The Christ of God (Luke 9:18–22) | The Gospel of Luke (Part 64)

Transcript

JRNT 115
The Gospel of Luke: The Christ of God
Luke 9:18-22
08/23/2026
Jesse Randolph


If you run a Google search, or I guess these days would be a ChatGPT search, and you entered the prompt, “who is Jesus,” you'd get all kinds of interesting hits on the first few pages of your search. You'd get hits like He is a man, He is a carpenter, He is a faithful teacher, He was a Jewish, rabbi, He was a religious leader, He was an itinerant prophet, He was a central figure of Christianity, He was a defender, a figure who was known for His profound teachings, His alleged miracles. here is one I saw that grabbed my attention when I ran a Google search this week, (I still Google, I don't ChatGPT, I’m getting old I guess). It was this, that Jesus was a guy with an “extraordinarily impressive personality.” That's the extent of this search results take on who Jesus is, meaning if you just leave it to the algorithm Jesus was at most a highly influential guy, one who you might even think of as the ultimate influencer, which is a popular idea in our day. He taught some profound things, He did some cool things, He told everyone to love everyone, and then He died. That's what Jesus did according to the world's way of thinking about Him. Well, as we're going to see this morning that question, who is Jesus, is a question with deep Biblical, theological and prophetic significance. It's a question with roots that go all the way down into the soils of the days of 2,000 years ago when Jesus made His first visitation to this earth. It is a question with great relevance to our lives and to our walks and to the very world in which we live today.

I'd invite you, if you would, to open with me in your Bibles to Luke 9. We're back in Luke 9 where this question, who is Jesus, is front and center in the narrative. We're going to be covering five verses this morning, Luke 9:18-22. God's Word reads, “And it happened that while He was praying alone the disciples were with Him and He questioned them saying, Who do the crowds say that I am? And they answered and said, John the Baptist and others say Elijah but others that one of the prophets of old has risen again. And He said to them, But who do you say that I am? And Peter answered and said, The Christ of God. But He warned them and directed them not to tell this to anyone saying, The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and scribes and be killed and be raised up on the third day.”

Now you'll recall that last Sunday morning we were in that very familiar account, one that's recorded in all four Gospels, of the feeding of the 5,000, that miraculous event where Jesus fed a crowd of more like 10,000 people with just five barley wafers and two dinky little fish. In fact, to give us a refresher let's go back to verse 15, just up the page, and we'll pick it up midway in Luke 9:15 where it says that Jesus had them “all sit down,” the crowds, and then verse 16, “He took the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven He blessed them. And He broke them and kept giving them to the disciples to set before the crowd. And they all ate and were satisfied and the broken pieces which they had left over were picked up, twelve baskets full.” So we go from that scene, that very familiar scene, the one recorded in all four Gospels of the feeding of the 5,000 where Jesus, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, is overriding the regular gestation process for fish by simply willing more fish into existence in this very scene. He is also bypassing, you'll note, the regular process by which bread is typically made with yeast and sugars doing their thing and simply creating more of it.

So, Luke takes us from that miraculous scene from last Sunday to the scene we'll be looking at today. We always want to ask the question as we work through these individual scenes, what's the connection between the two. Where is the connection? Is there a connection? Well, this is interesting, it's at least interesting to guys like me, I hope it's interesting to people like you. There is a link and I want to connect it all together by having us flip through some different Gospel accounts. Turn with me, if you would, over to Mark's Gospel, to Mark 6 and we're going to pick it up in verse 39, where it says, “And He commanded them all to sit down by groups on the green grass. And they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. And He took the five loaves and the two fish and looking up toward heaven He blessed the food and broke the loaves. And He kept giving them to the disciples to set before them and He divided up the two fish among them all. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they picked up twelve baskets of the broken pieces and also of the fish, and there were 5,000 men who ate the loaves.” Sound familiar? Absolutely it does, this is Mark's divinely inspired record of the same account we looked at last Sunday in Luke 9, the feeding of the 5,000.

