Peter's Confession

Jesus asks the question that still reverberates through time: “Who do you say that I am?” In Matthew 16, Peter’s answer becomes the confession upon which Christ continues to build his Church.

Transcript

Copy

For any time you know what gospel we're headed toward. And that is the Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 16 this morning. So go to Matthew chapter 16. And when you found the 16th chapter of this gospel, go ahead and stand with me if you are able. And we will read the Word of God once again.

You know, I love that our church doesn't just read one small pericope or one small passage and then preach from that, but rather, every single week, we have four readings, if you notice, and they're spread across the Bible so that we're not just locating ourselves in one place only. And we normally end with a gospel reading. And here recently, for at least a year or so, I've been preaching solely from the Gospel, rather than the Epistle or the Old Testament or the Psalm. But that's not always been the way it has been. But that's where we're landing now.

And so here we are in what is known as Year A of three years, abc, interestingly. And Year A deals with the Gospel of Matthew primarily. Okay, so notice these words. We've been in Matthew for weeks now. Notice where we are today.

And I'll just be honest with you. This text here is ground zero for our faith. In other words, this confession that is made today is the confession that saves you. So if you want to be saved, as we say, you want to be a Christian, this confession must be made off of your lips, not off of Peter's, not off of mine for you, but it must come off of your lips and from your heart. So notice these words.

Notice these words this morning. This is the word of God. When Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, who do people say that the Son of Man is? And they said, some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets. He said to them, but who do you say that I am?

Simon Peter answered, you are the Messiah, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you Simon bar Jonah, or son of Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

Jesus, thank you so much for this story. This moment in your life on earth. And for this confession that was made, Lord, by the end of this brief moment we have together, may we too be able to confess from our hearts in full faith that you are the Messiah, son of the living God. We pray in your name. Amen.

And you can be seated.

Well, here we are. And like many of the gospel writers, and like perhaps most of the Bible, we don't get an immaterial propositional truth. Now, I didn't even want that to come out just yet, but let me just say that again, most all of the Bible is not immaterial propositional truth. Disembodied from place, space and time, chronology, okay, but rather deeply grounded in a particular place with a particular people. Sound familiar?

I mean, we start in the Garden of Eden, not some place midway between heaven and earth, but grounded in this terrestrial ball, if we could put it that way, along with four rivers that help identify the location of it. You see, we don't have brothers and sisters here, a disembodied faith, one that you just have to simply disregard history, science, chronology, material existence. You don't have to set that aside to have faith in Jesus Christ. Because Jesus Christ in his own person took on materiality, took on a physical body that could be measured just like yours. When I stepped on the scale the other day, measuring how much I weigh, yes, Jesus had an actual weight because he was an actual man in an actual body.

And yet was and is God simultaneous. Two natures, one person, which again, remember our little. You know, you see it. If you ever go to Europe and you see a statue of St. Paul, St. Peter, anybody like that, they're going to always be doing that. And they're not doing a peace sign.

They're not saying peace in the Middle East. That's not what they're doing. That was a campaign from the first Bush presidency. That's not what they're doing. They're not throwing up a peace sign.

They're saying, father, Son, Spirit, three persons, one God, right here. And for Jesus, two natures, one person. The divine nature and the human nature. And the divine nature is the one who assumes the human nature being already in existence, whereas the human nature, like our human nature, comes into existence through conception. Everybody still with me this morning?

I didn't mean to get us this deep that fast. I really didn't. It just sort of happened. One thing, you know, you pull on one thread and the whole thing begins to unravel. But that is our faith, brothers and sisters.

It's not a disembodied thing, where over here we have our scientific historical mind and over here we have our faith mind, which means we just sort of dumbly believe in what we can't see. That's a bunch of hogwash and it's a lie from the pit of hell. No, Jesus in him, and already in a very fundamental way in the Old Testament, is showing and proving to us that our faith is grounded in history, grounded in scientific data, if you will, however you want to put that in the material world and in Jesus again, we have the heavens and the earth coming together in him as one.

Okay, so we don't have a dumb faith. Instead we have a faith that makes sense of all reality, every bit of it. The things that are immaterial history, you know, looking back in the what is it? What is the past? Immaterial.

