Upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. (Matthew 16:18b (KJV)
At the foot of Mount Hermon, in the face of pagan altars and a deep grotto that was thought literally to lead down to Hades, Jesus declared that he would gather a people to himself, and he gave that people a prophecy and a destiny — the gates of hell would not prevail against them.
The people of God would be a people of life, a people in whom the kingdom of heaven and the powers of everlasting life triumphed.
The Promise of Prevailing
Jesus’s promise in this verse is often applied in terms of spiritual warfare. The traditional rendering “hell” makes us think rather directly of demons and devils and the plans of the evil one. But this isn’t the best way to read the words.
The HCSB renders this verse, “The forces of Hades will not overpower it.” The literal Greek is gates, translated as “forces” because gates are part of a city’s fortifications and hence its strength. The King James’s “hell” translates Hades in the Greek, which should not be thought of in terms of the post-judgment lake of fire — equivalent to Jesus’s Gehenna — but rather as the equivalent of the Hebrew Sheol, the grave or realm of the dead.
In other words, “the gates of hell” in Matthew 16, which Jesus promises will not prevail against his church, should be understood as the realm and power of death. Although “gates of hell” leads us to think of Satan (and this is not entirely wrong, as Hebrews 2:14 tells us that the devil held the power of death), the phrase shouldn’t make us think of demonic forces per se but of the power of death itself.
This, Jesus declared to his disciples, will never prevail against the church. I understand gates as primarily a defensive apparatus, not as an offensive force. (No one was ever attacked by a pair of gates.) The inference, then, is that in this conflict, it is the church who will be on the offensive.
The church, Jesus informed his disciples, was about to conduct a raid on death — and the grave will not be able to withstand the onslaught.
Human Beings and the Problem of Death
Modern evangelicalism has tended to see the gospel solely through a lens of sin and forgiveness, so that our primary problem is sin and the guilt that comes with it, and the primary remedy is forgiveness.
What we often overlook, though, is that sin has led to another problem — and this can be felt and understood even by those who wrestle to wrap their minds around the concept of “sin.”
Our urgent, pressing, obvious condition as human beings is that we are dying. Every one is growing older, visibly so, painfully so, day by day; our bodies age and fail. To use a biblical term, they corrupt.
We are dying, and no matter how hard we try to make peace with this fact, we all know deep down that it wasn’t meant to be like this. Human beings were created to live, truly live. The Bible confirms this fact, but so does our experience in the world. We are dying, and we can’t easily make peace with it. We can’t calmly accept the loss of those we love. Nor, deep down, do we find it easy to accept the fact of our own impending demise. Dylan Thomas was right to urge that the dying fight against their fate — as his famous poem enjoins, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Why do we fight so hard against something that science would tell us is entirely natural? Why suffer the racking pain of grief when we are forced to say goodbye? Why fear the darkness at the end of the road?
The Bible would tell us it is because death is not natural to humanity. We weren’t meant to be parted from those we love. We weren’t created to suffer corruption. We weren’t meant to end.
Sin, the Sting of Death
The condition in which we now live is indeed because of sin. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:56 that “the sting of death is sin”: sin is the scorpion’s tail dealing out the poison that causes our fall. I suggest this truth is evident long before the day of death itself.
Strictly speaking, sin is not natural to human beings, no matter how much we want to insist that to err is human. Seen through the lens of Genesis, sin is an external force that has seduced and overpowered us. “Sin crouches at your door,” God warned Cain, “but you must master it.”
Cain didn’t, and we don’t, and its effects ravage our bodies and our souls. We reap sin’s corruption — those sins we commit ourselves and the effects of those committed against us, not only directly but down through the generations — in our very genetics, and in our world’s harvest of cancers, of debilitating diseases and pain, of failing immune systems, of broken hearts, anxiety, and destructive stress. Sin, as a force existing in the world and expressing itself through human choices, does indeed bring forth death.