Now look at what comes next in Mark's Gospel, Mark 6:45. This is Jesus's, or Mark's account of Jesus walking on the sea. I mean, that's a pretty big deal, that's a pretty major story, that's one of those stories that makes its way into every single child’s storybook Bible and it makes its way into a few marital spats when a husband says to a wife or a wife says to a husband, “Look at who walks on water now.” Maybe it's just us. Moving on, verses 53-56, Mark reports on Jesus's healing ministry in the town of Gennesaret on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. In Mark 7 there is this detailed account of Jesus's run-in with the Pharisees over this issue of His disciples eating bread with unwashed hands, ceremonially unclean hands, to which the Pharisees and the scribes took great exception. Look at Mark 7:5 where the Pharisees and the scribes “asked Him, Why do Your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders but eat their bread with defiled hands?” Then Jesus calls them out, He calls them hypocrites, and in Mark 7:8 He says this, “leaving the commandment of God you hold to the tradition of men.” Then down the page in verse 15 He said this, “There is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him. But the things which proceed out of a man are the things that defile him.” Note this power-packed statement in Mark 7:20 where He says, “that which proceeds out of the man, that is what defiles the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, sexual immoralities, thefts, murders, adulteries, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. All these things proceed from within and defile the man.” Next, verses 24-30, comes Jesus's encounter with the Syro-Phonecian woman, a Gentile woman of Greek origin. This woman knew her place, she knew that Jesus had come first for His people, the people of Israel, and yet as she noted in verse 28, “even the dogs under the table feed on the children's crumbs.” And then verse 31 and all the way to the end of the chapter is the account of Jesus's journey to the northern region of Tyre and Sidon and then down to the Decapolis, the ten cities south of the Sea of Galilee where He caused the deaf to hear and the mute to speak. Again, sort of a big deal. Moving on, Mark 8, this will all make sense in a couple of minutes, Mark 8 begins this account of the feeding, Jesus's feeding of the 4,000. Yes, I didn't say that wrong. There are two feeding incidents in the Gospels, there is the feeding of the 4,000 and the feeding of the 5,000. And then in Mark's 8th chapter he moves into a description of Jesus's further interactions with Pharisees and further interactions with disciples and the healing of another blind man. Then we get to Mark 8:27 where we see this. “And Jesus went out along with His disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi and on the way, He was asking His disciples, saying to them, Who do people say that I am? And they told Him saying, John the Baptist, others say Elijah, but others one of the prophets. And He continued asking them, But who do you say that I am? Peter answered and said to Him, You are the Christ. And He warned them to tell no one about Him.” So here we have Mark's nearly identical report of what Luke described in our passage for this morning in Luke 9:18-22. So, what we've just seen here is that Mark has included this report of all of these additional events that happened after the feeding of the 5,000 but before Peter's confession of Jesus as the Christ. Hold on to that thought for just a moment, if you would.

Now, if you would, turn with me back to Matthew's Gospel, Matthew 14. Let's pick it up in verse 13. We're not going to read the whole thing here but if you just let your eyes glance at the page here, we see that this is yet another instance or recording of the feeding of the 5,000 by Jesus. Matthew here details essentially the same events after this as Mark does, the ones we just went through. So according to Matthew's Gospel, after Jesus fed the 5,000, verse 22, He walked on the sea. That takes us down to verse 36 and in the first part of chapter 15 there is this dialogue between Jesus and the Pharisees over hand washing before eating bread. And then starting in Matthew 15:21 there is our Lord's encounter with the Syro-Phonecian woman, who Matthew calls “the Canaanite woman.” There are more healing miracles in Matthew 15:29-31, there is another encounter that Jesus had with the Pharisees in Matthew 16 and then this, Matthew 16:13, “Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, He was asking His disciples saying, Who do people say that the Son of Man is? And they said, Some say John the Baptist and others Elijah but still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets. He said to them, “But who do you say that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” There is that familiar language again, this time from Matthew, but again only after Matthew like Mark includes a number of additional details, sandwiches a bunch of other details about all these other events that occurred after the feeding of the 5,000 and before Peter's confession of Jesus as the Christ.

