Matthew 16:21–28 (ESV)
Jesus Foretells His Death and Resurrection
21 From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. 22 And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” 23 But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”
Take Up Your Cross and Follow Jesus
24 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 25 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? 27 For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done. 28 Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
Transcript - Generated automatically and not edited for accuracy.
Matthew 16 verses 21-28 From that time Jesus began to show to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed and be raised the third day.
Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, Far be it from you, Lord, this shall not happen to you.
He turned and said to Peter, Get behind me, Satan.
You are an offense to me, for you are not mindful of the things of God, but of the things of men.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.
For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
For what profit is it a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?
For what will a man give in exchange for his soul?
For the Son of Man will come in the glory of his Father with his angels, and then he will reward each according to his works.
Assuredly, I say to you, there are some standing here who shall not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.
Our sermon text this morning is the Gospel reading from Matthew where we heard Jesus and Peter talking still.
Again, last week we heard Peter's great confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.
And then today that conversation continues on as Jesus begins to tell the disciples about what that means to be the Christ.
and what it means to be a disciple of the Christ.
At the very end of the text last week in verse 20, it says that Jesus strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that He was the Christ.
And it always is a curious thing to me when I came across this when I was younger is,
If Jesus has come as the Christ to save the world, why is He telling the disciples at that time to tell nobody about who He was?
And our text this morning answers that question for us.
It tells us why all of the secrecy all of the sudden about who Jesus is.
Because there's a big shift that happens in the Gospel of Matthew now.
You don't have those big miracles like you've had so far.
You don't have the feeding of the 5,000 after this.
That was before.
Or the 4,000.
That was before.
You don't have these large crowds following Jesus around as much.
In fact, a lot of the miracles kind of become more intimate and personal.
You have Jesus casting out a demon.
You have some healing, certainly, but nothing like what we had seen before.
And why is that?
And I think we're going to see this as we look at what it means to be the Christ, especially as we look at the first few verses in our text.
Jesus lays out what it means to be the Christ in that very first verse in 21, where he says, From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things and be killed and on the third day raised.
From this point forward, Jesus' eyes are fixed on Jerusalem and that which is going to take place there.
The only real large crowd that you get at this point forward is the triumphant entry when the people came out to greet Him as He rode in on the back of a donkey.
But Jesus, He's not thinking of that.
He's not thinking of all those other things.
His mind is really set on one place, and that's on the cross.
because the divine description of the work of Christ is death on a cross.
Christ Jesus would face the worst possible death you could imagine.
Crucifixion was invented to be horrific.
Death, having your hands nailed to a cross and your feet nailed below you was a terrible way to die.
What would happen often is over the course of days
The person who was hung there would slowly lose their strength to hold themselves up and they would suffocate and die.
And in the meantime, they would be jeered at by the people who would pass by.
This was a punishment for criminals, for the worst in society.
And being up there for days, the animals would come.
And that wouldn't be very pleasant either.
If you didn't die from them attacking you or from exposure to the elements, suffocation was how you would eventually die.
The longer and longer you were there, the worse and worse it got.
But as if that death, death on an instrument of torture wasn't enough,
Jesus was scourged beforehand.
He was beaten with fists and clubs.
He was whipped.
He was, the skin from his back would have been pulled off by the whips that they used called a cat of nine tails that would have, think of like barbs on the end of leather or of rope.
Rocks were folded in and it would rip you to pieces.
It was pretty horrific.
But even that wasn't enough for the suffering of what laid ahead for the Christ.
He would also be completely rejected by the same people who were claiming his name on the Sunday before, who were saying, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
He'd be rejected by the people who ate with him on the side of the Sea of Galilee.
And if that wasn't horrible enough, he would be betrayed.
by his closest friends, by Judas Iscariot who was with him for years, and by Peter who would deny him three times in the courtyard during his trial.
What Jesus here tells Peter and the disciples was so far from what they had thought God had intended for the Messiah that Peter
I think out of a good will, out of good intentions, takes Jesus aside and rebukes him, he says, in verse 22.
And in our translation it says, Far be it from you, Lord, this shall not happen to you.
But if you were to literally translate this, the way how I would translate it is to say, May God be merciful to you, Lord.
You see, Peter is saying, may this never be the case.
May God have mercy on you so that way this doesn't come to pass.
Or maybe even, this would be maybe more audacious, God have mercy on you for even suggesting it, Jesus.
That sounds a little more like a rebuke, doesn't it?
See, Peter, he didn't understand what was in store for the Christ, for the Messiah, the Anointed One of God.
And because he didn't understand it, he who was closest, John didn't understand it, none of the twelve understood this.
And if they don't understand it, how much more will it be misunderstood by the people if they hear that Jesus is the Christ?
