In the providence of God, he has now brought us to Mark's gospel yet again on a Sunday morning. And we will be looking at Mark eight, verses 27 through 33. So if you will take your Bibles and turn there, Mark chapter eight, beginning with verse 27. And here, we will see the heart of the gospel. And that is what I've been titled my discourse to you this morning. And of course, the heart of the gospel is none other than the person and the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Let me read the text to you. Mark eight beginning in verse 27. "Jesus went out along with His disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and all the way He questioned His disciples saying to them, 'Who do people say that I am?' They told him saying, 'John the Baptist, and others say Elijah; but others, one of the prophets.' And He continued by questioning them, 'But who do you say that I am?' Peter answered and said to him, 'You are the Christ'. And He warned them to tell no one about Him. And He began to teach 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. And he was stating the matter, plainly. And Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him. But turning around and seeing His disciples, He rebuked Peter, and said, 'Get behind Me, Satan; for you are not setting your mind on God's interests but man's.'"

The heart of the Gospel is that Jesus Christ is indeed the Son of God; the one who paid the penalty for sin on behalf of all who believe in Him. He is the one that has conquered sin, Satan and death and all who trust in Him will have eternal life. You will remember when the Apostle Paul came to Corinth, which was an exceedingly wicked city. We read in First Corinthians chapter two and verse two what he said. He told them "For I determined to know nothing among you, except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified." But we must understand that Satan's primary objective is to thwart the purposes of God and redemption. And one of the primary ways that he does this, as this supernatural brilliant deceiver, is to distort and to demean the person and the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, the apostle Paul addressed this in numerous passages, especially in Second Corinthians chapter four, beginning in verse three, he said, "And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case, the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ." So who is Jesus Christ? How would you answer that question? I might add to that, the eternal destiny of your soul depends upon how you answer that question. And what you do with the reality of who he is. If you could have asked the people in the first century, and the days of Jesus, you would get many different answers. The religious elite of Judaism, the Pharisees and the Sadducees said that he was a fraud. He was a satanically empowered, blasphemer worthy of death. King Herod thought he was John the Baptist, who was resurrected from the dead and he was terrified because he knew he had him beheaded. The Jews thought that he was maybe Elijah or one of the prophets, like Jeremiah in particular, which was consistent with some of their traditional beliefs. And the Gentiles thought, well, he's he just a great teacher and this miracle worker, but some believe the truth of who he was, that he was, indeed the Messiah of Israel. He was the Son of the living God. Today in our culture, you will hear many errant responses to that question. For example, the prosperity gospel, which is a perversion of the true gospel, would say that, well, yeah, Jesus is the Son of God, but his primary purpose was to bring blessings of health and wealth and power, all of which were provided in the atonement. And when we give money to God, God rewards us with wealth, faith, they would tell us, faith in him, is a self-generated spiritual force that leads to prosperity. And prayer is the tool that you use to force God to hand out the goodies. Beloved, that is not the Jesus of the Bible. The social justice or woke gospel, also a perversion of the true gospel would tell us that he was basically a liberal Democrat and a socialist, according to one spokesman for this cause, James Chasey. He offers a good perspective of the leftist understanding of who Jesus is. Here's what he said, quote, "Jesus was a liberal Democrat, and a socialist. The defining message of the four Christian gospels and of Jesus himself was this, helping the poor, helping the sick, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, uplift the underdog, care for children, distribute wealth, be mindful of immigrants and strangers in your land, etc. By all the defining definitions of liberal and socialists, Jesus was most definitely both of them. He was also a rebel, and a fighter for the poor, for the bullied and the displaced of his time." End quote. One article that I read in the liberal British Daily newspaper called The Guardian caught my eye, the title of the article was "One Jesus for Liberals, Another for Conservatives," written by John Joe McFadden, here's what he said, quote, "A study led by Lee Ross of Stanford University in California, has found that the Jesus of liberal Christians is very different from the one envisaged by conservatives. The researchers asked respondents to imagine what Jesus would have thought about contemporary issues such as taxation, immigration, same sex, marriage and abortion. Perhaps not surprisingly, Christian Republicans imagined a Jesus who tended to be against wealth redistribution, illegal immigrants, abortion and same sex marriage, whereas the Jesus of Democrat voting Christians would have had far more liberal opinions. The Bible may claim that God created man in His own image, but the study suggests man creates God in His own image." End quote. I would have to agree with that last statement. What about the Jesus of black liberation theology, that drives Black Lives Matter and critical race theory. They believe that Jesus was a revolutionary savior, to liberate black people from the bondage of white people. It's a theology that centers around victimhood and, and oppression, salvation is all about equality, and social justice, and therefore, the mission of the church is all about political change. It's really a religious version of Marxism. James Cohn, who was a leading voice in this movement, and the leading voice in the Black Lives Matter Movement said this, "It is my thesis, that black power, even in its most radical expression, is not the antithesis of Christianity, nor is it a heretical idea to be tolerated with painful forbearance. It is, he says, rather, Christ's central message." He defines black power as, quote, "the complete emancipation of black people from white oppression by whatever means black people deem necessary." End quote.

