Our main text this evening is found in Ephesians, in chapter four. And the idea for this particular text arose when a member of this church asked, maybe around eight months ago, what it is that we mean when we say in the Apostles' Creed that Christ descended into hell. And my goal this evening is, Lord willing, for each one of us to gain understanding or perhaps fresh, deeper appreciation of the depths to which Christ went in order to provide salvation for everyone who looks to him in faith. Of course, our prayer is that you are among those people who are looking to him. So on the one hand, tonight is an evening where we necessarily think about something tragic. But it's to the end of the joy of Easter. Lord willing, the result this evening will be in the first place to deepen your adoration for Christ's sacrifice, but then also to strengthen your confidence regarding salvation, because I'm not unaware of that. Probably most of us, maybe all of us at different times have had struggles with assurance of salvation, whether we've been a believer for a week or for 40 years. And then lastly, we have as a goal to be humbled in our practice as Christians, to walk in deeper humility. And Paul makes a connection in our text about Christ's descent that should inform the way that we live towards one another and towards those in the world. Now, the context of our passage is that Paul is addressing believers living in a city called Ephesus in Asia Minor in the first century, and he's calling them to live a life worthy of the gospel. Try to imagine for a moment what life could be worthy of the gospel. But there is a style of life that scripture describes, which is within reach of every Christian through the Holy Spirit. And we are to strive after that. And here he presents several different truths about Christ, which help us towards that goal. Here together with me, the word of the Lord, beginning at verse seven. Grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift. Therefore it says, and now here he cites Psalm 68 verse 18, therefore it says, when he ascended on high, he led a host of captives and he gave gifts to men. In saying he ascended, what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth, He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens that he might fill all things. Thus ends the reading of our main text. Join me in asking for God's special blessing. Father in heaven, you have gathered these souls here and there is not a single one that has escaped your providential purpose. And you will have your desire through the opening of the sacred scriptures. They do not return void. Our prayer is that they would work life unto life, that all would hear the declaration of what Christ has undergone and achieved for us, and that we would cling tightly to him and put away every idol, especially our own attempt at righteousness, which could be acceptable to you. and instead that we would put on Christ as our victorious King and that you would equip us to live more righteously, but as a matter of gratitude and sincere love. We ask that you would accomplish these things for we pray them in Christ's name. Amen. In the nature of a sermon like this where we haven't been working through Ephesians, it's beneficial to recognize that we are dropping into the middle of a thought. Paul has been making a case, he's been building ideas upon one another. And so we need to understand something of the context here. Begin in the first place by grasping Paul's basic argument because it is very straightforward. Follow his logic and why he is quoting Psalm 68. The first part of his logic that begins earlier in the book is that Jesus is eternal God. He's not a creation of God. He's not the greatest creation of God. He is the second person of the Trinity, eternal, and has all power. He shares the same divine essence as the Father. And that being the case, he has always been the most exalted. In fact, God is not constrained to creation. He transcends all creation. And so he is higher than the heights. He is most exalted. He cannot ascend if he wanted to, in terms of his eternal being. But then scripture also describes this Lord of David, this Messiah, all the way back in Psalm 68, as one who would ascend. And so how can he ascend if he's already on high? And here, what Paul is doing is making a case that the Old Testament had already revealed that God the Son was going to come among us, that he was going to, in that sense, come down and be with his people, that he must first descend in order that he would ascend, and to do so, wearing our very nature as our Redeemer. And so there's something about the incarnation, and there's something about the death of Christ in particular, that is described in scripture as a descent, as a downward movement. And Paul's main point that he's building out of this argument, in fact there are two main points, one is that Christ's descent is the model for Christian character and humility. His descent is something that every Christian is called to imitate. But then beyond that, because in itself, that sounds great until you try to do it, and then you're miserable if you try to do it according to the flesh. Beyond that, Paul's other point is that Christ, through his descent, has also secured for you the means by which we are being sanctified. That in his descent, he has earned himself the freedom to bestow gifts. And here the context, and we'll hear more about this on Sunday with Acts chapter two, is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, who in all times has been regenerating people unto the Lord, and then fitting them for their work in God's kingdom. Now, in order to appreciate this in the first place, notice the emphasis on humility in verses one and two. Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you've been called with all humility, and gentleness. But then again, he underscores this in the descent, verse 10. He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens that he might fill all things. And here the filling is the pouring out of the Holy Spirit who enables all of God's people in all times to walk in his way. So what is the connection between the descent and this? What matters is to first understand In what sense did the Son of God descend? In what sense did He go down? Of course, there are a variety of ways that one can descend. There are a lot of different ways that one can descend. For instance, you can descend spatially. You know, if you've ever walked down a flight of stairs, you have descended in space. But then you can descend in other ways that are less tangible. For instance, we talk about someone descending into madness. So going from one state of being that better reflects God's intended order, and then going to a lower state of being. And there are many other forms of descent that could be added. And so in what sense did Jesus descend? The grammar of verse nine is admittedly difficult. It's admittedly difficult and can and has been understood in a variety of ways throughout the centuries. They're not dramatically different, but they do put a different emphasis on things. For instance, if you have an English Standard Version Bible here, as I know many of you do, it puts it this way in verse 9, that Jesus descended into the lower regions, comma, the earth, where it's indicating that the descent is in some sense to this general visible creation as we experience it. And the idea would be coming down from heaven into this visible realm. But then other translations provide an additional preposition, not because they're trying to add to the Bible, but they're trying to make clear what they believe Paul's intention was. And so this would be, for instance, the New King James Version or the New American Standard Bible would put it this way, that he descended into the lower regions of the earth. So this would have to do with some more specific area or realm within the world. So which is correct, and I want to make clear to you that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In fact, as I said, one can descend in complex ways. I had an opportunity when I was in grade school with a group of friends to compete and we built a boat and we, you know, use the kinds of things that you find at a big hardware store to build a small boat and other people did this too. And kids went out there and everybody thought they were going to win. They all were totally confident. and what they had prepared, their little boats, then floated out into a local pool, and then you watch them begin to descent. And with the descent, you know, it's both a spatial thing, they're going down in the water, but also people's egos as they go down. There can be multiple kinds of descent, and this one text, I'm going to try to persuade you, is not intended to say exclusively Christ's descent was one kind or another kind, but that in every way a human needed a savior, Christ came down from glory to save us. So what are the major different views here? Well, the first, as I said, that the descent refers to principally as incarnation. God eternal is spiritual, doesn't have a body. But in the incarnation, he took to himself from the human body of Mary by the working of the Holy Spirit, a true human nature, both body and soul. I have not ceased to be amazed at that when we pause to think about it. The one who transcends all time and space, and I don't even know what that means. What does it mean to be beyond time? We're so in it, we can't think of anything beyond it, that God has entered among us. And what a way of coming down when you think that for the period from the creation up until the incarnation, it's not as if the second person of the Trinity was unknown, hidden, hiding back there behind a curtain somewhere. No, God is being worshiped and glorified by the angels in heaven. And so although he did not have a human body, he did manifest his presence and his power in a way more glorious than has ever been known here up until the incarnation. We call that a theophany, an appearance, a manifestation of God's presence. And so from the time of creation until the time of the incarnation, you have the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God, dwelling in glory with the angels. And what do the angels do when they look at his splendor? Which again, this is not the full presence of God that could never be demonstrated. He's infinite. But when they look at this fullest manifestation of the Lord, these angels cover their faces with humility. And they say, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And then what does he do at the incarnation? He sets aside that splendor. He vacates the revealed presence in heaven and comes down. And where do we next find him? Crying in the arms of a poor woman, of a poor family, in a backwoods part of the world, being placed in a feeding trough for animals. That is quite a descent And then not only does he choose to place himself among creation, which is, that's a pretty big way to come down, but then among the lowest of society, and then suffers himself to be in every way despised, mistreated, abused. And so he begins to plumb the depths of physical agony throughout his life. And he does so, I imagine, in all the normal ways that we do, but then also in extraordinary ways. He suffers starvation for 40 days. I don't know what the most you've ever gone without food was, but I can tell you from my brief foray into fasting at any one given time, it's painful. He suffers thirst on the cross when you think of the blood loss that he went through. And he's crying out and begging and saying, I thirst. And then the violence that he experiences with the crown of thorns and the whipping until bone is exposed the driving of the nails, and that's just speaking of the physical agony. He also goes into the depths emotionally. What does Jesus not suffer? Because his heart is larger than all others. Many of us, I'm sure, go out of our way a lot of the time to avoid the news because our hearts break with the knowledge of what happens in a single 24-hour period in the world. But Christ doesn't close his heart. It says rather in Isaiah that he was a man full of sorrows, acquainted with grief. He suffered loss throughout his life of loved ones. He experienced disappointment, ultimate betrayal, isolation. That isolation was social, but then it was also spiritual. And it's the depths of the spiritual part that I believe we find the hardest part to understand. Because Jesus wasn't just a puppet made out of human flesh. He had a true human soul. And so upon his human spirit was being laid the chastisement, as it says in Isaiah, that brought us peace. And so he had to experience throughout his life, but especially on the cross, the justice of God, a sense of the weight of how we ought to feel for sins committed against the