Now turn back with me over to our passage to Luke 9. Let's sort of push off the dock here and get back into our text. We have to ask the question as we get back to Luke 9, Why did Luke, as we've just seen, and Luke as we've seen now for over two years as we've marched our way through the beginning parts of Luke's Gospel. Why has Luke who is otherwise so detailed and so methodical and so comprehensive, why did he leave entirely out of his Gospel these large sections of narrative which Matthew and Mark included? Why do we have what many scholars and theologians have called this big omission? Well, as you might expect, critical scholars, liberal scholars have had a field day with this as they try to explain this so-called big omission as a way to poke holes in the reliability of Luke's Gospel. And they've launched a couple of different lines of attack. Some have argued that Luke left out this section of narrative that we otherwise see in Matthew and Mark and this is suggesting that the Gospel authors, the Gospel writers were inconsistent in their writing. Therefore, the Bible has errors in it and God's Word is not inerrant and Scripture is not perfect. That's the way the line of argumentation goes. There is inconsistency and therefore the Scripture cannot be trusted. That's silly. Anybody with a mild degree of awareness about how eyewitness accounts work knows that eyewitnesses will routinely emphasize different aspects of what they saw as they report on whatever it was that they saw. You know you might have an eyewitness to a traffic collision who mentions at the time of the collision they saw the orange car strike a blue truck. But you might have others who will say, Yeah, I saw an orange car strike the blue truck and as that was happening this strong southwest breeze was coming through and a Delta airlines jet was flying over, and a gaggle of geese and her goslings were crossing the street. Something with feathers and feet were crossing the street as this was all happening. So, does that mean that these two witnesses are now untrustworthy and unreliable? No, because both are going to testify ultimately to these two vehicles, the orange car and the blue truck, actually colliding somewhere in the middle of the intersection. They just focused on different aspects of the same event but still pointed to the main idea that the orange car and the blue truck went POW.

Now others have looked at this big omission, so to speak, in Luke's Gospel and have said that because Mark and Matthew included all these other extra details and Luke left these details out, this must mean that at one time or another there was some sort of pre-existing written source of information about Jesus's life that the Biblical authors like Matthew, Mark and Luke drew from as they wrote their respective Gospels. But unfortunately, those in this camp will say that original source document, we no longer have it, it's lost. Wouldn't you know it? So according to this view the Biblical authors were relying on some other written historical account of the life of Jesus but we don't know who wrote it, we don't know what it is called, we don't know what happened to it, we don't know where it went, we don't know why any of the Biblical authors themselves never mentioned it but you should just trust us that there was another document that the Biblical authors were all referring to. Some non-inspired document that must have existed at some point in history.

Well, do you want to know why Luke omitted certain aspects of the account of the life of Jesus in his Gospel? I can assure you, point one, it has nothing to do with the inerrancy of Scripture. There is no viable attack on the inerrancy of Scripture. I can tell you it is not because of some other source document that we need to go chase down or figure out. Do you want to know why we don't have this additional information in Luke's Gospel? The answer is actually so simple. The reason that that information is not in Luke's Gospel is because the Holy Spirit ordained that that information would not be in Luke's Gospel. That's it. II Peter 1:20 says this, “Know this first of all that no prophecy of Scripture comes by one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by the will of man,” hear this, “but men being moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” That's the answer, men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. What that is telling us is that as Luke put pen to paper in his Gospel apparently the Holy Spirit didn't move him to include those additional details the way the Holy Spirit moved Mark and Matthew to include those details in their Gospels. It's as simple as that. The Holy Spirit of God, the third person of the trinity decided what would or would not be included in Luke's Gospel. That's the answer. So, whenever the critic or the skeptic or the naysayer comes to you about something related to what's in the Bible or what's not in the Bible. You know, do you believe that Moses actually wrote of his own death at the end of the book of Deuteronomy? Do you believe that Jonah was actually swallowed by a great fish? Do you believe that Balaam's donkey actually spoke? Do you believe that Sarah actually conceived in Genesis 17 at the age of 90? Do you believe that Jesus is going to return to this earth on a white horse? Do you really believe in the Bible when the Gospel writers didn't use the precisely identical words as the other Gospel writers as they gave an account of all the same stories? You can say to them, as a matter of fact, I do. I do believe in those things. And you can articulate what II Peter 1:21 says, “that men being moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” Then you can add this little cherry on the top from II Timothy 3;16 when you say that “all Scripture is breathed out by God.” It's from God, it's God's Word.

