By Father Thomas Hopko
Even on the Russian Orthodox crosses, by the way, there is a little inscription at the foot of Jesus’ feet on the cross, in four Slavonic letters, M, L, R, and B, in Slavonic, which translated means, “The place of the skull (or Golgotha) has become Paradise.” So the bosom of Abraham had to be transformed into Paradise, into a living reality again, with interrelationship with all of creation—the sun, the moon, the stars, the birds and everything. In other words, even the righteous person was in the realm of the dead and had to be liberated by the Messiah in order to have real life, eternal life, real communion with God.
Another example would be that in the Old Testament, in the Psalms, if you were in Sheol you could not praise God. That is why it was so bad to be dead. The reason why it was so bad to be dead was, you could not sing Alleluia, because according to the Scriptures, and the conviction was also, if you are dead, you are not alive, and if you are not alive, you cannot be singing the praises of God, you cannot sing Alleluia. You are mute, you are dumb, your eyes are closed, you cannot see anything, you are in darkness, you are in Abaddon, some kind of forgetfulness.
But it was also the teaching, I believe this is accurate, that the wicked people who did not follow the commandments of God, who did not follow Moses, who did not love life, who perpetrated evil when they lived on the earth, they are in the depth of the Sheol, they are in Hades also, but they are already anticipating their torment. First of all, they are being tormented by their own evil. They are being tormented by themselves and their own lack of faith and their own refusal to follow God’s commandments. Then they are being tormented by the fact that they want to live and have carnal sensual pleasures and they cannot do that anymore. Then they are tormented by the fact that they are not in the hands of God, they are in the hands of the evil one, they are in the hands of the demons in the pit of Sheol. They are also tormented by the expectation that when the Messianic King comes, they are going to be raised, not for glory, but for judgment, for condemnation, so to speak. They are going to get what’s coming to them, to put it in modern language.
So the evil dead are anticipating already their unending agony by the presence of the truth and the light and the glory of God, and their suffering is going to be “apo tou prosopou tou kyriou” as Isaiah said, quoted by the apostle Peter in the book of Acts. They will suffer torment from the face of God, and not from separation from the face of God, but from the presence of the face of God. If you are evil and rooted in evil and you do not repent, the presence of light and life and truth and glory causes you terrible agony.
Before the coming of the Messiah, the wicked dead were already somehow anticipating that, and the righteous dead were anticipating the time when they would have full and complete and total communion with God and all of the good creation of God, when the Messianic King would free them.
~Thomas Hopko, The Descent of Jesus into Hades, http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_descent_of_jesus_into_hades.
