Wrong Scouting Report

Matthew 16:13-18

INTRODUCTION

Last week we opened this series, Before the Whistle, not in a stadium but in a wilderness. Jesus came up out of the Jordan with water still running off him, and the voice of the Father said, "This is my beloved Son." Then the Spirit led him into forty days of hunger, and the devil showed up in the first series of the game. "If you are the Son of God."

That was the snap count. The enemy called his first play at the line of scrimmage, and he aimed it straight at identity. He always does. If the enemy can get you to question who you are, he never has to work very hard on what you do. Last week we looked at how the enemy always lies about your identity. The truth is, the enemy always lies about everything.

This week we move from the wilderness to a road in northern Israel, where Jesus does something that would get him kicked off most modern pregame shows. He asks his team what people are saying about him.

Every coach keeps a scouting report on the opposing team. Tendencies on third and long. Which corner bites on play action. Whether the left tackle sets up too high. To me, the most interesting thing about a scouting report is that everybody seemingly trusts the report completely and almost nobody asks where it came from. The graduate assistant who put it together might have watched dozens of hours of film. He might also have watched twelve minutes of highlights and filled in the rest with vibes.

We live on secondhand reports. You pick a restaurant because of a Yelp review written by a stranger who ordered the one dish you would never order. You form an entire opinion about a person you have never met because your cousin's coworker had a bad experience with them in 2019. You look up one symptom online at eleven at night, and by midnight you have picked out your own casket.

Secondhand information runs most of our lives. Usually the cost is a mediocre dinner. When the subject is God, the cost is much higher.

Jesus asks the disciples, "Who do people say I am?" The answers come rolling in like Monday morning sports talk radio. John the Baptist. Elijah. Jeremiah. One of the prophets. Notice something about that list. Every answer is complimentary. Every answer is respectful. Every answer is saying you’re a big deal, Jesus, but every answer is wrong.

They were not slandering him. The crowd was doing its level best with the information it had, and its level best landed short of the truth by an infinite distance. A scouting report can be detailed, well organized, widely shared, and still get you beat by forty.

Then Jesus turns and does the thing that makes this passage a hinge in the whole Gospel. "But who do you say that I am?" The question moves from the crowd to the room. From the survey to the soul. He is asking whether these men have anything of their own, or whether they have been running their lives on borrowed film and someone else’s scouting report.

Which brings us to the question I want you carrying all the way through this message, out the doors, into your car, into your week.

Who gave you your scouting report on Jesus? From where did you form your view of Jesus?

I am not asking for the one you would say out loud in a church building, or the one you learned to recite when you were nine. I mean the report you actually run on. The one that shows up when the diagnosis comes back, when the marriage gets quiet, when the money runs out, when the whistle blows, and there is no time left to study.

Who gave you your scouting report on Jesus? From where did you form your view of Jesus?

Matthew 16:13–18 ESV

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people 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 gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

SCRIPTURAL ANALYSIS

Verses 13-14

Matthew wrote this Gospel as a man who once sat in a tax booth collecting money for Rome and walked away from the table when Jesus said, “Follow me.” He writes to Jewish readers who knew the Scriptures by heart and were waiting on a King. His whole book is an argument about identity: who this man from Nazareth actually is. By chapter sixteen the argument has come to a boil. Jesus has fed thousands with a boy's lunch, walked across a lake in the dark, healed a Canaanite woman's daughter, and answered religious leaders demanding a sign from heaven. Herod thinks he is John the Baptist raised from the dead. Everyone in the region has an opinion.

So Jesus takes his twelve twenty-five miles north, out of familiar territory, to Caesarea Philippi. Understand that place. It sat at the base of Mount Hermon where a spring poured out of a massive cave in the rock. The Greeks called it Panias and worshiped the goat god Pan there. Locals called the cave the gate of Hades, the mouth of the underworld. Herod the Great built a gleaming white temple to Caesar Augustus on that hillside, and his son Philip renamed the city after Caesar and himself. Every god on the market had a shrine within walking distance. That is where Jesus stops and asks, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?"