What is a thought? Immaterial. And every single one of us are thinking right now. And whether you're thinking about what I'm saying or not, you're thinking that's immaterial. It's not just some brain minutia that's happening.

No, no, no. Thoughts are beyond us and can be received by us or disagreed upon us, et cetera, et cetera. Alright, well, let's get back down to the grounded text here. When Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, notice he's not in a mythic world. He's in an actual place.

And you may remember that Caesarea Philippi is way north of Jerusalem. This is right before Jesus turns his face to Jerusalem, okay? To head there to die on the cross and then to resurrect, okay. Before that, he's moving kind of most of his ministries in Galilee. And then he even goes further north.

In fact, last week, remember, he was overtaking a beach vacation, sort of. And now he finds himself right at the borderline of the promised land. It's very important he's not there by accident. He's right on the border of where gentile country properly begins. And this, of course, for the Greeks, Caesarea Vilba was the worship location of Pan.

And without going into his mythology, there was also what was known there as the access point of the netherworld, or Hades, or Sheol, or Hell, you could say, the place where you go when you die. And so the gates of hell were literally in Caesarea Philippi. So that when Jesus says the gates of hell here, they were standing at that portal. It was basically a cave, a cave entrance. You can still see it today, by the way.

A spring came from it. And this was the access right here. And so not only that, though there was Caesar worship, it wasn't every city, but in this city there was particularly Caesar worship, and they worshiped the Caesar as the son of God. So we have two things going on in a historical sense that Jesus takes and. And he's going to say in a certain way that really meant something to the first hearers that sometimes can be missed by some of us.

And that's okay. We don't have to know all, you know, some people, like, well, because I don't know all of the ancient Near Eastern history or Roman history. I can't read the Bible. Well, that too, is a lie. The Bible's able to be read by a child and understood at some level.

And as an expert scholar and understood at some level. And we ought to read the Bible because we want to know God and he will help bring about understanding.

Okay? So we're being located here, grounded again in an actual place with a real conversation that Jesus has with his disciples, okay? And, you know, he asked, who do people say that I am? Right? And so they list off some of the prophets.

We get kind of a different list in some of the other gospel writers, all the synoptic gospels, the Matthew, Mark and Luke have this particular story, okay, of Jesus, you know, Peter's confession of Jesus in this moment. And Jesus always asks the same two questions. And in rabbinic form, remember being a rabbi, the. That's what he does. He's not just going to give you the answer.

He's that frustrating teacher that when you ask him a question, he makes you seek it out with another question and another question. And so this is what he's doing here. Who do people say that I am? They say, well, you know, Elijah, some say Jeremiah, John the Baptist. They all kind of have maybe two things in common.

These are all prophets. And remember that a prophet says, simply put, is one that is the mouthpiece of God. So it's a high honor to say that Jesus is a prophet. He's not just a normal layperson, so to speak. He is a prophet that speaks the literal word of God, okay, To the people of God.

But there's another commonality here too, in this list, and that is they're all wrong.

He's not just another John the Baptist. He's not just another Elijah. He's not just another mouthpiece of God, one in a long list of Israeli history. No, no, he's also God, which then makes him the prophet of prophets, not just the mouthpiece. But, but the Word himself.

In other words, unlike perhaps all spiritual gurus and world religious leaders, Jesus does not come claiming to have found the truth. The Buddha, roughly 600 years before Jesus came telling us he was the man who was now awake. He had been enlightened under a Bodhi tree, which is just an enlightenment tree known for such, because his enlightenment happened at that moment and he woke up to reality. He tells us, in other words, he was teaching a way to understand reality. Same thing with Confucius, Mahavira and every other world religious leader that their religions still continue to this day.

They all claim to have found a truth, Muhammad included, by the way. In a cave, at night, in the darkness, by an angel, so he thought, or a demon, initially, he didn't know. All of them come claiming the same thing, and that is, they found a truth. Jesus comes differently, brothers and sisters. Jesus does not say, I have found a truth.

I have been received enlightenment. No, no, he says, I am enlightenment itself. I am the light of all light, you understand? I am the Logos, the reason itself, like the reason for all things, not just for some things, not just for this little spiritual side of things. I am the basis for physics itself, for mathematics, works upon my order, logic works upon the Logos, and so on and so forth.

