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…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10120 Hades is one of the most frequently misunderstood terms in the New Testament, largely because English readers associate it automatically with the Greek mythology from which the word originates. But the New Testament writers did not adopt Greek mythology when they used the term. They used the Greek word to express the Hebrew…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10150 Revelation 20:12 describes a scene of terrible finality: “And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done.”…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 10101 The intermediate state refers to the condition of human beings between physical death and bodily resurrection. This period—which for some has already lasted thousands of years—raises important questions: Where are the dead now? Are they conscious? What are they experiencing? Scripture provides clear answers that should comfort believers and warn unbelievers about what…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10200 What happens to a person in the time between death and the resurrection? It is a question that has occupied Christian thinkers across the centuries, and it is one that touches everyone who has stood at a graveside. Scripture gives more guidance on this than is often realised, though it does not answer…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10168 The question of where hell is located surfaces with regularity, often in the context of popular imagination that places it beneath the earth’s surface. It is a question that mixes legitimate biblical curiosity with assumptions drawn from Dante, medieval art, and cultural mythology. What Scripture actually teaches is more nuanced, and more sobering,…