Who Is This? And Why Is He Here?
Matt. 16: 13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”
Matt. 16: 13-20
14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others, Elijah; still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
15 “But you,” he asked them, “who do you say that I am?”
16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
17 Jesus responded, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father in heaven. 18 And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven.” 20 Then he gave the disciples orders to tell no one that he was the Messiah.
“Who do people say the Son of Man is?” “Who do you say I am?” This is about making a confession of faith about the identity of Jesus. And the question could be asked, what would help so one could make the correct and true confession?
Let’s suppose a person identifies as a police officer. What would help in order to know whether that is true? He calls himself a police officer. Others call him a police officer. He wears a police uniform with his name on it. He rides around in a police car and does the work of a police officer. You can be pretty sure he is a police officer.
With Jesus, we have what he calls himself, what others call him, and we have what he does. All of these should be helpful so one can make a right confession.
However, we know people can misidentify themselves or others – they can lie or be misinformed, they can be mentally confused. But Peter’s confession of Jesus was solid: “You are the Messiah/Christ, the Son of the living God.” He got it right.
But, again, how did he come to this conclusion and confession? Did Jesus call himself the Messiah/Christ (which means the anointed one, the promised one in the Old Testament)? In the Gospel of Matthew, up until this point, no. There is only one time for sure where he identified himself to another as the Messiah, and that was in a one-on-one private conversation (John 4:25f.) Other than that, Jesus never says, “I am the Messiah.”
What about “Son of God”? Did Jesus ever call himself the “Son of God”? In Matthew up until this point, no. He did not call himself the Son of God until the time of his trial.
So what did he call himself? How did he identify himself? He called himself, “the Son of Man.” He does that ten times in Matthew so far. But the thing to know is that this title, “Son of Man,” is a loaded title. It has overtones or implications of both these other titles; “Son of Man” implies both Messiah and Son of God. For example, “Son of Man” is found as a prophecy in Dan. 7: “… there, in the clouds of heaven, I saw one like a son of man coming. … To him was given dominion, honor, and a kingdom. All peoples, nations, and languages will worship him. His dominion is an eternal dominion that will not pass away…” (7:13-14). When Jesus calls himself, “Son of Man,” he has this prophecy in mind.
If we skip ahead to Jesus’ trial just before he is crucified, we see that Jesus tells his accusers that he is the fulfillment of this prophecy. “The high priest said to him, “I charge you under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God” (two things he has not yet clearly confessed by his words). But now he says, “You have said it,” (in other words, “Yes, I am.”). And then he makes it even more clear by saying, “But I tell you, in the future you will see (as Daniel prophesies) the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.” In other words, “I am the one fulfilling the prophecy of Daniel. I am the coming one, the Messiah, I am the one to be worshipped by all; yes, I am identifying as the Son of God.”
So, again, “Son of Man” is loaded title.
Add to this two more things that help with identifying Jesus. One is his miracles, having performed dozens and dozens if not hundreds prior to our text (chapters 4, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15). The purpose of his miracles comes out when Jesus is asked, “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” And he answered, ‘I did tell you and you don’t believe.'” But the way he told them was not by saying, “Yes, I am the Messiah.” Instead, this is how he told them he was the Messiah: “The works that I do in my Father’s name testify about me.” (John 10:24f.). “So, even though I have not said with words up to this point, ‘I am the Messiah,’ the works I do, the miracles I perform, say it very clearly.” Consider the miracles of feeding of the 5,000 and then just before our text, the feeding of 4,000. One of the things the Jews should have been asking themselves about these two miracle was, “Hasn’t something like this happened before? Didn’t God do this for the Jews during the Exodus? Could this person somehow be him who provides bread and meat with no effort, by his own power?”
But there is one more thing where Jesus implied he was the Son of God, and that had to do with forgiveness of sins, something the Jewish authorities recognized was the work and right of God alone to grant. Jesus said, “… the Son of Man (that’s me!) has authority on earth to forgive sins,” resulting in the charge of blasphemy against him (Matt. 9:6-7).
So, Jesus is identifying himself as the Messiah and the Son of God without directly saying so. It’s like saying that man is a police officer even if you have not heard him say so. You know he is because he’s wearing the uniform, he’s driving around in police car, and he does the work of a police officer. You can be sure he is. Same with Christ.
