[Note: This sermon expounds Matthew 16:18, returning to the main Matthew series after a period of completing missing sermons on the Beatitudes. Delivered 22 June 1980, Montreal.]
Today we continue our study in the words of our Lord Jesus at Matthew chapter 16. We have completed our study of the Beatitudes, filling in the messages that were previously missing on tape — and in fact, we filled in more messages than were originally missing, so what was a loss turned into a gain. Now we return to Matthew 16, where we had originally left off last year.
I hope that our study of the Beatitudes has made one thing particularly clear: these beatitudes portray for us above all things the character of our Lord Jesus Christ. They reveal what Jesus himself was like, because he never taught us to be what he himself was not. And when we compare ourselves with what is set forth in the Beatitudes, we are often left with a sense of discouragement that after so long in discipleship, we still seem so far from this ideal. It is important to bear one thing in mind: the Beatitudes set before us a goal, a mark. Paul says: "I press towards the mark, not as though I have already attained." You may not yet be perfectly poor in spirit, perfectly meek, perfectly pure in heart — so that no evil thought ever crosses your mind. We have not perfectly attained any of these things. But that is the mark towards which we press, relentlessly and determinedly. You do not become a disciple only after achieving all these things perfectly, which we shall never do in this life. The important thing is that you are on the way, moving in that direction. The Christian way of life is described in Acts as "the way" — a way to walk along, not merely a line to cross. So long as you are moving towards this mark, you can rightly be called a disciple, and you are growing, as a child grows.
Now let us turn to Matthew 16 and consider what is the foundation of the church. Let me read from verse 13 to verse 23 for context. "When Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, 'Who do men say that the Son of Man is?' And they said, 'Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.' He said to them, 'But who do you say that I am?' Simon Peter replied, 'You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.' And Jesus answered him, 'Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.' Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ. From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, 'God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you.' But he turned and said to Peter, 'Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are not on the side of God, but of men.'"
We will concentrate today on verse 18: "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it." It is a difficult passage — not, I think, because of its intrinsic exegetical difficulty, but because theologians have tried to use it as ammunition for their particular dogmatic positions. I plead for the attitude that we come to the Bible with no theological axes to grind, no preconceived ideas, and simply let the word of God speak for itself. When the Bible is used merely as a quarry for proof-texts to defend a position already decided upon, it is being misused, and the non-Christian rightly says: it is all a matter of interpretation, one theologian says this and another says that.
The Catholic and Protestant theologians are precisely on two opposite sides of the fence on this verse and have been going at each other without stopping. The Catholic position is that the rock is Peter, and therefore the church is built upon Peter — which supports the claim that Peter was the first pope. The Protestant position, historically, is that the rock is Christ, not Peter. In support of the Protestant position, the Catholic theologians are in the embarrassing situation that Augustine himself — whom they regard as one of their foremost theological geniuses — declared that the rock here refers to Christ, since he had no intention of defending the papacy and was simply reading the text. So even Augustine, innocent of the papal controversy, read the rock as Christ.
Let us examine both positions carefully and honestly. If the rock refers to Christ, then what is the point of the words "you are Peter" in the same sentence? The connection is lost. The Lord Jesus would simply have said: I will build my church on a rock — he did not need to preface it with "you are Peter." The words "you are Peter, and upon this rock" must have some internal connection, or the first clause is irrelevant. This is the great exegetical difficulty of the position that says the rock is Christ: it leaves the words "you are Peter" hanging in the air with no function.
Martin Luther proposed a variation: the rock refers not to Christ directly but to Peter's confession. The church is built on this rock, namely the confession "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." This at least attempts to connect "you are Peter" with what follows, since it was Peter who made the confession. But it creates further problems. Is the church built on the act of Peter's confession, or on the substance of what he confessed? If on the act of confession — the fact that we confess Christ — then the church is built on our human activity, which is a very unsteady foundation. If on the substance of the confession — the truth that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God — then the rock turns out to be Christ himself after all, and Luther's position collapses back into the simple Protestant view. H.A.W. Meyer, a Protestant scholar, rightly rejects Luther's position as linguistically unacceptable in this context. And in any case, the sentence "you are Peter" does not say "you have spoken a great confession" — there is no reference to the confession itself. It is an argument from silence.
