BLOG 5/31/15. WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH: “THE GATES OF HELL?”
Have you ever noticed that there are some subjects in the Bible that are absolutely essential to our understanding the integrity and awesomeness of its message, but which are deliberately skirted, or avoided because they don’t fit into our comfortable schemes of interpretation?
One such subject is right there at a crucial moment in Jesus’ initiating his disciples into how it was that upon Peter’s affirmation that Jesus was Israel’s long-awaited Messiah, he, Jesus, was going to ‘call out’ a people, i.e., the church, to incarnate that Kingdom, or that New Creation of God which he was anointed to inaugurate. So far we can handle the notion. But then Jesus follows immediately that raison d’etre of the church with another prediction, which will be the inevitable result: “ . . . and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Say what? Such a concept at the reality of hell, or of some such dominion of darkness is an embarrassment to our modern, or post-modern, or secularized minds.
But there it is, out of the mouth of Jesus, that the reality of his New Creation people, that new humanity that he will be calling out, . . . will be that it will be always in missionary confrontation with some kind of energized darkness that will oppose it, but that darkness will not ultimately be able to withstand the people of God. As if that were not sufficient to get our full attention, we tend to mindlessly pray that our Father will deliver us from the evil (one), as we pray the Lord’s prayer.
Try as we may, it won’t work. As one Biblical scholar concluded, after his own somewhat cynical study of such a reality, . . . that there is real evil in the world, and that it is malignant, and that it has personality. One can attempt to avoid even confronting such a demonic personality, but it leaves the much larger unanswered metaphysical issue of where the destructive and malignant reality, which we designate as evil, come from? What is it? What is its goal? From whence its power? How would it seek to prevail against the church?
When Paul, that uniquely brilliant, and unlikely candidate to be an apostle, or a missionary, tells the story of his conversion from being a primary persecutor of the church, to one of its primary spokesmen, he puts his commission from the ascended Lord Jesus in these words: “ . . . I am sending you to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive the forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by me” (Acts 26:17-18 in loc.).
Or, if you need a key to the understanding of all of the colorful images and the message of the Book of Revelation, it is most simply an overview of the history of the church and its engagement in the cosmic battle between the Beast (Satan) and the Lamb (Christ). Yes, and the battle is real and relentless and has casualties—but in the midst of it all there is the wonderful reality that God’s people conquer the Beast “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death” (Revelation 12:11). And that wonderful book of Revelation concludes with the reality that the devil, who such a deceiver, would be thrown into the lake of fire . . . forever, so also all the pieces of his dominion, Death and Hades.
From the third chapter of Genesis to this 20th chapter of Revelation there is the unmistakable reality the presence of this evil personality. So what do we do with that in our attempts to be faithful to our calling to Jesus Christ? Ignore it? Pretend it’s not there? We do so to our own peril. So I’ll leave it there for you to chew on . . ..
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