I am going to take a slightly different tack with today’s message. Normally, we approach each section of scripture and look at it’s applications. But today, we come to a large passage that when you look at each section in detail at first seems to contain a variety of unrelated stories in the life of Jesus. However, the more I looked at it, the more I became convinced that verses 7 through 37 all speak to the same issue and so at least initially they should be looked at as a whole in order to understand the bigger picture that Luke is trying to express.
The big picture is really framed by a question, and the question is stated by Jesus in vs. 20, “who do you say that I am?” That’s really the million dollar question, isn’t it? For two thousand years that has been the question of the ages, the question that everyone must answer, and the question we will all one day be held accountable to God for how we answered it.
And as Luke presents that question, he is also answering the question by describing four different events. At first they may seem unrelated, but in actuality they are all connected by this question: “who do you say that I am?” I think that by looking at these events, we might find our answer to that question in one of the four examples.
The first event is found in vs. 7. Herod the Tetrarch has heard about Jesus. Specifically, the text indicates that he heard about what Jesus was doing; healing and performing miracles, and preaching a gospel of repentance. And it says when Herod heard the news about Jesus he became perplexed. The reason he became concerned was because some people were saying that Jesus was John the Baptist who had risen from the dead. Others suggested that He was Elijah come back to life. Still others, that it was another prophet of old who had risen from the dead and was performing these great works.
In vs. 9, “Herod said, “I myself had John beheaded; but who is this man about whom I hear such things?” And he kept trying to see Him.” Notice the question that Herod asks, “Who is this man about whom I hear such things.” It’s a variation on the same question asked by Jesus later in vs. 18, when Jesus says, “who do people say that I am?” Herod is the first example of someone who considers that question.
Now notice who this man Herod is. He is the Herod the tetrarch, son of Herod the Great, the notoriously evil king who lived during the time when Jesus was born. Herod the Great was the same one that had all the children two years and under killed in the region of Bethlehem when Jesus was born because He was afraid of the prophecy told him by the wise men, that they were seeking the king of the Jews. That was the father, and the son was just as evil a man as his dad had been.
Herod the tetrarch was the one who had John the Baptist locked up because he told Herod that he was wrong to take his brother’s wife. His wife wanted to have John killed, but Mark 6 tells us that “Herod was afraid of John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he kept him safe. And when he heard him, he was very perplexed; but he used to enjoy listening to him.” There is that word again, perplexed. It means to be at a loss, to be confused, not knowing what to believe. We might use the phrase today, “he is clueless.” That seems to be the dominant characteristic of Herod. He was like those spoken of in 2Tim. 3:7, “always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”
But interestingly, it says he liked to listen to John. Herod was content to listen to the message about Jesus. He was content to have a discussion about Jesus. He was curious, and I imagine he would really have liked to see some miracle. He was willing to be entertained, to be intellectually stimulated. But Herod was a king and his agenda was to further his own kingdom, so he was not about to bow down to Christ. Herod was not about to confess that Jesus outranked him. He wasn’t about to worship Him. And Herod is like a lot like some people that come to church. They may have an interest in Christianity and may be willing to participate in a discussion about Jesus. They may be attracted to some ideas espoused in Christianity. They may find certain aspects of Christianity entertaining. They may be attracted by the supernatural. But ultimately, they are not willing to bow down to Him, to follow Him. They are like King Agrippa, another king who enjoyed hearing Paul preach, but put him off until a more opportune time. They are almost Christians, they show varying degrees of interest, but remain unconverted.
Listen, there is nothing more dangerous than to come and hear the preaching of God’s word, and feel the conviction of the Holy Spirit, and leave the service without making a decision for God. The devil tells you that later on you can think about this further, and maybe tomorrow would be a good day to make a decision for Jesus Christ. But tomorrow never comes. In Luke 23, Herod finally has his chance, Jesus comes to his palace before His crucifixion, and it says that Herod was glad to finally get the chance to ask Jesus a bunch of questions. But the text says that Jesus doesn’t answer him. He knows Herod’s heart has hardened. And it says that Herod and his men reviled and mocked Jesus. You better not put off the question of who Jesus is. If you deny Him as Lord of your life today, there is no guarantee that you will be able to change your mind tomorrow. You are either for Him or against Him.
