Consider Your King

Consider Your King

Read: Mark 8:31-38

“You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.”

Mark 8:33

“The cross of Christ is the most revolutionary thing ever to appear among men.”

—A. W. Tozer

IN WORD Peter surely should have known better. Other Gospels tell us that he had just confessed Jesus as the Messiah. And in a moment of horribly incongruous thinking, he took Jesus aside and rebuked Him for predicting His own death and resurrection. Did he really believe Jesus to be the Christ? And he still felt it appropriate to rebuke Him?

We’re astounded at Peter’s lack of logic, but we repeat it in our own lives frequently. We also claim Jesus as our Messiah, and unlike Peter, we see the death and Resurrection in hindsight. We have no problem with it; we even celebrate it every Easter. But do we live it? Do we see it as our guiding principle? Do we really understand the difference between the things of God and the things of men?

We avoid the way of the Cross at all costs. Intellectually, we know that Jesus calls us to follow Him on that way, but our natural human instincts pull us in the opposite direction. They pull us strongly, and more often than we like to think, we let them. We are guided by “the things of men” whenever we live without an eternal perspective. When we see ourselves as citizens of the world, rather than citizens of the kingdom of God, we are led to make bad choices. We are too easily governed by the limited perspectives of secular man, when the wealth of God’s wisdom is available to us— and compelling us to see all things with an eternal view.

IN DEED What lasts forever? God, His kingdom, His Word, and the souls of people. Nothing else. Yet when God calls us to invest ourselves entirely in these things, we are sometimes like Peter. We mentally take Him aside and try to persuade Him that He isn’t realistic. We try to tell Him the best way out of our predicaments or the best course for our future. Is Jesus naive about the ways of the world? No, we’re naive about the ways of the kingdom. We’re the ones who need to be reminded to consider the things of God.