So it should have been relatively easy for the Jews to see that Jesus was identifying himself as the Messiah and the Son of God. But that did not happen. They wanted to identify and confess him as something less. In his hometown, they wrote him off as a mere man and were offended by him: “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother called Mary, and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? And his sisters, aren’t they all with us? … And they were offended by him.” The Pharisees and Sadducees rejected any sort of Messiah and deity claims outright; they identified him as man operating under the power of Satan. And in our text, the Jews in general could not seem to think of him as anything other than a mere man, though a man risen from the dead, a great man, but still just a man: “Some say John the Baptist; others, Elijah; still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
I have noticed in the gospels that people confess Jesus or identify Jesus in one of four ways. First, there are those who said, “No way. He is not the Messiah and Son of God.” Second, there are those in a questioning or wondering mode: “Could this be the Messiah?” “Can it be true that the authorities know he is the Messiah?” “When the Messiah comes, he won’t perform more signs than this man has done, will he?” Third, are those who believed Jesus to be exactly who he claimed to be, but out of fear would not confess this publicly (John 9 & 18). And finally, there were those who, like Peter and the other disciples (Mary and Martha, and others), made the great and true confession.
But most could not make the jump or cross over to the confession that he was the Messiah and the Son of God, even though they, like the disciples, heard and saw the same things the disciples did. They heard Jesus. They saw Jesus do what he did.
So, why were Peter and others able to understand and confess Jesus’ identity rightly and so many others fell short? Everyone had the same evidence, everyone heard Jesus refer to himself as the Son of Man, they probably all knew of Jesus claim to forgive sins. So why did Peter get it right, and so many others get it wrong? “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father in heaven.” It takes God himself to change a person’s belief within the heart and mind and soul, a change that then results in the right confession of Jesus. We, by the power of the Holy Spirit sent by God the Father, believe and therefore confess. We cannot by our own reason or strength believe rightly. Apart from the working of God, the confession of faith by anyone will always fall short of what it should be.
Jesus was so pleased with Peter. “Well done, Peter.” “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah…”, followed by, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Jesus is not saying Peter is not the rock. Rather, his confession of Christ is the rock on which Christ builds his church. The pope is not the rock on which Christ has builds his church, as the Catholics believe for as you probably know they believe Peter was the first pope. Jesus is the rock – who he is and what he has done – on which the church is built. This is why Jesus said earlier in Matthew: “… everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain fell, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and pounded that house. Yet it didn’t collapse, because its foundation was on the rock.” (Matt. 7:24-25). This is why the apostle Paul wrote, “For no one can lay any foundation other than what has been laid down. That foundation is Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor. 3:11). “For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ.” (1 Cor. 10:3-4). (see Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope:22-29.) Jesus alone is the foundation, the rock, on which the church is built. And because Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God is the rock and foundation on which the church is built, the church is able to carry out the what the church is supposed to do, what the Messiah, the Son of the living God, wants it to do: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven.”
The church will either bind your sins to you, or to loose your sins from you; either announce that your sins are securely tied to you sending you to hell, or untie them all from you, free you from them all so you can stand before God without blemish, with all sins forgiven, and welcomed into heaven. If you are repentant of all your sins, the church totally releases you from you all your sins, the church frees you from them all, forgives you all of them, not because of the church has done anything or any mere human within the church has done anything, but because of the sacrificial work the Messiah, the Son of the living God has done, his work alone alone, in whom you trust resulting in the right confession.
To confess Christ rightly is sometimes easy. But there will be times when it is not. There are strong, relentless enemies: the world, Satan, and our flesh. They pressure us as they did Peter when Jesus was on trial, and instead of making a good confession, he denied Christ. But he was restored. As I have said many times, we have to prepare ourselves for what may come.
This last Monday and Tuesday were minor festival days: of Augustine and the Martyrdom of John the Baptist. Both men confessed Christ and the truths of his word. It was not easy. But they did so. May God grant us a right understanding of who Christ is and what he did, true faith in who he is and what he did for us, and, whether in good times or in the face of persecution, the true and great confession of Christ, our Lord and Savior.
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