(Audio)
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.
We may well wonder whether it is a reasonable thing to ask a human being to think as God does. After all God himself said, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways" (see Isaiah 55:8-9).
Peter hearing that Jesus would have to be killed was akin to him hearing that there would be a second flood. The covenant promise that began to take definitive shape in Noah's rainbow was the same promises that Peter saw being fulfilled in Jesus.
Peter said to him in reply,
“You are the Christ.”
Jesus asked Peter to elevate his thoughts from mere human ways paradigms. God insisted on the value of human life because it was created in his image. Peter knew this. How then could Jesus be allowed to suffer and die? He wasn't yet able to see was that in order for that value to be maximally realized that very value needed to be surrendered in love.
He began to teach them
that the Son of Man must suffer greatly
and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and rise after three days.
We take this statement of Jesus more lightly than Peter because the crucifixion already happened and because we didn't just receive a revelation from the Father himself, that Jesus was the Christ. We have a vague sense of the truth of it, but it isn't fresh in our hearts. But when we realize that the anointed of the Father had to suffer and die we can feel a little of the protest within our own hearts that Peter himself felt. However, we can accept God's plan for Jesus. Not only for Jesus, but every time we feel our hearts protesting in the face of what God chooses to allow we do not have to accept merely human ways of thinking.
"For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ (see First Corinthians 2:16)
The covenant promise is not negated by the death of Jesus. He is the ark the brings us safely through even the flood waters of death. He brings us safely to the solid ground of a new creation where a new and better rainbow shines.
And he who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian, and around the throne was a rainbow that had the appearance of an emerald (see Revelation 4:3).
The invitation to us is to recognize that we have been given the mind of Christ. We do not have to falter when human wisdom fails. We can follow God no matter what.
When the LORD has rebuilt Zion
and appeared in his glory;
When he has regarded the prayer of the destitute,
and not despised their prayer.
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