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Heaven, Earth and the Other World - Before the Resurrection

On Earth:
Matthew 27:62-66 (NIV)
62  The next day, the one after Preparation Day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate.
63  "Sir," they said, "we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, 'After three days I will rise again.'
64  So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first."
65  "Take a guard," Pilate answered. "Go, make the tomb as secure as you know how."
66  So they went and made the tomb secure by putting a seal on the stone and posting the guard.  

Jesus' death made people nervous.  The Chief Priests and Pharisees, Pilate, all were concerned that something would happen - but they were thinking in terms of common human deception - or, as we say it - "it takes one to know one".  Human capacity to think cynically has no boundaries, and the Spiritual mind knows it's a dead end.

The Other World:  
1 Peter 3:18-19 (ESV)
18  For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit,
19  in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, 

It's a slightly eyebrow raising passage - huh?  what?
Jesus went where?  He went to a prison to proclaim to the spirits who were there.
Peter tells us a verse later where they came from.  1 Peter 3:20 (ESV) 
20  because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water.

These spirits were no ordinary beings, but rather connected to an action in the days of Noah that caused God to put them away in this place called "a prison".  
Why did Jesus go there?  "To Proclaim".

To make a long story short, Genesis says that there was a time when Satan sent some of his fallen angels to completely corrupt all of human kind - essentially seeking to destroy all vestiges of humans being made "in the image of God".  You can read this account in Genesis 6.  The key thing is that God's response to this at the time was to send a cataclysmic judgement upon the earth in the form of a universal flood, and only Noah and his family were saved to start back over again.  The image of God is preserved in all of human kind, and these angels who "cross the line" were sent to this "prison" in the other world.

SO...on this day, Saturday, Jesus goes to them to "proclaim"... the text doesn't tell us what he proclaimed, but we know his last words on the cross - "It is finished".  His work of redemption is done, and all of human kind has the potential of being restored to the relationship God intended us to experience.

Heaven:
We don't know what heaven was doing on that Saturday...a day here is not the same as heaven which sees no 24 hour cycle of day night.  When I think of Saturday, I think of what we're doing when family is coming back home - getting ready for a grand celebration.  
Heaven?
Heaven was about to receive Jesus back...
Philippians 2:8-11 (ESV)
8  And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
9  Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name,
10  so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11  and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. 

Hebrews 9:24 (ESV)
24  For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. 

Saturday...  Sunday is just around the corner, and a new day is about to dawn...

Peace

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