The short answer
The keys of death and Hades are authority over the realm of the dead, the power to open it and to shut it. In Revelation 1:18 the risen Jesus says he holds them, and he joins that claim to his own death: he “was dead” and is now “alive for evermore.” He went where the dead go, was not left there, and came out holding authority to release them. Hebrews says the devil had the power of death. Christ took it away through his death.
What Jesus Said in Revelation 1:18
The book of Revelation opens with a vision. John, exiled on the island of Patmos, sees the risen Christ standing among seven golden lampstands, with eyes like fire and a voice like many waters. John falls at his feet as though dead. Jesus lays his right hand on him, tells him not to be afraid, and says who he is:
I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.
Revelation 1:18
The sentence has three parts, and they belong together. Jesus is the living one. He was dead. He now lives for ever and holds the keys. He bases his authority over death on his own experience of it. He holds the keys because he died and came back. The rest of the New Testament explains how his death and resurrection put them in his hand.
“Hell” or Hades: The Place of the Dead
The King James Version says “the keys of hell and of death.” Most modern translations say “the keys of Death and Hades,” keeping the Greek name and following the word order of the Greek text they translate. Both refer to the same place.
In older English the word “hell” covered more ground than it does now. The KJV uses it for three different Greek words. One is gehenna, the word Jesus used for the place of final punishment. Another is tartarus, used once, of the angels that sinned (2 Peter 2:4). The third is hades, the Greek name for the place where the dead are, and that is the word in Revelation 1:18.
The Old Testament calls the same place Sheol. Everyone went there at death, the righteous as well as the wicked. Jacob, told that Joseph was dead, said, “I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning” (Genesis 37:35), and the word for “grave” is Sheol. When the Old Testament was put into Greek, Sheol became hades.
Revelation itself keeps Hades distinct from the lake of fire. At the last judgment “death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them,” and then “death and hell were cast into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:13–14). The hell of Revelation 1:18 is the realm that holds the dead until that day. Christ holds the keys of that place.
What a Key Meant in Scripture
How Atonement Works gives the meaning in one sentence: “A key is authority over a place, the power to open it and to shut it.” In the ancient world the one who held the keys of a city or a house controlled who went in and who came out.
Revelation uses the picture the same way elsewhere. In the letter to the church at Philadelphia, Christ is the one who has the key of David, who opens and no one shuts, who shuts and no one opens (Revelation 3:7). Later, an angel comes down from heaven with the key of the bottomless pit and shuts the dragon up in it (Revelation 20:1–3). In each case the key means the right to open or close a place and to decide who stays inside.
Jesus used the opposite picture in Matthew’s Gospel. He promised that “the gates of hell shall not prevail” against his church (Matthew 16:18). The gates of Hades are what keep the dead in. Jonah described them from the inside: “the earth with her bars was about me for ever” (Jonah 2:6). Gates and bars shut people in. Keys open them. When the risen Christ says he holds the keys of Hades, he is saying that the place whose gates closed behind every human being is now under his authority.
How the Risen Christ Came to Hold Them
Revelation 1:18 says Christ “was dead.” The rest of the New Testament says where he went. On the day of Pentecost Peter quoted Psalm 16 and applied it to Jesus: “thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption” (Acts 2:27). David died and his tomb was still in Jerusalem, so Peter said the psalm spoke of Christ, “that his soul was not left in hell” (Acts 2:31). His body lay in the tomb and did not decay. His soul was among the dead and was not left there. (For more on this, see Did Jesus descend into hell?)
Earlier in the same sermon Peter said:
Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.
Acts 2:24
Death took hold of Jesus and could not keep hold. Paul says the same journey from the other end. The one who “ascended up on high” and “led captivity captive” had first “descended first into the lower parts of the earth” (Ephesians 4:8–9). In every passage that places Christ among the dead, he acts or God vindicates him. He is never held there against his will or punished there.
The book puts the result this way: he entered the place, and he came out of it holding its keys. Revelation 1:18 is the risen Christ’s own summary of what happened between his death and his resurrection.
Who Had the Power of Death Before?
Hebrews names the one who held power over death before Christ:
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 word “destroy” here means to render inoperative, to put out of action. Paul uses the same verb when he says Christ “hath abolished death” (2 Timothy 1:10). People still die, and the devil is still active (1 Peter 5:8). What Christ took away was the devil’s power of death over those he delivered.
Set beside Revelation 1:18, the two verses describe a change of hands. The devil had the power of death. Christ now holds the keys of death. Hebrews says the change happened “through death.” That raises the obvious question: how could a death take away the power of the one who held death?