No, he doesn't just say, I have found the truth, but I am the truth. Not just I found a way, I am the way. Which means, and hear me on this, you can't propositionally just believe, you must believe on Him. You understand that our beliefs, our doctrine, our creed is, is based on a living person. Just as I'm living before you now in this moment, so too Christ lived and died and rose and is living.

And he's here with us where two or three are gathered in his name. Have you ever noticed how we begin our service? Welcome in the name of, of Jesus Christ. This is not a country club gathering. It's not one club among many.

It's the club of clubs. It's the family of families, it is the society of societies. And all are welcome who confess his name. Like actually understand, you know, his name is who you are. Understand who he is.

No, it's not enough that he's a prophet. That's insufficient. It's good, but it's not who he is. And notice again, no one has ever walked the face of the earth saying who am I? And that's supposed to mean something.

Typically, if you say who am I? You end up locked up in a mental institution. Well, they forgot who they were. You should know who you are. This statement of who do you say that I am?

Had to echo in their mind as the great I am.

In other words, Jesus, as Yahweh does in the Old Testament at the burning bush, is going to not define God alongside other things, but rather, forgive me for this in an ontological way. Purely a way of being. That's what that means. Just a pure way of I am, period. Not, I am a man.

I am from my mom and dad. I am a worker over here. I am a husband, am. He's the ground of all being.

Remember to remember what Paul says right in him, what we live and move and have our being. Why? Because he is the ground of being. Like I said, this is foundational, fundamental, sub Saharan, persistent. It's what persists through time.

And he appears at a particular time. The one who is infinite, eternal takes on a body that is finite. Think about that. That can be cut and bleed, that can die. And it does.

But then, because he joins it to the infinite and eternal divine nature, he resurrects and the cross is empty. He resurrects. And we're still here on the first day of the week celebrating his resurrection. Now, I didn't mean to get that worked up all day. None of this is in my notes.

Even so, I don't even know where I'm at on this page.

This is our faith, brothers and sisters, a living person, not just ideas. If you thought Christianity was just about ideas, those ideas are again gathered up in a body. It is literally the body, the glorified, resurrected body of Jesus that saves us.

Not just the ideas. The ideas are inextricably united and embodied in him.

All right, who do you say I am? Peter says, well, you are the Messiah. Old Testament language here, right? Mishiach, right? He had been saying in his Hebrew or Aramaic, messiah, he says, son of the living God.

So that second part there is really. That's a big deal. The son of the living God. We don't have time to unpack that enough just to say this. That is a clear, perhaps the clearest sort of divine claim made upon Jesus.

It's clearest right here in this confession, which is why it seems very clear that Jesus answer back to Simon Peter. Is this Simon? Do you even realize what you just said, bro? I mean, I'm just, you know, this is my. What's happening in my head, how it sounds.

Do you understand what you said? Did I do something right or wrong? I mean, you know, this is Peter after all, right? Like, I mean, you know, you Never know, right? He says, listen, what you just said cannot be accessed by man.

Let me just interpret that a little bit. Human reason or what we call philosophy cannot give you access to that claim. That is a divine claim that actually comes from heaven. In other words, what we call revelation. Let me just a little plug here.

Philosophy is never in competition with revelation because again, if you're reading Logos correctly, then you're only going to get what the Creator created, right? Everybody understand how that. So we often talk. Oh yeah, bad philosophy. Only theology.

But listen, his world is his. It will always match him if we're reading it correctly. But it is hard to read nature. It really is. I mean it is hard and it's hard to read Revelation.

And so we have general revelation or natural revelation, but we also have divine revelation. Jesus says that is divine revelation. Peter and in fact Simon, that was his given Hebrew name. In fact, I'm going to change your name just like I did with a host of other key figures in the Bible. For instance, in our own readings today wasn't I have this somewhere Abraham is mentioned, you remember, in the Isaiah reading.

I'll just refresh our memory. Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness. Look to the rock. Listen to our. Remember Old Testament always complements the New Testament or sorry, the gospel reading.

