Matthew 16:24-25 (NKJV) 24 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. 25 For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.
As we continue to release the tremendous potential God has placed in us as believers, we have come to realize that we must be what Jesus calls us in his great prayer of John 17. It is his will that we become supernatural people living right here in the natural world. To do that we must have certain things established in our lives. One of which is an active and growing faith in God and the acceptance of the reality of the supernatural.
I want to begin discussing something else that is vitally important to living supernatural lives. We see this in today’s scripture. Mathew 16 is one of the most significant teachings Jesus ever gave. In this encounter with his disciples, he revealed to them there is a deeper level of “knowing” than what they experience through their natural senses. He tells them that this knowledge gives them access to the “keys of the Kingdom of Heaven.” There is much more we can learn from what Jesus told his disciples, but I want to point out that the things that opened this up to them were two questions Jesus asked and the answer to the second question as given by Peter.
Peter was the first to recognize and receive what we will call revealed knowledge. This is knowledge that is revealed to the heart of a person by God himself. It may be independent of what we know by way of our senses, or it may be things we could perceive by them given a deeper meaning through input from God himself. Either way, we know something the way God wants us to know it.
This receiving of “revealed knowledge” has made the “keys to the Kingdom” available to Peter and by extension the rest of the disciples. Keys are an interesting metaphor for what Jesus wants us to see. Keys represent ownership. Jesus has just given right to use the power of the kingdom of heaven to them. Jesus still retains ownership but by telling them he is giving them the keys; he is giving them his ownership rights to something very important. Keys also represent the power to activate something. If I give the keys to my car to someone, I am doing both these things.
I would love to spend more time on this idea of keys, but I want to move on in the story. It is obvious that the disciples have just been given something significant. It is also obvious that Peter is an important character in opening this up to all of them and to us as well. It would seem Peter has had a good day! That day is about to go very wrong.
Matthew 16:21-23 (NKJV) 21 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. 22 Then Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, “Far be it from You, Lord; this shall not happen to You!” 23 But 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 the things of men.”
Peter, who has just unlocked the power of revealed knowledge receives a rebuke from Jesus that could not be more devastating. Jesus calls him Satan and says, “Get behind me.” Wow! I can just imagine that Peter was feeling a little superior at that moment. Jesus had said some wonderful things and it probably seemed he was saying them about him in particular. He might have thought that this clearly made him Jesus’ second in command. That is what it looks like when he pulls Jesus aside to tell him that the bad things Jesus just told him would happen in the future would surely not happen to him under Peter’s watch. Jesus’ answer must have come as quite a shock given what had happened just a short time before. What was it that caused Peter to go from being called blessed by Jesus to being called Satan? The answer is that he was not walking as a supernatural person but was at this point dominated by his flesh.
There are two basic principles we can see here that we can identify in the Peter of verse 17 which are lacking in the Peter of verse 23. First, Jesus tells him that he is “not thinking like God but is thinking like men.” I find it very interesting that the whole point of their discussion in response to Jesus two questions in this chapter revolves around knowledge revealed by God as opposed to knowledge gained only by the natural senses. The keys to the Kingdom of God were available because of the receiving of the former, yet when Jesus directly gave Peter some of the latter, he did not even recognize it for what it was. He thought naturally not supernaturally
To be supernatural people, Jesus’ says we must think supernaturally. We must open our hearts to the knowledge that is revealed by God and allow it to have more weight in our lives than just what we know by our senses. Peter’s senses could tell him that Jesus was the Messiah, but it was God who revealed that he was the “Son of the Living God” (See verse 16.) The whole Jewish world was looking for the Messiah. He was part of there religious and cultural tradition. However, the fact that Jesus was the son of the living God was not. God took what Peter could know by his senses and revealed to him something deeper.
Just a short time later Peter heard something from the mouth of “the Word made flesh” and could not see beyond what his senses told him. Verse 16 caused him to be called “blessed” while in verse 23 he is called “Satan.” Had he allowed God to show him the deeper meaning of what Jesus was saying, he would have understood that God was preparing to do something supernatural that would change everything. Instead, he cannot get past his love for Jesus and what he knew of him in the natural. When he does that, he is in opposition to the will of God. He is cut off from the keys he found a short time before and he becomes a hindrance to what God needs to do. He has gone from being a supernatural person to being a person dominated by natural things.
What was it that caused him to lose so quickly what he had been given earlier in the same chapter? What hindered him from thinking supernaturally? Jesus tells us in the verses we began with. If we are to be supernatural people, we must be willing to lose our life in order to find our life. This seems a little confusing on the surface until we look a little deeper.
The word for life in both cases is the Greek Word “psyche” which carries a number of meanings depending on the context. Here it can be seen as the “self.” In other words what makes you who you are. Jesus says we must be willing to lose one “self” so we may find a “higher self.” In the context of this chapter, Peter has found a self that is capable of understanding and using the “keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.” However, when confronted with the revelation that Jesus must suffer and die to accomplish the will of God, he cannot “lose his natural self so that he may receive the self that Jesus opened to him earlier in the chapter.
He chooses instead to save the self who knows and loves the physical Jesus. He does not want to lose him. He cannot understand how Jesus’ suffering and death could possibly be of any benefit to him or the other disciples. Indeed, he cannot see how it could benefit the world. His sense “self” cannot allow his “God has revealed this to you self” to see what God is really doing. Since he is not willing to lose the one, he cannot receive the other. So it is with us. If we are not willing to lose the natural self, we will not be able to walk in the supernatural self that Jesus says should be ours in John 17.
What must we do? The same things Jesus reveals to Peter. We will find out what that is next time.
For Audio Messages Visit: https://anchor.fm/bill-kiefer or search Practical Wisdom from the Word of God or Bill Kiefer on Spotify or where you listen to podcasts.
Leave a Reply