Spirit Prison

I’m going to give you a scenario and then ask you a question.

You walk into a building full of cells.  Each cell has thick bars over the windows, if there are windows.  The front of each cell is vertical bars.  There is a kind of barred door, currently shut.  The cells have a spartan bunk and a bolted-down toilet.

You walk up to one of the cells.

There is a man sitting on the bunk.

Here is the question.

Is he in prison?

Your answer should be “I don’t know.”

Is the cell door locked?  If it is locked, does the man have the key?  If unlocked, are there barriers beyond the cell door?

It isn’t the decor and the atmosphere of misery that makes a prison a prison.  It’s the inability to leave.

If the man on the bunk can leave, he might be a prison guard catching a moment of rest.  Perhaps he’s a bunk  inspector.  Perhaps he paid a lot of money for an adventure AirBnB.  Perhaps he just has strange taste in fixtures and fittings.  What he is not is a prisoner.

Today in Holy Week Christ broke the gates of Hell and freed all the captives.  All of them.  That does not mean that Hell is empty.  It means it is no longer a prison.

Every lock now has a key.

Christ’s  Holy Week Victories

Gethsemane Thursday*: Fear and Doubt.  Sin.

Golgotha Friday: Fear, Unrighteous Dominion, and the Local Optimum Trap.  Death.

Spirit Prison Saturday: Hell.  And Sin.

Let me explain that last bit about sin a little.  Just like in some sense Christ won over death by voluntarily accepting His own death on Friday, but the victory wasn’t complete until He rose from the dead on Easter Sunday, Christ won over sin at the Garden when He sinlessly accepted all sin.  But the victory was not complete until He rose out of the sin, so to speak, on Saturday.  Until He was sent to Hell and Hell could not hold Him even for an instant.

*Using our own calendar.  Under the Jewish version where the day ended at sunset, the events of Thursday night in the Garden also occurred on “Friday.”