Can I Get A Witness

An expository sermon from 2 Peter 1:16-18 on the extraordinary signs and eyewitnesses of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Thank you, Hadley. If you have your Bible, would you open it to 2 Peter chapter 1? We are working our way systematically through this second letter of Peter, going verse by verse, phrase by phrase. And today we come to verses 16 through 18. And it begins by saying in verse 16, For we have not followed cunningly devised fables. When we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honor and glory. When there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, saying, This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. And this voice which came from heaven we heard when we were with him in the Holy Mount. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, it is our delight and our privilege to study your word today, to examine the revelation that you have given to us, knowing that it is a word from God to man. Father, I pray that you would help us to follow the pattern that you have set in Scripture, that we would rightly discern what is the authorial intent of this passage, that we might be able to make the right application to our lives where we are here today. Lord, all of it is not for our advancement, but for your glory. That as we seek to deepen our knowledge of you, we can deepen our worship of you, we can increase our praise for you. Father, it's all about you. May we keep it that way, I pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Let me tell you what's going on in these verses right here. In these verses, Peter is speaking to the validity of his Christ claims. In other words, he has been making some claims about Jesus. And at this point, he wants to give some confirmation. He wants to validate those claims. And perhaps you didn't notice them before as we were walking through those texts and looking at other aspects. And so I just want to take you back and walk you through this chapter and point some of them out to you. The very first Christ claim is found in the beginning of verse 1, where Peter says, Jesus Christ. And that's easy to read over. We're so used to seeing that combination together that we almost think that it's a first and a last name, but it is not. Jesus is his name. It is the Hebrew name Joshua, and in Greek it is Jesus. Christ is a title. It's a very specific title. It means anointed one. And it is a reference to the long-awaited Messiah that had been prophesied about in the Old Testament. And so when they call him Jesus Christ, they're saying he's Jesus who is the Messiah. The next claim that you find is at the end of verse 1, when he says, our Savior, Jesus Christ. The term Savior means deliverer or the one who saves. And in this culture, though Peter is a Jew, Peter speaks Greek, he writes in Greek. That was the common language of the time. And the term that he uses Savior was actually used commonly in the Greek world as a title for deities, as an epithet for the gods who were active in the world's affairs, like Zeus and Apollo and Hermes. And so when Peter is speaking to his audience, he wants them to know that this Jesus is not just transcendent far away, but as I mentioned earlier, he is imminent. He is near. But Peter saw Jesus as so much more than a demigod. He's not putting him on the level with Zeus and Apollos and Hermes. He is actually assigning to him the highest level of sovereignty by his next claim. You will find that claim there made in verse 2 when he says, Jesus our Lord. That term Lord is the Greek word Korios, and it means master, sovereign ruler, supreme in authority. When we say Jesus is Lord, let me tell you, we're saying a mouthful. We're saying that he is my master, that I serve him, that he has unilateral rights over everything in my life. And if you're not ready to sign on with that, then you're not ready to be a Christ follower. Is that not the demand that Jesus made of those who would follow him? Leave father and mother. Follow me. Leave your lands, leave your job, leave those things that had once been a priority and follow me. Why? Because Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord. He is sovereign. He is supreme. From there, Peter goes on to claim that Jesus has divine power in verse 3, that he has a divine nature in verse 4. He claims that he is the king of an everlasting kingdom in verse 11. That he gives divine revelation in verse 14. And that he was incarnated in verse 16. Now those are some pretty big claims to make about this man named Jesus. And I would say to you that these are the foundational claims of Christianity. These are not fringe beliefs, these are not what is held by a few radical Christian followers. These are the very fundamental beliefs of Christianity. I think that every Christian would agree with what Peter has said about Jesus. We would say, yes, he is the Christ, he is the Savior, He is the Lord, He does have divine power, He does have a divine nature, He is the King of an everlasting kingdom. He was incarnated and He does give divine revelation. However, we must acknowledge that those are incredible claims. And that they are hard to believe. Because they are not true about anyone else in the world. If we were to try to make that claim about anyone else, even those religious figureheads throughout history, they would not be true. They're only true about one man, the God man, Jesus Christ. And so God knew that these claims would be hard for us to believe. And since God in his sovereignty knew that it would be hard for us to believe these things, he corroborated these incredible claims about Jesus with two attestations. He gives extraordinary signs to confirm that these claims are true about Jesus. And then he provides eyewitnesses to confirm that these claims are true about Jesus. And that's what we find in these verses from Peter. It is a reference to the evidence of extraordinary signs and to eyewitnesses. Let me begin with the extraordinary signs. Those are mentioned in verses 17 and 18. In verses 17 and 18, Peter refers to a specific event that happened when Jesus was on the earth. We call it