"CHRIST’S HELLISH AGONY ASSURES US THAT GOD NEVER FORSAKES US."

44. Q. Why is there added: He descended into hell?
A. In my greatest sorrows and temptations I may be assured and comforted that my Lord Jesus Christ, by His unspeakable anguish, pain, terror, and agony, which He endured throughout all His sufferings[1] but especially on the cross, has delivered me from the anguish and torment of hell.[2]
[1] Ps. 18:5, 6; 116:3; Matt. 26:36-46; 27:45, 46; Heb. 5:7-10. [2] Is. 53.

Scripture Reading:
I Peter 3:18-22
Psalm 88

Singing:  (Psalms and Hymns are from the "Book of Praise" Anglo Genevan Psalter)
Psalm 22:1,2
Psalm 88:1,2,6
Psalm 42:4,5
Psalm 22:7,8

Beloved Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ!

Sunday by Sunday we confess with the Apostles’ Creed that Jesus Christ "descended into hell." What, congregation, do you understand by the phrase "descended into hell"? It needs to be granted that at first reading the phrase means that Christ went down to the literal place known as hell, the bottomless pit. And given where this phrase occurs in the Apostles’ Creed –it occurs after the references to His crucifixion, death and burial, and before the reference to His resurrection- we walk away with the conclusion in our minds that here we’re confessing that the Lord Jesus Christ spent the three days between His death and resurrection in the company of the devil and his demons.

Is this so? Did our Lord Jesus Christ literally spend a period of time in the company of the devil and his demons in the bottomless pit, in that place known as hell? If yes, of what comfort is that to us? If no, what is the significance of the Apostles’ Creed as it’s worded?

As it is, congregation, Scripture nowhere teaches that the Lord in fact went to that bottomless pit known as hell. When we in the Apostles’ Creed confess Jesus’ descent into hell, we’re confessing something rather different. As we confess in our Lord's Day, Christ’s descent into hell means that Christ endured the agony, the horrors of hell. And that’s enormously comforting for us, for He endured this hellish agony in our place. So, no matter how deep the pit into which we sink might be, we never experience the terrors of hell.

I summarize the sermon with this theme:

1. The Scriptural meaning of this confession
2. The personal comfort of this confession

The Apostles’ Creed, brothers and sisters, came into being via a process of growth. In other words, it was not written at one time, nor by one writer, but developed over a period of many years.

The last addition to this creed is the phrase under consideration this afternoon, "He descended into hell." Nobody really knows why these words were added. But "added" they were, and that comes back in our Catechism in Q 44: "Why is there added: He descended into hell?"

There are those who insist that with this phrase the Church would confess that Jesus literally went to that home of the devil and his demons, that place of eternal torment where the unbelieving go. To prove their point they refer specifically to the passage we read from I Peter 3. In vs 18 the Holy Spirit says this:

"For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit, by whom also He went and preached to the spirits in prison" (vss 18f).

Those last words, "preached to the spirits in prison," are then understood to be proof that the Lord Jesus Christ went to hell in order to preach the gospel of His victory to the damned. If that’s true, that raises of course the next question: would these unbelievers then receive another chance still to repent….

As it is, brothers and sisters, Peter is not saying that Christ went to the home of the damned. Look carefully at what Peter says. He writes that "Christ … suffered once for sins." We understand that to be a reference to what Christ experienced on the cross of Calvary. Peter adds that Christ was "put to death in the flesh." That’s a reference to His death on Good Friday. Peter continues, "but was made alive by the Spirit." That describes Jesus’ resurrection on Easter Sunday. After His resurrection, by this Spirit, Christ "went", Peter adds. Where to? Peter doesn’t tell us right away. But he does tell us what Jesus did by His going. He "preached to the spirits in prison." Now, that phrase "spirits in prison" certainly does suggest to our minds that Peter is thinking of the damned in hell. The problem is, though, that the Bible nowhere else uses the word ‘spirits’ to describe people, let alone the people who have gone to hell. But the Bible certainly uses the word ‘spirits’ to describe angels, be it good angels or fallen angels (cf Eph 2:2). And Peter himself says later on what happened to the "angels who sinned" in the beginning (II Peter 2:4). These angels, says Peter, –we know them as demons- were cast into hell, and there God chained them so that these demons cannot do all that they would like to do (cf Rev 20:1f). These fallen angels are "the spirits in prison" of I Pet 3. To them, Peter says, Jesus "preached". When? Peter is emphatic: this preaching occurred after Jesus’ resurrection. Whatever it is that Peter is describing here, it took place not while Jesus was dead but rather after He arose from the dead. Note that vs 19 occurs after the resurrection mentioned in vs 18. Further, His going was the proclamation. That’s vs 19: by the Spirit He "went", and it’s the fact that "He went" that forms a proclamation to the demons of hell. You see, those spirits are in prison, they’re bound, and so they can’t stop Jesus from going where He wills. That Jesus could freely "go" was a proclamation to the demons that He was more than they. That’s underlined in vs 22, where Peter says that Jesus went to heaven and there received a place at God’s right hand, with "angels and authorities and powers" (that describes the fallen angels, cf Eph 6:12) "having been made subject to Him." Notice, then, congregation: I Peter 3 does not teach that Christ went literally to the bottomless pit.

