Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word. It seems like lately there’s a great deal of controversy among just about everyone. The basis of much of it is that truth is subjective, and frankly, I don’t see it, I don’t believe it, or adhere to it. Truth is truth, and when it comes to the Word of God, I think cherry-picking has become a religious art form. But I digress, and I’ll step aside. Matthew chapter 16, part 1, regarding Simon Peter.

I think Matthew 16 is a good place to pause and take a look at an important player in early Christianity. Let’s begin with his name, or really names. In the New Testament writings, this man is called by several different names. His birth name was Simon, a variant of the Hebrew name Simeon. Simeon was one of the older sons of Jacob in the Old Testament, well known to Jewish history, well known for a rash act of cruelty actually told about in Genesis 34. Seems a little odd that Simon Peter’s parents would choose that name, but interestingly, as it turns out, Peter did become known for his rashness at times.

Anyway, Simon, from the Hebrew name Simeon, was his given birth name. But we more frequently hear him called Peter. That these are the same person is clear right here from our chapter, where Matthew refers to him as Simon Peter, using both names. Simon is given name, and Peter, literally Petros, which in Greek means stone, a nickname Jesus gave him early on. But then, later in the New Testament, we find the same man also called Cephas at times, usually by the apostle Paul. The reason for that is that Cephas is the Aramaic translation of the Greek word Petros, and Aramaic was the everyday language Peter and Paul and the other disciples used in Israel in Jesus’ time.

Whereas Greek was the language the New Testament was later written in, so at times the Aramaic version Cephas is used, and in others, and more frequently, the Greek Peter is used. Simon, Peter, Cephas, these are all the same man in the New Testament. Clear on that? Yeah, clear as mud, Paul, you’re probably thinking. Anyway, I’m going to stick with calling him Peter, since that is the name he’s best known by. Peter was originally from one of the northernmost towns of Israel called Bethsaida.

But when he was called by Jesus to be a disciple, he was living and working in Capernaum on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, working in a commercial fishing business owned by a man named Zebedee, alongside Zebedee’s two sons, James and John, who also became disciples of Jesus. Although Peter was a simple fisherman, he had a big personality and natural leadership ability, and this is evident in the gospel accounts and the book of Acts. It was his nature to speak up first and to act out boldly. We just saw a couple episodes ago Peter, seeing what appeared to be Jesus walking on the water one night, called out, Lord, if that’s really you, let me come to you. And when Jesus said, Come on, Peter didn’t hesitate to climb over the side of the boat, anxious to give that a try, while more cautious men watched him.

And in today’s chapter, when Jesus asked his disciples what people were saying about him, what they were hearing, who people thought he was, they all offered various opinions that they had heard. But when Jesus pressed them, And you, who do you think I am? It was Peter who spoke up immediately, declaring, You are the Christ, that is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. We see these characteristics in Peter time and again. Jesus certainly saw Peter’s natural gift for leadership and his fervency too. In fact, the old fishing crew of Peter, James, and John became an inner circle within the circle of the twelve disciples.

Those three had special privileges and got to see more than the others. For example, only Peter, James, and John were with Jesus during his transfiguration on the mountain. We learned all about that in episode 31. And among other things, it was those three who Jesus asked to stay up and pray with me in the Garden of Gethsemane the night he was arrested. Jesus was also aware of the flip side of Peter’s character, his volatility and tendency to act first and think later. On that night when the temple officials and police came out looking for him, it was Peter, remember, who pulled a sword and instinctively moved to defend Jesus.

He actually hacked off a guy’s ear in the darkness before Jesus sternly ordered him to put that sword away. And it was then Peter who followed at a distance to the high priest’s house to see what was going to happen with Jesus that night. And there, sadly, when people recognized him as a disciple, he denied even knowing who Jesus was. So Jesus and Peter, they had an interesting relationship, to put it mildly. Peter’s life after Christ’s resurrection and ascension, though, was transformed, and anything but the life of a simple fisherman we might have expected when we first met him on the beach mending his nets at Capernaum. In our chapter today, Matthew 16, we’re somewhat across the midpoint of Jesus’ public ministry years.