The second event Luke records shows another group of people and their response to the same question. It’s the familiar story of Jesus feeding the 5000. The multitudes followed Jesus into a desolate place near Bethsaida where He was really trying to be alone with His apostles, and as He preached and healed those who were sick, the day starts to come to a close. And the disciples tell Jesus that He should send the people away while it was still daylight so that they could find something to eat and a place to stay.
It’s a very familiar story, so I am not going to exegete every detail of the feeding now. We may go into the specifics of this event later. But the key point of it is this, maybe as many as 10,000 or more people are fed by Jesus and the disciples from just 5 loaves and 2 fish. And after the crowd has eaten and gone home, and they have picked up the leftover food into baskets, Jesus asks the disciples another variation of the same question. He says, “who do men say that I am?” He is obviously referencing the multitude that He just fed with this great miracle. The disciples had helped him in serving the people. They had been interacting with the multitude all afternoon. And now Jesus asks “who do these men say that I am?”
It’s about 2 years now into Jesus’ ministry. And Jesus has been preaching all over Galilee. It’s obvious He has wisdom that no one can answer. He has a message that even the Pharisees have to recognize is from God. And He has performed every conceivable type of miracle of compassion, from delivering demon possessed people to raising the dead, giving sight to the blind. Furthermore, He does so over and over again, countless times. Just that afternoon, with a crowd of over 10,000 people there must have been dozens if not hundreds of people cured as implied in vs. 11. So there has been ample opportunity, and ample evidence by now as to who He is.
The disciples answer in vs. 19, some people say you are “John the Baptist, and others say Elijah; but others, that one of the prophets of old has risen again.” Pretty much the same answer that Herod had given. There doesn’t seem to be a consensus among the people, in spite of 2 years of public ministry and countless miracles attesting to His deity. After all this time the majority are still spiritually blind.
One thing that we should have learned by now in our study of Luke, is that the miracles that Luke records Jesus doing always have a spiritual significance beyond the immediate physical need. And the primary significance of this miracle, especially in light of what Luke is trying to present here, is that Jesus is the bread of life. He is the source of life. The multitude were willing to concede that Jesus was a prophet, that He was able to teach them about life and miraculously provide the food that sustains life, but they could not understand that He was the source of life. That He was the Creator of all life and therefore deserved their worship.
I’m afraid that a lot of evangelical Christians fall into this group in some ways. They fail to really understand that Jesus is the bread of life; the source of life, not just a means to a better life here and now. The popular but incorrect view of many in the church today is that the Christian life is like a banquet, and God has given us all these things to taste and enjoy, and Jesus is the maitre’d that serves us at the banquet of life. I know that very few would admit to that kind of theology, but when you really consider the popular one dimensional view of Christianity then it becomes apparent that Christ is serving them, rather than them serving Him. They are seeking the gifts of the kingdom, but misunderstanding the Giver. Matt. 16:4 Jesus would eventually rebuke the multitudes for that attitude, saying, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign; and a sign will not be given it, except the sign of Jonah.” The men of Nineveh repented at Jonah’s message. Our generation seeks the fruit of the spirit but are unwilling to repent at the Spirit’s conviction. John 16:8 Jesus said when the Holy Spirit comes He will convict the world of sin.
What Luke is trying to teach us through the miracle of the feeding of the 5000, is not that if Jesus fed 5000 then we can feed 10,000, but he is teaching that Christ is the banquet. Christ is life and the source of life. John 1 says, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of the world.” The Creator of life is so much more to be desired than life. We need to worship Him, for He is the source of life. And when we come to a real understanding of that difference, then we should have no greater purpose than to give our lives in service to Him.
Rather than focusing on bread, we need to focus on the source of all life. Rather than focusing on the material world, we need to focus on the ruler of the world. If we truly believed that He was the source of all things, then we would worship Him by serving Him, and by living for Him and trust Him to provide our needs. But when we our focus is inward, on our appetites, on our desires, on our goals, our ambitions, then we see Christ as no more than a waiter, serving our needs, serving our appetites. Making it possible for us to enjoy what we want. It’s a subtle change of preception that makes all the difference between following Christ, and trying to manipulate the gospel for our own benefit.
At the core of the problem with that kind of view is that in the smallness of our minds, we try to confine God to a one dimensional realm. We try to boil God down to one dimension, focus on only one dimension of His character. But God is not one dimensional. He can’t be reduced to just one characteristic like love, or grace. He is so much more than we can even imagine. And that is where we so often find ourselves struggling. Because if He is just a God of love, then how could He send someone to hell? If He is a God of love, then how could He allow suffering like the storm that just hit the Philippines which may have killed as many as 10,000 people?