Well, it gives you an idea of the different philosophies of our day with respect to who Jesus is, and what he is all about. So the question is, are these popular cultural definitions of the person in the work of the Lord Jesus accurate, biblically? Is this the true Jesus? Of course, the answer is, no, they are inaccurate. In fact, they are a blasphemous and damning distortion of who he is. My friends, please hear me if you do not know who Jesus is, what he has done, what he is doing, and what he will do, you will one day perish in your sins, and pay the penalty for your sins in an eternal hell. And that's the bad news that makes the good news of the Gospel so incredibly good. My friend, please hear me. Jesus is indeed the Son of God. John three and verse 16. And following familiar passage, we read, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged. He who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. This is the judgment that the Light has come into the world and men loved the darkness rather than the light, for their deeds were evil." And down in verse 36, we read "He who believes in the Son has eternal life. But he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him."

Now the text that we have before us answers this question of who Jesus is, and in our passage here in Mark 8:27 through 33, we will examine this whole issue under two categories that I trust will be helpful to you. First, we will see a divine disclosure. And secondly, we will see a satanic temptation. Now, let me remind you of the context, Jesus and his apostles have been in the Jewish region of Bethsaida, where the people and the religious leaders have showed nothing but contempt for Jesus despite all of the miracles that He has performed. They refuse to believe that he was the Messiah, the Son of God, and because of their persistent, unyielding unbelief, Jesus had sentenced them to permanent spiritual blindness. He had also already commanded His disciples to be aware of the leaven. That is the damning and deadly influence of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and Herod and his sycophants, beware of them, and he then healed a blind man to illustrate the difference between permanent spiritual blindness of the religious phonies, and the temporary spiritual blindness of the disciples. And now they have all hiked about 25 miles north, to the region of Caesarea Philippi. And here Jesus is turning his attention primarily to his apostles. And here he focuses on the most important of all questions, and that is, who am I? And their answer, and ours, is the key that unlocks the door to eternal life in heaven if you get it right, and if you don't, without that key, you will remain incarcerated in a dungeon of darkness that will consign you to an eternal hell, where you will pay the penalty that Jesus would have paid had you trusted in him. The place of what Jesus described as Outer Darkness, of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Now, with that little background, let's pick it up at verse 27. "Jesus went out along with His disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi." A number of us were just there not too long ago. Let me take you there for a moment. This was essentially a Hellenistic and pagan city, was about 45 miles southwest of Damascus, Syria, and about 25 miles north of the Sea of Galilee. It's located at the base of Mount Hermon. It's near the ancient Israelite town of Dan. And in fact, this is about as far north as Jesus went when He was on earth. It has an enormous spring, beautiful spring that feeds the Jordan river that runs through it. In fact, the foothills there of Mount Hermon are lush, they're beautiful. There's, there's lots of water, lots of foliage. Originally, it was known as Baal ,Hermon and Baal God in the Old Testament period. And then later on about the third century BC, during the Hellenistic period, the city was resettled. It became Paneas, or Pantheon, named after the Greek deity Pan, maybe you remember seeing pan is the half man, half goat, half goat God, alright, you've seen that as half goat half man. It's amazing what the depraved mind can come up with to worship, right? And he's typically seen playing a flute, that's another story in and of itself. But he was the god of fright. In fact, we get our word panic from that. And these are magnificent ruins that are still there. To this day, you can see an open air sanctuary, there's a sacred cave where they offered sacrifices. All of that is still there. There's a series of hand hewn niches where statutes of their deities were placed, and there still exists remains of shrines to Pan and inscriptions even from the second century bearing his name.