Yet it’s not, brothers and sisters, simply a matter of the Bible nowhere saying that Jesus went to that place called hell after He died. The Bible is emphatic in telling us where Jesus did go after His death. Remember the words we read last week from Luke 23. To the criminal on the cross Jesus said, "Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43). Notice: Jesus speaks of "today", and not at some undisclosed time in the future after He could possibly have gone to hell. Notice too that Jesus tells the criminal that he would be "with Me" in Paradise. That’s to say: Jesus would Himself be in Paradise. And Paradise, of course, is not hell, but heaven. Further, just before He died, Jesus said to His Father, "Father, into Your hands I commit my spirit" (23:46). We well understand that with these words Jesus is not committing His spirit to the devil in hell but to the Father in heaven. No beloved, the Bible makes very clear that when Jesus died on the cross His body stayed on this earth, but Jesus Himself went to His Father in heaven. It happened to Him as it happens to all God’s own; when Jesus died His soul was "immediately" taken up to heaven (cf Lord's Day 22).

So we’re back to our question from the beginning: what are we to understand by the phase of the Apostles’ Creed that Jesus "descended into hell"?

The answer, congregation, requires us to consider what is meant by the word ‘hell’. ‘Hell’ is that bottomless pit with its everlasting fire, its gnashing of teeth, its pain and terror (cf Mt 24:51; 25:30, 41, 46). The human mind doesn’t like the notion of such a place, and around us we hear denials that hell in fact exists. But the Word of God is emphatic that, Yes, hell is most certainly very real. Yet the essence of hell is not its fire and terror and pain; these are but the fruits of what hell at bottom really is. What characterises hell, and gives it its terror, is the fact that hell is void of any grace from God. Hell is to be rejected by God, deserted and disowned by the Creator and Sustainer of life, to be denied any grace from the Maker of heaven and earth. That is hell.

Forsaken, forgotten. Maybe it’s happened to you in years gone by that you were with your mother in a crowded mall. You looked around…, and couldn’t find your mother. She was gone…, you were alone…. That feeling of rejection, of lost ness, that panic: multiply that endlessly, and maybe you being to taste the terror, the pain of hell, of being rejected by God.

The Scriptures give us examples of persons who felt forsaken by God. I think of Heman the Ezrahite – Ps 88. We don’t know who he was, we don’t know his situation; we know only how he felt. Listen to him:

"O Lord, God of my salvation,
I have cried out day and night before You.
Let my prayer come before You;
Incline Your ear to my cry" (vss 1f).

But God doesn’t hear. Though Heman’s "soul is full of troubles," God in heaven has no time for Heman. Heman prays, but God ignores him, forsakes him…. Vs 13:

"…to You I have cried out, O Lord,
And in the morning my prayer comes before You.
Lord, why do You cast off my soul?
Why do You hide Your face from me?"

All his praying helps not a thing…; God is gone…. And if it’s not bad enough that God is gone, Heman complains that his friends and loved ones too want nothing to do with him, more: "Loved one and friend You have put far from me" vs 18). Talk, beloved, about a sense of total despair….

Was Heman in fact forgotten by God, forsaken? Make here no mistake, congregation. The Lord God had established with Heman the Ezrahite the same covenant of grace that He established with every other child of His in the course of history. At his circumcision the Lord signified and sealed to Heman that he was God’s child-by-covenant, and so God promised to be Heman’s Father, to supply all his needs, to avert all evil or turn it to Heman’s benefit. What do you think: would the God who promised such riches to this covenant child of His some years later turn around and forsake this child? Is that the God of the Bible, the kind of God Heman had, you have?? We know it well: the Bible is emphatic that God isn’t like that.

And why is He not like that? Do our sins not dictate that God should leave us and forsake us? Yes, beloved, it is true; our sins do dictate that. But we confessed the other week - and ate and drank the sign and seal of that reality today- that Christ by His death on the cross has paid for our sins so that God is not angry with us on account of our sins anymore. So our sins are never a reason why God might forsake us. Are there other reasons, then, why He would forsake us? Will it ever happen that we find ourselves in a hell, a place where God is not with us?

