Month: June 2021

Jesus has asked His disciples the question, “Who do you say I am?” Matthew  records the  conversation, “Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.”

To call Jesus the Messiah – the anointed one of God, savior of God’s people and Son of the Living God – is a hallmark of every Christ follower, and arguably the first significant step of faith that any Christian takes. It is not a small step. Many trip over it, finding it too much of a hurdle. That’s because recognizing Jesus as the Son of God is a step of faith. It means we have overcome our resistance to God being alive and actively working in our world. It means we have overcome our resistance to God being so concerned about us and the separation between fallen humankind and Himself that He was willing to go to the point of incarnation to reconcile us. Moreover, it means that God is not a single personality. 

Many are those who’ve lived their whole lives with a very strong worldview that God is a single personality. For them, the matter of God having a Son is the largest stumbling block. Those of us who came to Christ from a nominal or secular or pantheistic background might not see that as a problem. But for much of the world it is – especially for Muslims and Jews. Peter’s worldview was that of a Jew. God was and is One. God will always be One. Not two, not three. Just one. In fact, the Jews to this day daily recite the Shema, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”  In that worldview, God could not be both Father and Son, and certainly could not be Father and Son and Spirit. 

Whatever the idea of the Trinity is, it is not Jewish thinking!

Certainly, Jews knew that God had a “son” in created Adam (as Luke 3:38 points out, “…Adam, the son of God”, and has a “son” in Israel as a nation (as Isaiah 63:16 points out, “…you, O Lord, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.” But in the Jewish mind, there could be no such thing as God’s literal Son. So, when Jesus hears Peter call Him the Christ, He knows that this fact did not spring from Peter’s own thinking. 

In fact, knowing that Jesus is the Son of the Living God and is our Messiah (literally, “Anointed One”, meaning savior) is never the result of human thinking. It is always a revelation of God. A human mind might hear the words and think about the idea, but it will remain an idea and will have no more impact than a passing idea until the revelation of God makes it reality in your mind, heart and soul. Then you know. Then reality has broken in. 

Reality changes everything. Like the light of dawn after the darkest night, it changes the landscape of everything we see, and the warmth of that reality breathes new life into our soul. Then you are convinced of, and will always confess, that Jesus is Christ, the Son of the Living God. 

If Jesus is God, then what He says about sin, salvation, judgment, how to live an abundant, joyful life … indeed, everything He said must be true. Our eternal destiny rests on our answer to the question, Is Jesus really God?

Dan Story

APPLICATION: Intentionality

How does the reality that Jesus truly is God in the flesh change how you live your life today?

Jesus has asked His disciples who people think He is. “They replied, “Some  say John the  Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?””

This is the question that is at the very heart of Matthew’s Gospel. Who do WE say Jesus is? 

To this point, Matthew has revealed Jesus as Messiah in a powerful way. He began with the evidence of Jesus’ birth, which started with the Abrahamic line and ended in the virgin birth at Bethlehem – a direct fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14 and Micah 5:2. The heavenly star which guided the Magi to Herod became a matter of international record. Jesus’ early childhood in Egypt fulfilled Hosea 11:1, while the time of His birth sadly fulfilled Jeremiah 31:15. His younger years in Nazareth also affirmed the prophetic record. No preplanning by a criminal mastermind could’ve organized those details. They were divinely given and divinely fulfilled, quite apart from Jesus’ human will. 

And that is not all. Jesus’ prophetic preaching ministry in Galilee fulfilled Isaiah 9:1-2. His healing ministry fulfilled Isaiah 53:4. His reluctance to attract attention fulfilled Isaiah 42:1-4. His teaching in parables, Psalm 78:2. And all this prophetic fulfillment is apart from the evidences of His baptism, the actual miracles of healing and His divinely inspired moral teaching – which still is the very best planet earth has ever heard. 

Then there is the turning of water to wine, the calming of the storm, the walking on water, the raising of the dead and the casting out of the demonic, to the obvious great benefit of both the one rescued, their families and the surrounding townsfolk. Virtually every detail Matthew has given us about Jesus’ life and ministry shouts at us of His divine nature. The evidence so far has been overwhelming!

But evidence can only dictate a verdict where logic and common sense guide the way. The reality is that human beings are highly emotional – so much so that virtually every decision is at some level an emotional decision. This makes our decision-making ability highly personal: Our emotions, past memories and fallen thinking are all involved in addressing the matter at hand, in spite of the obviously objective nature of the question being asked. 

“Who is Jesus” is inseparable from “Who is Jesus to you?”

Ultimately, it is that question that must be asked of each of us. It is a personal question, but not a personal question asked for interest’s sake. It is a question that has the highest possible stakes. For if Jesus is not Messiah, then there is no salvation. If Jesus is not Healer, there is no hope. If Jesus is not Lord, there is no motive for holy living, and no chance His Spirit might fall upon us to enable such living. And if Jesus is not King, then we are all left to fend for ourselves. 

“Who do you say I am?”

You have only to look at the one asking the question to know the answer. 

The great assertion of the faith that sets a Christian apart from others is this: Jesus Christ is God come in the flesh.