How Atonement Works gives its own answer, a synthesis drawn from several passages. Chris White argues that the devil’s power of death rested on sin. He is the tempter and the accuser, who “accused them before our God day and night” (Revelation 12:10), and his accusation had force because the sins were real. Paul writes that “the sting of death is sin” (1 Corinthians 15:56). Christ “was once offered to bear the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:28) and carried them down to the dead, as the live goat on the Day of Atonement carried Israel’s sins away. When those sins were forgiven and removed, the accuser lost the ground of his claim. The book reads that loss as the moment the power passed from the devil to Christ.
Revelation 1:18 is the end of a longer story. How Atonement Works follows Christ from the cross to the dead and back, and explains how his death took away the devil’s power of death, using Hebrews 2, Colossians 2, and the Day of Atonement.
Get the Paperback on AmazonDid Jesus Take the Keys from Satan?
Many sermons and songs picture Jesus going down to hell, fighting Satan, and wrestling the keys out of his hand. The picture tries to express something true. Hebrews does say that Christ destroyed the one who had the power of death, and the early church spoke of the descent as a victory in the enemy’s own country.
Revelation, though, describes no such fight. It records Christ’s statement that he holds the keys, and it grounds that statement in his death and resurrection. Scripture never calls Satan the keeper of the keys of Hades, and no passage shows a struggle over them. The power passed “through death,” as Hebrews says, and the New Testament explains that death in terms of sin borne and forgiven.
Other Christians read the verse differently, and their reading deserves a fair statement. Many interpreters stress that authority over life and death always belonged to God, and that the devil never held it in his own right. On that view Revelation 1:18 shows the risen Son sharing the Father’s sovereignty over death, and the verse says little about the devil. Calvin and many Protestants after him also placed Christ’s “descent into hell” in his suffering on the cross, so that the keys show his victory there rather than anything he did among the dead.
The book agrees that the devil’s power was never independent. He could act against Job only as far as God allowed (Job 1:12; 2:6). It also holds, with Hebrews, that the devil “had the power of death” and that Christ took it away. And it follows the passages in Acts, Romans, Ephesians, and 1 Peter that place Christ among the dead after the cross and before the resurrection. In the book’s words, “In the descent, as Scripture describes it, Christ is a victor in the enemy’s own territory.”
What the Keys Opened
A key is for opening. The Old Testament had promised that God would bring his people out of the realm of the dead. Hosea has God say, “I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death” (Hosea 13:14). The psalmist praises God because “he hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron in sunder” (Psalm 107:16).
The New Testament describes that release beginning with Christ. When Jesus died, “the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection” (Matthew 27:52–53). Paul says that when Christ ascended, “he led captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:8). Hebrews says the faithful of the Old Testament died waiting, and that “they without us should not be made perfect” (Hebrews 11:40).
Early Christians called this the harrowing of Hades. The book reads Revelation 1:18 with it: the place Christ had entered was now his to open. The righteous dead, held under the same accusation as the living, were brought out because the ground of that accusation had been taken away.
What the Keys Mean for Christians Today
Jesus spoke Revelation 1:18 to a frightened man. John had fallen at his feet as though dead, and the first thing Jesus told him was not to be afraid. The keys were given as a comfort.
Hebrews names the same purpose for Christ’s victory: to “deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:15). Christians still die. But the realm of the dead has been entered by the Son of God, its captives have been led out, and its keys are in his hand. The one who decides who stays among the dead is the one who died for his people and rose again.
Death itself will not last for ever. At the end, death and Hades give up their dead and are cast into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:13–14). The one who holds the keys now will close that realm for good. Until then, a believer who dies goes to the Lord who holds the keys. His resurrection is also the ground of their forgiveness, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:17 (see the resurrection and forgiveness).
Where This Understanding Comes From
The belief that Christ went down among the dead and brought them out is very old. In the second century Ignatius wrote that Christ raised the prophets who had waited for him, and Irenaeus wrote that he went down and preached to the dead. Origen connected the descent with the scapegoat of the Day of Atonement. Eusebius and Gregory of Nazianzus described Christ breaking open the gates of death and leading souls out. Richard Bauckham and Samuel Renihan have shown that a descent to the dead followed naturally from Jesus’ death for Jewish and early Christian readers. David M. Moffitt has argued that Hebrews 2:14–15 draws on Passover and the defeat of the destroyer, and Katie Marcar has argued that Hebrews knows the descent and the release of the dead. How Atonement Works builds on this work and credits it. Its own contribution is the explanation of why the devil lost his power: the sins on which his accusation rested were carried away and forgiven.