incomparable dignity and majesty of God, as well as the image bearers that we constantly harm and wrong. And not only does he experience that weight of shame and guilt, but the punishment, whatever that means. Not so far north from here into the east, there is a remarkable geological feature. And I would assume, being here in Arizona, that some of you have been to it, it's a huge crater. Any of you been to that crater? That crater is one of the largest on Earth. We just happen to live near it. It's about a mile across and over 500 feet deep. You think of the force that was applied to the crust of the Earth to blow out that amount of mass in every direction. But it might be even more remarkable to learn that The Lord has placed in our own solar system much bigger craters. On Mars, there is an impact basin called Helos Planitia. It is more than 500 feet deep. It is 24,000 feet deep. And I leave you to guess how wide it is. 24,000 feet deep. That would be to take the twin towers when they were standing and to stack them up 27 times. How big, how massive was the meteor that God ordained would one day mar that planet? Think about the depths, not physical, not of rock, but the depths of suffering that are to be experienced by people who essentially through their life through their unbelief said, my desire is to be left alone by God. Hell is not simply this Dante-esque, you know, devils in red suits. The agony of hell is the isolation and the knowledge that it cannot be ended. But it's the appropriate justice against those who have despised the Lord. Every good thing we've ever had was by his design and creation. And the desire that he had was that these things would bring us to him, to experience, to share, to enter into love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and to draw others into that too. And Christ, in some way, by the end of his time on the cross, is able to say, it is finished. Which means, if you imagine that meteor that struck Mars, but instead of thinking of a meteor, you think of just the sum total of human guilt and justice. And the crater that leaves upon the Savior, it's as if it all fell upon him, because he's taken the place of others who deserve it. Isaiah 53 says, he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace. With his wounds, we are healed. So the first way of reading this passage is that what it means for Christ to have descended was that He became incarnate, and he became incarnate in order to deliver us. The second view, however, and there have been many who have held this view throughout the ages, is that it's focused on something more specific, that it's focused on his descent into the human experience of death. None of us, by definition of being here, have known that. We haven't experienced this, but we recognize that there are two sides to it. There is the cessation of life in the body, the separation of the spirit, which animates the body, and so you have corruption working in the flesh until it breaks down, returns to dust. Not God's original design for man, but the curse. And then there is the spirit as well. And when we talk about Jesus descending, there's a sense in which we can say, that he truly went down into the earth. When we think about the symbolism of the grave, why they're even laid in the ground, and why believers since the time of Abraham at least have chosen to place bodies in the earth. That's an admission, a recognition of dust unto dust. From the ground you were made, back to the ground you go. It also becomes a beautiful picture of planting a seed with the expectation of resurrection and life. But here Christ, his body is laid in the grave. But not only his body goes down, but also his human spirit can be described as descending. And that might seem strange to you, because we are so accustomed in our Christian era, following the resurrection of Christ, to think of, you know, a human being dies, and if they are a believer, if they're right with God, then their soul flies upward, as it were. We imagine death as an upward departure for the soul. But you should know that prior to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Hebrew people envisioned and described the departure of the soul in downward turns, because they recognized that it's a breaking apart of the way that God intended things to be. God meant for the body and the soul to be together and for us to live out our worship in this more rich way, where we praise him not just with our minds and our hearts, but outwardly with our voices. And so to be without your body is a descent from the intention of God's will for man. It's a downgrade. This is reflected, by the way, in passages like Genesis 37, verse 35, where Jacob says, as he's nearing old age, I shall go down now to Sheol, to my son in mourning. And the word Sheol in Hebrew means essentially the grave, but it always carried that double connotation, the body and the soul. Or in the book of Numbers, you may recall that there's a story of a man who leads a kind of rebellion against Moses. The man's name is Korah, and Moses says, all right, Lord, you're gonna have to settle this. Korah's claiming that he's the real priest and he's the leader, so Father, please make it clear to your people And what does the Lord do? He opens up the earth and the earth spreads out and swallows the Korathites. They were all gathered in one area and then closes back over them. And in verse 33 of number 16, we read these words, and they all went down alive into shale. The departure into death was viewed in a downward way, again, because of the downgrade. And so this is not to say that after Jesus suffered on the cross that he can continue to be tormented in a punitive way. But it is to say, prior to the resurrection of Christ, there had never yet been a person who came back from death in the power and the fullness of the new creation. And so Jesus experienced the true consequence, and whatever it is that human beings suffer after death, in every way, like us, in order that he might redeem us And this is why many of the church fathers interpreted Psalm 68 and Ephesians 4 as talking about a kind of liberation of the souls who have been gathering and gathering and gathering on that side of death. Think of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses, and then you have Deborah, and you have all the Esther, just all of these believers whose souls weren't being