This is what happens when the Fourth Turning meets 5th Generation Warfare. It s Good Friday, the most solemn day of the year, and it s the day that brings us towards Easter, and this Easter special today is going to be called War for Heaven: The King vs. The Damned.
00:06:56.900So one interesting thing that I've noticed about Unhumans is that people are starting to refer to it more and more as a Christian book,
00:07:04.860which is interesting because we didn't really write it to be a religious book in any way,
00:07:09.820but it does kind of work out that so many of the victims of communism did tend to be Christians,
00:07:16.520and that was something that came up in the research again and again, whether it be France, whether it be Russia, or whether it be Spain.
00:07:24.280And, of course, what we see going on today, this is something where when we did the Tucker Carlson interview,
00:07:31.380even he asked, he said, is there a demonic aspect to all of this?
00:07:35.080And I said, well, you know, Tucker, we weren't writing a spiritual book, but personally, yes, that's exactly what I believe.
00:07:40.780I do believe this is demonic influence that pushes people to these horrific evils in society.
00:07:48.320And one of the things that I always like to talk about on the program and I wanted to get into in this special is people talk about Jesus spending the three days that he was dead.
00:08:02.160And they say, well, he was in the tomb, and they say that he was there.
00:08:05.760But the modern church has kind of gotten away from the teaching of the harrowing of hell.
00:08:12.020And this is the idea of what happened on Holy Saturday.
00:08:16.340What happened in between the tomb being shut and the stone being rolled forth.
00:08:23.220And this is something Mel Gibson was talking about this on Rogan recently, how the passion of the Christ, too, is going to go into this ancient Christian,
00:08:32.480which was a widespread belief at the time, of the harrowing of hell, something the early church talked about.
00:08:38.320It's in the Apostles' Creed, which dates back to the fourth century.
00:08:42.960St. Ignatius was talking about this in 100 AD.
00:08:45.140Of course, it's referenced in the Bible itself, in Ephesians, and in Peter, again and again, about Christ leading a host out of captivity and Christ preaching to those in prison.
00:09:00.140So, Joshua, we were chatting last night, and even you mentioned that this was something that, as you were growing up, that you'd never really heard about.
00:09:09.200I grew up in a number of evangelical Christian conservative communities.
00:09:12.760And while they certainly have their upsides, like the memorization of the epistles, memorization of the Gospels, and being able to recite this or that Bible verse for everything,
00:09:24.400one of the things that was lacking is an investigation of these most ancient teachings and stories from the Bible itself.
00:09:34.780And, of course, one of those is the harrowing of hell.
00:09:37.180Now, if we look at what the word harrowing means, it comes from an old English word that means to pillage or to plunder.
00:09:49.360And then if we look at what we consider to be non-Christian, just think about that for a second.
00:09:55.140The most ancient Catholic teachings we considered to be non-Christian.
00:10:00.920These are the spiritual grandchildren of the apostles, and we totally and completely ignored them because they had the word saint in front of their name.
00:10:11.480This is, I think, a bizarre experience that probably tens of millions of people in America can relate to.
00:10:17.480But when we go back and look at these traditions, we see that the story is that on Holy Saturday, while Jesus was dead, he visited the underworld in Greek, Hades, in Hebrew, Sheol.
00:10:32.540And that is where the righteous and the unrighteous were together in the underworld.
00:10:38.280And he pillaged and plundered this level of hell, meaning he preached the gospel, which is in 1 Peter, by the way.
00:10:47.820He preached the gospel, declared his victory over Satan, over evil, over death itself.
00:10:56.080And he brought the righteous with him.
00:10:59.460Now, that, of course, is what the plundering is.
00:11:01.620It is a removal of the righteous souls during this judgment period.
00:11:05.720And the story goes, if we look at the oldest sources of this story, the first two souls he liberated were Adam and Eve.
00:12:16.060Oh, and by the way, just to—you know, when you go to the Orthodox churches, you'll see the icons of Christ breaking the gates of hell and then bringing Adam and Eve out of their tombs.
00:12:27.460And then, you know, sometimes you'll also see a procession up into heaven.
00:12:30.840You see this in a lot of Byzantine artwork.
00:13:06.660For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of earth.
00:13:15.180And there's quotations from St. Augustine.
00:13:18.840He descended into hell, broke the gates of darkness, brought forth the souls of the righteous who were held in the bonds of death.
00:13:24.520St. Ignatius, how shall we be able to live apart from him, seeing that the prophets, being his disciples in the spirit, were expecting him as their teacher?
