Sunday Thoughts: 'Who Do You Say I Am?'

Rumors buzzed around the Roman province of Palestine. Who was this man who was going around performing miracles and teaching with authority? Was he a prophet? Was he just an amazing teacher? Or could he have been — gasp — God’s promised Messiah who would deliver God’s people?

Since He was fully man and fully God simultaneously, Jesus knew what everybody was saying about Him, but he asked His disciples anyway.

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
Matthew 16:13-14 (ESV)

The ESV Study Bible notes explain: “The responses are in line with the popular messianic expectations held in Israel, arising from a strand of OT predictions about a great prophet who was to come (cf. Deut. 18:15–18; Mal. 4:5).” In other words, the people of Israel had particular expectations from the scriptures, and they matched those expectations to Jesus.

Then Jesus turned the question on the disciples:

He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.
Matthew 16:15-17 (ESV)

Naturally, Peter was the one to speak first, but he and the other disciples had seen firsthand what Jesus was doing. They had a behind-the-scenes glimpse, if you will, at the Kingdom of God coming to earth.

In the Holman New Testament Commentary, Stuart Weber points out that Peter’s “You” to Jesus was intended to be emphatic. He also writes:

Here before the disciples stood the hope and salvation of Israel and all the earth. Certainly the Twelve had not been totally ignorant of this reality in the preceding weeks and months, but they finally had reached a degree of certainty. Now they were able to articulate the truth with confidence. Even as the reality took form in their minds, they must have felt a compulsion to bow down in awe before Jesus.
There were many false gods in the secular cultures surrounding the Jews, but only one God was living. The rest were dead and inactive. This included those gods carved into the high rock wall where they were standing. When Peter confessed Jesus as this “living” Son of God, he recognized Jesus as the unique, promised Son of prophecy (e.g., Isa. 7:14; 9:6–7). He was the true God as opposed to the dead deities of this world (cf. Deut. 5:26; Pss. 42:2; 84:2; Rom. 9:26; 1 Tim. 3:15; 1 Pet. 1:23; Rev. 7:2; 15:7).

Our response to the question of who Jesus is makes an eternal difference. In a 1986 sermon, John Piper preached, “So in order to receive Christ in a way that honors him, in a way that saves, we must recognize who he really is. We must see his glory and agree in our heart that he is indeed worthy of all our trust and obedience.”

In “Mere Christianity,” C.S. Lewis put forth his famous trilemma:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. . . . Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

Who do you say Jesus is? I hope and pray that you can answer like the Apostle Peter did: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”