That period had begun, remember, by John the Baptist, Jesus, and their followers proclaiming throughout the towns and villages of Israel the gospel of the kingdom: Repent, for the kingdom of God is near. That didn’t happen. National repentance and acceptance of Jesus as Messiah, I mean. Then, at some point, Jesus began narrowing the scope of his ministry. He began teaching more in parables, benefiting those who had hearts to really listen to him, puzzling the rest. Now at this stage we’re at in Matthew 16, his focus seems to narrow even further as he begins preparing his disciples for the end game, and even what would come after that.

As Matthew writes at verse 21, from that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and be raised up the third day. This final narrowing of focus to his true followers may have been prompted by something Matthew tells us about in the opening verses of chapter 16. Listen. The Pharisees and Sadducees came testing Jesus. They asked him to show them a sign from heaven. But he replied, When it is evening, you say, ‘It’ll be fair weather, for the sky is red,’ and in the morning, ‘There will be a storm today, for the sky is red.’

Do you know how to discern the appearance of the sky, but cannot discern the signs of the times? An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah. And he left them and went away, Matthew says. By adulterous generation, he meant most of Israel persisted in spiritual unfaithfulness to God. This was language frequently used by the Old Testament prophets. The Pharisees and Sadducees.

These were the two dominant religious parties in Israel at the time. Pharisees were the traditionalists, the conservatives, whose influence was generated in the synagogues throughout the country. Sadducees, on the other hand, were the liberals, whose influence came from their hold on the temple and all the official religion that flowed from that place. These two groups had little in common. In fact, were rivals normally. But their opposition to Jesus brought them together here.

Realize, by this time, Jesus had performed so many miracles, yet Matthew says some from these groups showed up one day demanding Jesus perform a sign from heaven for them, that he do an attesting miracle, something to prove himself to them. He answered, in effect, You understand the saying, ‘Pink at night, sailor’s delight; pink in the morning, sailor’s warning.’ You’ve observed these signs and can forecast the weather, yet you don’t recognize the meaning of all the signs I’ve been performing? I’ve got no more signs for you guys except the sign of Jonah. And he turned away from them. The sign of Jonah.

What was that about? Well, earlier he had told these same people, this is in chapter 12, No sign will be given to you but the sign of Jonah the prophet. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Clearly this was a reference to his coming death and resurrection. You want to see another sign? he was telling them.

Keep watching. So the immediate context here in chapter 16. is that Jesus has now decided to spend his dwindling time primarily on the handful of people who did believe he had come from God and who did have real faith in him. That’s why he challenged his disciples with that question, People are saying all kinds of things about me, yes, but who do you say I am? He wanted them to squarely confront and fully embrace the truth of exactly who he was. And characteristically, it was Peter who declared without equivocation, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. It’s in Jesus’ response to Peter, found in verses 17 through 19 of our chapter, that we come to one of the most debated questions in the history of Christianity.

Jesus responded to Peter’s declaration this way: Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, I mean son of John, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven. Actually, how you understand what Jesus said there pretty much determines whether you can be a Roman Catholic or not. That denomination understands it one way, while the rest of professing Christianity understands it another. Having studied Roman Catholic doctrine some, here is how they interpret what Jesus said that day.

They understand Jesus to have declared that Simon Peter would be the foundation of the coming Christian church, which nothing, including hell itself, could overcome. To Peter and his successors, they assume, Jesus gave the keys to heaven. From these couple of verses, they built the narrative that Peter was designated by Jesus there as the first pope of their church, the only church Jesus founded, they claim, and that it’s through that church, the Roman Catholic Church, that people’s sins are either forgiven or not forgiven. They, as Peter’s rightful successors, hold the keys to the kingdom of heaven. That’s the often pictured Saint Peter outside the pearly gates of heaven deciding who to allow in. As I mentioned a few episodes ago, this is the place in the New Testament of the Bible to which knowledgeable Roman Catholics go to claim their denomination is it.