the Mount of Transfiguration. It is an event that is recorded by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and just then, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, not John. And it is when Jesus went up on the mountain, he took with him Peter, James, and John, and it says he was transfigured. Let me read it to you from Matthew's account. It says, after six days, Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, led them up on a high mountain by themselves, and he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, his clothes became white as the light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with him. Then Peter answered and said to Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here. It is good for us to be here. If you wish, let us make here three tabernacles, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah. While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and suddenly a voice came out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear him. Can we just take inventory of the supernatural signs that are in this one text that Peter makes reference to? And then he says, and unless you think we're following cunningly devised fables, right? Made up stories. Let me tell you about the eyewitnesses and the extraordinary signs. And he refers to one extraordinary sign on the mount of transfiguration that he was a witness to. First, there is the transfiguration. It says that Jesus begins to glow like the sun. Let me ask you, what would you think if you saw that? I'm not talking about somebody who has the glisten of some sort of body glitter on them. I'm not talking about the reflection of black light like our teens did at vacation Bible school. I mean, inexplicably, somebody begins to shine like a flashlight, like a spotlight, like an LED light, right? He just begins to radiate light. Next is the appearance of the prophets Moses and Elijah. Well, they have been gone for hundreds of years. They haven't been on the earth, and all of a sudden Peter is seeing these two guys conversing with Jesus. Again, let me ask you, what would you think about that? I mean, what if you saw, we all know what George Washington looks like, right? We grew up with his picture in our elementary classroom. What if you saw George Washington? I mean, with your own eyes, not AI, not, you know, like the video your grandma sends you, you know, that's been doctored up by AI. But you with your eyes see this dude that you know has been dead for hundreds of years, and right there he is. And so Peter sees this sign that's given there of Elijah and Moses speaking with Jesus. Then there's the voice of God from heaven. This cloud comes, and there is no similitude of a person, and yet a thundering voice comes from heaven. This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear him. Not a noise from heaven. I gotta tell you, I'm a skeptic. People come tell me they had a dream, I think you had indigestion. They tell me they saw a sign, I think, you know, there's an explanation for that. I am a very skeptical person. But what I want you to see about this is that it wasn't just a noise that Peter heard and said, Oh, it was the Lord speaking to me. It's a whole sentence. This is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased. Hear him. That's a direct quote of the words that came that day when Peter was on the mount with Jesus. And this is just one instance that Peter cites. And I would say, think about all of the extraordinary signs surrounding Jesus. I mean, that's just one. And we get this multitude of extraordinary signs that are surrounding this one called Jesus. I mean, when you look at the others, just consider that there's numerous prophecies of the Old Testament that were fulfilled by Christ. Like when he would be born, where he would be born, how he would be born. You find the town mentioned in the Old Testament. It's Bethlehem, the way he'd be born, of a virgin. It's prophesied 700 years before by Isaiah. When he would be born, the wise men come because they see a star, and Daniel had been with them, and they know that there's some sort of time frame about when this Messiah would come. I would say to you that these prophecies, which were written hundreds of years before Jesus was born, was impossible for this infant to fabricate or manufacture, much less his family. You can't say, well, his family knew about these prophecies, and so they orchestrated and they went to Bethlehem so that they could have that baby bear there, and then they ran down to Egypt, so because there's one that says they caught a son. They could not have fabricated or manufactured these results. In fact, there are over 300 prophecies recorded in the Old Testament concerning Christ. Over 300. The mathematical probability that Jesus could have fulfilled just eight of those prophecies. Let's just take eight. Let's forget the 300 for a moment, that he would fulfill just eight of these prophecies would be one in one hundred thousand trillion. Now, that's a number I can't comprehend, and so I got some ways to describe it for you. First, that's one followed by 17 zeros. How'd you like to have that check? For a frame of reference, one billion seconds is 32 years. And this is one hundred thousand trillion. I don't know how many hundreds of years or thousands of years that adds up to. What do you think the probability of that is? 42,000 miles? Man, I've lost stuff in my house I still haven't found. I'm telling you, there's some sort of some sort of time warp quantum leap thing that goes on because there are some things that have literally disappeared in that house and they're not there. I can't imagine trying to find one silver dollar while blindfolded over 42,000 square miles when it's 12 feet deep. That means you'd you could get you a shovel and dig down ten feet to pick you one. I mean, it's just mind-blowing. And yet Jesus fulfilled much more than eight prophecies. In addition to that, there were miracles performed by Jesus. Remember the multiplication of food, he breaks the bread and the fish and it feeds 5,000 people. There's the controlling of the weather when they're on