That was all introductions. Let's head back to our text now, to Luke 9:18. I just want to geek out for a few minutes with you guys because we had a shorter passage this morning. But look back at Luke 9:18. I do have three points for you, three points to hang the message on, the text on. First as we look at verses 18-19, we're going to see THE PERSON OF CHRIST PROBED. Verses 18-19 again say, “And it happened that while He was praying alone the disciples were with Him and He questioned them saying, Who do the crowds say that I am? And they answered and said, John the Baptist and others say Elijah but others that one of the prophets of old has risen again.”

Now I've already taken you on this fun little detour for me of these parallel accounts in Mark and Matthew, so I won't turn you there again. If you just want to jot down these references, one is to Mark 6:27 and the other is to Matthew 16:13, they tell us that the scene we are in today in Luke's Gospel took place in Caesarea Philippi. Caesarea Philippi was quite a way north, maybe slightly northeast, from Jesus's main base of operations up to this point in Capernaum. Probably about 50 miles or so northeast, I guess you could think of it like going from Lincoln to Omaha, although without the benefit of I-80 between. That's where Jesus went away to pray on this occasion in our text, to Caesarea Philippi, a place where He could get away from the crowds and draw near to His Father through prayer. Though it says here in verse 18 that our Lord was praying alone, note that this does not mean that He was all by Himself in this episode. No, He brought company with Him on this trip because right after saying that Jesus was praying alone, Luke immediately says next that “the disciples were with Him.” What this means when it says that Jesus was praying alone is that He alone was praying, He alone in this incident was communing with God the Father at this very moment. The disciples, the twelve, you could think of it this way, they were listening in on the Son of God as He prayed to God the Father.

Well at some point as He was praying Jesus went from praying to His Father to turning His attention to His men. Look at the end of verse 18 where it says, “And He questioned them,” meaning the twelve, “saying, who do the crowds say that I am?” What a fascinating question. You know this is another one of those strokes of Spirit-directed literary genius by Luke, and I say that because this question is nestled perfectly between Herod asking a similar question back in Luke 9:9 where he says, “Who is this man about whom I hear such things,” and then Peter eventually confessing the Christ of God in Luke 9:20. So Herod asks, Who is Jesus, and Peter, as we're going to see soon, gets it right on behalf of the disciples saying He is the Christ of God. What Luke is really zeroing in on in this scene, in this section of his Gospel is Jesus's identity. Who is He? Verse 18, who do the crowds say that I am? Verse 20, but who do you say that I am?

Now as readers and as students of Luke's Gospel we have been seeing Luke drop breadcrumbs all over his account about Jesus's identity. I mean, going back to the very beginning we remember the angel Gabriel appears to Mary back in Luke 1:32 and he tells her that her coming Son, Jesus, “will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David, and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever. And there will be no end of His kingdom.” And then Luke 2:11 the angel appeared to some shepherds who were out in the field, and he told them that “today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior who is Christ the Lord.” At the temple later in Luke 2 “a righteous and devout man named Simeon” saw the eight-day old Jesus and he declared that a “light for revelation to the Gentiles had come and for the glory of Your people Israel.” John the Baptist, Luke 3, preached the message in Luke 3:4, he said, “Make ready and prepare the way for the Lord.” Luke 3:22, at Jesus's baptism, a voice comes out of heaven, that of God the Father saying, “You are My beloved Son, in You I am well pleased.” Satan implicitly acknowledged that Jesus was the Son of God in the temptation seen in Luke 4:3-9. When Jesus cast out demons and unclean spirits, they had no difficulty recognizing who He was. Luke 4:34, “I know who You are, the Holy One of God,” says one of those demons. Luke 4:41, “Demons also were coming out of many, shouting and saying, You are the Son of God.” Even Jesus Himself up to this point has been engaging in a number of works which testify to His identity. And He was using expressions through His speech which pointed to His identity, like in Luke 5:24 He says, “So that you may,” this is the scene of the paralytic on the bed, “So that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, He said to the paralytic, I say to you, Get up and picking up your stretcher go home.” Or Luke 6:5 our Lord said, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” Luke 6:46, “Why do you call Me Lord, Lord and not do what I say?” There are additional texts that relate to His being able to actually forgive sin, which point to His deity ultimately.

