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VI.
HE DESCENDED INTO
HELL; THE
THIRD
DAY HE ROSE AGAIN
FROM
THE DEAD, HE ASCENDED
INTO
HEAVEN, AND SITTETH ON
THE
RIGHT HAND OF GOD THE
FATHER
ALMIGHTY.
Now hath Christ been raised from the dead, the first-
fruits of them that are asleep. For since by man came
death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For
as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made
alive.
1
COR. xv. 20—22.
We
behold Him Who hath been made a little lower than
the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of
death
crowned with glory and honour, that by the grace of God
He
should taste death for every man.
HEB.
ii. 9.
Wherefore
also God highly exalted Him, and gave unto
Him the name which is above every name; that in the name
of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and
things on earth and things under the earth, and that every
tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory
of God the Father.
PHIL.
ii. 9—11.
Wherefore also He is able to save to the uttermost them
that draw near unto God through Him, seeing He ever liveth
to make intercession for them. For such a high priest became
us, holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and
made higher than the heavens.
HEBR. vii. 25,26.
IN considering what the Creed teaches us as to
the earthly work of the Lord, we noticed that
events which appear to our eyes full of the deepest
sorrow and humiliation may yet include at the
same time a divine glory, hidden from us because
we have at present no power to see it. Thus in
the immediate prospect of the betrayal, of the
agony, of the Cross, looking at His work accom-
plished, when Judas had now gone out into night
from the circle of the twelve, the Lord summed up
His judgment of all in the memorable words
Now is the Son of man glorified. The glory was
present in the very shame; and we can at length
see it there. But none the less this glory is
presented to us in our Creed in a succession of
facts which correspond with the facts of Christ's
life of humiliation. As we confess our belief in
Jesus Christ Who was conceived, born, suffered,
was crucified, dead, and buried: we confess also
that He descended into Hell; the third day He
rose again from the dead: He ascended into
heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the
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VI.
John xiii.
31.
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74
Difficulty of dealing with the unseen.
VI.
Hebr. vii.
16.
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Father Almighty. Step by step we acknow-
ledge in these clauses Christ's entrance into the
world of spirit, His new Birth into the fulness
of a glorified human Life, His exaltation to the
throne of divine Majesty, His present sovereignty.
No death, no limit closes any more the energy of
an 'indissoluble life.'
But in thinking of these truths we must use
great caution. There is, as I said before, a serious
danger in the prevailing spirit of realism which
leads us to dwell on the outside, the form, the
dress of things, to the neglect of the ideas which
are thus half-veiled and half-revealed. And
this danger besets us in its gravest shape when
we endeavour to give distinctness to the unseen
world. We transfer, and we must transfer, the
language of earth, the imagery of succession in
time and space, to an order of being to which, as
far as we know, it is wholly inapplicable. We
cannot properly employ such terms as 'before' and
'after,' 'here' and 'there,' of God or of Spirit.
All is, is at once, is present, to Him; and the
revelations of the Risen Lord seem to be designed
in part to teach us that though He resumed all
that belongs to the perfection of man's nature, He
was not bound by the conditions which we are
forced to connect with it.
While then we are constrained to use words of
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Revelation suggestive of the truth.
75
time and space, and to speak of going up and
coming down, of present and future, in regard to
the spirit-world, and Christ's glorified Life, we
must remember that such language belongs to
our imperfect conceptions as we now are, and not
to the realities themselves: that we must not be
startled if it leads us to difficulties and contradic-
tions : that we must allow no conclusions to be
drawn as to the eternal from the phenomena
of time.
This is no doubt a difficult demand to make;
and it may seem to deprive us of much which
brings joy and strength in the trials and sorrows
of earthly life. But indeed the gain is worth the
effort. If once we can feel that the imagery in
which the glories of the world to come are described
is only imagery, we can dwell upon it with ever
increasing intelligence and without distraction.
There is then no monotony in eternal praise, no
weariness in unbroken day, when praise is the
symbol of a heart conscious of God's infinite
goodness, and day of the manifestation of His
unclouded truth. The gates of pearl and the
streets of gold cease to suggest thoughts of costly
display and transitory splendour. The soul uses
the figures as helps to spiritual aspiration and
welcomes their irreconcileable contrasts as warnings
against treating them as literal descriptions of
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VI.
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76
The Descent into Hades.
VI.