punished, but it was unclear why, when they were sinful, even as the people whose souls were in torment, as Jesus describes in Luke 16. But look at verse eight again of our text. When he ascended on high, he led a host of captives and he gave gifts to men. Without going into elaborate detail, I will simply summarize. The consensus view of the church has basically always been that when Christ was separated in spirit from his body, his spirit went to the same place, however you think of that. that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are at. And for a couple of days, they don't know for sure what is going to happen. And then Christ says, I'm going back. I can only imagine the thrill and the excitement of souls commuting with the soul of Christ on that side of death. And then he says, there's more to the story. I'm about to be raised. and raised in the way that I'm going to raise all of you. For the souls then to be brought at Christ's ascension with him into a qualitatively fuller experience of glory. Because now they have the not only incarnate but the resurrected glorified Lord in their midst. And his body, his resurrection body, is the proof there is a final resurrection. We have to tell ourselves that all the time when we think of those who have passed before us or those who will yet pass. The resurrection is our assurance and we can never separate what an awful sermon it would be if on Good Friday we only thought about the death. The death is unto life and liberation. So then that answers our question, why did God descend to these depths? He went to these depths because they were simply brother or sister or friend, no other way of salvation. How do we spell that out? And really, in a sense, we can't. Only the Holy Spirit can crack through the hardness of the sinful heart that wants so badly to be either its own savior or to have a free ticket to sin. I can't make you believe it, but God works through means, and his means are reasonable, and there is a logic to salvation. God by nature is infinite, and must be for there to be a finite creation. God is infinite in dignity and worth, and so every sin is committed not just against some person, but against the infinitude of God's dignity. And so someone had to go to the bottom of who himself had that virtue, which means unless the second person of the Trinity came for us, and unless he submitted to die, you don't have any hope. There is no hope. What's the plan to show up to the judge of all the earth, who surely must do righteous? Do you not have a conscience? Your conscience itself is the evidence that there is a God, that we know there's right and wrong, not just opinion, Some things truly are right and wrong. And you're gonna show up to him and present your best efforts. It'll all be shambles, it'll all be embarrassment, it will all be horror. But for the one who has come in Jesus Christ, they say, he has been to the depths for me. And then what humility that should form in us, not only, I'm not talking about like a self-flogging humility of, feel like you can't enjoy any good thing ever again, I'm just so awful. The humility that is in Christ is a humility that raises and elevates everyone it comes into contact with. Christ put on the clothes of a servant and washed the feet of his disciples, not to make his disciples embarrassed, but so that they would experience blessing. And Christ wants you to have the blessing of a humility that at its core sees itself for what it is, and what you are now in Christ is his co-heir, but also his fellow servant, because Christ remains the most humble. He's not above anything that God desires for him. Verse one again, I, therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you've been called with all humility and gentleness. with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace. If Jesus descended so far for you, can't we come down just a little bit lower? But every one of us struggles with this. Nobody has the full humility that we ought to have. Think of just the words, bearing with one another in love. In the past week, did you become overly angry with someone over something? You might say no, because you don't feel it was overly angry. So if I just ask, did you become angry, you say yes, but exactly the right amount. Bearing with one another in love. When they beat Christ in the face, he turned the other cheek. When the church lives this way, there is a glimpse, a light that cuts into the world from the age to come and it cannot be contended with. When the church lives in this way, especially as a community, but even individually, people are persuaded and the Holy Spirit uses that to open the eyes of others to see the beauty of the gospel. The beauty of the gospel is that it breeds a humility, A humility that delights in the betterment of all others. May God work that in us. We started this service with Psalm 22, which at the beginning of the psalm is very bleak, and it's a psalm that prophesied concerning the crucifixion. But it doesn't end there. The latter half of the psalm changes perspective and begins to look to the resurrection, even as we begin to look ahead to this Sunday and celebrating the resurrection together. And so we will, following the prayer, stand to sing 22A, stanzas eight through 10. First, join with me in prayer. Our Father, we thank you that your love for us was not a response to what you foresaw that we would bring to you in terms of our own righteousness or devotion, Indeed, all of that we credit to you, to the Holy Spirit who works in us these things. For Christ is risen and he has given gifts to men, even your spirit. But we ask for more of your spirit and more of your power that we would live in a way more befitting of this gospel, a way more worthy of a Savior who has died for us. Help us to die to ourselves, to take up our cross daily, to perceive in those around us, not our enemies, but those whom you have called us to serve, as images of you. We pray that you would please work in each one of our hearts a deeper assurance of the fact that you are indeed reconciled to us. Nothing could be added to where Christ has gone to save us. Please give this same joy to others. Use us as ministers, ambassadors of this good news. Help us to explain in plain ways and with affection the hope that we have to those who ask. Perhaps even this weekend, All of these things we bring to you in Christ's name, amen.