Peter: What Can We Learn From Peter's Life?નમૂનો

"Who Do You Say I Am?"

Jesus asked His disciples an important question: “Who do you say I am?” They had already discussed who other people were saying Jesus was, but Jesus wanted to hear who His closest friends thought He was. They had seen Him do many miracles and teach with great authority. Were they beginning to understand His true identity? Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

This was a heavily laden statement. The word “Christ” has the same meaning as the Hebrew word “Messiah”: anointed one. Based on the prophecies in their Scriptures, Jewish people had been awaiting a Messiah for centuries. They expected the Messiah to be a human king anointed by God and empowered by Him to deliver them from their enemies and usher in a kingdom of peace. However, they had no belief that the Messiah would be divine – that he would be God.

For Peter to call Jesus the Messiah was to acknowledge that generations of hopes and dreams for the Jewish people might finally be coming true. Peter was actually not the first to refer to Jesus as the Messiah, but he took it a step further. Calling Jesus the “Son of the Living God” showed not only his belief that Jesus was God’s anointed Messiah, but that He also was divine. He believed Jesus was God in the flesh, walking on earth. Considering this had never before happened in the history of the world and Peter had no reference point for this, it truly was a faith-filled, revolutionary statement. Jesus highly praised him for it, noting that Peter could only have known this through a revelation from God the Father. Peter was willing to say aloud what others might fear to say, because for a human to make a claim of divinity carried the very serious penalty of blasphemy in Jewish culture.

We will see later on that Peter still did not have a full understanding of what it meant for Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of the Living God. He, like the rest of his people, still expected a military leader at this time. But he was at the start of believing what Jesus wanted the whole world to know and believe: that He was, indeed, the Son of God.

Reflection:

Who do you say Jesus is?

Are you willing to declare who Jesus is, even when it’s counter-cultural?