What is Paradise?

 

A garden is kept today at a place that represents

the tomb where Jesus' body was placed. Yet we

have reason to suspect that, like the circumstances

of His death, the tomb He borrowed did not make

His physical death beautiful, at all.

We remember how Jesus cried when he came to the tomb of His earthly friend Lazarus. Jesus knew Lazarus would die and that Heaven would will that Lazarus be raised from the dead; but knowing did not stop God's tears for Lazarus - and did not stop God's tears for His own body, His own Son, later on.

It had to have been that Jesus also knew what hell it was to go to the grave back then, to go to the grave before He had made the way to Heaven, before He had taken up the keys to hell, before men knew better than to enter into tombs behind the dead.

Before Jesus broke hell's grip from our human lives and deaths, the demon-possessed often occupied and scavenged tombs, desecrating remains. That was the state at least one demon-possessed man was in when Jesus found Him dwelling among tombs.

God referred to such tombs as the "underworld" (particularly in The Bible in Basic English translation), translated "sheol" in many Bibles. One translation that offers some clarity is Wycliffe, for example.

... Jesus ended all that grave dwelling - all that hell!

But that hell was still on Him bodily when a woman found Him after death: www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2020%3A17-18&version=KJV

Jesus' dying and time in the grave, in sheol, was not like spending three days in a beautiful garden.

"He was despised and rejected by men,

a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

Like one from whom men hide their faces,

He was despised, and we esteemed Him not."

Isaiah 53:3

That's a fact of life I've accepted from the time I truly knew anything about Jesus.

Jesus Himself preached against those whose hearts were trained on dressing the graves of the truly righteous, instead of on just living God's will.

He drew all kinds of souls out of living death.

But He didn't do that until after He Himself rose up from the evil of death that lacked heavenly understanding.

Jesus rose up, and days later, sent the Holy Spirit to cleanse, to baptize, His church. And He remains faithful today to cleanse us of all unrighteousness, the Bible says.

He told the former criminal who spoke with Him on the cross, that the former criminal would be with Him that day in "Paradise"; but that wasn't a heavenly promise: it was an earthly, bodily, difficult truth - the same truth that brought tears at Lazarus' tomb.

Before Heaven took control of the grave, the grave was a terrible place to be. For three days, the former criminal's bodily remains suffered the grave, the pit, the enclosed place that served as the hell of that era - just as Jesus suffered.

If a beautiful garden surrounded either soul's grave at that time, the grave experience itself was nothing good. It was a downward, many steps into a cold earthen tomb where, like some morgues during the Holocaust, evil was prone to enter in.

But thank God today that mankind has been redeemed from that way of life, that making of beds in a hell that was without without mercy, without decency, and that was without immediate release to Heaven.

~

For backgroud, you can read more about the root meaning of "paradise."

“And that he went up, what is it except that he also went down first to the lower parts of the earth?”

Ephesians 4:9, Young's Literal Translation