Look to the rock from which you were hewn. This is Isaiah prophesying, ok, okay. He says this and the quarry from which you were dug out. Look to Abraham, your father and Sarah who bore you. Abraham was just one, but I made him many.

Remember his name change Abram, Exalted Father. Which was kind of a joke around town, by the way, because he had no children and his actual name was Exalted Father. Imagine how embarrassing that is. And then God changes his name to not just Exalted Father, but Father of many nations before he ever even has a son. How embarrassing is that?

Except that the promises of God are irrevocable. They will happen. Because he doesn't just see one slice like we do, he sees the whole thing, the whole blueprint. Okay, Abram to Abraham, you know, we know later, Saul to Paul, right here, Simon to Peter. And interestingly, Petros in the Greek and many people know this and can pick this up means what Rock?

So Peter Petros on this Petro, I will build my church. I call you the rock. Or some translations would see it as he calls him Rocky. I kind of like that one, you know, you're Rocky. We see Peter as Sandy, you know, he's wishy washy, right?

He's not really the one to trust. Maybe John's a better option here. Jesus, you know, he seems to be a little smarter and a little more stable perhaps, right? Even though he was the Son of thunder, remember? No, because Peter and not the others make this confession.

Jesus says, oh, guys, pay attention, because on this rock, Peter the Rocky, that's where I will build my church. Upon Peter's confession of the rock. Now, this gets complicated. I don't plan to, you know, exegete this for us today, fully and formally, but I will say this. The early church fathers really do help us with this.

And I just want to give you three voices very quickly from the early church as they wrestled with, okay, who's the rock here? Is Jesus the rock? Is Peter the rock? Or is Peter's confession of Jesus the rock, which is typically the way this is laid out. If you go with Peter, by the way, you know this Roman Catholicism, okay, not Greek Orthodoxy or Protestantism, but it's Roman Catholicism.

What do we do? Well, again, I'm not going to lay out a whole case here today, so just calm down. We're not going to be here a long time. But Chrysostom, okay, one of the greatest early preachers, he says that on this rock is the first faith of the confession. So he actually locates it in the confession that you are the Messiah, son of the living God.

And with that understanding, that means we too can be a rock upon which the church is built. And the church is actually built on that credo, that confession. I believe that you are the Messiah of the Old Testament and the son of the living God for all time. Well, that's what saves you again, right? Like that confession is where, where salvation is turning upon.

Cyril of Alexandria says the rock is the unshaken faith of the disciple Peter. So think about that. So in his. So he's. He's lifted up by Jesus here as an example of all those who would be Peter's successor in this way, if you can, if you follow what I'm saying there.

And then finally, Augustine famously lays out, I think, probably where. Where most of us in the Protestant sort of stream of Methodism would be, perhaps. I don't speak for all of Methodism, by the way, but, but he says this. The rock is Christ. Peter is named from the rock.

So now because of Peter's confession, Jesus says, now you are a stable rock from my stability and me being the rock. And Peter is then named that. So in other words, the way he says it is, Peter is named from the Rock, not the rock from Peter. You see the distinction there, right? So it's passing down from the divine to him.

But notice always from the divine, immaterial to the embodied, actual person. God could have done all of this all along, all by himself, per se. I mean, he could have. Could have done that. Instead, he chose to call.

Moses said, meet with me on this mountain, and I'm going to give you the law at this particular place, at this particular time, with this particular person. He loves to do that. That's what he loves to do. Like, if you want to know God, that's how He. Like, that's why we can't love just God and call it a day.

We have to love God and our neighbor. And sometimes our neighbor ain't easy to love. Amen. Sometimes. You are that neighbor, by the way, and I'm that neighbor.

You know, just ask my kids. The church is then built on the one whom Peter confessed, and it still is to this very day. Now, I asked the guys, just. Can y' all throw up that picture real quick? This is a picture that Justin actually took when he was in Rome, which is where Peter was a pastor and a bishop.

And this is Peter. And you can see he's throwing up the. You know, he's doing the thing. I told you. He also has the keys.

And in our text today, does he not say, notice what Jesus says? I will build my church. Not you. I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against us. I will give you the keys.

