How Did Jesus Defeat the Devil by Dying?

What Hebrews 2:14 Says

The letter to the Hebrews gives this as one reason the Son of God became a man:

Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.

Hebrews 2:14–15

The Son shared our flesh and blood so that he could die, and his death disabled the devil. The word translated “destroy” does not mean to annihilate. It means to render powerless, to put out of action. Paul uses the same verb when he says that “the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). The devil is still active, and Peter warns that he “walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). What Hebrews says he lost is his power of death.

The risen Christ tells John that he “was dead” and now has “the keys of hell and of death” (Revelation 1:18). Hebrews says the change came “through death.”

That phrase is the puzzle. If the devil’s power is the power of death, a death looks like his victory, and the Gospels show him working toward the crucifixion. “Then entered Satan into Judas,” Luke writes (22:3). Paul says that if the rulers of this age had understood God’s wisdom, “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8). Why the devil sought the death that defeated him is the subject of a separate article, why Satan wanted Jesus crucified. The prior question is how Christ’s death took the devil’s power away.

The Classic Answer: Christus Victor

In the first Christian centuries, victory over death and the devil stood near the center of how believers spoke of the cross. Irenaeus, writing around AD 180, described Christ as a second Adam who went over the ground where Adam failed and made war on the enemy who had led humanity away captive. Athanasius wrote that the Word took a mortal body so that by his own death he could overcome the death and corruption sin had brought. Eusebius and Gregory of Nazianzus pictured Christ going down to Hades, breaking its gates and leading the dead out.

In 1930 the Swedish bishop Gustaf Aulén called this the “classic” view of the atonement, and his book gave it the name most people now use, Christus Victor. In its classic form the view holds that humanity was held captive by sin, death and the devil, and that God himself, in Christ, entered that conflict and won. The cross and the resurrection are a triumph over hostile powers. Aulén argued that this was the main view of the early church and of Luther, and his book revived interest in it.

How Atonement Works agrees with the classic view about the victory. Scripture says plainly that Christ destroyed “him that had the power of death,” and the classic view keeps that victory where Hebrews puts it, in Christ’s death, his descent to the dead, and his rising. The early writers agreed that Christ won, though they explained the means in different ways. Some said Christ’s life was a ransom paid to the devil, who held humanity captive. Gregory of Nyssa compared Christ’s human nature to bait that hid the hook of his divinity. Gregory of Nazianzus answered that God owed the devil nothing. In the book’s assessment, the classic view proclaims the victory without saying what the devil’s power consisted of or what in Christ’s death removed it. Chris White’s book was written partly to fill that gap. For a survey of all the main views, see the theories of atonement.

Two Other Answers: Penal Substitution and Passover

Penal substitution gives its own answer. On that account the devil’s power over people is their guilt under God’s law. He can accuse because the charge is true, and the sentence of death stands against the guilty. When Christ bore the penalty of sin in the place of sinners, the sentence was carried out and the accusation lost its ground. Calvin, explaining the creed’s line on the descent, tied Hebrews 2:15 to Christ’s struggle with death and the devil.

The book shares a good deal of this. The devil’s accusation rests on real sin, and its ground has to be taken away. The accounts differ on what takes it away. In the penal account the sentence is satisfied by being carried out on a substitute. In the book’s account the sins are borne away and forgiven, as on the Day of Atonement. The book also observes that many teachers of the penal view explain the cross without mentioning the devil, though Hebrews names him.

Recent scholars of Hebrews have read these verses against Passover and the exodus. David Moffitt has argued that “bondage” and “deliver” are exodus words, and that Jewish readers before Christ took the destroyer of Egypt’s firstborn to be an evil angel. Katie Marcar has built on his reading. The book follows them on much of this. It notes one limit of the Passover picture: in Exodus the blood on the doorposts kept the destroyer out of Israel’s houses, and he went on through Egypt that night. The blood protected Israel without disarming him.

What the Devil’s Power of Death Rested On

The book’s answer begins with what the devil’s power was. No single verse defines it. Chris White proposes, as a synthesis of several texts, that the devil’s power of death rested on sin and on the true charge sin supports.

Jesus called the devil “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44). He is the tempter in the garden and in the wilderness. He is also the accuser. Zechariah saw Joshua the high priest standing in filthy garments with “Satan standing at his right hand to resist him” (Zechariah 3:1), and Revelation calls him “the accuser of our brethren . . . which accused them before our God day and night” (Revelation 12:10). Paul joins sin and death in one line: “The sting of death is sin” (1 Corinthians 15:56).

Put together, these texts describe one pattern. The devil tempts people so that he can accuse them, and he accuses them so that the sentence of death can be pressed. His accusation has force because the sins are real. If that is what his power was, then taking the sins away takes his power away.

At the Cross, the Record Against Us Was Cancelled

Paul describes exactly that in his letter to the Colossians:

And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses; blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross; and having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.

Colossians 2:13–15

Forgiveness comes first in Paul’s sentence. The word for “handwriting” means a handwritten document, often a signed note of debt. Readers have taken it as the law of Moses, as the debt our sins signed us to, or as a written list of charges. On each reading it is a true record of guilt that stood against us, and God blotted it out when he forgave. The book reads it as the record of the charges the accuser held. Then the powers were stripped, as a victor strips a defeated enemy of his arms, and led in triumph. Calvin took these powers to be devils, disarmed so that they had nothing left to bring against us.