And so there's the answer to that first question.
Why all the secrecy all of the sudden?
It's because the people weren't ready.
And more importantly, Jesus had a job to do.
His job as the anointed one of God was to die on the cross for those people.
And this was always the plan.
It's not as if this was an audible that was called because of sin, but from the very beginning this was God's plan to redeem creation in this way.
And we see this
the working of God even in Genesis chapter 1 about the Holy Spirit and the Word and the Father all working together in creation to create and then we see the same work amongst the Trinity in recreating the world through Christ.
And we see immediately after the fall in Genesis 3-15 where God promises the woman and the man, Adam and Eve, that He would defeat the serpent.
That the serpent would strike at and bruise the heel of the seed of the woman, but then that the seed of the woman would bruise the head of the serpent.
And maybe even a better translation there is crush.
that the serpent's head would be crushed, the heel would be crushed.
And how well does that fit with what actually happens with Christ upon the cross?
The prophet Isaiah talked about God's chosen servant in a group of poems called the Servant Songs towards the second half of the book of Isaiah.
In Isaiah 42, God says, Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights.
I have put my spirit upon him.
He will bring forth justice to the nations.
Then at Jesus' baptism, heaven was opened up.
The Father said, This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.
And the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, descended upon him.
See, Jesus is this chosen servant, but this chosen servant is spoken of not just as this victor over evil, as the people often thought of him in that day, but was really also the suffering servant of the later psalm that comes in Isaiah 53.
You see, God's anointed was not destined for earthly power and glory the way how all the other kings of the earth desired.
But see, that was what Israel's desire was from the beginning.
that when they wanted their first king, King Saul, the reason why they wanted a king was so that way they would be like all the other nations.
They wanted earthly glory and they wanted their king to have earthly glory.
And so it made sense then that the Messiah, the one who would come, would also have earthly glory.
But Isaiah 53 says that the Anointed One, the Chosen Servant, would be despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
He would not be esteemed by men, but would be stricken and smitten and afflicted.
He would be pierced and he would be crushed.
He would receive the world's chastisement on himself, and he would be oppressed like a lamb led to the slaughter.
and then it says and it was the will of the Lord to crush him this one the chosen suffering servant of God who would face a horrific suffering and death one that was unimaginable Jesus he is the one who is the Christ and this is his description of what it is that the Christ has come to do this is
His job to suffer and to die.
And why?
Why suffering?
Why all this horrific suffering and betrayal and beating and death?
Well, He does this for you.
He takes on the punishment and the shame of the cross.
He takes on the scorn of His own people.
He takes on the betrayal of Judas and of Peter.
for you.
If you fill out more of those words from Isaiah 53, the prophet told us this ahead of time.
He says, Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken and smitten by God and afflicted.
But he was pierced, why?
For our transgressions.
He was crushed for our iniquities.
Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.
Jesus suffered all that he faced, the rejection, the betrayal, death, even death on a cross for your transgressions, for your sin.
He was crushed for your iniquities.
He took on your chastisement so that way you would be healed.
so that you would be restored to God.
And so what does this then mean for you is that He, the Christ, has become your Savior.
He's become the one who has redeemed you, who has removed your sin, who has given you His perfect righteousness.
He is the one who brings you into the kingdom of heaven.
And no one else can do this.
It's only by the name of Jesus Christ by which you can be saved.
It means that because of God's grace through faith in Jesus, you have peace with God.
Because of God's grace to you and faith in Jesus, that your sin is truly forgiven and you are counted amongst God's righteousness, amongst God's elect.
Because of God's grace to you and faith in Jesus Christ, you are citizens of heaven.
The kingdom of God has not just come near to you, but you are in it.
You don't have to earn this.
You don't have to worry about if your motivations are pure enough.
You don't have to worry if you must do this or that.
You don't have to worry about missed opportunities.
Jesus died for you.
He suffered for you.
And this is true.
And as Jesus asked Mary and Martha when their brother died, do you believe this?
Faith comes through hearing, we heard last week, and hearing through the Word of God.
We are saved through faith in Christ.
Do you believe this?
The divine job description of Christ is death on the cross.
When Peter tries to deny that this is God's will for Jesus, for the Anointed One, Jesus returns a rebuke to him in one of the harshest and most imaginable ways you can think.
He says, get behind me Satan.
These words that he says are almost exactly the same words that he says to Satan when he's tempted in the desert.
And so we see some parallels here between this and that temptation by the accuser, by the divider, by the devil himself.
Jesus' word, excuse me, Peter's words were guided not by God and His Spirit, but by Peter's own desires, by his own desire for earthly glory and power, something that mankind naturally seeks after, something that you seek after and that I seek after apart from God.