Now in Jesus day, the city was ruled by Herod the Great's son Philip, and Philip had renamed the city Caesarea in honor of Caesar Augustus, and to distinguish it from Caesarea Maritimi which was located west of Jerusalem on the coast of the Mediterranean, it became known as Caesarea Paneas or Caesarea Philippi, in honor of Philip the Tetrarch. I might also add that it was in this area, that Jesus transfigured himself on the mountain so you get a little feel of where it is, and it was a magnificent city in Jesus day, but a pagan, wicked city.

Verse 27, goes on to say, "and on the way Jesus questioned His disciples saying to them, 'Who do people say that I am?'" Now the parallel passage in Matthew, verse 16, or chapter 16, verse 13, says that "when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, He was asking His disciples, 'Who do people say that the Son of Man is?'" And in Luke 9:18, we read, "And it happened that while He was praying alone, the disciples were with Him, and he questioned them saying, 'Who do the people say that I am?'" So that's what's going on here. Now, bear in mind that Jesus knew exactly the opinions of all of the people. He wasn't in need of information here, there was no lack of knowledge. In fact, in John two verse 25, we read that Jesus "did not need anyone to testify concerning man, for He Himself knew what was in man." So why was he asking this? Well, I believe it's because he wanted them to rehearse what people were saying, to contrast the folly of their beliefs with the truth of who he really was, and who he truly is.

So we have the answer here in verse 28, "They told him saying," well, some say you're "John the Baptist," and again, that was Herod's idea, "Others say, Elijah," I might add that this was consistent with what the Jews understood from God's prophet in Malachi four, verse five, we read, "Behold, I am going to send to you Elijah, the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord." So some of them thought, well, maybe this is Elijah. And then finally, it says, "but others one of the prophets." Now, one might ask, and appropriately so, why on earth with all of these miraculous signs, why was it so hard for them to believe that He was who He said He was, namely the Messiah? Well, the answer is it's because he did not fit their pre-conceived idea of the type of Messiah that they wanted. You see, by the first century, messianic expectations were at a fever pitch. The people were so tired of being under Roman bondage. You will remember in Matthew 11, beginning of verse two, "Now when John," referring to John the Baptist, "while imprisoned, heard of the works of Christ, he sent word by his disciples who said to Him, 'Are you the Expected One? Or shall we look for someone else?'" I mean, even John was thinking, I mean, I'm in prison here. I mean, when are we going to get the show on the road here and get rid of Rome? So are you the one or should we expect someone else. We also know according to John 1:29, that John knew that Jesus was the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. So there was confusion. And I might add that the average Jewish person did not want a lamb, they wanted a lion. They wanted someone to deliver them from the bondage of the pagan Gentiles, not deliver them from their sin. You remember what happened after his miraculous feeding of the many 1000s. In John six, we read in verse 14, "Therefore when the people saw the sign which He had performed, they said, 'This is truly the Prophet who is come into the world.' So Jesus, perceiving that they were intending to come and take him by force to make Him king withdrew again to the mountain, by Himself alone." So they wanted a military Messiah. And it should be no surprise given the conditions in which they lived in that day.