That is, that they are the original and only true church of Jesus Christ. So let’s think about that. Is that really what Jesus intended, all that? First, what Jesus said, according to Matthew, is that Peter’s declaration that he was the Messiah, and more than that, the very Son of God, isn’t just a conclusion he arrived at because he was insightful, but something God had revealed to him. Then he said, literally, You are Petros, and on this Petra I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not be able to overpower it. By the gates of hell will not be able to overpower it, Jesus meant the coming persecution Satan would use to try and stop Christianity’s growth would not succeed in stopping it.

But in this important statement, why does Matthew, in quoting Jesus, change from Petros, Peter’s nickname, to Petra, which means rock? Again, literally, you are Petros, and on this Petra I will build my church. Petros, Peter’s nickname, meant a stone. But what the church of Jesus Christ would be built on, he termed Petra. Sounds like a play on words. The Greek word Petra was used more as a layer of stone or a formation of rock, like a ledge of stone or rock that would make a solid foundation to build something on.

I say that because this was the word used in chapter 7, where Jesus talked about building our lives on rock, meaning on him and his word, rather than on sand that could be washed away by the storms of life. This is why those of us who take the Bible as our final authority, rather than any church’s claims, doubt that Jesus meant that Peter himself was what his coming church would be built upon, but rather the truth of Peter’s declaration concerning Jesus’ true identity, that he was both Israel’s Messiah and the unique Son of God. That’s the foundation of Christianity, Jesus and who he actually was. It’s not coincidental that John says, if you remember, that he wrote his gospel to persuade us that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

But in all candor, taken in isolation, I can see how people could read those verses here in Matthew 16 and think Jesus meant Peter himself would somehow be the foundation of his coming church and have unique special powers. This is why I keep emphasizing that it’s a mistake to pluck one verse or two out of the Bible and build a whole thing on it, like in this case, the whole superstructure of the Roman Catholic religion. An early Christian named Cyprian, who lived in the middle of the third century, so about 200 years after Jesus’ time, is the first person I could find who explicitly began teaching that Jesus meant that the man Peter himself was, in a unique sense, the rock the Christian church should be built on.

And after him, a fellow named Leo, who lived in the middle of the fifth century, so 400 years after Matthew wrote this, became, not coincidentally, the first church leader in Rome to self-identify as pope and to claim that he and his office there in Rome had primacy over all of Christianity. It took hundreds of years for that interpretation to take hold. And then the backfilling began. If this claim is true, that is, that Jesus meant that Peter himself is the foundation of the Christian church, then Peter had to have been the first pope, right? Then around that, a lot of legends grew up about Peter’s being in Rome for an extended period of time and Peter’s passing on his primacy over the church to a man named Linus, who was an early church leader in Rome and who presumably then passed it on to the next leader at the church at Rome, and so on and so on.

But of course, all of that’s extra-biblical and took centuries to develop and harden into the Catholic dogma that now underlies the institutional Roman Catholic Church. Peter didn’t even start the church at Rome. It started long before he ever visited there, if he ever visited there. Back to what we actually see in Scripture. Peter himself never claimed for himself any such role, nor did anybody else in the New Testament say or write anything like that about Peter. We do read that he recovered from that failure of denying Jesus and how the risen Christ forgave and recommissioned him.

We talked about that in episode, oh, I can’t remember what it was, but it was Mark 16, or perhaps it was John chapter 21, or both. Going forward, in the earliest church at Jerusalem, Peter was certainly a leader again. We see this from the opening chapters of Acts, and his natural boldness shined when he publicly preached the gospel in Jerusalem, challenging the nation and its leaders to repent for rejecting the Messiah. The newly converted Saul of Tarsus called him, along with John and Jesus’ brother James, pillars of the first church in Jerusalem. But did Peter see himself or others see him as someone uniquely exalted over growing Christianity? How could he?