And so Peter, who's often thought of as the spokesman of the disciples here,
Jesus treats him as the spokesman for Satan.
He says, get behind me, go away behind me, literally.
You are a hindrance to me, a stumbling block.
And so Peter, the one who had this great rock of a confession, now is a stumbling rock by his anti-confession, by his temptation of Jesus.
And so Jesus, He recognizes and He knows that the Father's will is that He would overcome evil certainly, but not through the way how Peter would have Him do it, not through the way the people would have Him do it.
Jesus' glory would not come through conquering others by their death as if He was going to throw out the Roman rulers of His day, but instead by conquering death through His own death and His resurrection.
So we have the description of the work of Christ, the job description of Christ, death on a cross for the sins of the world.
But we also then see a description of what it means to be Christ's disciple.
And the description there is death carrying a cross.
This idea of denying yourself and following Jesus while carrying a cross is the sort of message that people don't like to hear.
People, in fact, hate to hear this.
Peter doesn't want to hear it.
James and John, you know, the sons of Zebedee, they were called the sons of thunder.
They didn't want to hear this either.
If you remember a little bit later on in the gospel that they would actually go to Jesus and maybe even their mom was there with them and they were asking for positions of authority and of honor in the kingdom of heaven.
They wanted glory, the kind that they had imagined since they were little boys and they'd pick up sticks and think that they were swords.
They wanted glory.
All the disciples together later on, they were arguing about who was the greatest in the kingdom of God.
They wanted glory for themselves.
They wanted to have this position in Christ's kingdom as well.
People today don't want to hear it.
They don't want to hear about being a Christ follower and suffering because you're a Christian.
They want it to be easy.
And that's why you get false teaching that is rampant throughout the church.
often goes by the name of prosperity preachers, the prosperity gospel or the word seed movement, that sort of a thing.
And I think it's important for us to point out false teaching.
It's something that God actually cares about very deeply.
If you read through the book of Romans, which we're going through in our lectionary, you get to the end of Romans, the very last thing Paul tells the church in Rome is to mark false teachers and avoid them.
If you read through 1st, 2nd Timothy, the book of Titus, what we call the pastoral epistles, Paul puts a very strong emphasis on the importance of correct teaching, of right doctrine.
He says to Timothy, be mindful that you rightly divide the Word of God, that you be mindful of doctrine.
And so it's important for us to call out false teaching when we see it.
And the prosperity gospel I think fits really well with our text as something that we need to mark and avoid.
We need to be aware of what it is and who teaches it.
The prosperity gospel or sometimes like I mentioned called the seed faith gospel teaches that God's will for you is always financial health and physical health.
And the way how it usually goes is that if you have enough faith and if you speak positive words and you donate to their ministry often, then financial blessings and health benefits will come your way.
And I'm going to mention names here because it's important for us to be on guard against this type of teaching.
The teaching is not private.
It's public.
And their teachings are very influential throughout the church and especially amongst older populations.
And so it's important for us to look out for ourselves and for our loved ones.
Some of the most well-known prosperity teachers include the likes of people like Benny Hinn and Creflo Dollar.
Kenneth Copeland, Joseph Prince, Joyce Meyer, Paula White, and Joel Osteen.
Those are just some of the big ones.
There's a lot of others.
It kind of filters throughout the church at times and so even sometimes pastors at smaller churches will fall into this as well.
But these are the most likely that you'll run into if you turn on your television.
What's the problem with the teaching?
Well, for one,
It teaches that the work of Christ primarily has nothing to do with the forgiveness of sins.
That the description that Jesus gives of the Christ is the one who goes and dies on the cross and suffers for the sake of sin.
It says, no, that's more of a secondary thing for you.
that the primary thing that Jesus does for you is that He's well pleased with you and He loves you and He cares for you.
And so there's truth mixed in here, but not only that, but then that the blessings that He wants for you are primarily temporal.
They're blessings in this day.
Certainly God does want to bless us and there's ways how He does this through family and through home and through our work and sometimes those blessings are financial and sometimes they're not.
Think of Job.
Job, the man of God with whom there was no fault, it says.
He was tempted to curse God's name by having everything stripped away from him.
And yet he wouldn't do that.
He wouldn't curse God's name.
Now, he had faith.
He was confessing God.
He believed.
And we wouldn't say that he doesn't just because his family died in an accident or that his animals all ran away or that he was robbed.
And this is fundamentally the issue.
The prosperity gospel would have you believe that if you aren't financially blessed, or if you are dealing with health issues, that you don't have enough faith.
You need to believe harder.
You need to give more to my ministry.
That sort of a thing.
And that if you do this, then certainly good things will come to you.