the Sea of Galilee, and he says, peace be still, and it calms out. There is the healing of diseases and deformities. You know, uh faith healers, uh, a lot of them are scam artists. Uh just to put it plainly. And they will have pics in the crowd sometimes, and it's been documented, it's it's been proven. And they would have people with fake ailments or on crutches or in a wheelchair, they would come and they would heal them. Then they take up an offering. You know, that's how it works. But when you read the healings of Jesus, it wasn't just some sort of illness that could be fake. He liked restored limbs, he cured leprosy, he healed blindness, he healed paralysis. And so we find that these are extraordinary signs. And if that weren't enough, he raises people from the dead, at least three that are documented in the New Testament. And the greatest, most extraordinary sign of Jesus being the Christ is that he rose again from the dead on the third day. After being brutally killed, publicly executed, confirmed to be dead, laid in a tomb for three days. And if you know anything about decomposition, it happens a lot sooner than that. And he walks out of the grave on the third day. I would remind you that a miracle, by definition, is an event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature. And so it is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of God. And what we are looking at in these extraordinary signs are things that cannot be explained by the laws of nature. They are supernatural, and they are indeed the act of God. And yet that is not all the evidence. It is further buttressed by eyewitnesses. Remember, Peter gives these two attestations. It is the extraordinary signs, like on the Mount of Transfiguration. But then there's also the eyewitnesses. As we read, Peter was an eyewitness to the transfiguration. He says, we were eyewitnesses of his majesty when we heard the voice and we saw on the mount, the holy mount. But notice that Peter's not the only eyewitness. He says, eyewitnesses to his majesty. Those eyewitnesses that he's referring to in particular were John and James, who accompanied him on the Mount of Transfiguration. And so we have three witnesses here. That's important because God established a precedent in Scripture about the validity of multiple witnesses. I just want to review this for you real quickly. Back in the law of Moses, when God is ordering the nation of Israel, and he's giving them rules by which how they are to govern themselves, he actually articulates rules about witnesses. Listen to what he says in Deuteronomy 17, 6. Whoever is deserving of death shall be put to death on the testimony of two or three witnesses. He shall not be put to death on the testimony of one witness. Again, Deuteronomy 19, 15. One witness shall not rise against a man concerning any iniquity or any sin that he commits by the mouth of two or three witnesses. The matter shall be established. That sounds like a good policy, doesn't it? If you could be convicted of being guilty by one witness, right, and it's he said, she said, or he said, he said, or she said, she said, or whatever, then you and I are in a world of hurt. And that's why God says, no, this needs to be confirmed. At least two. Probably three. As a matter of fact, this carries over into the New Testament in Matthew 18, when Jesus says, if he will not hear, take with you one or two more, that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. So why did I give you that little piece of legislature from the Old Testament? It is because I want you to see that God holds himself to his own standard when he is giving a confirmation about who his son is. Not only does he send the extraordinary signs, those extraordinary signs would be no good. If nobody saw them. And if just one person saw them, well, you want to believe the stuff one person has told me before. But if there's a multitude of witnesses. For example, one of the witnesses who saw the transfiguration of Jesus with Peter was John. And John wrote several letters, and in 1 John he begins by writing these words. And our hands have handled concerning the word of life. The life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us, that which we have seen and heard, we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us. And truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. That's much like what Peter is saying in his letter. We're eyewitnesses to his majesty. John says, I am speaking to you as an eyewitness. And not just somebody who saw from afar off. I was with him up close and personal for three and a half years. I saw him. I examined him. I scrutinized him. I heard him. I handled him. And I'm declaring to you, he is real. And what he did was legitimate. In fact, John in his gospel, along with the other three gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are eyewitness accounts. That's what they are. When you begin reading the New Testament, it begins with eyewitness accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. And in those accounts, you will find all these extraordinary signs are recorded. This is where Christianity and the Bible really stands out from all other religions. I read a post this week from Shariq Khan in which he said, listen to this, when I was a Muslim, I never noticed what the Quran doesn't have, such as dates, places, and names you can check. Read the Quran's story, and you will find that they have no chronology, almost no geography, kings who are only called Pharaoh, and events floating in no particular year. Where did the story happen? When? Under whom? The text doesn't say. You can't check it, which conveniently means you can't check it. Now, reading the opening of Luke 3, listen to how the Bible speaks. In the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, Herod being Tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip, Tetrarch of Itcher, and Tregonitus and Lysanius Tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas. Seven historical anchors in one sentence. An empowered governor, three rulers with their exact territories, and two high priests. I say to you, that's what you call an eyewitness account that can be checked out and confirmed. That's what the Bible is. That's why we believe in Christ to the exclusion of all others because of the extraordinary signs and the eyewitnesses who testify it to it. So let me ask you, what is the main claim of Christianity that is hardest to believe? The resurrection. The resurrection, that Jesus came back to life. Like we can believe pretty easily that there was a guy named Jesus who lived. He's got the most well-documented life in all of history. Oh, we can believe that Jesus was an anomaly, that he had a following, that he did things differently. That's easy to believe. It's easy to believe that he was crucified on a Roman cross because there were multiple crucifixions during that time. What's not easy to believe is that he walked out of the grave. I wonder if there were any eyewitnesses. 