Matthew 16:13-14(NKJV) 13When Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, “Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?” 14So they said, “Some say John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
Yesterday we looked at what God told Joshua when he was faced with the challenge of replacing Moses as the leader of Israel. I can only imagine how difficult it would be to replace someone that had been so mightily used of God. The thing that God tells Joshua in his first hours as leader would have to be very important. We found that the key God revealed was to meditate in the Word of God day and night.
Joshua was going to need to hear from God just as Moses did. He was going to need to know God’s path as they took the promised land. He was going to need God’s wisdom in order to defeat the enemies before them. The key to having that kind of access to God and his power was to meditate in the Word. This same key will enable us to walk in the spirit thereby causing us to be successful in our Godly destiny.
What is released into our hearts and minds when we meditate in the Word of God? How does this produce what Paul called the “renewing of the mind” so that our soul becomes a clear channel for the Spirit of God to flow through? Let us examine the life of another New Testament bible character to find out.
Peter was a very real person. He is many people’s favorite disciple because he is so like us. He is too outspoken. He is impetuous and often he gets himself into trouble. He cries out to Jesus when he sees him walking on the water as he comes to them in a storm. He says, “Lord, if that’s you out there, ask me to come to you on the water.” What is Jesus going to say, “No Peter, it’s not me. Stay in the boat.” Instead the Lord says, “It’s me, come on out.”
Like many of us, Peter starts out well and then gets into trouble. Before long he is sinking into the waves. Jesus has to come and rescue him and ends up chiding him, “Why did you start doubting.” Many of us can see ourselves in Peter. However in the scripture we will study this week, he seems different.
Jesus and his disciples have just left from yet another encounter with the Pharisees. They were resting and Jesus asks them a question. I always pay special attention when Jesus is asking questions. When he does so he is about to say or do something important. Jesus never asks anything just to get information. When he asks a question, particularly of his disciples, he already knows the answer. He is looking for their response so he can teach them something. He is also looking for our response.
His question almost seems out of character. “Who do men say that I, the son of man, am?” Jesus never cared about what people thought. He was not moved by public opinion or the opinion of the leaders of his day. Why would he want to know what people were saying about him? He did not. He wanted to make a point about knowledge.
There are two kinds of knowledge available to the believer. One kind is the knowledge that people use all the time. It comes to us via the gates of our 5 senses. We gather it by what we see, hear, feel, taste and smell. These information gates are the source of everything we have learned from our life experience. This knowledge is processed through our minds, where we come to certain conclusions. It is stored in our hearts where it makes up the basis for how we think. This knowledge is called “sense knowledge” because it comes through our senses.
The problem with sense knowledge is that it is based solely in the physical realm. We have made sense knowledge a god in the western world. We are told that we cannot accept anything as true which cannot be proven in the natural. Let us look at this first question Jesus asks.
He wants to know what others are saying about him, not what the people he is talking to are saying. He uses the term “son of man” to describe himself. The son of man is what he is outwardly. He was human because he was Mary’s son. He had a physical body just like ours. He ate and drank and slept just like we do. So his question is really, “What do other people say about what they see in my outward life?”
Their answers are interesting. “Some say John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” You will notice a couple things about these answers. First of all they do not require any commitment on the part of the hearers. They simply require opinions. The opinions they give are based solely on sense knowledge. They are asked what they have “heard” people say.
They are also outside of spiritual thinking. For Jesus to be John the Baptist come back to life was completely against the Jewish teaching. To say he was Elijah would have fit with the religious idea that interpreted some of the prophecies to say that Elijah would reappear to announce the coming of the Messiah. To say he might be one of the other prophets is just a foolish statement which is not at all based in spiritual truth.
You see sense knowledge will never lead us to spiritual conclusions. The whole Jewish world was looking for the messiah at that time. However, when he stood before them they did not recognize who he was. Some suspected He could be the Messiah. but they could not accept it. Why? Because they read the Scriptures from a sense knowledge base. They were focused on a physical leader who would set them free from the bondage of Rome.
Jesus could not be the Messiah because he had not raised and army. He had not taken up arms against their oppressors. He was not a political leader negotiating their freedom. He was a simple carpenter from a far away province who did not seem to care about the freedom of the nation. As a matter of fact, his miracle working was just making life harder for the Pharisees.
Sense knowledge would not allow them to see the suffering servant in the Messianic prophecies. It would not allow them to see that Jesus had come to rescue the whole world, not from Rome but from sin. Sense knowledge would not allow them to come to a spiritual conclusion.
As you go through your day today, look around at your life and circumstances. How much of what you see is interpreted solely on the basis of sense or natural knowledge? How many of the conclusions you come to are based on what can be proven in the natural world? If you are limited to that you are loosing out on a great deal of the power of Christianity.
Tomorrow we will continue and discover that there is another dimension of knowledge that can revolutionize our lives.
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