Denying Jesus

Mark 14:66-72.  This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on January 10, 2021.

In Matthew 10:32-33, Jesus says, “Whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven.  But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven.”  Jesus puts confessing him and denying him in opposite positions, and declares that our present actions toward him will affect his future action towards us.

It is a sobering thought that we will all stand before the Lord, Jesus Christ, and through him give account to God the Father for our lives.  In that day, all the things of this earth will be absent, and it will only matter what our Creator thinks.  It will only matter what I did with Jesus in this life.  Did I deny him, or did I confess him?

Even though God will hold us accountable, He is gracious and merciful.  Our passage today involves the Peter, the disciple of Jesus, denying Jesus three times.  In doing so, he helps us to see the mercy of God to those who are worthy of punishment, but have repented of their sins, picked up their cross, and have followed Jesus.  Praise God that we are not shackled to our worst moments in this life.  Through Jesus, our greatest failures can be forgiven. 

Now, let’s look at our passage.

Peter denies Jesus three times

No doubt, Peter would describe this as the worst day of his life.  Everything that he had been doing for three and a half years was now going up in smoke, and he was powerless to do anything about it.  The worst part of it will be that he was unable to stand by the Lord in his darkest hour.

So, we have Peter in the courtyard of the high priest’s compound warming himself by a fire along with servants and soldiers of the high priest.  The interrogation and trial of Jesus appears to be on a balcony of some sorts.  They cannot hear and see all of the proceedings, but Peter is able to keep tabs on what is happening to Jesus. 

In this situation, Peter is confronted by a servant girl and then later by several other servants.  There is a contrast here of the strength of Jesus and the weakness of his disciples.

Jesus is confronted by the strong “bulls” of Israel.  They are the ones who have great power within Israel, even with being dominated by Rome.  However, Peter is confronted by a servant girl, and other servants of the high priest.  I do not mean to diminish his situation, but rather to point out the contrast.  Peter was not ready for such a confrontation with the big boys, but neither was he ready for this chance to cut his teeth on taking a stand for Jesus.  Our Lord is ready and able for all that our enemy can throw at him, but we are weak and in need of strength, and spiritual growth.  How wonderful it is that our gracious Lord sticks with us and enables us to grow stronger by his Holy Spirit and through our failures.

We are told in the other gospels that this servant girl was the one who was in charge of the door.  Having seen Peter fairly well at the door, she recognizes him as one of the followers of Jesus.  Peter is confronted several times by her on his relationship to Jesus.  The first confrontation is, “You also were with Jesus of Nazareth.”  The second is actually spoken to the group of servants, “This is one of them.”  The third confrontation comes from the group and clearly involves multiple accusation from “those who stood by.”  Mark records one of them recognizing his accent, “Surely, you are one of them for you are a Galilean and your speech shows it.”  It was no secret that the followers of Jesus were Galilean- Judas seems to be the only exception to this.  In John 18:26, we are told that one of the servants happened to be a relative of the man, Malchus, whose ear Peter had cut off with a sword.  “Did I not see you in the garden with him?” 

After each of these three confrontations, Peter denies Jesus instead of confessing his relationship with him.  To deny is to reject the claim of something that is stated, and in this case, thereby rejecting Jesus himself.  He disowns Jesus as his acquaintance, friend, or teacher, and thereby, he becomes guilty of the actions Jesus had warned them of earlier in Matthew 10.  Peter should have confessed Christ.  To confess is to speak the same as, or agree with someone or something.  The statements that Peter is confronted with are true, but he refuses to agree with them (speak the same thing as).  However, because they are statements of relationship, Peter refuses to confess Christ as his Lord and Teacher.

Clearly the servant girl is not physically intimidating, but she can notify the larger group and get Peter arrested too.  It is amazing how people who have very little natural power in this life can suddenly have great power over our choices because of the situation.  Peter’s fear is the true source of her power over him.

We don’t know what is going through Peter’s mind fully.  Perhaps, he intends only to nip it in the bud at the first denial.  Perhaps, he justified it because he was finding out what would happen to Jesus.  Regardless of his justification, there can be no justification for refusing to stand with Christ and denying a relationship with him.  “I do not know this man of whom you speak!” 

As if this wasn’t bad enough, Peter even invokes a curse and swears that he is not lying.  The KJV and the NKJV say that “he began to curse and swear.”  Cursing and swearing here is not cussing with vulgarities and profanities.  He is actually using a curse formula to back up the truth of his statements.  This is similar to our childhood years when we might say to someone regarding our veracity, “Cross my heart, hope to die, poke a needle in my eye.”  Clearly, we were being hyperbolic when we said that- I know of no one who had a needle poked in their eye when it was found out that they lied.

Swearing is similar.  We might say, “I swear on my mother’s grave!”  In Israel, it was common to swear on the altar or the temple, etc.  It was a way of making a kind of informal affidavit that others could hold you to.

