Articles
Rebuking the LORD - Mark 8
Rebuking the LORD
After making the great confession: “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29), Jesus explains God’s plans for the coming days: “...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” (vs. 31). Such was the eternal purpose of God that Jesus would die as the sacrifice for sin (cp. Eph. 3:11). This apparently did not square with Peter’s idea of what SHOULD happen.
What do you do when your ideas don’t square with the teaching of Jesus? Peter ‘rebuked the Lord’. Amazing. Confess that Jesus is the Christ BUT that He doesn’t know what He is talking about! On a different occasion when Peter tried to tell the Lord what to do, God spoke from heaven saying: “This is my beloved Son. Hear you HIM!”. Those words still echo from heaven. We are not to tell Jesus what is right and wrong but we are to hear HIM. He has the words of life. His words will judge us in the last day. His word is the declaration of the Father unto mankind.
On this occasion Jesus then rebuked Peter. Such action on Peter’s part was to listen to the wrong source. Such was listening and following Satan and not God. Such was listening to the voice of MAN and not to Jesus. The problem was simply that Peter had ‘set his mind on things of man’ and not the ‘things of God’. Peter desired that Jesus wouldn’t die but such was NOT the desire and plan of God. Without such sacrificial death there would be no forgiveness for men. God desires forgiveness even at such great cost.
How many times have our thoughts been at odds with the desires of God? How often have we ‘rebuked’ the Lord because His teaching isn’t what WE want to hear?
Jesus then proclaimed the answer to this whole problem: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (vs. 34). He presents the greatest obstacle to being a disciple: self. A disciple MUST deny SELF in order to follow. Man MUST crucify SELF in order to live for Him. We yet face this eternal question: Is HE the Lord of my life or am I? Hugh DeLong
