Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08087 The question of Jesus preaching to demons between his death and resurrection comes up more often than you might expect, usually after somebody has read 1 Peter 3 or recited the line in the Apostles’ Creed about descending to the dead. It sounds strange to modern ears, and it has been used to…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 08086 The spirits in prison of 1 Peter 3:19 have generated more commentary per word than almost any other verse in the New Testament, and Martin Luther famously admitted he did not know what Peter meant. That is a reassuring thing for the rest of us to hear. If a passage humbled Luther, we…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10168. The location of hell is one of those questions that sounds like idle curiosity and usually is not. People ask it because they want to know whether hell is a real place with a real address, or a state of mind, or a metaphor that preachers use to frighten congregations into behaving. Scripture…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3063. Few lines in the Apostles’ Creed cause more raised eyebrows than the confession that Jesus did ‘descend into hell’. What can that possibly mean? Between the cross and the empty tomb, did Jesus really go to the place of the damned? Was he suffering there? Preaching there? Triumphing there? And should Christians even…