What Happened When Jesus Died and Went to Hades?

I want to suggest to you that this is the commonest and the most serious problem that confronts most religious people. And most of you here this morning, myself included, are religious people. If we weren’t religious people, we wouldn’t be here. So this is a message for you and for me. And I trust, by the grace of God, to pinpoint and to analyze what, as I’ve already said, I think is the commonest problem and the greatest spiritual danger that confronts religious people, and that includes Christians.

When I see what’s written in the New Testament, I find that it was the main problem of Israel as a nation. And I see also that it was because of this problem that Israel missed their Messiah. It was this that kept them from recognizing and receiving their Messiah. And if you consider the 1900 years of tragedy and suffering that have resulted from that failure to recognize the Messiah, I think you can understand how disastrous this problem can be in the life of an individual or a church or a nation.

For an opening scripture, I would like to turn to Romans chapter 10 and read the first four verses.

“Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they might be saved.”

And that’s still their greatest need today. Let’s never forget that. It’s not primarily to inherit the land or to defeat the Arabs, it’s to be saved.

“For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.”

That’s the analysis of their problem: being ignorant of God’s righteousness, going about to establish their own righteousness, they have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God. “Going about to establish their own righteousness,” I would say, is the biblical description of self-righteousness. That’s the problem we’re analyzing today. And then in the fourth verse, Paul makes a very emphatic statement:

“For Christ ‘is’ the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.”

It’s very carefully worded. Paul does not say that Christ is the end of the law as part of the word of God, or as part of Israel’s history, or as part of Israel’s culture. But he says, Christ is the end of the law as a means to achieve righteousness with God. When Christ died on the cross, that finally and forever excluded the law as a way to achieve righteousness with God. And he says, “Christ ‘is’ the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.” There are no exceptions, neither for Jew nor for Gentile, neither for Catholic nor for Protestant. Christ is finally and forever the end of the law as a means to achieve righteousness with God. Very important statement. I really believe that few Christians fully appreciate it.

I would have to say, going in my observation, multitudes of Christians are living in a kind of twilight between law on the one hand and grace on the other, and they really don’t know where they belong, and they lose the benefits of both.

Israel ought to have known that their own righteousness would never suffice, because Isaiah had told them that very, very clearly. If you turn for a moment to Isaiah chapter 64 and verse six:

“But we are all as an unclean ‘thing’,”

that refers primarily to Israel and then to the whole human race,

“but we are all as an unclean ‘thing’; and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.”

A lot of people would understand Isaiah to say, “All our sins are as filthy rags.” But he doesn’t say that. He says, “All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” The utmost that we can achieve in establishing our own righteousness in the sight of God is nothing better than filthy rags. And he says, as a result,

“we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.”

So let’s bear that in mind right at the beginning, that all our righteousnesses in the sight of God are no better than filthy rags, the best that we can do. In any way to achieve righteousness doesn’t rise above the level of filthy rags.