My understanding of it was that Jesus was making the statement/promise that there wouldn’t be any doctrinal errors that creap into the churches teachings which if had would signifigantly raise the chances of seeing the gates of hell.
It means (among other things) that the powers of the netherworld will not be able to get the better of the Church when they attack the Church.
The Greek uses “Hades” for “hell”/“underworld” - it’s the Greek equivalent of the region of the dead which the OT calls Sheol.
In the OT, the gates of a city were: a place of judging legal cases; and, the strongest point in the defences - which is why the keys of a city are so important; to hold them, is to have the power & right of access, and the duty of making sure that no one unauthorised gets in. So Peter is a watchman as much as anything else - as in the OT passages about watchmen, such as those in Ezekiel.
Heaven was also thought of as having gates, with guardians - Jesus seems to be drawing on this imagery; in Gen. 3.24, cherubim are set as guardians before the garden of Eden. ##
Gates are defensive structures rather than offensive. This has more to do with the Church attacking Hell than it does Hell attacking the Church. It means that the Church will always have the doctrinal integrity to save souls and, in the opposite sense, never have doctrinal errors that will cause souls to be deceived and damned. In this way, the gates of hell will not prevail in its defense against the Church and in its objective to capture those God has foreknown to be His.
I agree. We are fighting a war against evil and are on the attack rather than cowering BEHIND locked gates. The spiritual weapons God has given us are so incredibly powerful that they are battering down the gates of Hell. I saw a lot of this imagery in The Lord of the Rings where lesser, and seemingly weaker, forces won against the power of Mordor.
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