Shortcuts

     Pastor Jason Brinker at First Baptist Church, Jacksonville, NC, has been taking us through Matthew 16 with the topic "Burn the Ships" for several weeks. Yesterday something hit me that I had never seen before. It's about shortcuts and how awful they can be.
     I lead one of the Life Groups, and last week we were looking at verses 13 through 18, Pastor Jason's focal text for the previous Sunday. I took them back to the beginning of the chapter where the Pharisees and Sadducees tested Jesus by asking him for a sign to prove he was the Messiah. Now, to us Goyim it might seem like any sign would suffice. But to them, only the sign in the book of Daniel would do: he would have to reveal himself by coming in glory on the clouds and establishing his kingdom right then and there.
     What they forgot about (or just ignored) was the other sign in the book of Isaiah: "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and he shall be called Emmanuel." And the other part: "He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." And one more: "They looked on him whom they pierced." They were looking for a conquering king; but he had to come as the suffering servant first. They wanted a shortcut.
     I asked the Life Group which Messiah they thought Peter was referring to when he confessed "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." At first they were a little confused until I reminded them about the Pharisees and Sadducees.Yesterday, we got our answer.
     This Sunday, Pastor Jason went on in the chapter to cover the turn of events when Jesus began explaining to the disciples that he would be going to Jerusalem and would have to suffer and die at the hands of the Elders and Chief Priests but that on the third day he would rise again. Peter took him aside and pretty much raked him over the coals for it, at which point Jesus called him Satan and told him to get behind him. Peter had gone from being a stone with a confession that would be the rock on which Jesus would build his community to a stumbling block to Jesus' purposes. Peter, after all, was obviously thinking like the Pharisees and Sadducees and was looking for a shortcut Messiah.
     One of the things Pastor Jason brought up was how Satan had known since the third chapter of Genesis that this was going to happen, that a son would be born to the line of Adam and Eve whose heel he would bruise at the cost of his head being crushed. This was why Satan came at Jesus in the wilderness, inviting him to make bread from a stone to satisfy what at that point was starvation. He then offered the entire world and all its riches to Jesus if he would bow down and worship Satan; another shortcut.
     Now, Satan is not his name. It's his title and means "Adversary." His name is Lucifer, which means "Light Bearer." Sometimes, Satan speaks to us through others, so Jesus could have been directly addressing Satan, or he may have merely been calling Peter an adversary. In modern English, there is an idiom to "get behind" something or someone in support. I see that application when Jesus tells Peter to get behind him, though I doubt the idiom translates well either in Greek or Aramaic.
     However, the real revelation to me was the association with the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The serpent presented it to Eve as a shortcut to being like God, Lucifer's iniquity. That was the whole point behind the tree; God commanded them not to eat of it because he knew its true meaning. He loved them enough to want their love in return, and true love toward God starts with obedience. Because God gave us a free will to choose right from wrong, and because we like things easy, we look for shortcuts to get what we really want. Look where it's gotten us.