So what about the Catholic position? If Peter is the rock, then would we not expect the Lord Jesus to say: "You are Peter, and upon you I will build my church"? But he does not say that. He says "you are Peter" — the masculine form Petros — "and upon this rock" — now using the feminine form Petra, which means a great rock or cliff, not merely a stone. The two Greek words are not the same. Petros is a piece of rock or stone; Petra is a great foundational rock. This linguistic distinction is the reason Protestant theologians have argued that the reference must shift. Furthermore, Paul explicitly states in 1 Corinthians 3:11: "No other foundation has been laid than that which is laid, which is Christ Jesus." If Christ is the only foundation, the church cannot be built on Peter. And fundamentally, nowhere in the entire New Testament is Peter ever spoken of as the sole foundation of the church. There is simply no such teaching anywhere in scripture.
But we must also acknowledge that Ephesians 2:20 creates a genuine difficulty for the simple Protestant view: Paul says that the household of God "is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone." Paul, having declared that Christ alone is the foundation in 1 Corinthians, here says the church is also built on the apostles and prophets. Is this a contradiction? It appears so, unless we understand what the rock actually refers to. Now in the Old Testament, only God is described as a rock — never a man. Psalm 18 uses two different Hebrew words for rock in describing God; Psalm 31 does the same; 2 Samuel speaks of God as the rock of refuge. In Deuteronomy 32:18 there is the remarkable expression: "the rock that begot you," or "the rock that bore you." A rock does not beget children — yet here the Israelites are described as sons of the rock, born of God. And in the New Testament, Jesus is repeatedly described as the rock: the rock in the wilderness in 1 Corinthians 10:4; the rock of offence in Romans 9:33 and 1 Peter 2:8. Only God, and in the New Testament only Jesus, is called the rock. The position of Peter as rock, or as the sole rock, becomes more and more remote in the light of this evidence. But the question remains: what then is the answer?
# "You Are Peter, and on This Rock I Will Build My Church" — Matthew 16:18 (Part B) — The Divine Nature as the Rock; Living Stones; The Church Built on Love
[Note: This is Part B of the sermon on Matthew 16:18, continuing directly from Part A. Delivered 22 June 1980, Montreal.]
The answer, once understood, makes the problem disappear immediately. The rock refers to the divine nature. In the New Testament, the word rock never refers to a human being in his natural state. Human nature, by very definition, is weak — the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. You are not going to build the church upon the flesh, upon human activity, upon even a human confession or a human act of faith, because human faith is unsteady and wavering. The very passage proves this: Peter, no sooner had he made his great confession, goes on to rebuke Jesus for saying he would go to the cross. Immediately after so grand a declaration of faith, he fails. Are we going to build the church on a man who three times denied Christ? If we were looking for a human foundation, we might more reasonably choose the apostle John, who never denied Jesus and followed him right into the courtyard at the trial. But neither John nor Peter nor Paul — however great — is a secure foundation for the whole church. Human beings fail. And of course, even if it were built on Peter, what happens when Peter dies? "The powers of death shall not prevail against it" — but death has certainly prevailed against Peter, and against Paul, and against John, at least until the resurrection. It is Christ alone who broke the powers of death by rising from the dead.
But — and this is the key — the rock does not refer exclusively to Christ as a person separate from us. It refers to the divine nature, which is perfectly and fully present in Christ and is also imparted to those who are born of God. Consider carefully what the Lord Jesus said. He first addressed Peter by his old name: "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah." Simon Bar-Jonah was Peter's original name — the name he had in his natural, unregenerate state, the name of the flesh. But then in verse 18 the Lord changes the name: "You are Peter." Peter — Petros in Greek, Kephas in Aramaic — was the name given when Peter became a disciple; it was his new name for his new nature. John 1:42 makes this explicit: when Andrew brought Simon to Jesus for the first time, Jesus looked at him and said, "You are Simon the son of John. You shall be called Kephas" — future tense. The transformation had not yet occurred; Peter had not yet received his new nature. But the Lord said you shall be called this — you will become a new person. Mark 3:16 confirms this: "Simon, whom he surnamed Peter." It was a new name for a new person.
What is the new nature? It is described precisely by Peter himself — and this is very revealing — in 2 Peter 1:4: "You have become partakers of the divine nature." Peter is the only person in the New Testament to use the expression "divine nature." And when you realize this, you see that Peter himself perfectly understood what the Lord Jesus meant. The Lord was not saying he would build the church on Simon the man in his natural state. He was saying: you are Peter — you have received, or will receive, this rock-like divine nature — and upon this rock, this divine nature, I will build my church.