But we also need to remember that there is great power in man's depravity, we can come up with all kinds of crazy things and believe things that are utterly preposterous. You add that to Satan's temptation and you can see that man can believe all kinds of silly things. It is in man's very nature, they had he invent gods of his own, making after his own image. After all, most people want a God that they can appease. They want a God that they can impress. They want a God that they can manipulate. They want a God that will kind of wink at their sin and be their buddy. And this is central to all forms of idolatry, all false religious systems, because fundamentally, in the depravity of our hearts, we want to believe that God exists for us, rather than the truth, which is, we exist for him, to live to the praise of his glory. And often self is the God that people worship. In fact, self idolatry is at the core of, of apostate Christianity. Whether it's the social justice Jesus or the prosperity Jesus, or the Jesus of all the religious systems that preach salvation by works, if you just do these things, then you can impress him enough for him to save you. I recently read about a female contemporary Christian singer songwriter. The lyrics of one of her songs underscores the idolatry of self that is so popular, especially in apostate evangelicalism, and how men and women invent a God that will exalt them rather than the other way around. The one of the lines of her song says this, I am who I am because the I am tells me who I am. And people sing that over and over and over again. Well, yes, that's clever. That's cool. It's catchy, isn't it? The difference it is also self-exalting hogwash. It demeans God. And it redefines his purpose in redemption, to be nothing more than a God that exists to make his creatures feel good about themselves. Dear friends, that is not the Jesus of the Bible.

I might add that he does indeed tell us who we are. He tells us that we are spiritually dead that we live in open rebellion, that our hearts are at enmity with him, were darkened in our understanding. We are alienated from God because of the ignorance that is in us and because of the hardness of our heart. So he does tell us who we are. And when we understand who we really are and who he really is, then the only thing left to do is to cry out for undeserved mercy. And when we do, He will save us by His grace. But that is not a message that sells records. That is not a message that will pack churches. So the point here is that Satan is ingenious in his distorted deceptions, the ways that he can somehow deny the infinite perfections of the living God. He is cunning with his abilities to misrepresent the person and the work of Christ and his deceptions are always appealing to our depraved hearts. You see, until we come to faith in Christ and understand who we really are, who he really is, until he has saved us by His grace, we have to admit that prior to that we really wanted a Jesus that's a genie in a bottle, right? One that will serve us. We want a genie in a bottle that winks at sin, not a thrice holy sovereign, right? We want a Santa Claus not a savior, we want a butler, not a king. That's how people think of who Jesus is.

So again, Jesus asked his apostles to list the diverse beliefs of the people. And verse 29, "And he continued by questioning them. 'But who do you say that I am?'" You've listed all of the popular opinions. But who do you say that I am? And now we see Peter answers on behalf of all of them and says to him, "You are the Christ." "Christos" in the Greek, the Greek word for Messiah, from the Hebrew "Mashiach", which means the anointed one. What I find really interesting is although most all of the people were confused, the demons knew exactly who he was right? In fact, we read about that, for example, in Luke. A demon recognized him as a Jesus Son of the Most High God. So the apostles were finally resolute in their conviction of who Jesus was. Ah, but you must understand how they came to this conclusion.

