It’s possible to admire Jesus and still not know who he is — and Matthew 16 says he is the Son of the living God, not merely a great teacher. In Matthew 16:13–20, Jesus asks his followers who people say he is, and Peter answers with a confession Jesus says came from the Father himself: not one more prophet in a long line, but God come into the world in human flesh. Because Jesus is God in the flesh, every promise the Father made is fulfilled in him — mercy for sin, and the defeat of death. Jesus builds his church on that confession, promising that not even death can overcome it, and he hands his followers the keys of the kingdom: the authority to tell others that heaven and earth are joined in him.

Key Takeaways

• Thinking well of Jesus is not the same as knowing him. Jesus pressed his own followers past the popular answers with a direct question — “But what about you? Who do you say I am?” — because the answer to that question changes everything downstream of it.
• Peter’s answer put Jesus in a category of his own: “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Not a messenger sent on God’s behalf, but God’s own Son — and not a new idea of Peter’s either, but the recognition of what Jesus had been claiming all along by calling himself “Son of Man,” a title drawn from Daniel’s vision of a human figure given the authority and worship that belong to God alone.
• Jesus is not a copy or an impression of God. Scripture presents the Son as perfectly one with the Father, which means that looking at Jesus is looking at God as he actually is — not a likeness of the original, but the original in human flesh.
• Peter didn’t reason his way to that confession — Jesus tells him the Father revealed it. Faith in Christ is something God gives rather than something a person achieves by being clever or spiritually advanced enough.
• Because God came in the flesh, the Father has kept every promise he made in Christ rather than leaving it to us: mercy for sin, a share in our broken human life, and the undoing of our death at the cross and the empty tomb.
• Jesus builds his church on the confession that he is the Son of God, and he promises that not even death can topple what he builds on that foundation — the security of the church rests on who Christ is, not on how steady his followers manage to be.
• Christ hands his followers the keys of the kingdom — the authority to speak his forgiveness out loud to one another. When a Christian declares that forgiveness, it isn’t a kind human opinion; it’s God’s own verdict in heaven.

Ascension on Air is the podcast of Ascension Lutheran Church in Harrisburg. If this episode was meaningful to you, please subscribe, leave a review to help others find the show, and share it with someone who’s still deciding what to make of Jesus.

www.ascensionharrisburg.com