We are never told to use a curse formula to back up our statements, and Jesus warned us not to swear by anything either.  Rather, he tells us that we are to let our yes be yes and our no be no.  What a different world this would be if we would operate in such a fashion.  Truthfulness is passé.  Only people who are prone to lying feel the need to swear and invoke curses on themselves in order to get others to believe them.  Of course, Peter is lying now.

By his own words and by his own judgment, Peter is condemning himself eternally.  How could he stand before God with such evidence against him?  These are the kinds of things that would stand against us before God on that day, not to mention that even our thoughts and the schemes of our heart can be brought against us as evidence.

Mark tells us that the rooster crowed for the second time at this point.  Luke tells us that, even as Peter was swearing that he was telling the truth, the rooster crowed the second time.  The gravity of the moment sinks in to Peter as he hears the rooster crow, and then, as Luke records, he looks up to see Jesus looking at him.  Jesus who is in his darkest hour and is even then being accused by others looks over and locks eyes with Peter for a moment.

The crowing of the rooster and the look of Jesus stirs up Peter’s memory.  What seemed like an eternity ago in the upper room, Jesus had told him that he would do this.  He had vehemently denied that he would leave Jesus, and here he was just as vehemently denying Jesus.  Peter is broken emotionally, leaves the area, and weeps bitterly.

It is difficult to come face to face with the weakness of our flesh, especially when we are insistent on seeing ourselves stronger than we are.  However, there is a contrast here between Peter and Judas.  Both are weak in the flesh and fail to stand with Jesus.  However, Peter truly desired to stand with Jesus, and is being tripped up by his flesh.  He has not fallen so as to be beyond recovery.  Judas, on the other hand, did not desire to stand with Jesus, and his flesh leads him to destruction.  God knows our hearts and aids those who are weak and yet still desire Him.

Peter’s mistakes

It would be good for us to pay attention to Peter’s mistakes because they are our mistakes too.

Peter kept his distance from Jesus out of fear instead of courageously choosing to remain by him.  He let his fear of arrest, and the subsequent bodily harm, separate him from Jesus.  He still believes in Jesus, but he can no longer follow Jesus where he is going.  This is also symbolic of a spiritual issue that we must all face.  Just hours before, Jesus had led Peter to a place of prayer and asked him to pray with him.  Notice that Jesus did not ask them to pray for him.  His intention all along was that they would pray for themselves and the coming trial.  Peter’s failure to pray in the garden is directly connected to his failure to confess Jesus in the courtyard.  His failure in private led to his failure in public.  His spirit was willing, but his flesh was weak.

Christ is calling us into the Word of God, and into a relationship of prayer.  This is a place where we can wrestle with our flesh and fears before the One who loves us.  When we neglect to shorten the distance between us and Jesus through the communion of reading his word and prayer, we are then at the mercy of our flesh and its inability to follow Jesus.  It is not enough to be a Christian superficially.  We must draw near to Christ in our hearts privately before we will ever be able to stand with him publicly.

A second mistake is that he ends up in the wrong company.  The separation from Jesus puts Peter in a group that will not help him grow spiritually.  They do not believe in Jesus.  Now, it is one thing to be surrounded by unbelievers when you are with Jesus, or surrounded by the enemies of Christ when he is with you. It is quite another to be on our own.  To stick with Jesus was to incur suffering, but to stick with the crowd was to be pulled into sin.  Hanging with the wrong crowd will always corrupt good morals and good decisions.  This connects to his third mistake.

Peter had shrunk back from suffering, but even worse, he was willing to say, or do, anything in order to avoid it.  This is where we all are in our flesh.  We do not want to suffer in this life.  It was important for Peter and the other disciples- and us- to come face to face with the reality that they were incredibly weak in the face of physical suffering.  This is precisely why Jesus sends us the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is not a guarantee that our flesh will never get the better of us.  Rather, He is a guarantee that God is with us.  He also convicts us of the right course of action, and then empowers us to follow through.  The empowering of the Holy Spirit is not as we would like in our flesh.  In many video games, a person may gain an item that strengthens them.  Typically, there is a sound or obvious action that lets them know that they are now powered up, or invincible.  The Holy Spirit does not empower in such a way.  Rather, He empowers us as we listen and step out in faith.  Like Peter stepping out of the boat, it may seem foolish, but if God directs us then we can trust Him to support us.

Peter made many mistakes and he sinned grievously.  We can surely relate.  Let us remember the love of Jesus for Peter that later found him fishing on the sea of Galilee.  Peter was forgiven of his sins, even denying Jesus, because he was repentant and turned towards Jesus, not away.  Let us be thankful that the warning of denying Jesus before men is not about an unpardonable sin, but about something that can be repented of, that can be washed away, and can be forgiven.

Denying Audio