We see the multidimensional characteristic of God displayed in the trinity. We can’t understand it. And we constantly run into problems in our theology because we want to separate them and characterize the Triune God in a way that makes us more comfortable, or makes God more palatable to us. But we need to come to the realization that God is the great I AM. He is inscrutable. We cannot see Him or touch Him or quantify Him or dissect Him or examine Him. He is not subject to us in any respect. But rather we need to be subject to Him and who God declares He is.
Moving on, after the disciples replied with the answer of the multitude, then Jesus turns to them and asks, “But who do you say that I am?” Notice something important here. In this third example Jesus is asking His devoted followers the question. He is asking His disciples, even His apostles “who do YOU say that I am?”
And that is the question that Jesus is asking you as well today. Who do you say that Jesus is? Is He your server, or are you His servant? Is He King of your life, or are you still on the throne of your destiny? Have you diminished Him to a small enough role in your life that you can compartmentalize Him, you can keep Him in a little box on a shelf that you pull down on Sundays, or when a crisis comes, but put away when the crisis is over or the workweek starts up? Is Jesus worth forsaking everything for, or only worth a fraction of your time and energies?
Peter answered Jesus, assumedly for all of them, for he was the spokesman for the group. “The Christ of God.” You are the Christ, the Son of God. Christ is the Greek word Christos, which means “anointed One.” It was the title of the Messiah. It occurs 531 times in the New Testament. And it is a full, multidimensional title of Jesus that indicates all that God anointed Him to do. Peter and all the disciples would know very well the full implications of that title. The Messiah had been prophesied many times in the Old Testament and the entire Jewish nation had been looking forward to His appearing for hundreds of years. They were looking forward to the promises that He would fulfill concerning their nation and the world.
Every Jewish child would be familiar with Isaiah 9:6, an important prophecy concerning the Messiah. “For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; and the government will rest on His shoulders; and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness, from then on and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will accomplish this.” What a thrill must have stirred the hearts of the disciples as they heard Peter declare this great truth. And Jesus confirmed Peter’s statement of faith. He said in the parallel account of Matt. 16:17, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.”
Peter and the apostles should be commended for their acceptance of this great truth. Herod didn’t see it. The multitudes didn’t see it. But the Holy Spirit had given insight to the disciple’s blind eyes so that they could see that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God. That is, the very God incarnate, in the flesh standing in front of them.
But yet, even as Jesus blesses Peter for confessing Him, at the same time Jesus knows that their understanding of all that Messiah means was still too limited. They understood the King part, they understood the Deity part, they understood the government aspect. But they failed to connect it to Isaiah 53, which talked about the suffering Savior who would die for the sins of the world. They failed to connect that with the Messiah. 53:5, “But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed.” They did not understand that dimension of the Messiah. And that one dimensional view of the Christ would be a cause of their eventual falling away from Him when He went to the cross. Jesus knows that they still need to see more completely who He is and what He came to do.
That’s why in vs. 21 “He warned them and instructed 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.” Jesus didn’t want them telling the multitudes that He was the Messiah, because He knew their theology was still premature. They didn’t understand the purpose of the Messiah, to bring in first a spiritual kingdom by taking away the sin of man, and making it possible to enter into the kingdom. They didn’t understand that the first phase of the kingdom was a spiritual kingdom and to make that possible, He was going to offer Himself as a sacrifice for sin on the cross.
Then look at the next verse. And this is where I think the purpose of the kingdom is still being missed today. Jesus explains that it is just not Him that is going to the cross, but His disciples have to be prepared to go to the cross as well. And that is an important message of the gospel that is being lost in this one dimensional Christianity that is being taught today. The gospel that says grace means we don’t have to sacrifice anything, that Jesus does all the dying, and He continues in eternity to just serve us so we never have to sacrifice anything ourselves.
But listen to what Jesus says in vs. 23, “And He was saying to them all, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it.”