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that which it has not entered into the mind of
man to conceive. While therefore we hold
thankfully and faithfully that the facts of the
spiritual world must be described in words borrowed
from the material world, which answer to the
unseen realities but cannot express them, we are
able to consider with fresh confidence, and not
altogether in vain, the eternal meaning of Christ's
Descent, Resurrection, Ascension, Session in heaven,
as these facts are set forth in our Creed. In our
confession that Christ descended into Hell, rose
again, ascended into heaven, sitteth on the right
hand of God, we can see perfectness of divine
sympathy in every phase of our existence, absolute
ennobling for every human power, access to the
divine Presence beyond every confinement of sens-
ible existence, assurance of final victory in every
conflict with evil.
He descended into Hell, that is, into
Hades,
into the common abode of departed spirits and
not into the place of punishment of the guilty.
This clause, as we know, has given occasion to
much misunderstanding and superstition. It is
not found in the earliest Creeds and it is almost
peculiar to the West. But it is not on this
account less precious as part of our heritage. As
it stands it completes our conception of the Lord's
death. To our minds death is the separation of
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Limits to the interpretation.
77
body and soul. According to this conception Christ
in dying shared to the full our lot. His Body was
laid in the tomb. His soul passed into that state
on which we conceive that our souls shall enter.
He has won for God and hallowed every condition
of human existence. We cannot be where He has
not been. He bore our nature as living: He bore
our nature as dead.
So far the interpretation of this clause He
descended into Hell seems to be clear; and it
carries light into the tomb. But more than this
we dare not say confidently on a mystery where
our thought fails and Scripture is silent. The
stirring pictures which early Christian fancy drew
of Christ's entry into the prison-house of death to
proclaim His victory and lead away the ancient
saints as partners of His triumph; or again to
announce the Gospel to those who had not heard
it, rest on too precarious a foundation to claim
general acceptance. We are sure that the
fruits of Christ's work are made available for every
man: we are sure that He crowned every act
of faith in patriarch or king or prophet or saint
with perfect joy: but how and when we know not,
and, as far as appears, we have no faculty for
knowing. Meanwhile we cling to the truth
which our Creed teaches us. To the old world, to
Jew and Gentile alike—and it is a fact too often
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VI.
|
78
The
Resurrection.
VI.
Acts ii. 31.
Rom. vi. 9.
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forgotten—'the Under world,' 'Sheol' the place of
spirits, was a place of dreary gloom, of conscious
and oppressive feebleness. Even this natural fear
of the heart Christ has lightened. There is no-
thing in the fact of death, nothing in the con-
sequences of death, which Christ has not en-
dured for us: He was buried. He descended into
Hades, the place of spirits.
But it was not possible that He should be
holden of death: His flesh saw no corruption:
His soul was not left in Hades. And we confess
that the third day He rose again from the dead.
If death, as I said, is presented to us as the
separation of soul and body, the Resurrection is
the most complete, nay the eternal, union of the
two. Being raised from the dead Christ dieth no
more. The human life which He had before
lived under the conditions of space and time, of
decay and dissolution, was now gained subject to
no change and free from the limitations of earth.
At the same time nothing was laid aside or lost
which belongs to the fulness of our human nature.
The Risen Christ could, without derogating from
the perfection of His glorified manhood, shew
Himself as believers had known Him before, the
same in power of quickening and teaching, the same
in sovereign authority and tender sympathy, the
same in look and voice: the same, and yet such
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The lessons of the Resurrection.
79
that these points of identity were recognised as
signs of a being, a love, a presence, unspeakably
greater, deeper, more universal, than could have
been in any way perceived before He had con-
quered death. In this way the Resurrection
of Christ was a revelation to men of that which
God has prepared for them that love Him.
And as we welcome it into our soul it is able,
as I have elsewhere endeavoured to point out,
to harmonize life, to inspire life, to transform
life.
For as we believe that Christ rose from the
dead, we believe that He bore from the grave the
issues, the fruits, not only of His open ministry
and of His final Passion, but also of the unnoticed,
silent years of obscure discipline and duty, and
shewed these in their spiritual meaning. We
believe, and come to feel as we look to Christ
Risen, that all the seemingly trivial fragments of
life have a unity for man who shall die and live
through death.
As we believe that Christ rose from the dead,
we believe that He made plain to us the realities
in the midst of which we are, that by laying open
the powers of another order He offered us strength
for effort, that by the promise of His fellowship
He declared the worth of labour. We believe,
and come to feel as we look to Christ Risen, that
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VI.
|
80
The
Ascension.
VI.
Acts xvii.
28.