And then when they don't, well, believe harder.
Give more.
It really becomes a sinister thing, not even so much because of the grift that it is, but because of the comfort that it steals.
You think of the third, we studied the third commandment last year in Bible study, and we talked about how the primary reason for the command is for rest.
And in that resting, there's also the receiving of God's Word and the comfort of the gospel and that
The fulfillment of the third commandment truly is that Christ is for you.
Jesus died for you.
You don't have to strive to earn God's favor.
Jesus has accomplished all for you.
That Jesus is our Sabbath rest.
And so really our Sabbath is found through faith in Him.
And what happens when you have something like this, any false teaching does this by the way, but the prosperity gospel does this very clearly is it takes that comfort that you have in Christ through faith and it robs it from you.
It takes it from you and it says, but you're sick.
So obviously you don't believe enough.
You're having financial difficulties.
You obviously haven't given enough to God.
And when this happens, this isn't just a temporal issue as some would have you believe.
It becomes an eternal issue.
It puts our very soul in danger.
So this doesn't just stay here with us, it permeates our lives.
It doesn't just affect us on Sunday mornings, it affects us every day.
It affects us in the depths of our heart and our conscience.
One of my pastors, he would say it this way, if it doesn't work in tribal Africa, then it's not the gospel.
If it doesn't give you comfort when you're in the depths of the depression in the 1930s, then it doesn't give you comfort.
If it can't comfort you when you've lost everything like Job did, then it's not the gospel.
What it is, it's a false gospel.
It's a false teaching.
Really, it's shackles that get thrown upon you.
At the end of the day, the picture of discipleship is exactly the opposite of what our sinful nature would want.
It's exactly the opposite of what the prosperity teachers would have you believe.
It's the complete opposite because what it is, is it's suffering.
It's suffering.
Jesus says, if anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.
Deny yourself.
Deny the sinful nature that seeks the prosperity that comes easy.
To deny the sinful nature that goes after the things of the world instead of the things of God.
That's the primary thing Jesus says about Peter.
He says, you have set your mind on the things of earth, on the things of men, instead of the things of God.
And so Jesus comes, he comes not only to save us, and then as if he wants to just leave us there, he wants to transform us.
He wants to renew us, he wants to recreate us in his own image.
He wants us to have a new nature that is found in him.
And so, you think of like, back a long time ago, for me I think, like back in the 90s, right?
It was so long ago, right?
Back in the 90s, there was these bracelets.
What would Jesus do?
Remember these?
WWJD?
And the idea behind it is fine, you know, like we should try to do the things that Jesus would do.
Well, what are the things that Jesus said we should do that He does?
One of them, that's spelled out in Scripture, is to carry a cross.
is to suffer like he suffered.
And so, one of the things I think we need to think about with this is, okay, what does that then mean for us?
Do I need to go out of my way to find suffering?
You sometimes hear about this with missionaries, and God bless missionaries and the work that they're doing, and may he protect them from this, is this idea of like a martyr complex, right?
You've heard of this?
Like, I'm gonna go for the purpose of dying, right?
That's not necessarily what every Christian is called to do, is to go off to a mission field where they might be killed.
But what it does mean is that when suffering does come to us, like the disciples in the book of Acts, when they are jailed and beaten for the sake of the gospel, we should count it as a blessing that we are seen fit by God to suffer as Christ has suffered for the sake of the gospel.
And so when Satan comes and he works inside of us to try to cause us to cling to things other than Jesus Christ and what he has done for us, whether it be from the prosperity gospel or any other false teaching, or an idol, or when we go and we cling to our sin because we like our sin, these types of things.
When Satan comes and he accuses us of being a sinner, we say, yeah, you know, you're right.
You're right, I am a sinner, but I have a Savior who has died for my sins.
That He has forgiven me and He has given me a new way.
He has given me a new heart, a new mind.
He's transformed me into His own image.
And so I no longer seek after those things, but I seek after Him.
And because this is you, because you're a Christian, it doesn't mean that you're never going to fail in this.
We see and Jesus understands that we struggle with our sinful nature every day.
And when this struggle comes, we think back to that cross that we were called to carry.
We remember what a cross is designed to do.
It's designed to kill.
And we put to death the old man.
We put to death our sinful nature.
And the way how we do this is by confessing what is true.
By speaking with God that which he has spoken to us.
That yes, Lord, I am sinful and I am in need of your mercy.
Have mercy on me for the sake of your son Jesus Christ.
And when we confess our sins, God is faithful and he is just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness because Jesus Christ is for you.
He died for you and he rose for you.
He comes and he speaks to you now and he promises to return for you at the end of all things.
Amen.
The peace of God which surpasses understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
Amen.
