Hades is where the unsaved dead consciously await the resurrection that leads to the Great White Throne. It is temporary, and Revelation says so plainly by describing its end: Death and Hades give up the dead who are in them, are judged, and are themselves thrown into the lake of fire.

A holding cell is not a prison sentence, though nobody in the cell is under any illusion about what is coming. That is the flavour of the biblical language. Nothing in Scripture suggests the realm of Hades is pleasant, and nothing suggests it is final either. It is the waiting room of judgement.

Consciousness is assumed throughout. There is speech, memory, awareness of others, awareness of one’s own condition and awareness of surviving relatives. Whatever else the realm of Hades is, it is not unconsciousness, which is why I cannot make room for soul sleep in my reading of the text.

The rich man and Lazarus

The fullest window we are given opens in Luke 16:19-31. A rich man dies and is buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifts up his eyes. He sees Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. He speaks, he is answered, he pleads for his five brothers, and he is told that a great chasm has been fixed so that nobody can cross from one side to the other.

Some read the account as a parable and therefore treat every detail as scenery. I would only observe that Jesus names one of the characters, which He does nowhere else in a parable, and that even a parable draws its force from a world the hearers recognise. He is not correcting their understanding of the realm of Hades. He is assuming it.

The detail that arrests me is the chasm. Not a wall, not a door, not a period of probation, but a fixed gulf. Whatever chances a person has are the chances given on this side of dying. That is a hard thing to preach and a harder thing to hear, yet it is what the text says.

Did the believing dead once wait there too?

Abraham’s side, in that account, is a place of comfort, and it is described as being within sight of the place of torment. Many teachers I respect have concluded that before the cross the realm of Hades had two compartments, one for the righteous dead and one for the unrighteous, and that the ascension of Jesus emptied the first of them.

Ephesians 4:8-10 speaks of Jesus ascending on high and leading a host of captives, and I take that as the most natural fit. From Paul onward, the language for believers changes entirely. To be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord. Nobody in the New Testament letters is waiting in a shadowy antechamber.

I hold that reading with conviction rather than dogmatism, because Scripture states the outcome more clearly than it states the mechanism. What is beyond argument is where believers are now, which I have set out in where believers go when they die.

Jesus holds the keys

In Revelation 1:18 the risen Jesus says that He has the keys of Death and Hades. Keys are the language of authority and access. The one who walked into that realm and came out again now decides who enters and who leaves it, and there is enormous comfort in that for anyone standing at a graveside.

He said something similar in Matthew 16:18, that the gates of Hades would not prevail against His church. Gates are defensive. The picture is not of a church cowering behind its walls while death batters at the door, but of the church advancing against a realm whose gates cannot hold.

Peter preached on the day of Pentecost that God did not abandon the soul of Jesus to Hades, quoting Psalm 16. The realm of Hades could not keep Him, and because it could not keep Him it will not keep those who are His.

Hades and the lake of fire are not the same

Revelation 20:14 could hardly be clearer. Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. You cannot throw a thing into itself. The realm of Hades is the intermediate state; the lake of fire is the final one, and between them stands the resurrection of the unjust and the Great White Throne.

This is why I take care with the word hell in conversation. When someone asks whether their unbelieving neighbour is in hell, the biblically precise answer is that nobody is yet in the lake of fire. What Scripture describes is a conscious awaiting of judgement, which is grave enough without our adding to it.

The two-stage pattern mirrors what happens to believers. We are with the Lord now, and we are raised bodily later. The wicked wait now, and they are raised and judged later. Neither side receives its final condition at the moment of death, and both sides receive it at resurrection.

What this rules out

It rules out purgatory, since nothing in the realm of Hades purifies anybody and the chasm is fixed. It rules out annihilation at the point of death, since the dead are described as conscious and are later raised to stand before a throne. It rules out a second chance, which is the thing people most want it to leave open.

It also rules out the cheerful modern assumption that everyone drifts into a vaguely pleasant somewhere. The New Testament writers were not sentimental about death. They were confident about Jesus, which is a very different thing, and their confidence never once extended to those who had refused Him.

How the early church spoke of it

The line in the Apostles’ Creed about descending to the dead has caused more arguments than almost any other clause, and much of the heat comes from translating the phrase as hell rather than as the realm of Hades. Whatever else that clause means, it does not mean that Jesus suffered punishment after the cross. He had already said the work was finished.

Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 gives us the safest footing. Jesus truly died, He truly entered the realm of the dead as every human being does, and He was not left there. The emphasis falls on the not being left rather than on any activity while He was there, and I would keep my emphasis where the apostles kept theirs.

1 Peter 3:19 speaks of a proclamation made to spirits in prison, and I take that as an announcement of victory rather than an offer of salvation. A herald announcing the outcome of a battle is not conducting negotiations. The realm of Hades heard that the war was over, and nothing in the passage suggests anyone there was given fresh terms.

Comfort for the grieving

I have stood beside a good many coffins over the years, and the pastoral value of this doctrine is not in what it lets us say about the deceased. It is in what it lets us say about Jesus. He has been where they have gone. He knows the country. He carries the keys.

Paul told the Thessalonians not to grieve as others do who have no hope, which is a long way from telling them not to grieve. Christian hope does not cancel sorrow; it refuses to let sorrow have the last word. That is a distinction worth remembering when you are the one holding somebody’s hand at a graveside.

So, now what?

Doctrine like this is not given to make us morbid. It is given to make us urgent and to make us kind. If the realm of Hades is real, then evangelism is not a hobby for the enthusiastic, and the person sitting beside you on the bus is not a statistic.

It should also settle your own heart. Jesus has been through that country and holds its keys. Are you trusting the one who came out the other side, or are you hoping that the gulf turns out to be narrower than He said it was?

“Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.” (Revelation 1:17-18)