So, for us as we've been reading Luke's Gospel, as we've been hearing Luke's Gospel preached each and every Sunday, we have been let in on a secret about what's already been laid out for us up to this point in Luke's Gospel, which is that Jesus is not merely a man, He's not merely a teacher, He's not merely a healer. No, He is the promised Messiah of Israel, He is the Son of Man, He is the Son of God, He is the light who has come into the world, He is God in flesh. He is clearly portrayed in these first 8½ chapters as having entered into His creation to walk among men and to offer Himself up as a solution for man's sin problem. But Jesus's disciples who saw everything that we are now reading 2,000 years later and saw it all take place in front of them in real time; they were much slower to process the reality and the truth of Jesus's identity. It wasn't clicking as quickly for them as it does for us who have the benefit of reading these accounts in the comfort of our home, seated at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee nearby.

One example we've seen of the disciples' delay in figuring out who Jesus was, it took place not long ago in our study of Luke, back in Luke 8 and the scene involving the stilling of the storm. Recall the scene, they are crossing over the Sea of Galilee, the disciples are panicking over this tempest that has brewed on the sea, this violent storm, and after Jesus quiets the storm, the sea becomes like glass and we're told in Luke 8:25 that they “were fearful and marveled saying to one another, Who then is this that He commands even the winds and the water and they obey Him.” The twelve posed that question, “Who then is this?” Herod in Luke 9:9 asked, “Who is this man about whom I hear such things?” It is now into that context that Jesus is asking His own disciples in verse 18, “Who do the crowds say that I am?”

Now Jesus wasn't asking that question, “Who do the crowds say that I am,” for His own benefit. Jesus, we know, is the omniscient God of all, fully aware of every thought that every member of that crowd had at any point in their lives, including in this very moment. Rather what Jesus was doing by asking this question, “Who do the crowds say that I am”, was setting up this contrast between the crowd's incorrect assessment of who He was and is and the correct assessment of the twelve as to who He actually was. That is highly pertinent for today because that same contrast and that same divide still exists in the year 2026; where you have the world's incorrect assessment of who Jesus is. He's a fun guy with an interesting personality, whatever the quote was at the beginning, which is in contrast with what God's Word says about who He actually is. More on that a bit later.

For now, the disciples needed to give their answer to Jesus's question which they did in verse 19. It says, “And they answered and said, John the Baptist and others say Elijah but others that one of the prophets of old has risen again.” Now if that language sounds familiar and especially fresh in your minds it's because we crossed a bridge into similar language just a couple of weeks ago back in Luke 9:7-8. If you look up the page at Luke 9:7 it says, “Now Herod the tetrarch heard of all that was happening and he was greatly perplexed because it was said by some that John had risen from the dead.” That would be a problem for Herod who was the one who had John beheaded. Verse 8, “and by some that Elijah had appeared and by others that one of the prophets of old had risen again.” Both Herod's response there and the response of the crowds in our text today tell us that there were three pervading theories at the time of who this Jesus was, pretty popular theories. The first is that He was the recently beheaded John the Baptist whose head had suddenly become attached back to His neck and He was now walking the earth doing these miracles and such. The second theory was that He was the prophet Elijah who long ago in II Kings 2 had been taken away in a chariot but now had apparently appeared in the person of Jesus in fulfillment of Malachi 4 which says, Malachi 4:5, “I'm going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and awesome day of Yahweh.” The third theory is that Jesus was one of the prophets of old. Matthew 16 surmises that it could have been Jeremiah. Whoever it was under this theory, if you look here at Luke 9:19 He wasn't only just John the Baptist or Elijah or one of the prophets of old, but look at the last couple of words, that “He had risen again.” That's a neat little window into the fact that even in Old Testament times there was a theology of resurrection for Old Testament saints. Job 19:25, “As for me I know that my Redeemer lives and at the last He will rise up over the dust of the world.”

In response to Jesus's question in Luke 9:18 the disciples answered in verse 19 saying, “John the Baptist, others say Elijah but others that one of the prophets of old has risen again.” Note Jesus got His answer here from the disciples about what the crowds were saying and He simply moved on. He didn't pry into their answer, He wasn't interested in dabbling in false theories that were floating around out there about who He was, rather He was interested in getting to the truth. And so, moving on He asked His disciples another question in verse 20.

