At teacher's meeting last night, I wanted to hear what the others had to say about Ephesians 4:8-9. "When he ascended up on high he led captivity captive...now he ascended...what is it but that He also descended first into the lower parts of the earth...he ascended above...that he might fill all things. 

Personally, I have always believed that this passage was talking about paradise.  Paradise is mentioned a number of times in the Bible.  It seems to be a place where those who died went--while waiting on the Messiah.  (Or waiting on their Judgment.) The place where the rich man looked across a gulf, and begged Lazarus (Who is described as "in the arms of Abraham) to send someone to tell his brothers about the place of torment he was in.  They could see each other. It was not heaven.  There will be no sorrow in heaven, you won't see the lost.

This is probably where Catholics get the notion of purgatory.  However, Lazarus told the rich man that even if someone rose from the dead, the people living in sin wouldn't repent.  Paradise was a waiting place for the death and resurrection of Jesus.  It was not a place you could pray someone out of, or make a donation to the church to get them out.  You were in torment, or waiting on heaven.

This was a holding place for those who died and couldn't enter heaven until the sin price was paid by the blood of the Lamb--Jesus.  Two sides, one a place of torment, the other a place of waiting until Jesus could "descend" and get the "captive" people who had died in faith to ascend to heaven with him.

We know that when Christ arose: Matt.27:52 "And the graves were opened and many bodies of the saints which slept arose."   What we know from the Biblical record is that you couldn't get from one side of the gulf in Paradise to the other.  You were physically dead waiting on eternity with Christ, or condemnation with Satan.  So paradise wasn't heaven.  It was to hold the faithful till Christ arose.