Mark 8:31-33 – No death, no gain

After Peter’s great confession that “Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God,” the disciples still understood very little about Him. They did not know the extent of His ministry and needed to know more fully what He came to do. So He told them vehemently not to tell anyone about Him yet.  Almost immediately, the Lord began to reveal to them concerning His impending suffering and death. He taught them, “…that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again." He told them plainly who His adversaries were - the elders, the chief priests and the scribes. Then He told them that He would be killed and would rise again three days later. He laid the cards out plainly, trusting the disciples to understand. Apparently they did not. It was demonstrated by what Peter did. 

The same Peter who made that great confession, now took the Lord aside to rebuke Him. Matthew 16:22 captured for us what Peter said to the Lord. “God forbid it, Lord! This shall never happen to You.” He was essentially dissuading the Lord from His mission. Peter must have thought he was doing the right thing. But he was totally wrong. He was displaying his ignorance concerning the Lord’s mission. Peter was showing an attitude all of us have the tendency to adopt. The attitude of self-interest and self-reliance. The attitude that says, nothing can be more important than the “me”. This is pride in disguise. Where did this attitude come from? This same pride was what led to Satan’s downfall. The Lord saw behind those words of Peter, the engineering of the wicked one. Satan had once tried to prevent His mission. In the wilderness of temptation, the wicked one suggested to Him to think of Himself. That old devil was actually insinuating in those three temptations that there were other ways to accomplish what God wanted.             

The Lord could identify in Peter’s words, the same old devil trying to use this disciple of His to prevent His mission. Furthermore His other disciples were looking on and they must not catch the same spirit. So He rebuked Peter with some strong and harsh words. “Get behind Me, Satan; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s.”

Without the cross there will be no resurrection. Peter missed that totally. The resurrection was and still is the one key evident that this Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. Without the cross there would be no true Christianity. Christ had to bear the cross to bring to an end all our self-reliance, self-sufficiency and self-importance. No death, no gain. So in his hymn, Isaac Watt included the following:

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,

Save in the death, of Christ my God!

All the vain things that charm me most,

I sacrifice them to His blood.