The following is a response to this video.
The notion there was a place separate from Heaven called Abraham's Bosom where the righteous dead went before Jesus' death and resurrection is unnecessary and, in my opinion, false. It's pretty clear from Scripture that Enoch, Moses and Elijah went to Heaven, and I think Hebrews 11 also makes this clear. These Old Testament saints gained entry into the Holy of Holies before the veil was torn because they looked forward to what Christ would do on the cross (and tearing the veil in two) for their salvation.
Luke 16 23, in many translations, says the rich man _lifted _up his eyes, meaning Abraham and Lazarus were in a place above him. Thus, the whole notion of Hades East and West or North and South is also a false, unnecessary notion because the righteous went to Heaven and the wicked went to Hell, just as they do today. The reason the word Hades is used is because the Greeks, Luke being a Greek, had no concept of a wonderful place called Heaven and a terrible place called Hell. There was only the underworld, with some nice places and a bad place, but mostly an undefined middle area where those who were neither exceptionally bad or very good people went.
As for 1 Peter 3 19 and the spirits in prison, that link should clear things up, but I'll explain it a little more simply. Peter is saying that, just as the spirit of God raised Christ from the dead after he had been unjustly executed, so also that same spirit was in Noah when he preached to the disobedient people of his day. The souls of those disobedient people are now imprisoned in Hell because they did not listen: Noah and his family being the only ones who were saved from the flood.
It would be like if I said, "In 1984 I worked on a fundraiser with John Smith who is in the nursing home." I am using the phrase "in the nursing home" to refer to John Smith as he currently is, not as he was in 1984.
Speaking of turns of phrase, the doctrine of soul sleep mainly comes from several verses in the Bible which refer to dying as falling asleep. However, fell asleep was simply a Hebrew idiom for died. It would be like if, a thousand years from now, someone came across a book from the twenty-first century that contained the phrase "pushing up daisies", then began stating as a fact, based on this phrase in that book, that all people in the twenty-first century were buried in fields of daisies.
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