Into this condition of sin and death, where every person comes eventually to the gates of death, Jesus promised that death would not prevail against the church.
The church comes on a mission of life, healing, and resurrection, and this mission will be victorious.
Death will not stand against the church, either when Satan comes as an aggressor or when the grave attempts to hold its prisoners.
The Harrowing of Hades
The Apostles Creed narrates as an essential confession of our faith that Jesus “descended into Hell”; that is, as other English translations render it, “He descended to the dead.” This is followed by the declaration: “On the third day He rose again.”
When Jesus promised that the gates of hell would not stand against the church, he neglected to mention that he would personally be the first to shatter their power.
Early Christians spoke of Jesus going to “harrow hell”; that is, to break the power of death and release its captives. A fourth-century narrative of this event, found in an early Christian document called The Gospel of Nicodemus and likely based on traditions that are much older, personifies Hell and Death and sees them on the verge of panic as they realize that the man who has died on the cross and is coming down to them is God himself. Angry with Satan, whose hubris is responsible for this terrible turn of events, they attempt to fortify the gates of Hades against Christ, but cannot.
The voice of David cries out against them, commanding the gates to open:
Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors;
and the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.
Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory. (Psalm 24:7-10, KJV)
Entering into the realm of the dead, the Lord of life breaks down the gates and releases the captives who have been held by Death since the time of Adam and Eve. The gates are trampled a second time as Jesus raises the souls of his faithful people to paradise — and broken beyond repair when Jesus himself rises from the dead, body and soul, on the third day.
Peter, who first heard this promise of the church’s victory over the gates of death, preached in his first sermon in Jerusalem:
God raised [Jesus] up, ending the pains of death, because it was not possible for Him to be held by it. For David says of Him:
I saw the Lord ever before me;
because He is at my right hand,
I will not be shaken.Therefore my heart was glad,
and my tongue rejoiced.
Moreover, my flesh will rest in hope,
because You will not leave me in Hades
or allow Your Holy One to see decay.
You have revealed the paths of life to me;
You will fill me with gladness
in Your presence.
The Victory of the Church
All of this, of course, is getting ahead of our story — but it’s helpful, sometimes, to remind ourselves that Jesus didn’t speak words that fell to the ground, but words that were realized in truth in his own lifetime and in the experience of the early church, even as they continue to be realized in our own lives.
And that is where the prophecy of his prevailing becomes very personal: Jesus did not promise his disciples that he would overcome the gates of death, but that we would.
Just as sin entered the world in the early ages of the world and began its work of death and destruction, so forgiveness and cleansing bring with them healing and holiness, and these forces of life counteract the power of death through our lives.
Indeed, the power of death will not prevail against the people of God — not in our families, our bodies, or our hearts. Through our lives, our prayers, and our obedience, we are beating the gates of death and conducting a raid until hell is emptied out.
The victory of Jesus is realized in and through us, in the daily battles we fight. Your battles and mine may seem small, but they are no less conflicts between life and death, holiness and sin, light and darkness.
Our victories are the victories of Christ and the church, just as his victories are ours.
And in the end, we are destined to see the final end of death with our own eyes in the resurrection at the end of this age. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:
Brothers, I tell you this: Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, and corruption cannot inherit incorruption. Listen! I am telling you a mystery:
We will not all fall asleep,
but we will all be changed,
in a moment, in the blink of an eye,
at the last trumpet.For the trumpet will sound,
and the dead will be raised incorruptible,
and we will be changed.For this corruptible must be clothed
with incorruptibility,
and this mortal must be clothed
with immortality.When this corruptible is clothed
with incorruptibility,
and this mortal is clothed
with immortality,
then the saying that is written will take place:Death has been swallowed up in victory.
Death, where is your victory?
Death, where is your sting?(1 Corinthians 15:50-55)
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This is Part 247 in a series on the Gospel of Matthew, which you can access here. Unless otherwise marked, quotes are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible.
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