What does it mean that Christ descends to where?

Here we have some of the most difficult and challenging verses of the Letter to the Ephesians in 4:7–10. Paul says, “Now grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of the Messiah’s gift. For it says: When He ascended on high, He took prisoners into captivity; He gave gifts to people. But what does ‘He ascended’ mean except that He descended to the lower parts of the earth? The One who descended is also the One who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.”

There are two difficult parts of this passage: first, verses 7–8 and what the quotation is all about from Psa 68; and then what on earth verses 9–10 is all about.

The Reference to Psalm 68

First, the psalm. Paul is quoting from Psa 68:18. It’s important, whenever an OT citation is quoted in the NT, that we pause and think about the context of that passage because it’s been demonstrated that the NT authors often had the wider context in mind as they cited a particular text. So what is Psa 68 about? Ultimately, it is about God’s power, it is about God’s strength, and it’s about God’s victory over His enemies.

“Gave” or “Received”?

So far so good, but one difficulty arises when you actually look up Psa 68:18. You see that Paul’s quotation differs from the psalm itself. It not only differs in our English Bibles; it differs from the original Hebrew text and also the Greek translation of the OT. Where Paul says that God gave gifts, the psalm says that He received gifts—kind of the opposite idea. What do we do with this? Some commentators say that Paul just made a mistake; you know, when he was remembering the psalm, he didn’t have the psalm in front of him, and he wrote “gave” instead of “received.”

A Variety of Views

Some say, “No, it was not a mistake. But he was not quoting a version of the OT that we would normally recognise as authoritative. Instead, he was quoting from an Aramaic Targum, an Aramaic translation of the OT.” Others say that Paul deliberately changed the text to make a point. Now, the commentators vary on all these issues, and there are other views besides.

A Case of Intertextuality?

One of the best explanations, however, is one by G. V. Smith, in an article he wrote some years ago, where he argues that, okay, if you really need to understand Psa 68, you should understand that in the background of that psalm is another passage, and that is Num 8. Okay, so this is a great case of intertextuality. You’ve got Ephesians 4 referring to Psa 68, but Psa 68 has in its background Num 8, and so we see that all of this is brought to us by the number 8.

The Motion of God to Give and to Receive

When we read Num 8 and 18, we see that those chapters address the Levites, the people who function as priests for the nation of Israel. And we see that God takes the Levites and] He separates them out from the people of Israel and takes them to belong to Him as a special priesthood. But then the purpose of separating the Levites out is that He might give them back to serve the people.

And so there is a notion of God receiving and God giving, and the purpose of that is to serve the people. That’s important at that point. Now, if we take that background from Num 8 and 18 and then look again at Psa 68, we see that, in fact, God receives gifts and returns gifts. There is that double motion of receiving and returning.

The Parallel of the Apostles and Prophets to the Levites

So what does all this have to do with Eph 4:8? Well, it seems that Paul is deliberately focusing on the giving part of that double motion, the giving and the receiving. He is about to go on in verse 11 to talk about God giving the apostles and the prophets to serve God’s people, just as He did with the Levites. He took the Levites out from the people in order to give them to the people in service. God gives the apostles and prophets for the service of His people.

That means, according to Smith, that Paul has deliberately tweaked the psalm, the citation of Psa 68, but he has still done justice to the intent of the psalm because the psalm, recalling Num 8 and 18, has that double motion of God receiving and God taking. So what we have here is a deliberately changed citation that reflects Paul’s use and interpretation of Psa 68.

The Purpose of Christ's Descension

Now we come to the second difficult part of the passage. Paul refers to someone descending. This relates to Christ’s descent to earth, as depicted in Phil 2. One who is with God and equal to God became a man, became a servant. The point is that Christ lowered Himself, but He lowered Himself only to be raised again, raised from death and then ascended into heaven.

Victory over Death and Evil

His victory over death is His victory over the evil powers. We looked at that earlier in chapters 1 and 2. Christ’s ascension—Christ being seated above the evil powers—indicates that He has conquered them. If we understand that the ascension of Christ correlates roughly to the idea of taking prisoners—that is, He beat the bad guys—then we can see how the ascension is what Paul is talking about here. Also, the ascension is related to the giving of gifts, which Paul has discussed by citing Psa 68.

Paul Reflects the Full Cycle According to Peter

In Acts 2 the apostle Peter, in his famous Pentecost speech, says to the Jews in the audience, [in essence,] “You killed the Christ, but God raised Him from the dead”—verse 32—” exalted Him to God’s right hand from which position He poured out the Holy Spirit” (verse 33). And so we see a movement here in Peter’s Pentecost speech of death, followed by resurrection, followed by ascension, followed by pouring out of the Spirit. That is the kind of idea that Paul has in mind here—that Jesus descended, He became a man—He became incarnate, a human being—and He died.

The Giving of Gifts through the Spirit

But the one who died is raised again—resurrection—and He is lifted up in ascension, and from that position He pours out the Spirit to all believers, meaning that there are many spiritual gifts. Remember, this is all about gift-giving. And so Paul is ultimately talking about God’s gifts to the church facilitated by the giving of the Spirit. And what we will see as we move on through chapter 4 is that there are special giftings, and that helps to create diversity within the one body of Christ. But even though there is diversity with different gifts, we all share in the one Spirit

Campbell, C. R. (2017).