Our first point was THE PERSON OF CHRIST PROBED. If you are taking notes as we look at verse 20 now, here is our second point, THE PROMINENCE OF CHRIST PRONOUNCED. Verse 20, “And He said to them,” speaking to the disciples here, “but who do you say that I am? And Peter answered and said, The Christ of God.” Now note that Jesus's question wasn't aimed at any one man as He asked that question in verse 20, “Who do you say that I am.” It wasn't aimed at any one specific member of the twelve. No, the text clearly tells us that He addressed this question to “them,” He said to them. Not only that, that word “you.” when He says, “Who do you say that I am,” that's a plural form. So, Jesus is really saying something like, Who do you men say that I am, Who do you guys say that I am. If He were down South, Who do y'all say that I am. That's the sense of the word here. The question is addressed to the group, to every individual man who made up the twelve. Characteristically as we see at various different points in the Gospel, Peter speaks up, he speaks up on behalf of the group. “Peter answered,” Luke tells us, “and said, The Christ of God.”

So the crowd got it wrong, the crowds got it wrong but the disciples with Peter here speaking on their behalf they got it right. Jesus is the Christ of God. Not merely a man, not merely a carpenter, a Jewish rabbi or a faithful rabbi or a faithful religious leader or this guy with an extraordinarily impressive personality. I mean, I hear that description and it makes me bubble. I'm thinking of some like hacky-sack playing college guy in the quad, that's their view of Jesus. No, Jesus is the Christ, He is the Anointed One, He is the long-promised Messiah of Israel, He's the One who had come from the line of David and who would one day occupy the throne of David, He is the special set apart One by God, long prophesied. And note, it's THE Christ, THE Christ of God, not a Christ, not one of many Christs. THE Christ, the singular Christ, the one and only Christ, the only possible option for being the Christ. The same sense comes through, by the way, in Mark's version of this account of Peter's confession. In Mark 8:29 Jesus asked His disciples, “But who do you say that I am?” There Mark records, “Peter answered and said to Him, You are The Christ.”

Note the contrast. The crowds were saying that Jesus is either John the Baptist or Elijah or a prophet like Jeremiah, but Peter on behalf of the twelve is saying no, You are the Christ. Not only the Christ, “the Christ,” he says, “of God.” Those two additional words, “of God” add this incredibly important additional detail; that namely that Peter was confessing that Jesus was not only the Messiah of Israel, but the anointed Messiah sent by God Himself. The very Anointed One, the very promised Messiah who God had said He would send and now in fulfillment of Scripture He actually had sent. Taking it even a step further than that, in Matthew's account of this scene in Matthew 16:16 it's recorded this way. “And Simon Peter answered and said, You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” That second clause, the Son of the Living God, was a confession, not only that Jesus is the Messiah but that He is God. Peter, on behalf of the twelve was affirming, when he said that Jesus is the Son of God, that Jesus is one in essence, one in nature, coequal, co-eternal with God Himself. Peter was confessing in that scene that Jesus was more than simply a resurrected prophet of old, that He was not John the Baptist and not Elijah and not Jeremiah, but he was confessing that Jesus is the Son of the Living God, the eternal Son of God, God Himself, “the One who angels worship” as the author of Hebrews says in Hebrews 1:6. The One before whom “every knee will one day bow” as Paul says in Philippians 2:10. In Matthew's account, Jesus replied to Peter's confession in Matthew 16:17 saying, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you but My Father who is in heaven.”

Back to our text, Luke 9:20, “Jesus said to them,” the twelve, “But who do you say that I am? Peter answered, You are the Christ of God.” The Christ of God, the long-promised deliverer of Israel, sent by God and in fact God Himself. As we've been studying and reading again in our time in Luke up to this point, we've seen these realities come through Luke's pen as the Spirit moved him. Again, just think of Gabriel's words to Mary in Luke 1:32-33. We spent so much time on this passage because of all the theological meat that is on this bone. Luke 1:32, “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever and there will be no end of His kingdom.” But now fast forward to Luke 9 and for the first time in this Gospel we have a record of Jesus's disciples really starting to get it as to who this man, the God-Man, was in their midst.