Paul places the cancellation of the record at the cross. Christ bore our sins “in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24), and the record of them was nailed there. Elsewhere Scripture joins forgiveness and freedom from Satan in the same way. Jesus sent Paul to turn the Gentiles “from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins” (Acts 26:18). The Colossians article on this site, how forgiveness defeats Satan, explains this passage in more detail.

Through Death: The Sin-Bearer Goes Down to the Dead

The book finds the rest of the answer in the Day of Atonement, the rite Hebrews uses to explain Christ’s work. That day had two goats. The first was killed, and its blood was carried into the holy of holies. The second was “presented alive before the LORD, to make an atonement with him” (Leviticus 16:10). The high priest laid both hands on its head, confessed over it all the sins of the people, and sent it into the wilderness to “a land not inhabited” (16:22), which in Hebrew is a land cut off. The day’s atonement was not complete without it.

The Hebrew text says this goat was “for Azazel.” Ancient Jewish readers took Azazel to be a fallen angel, and Jacob Milgrom, the leading modern scholar of Leviticus, read the name as a personal being and the rite as returning evil to its source. The book takes a further step and identifies Azazel with Satan. On that reading the goat carried the people’s sins back to the one who first led humanity into sin. Nothing was offered to him; Leviticus forbids sacrifices to devils (17:7).

Hebrews says that Christ “was once offered to bear the sins of many” (9:28) and that he “suffered without the gate” (13:12). Peter preached that his soul was not left in hell (Acts 2:31), and Paul says that he “descended first into the lower parts of the earth” (Ephesians 4:9). The book proposes that Christ, bearing our sins, fulfilled the live goat. He carried the sins out of the gate and down to the realm of the dead, and returned them to their source.

This explains why Hebrews says “through death.” The sins could not be carried away by someone who stayed alive. The live goat had to leave the camp, and the sin-bearer had to go where sins are taken, out of the gate and down among the dead. Death was the way into the realm of the dead. The devil, who held death, could not keep Christ out of his territory when Christ entered it carrying the sins that were the ground of the devil’s power.

The descent did not add a second payment to the cross or complete an unpaid penalty, since the record was cancelled at the cross. The book holds that nothing was paid to the devil at any point. The sins returned to him were his own work, the thing he had brought into the world and the material of his accusation. Having them set back on his account cost him his power and gave him nothing. In the third century Origen made a related connection: he read Paul’s words about the powers triumphed over at the cross alongside the scapegoat of Leviticus 16.

This question sits at the heart of the book. How Atonement Works traces the whole Day of Atonement through the work of Christ: the blood, the risen high priest in heaven, the scapegoat that carried sins away, and the defeat of the devil.

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The Accuser Disarmed and the Dead Released

With the sins carried off and forgiven, the accuser had nothing to bring against those whose sins were taken. Revelation describes the same outcome. The accuser is cast down, and the brethren he accused “overcame him by the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 12:11). In Zechariah’s vision the LORD answered Satan’s charge by removing the filthy garments: “I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee” (Zechariah 3:4).

The first people this reached were the dead. Paul says that when Christ “ascended up on high, he led captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:8). Matthew records that when Jesus died “the graves were opened,” and many saints came out after his resurrection (Matthew 27:52–53). Hebrews says the faithful of the Old Testament died without receiving the promise, so that “they without us should not be made perfect” (Hebrews 11:40). The early church called this the harrowing of Hades: Christ entered the realm of the dead as a conqueror and brought out the people held there. Christians differ on who exactly was released. The book understands the captives as the faithful dead of the old covenant, who had the same accuser and the same charge as the living, brought out from among the dead into the presence of the Lord.

The law gave Israel a picture of release without payment. The Jubilee, the year when slaves went free and land returned to its families, was proclaimed with a trumpet “in the day of atonement” (Leviticus 25:9). A man not redeemed by a kinsman still went free: “he shall go out in the year of jubile, both he, and his children with him” (Leviticus 25:54). The one who held him received nothing. His claim ended because the LORD declared the year.

What This Means for Christians Today

Christ’s death, his descent, his resurrection and his entrance into heaven belong to one saving work. The cross is indispensable to all of it: without the death there would be no sin-bearer outside the gate and no record nailed to a cross. The same Christ who carried our sins away now appears in the presence of God for us as our high priest, as the article on the resurrection and forgiveness explains.

For those who are in Christ, the accuser has no charge left to bring, because their sins have been forgiven. Hebrews names the result: Christ delivers those “who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” Believers still face temptation, and their bodies still die. Death itself, “the last enemy,” will be destroyed at the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:26). Meanwhile the risen Christ holds the keys of death, and the devil has lost his hold on those whose sins Christ bore.

Where This Understanding Comes From

Victory over death and the devil was taught widely in the early church, by Irenaeus, Athanasius, Eusebius, and Gregory of Nazianzus among others, and the descent of Christ and the release of the dead were common teaching. Gustaf Aulén named the classic view Christus Victor in 1930. Origen joined the cross’s triumph over the powers with the scapegoat. Jacob Milgrom’s study of Leviticus explained the two goats and read Azazel as a personal being. David Moffitt has written on Hebrews 2:14 and Passover, and Katie Marcar’s 2025 article asked how Hebrews pictures the devil’s defeat and argued for the harrowing of Hades in Hebrews. Samuel Renihan and Richard Barry have connected the scapegoat with Christ’s descent. How Atonement Works builds on this work and credits it. What it adds is an account of how the pieces fit: the devil’s power rested on sin and true accusation, Christ carried the sins away, and God forgave them, so the accusation lost its ground.