Before Resurrection

Disrupting The Realm of the Dead

The silence hasn’t lifted yet.

The tomb is still sealed.

There is no sign of resurrection, no voice from heaven, no movement.

Just absence.

And yet—this absence is not empty. Something is happening beneath it.

Not visibly. Not emotionally. Structurally.

This is not the waiting room. This is the underworld.

This is Sheol—the realm of the dead.

Sheol is the ancient Hebrew term for the realm of the dead but it is not synonymous with hell in the modern sense of fire, punishment, or damnation.

Sheol is not a place of suffering. It is a place of absence. The demonic love it here.

In early Jewish cosmology, Sheol was understood as the underworld—the domain beneath the land of the living.

Everyone went there when they died: the just and the unjust alike. It wasn’t a moral sorting ground. It was simply where the dead went to wait.

Sheol is where the breath is gone but the story isn’t finished.

It is referenced throughout the Hebrew scriptures, almost always as a space beneath, marked by stillness and separation from God’s presence.

There is no praise in Sheol. There is no action, no movement.

It’s not hostile, but it is hollow.

It is not punishment, but it is not communion either.

It is, in every sense, the realm of the unresolved.

In the Greek world, this concept became Hades, and it carried over into the early Church as a direct continuation of Sheol—not as mythology, but as cosmological structure.

The Creed that summarizes Christian belief—the Apostles’ Creed—states plainly: “He descended into hell.”

The language has since been distorted, but the meaning remains: Christ went to the underworld.

Not to Gehenna, the realm of fire and judgment, but to Sheol—the silent place where the dead were held until redemption was complete.

The theological term for this descent is The Harrowing of Hell.

That phrase means exactly what it sounds like: a harrowing, a breaking open, a stripping of power.

According to this doctrine, Christ descended into the realm of the dead not to suffer, but to liberate.

He entered Sheol in order to retrieve the righteous who had died before the resurrection was available to them.

Those who had lived in covenant before the Messiah had come. The prophets. The matriarchs and patriarchs. The unnamed just. The forgotten faithful.

Early Christian iconography shows Jesus breaking open the gates of the underworld and grasping Adam and Eve by the wrists, pulling them out. Not gently. With force. With intention. Because Sheol cannot be exited alone. It doesn’t release anyone who enters it. It has to be invaded.

This is not metaphor. It’s not poetry. It’s not allegory or myth.

It is the structure beneath the visible world, and it is the reason resurrection has weight.

Jesus didn’t just rise.

He descended.

And that descent matters because of where he went—and who he pulled out when he did.

Sheol is not just a post-mortem space. It’s a spiritual domain.

It’s the realm where unresolved realities live. Not just for the dead, but for the living.

It’s the space where trauma rests before it’s witnessed.

Where grief waits to be metabolized.

Where what’s been buried but not yet redeemed sits—outside of time, outside of language, but not outside of God.

And this is why the Harrowing matters.

It tells the truth most doctrine avoids: that redemption doesn’t skip the dark. It enters it.

Not at the surface level, but at the root.

If you’ve ever experienced a season where it felt like everything had collapsed and nothing was being restored—where God wasn’t speaking, and no intervention was coming—you may have passed through Sheol.

Some mystics and esoteric traditions describe this space as a necessary dismantling—the collapse of false structures before the true foundation emerges.

It isn’t something we always recognize at the time. It often doesn’t have language until later. But the architecture is there.

Sheol is not hell.

It is not punishment.

It is not exile.

It is the silence that holds what has not yet been reclaimed.

And once Christ has entered a space, that space loses the right to claim finality.

That’s what the Harrowing of Hell ultimately reveals: that absence is not abandonment. That delay is not disqualification. That silence is not failure. And that even the realm of the dead is not beyond the reach of God.

So if you’ve carried pain that never seemed to resolve, or waited through a stretch of life where the miracle didn’t come—if you have known what it is to be suspended in the void, between what was lost and what has not yet risen—there is a name for that place.

And it is no longer ruled by silence.

This is the threshold we stand on now.

It’s not just the close of a cycle, but the quiet beginning of something that cannot be undone.

In sacred tradition, this is the eighth day—the day after rest, the day that doesn’t fit inside the original structure of time. It’s infinity.

It’s the day of what continues.

Resurrection isn’t a return to what was. It’s the emergence of what can no longer be contained—by silence, by systems, or by history.

What began in Sheol isn’t over.

The descent made the return possible, but the work is still unfolding.

The pattern is alive.

And the harrowing continues—here, now, in this world, in this body, through this line.

I love you.