But even then, as the Lord's disciples, the twelve, came around to this understanding we note that the Lord had to give them a warning, in fact it's even a firm warning about what their expectations of the Messiah ought to be and what He was actually there to do and how that was going to correct how they viewed the promised Messiah. See, these men of Israel in the first century, when they were thinking of the Messiah who was to come, they had a very specific framework in view. They were thinking of Scripture passages like Jeremiah 49:10, that “the scepter shall not depart from Judah nor the ruler's staff from between his feet until Shiloh comes and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.” They were thinking of passages like Isaiah 11:4, “He will strike the earth with the rod of His mouth and with the breath of His lips He will put the wicked to death. Also, righteousness will be the belt about His loins and faithfulness the belt about His waist.” They were thinking of passages like Jeremiah 23:5, “Behold the days are coming, declares Yahweh, when I will raise up for David a righteous branch and He will reign as king and prosper.” They were thinking of Jeremiah 33:15, “In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous branch of David to branch forth, and He shall do justice and righteousness on the earth. In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will dwell in security.”

Sure, there is that whole suffering servant description of the coming Messiah in Isaiah 53 that He would have no stately form or majesty, that He would be despised and forsaken of men, that He would be a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, that He would be stricken and smitten of God, that He would be pierced through for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. But by Jesus's day the commonly held view in many of the extra Biblical Jewish writings of the time was that the coming Messiah was going to be this conquering King. This conquering King who is going to rebuild their temple and put them back in their land after they had been dispersed to other lands in captivity and all the while destroying Israel's enemies. That was the commonplace expectation of first century Jews living at this time, that the Messiah when He came would be this regal figure who would make things right and level the playing field and destroy Israel's enemies. You can imagine that these disciples, having just heard their spokesman, Peter, confess that Jesus is the Christ of God, the Messiah, there might have been an element there where they were excitedly thinking to themselves that victory and power and authority are within reach. It's all on the horizon. Here we are, these righteous ones, the ones that are in Jesus's inner circle and we are about to start ruling and reigning with Him, like tonight, tomorrow.

Right away He needed to reshape their thinking, and He needed to re-calibrate their thinking and that's exactly what He did in these next couple of passages. He turned their expectation of who they thought the Messiah would be and what He had come to do on their head. If you are a notetaker here is our third point, THE PASSION OF CHRIST PROPHEISED. Look at verses 21-22, it says, “But He warned them and directed them not to tell this to anyone saying, The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and be raised up on the third day.” Now right away note that in verse 21, these are very firm words of warning from Jesus to the twelve. The way this is phrased, this is a strict set of orders He is giving them, these are almost like words of rebuke. He is telling them they ought to remain absolutely silent. He warned them and directed them not to tell this to anyone. But why? Why swear them so sternly to silence? Well, the Jews of this time are not only ready for their Messiah to come as they conceived of Him as a political ruler, as a conquering king. They were ready for Him to come so that they could throw off the shackles of their Roman rulers right away. See, the Jews of this time despised the fact that they were in subjection to the Romans and they were desperate for deliverance. They were in this perpetual state of readiness to get behind any man who might give them a chance to throw off the shackles of Rome. So, with this powder keg-like political climate as a backdrop, the reality is that if Jesus had, at this point, been embraced widely, at this very moment, according to conventional wisdom of who the Messiah would be and what He would come to do. He would have been embraced by the crowds on a wrong set of premises and on a wrong set of grounds where the people would have embraced Him as some sort of political or military rebel. In doing so they would have completely missed the point of His teaching all along.

So here in Luke 9:21 He warned them and directed them not to tell this to anyone, namely that He was and is the Christ of God because if anyone got news of that, they would put the robe on Him and give Him the scepter and say you go fight Rome and be our military general. He is about to tell us that His actual cause was to go to Jerusalem and to die on behalf of sinners. He couldn't let this happen; He couldn't let the mission get off course. He was there to go to Jerusalem as we're going to see later in Luke 9. And so, He lets them in on this in Luke 9;22, saying, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and scribes and be killed and be raised up on the third day.” His mission wasn't to become a military general, staging a military coup. His mission was to do just this, what we see in verse 22.

