Abraham's Bosom Was Not Heaven

Yesterday I wrote about the two verses Matthew drops into the crucifixion and never picks back up. The graves opened Friday. Nobody came out until Sunday.

A reader went straight past the gap and asked the better question.

If those people were already in heaven, why were they in graves at all? Why did they come out of the ground and walk into a city if they were not in the ground to begin with?

Another one said she had never heard a sermon on it in her life and had always wondered why.

So we are going to do the thing this publication does. Put the verses side by side and read what is actually printed.

Start with the story everybody thinks they know

“And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.” (Luke 16:22-23)

Read the geography, not the moral.

Two men die. Neither one goes up. One is carried into a place with a name. The other opens his eyes somewhere he can still see the first man.

They can see each other. They can hear each other. One of them holds a conversation across the distance.

“And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.” (Luke 16:26)

A gulf fixed. Not a wall between earth and heaven. A gulf between two compartments of the same place.

This is the part that changed everything for me

Two compartments. Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom. The rich man in flames. A great gulf fixed between them.

But read the context your KJV gives you.

This is NOT the Lake of Fire. This is NOT final judgment.

This is a holding cell.

Nobody there has been sentenced yet.

Once you see that, the graves in Matthew 27 stop being strange. Those bodies were in the ground because the people were not upstairs. They were waiting somewhere, and Luke tells you the name of it.

Which raises the only question left.

If that place was full on Friday morning, who emptied it, and when.