He does not give Peter the keys right now. And in fact, at the end, you may be wondering, are you going to deal? You can keep that picture up for a second because I'm going to return to it. Then he sternly ordered the disciples to tell no one that he was. You're like, talk about a wet blanket being thrown on a situation, right?

Like, why? Like, you built. It's a whole big moment. And you're like, hey, guys, do not tell. Why.

Why that right there. Jesus says, even though you're confessing rightly who I am, you still don't know really who I am and what I'm going to do. It's going to shock your socks off. You have no clue what's coming. You're going to be dazed and confused.

But it'll all make sense in time. When I come back from the dead, it'll all make sense. And when I send my spirit, oh, yeah, then it's going to really make sense. Peter is being proclaimed over here as The Rock when he's not yet really fully the Rock. He's not rocky yet.

He's still shaky and sandy, but he won't be after Pentecost. He'll stand before kings and peoples and authorities, and he'll have no fear. So much so that when they told him, we will crucify you to shut you up. And he said, if you do so turn me upside down. I'm not even worthy to be crucified like my Lord.

That's my only request. And they met it. And Peter was crucified upside down and he met his martyrdom, but he also simultaneously met his Lord just a moment after his physical body died. And even to this day, he awaits the resurrection of his body. And you know where his bones are.

We actually know where his bones are. They're underneath St. Peter's Basilica, an actual place in time and space right? Now, you see, if you ever thought that Christianity is just another spiritual religion, you got it all wrong. There's actual places where our Lord walked that you can go to and visit, make sure it's safely, but nevertheless, you can. And there's a church that's built on this dude's confession that that's not just in Rome, but in this very room.

For those that would have the same confession as Peter, Christ is still building through silly little things like a friend day. He's still building his church and welcoming new people in.

Yes, he had to go to the cross because the way of the cross is the way of life for us Christians. And until he did that, he said, guys, just hold off on proclaiming me because there's one teensy little other thing here that's essential. And it's resurrection. It's the way of the cross.

And so maybe a big point to take away today is if you thought our faith was just immaterial and spiritual and in our mind, in that sort of propositional truth sort of way. Brothers and sisters, this is exactly why we meet on Sundays in an actual place with real people that don't look like Rocky, right? But once we are filled with the Spirit, we have the confession of Peter here that comes from above. And we can rightly proclaim who Christ is among us so much that it saves us, saves us from eternal damnation, that the gates of Hell itself, okay, the netherworld, the place of the dead, is, notice not with able to stand the church. You know, gates are a place to keep people in.

And no one had ever returned from the grave until Jesus Christ did. And when he comes this Is hard for me to do. When he comes, he says, okay, Peter, you ready? Let's go. And guess who preaches the first sermon after Pentecost?

It's Rocky. You know, he's ready to fight. He's right. Ready to fight against the very gates of hell. It may seem like we're running toward the gates of hell with a little water gun, but trust me, we got a big guy behind us.

The living God who promises the church will never fail. On Earth. We have nothing. Kingdoms. Where are all the Caesars?

Where are all the tribal leaders across the world that have ever ruled over others? The despots, the totalitarian? Where are they today? Dust. Where's the one king who will reign forever?

We know exactly where he is seated at the Father's right hand in a body not immaterial, in a glorified body. And we can see him and know him by faith. Not a faith that discounts the physical world. No, no. We just grounded it there.

No, no. But one that you can look around the room and see the family of God right now. And your faith encourages my faith. As we move toward Him.

We must have an embodied faith. So is that confession in you? Is it lived out when we move out of this space. Because we're about to dismiss here in just a few minutes. And we're going to send you out just like Jesus sends his disciples out always.

We welcome you in the name of Jesus. And then we send you out of this place. Go and spread his name, that confession of faith. So do you know him today? Who do you that.

That question still reverberates through time to this moment. Who do you say that I am? It's the most fundamental, important question you'll ever answer in all your life. Who do you say that I am? The only answer is, you are the Messiah, son of the living God, and I come under your lordship.

Is that you today? Do you have that kind of boldness that Peter longed for and he got when he was filled with the Spirit on the day of Pentecost. Ask the Lord today for his Holy Spirit.

You cannot do this alone. You cannot believe this alone. You must have his spirit and his church.

All right. May it be so. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.