Now this is the first direct mention, by the way, in Luke's Gospel by Jesus or anyone else that He would, in fact, suffer and die and rise. There have been little hints of it and traces of it up to this point. When Mary and Joseph encountered that old man Simeon back in Luke 2 you might remember that Simeon told Mary that a sword would pierce through her own soul as well. Could be an allusion to the fact that her eight-day old baby boy would one day die. Luke 5:35, Jesus Himself spoke of a day when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, a couched reference to His future death. But what we have here in Luke 9:22 is a full-blown prediction and statement by Jesus Himself of His forthcoming passion, His coming days of suffering and rejection as well as His coming death and His coming resurrection. He began with a prediction of His coming sufferings, identifying Himself as the Son of Man here in verse 22, a title indicating His deity, His Godness and also His affiliation, association with man. He said that He must suffer many things. By the way, this is the first of a few different suffering Son of Man statements in the Gospel of Luke. You could also jot down Luke 9:44, “For the Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men.” And Luke 17:25, “But first He must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation.” Of course, our Lord would suffer. Luke 22 records that after His final meal with His disciples and His prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane our Lord was betrayed by Judas, one of the twelve. He was arrested, He was denied three times by Peter, He was tried by the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious tribunal. He stood before Pilate, the Roman governor, then He stood before Herod, the Judean king. He was whipped and He was flogged and mocked and blasphemed before His ultimate crucifixion and resurrection. Luke 24:26, this is after His resurrection, Jesus says, “Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?”

Well, here in Luke 9:22 Jesus said that He would not only suffer many things but that He would be, next he says, “Rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes.” Those three groups made up what was known as the Sanhedrin and the Jewish religious ruling body of the day. These were the religious elite; these were the people whose job on paper was to promote and protect the people's worship of the living God. They were steeped in the Scriptures, and they would have known that the people were anticipating the coming Messiah, and they should have seen from a mile away that the Messiah was in their midst. But they were blinded, spiritually blinded, blind guides, Jesus called them. And though they were the trained and ordained theologians of the day, the professionals you could say, they didn't have ears to hear or eyes to see and so they rejected the Messiah who God sent for them.

Our Lord not only suffered and was rejected, but next Luke refers to the fact, or Jesus does, that He would be killed. “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed.” You know Jesus during His ministry, we'll see soon in Luke 11, called out His own people the Jews for killing the prophets whom God had previously sent to them. Now He is saying to the twelve that history would repeat itself and they were going to kill Him, too and we know that happened, of course. Luke 23:46, “Jesus crying out with a loud voice said, Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit. And then having said this He breathed His last.” Jesus, the author of life was indeed killed. But the story doesn't end there because we know, Luke 9:22 and elsewhere in the Scriptures, that He would be raised up on the third day. Death, in other words, would not be the end of the story. The cross, which we encounter later in the Gospel account, would not be the end of the road for our Lord. Rather, on the third day the Son of Man would be raised up, resurrected back to life. So yes, He would suffer and yes, He would die, dying for the sins of the world, but He would rise up three days later. He'd be resurrected, and through that resurrection He would prove and certify His claims to be the Messiah, the Son of God, the Son of Man. He would prove His ability to forgive sin, to grant eternal life and to set up His one day coming kingdom.

In answer to the question that was posed at the beginning, Who is Jesus? He is not who the world says He is, we can say that. He is not what different religious groups say He is. He is not what you thought He was or what you would imagine Him to be. He is not a figment of your imagination; He is not bound by your imagination. Who He is, is who He is. Who He is, is how He affirmed Himself to be when Peter said to Him here in our passage, the Christ of God. Jesus is God's promised solution to man's sin problem. Jesus is the One who is going to come back again one day and establish His kingdom on the earth. He will one day, we're told in Revelation 19, wear many diadems on His head as He returns to this earth as the King of kings. But first what He had to do was wear a crown of thorns to get there. First, He had to go to the cross. As we're going to see next week when we get into Luke 9:23, He expects His followers, His subjects, Christians to take up their cross as well. Look at Luke 9:23, “And He was saying to them all, If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me.” To be a follower of Christ, in other words, is not merely about intellectual assent, it's about life pattern. It's about following the One who went to the cross for you, following the One who died for you, following the One who rose for you, giving all aspects of your life to Him, every corner, every nook and cranny to Christ.