Gates of Hell Will Not Prevail

7 August 2025  Matthew 16:13-23  

“You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.” Matthew 16:18

The key to understanding how we get from Peter the Rock, holding the keys to the kingdom, to “Get thee behind me Satan” in just four verses is what Jesus says about hell: “On this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).

The gates of a city, like the doors and windows of a house, are the weakest spots in the wall. That is why prudent attackers attack there. Jesus is calling for an attack, and describing in this text what an attack on hell looks like. The attackers are people like Peter – they recognize who Jesus is, i.e. the Lord and the Savior, and they resolve to attack hell on His behalf. Their weapons are the Cross and the Resurrection, which is why, right after Jesus hands Peter the keys to the kingdom, he predicts Good Friday and Easter. The cross in those days was the most vivid emblem of the worst thing that the powers of hell can do – put God to death in the most painful and shameful way possible. The Resurrection is the undoing of the worst thing the powers of hell can do, and therefore it is the undoing of hell. That event, and the proclamation of that event, is how the Church – the people, like Peter, who recognize that Jesus is Lord and Savior – will crash the gates of hell and win.

And it was precisely that attack that Peter said should never happen: “God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you!” (Matthew 16:22). Don’t attack hell.

Just moments after becoming the first Pope, Peter was declining to do the one thing the Church was created to do in the first place. “Don’t attack hell. We can feed people instead, we can heal people instead, we can cast out evil spirits and make people happy instead. People will love us for that. People will follow us for that.” People who sit in pews sabbath after sabbath are still making that argument. And Jesus is still responding the same way He did to Peter: “Get behind me, Satan!”

The strategy of hell is to make sin and death appear normal, the kind of thing people don’t attack, think it is wrong to attack. That is why attacking hell is job one for the Church. Feeding and healing are important as signs of compassion for the people who are under the thrall of hell, and they show people what the result of the attack will be – food and health forever. But they are not a replacement for the attack.

We attack hell by announcing the victory over sin and death, and calling people to conversion. Conversion is not a “one and done” kind of event. It is the ongoing process of turning as much of ourselves as we have toward as much of God as we understand. Our whole lives, every life well lived, is constantly discovering more about itself, and turning that toward God. That is a pretty good definition of what prayer is also, which is why Jesus said that the worst demons can only be cast out by prayer (Matthew 17:21), and why St. Paul calls all believers to “pray without ceasing” (I Thessalonians 5:17). To pray without ceasing is simply a description of what conversion is like. It is also what attacking hell is like.

And that is what Peter, at first, was declining to do, and why Jesus said to him, “Get behind me, Satan.”

For millions of people, especially millions of young people, sin and death have become normal – gender ideology, pornography, casual drug use, the marginalization and victimization of children, all of it conveniently anesthetized by doomscrolling and complacent ignorance. What they need is conversion, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.