Matthew 16:21-23 = Mistaken zeal

Peter just had a great revelation. He said of Jesus - You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Jesus told Him how from a shifting-sands like character, he was going to be stable and solid like a rock. We can see it as a hint by Jesus on the part he would be playing in the His New Community. As we have said in the previous passage that he still needed to be honed. So the process had begun.    

 

It seems so ironical isn’t it? The same Peter who was given a grand revelation of who Jesus really is, now trying to prevent Him from fulfilling His mission. His idea of what God’s Messiah would do was much like the Jews. He was expecting the Messiah to lead them in a revolution against their pagan enemy, the Romans. Messiah would free them from their oppression and like David, should lead in the march forward. Hence when told of God’s intended way to bring about the expected liberation, he balked. Having told that Jesus would build His church, the next natural step should be to strategize how to bring it about. Peter was probably expecting the Lord to sit down with them, His disciples, and talk about plans to bring forth what He had said into fruition. Instead the Lord began to reveal the crux of His mission.  

 

Here were how things would be happening, He must go to Jerusalem and suffered greatly at the hands of the elders, chief priests and the scribes and eventually be killed. But He also told them That He would rise on the third day. Instead of being on God’s side, Peter played the devil’s advocate. He took the Lord aside and rebuked Him. He said some very sharp words to the Lord, “God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” Immediately, the Lord told him off. Peter unwittingly had played himself into Satan’s hand and would have become a tool in his hand to foil God’s grand scheme to save humanity. Peter had thus become a stumbling block. His thinking was not in God’s grand scheme, his concern was merely for the interest of men.

 

When we are called into leadership or into God’s service, we need to be careful to seek to be on God’s side. We must seek to look at things from God’s perspective. We must be concerned with God’s work and the advancement of His Kingdom, but we must never play into the enemy’s hand, and unwittingly retard the progress of God’s plan and purpose through us.