This is exactly why, in Deuteronomy 32:18, the extraordinary expression occurs: "the rock that begot you, the rock that bore you." The Israelites are children of the rock — sons born of God who is the rock. And whatever is born of a rock partakes of the rock's nature. What is born of the Spirit is spirit. Those born of God partake of the divine nature. And because God is a rock — eternal, stable, unchanging, immovable — those born of God have this rock-like character in their new nature. This perfectly explains how Paul can say in 1 Corinthians 3:11 that Christ alone is the foundation, and then say in Ephesians 2:20 that the church is also built on the apostles and prophets. There is no contradiction. The church is built on the divine nature, which is fully and perfectly present in Christ, but is also imparted to all who are born of God. The apostles and prophets serve as a foundation not in their human nature — flesh and blood are unstable — but in the divine nature that has been imparted to them. Wherever the word of God is faithfully proclaimed and the divine nature is genuinely at work, the church is being built.
And Peter himself, having understood all this, goes on in his first letter to describe exactly what the Lord meant. In 1 Peter 2:4–5 he writes: "Come to him, to that living stone, rejected by men but in God's sight chosen and precious; and like living stones yourselves be built into a spiritual house." He calls the Lord Jesus "a living stone" — and then calls us living stones as well. Because we now share the same divine nature, we too are living stones, to be built up into a spiritual house. The church is that spiritual house. And the powers of death cannot prevail against it, because what is born of the Spirit is spirit, and spirit is eternal. Those who have the divine nature in them have everlasting life; the gates of Hades cannot overcome it. As 1 John 5:4 states: "Whatever is born of God overcomes the world." 1 John 2:13–14 says: "I write to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one... you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one." And 1 John 4:4: "Little children, you are of God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world."
The powers of Hades include everything opposed to life and to God: the world, the flesh, the evil one, and the false prophets who go about spreading the spirit of antichrist. All these will not prevail against the church that is built on the divine nature. Whatever is born of God overcomes all of these things. So the whole picture — what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3, what he says in Ephesians 2, what Peter says in his letters, what John says in his letters — all fits together perfectly. The church is built upon the divine nature, expressed in Christ and imparted to us.
Now what is the mark of this divine nature? What is its character? John tells us very simply in 1 John 4:8 and 4:16: "God is love." The divine nature is love. The church is built on the divine nature, which finds its expression in love. That is why the Lord Jesus says: "By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, because you love one another." And yet this is precisely where the difficulty begins. Anyone who has tried seriously to love in a Christ-like way immediately knows: the spirit is willing but the flesh is desperately weak. We are selfish in our nature; the flesh continually dominates us. And that is why we live defeated Christian lives.
I look at the church today and I find defeated, miserable people, always with problems, always overcome by the world, always defeated by Satan. It says we overcome the world, but the world has been overcoming us. It says rivers of living water will flow out of the innermost being — but we can barely find drops. We are fighting just to survive, just to keep one little lentil patch green, hoping to have something to show at the day of judgment. Where are the overcomers? And sometimes, if I am honest, I feel very discouraged. I want to climb to some quiet mountain top and ask God: am I talking nonsense? Here I am preaching a gospel of divine revolution in the human soul, and all I can see around me is squabbling, grumbling, endless problems, depression, and people fighting to stay on their feet. We must ask ourselves urgently and honestly: am I living the Christian life as it was meant to be lived? Or am I kidding myself?
The test is simple and it is John's test: does love flow from me? 1 John 3:16 says we are to love one another as he loved us, willing to lay down our lives for one another as he laid down his for us. We can barely bring ourselves to pick up the phone during the week and ask a brother or sister how they are getting on. Let alone lay down our lives. The church — the true church built on the divine nature — is a community where each one pours himself out for the other, where there is this interaction and concern and total commitment of one person to another. That is what Paul describes in his letters as the body. We don't come near to understanding this. But the foundation is there: the divine nature in Christ, imparted to all who are born of God. The question is whether we will allow that nature to do its full work in us — whether we will let God's love flow through us without restraint. That is the challenge, and I found it particularly appropriate to return to this passage now, at the time of our summer camp, as we focus together on building one another up in love.