See, Jesus had been presenting that principle to them for some time now. In the beginning of the chapter Jesus commissioned and sent out the apostles to go to the surrounding villages and preach His message, and to heal and cast out demons in His name. He was teaching them that the kingdom is something not only to receive, but something we are to participate in. Notice also in the feeding of the 5000, Jesus told the disciples who wanted to send the multitude away, “No, you give them something to eat.” They must have been freaked out by that one. Five to ten thousand hungry people and Jesus tells them to feed them. And all they had was 5 loaves and 2 fish. But Jesus wanted them to start thinking about not being served, but serving. And so He blesses the food and starts breaking it and the disciples start handing it out. He gets them serving in the kingdom. And now He presents yet another dimension. Not only does Jesus plan on taking up the cross, but He says His disciples must do the same. They must be willing to lose their life in order to save it.
I wonder how many of you have come to truly understand that point? That you have to be willing to lose your life in order to save it. I don’t know how well that is being articulated today in Christian circles. We’re willing to sing about the cross, but we shy away from laying down our lives for His sake. And the only possible excuse is we must think our lives are more valuable than Jesus’ life. We are willing to lay sin upon sin upon sin on His back, till it’s shredded and bleeding, but we are unwilling to bear even the smallest responsibility that God would ask of us.
We sometimes imagine some sort of theatrical setting, where we are the hero or heroine who are tied to a stake in a great amphitheater, and the villain asks us if we will renounce Christ. And in that imaginary scenario, we believe that we would bravely announce, “No, I will never renounce Christ!” Much like Peter boasted before the cross, “I will never deny you!” But in reality that imagined scenario never happens for us. Instead, a still small voice in your conscience asks, “are you willing to give up Wednesday night for Jesus?” Or are you willing to sacrifice financially for Jesus? Are you willing to step out of your comfort zone and witness for Jesus? Or when God asks you to give up one of your carnal habits, then we cry foul, we call it legalism, and we claim grace which is means nothing more than a license to do what we want to do with no consequences.
Jesus speaks to that kind of one dimensional discipleship in vs. 25, “For what is a man profited if he gains the whole world, and loses or forfeits himself? For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when He comes in His glory, and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.” Is it possible that when the scriptures say that we must confess Jesus as Lord, then Lord means we actually have to submit to Him, to serve Him? I think we underestimate what it means to call Jesus Messiah and Lord. I think it means complete capitulation. God doesn’t want part of us, He wants all of us.
I’m going to mention the fourth event, though I only will make a brief point and we will close. I’m sure we are going to revisit these events over the next couple of weeks. But I want to show you quickly that there is one more response to the question, “Who do you say that I am?” And that is found in vs. 35, at the mount of transfiguration. Jesus took Peter, James and John to a mountain to pray, and suddenly as He was praying, His appearance began to change and His clothes began to shine, and then Elijah and Moses appeared with Jesus.
You better believe Peter and the boys started freaking out, to use the common vernacular. Peter began to babble on about building tabernacles for them all. He didn’t have a clue what to say, so he just started rambling on. And suddenly, a dark cloud formed and overshadowed them. And a voice came out of heaven saying, “This is My Son, My Chosen One; listen to Him!” God Himself spoke from heaven, giving the final answer, the definitive answer to the question, declaring that this Jesus of Nazareth was none other than the Son of God, God incarnate, come in the flesh. And we should listen to Him. I think Peter, James and John got the message. I think they saw first hand that the two greatest prophets, Elijah and Moses, were there, but there was someone here much greater than a prophet. God had come to earth to walk among men, and we should give obeisance to Him.
So who do you say that Jesus is? Is He someone that you have an intellectual interest in like Herod did? Are you curious about Him, perhaps willing to have a discussion about Him? Perhaps you want to see Him do some miracle or see in Him some entertainment value. Or do you see Him like the multitudes, following Him for the bread and fish, following Him for the tangible, earthy material things that you think He might be able to provide, but not really able to understand the spiritual dimension? Are you more interested in the banquet than the One who is the bread of life? Who do you say that Jesus is? Are you like the disciples, who may have had their theology technically correct, but missed the spiritual command to deny yourself and take up your cross? Are you unwilling to set aside the gain of the world for the sake of following Jesus Christ? I hope and trust that you give the right answer today, and not be like Herod, who when He finally got around to see Jesus, had a hardened heart that was no longer interested in the truth.
The question is still being asked of those who would be His disciples today. Who do you say that I am? I pray that your answer is to bow before Him and declare Him Lord and King, the giver of life, and commit to serve Him for the rest of your days.
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