And here's where the story gets even more fascinating. Yes, the apostle saw all of the miracles, they were with Jesus, but 1000s of other people saw the same miracle. So the question is, how did they come to believe the truth? How do any of us come to believe the truth? And the answer, my friend is because God reveals it to us. God revealed it to them. So here we see the first point in my little outline, a divine disclosure. Matthew helps us understand this in Matthew 16, verse 17, a parallel account, "And Jesus said to him, 'blessed are you Simon Barjona,'" which means son of Jonah, which is just a variant spelling or a shortened form of John, "blessed are you Simon, Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven;" flesh and blood referring to mortal man. In other words, no human being, no mortal person, no human effort or cleverness, no human cogitation, reveal this to you? Dear Christian, if you believe, as I hope you do, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, it's because God has revealed it to you. It is because God the Father decreed for His glory to save you by His grace. And he called you unto himself and adopted you as His child, and drew him drew you unto Himself gave you the gift of faith. It's because God the Son revealed Himself to you in His incarnation, It is because he accomplished your redemption through the shedding of His blood on the cross of Calvary. It's because God the Spirit, breathed spiritual life into your spiritual cadaver, so that you could see the horror of your sin and the glory of the cross. It's because he gave you spiritual eyes to see the glory of who Christ really is. is. The apostle Paul testified to this very thing in Galatians one, verse 15. We read what he says, "God, who had set me apart even from my mother's womb and called me through His grace was pleased to reveal his Son in me, so that I might preach him among the Gentiles." As I was meditating upon this passage, and the reality of all of this, even in my own life, knowing that God has revealed this to me, solely because of His grace, my mind went as it often does to a hymn. To Charles Wesley's great hymn, "Love divine all loves excelling, joy of heaven, to Earth come down. Fix in us, they humbled dwelling all the faithful mercies crown. Jesus, thou art all compassion, pure, unbounded love thou art. Visit us with thy salvation, enter every trembling heart." Oh, isn't it wonderful that God has loved us enough to reveal Himself to us by the power of His Spirit and His word.

I want you to notice what happens next. Next, we have a very stern admonition. Seems a bit strange, right on the heels of this divinely revealed, revealed confession, we read in verse 30. And he warned them to tell no one about him. Why? Don't you know if you were one of one of the apostles, you would have just you would have been euphoric. In this is who he is. And what do you do when you hear really, really, really incredibly good news? You want to tell everybody, right? You know, that was what was going on with them. They were ecstatic. But Jesus says, I don't want you to tell anybody. You see, he had other plans. And he's about to reveal to them more information. And what he was about to say was utterly incomprehensible to them.

Verse 31, "And He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things;" he must suffer many things. The implication here is very clear, this is part of the Father's plan. This was a part that could not be altered, it could not be ignored. This was integral to Jesus mission on earth; he must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes then be killed. And after three days rise again, Verse 32, "And He was stating the matter plainly." This is why he didn't want it publicized. Because any public proclamation concerning his ultimate mission would only throw fuel on the fires of confusion and create chaos as he tried to make his way to Jerusalem and to the cross. This, of course, was all inconceivable to them. Mark later on in chapter 10, verse 45, tells us what Jesus said, "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give His life a ransom for many." And as we will see, Peter and the others just could not accept this, because it did not fit into their preconceived ideas. It conflicted with their theology. But as God declared through the prophet Isaiah concerning his incomprehensible grace, especially as it related to rebellious Israel, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor or are your ways my ways," Isaiah 55, eight, and nine. "My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways declares the Lord, For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." And in that context, literally what he's saying is that the grace of my pardoning mercies do not even remotely compare to the way that you would treat people that have offended you. You can't even begin to comprehend the limits of my grace and Jesus' death on the cross was the key for God's provision for this Mercy and accomplishing our redemption. Remember, according to First John two and verse two, Jesus is the propitiation for our sins. Propitiation means he is the satisfaction. He is the one that placates the just wrath of God that should fall upon us. This is why the Son of Man must, as we read, "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." As I was thinking about this, isn't it sad that the apostles had never apparently heard about this, even though they were raised in Judaism, and although there are several Old Testament passages that would have given them a sense of what the Messiah would do, and endure. For example, in Isaiah 50, and verse six, and granted, some of these are a bit veiled. But There we read, "I gave my back to those who strike me and my cheeks to those who pluck out the beard. I did not cover my face for my humiliation and spitting." When you think that the rabbi would have said, you know, this is a reference to the Messiah someday. Isaiah 52:13, all the way through Isaiah 53 And verse 12 make it real clear. Let me give you a few examples of this. Isaiah 53, beginning in verse four, "Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried, yet we ourselves have esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted, but He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities, the chastening for our well being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way, but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him." Later on, in verse 11, "As a result of the anguish of His soul, He will see it and be satisfied. By His knowledge, the Righteous One, My Servant, will justify the many, as He will bear their iniquities. Therefore, I will allot Him a portion with the great, and He will divide the booty with the strong, because He poured out Himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors. He had He Himself bore the sin of many, and interceded for the transgressors." Even the Psalmist tells us in Psalm 16, verse 10, "For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, Nor will You allow Your Holy One to undergo decay." Psalm 22 and verse one, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning." Verse seven and eight, "All who see me sneer at me, they separate with the lip, they wag the head saying, commit yourself to the Lord, let Him deliver him, let Him rescue him, because He delights in him." Verse 16 and following,"For dogs have surrounded me, a band of evildoers has encompassed me. They pierced My hands in my feet, I count all my bones, they look, they stare at me, They divide my garments among them. And for my clothing, they cast lots." What about Zechariah chapter 11, beginning in verse 12, "They weighed out 30 shekels of silver as my wages, then the Lord said to me, throw it to the potter, that magnificent price at which I was valued by them. So I took the 30 shekels of silver and threw them to the potter in the house of the Lord." And then one of the great texts in Zechariah, chapter 12 and verse 10, "I will pour out on the house of David, and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced, and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son. And they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn."