The title comes from Daniel seven, the figure who comes with the clouds of heaven and receives an everlasting kingdom. The disciples report the street consensus. John the Baptist. Elijah. Jeremiah. One of the prophets. Notice the ceiling on that list. Every answer honors him. Every answer places him in the highest category the crowd had, which was a major compliment to anyone else. However, every answer lands short of the truth by an infinite distance, because a prophet points to God, and this man is God in the flesh standing on a pagan hillside.

Verses 15-16

Jesus turns the question. In the Greek, the word "you" is emphatic and plural: you yourselves, you men who have walked with me. The survey closes. The exam begins. Simon Peter answers, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Christ means the anointed one, the promised King of the Scriptures they had been reading their whole lives. Peter says "living God" in the shadow of temples built to gods carved from stone and to an emperor who would be dead within a generation. He names Jesus correctly in the one place on earth where being wrong about God was the local industry.

Verses 17-18

Jesus tells Peter where that answer came from. Flesh and blood did not reveal it. The Father did. Peter did not reason his way there, inherit it, nor absorb it from the crowd. It was given to him. Then comes the promise: you are Peter, a stone, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. He says it within sight of a cave the locals called by that exact name. Gates are defensive structures. Gates do not charge. Jesus is describing a church on the move, built on a confession that came down from heaven, that will aggressively pursue victory..

Stand back and look at the hillside. Every false god at Caesarea Philippi had a temple, a story, and a following. Pan had worshipers. Caesar had a marble house and an army to back the claim. None of them could tell the truth about the God standing there in sandals. That is the pattern running all the way back to Eden, where the serpent's opening move was a question about God's character. The strategy has never changed, because a lie about God's identity does more damage than a hundred lies about anything else. Get God wrong and every other conclusion in your life bends around that catastrophic error.

Peter's confession holds because it came from the Father. Borrowed theology has a ceiling. Revealed truth has a foundation. The question hanging over this text is whether the report you carry about Jesus came from a crowd or came from God. That question: Who gave you your scouting report on Jesus? From where did you form your view of Jesus? matters because...

TODAY’S KEY TRUTH

The enemy always lies about God's identity.

APPLICATION

So here we are. Jesus asks the crowd a question, gets four respectful answers, and every one of them is wrong. Then he turns the question on the men who know him best, and Peter says the thing no survey could have produced. Jesus tells him exactly why he got it right. The Father showed him. Which leaves our question sitting in the middle of the room. Who gave you your scouting report on Jesus?

Paul answered that question in a single sentence in 1 Corinthians. “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” The word Paul uses for natural person describes someone running on unaided human equipment. Good mind. Good intentions. Good moral instincts. No Spirit. Paul says that person is unable, and he means unable in the way a radio is unable to pick up a TV signal it was never built to receive. The information is in the air. The receiver has a ceiling.

That explains something that has confused every believer at some point. You can hand someone the clearest presentation of the gospel ever assembled, watch them nod along at every point, and see nothing happen. You can also watch a man with a ninth-grade education and a hard past hear the same words and come apart in tears. The difference is not intelligence, sincerity, or presentation quality. The difference is revelation.

Jesus says the same thing in John 6. "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him." The word for draws is the word used for pulling a net to shore or hauling water out of a well. It carries effort and intention. Somebody outside the well does the pulling. Your faith did not begin with your decision to be a spiritual person. It began with the Father reaching down and pulling you toward Himself.

Hold that alongside something else, because Peter was in the room. He had walked twenty-five miles to that hillside. He had spent three years watching, listening, asking, and getting corrected. Revelation came to Peter, who had positioned himself where revelation could find him. God gives the sight. God also gives means: Scripture, prayer, the table, the gathered church, the long ordinary faithfulness of showing up. Study is the bucket. The Father is the well. You will never manufacture living water by owning a nicer bucket, and you will not draw anything while your bucket sits in the garage. You also have to engage.

Here is why this matters on a Tuesday afternoon. A wrong scouting report holds up fine in good weather. You can carry a God who wants you comfortable, who grades on a curve, who exists to bless your plans, who never judges, and that god will function beautifully right up until the biopsy comes back. Then that report fails, and it fails at the worst possible moment, because the god you built out of secondhand information, out of popular social thought, has no power to hold you together as you’re falling apart. That God you created, that God is not real.

