Summary
Who Do You Say That I Am?
Near Caesarea Philippi, Jesus put two questions to His disciples. The first was about public opinion: "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" The answers came easily—John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets Matthew 16:13-14. What unites those guesses is that each one casts Jesus only as a forerunner of the Messiah, never the Messiah Himself. "Son of Man," meanwhile, was Jesus' own favorite title—used some eighty times in the New Testament—and was the most common designation for the Messiah.
Then the question turned personal: "But who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" Matthew 16:15-16. For all of Peter's failings, here he confesses rightly: Jesus is the long-anticipated Messiah, the Son of the living God, God in the flesh. Jesus declares this confession blessed, revealed not by flesh and blood but by the Father in heaven, and announces that on this rock—the confession that He is the Christ—He will build His Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it Matthew 16:17-18.
And yet, only verses later, when Jesus foretells His suffering, death, and resurrection, that same Peter takes Him aside and rebukes Him: "Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you" Matthew 16:21-22. Jesus answers sharply: "Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man" Matthew 16:23. Peter cannot conceive of a Messiah who would suffer and die, so he begins to fashion his own—reshaping Christ with thoughts and words just as Israel once melted gold at Sinai and called the work of their hands a god Exodus 32.
The same temptation confronts every believer, as “Who Do You Say?” 9-10-23 presses home. We are tempted to mold Jesus into a genie who must grant our wishes, and then grow angry when He does not act as we have shaped Him. We fashion a god who only partly forgives, so that our works might still contribute to the healing of our broken relationship with Him. We fashion a god tolerant of sin, who winks because "everybody falls short"—a god less than holy. We fashion a god obligated to answer prayer if only we drum up enough faith, a teacher whose words we may critique and discard, a Lord content with the leftovers of our lives and the box we put Him in. Left to ourselves in our sin, we will systematically give the wrong answer to Jesus' question.
But Christ does not leave us there. He knows us completely—when we sit and when we rise, our thoughts before they are spoken Psalm 139—including our proclivity to remake Him. His response is compassion. He bears all our sin, including our idol-making of Him, to the cross, forgiving us and restoring the relationship. And He keeps coming to us in His inerrant and infallible Word, which is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness 2 Timothy 3:16. Through that Word He keeps telling us who He truly is—His grace, mercy, justice, and omnipotence—and the Father Himself births in us the right answer to His Son's question, again and again drawing us back to the Rock.
Video citations
- “Who Do You Say?” 9-10-23 — We'll open up your Bibles Please with me for our time of study today. To the 16th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, if you are using a few edition of Holy Scripture, you're going to find that on…