Jesus had taught them not to be like the Pharisees who loved the places of honor and the chief seats in the synagogues, loved being greeted with respectful titles in the marketplace and called Rabbi by men. Don’t be like them, for one is your teacher and you are all brothers, Jesus told his disciples. Do not call anyone on your earth father, therefore, he meant in the sense of spiritual superiority, for one is your Father and he is in heaven. So I’m quite sure Peter, nor anyone else, thought of him as their holy father, kissed his ring as he was out and about in Jerusalem. No, how Peter saw himself was first and foremost an apostle of Christ to the Jews. He for some time had a hard time even accepting Jesus really meant what he said about proclaiming the gospel everywhere, or that Gentiles who believed in it should be part of the Christian movement on equal footing with Jews.

In fact, we saw this in Galatians chapter 2. The apostle Paul, at one point, had to call Peter out publicly for misleading young Christians there in Antioch over this very thing. And continuing on in Acts, when we come to chapter 15, at that important Jerusalem council meeting, where the question of salvation by grace or salvation by grace plus works was discussed. Although Peter was there, as was Paul, Barnabas, and others, early Christian leaders were all there. Presiding officer was Jesus’ half-brother James. It was James who, after hearing both sides’ arguments, issued the official verdict for the church.

What I am saying is that it would be news to anyone on the ground in the Christian movement in the first century that Peter was supposed to be the rock on which Christianity rested, or anything like a pope with some kind of authority over all of the growing Christian churches. That whole concept didn’t arise for hundreds of years later. Peter authored only 2% of the New Testament scripture, but in his epistle we call 1 Peter, he did write something that bears on how we should interpret these words from Jesus in Matthew 16. In chapter 2 of 1 Peter, he writes, And coming to Him, that is Christ, as to a living stone which has been rejected by men, but is choice and precious in the sight of God, you also, as living stones, are being built up into a spiritual house.

For this is contained in the Scripture: ‘Behold, I lay in Zion a choice stone, a precious cornerstone, and he who believes in Him will not be disappointed.’ He’s using there the same metaphor as Jesus in Matthew 16 about God building His church. What an opportunity for Peter to assert that, yes, he was the rock on which the church was to be built, if he believed that. But he never claims anything of the sort, which should tell us that’s not what he believed and not how Jesus’ words were understood by his apostles. When using that same metaphor about the foundation of the church God was then building, he says it’s Jesus. He’s God’s choice foundation stone, who the Jews rejected, but on which the church would be built.

When Peter does describe how he sees his own role in that letter, 1 Peter, 2 Peter 2, he humbly calls himself a bondservant and apostle of Jesus Christ. And in another place, your fellow elder who witnessed the sufferings of Christ. As we keep emphasizing, it’s always a mistake to pluck verses from here and there and build your own doctrines out of them, much less build a whole religion out of them. That should never have happened. Cyprian and Leo and you and me too should always take into account everything that the Scripture says on a given subject to be sure we are understanding things correctly. So what can we say regarding Simon Peter?

His was a remarkable story, going from a simple fisherman to being chosen by Jesus as one of the twelve, to becoming an apostle and key leader of early Christianity. This from a man who was not very educated, who was brash and a little too self-confident at times. But Peter had such a heart for following the Lord and remarkable boldness once he was fully convinced that Jesus was indeed the Christ, the Son of the living God. He played a key role at the outset of the Christian era. Once he got his mind set on God’s agenda and not his own, and he was faithful even to the point of death, as Jesus challenged his disciples in this very chapter they must be willing to be.

So even though Peter is not what some have made him out to be, and would be embarrassed and I believe, frankly, angry that that ever happened, he is a larger-than-life figure in those early years of Christianity and certainly fulfilled Christ’s calling on his life in advancing the Great Commission. We’re out of time for this episode, but there are more important questions to get into from Matthew chapter 16, so I’m going to come back to this chapter next time. Till then, thank you for listening. This has been Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul. And thanks for joining us for this episode of Share the Word.

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