SATURDAY (part three of three) - A short story about the Day In Between.

What were Christ’s very last words on the Cross?

“It is finished.”

Who was He saying that to? Not the thieves. If He said it to anyone, it was to His Father, God. 

So…what was finished?

His task. The sins He was to deliver to Hell.

Already.

When Christ arrived in that total darkness, He had already completed the task which He had been assigned to do. Your sins and mine were already deposited in Hell.

Wait…by whom? Christ was on the cross? How could He have done it?

Technically, He couldn’t.

 

But the Holy Spirit could have. 

Remember, one of the reasons that the Messiah had to die was to release the Holy Spirit from Himself and allow it to come unto all mankind.

But now, on the day of His crucifixion, now that Christ no longer needed Him on earth, the Holy Spirit was free to do an “end-around” on Satan before that release.

While Satan was perhaps waiting for Christ to try to leave all those sins on his doorstep… the Holy Spirit had already done it!

So, imagine the conversation... (PS – for me personally, it helps to give Satan a cinematic evil accent in my head as I read his dialogue. But, you read it as you please…)

†

“Hah! The great Jesus Christ – dead, just like any other man. Sheol always gathers in her prey in the end!”

“Yes, Satan. Dead. Just like any man.”

“Yes…yes. Wait.” Satan’s senses move over the spirit of the Son of Man in the darkness, sensing. Looking. Searching.

“You…” the prince of the darkness began. “You have no…companion with You this time, do You?” said he. “To help You, as He did in the wilderness.”

“No, Satan. He is not with Me. But He is here. He brought you a…gift.”

“A gift?” Jesus could hear the lilt in the Adversary’s voice, even without being able to see the smile of curiosity in the darkness. “What could the Son of God possibly bring me that I can’t just take whenever I want to?”

Deep in the blackness, Christ returned the smile. It was His first smile in days. 

“Sin.”

“Sin?” His laughter made a lesser righteous man’s skin crawl. “Foolish Man. I have all the sin I need, thanks to this fallen human race. Here; let me show You.” Satan caused light to reach Christ, albeit an eerie, almost purplish aura of a light. The prince went to what he foolishly considered 'his' prisons, where the spirits of the most recent sinners lay, unmoving.

“The sins of these poor souls lay bare for You to see, Son of God, and…eh? Hmm. That’s odd.” Satan paused over one recent arrival. “This one seems to have no sins. Must be a mistake. You’re the only one who…” He pauses as he scans more of his imprisoned souls. “He doesn’t have any either. And neither does she. What’s going on here?”

“I just told you, Lucifer. I had their sin. All of it. And from now on, every single person who believes on Me will register exactly the same – sinless, blameless, in front of God and all His angels – even the fallen ones, Satan. You have no more right to hold them here than you do Me.”

“What? Of course I can hold You! You said it Yourself – You brought their sin here, so You get the privilege of receiving their punishment!”

“Been there.”

“What?!?”

“Done that.” Now Christ rose up over the shadow of darkness, over the imprisoned spirits, over the various bound demons. “Apparently you were not paying attention, Satan. Those sins have been punished. The Father has taken His Holy Wrath on the possessor of those sins already:…”

“You.” The prince of shadows slowly begins to put the puzzle together.

“Me. I was carrying those sins, even before you visited Me in the garden of Gethsemane, but you were too concerned with tempting Me, too proud of your fiendish plan to execute Me that you never noticed that you had been manipulated into that plan by the Father from the beginning.”

“I did this?…”

“You did this. You paved the way for dozens of these souls to leave Hades, their punishments having been served, their debt paid, just because they believed on their Lord Jesus Christ before their death. And here is the best part…”

“No…” His voice is faint now, pointed more inward than out.

“Yes, Satan. From this day forward, every person who believes on Me will similarly find their sentences here eliminated. I carried the sins of every believer with Me: not just those alive today but through the end of time, and their bail has been paid in full. They will never…see… Sheol. You and your fellow fallen angels will forever after be the only ones sent here against their wills. Everyone else will have the choice to follow Me and count their sins paid, rather than be sent here.”