00:13:32.480And for this, he whom they rightly awaited when he came, raised them from the dead.
00:13:38.920So there's this—it also kind of serves a logical, I think, it serves a logical work as well, because what to make of all of the righteous?
00:13:50.280Where are Moses, Elijah, the prophets, Isaiah—were they in hell because they hadn't gone to heaven yet?
00:13:58.400Where were Adam and Eve this whole time?
00:14:00.280Well, St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that this area of Sheol or Hades was referred to as limbo.
00:14:08.320So we're breaking down the truth of Christ's descent into hell, the war for heaven, the king versus the damned, on this Easter special, Human Events Daily.
00:14:20.980Jack Posobiec, Joshua Lysak, we'll be right back.
00:14:26.720All right, Jack Posobiec, we are back.
00:14:31.380This is Human Events Daily, our Easter special.
00:14:34.360We're discussing all things Easter, specifically, by the way, for Holy Week, Holy Saturday, which is a day that, look, everyone remembers Good Friday, everyone remembers Easter Sunday.
00:14:47.380But somewhere along the way, it seems as though we've lost our connection to Holy Saturday and the importance that this plays in the Passion of the Christ.
00:14:58.140Because people think that the Passion of the Christ ends with Christ's death.
00:15:01.900If not so, there was actually a mission, a mission, believe it or not, to the gates of Hades itself, where Christ descended low to bring forward the souls that were left in limbo.
00:15:17.000And also, for what's called the harrowing of hell, where he tormented the devil, tormented the demons.
00:15:24.480And we're speaking with author Joshua Lysak.
00:15:28.200Joshua, there's a line in Aquinas where he's in the Samatea Logica, where he's discussing this 800 years ago.
00:15:36.240And he says that this would have been a cosmic event because Christ's light was able to, the light of Christ's soul itself, the king's presence, actually coming down into Hades, into the land of the dead, the underworld, would have illuminated every single dark corner all the way into the lowest depth of hell itself.
00:15:56.480Because the demons, Satan himself, Lucifer, would, of course, all be required to obey direct commands from the king.
00:16:08.160He is, of course, the king of the demons as well, despite their constant attempts to disobey and wage war on the throne.
00:16:17.980So, for me, Holy Saturday, I think one of its most important keys here is that when we have Christ at our back, that he actually does have power over the demons and over even death itself.
00:16:33.260And I feel like a lot of that gets lost when we don't talk about Holy Saturday.
00:16:40.500And it is a continual inversion of what we like to think of in terms of a hierarchy.
00:16:48.800And this is one of the most profound aspects of the story of Jesus Christ as the king of kings, is that when we think of a king in a traditional sense, it's the top dog.
00:17:33.520We have the inversion of what pillaging means to take and to steal.
00:17:41.300It is rather a restoration or it's a returning.
00:17:46.220So many of the events that happen during Holy Week and then leading up to the crucifixion and the resurrection, so on and so forth, is Jesus doing the opposite of what a king is supposed to do.
00:17:56.060It is a king being, instead of the chief, it is Jesus Christ, the king of kings, being the chief servant to his followers and to his apostles.
00:18:05.640And this is why I believe the image of the crucifix and the Catholic tradition and the icons of the Eastern Orthodox tradition are so essential.
00:18:13.620And I grieve for all of the Protestants and all the evangelicals across this country and across the world who, in their worship and in their daily meditations and practices, simply have the image of, let's say, a plain and generic cross symbol versus that which is the crucifix,
00:18:31.700which is the image of the king of kings, willingly humbling himself to the most radical extent that the highest could possibly do, which is becoming the lowest.
00:18:42.740And then going even lower than death into the underworld itself as this king of these, king of the damned, in a way, and bringing those souls with him, pillaging out of that place those who are righteous, those who lived a righteous life.
00:19:02.140And this, let's say, underworld theology answers so many questions and closes so many loops that children have.
00:19:09.940Like, well, what about righteous people who died before, you know, like, Jesus came?
00:19:33.900So these are questions, by the way, that go back to the earliest days of the church.
00:19:40.540And Aquinas was extrapolating on this 800 years, eight centuries ago, he wrote this up.
00:19:47.380But because we've been so disconnected from Christian history, it's something that even good teachers today, you know, good Sunday school teachers,
00:19:56.540they're not bringing this up, but this belief was understood and widespread in the early church.
00:20:02.660And that's why I think it's so important to do what we can to bring back the early church history on this Holy Week.