Warren Wiersbe

APPLICATION: Thankfulness

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!

“When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples,  “Who do  people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”” 

When Jesus asked His disciples who people think He is, He got some answers that are remarkably familiar with things people say in our day about Christ:

Some people believed Jesus was just a really good man. A man who was “in God’s good books” so to speak. But if that’s all He is, He is no more than John the Baptist. John the Baptist was a good man. In fact, Jesus Himself said, “I tell you the truth: Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” But John wasn’t a worker of miracles. In fact, Scripture does not record John the Baptist doing any miracle or participating in any wonder, save the wonder of God’s Voice during Jesus’ baptism. In that regard, John the Baptist isn’t any different than any of us. It was only John’s devout relationship with God that made him qualitatively different than anyone alive today. 

Some believed that Jesus was Elijah. Elijah was a unique prophet, in that he did not physically die, but was taken up to heaven. Through him, God brought about the three-year drought during King Ahab’s time. Elijah even ministered across cultural barriers when God provided through him for the widow of Zarephath with an unending supply of flour and oil during the famine, and later raised her son from the dead. It was Elijah who organized the great show-down against the idolaters at the top of Mount Carmel and prayed fire down from heaven upon the altar and sacrifice. It was Elijah who prayed rain upon the land after that incident, who was fed by angels while on the run for 40 days and nights in the wilderness, and who prayed fire down upon the soldiers sent to take him in – not once, but twice! It would be believable that Jesus was Elijah, except that Jesus did not return down from heaven to Israel before He started His ministry – everyone knew He was born in Bethlehem and grew up in Nazareth. 

Some believed that Jesus was Jeremiah or another prophet. Jeremiah was the most misunderstood man of his day. While speaking for God from his youth with a demonstrable passion and intimate relationship with God, Jeremiah failed to mobilize the nation, and is best remembered for his lament over the nation. Yet Jeremiah also was responsible for giving the nation a conscious, by which they persevered though the exile. Perhaps Jesus was simply the same. Certainly, Jesus was prophesying the destruction of the nation on account of their falling away from God just as Jeremiah had done. 

But of course, Jesus is more than any of these. More than John the Baptist, more than Elijah and more than Jeremiah. Jesus is the fulfillment of all three and more. The witness of Himself and His Father was that He was God’s Son, not the reincarnation of a former prophet. 

The disciple of Christ knows that, even if all around the people do not! 

Jesus was God spelling himself out in language humanity could understand.

S.D. Gordon

APPLICATION: Worship

It is impossible to know and meditate on Jesus’ identity without worshipping Him. 

“When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples,  “Who do  people say the Son of Man is?””

Jesus has come with His disciples to the area near Caesarea Philippi. “This city was situated about twenty-five miles north of the sea of Galilee at the foot of Mount Hermon, which was largely pagan territory. One of the sources of the Jordan issues from a cave near this city, and there was an ancient shrine in the cave. When the Greeks came they dedicated the shrine to “Pan and the Nymphs”; they called the cave “Paneion” and the area “Paneas.” In 20 b.c. Augustus gave the district to Herod the Great and built a temple of white marble in honor of the emperor at Paneas. When Herod died in 4 b.c. the area became part of the tetrarchy of Philip, and this man rebuilt the city. He called it Caesarea in honor of the emperor Augustus and added “Philippi” (which distinguished it from Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast and, of course, honored Philip himself).”

Jesus and His disciples are now in an area that not only was completely pagan in origin and name (Pan was the god of shepherds and the outdoors), but in a profound way was made more pagan by the institution of the worship of a human emperor instead of a god, and renamed to not only honor the emperor, but a mere tetrarch. It is a region that was given over to idolatrous and prideful self-declaration – a region that in many ways represented humankind’s worst ambitions in their basest form. 

Knowing exactly where they are and how far along in their discipleship journey those who have followed Him are, Jesus chooses to ask the critical question, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”

It is the height of preplanned irony. For it is here and now, in the context of a physical background rooted in prideful self-declaration, that His disciples will have to wrestle with who they will declare Jesus is. Not only that, but in a profound juxtaposition, while standing outside an unholy city dedicated to a man and near a shrine originally built to honor the god of shepherds, Jesus is about to be declared for who He is and about to declare what He came to do, which is to die at a pagan site outside the holy city to become the source of eternal life for all who come to Him, the Great Shepherd. 

This is the center of Matthew’s Gospel. This is the pivot point. This is the pivotal question, “Who is Jesus to you?” 

One’s answer to that question determines the path of life we take from then on. One’s answer to that question ultimately determines one’s destiny. 

It all comes down to this. If we declare that Jesus is not Messiah but just a man, then we remain trapped in idolatrous ideology. But if we declare that Jesus is Messiah – God our Saviour – then we must bow our knee to Him and His will for us, meaning our lives are forever tied to His; We become His people, and He becomes our God. 

Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God.

Tim Keller

APPLICATION: Worship

Knowing Christ we find we have been grafted into God’s family by covenant. We have become ‘in-Christ’ in the same way as we have in-laws by means of a marriage covenant.