How we admire those valiant believers who take on tasks that seem to us an invasion of Enemy territory itself. Here is a city or a neighborhood or even a nation, an isolated island, that has been dominated by forces of Satan’s army for time untold. A man or woman of God, on bended knee, crying out to be used in the military strategies of the Lord, is summoned to take a Gideon’s group and invade that awful place with Good News from heaven. Awesome.
But what I have just described is not “storming the gates of Hell,” and I would hope that this particular phrase will soon be phased out from common usage.
Why? Nowhere are those words, or such a concept, found in our Military Manual, the Holy Scriptures. Nowhere is such a mandate given by the Commander in Chief.
You say, What about Matthew 16? Where Peter is told that the church is coming and the very “gates of hell” will not “prevail” against it?
It is an odd assembling of words, for sure. People have puzzled over the idea of a gate rising up and doing battle against a saint. Well, that doesn’t work, they say, so it must be that saints are going to rush the very gates of the underworld, and those gates will not be able to keep us out.
Well…
Christians do indeed go, by order of the Chief, into hellish places, as described above. But never are they called to go into Hell itself for some mission. Hell is for now the place of the dead, though it is suggested that the eternal punishment has already begun, so it is also that place. But it is not Satan’s Kingdom. That entity is above ground. Indeed, Lucifer is known now as the prince and power of the air. The “Pit” seems to be at the other end of the road, where the defeated losers live, therefore a place not worth invading to begin with.
Only once did a person enter that domain, per Scripture, to come out again. Jesus, according to I Peter 3, went there in His Spirit while His body was in the tomb, and spoke a Gospel message to citizens of Noah’s day, held there for all these centuries by their rejection of God’s message. The Scripture is not clear about the outcome of that meeting so I will not make conjectures.
Suffice it to say here that Christians are not commanded by the Word or any message I have heard of since, to go to the place where judged and departed souls wait for their next phase of existence. They are commanded to do battle against the enemy that controls the cosmos, the world system. That is above ground.
So what did Jesus mean? A quick study of “gates of hell” or “gates of death” in Scripture leads one to the simple conclusion that all Jesus was talking about here is death itself. A person who goes to the “gates of hell” has died. In the natural it seems that death is the end of everything. Jesus says, death itself will not stop My church. Disciples, you will die. Even I will die. But my church will live on, because death will not prevail against what I am beginning here.
So, again, thank God for the soldier-minded among us. For we are all called to this battle. But no need to prepare for a subterranean adventure. Plenty to do on Terra Firma. And even though you and your whole battalion are lost in battle – it happens – the church will continue to live and prosper.
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