And Jesus responded, “Simon son of Jonah, you are blessed because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father in heaven. (Matthew 16:17)
I have to wonder what Peter thought when Jesus spoke these words to him. Throughout their time together Jesus had often spoken of his Father in familiar, intimate terms; it was clear to anyone listening that Jesus had a relationship with God that was so close as to constitute a kind of unity.
But with these words, it’s as though Jesus was saying to Peter, “You, now, you too! You too have heard, intimately, from the Father; you too have received directly from him.”
For Peter this might have come as a shock, or as a confirmation of something he knew deep down but hardly dared hope could be true.
Certainly, we have no record that God had revealed this truth of Jesus’s identity to Peter in some kind of apocalyptic glory. It’s just something that, in this moment, he seemed to know, perhaps as everything he had seen and heard in Jesus came together in a single moment and formed a picture he recognized.
I’d guess these were pieces he had been mulling over for some time, questions he’d been asking. What Jesus characterized as a revelation from God may have felt, in the moment, like the satisfying click of a logical conclusion.
However it all came together for Peter, Jesus’s words here point to a fundamental principle of the Christian faith: everything we have received came from God.
A Faith We Didn’t Make Up
Throughout history, people have arrived at ideas about God all kinds of different ways. Most basically, they’ve formulated beliefs based on actual spiritual experiences. But we’ve employed plenty of other faculties to reach for the divine too. Aristotle used logic to posit his Unmoved Mover. Greek poets and playwrights drew on legends and local memories of heroes to craft the elaborate mythologies of Olympus.
But the Christian claim is that our stories did not come through human hands in this way, nor were our most precious doctrines formulated using reason and logic. Rather, the truths of our faith were revealed to us by the Father, through the Holy Spirit, acting in the world and giving us what we could not possibly have invented.
(As support for this claim, I call to witness the very strangeness of Christian doctrine. Why a single God who exists in Trinity? Why the Incarnation? The Crucifixion, for heaven’s sake? We do our best to apply logic and reason to all these things after the fact, and still come up short—hence why we argue about doctrine—but it’s hard to believe anyone would actually invent these things whole cloth. A self-sacrificing God does not much fit the patterns of the world.)
The Claims of Christianity
In any case, we do claim this.
We claim that God has revealed himself to us, supremely so in the person of Jesus Christ, who came, lived, died, and rose again within human history—as a Jewish man, born to a young Jewish virgin, during the time of Roman occupation under Augustus Caesar.
We claim this man changed the world, which he manifestly did—say what you will about the followers of Jesus throughout history, they have not left the world the same as they found it. But we claim he has also revealed himself to prophets, who wrote down inspired words in books we call the Holy Bible. We claim he taught us moral precepts and gave us not only a history but a way of interpreting it.
At no point has he left us to figure him out on our own, to grope around in the darkness and hope we will at last make out a shape. Instead, he has come and opened our blind eyes and patiently helped us to see.
Like the healed man in Mark 8, we may initially see “men like trees walking,” but through the work of the Holy Spirit our sight of God grows clearer and clearer, as he wills that it should, because he desires relationship with us and so he has initiated it, introduced himself, and waited on our response.
As Christians, everything we know flows from relationship with God. This is, again, a relationship he initiated.
Like Peter, we may not always understand what we’re seeing and hearing at first. But God is speaking. Through his Scriptures. Through his Son. Through his Spirit. Through events unfolding around us, and through the movements of our hearts.
What This Means
I think it’s worth reflecting on the truth that if you know anything at all about God that is true, you know it because on some level, the Father has revealed it to you. Maybe you feel like you don’t know how to hear from God. And yet here you are, knowing something deep down in your core to be true. How do you know it, if you can’t hear? How did you see that truth, if your eyes are not capable of seeing? And what does it mean about God the Father, if he is taking the time to show you things—to make sure that your heart is able to grasp what he says in his Word, in his life, in your life, in your inner world?
It may seem to you that you only have a mustard seed, but plant it, friend; plant it, water it, wait for it to grow.
This is no small thing; this is the kingdom of heaven come to earth in you.
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This is Part 245 in a series on the Gospel of Matthew, which you can access here. Unless otherwise marked, quotes are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible.
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