See here, my brothers and sisters, the point of the confession that Christ "descended into hell." What is hell? That God’s grace is gone. What happened to Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary? God withdrew from Him every trace of His grace! From the sixth hour till the ninth, from twelve noon till three PM –when the sun is hottest and light the most intense- blackest night settled around the cross of Calvary. That black symbolized that God –God is light- was gone. God, Jesus’ Father, the Sustainer of life, the God who was Jesus’ very bread, the God whose will was Jesus’ delight, forsook His child, went away, withdrew His grace. All that was left was wrath, eternal wrath: that was anguish for the Christ, was pain, terror, agony. From our own experiences we know what anguish is, we know what pain is, and terror, and agony. But words fail us, congregation, as we seek to describe the intensity of the anguish that settled upon the Son of God as His Father turned His back on Him, forsook Him. We can empathize with Heman in his anguish, but who, beloved, who can plumb the depths of Jesus’ anxiety when He cried out those agonizing words, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" Well do we in our Catechism describe Christ’s "anguish, pain, terror and agony" with the word "unspeakable". With our limited and broken minds we can’t even begin to understand the agony, the terror, this was for our Lord. All we can say is that this was hell for the Son of God. No, Christ did not literally descend so many meters into a pit called hell. But on the cross itself the circumstance characterizing hell settled on the Son of God. That is what is captured by that phrase of our confession, "He descended into hell."

What, now, is the benefit of this hellish agony on Christ’s part? This, beloved: Christ’s forsakenness on the cross is the reason why Heman was not forsaken. Heman, like all of us, had those moments that he felt God was gone, God didn’t care, God showed no grace. On his knees beside his bed at night he poured out his complaint to God, and to the way he experienced it his plea fell on deaf ears. In the morning he poured out his complaint to God again, and again to the way he felt about God did not hear. He experienced no grace from God, experienced God as absent. But the way Heman experienced things was never the true measure of reality, for his feelings were warped by the fall into sin. The God who established His covenant with Heman would never forsake His child –why not?- because one day Christ would be forsaken!! Never would Heman taste the unspeakable agony of hell because one day Christ would taste that unspeakable agony.

Here, congregation, is unspeakable comfort! Our Lord’s Day speaks of "our greatest sorrows and temptations." With that phrase, our Lord’s Day would have us think back to the worst thing that has ever happened to us. So, think, beloved: what is the worst thing that ever happened to you? What makes for your worst nightmares, your feelings of terror, of panic?? More often than not, those events –our greatest sorrows and temptations- lead us to conclude that God wasn’t with us, and the pain that keeps coming back leads us to conclude that there is no grace from God for us. Hell.

But this is the gospel, dear brothers and sisters. The Lord God would have us know that even in such "greatest sorrows and temptations" He has not deserted us, He has not withdrawn His grace from us. How we experience things is not the measure of reality! On the cursed cross Christ was deserted, forsaken, God’s grace withheld from Him, so that we might never be deserted, forsaken by God. That is the gospel, beloved! And that is why you may be assured and comforted –despite the horrors of your situation- that you are not alone, you are not in a hell, forsaken by God and His grace. By His unspeakable anguish He has "delivered me from the anguish and torment of hell" – we say in our Lord's Day, and that’s to confess that we never taste hell in this life nor the life to come, regardless of what happens.

This morning we read together the Form for the Celebration of the Lord’s Supper, and we’ll read the Abbreviated Form shortly. That Form puts this gospel into such beautiful words. Listen: "On the cross He humbled Himself, in body and soul, to the very deepest shame and anguish of hell. Then He called out with a loud voice, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? –purpose?- that we might be accepted by God and nevermore be forsaken by Him (Book of Praise, pg 597). The Abbreviated Form puts it more pointedly: "He was forsaken by God that we might nevermore be forsaken by Him." You heard that, beloved? You sat at His table, you ate the bread and drank from the cup because Christ would impress on you that you have part in His sacrifice. That means that this blessing is also yours! This is a gospel promised in the covenant, and that is why Heman, despite his feelings of rejection, continued to pray. He knew –for God is faithful- that his feelings didn’t tell him all the true facts of life.

We go back to our regular lives, and for some of us that includes the memories that gives us nightmares. Such is the care of your covenant God, beloved, that He impresses on you today the good news that He never leaves you nor forsakes you (Heb 13:5). Christ tasted hellish agony long ago so that you might today never taste that sort of agony. God withdrew all grace from Him so that He might never withdraw His grace from you today.

What, now, is faith? To keep dwelling on those feelings of being alone, forsaken by God? No, beloved, no. Faith is that one subjects those feelings of aloneness to the greater reality driven home today through Word and sacraments: God never leaves us or forsakes us. That is why prayer is always, always possible. Amen.