Think about the enemy's method. In Eden, he did not deny God's existence. He asked a question about God's character. Did God actually say? Is God holding out on you? In the desert, the enemy asked Jesus, "If you are the Son of God." He lies about who you are. He always lies about who God is. Those two lies work together, because if you believe God is stingy, distant, or disappointed, you will read every hard season as evidence against him.

So do four things this week.

Audit the report. Name out loud where your working picture of God came from. A parent. A church hurt. A false preacher. Our culture. Somebody's Facebook post at eleven at night. Test it against the text. Read one Gospel start to finish, without commentary. Let Jesus speak for himself.

2. Ask for the real report. Pray the honest prayer: Father, I have opinions about you. Show me the truth. That prayer has never once been refused.

3. Get in the film room. Revelation shows up where God's people gather around God's Word. Peter did not receive that confession alone on a hillside. He knew from being with Jesus. Get in the Word.

4. Lastly, say it out loud. You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. Yours, revealed by the Father, tested and proven, ready for the whistle. Say it in the car and the waiting room. Say it at two in the morning when the ceiling has nothing to offer you. A confession you have never spoken is a confession you have never tested.

Here is why you need to do these four things: The only report the enemy cannot corrupt and distort is the one that came straight from the Father.

The enemy always lies about God's identity.

CONCLUSION

Let me answer the question we have been carrying all morning. Who gave you your scouting report on Jesus? From where did you form your view of Jesus?

There are only two possible sources. The crowd gave it to you, or the Father gave it to you. Every opinion you hold about God traces back to one of those two sources. The crowd includes your family, your upbringing, the last church that hurt you, the television preacher your grandmother watched, or a culture that finds Jesus useful as a symbol but unbearable as a King. The Father gives his report through his Son, in his Word, and is confirmed by the gathered church. That is the whole list.

Here is the honest answer for most of us. It is mixed. You have some of the Father's report and a good deal of the crowd's, filed in the same report, and you have never sorted them. That works fine on a Sunday morning in a comfortable room.

Then the whistle blows.

The phone rings at two in the morning with your brother's name on the screen. The doctor pauses before she speaks. The company reorganizes and your name is on the wrong list. The marriage goes silent in a way that feels permanent. Your kid stops calling. The chair at the head of the table goes silent where somebody used to sit and laugh.

That is the moment your scouting report gets tested, and there is no time left to study. You will run whatever you have already built. If the god in your report was assembled out of secondhand impressions, he will fail you in the third quarter of the worst night of your life, because a god who exists to keep you comfortable has nothing to say to a person standing in a hospital hallway at four in the morning. That is the worst place to discover your god is not real.

Now hear the encouragement in this text.

Peter got the answer right on that hillside, and a few months later he stood by a fire in a courtyard and swore he had never met the man. His report was accurate. His nerve failed anyway. The confession did not make Peter invincible. It made Peter rebuildable. Jesus found him on a beach, cooked him breakfast, asked him three questions, and put him back to work. The rock held because the One building on it never let go.

That is the difference between the report you carry and the God who carries you. The gates of Hades did not prevail against a church built on a man who cracked under pressure, because the foundation was never Peter's courage. It was the Father's revelation, and the Father does not take his revelation back when you have a bad night.

If you are realizing your picture of God came mostly from the crowd, that realization is itself a report of grace. The Father does not show a man his blind spot to shame him. He shows it in order to move him. Nobody comes to Jesus unless the Father draws, which means the fact that you are uncomfortable right now is evidence that a hand is already pulling.

Think about what happens one chapter later. Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a mountain; his face shines like the sun, and the Father speaks out of a bright cloud. "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him." That is the same voice from the Jordan River. The Father keeps saying the same thing about his Son to every generation, to anyone who will stop taking the crowd's word for it.

Get your report from him. Read the Gospel until Jesus stops being a rumor. Pray until the words are yours. Sit in the room with God's people until the confession forms in your own mouth.

Do that work now, before the whistle, because the game is decided in the preparation nobody sees. When the storm arrives, and it will arrive, you will not need to figure out who God is. You will already know. And you will know He is real.

The enemy has been telling a lie about God since the garden. Peter's answer is still the one that holds. You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. Let Peter’s words become your rock.

The enemy always lies about God's identity.