Here's my point with all of this. The apostles did not connect these dots, theologically, so they couldn't grasp the idea of Jesus suffering and dying. And again, he warned them to tell no one about him. Later, however, Jesus would himself make that proclamation concerning himself. Mark records this in Mark 14, verse 61 and following, "Again, the high priest was questioning him and saying to him, 'Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?' And Jesus said, 'I am. And you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven.'" Well, all this was more than Peter could stand. And Satan loved it so.

So we've seen a divine disclosure now we're going to see a satanic deception in verse 32, "And Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him." I cannot imagine a more brash display of arrogance. Here, you've got an uneducated fisherman, rebuking the omniscient Creator of the heavens and the earth, and all that is in them. Can there be any greater disparity of, of wisdom and authority? I think not. But also we shouldn't laugh. We can all be guilty of this. Are we not all guilty of reading some passage in scripture, coming across some doctrine that we don't really understand? And frankly, we don't like very much. So what do we do? Oh, we get creative. And we come up with a novel way of explaining what God has said. Yeah, so six days, six day creation, but they weren't six literal days. Or well, yeah, sovereign election, but it's not like he really chose some and not all. Think of all the ways people try to deny the doctrine of hell, or reinterpret the role relationships between men and women, that God has ordained for males and females, the covenant purposes of marriage between one man and one woman. How people remove the offense of the cross, to make it more acceptable, to make it more politically and religiously correct so that more people will like Jesus. Because after all, being a friend with the world is a better strategy of evangelism than preaching the gospel.