“I did this…”

 “You did this. Congratulations, Satan. You signed your own warrant.”  Though He spoke with no more effort or exertion, His voice boomed over the entire underworld. “To all of you, fallen angels, be wary, for your fate is sealed.” And now, as He recited Psalm 16: “I saw the Lord always before Me, for He is at My right hand,” the Holy Spirit rejoined Him. “That I may not be shaken. Therefore, My heart is glad, and My tongue rejoiced, for You will not abandon My soul to Sheol, or let Your Holy One see corruption.”

“And now, Father,” He continued, growing more radiant with every word, “glorify Me in Your own presence with the glory that I had with You before the world existed.”

And as He finished, the radiating light of God emanated from his body and overwhelmed the purple darkness; the newly-sinless were set free, and death could no longer keep its grasp on the soul of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

†

At Satan’s feet were the dried up “husks” of the sins carried on earth by Christ and transferred to Satan’s realm by the Holy Spirit. They piled up against his feet like battered leaves after a storm on a blustery autumn day. Did you know sins have shells? Oh, they do. The more you deny a sin, the thicker the shell gets. The sins of generations’ hidden secrets can be as hard as stone, and the work it takes to crack through those shells is immense. Today, though, even those husks lay bare, cracked open by the Lord’s Wrath as easily as any other.

Above him, the explosion of Christ’s departure was tangibly felt by humans all around Jericho – not just the initial earthquake but the aftershocks as well. Mount Olivet, which sits on a fault line, shook as it rarely did. The veil was split in the Temple, revealing the Holiest of Holies to the neighboring chamber for the first time. Time, remember, doesn’t work the same way in the Realm of God as it does on earth. Though on earth, we associate the events of Matthew 27:51-53 with Christ’s death, these came instead from His victory over Satan, and the synchronicity of the two proclaims the fact that the believers were truly set free the instant Christ died, and the sins left earth with Him. With Them.

Those saints whose souls were just freed from Sheol had gotten lost “in the shuffle”, so to speak. At first, many of them returned to their bodies and tried to figure out how to cope with their new-found freedom by coming back to earth, as Matthew described. Soon, however, the angelic hosts were able to guide them to their new Home, and order was restored.

As he picked up a particularly hefty husk, Satan was left to ponder what might have been, had he understood what God the Son had told him earlier. Ever the optimist, he tossed the larger section of the marble-like sin husk up twice in succession, and then threw it a great distance, striking his intended target – a small demon, facing away from him – in the back of the head. 

He let out a small chuckle. “Ah, well, I Am, you’ve bested me here. But it’s a minor victory at worst. So Jesus reached what, a few hundred Canaanites? A couple thousand at most? There’s an entire planet of sinners that will still be mine to harvest. Once His visit to earth isn’t newsworthy any more, this will die down, and they’ll all be mine again. No reason to worry.” He threw the other half of the sin shell, striking the same demon in the right ear. Another chuckle.

†

            Sunday morning came, and it was time to complete the mission. The crypt was broken open from the inside, and the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ emerged from the tomb, filled for the first time in a while with the full power of God. Were Jesus proud, He would have reveled in the moment as He felt the power He had willingly set aside more than thirty years ago, along with so much more.

            But He was beyond pride. 

            He left the cave and went to the top of Mount Olivet, still silent and unoccupied so early in the morning after the Sabbath. Soon enough, He would make His presence – His resurrection – known, and it would verify everything He had told the disciples. Then, they could begin to spread the Good News – that there was now a way to become close to God, to walk with Him, and to experience life the way that God had always wanted humans to experience it: as complete beings, not just in these fragile shells with fallen souls. They could begin spreading the Word, how believing in His Lordship would allow them eternal life in His presence. Jesus knew, now that He was restored to His God-ly understanding, what the future held in all of its beautiful detail. And He once again understood that rather than being limited to the few people His human form touched, His message would now begin to spread throughout the globe, allowing those elect who would understand it to choose belief in Him, having never seen or heard Him in person. And once the message reached the last, remote corners of humanity, it would be time to return and make good on the promise. 

            Until then, however, there were more immediate concerns. More immediate, in fact, than meeting Mary Magdalene on the road to topple that first domino. 

So He knelt, momentarily taking in the view over Jerusalem as He did so, before He bowed His head.

            And then, He prayed.




- gordon paul smith