John xvi.
7.
|
we have a motive for work prevailing through all
disappointment and failure.
As we believe that Christ rose from the dead,
we believe that He shewed to us, more directly
even than by the Incarnation, the union of the
two worlds, the seen and the unseen, and taught
us not to turn away from earth that we may find
heaven, but to behold in earth the scene of a
veiled glory. We believe, and come to feel as we
look to Christ Risen, that here and now we live
and have our being in God.
But these lessons were not finished by the
Resurrection. The appearances of Christ during
the great forty days, however mysterious, still set
Him in connexion with particular places and
times. It was therefore expedient that He should
go away in order that His disciples might feel
Him near them always and everywhere. And we
acknowledge that this blessing has been given
when we say that He ascended into heaven.
For, as we have seen, we are not to think of
the Ascension of Christ as of a change of posi-
tion, of a going immeasurably far from us. It
is rather a change of the mode of existence, a
passing to God, of Whom we cannot say that He
is ‘there' rather than 'here,' of Whom we all can
say 'God is with me,' and if God then Christ Who
has ascended to the right hand of God.
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The lessons of the Ascension. 81
When therefore we declare our belief in Christ's
Ascension, we declare that He has entered upon
the completeness of spiritual being without lessen-
ing in any degree the completeness of His hu-
manity. The thought is one with which we need
to familiarise ourselves. We cannot indeed unite
the two sides of it in one conception, but we can
hold both firmly without allowing the one truth
to infringe upon the other. And as we do so we
shall see how the Ascension illuminates and crowns
the lesson of the Resurrection; how it brings home
to us now all that the Apostles learnt by their
companionship with Christ their earthly Teacher,
and with Christ their Risen Lord.
By the Ascension all the parts of life are
brought together and shewn in the oneness of
their common destination.
By the Ascension Christ in His humanity is
brought close to every one of us, and the words
‘in Christ,' the very charter of our faith, gain a
present power.
By the Ascension we are encouraged to look
beneath the surface of things to that which makes
all things capable of consecration.
We ponder these lessons of the Presence about
us and in us of the Ascended Christ all the days
to the end of the world, and the sense of our own
weakness becomes perhaps more oppressive than
W. H.
F. 6
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VI.
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82
The Session at the right hand of God.
VI.
Hebr. i. 3.
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before. Then it is that the last element in our
confession as to Christ's work speaks to our hearts.
He is not only present with us as Ascended: He is
active for us. We believe that He sitteth on the
right hand of God the Father Almighty.
These words express under a natural image
the three ideas of an accomplished work, of a
divine sovereignty, and, by consequence, of an
efficacious intercession.
An accomplished work. The image of Christ's
Session is that of perfect rest, of rest which
answers to the being of God 'Who worketh
hitherto' without effort and without failure. The
sacrifice has been completed, but the fruits of it
remain inexhaustible. The purification of sins has
been made, but the application of it is for all time.
A divine sovereignty. Priests stand in their
ministry. Angels stand before the throne or fall
prostrate at the feet of Him Who reigns there.
But Christ is King as well as Priest, Son as well
as servant. He sitteth at the right hand of God,
sharing in the fulness of God's Majesty, bearing
all things, bearing them to an appointed end, by
the word of His power.
An efficacious intercession. The love of God
can know no change. He Who shewed His love in
living and dying for us, loves no less now when that
Life and Death have passed into triumph. Nay
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Practical effect of the Revelation.
83
rather, if we dare to follow the course of human
feeling, we may think that the joy of gathering
the fruits of toil adds intensity to love.
Such appear to be in the briefest summary,
the main thoughts which lie in what our Creed
teaches us of Christ's Life in the world of Spirit.
They furnish abundant material for meditation;
and such thoughts of Christ, the Son of man,
throned in glory, are fitted to help us in our
common duties. As we ponder them they bring
His whole work near to us, to each one of us,
with an immediate power. They fix our minds
not on anything past nor on anything future,
but on what is now. They give definiteness to
the uttermost aspirations of worship and faith.
They enable us to acknowledge, without turn-
ing aside from any of the saddest mysteries of
earth, how Christ has fulfilled the destiny of
man fallen. They enable us, so to sum up
all, to enter little by little into the meaning of
the apostolic words, to see Him who hath been
made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus,
crowned with glory and honour because of the
suffering of death, that the virtue of His redemp-
tion may become available universally, that He
may taste death, not for all but, with a directly
personal application, for every one.
6—2
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VI.
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