Luke 9:18-20--Peter Confesses Jesus as the Christ

Luke 9:18-20
English Standard Version
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Peter Confesses Jesus as the Christ
18 Now it happened that as he was praying alone, the disciples were with him. And he asked them, “Who do the crowds say that I am?” 19 And they answered, “John the Baptist. But others say, Elijah, and others, that one of the prophets of old has risen.” 20 Then he said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” And Peter answered, “The Christ of God.”

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I won't spend a lot of time here today as we mentioned this passage and some of its cross-references at the end of our last journal article.  After Jesus performed this sign and others (see the journal articles from the Gospel of John if you'd like to know more about the seven signs that John records and why he chooses to call them "signs.").  There are other things that happen between the feeding of the 5,000 and this question that we don't see anywhere other than the Gospel of John either, but this question makes sense in the context of John's disciples hearing things and needing to send an envoy to ask Jesus who He was, Herod hearing things after John the Baptist was killed and wondering exactly who Jesus was, and the crowds, including the disciples, hearing many of these same things.

Jesus knows about the questions about His identity and initiates the conversation with a question, "Who do the crowds say that I am?" The disciples rattle off all the same things that Herod had heard in verses 7-9 including that some of the crowd believe that Jesus is John the Baptist.  That seems rather silly to me for them to believe that because Jesus had John baptize Him, so they couldn't be the same person, but not everyone was there that day to see that event and this was a day and time before photographs, and certainly before newspapers and social media posts for people to reference as to what happened on a certain date.  People who had never seen Jesus and John together at the same time might question if they were the same person or at least had the same spirit (I would say they did have the same Spirit at work on them) because their message was similar.  The same words that made Herod fearful made the crowds want to come out and see Jesus to find out more and the air was ripe with anticipation as we saw in John 6 where the people tried to take Jesus by force to make Him king.

Jesus turns to the disciples and asks them personally, "Who do you say that I am."  This question is simple, yet so important as I mentioned yesterday.  We're studying a little book called "What is the Gospel" by Greg Gilbert in the Sunday School class I attend at Harvest Christen Fellowship this quarter.  This is one of the central questions to what kind of gospel you believe.  Is it based on the whole story of Scripture about the words and works of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, or have you only taken a slice of the Bible and tried to make the gospel of Jesus Christ all about that one thing?  There were prophecies that the people were looking to have fulfilled and they were drawing comparisons to Jesus being the fulfillment of the Old Testament :"prophetic types" (something that pointed forward to the person and work of Jesus), but not any one of those fulfillments gives us the full picture of who Jesus is.

Peter answer Jesus' question with an answer that Jesus says has to have been given to Peter by God the Father, since man alone does not come to the conclusion that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God without the Father revealing this to the person.  This confession is so foundational that Matthew tells us Jesus uses the opportunity to give Simon the name Peter (the Greek version of the word "pebble") and makes the claim that upon this foundation (referring to the confession just made which Jesus calls "bedrock"), that Jesus would build His Church.  This should be the immovable, unshakable, solid foundation that we build our faith upon, because this is the true identity of who Jesus is.  It is vitally important that we get this right.  This is why John wrote a gospel full of signs that point to the identity of Jesus and why Luke wrote to the Gentiles to make sure they had an orderly account of the history of who Jesus was and the work that He did.  Looking at the work of Jesus without knowing His identity can lead us to wrong conclusions about why He came and what our purpose as His disciples are and we get many false gospels that give us many incomplete or false pictures of Jesus.  So then, we must look to the Word of God and have the same kind of revelation from the Father and the Spirit about who Jesus is for us to truly understand the gospel.  If we get this wrong, we will not understand the birth, life and ministry, death, burial, and resurrection, nor anything about Christ before or after these events.  We must be know His identity to understand His purpose correctly interpret His words and His works.