Well, in various ways, we've all struggled with who God is, if we're honest, and how he rules His universe. I think of what the Apostle Paul said at the end of his discourse, there in Romans, on the glorious doctrine of justification, he finally said, "Oh, the depths of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God, How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways." Dear friends, when we reject His Word, and we reinterpret His Word, and we ignore His will, that is called sin. And basically, what we were saying is, thank you God, but I have a better idea. And that's what was going on with Peter and the others. They could not fathom the Lord Jesus, their Messiah, the one that they love, they could not imagine, in their wildest dreams that he is going to be rejected, that he is going to suffer, that he's going to be murdered, don't you know, in their hearts are saying, You've got to be kidding me. I mean, I've got all these plans for where I'm gonna live in the kingdom and in what I'm gonna do with my family, and in all of these magnificent things. I mean, really, are we supposed to live under the bondage of the Gentiles? Are we supposed to remain in this wicked world and endure all of this? No! I won't have it! Jesus, we need to talk. Have we all been there? In some ways? Dear friends that is the satanic temptation. God, I know what you said, but you certainly can't mean that I've got a better idea. I've got a better plan. I've got one that kind of fits into the culture, and certainly jives with my preconceived ideas of how you need to be and we need to be. Matthew tells us in Matthew 16, verse 22, "Peter took Him aside." I can't even imagine this. And yet I'm sure if I was there, I would have probably been just as dumb. Just as selfish, just as rebellious Peter took Him aside. You can almost see Jesus taking him by the arms. Hey, come here. We need to talk. We need, we need to talk. "And he began to rebuke Him saying, God forbid it, Lord, this shall never happen to you." And then we read that Jesus turned and said to Peter, "Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me, for you are not setting your mind on God's interest, but man's." Mark says in verse 33, "But turning around and seeing His disciples," that's a very important phrase. I mean, he knew the disciples were thinking the same thing. So, you know, Peter has taken him aside, and he's going to answer him. And so what did Jesus do? He turns around so that they can all hear all right? "He turned around and seeing His disciples, He rebuked Peter and said, 'Get behind Me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on God's interests, but man's'". You see, Jesus knew that sinful people could never enter into the holy presence of God in the eternal kingdom. He knew that the only way they could possibly do that is for an infinitely Holy God, to pay the penalty for their sin. And that required suffering sacrifice, it required a cross. Jesus knew he had to pay the penalty for their sins so that they could be reconciled to God by grace through faith and enter the kingdom. They didn't understand all of that. And sadly, many people today, do not understand that.

By the way, Satan tempted Jesus to avoid the cross during his week and stayed in the wilderness. Remember that in Matthew four and Luke four, he knew Christ's sacrifice would not only defeat him, but also gain victory, your victory over sin and death. So you will recall how he tempted Jesus to doubt the father's perfect plan and to presume upon his grace, but Jesus refused to transfer his allegiance to Satan. And it's interesting in Luke four, verse 13, we read, "When the devil had finished every temptation, He left him until an opportune time." Peter was now an opportune time to tempt him once again. You know, it's hard to imagine Peter being speechless, but I think at this point, he probably was. I mean, think about it, he went from confessing Jesus as the Christ and being blessed for it to being likened to Satan. He went from being a spokesman for God to being a spokesman for Satan. And, and he did this in one short encounter. There's a great lesson here for me and one for you. And that is to remember how quickly the righteous can stumble. Dear friends, always be suspect, of your own spirituality.

Fortunately, God is long suffering, he's gracious to save and to sanctify. And later, Peter and the and the others understood. I mean, it all came together they understood that Jesus had to die. They understood that that was God's perfect plan all along, that apart from that, they could never be redeemed. You will recall at Pentecost, Peter said in Acts two beginning of verse 22, "Men of Israel, listen to these words: Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs, which God performed through Him in your midst, just as you yourselves know, this Man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death. But God raised Him up again putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power."

Dear friends, I pray that you all know that Jesus is the Christ. He is the Messiah of Israel, the Son of God, that this is the very heart of the gospel. This is what we see all through the gospel record. In fact, the apostle John summarize this in John 20 and verse 31. "These had been written to you so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name." So who do you say that Jesus is? I hope Your answer is as it should be, and I pray that you have surrendered your life to Him and that you serve him. Because the eternal destiny of your soul depends upon not only your answer, but also your response to His Lordship. Let's pray together. Father, we are so thankful for the magnificent truths of your word that brings such clarity to all of the confusion and chaos that is inevitably part of this fallen world. We know that Satan is ingenious at coming up with ways of distorting the person and work of Christ. And you add to that our own depraved hearts that that long for things that will ultimately destroy us. And it's easy for us to be deceived. So we thank you that you have revealed the truth of who Christ is to us. And we know that it is all because of your grace, not because of our ingenuity. Not because of our cleverness. And, Lord, if there be one here today that knows nothing of what it means to be reconciled to you through faith in Christ. I pray that you will overwhelm them with such conviction that they will humble themselves before you this day and place their faith in the living Savior. We thank you We give you praise for the glory of Christ. Amen.