Romans Chapter 5 Vs. 18

 

Death in Adam, Life in Christ

Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life. Rom 5:18

The Lord Jesus Christ went down “into the lower parts of the earth” (Eph. 4:9) or “Sheol,” called “Hades” in the New Testament (Acts 2:27, 31).

Sheol (pronounced “Sheh-ole”) [1], in Hebrew שאול (Sh’ol), is the “abode of the dead”, the “underworld”, or “pit”. [2], Sheol is the common destination of both the righteous and the unrighteous dead, as recounted in Ecclesiastes and Job.

There are three Greek words for our English word “hell”, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus, none of which are rendered by the word prison. Hades had a section commonly known as “hell” and a compartment known as “paradise,” separated by “a great gulf fixed” (Luke 16:26). Gehenna is used of our Lord in the warnings and “danger of hell fire” that the “whole body should [not] be cast into hell” (Mat. 5:22, 29-30; etc.).

While “tartarus” is found only one time (in 2Pet. 2:4), to describe the intended purpose for this “hell”: Now if “TODAY” the thief was to be with Christ in “Paradise” (Luke 23:43), then it was at the time of His death that he went to “Paradise.” Since Christ had “not yet ascended to [His] Father” (John 20:17), and could therefore not be “touched,” it is more than logical that “Paradise” was “IN THE HEART OF THE EARTH”, where “the Son of man” spent “three days and three nights” (Mat. 12:40).

The answer is no. You see the Lord was victorious when He went to hell and he preached to the prisoners there and brought them out with Him. In some cases, preachers are teaching that he went there to preach to the spirits (demons), who were incarcerated there to claim the victory he had won over death.

We see from this that Jesus’ purpose in going to hell was not to suffer, but to deliver those in the devil’s captivity.

Remember, up to this point Satan had the keys to death and hell. I believe this is when the keys were taken from Satan.

In these verses Paul concludes his basic parallelism between Adam and Jesus Christ begun in Rom. 5:12 and the contrasts between them in Rom. 5:15-17. Paul reduced the contrast to the briefest possible statement. Consequently (lit., “so then”), just as the result of one trespass (paraptōmatos, “false step”; cf. Rom. 5:15-17, 5:20) was condemnation (katakrima, “punishment”; cf. Rom. 5:16) for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men.