1 Corinthians chapter 15, verses 3 through 6, Paul writes, I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. After that he was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to this present day, but some have fallen asleep. Do you hear that? That's over five hundred eyewitnesses of Jesus living after his crucifixion. And as a matter of fact, when the Apostle Paul writes this letter to the Corinthians, in case anybody's doubting, he's saying, listen, the majority of those 500 eyewitnesses are still alive today. If you want to go track them down and do some investigative journalism, you'll find that they all tell you the same story. That that guy Jesus, who was crucified on that cross, was out walking around doing miracles and teaching us stuff afterwards. Let me ask you, what else could God have done to prove to you that Jesus is the eternal Son of God who became a man, died on the cross for your sins, and rose again? What else could he do? If you're here today and you're not a believer and you say, Well, I have my doubts, I'm asking you, what else could God have done? Lest it is he appeared to you in this very moment and give you a very custom sign to yourself, telling you that Jesus is the way. You know that happened one time in the Gospels in Luke 16, when there was a man who died and uh went to hell and he wanted his brothers to be saved, and he requested that Lazarus would be sent to them back from the dead. And you know what was told to him? If they don't believe the scriptures, they won't believe though one rose again from the dead. And so your issue is not that there isn't enough evidence to prove that Jesus is the Messiah. The evidence is there. It is a question of whether or not you will believe the evidence. Peter said, We have not followed cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. Peter said, We don't believe in cleverly designed fables about Jesus. We were eyewitnesses. The evidence is set before you by the eyewitnesses who saw it. And so the only question is, will you believe it? Will you believe it? Nobody else can believe it for you. It is a decision that you have to make. You say, but I have unanswered questions. You know what? I've got unanswered questions about electricity, but I turn that light switch on, the lights come on. And I'm not gonna sit in the dark till I figure out everything about electricity. I I've got apprehensions about driving down the highway and a double yellow line being the only thing that keeps a speeding car from slamming headfirst into me. And yet by faith I drive down the highway every single day and trust that they're gonna stay on their side of the line. Let me tell you, friends, we believe in things that we don't fully understand, and we exercise faith every single day. Why can't you believe in Jesus? If you're waiting to have every question answered, you'll never believe. But when you believe, I found out a whole lot more questions get answered. Not only is it important for people who have not yet believed, but it's important for believers. Those who have trusted Christ, because it's essential to our growth. This is seen in the closing line of Peter's letter when he says, But grow in grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. When you and I learn more about Jesus and we understand how God confirmed who he is, that's growing in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. And that is what we want to do as Christians. We want to grow closer to Him. Would you bow with me? Should we bow our heads for just a moment? Perhaps the Lord has been speaking to your heart in that still, small, indescribable, subtle way. Yet it's very recognizable. Maybe you're here today, you've never trusted Christ. Maybe you're wrestling with that decision. Listen, I would love for you to put your faith in Christ today, but I'm not gonna leverage you to do that. The Bible says that his word is like a seed, it gets planted, and then it's like a seed that gets watered and it begins to grow. And so perhaps the plant seed's been planted in your heart. Perhaps God is giving you evidence and he is making himself known to you in these subtle ways. My friend, pay attention. Pay attention because once he passes by, he may not come your way again. For believers. May we not think that we've got Jesus all figured out. May we not think that just because we've been in Sunday school for years or church, that we've learned everything that we can know about God. May we be mesmerized by the mystery of God. May we make it our life's pursuit to learn more about this one who saved us from our sins so that we can love him ever more effectually. Dear Heavenly Father, I do praise you. I want to know more about you so that I can praise you more. Lord, you are so indescribable. And it is somewhat inconceivable to think that you sacrifice so much to save us. Father, I pray and ask that you would help those who may be wrestling with belief. I pray, Lord, that you would call them, that you would convict them, that they would answer, Lord, and respond. I pray for those who are saved, Lord, that we would not have it on cruise control in our Christian life, but that we would keep digging deeper, getting to know you so that we can love you and worship you and serve you evermore. Father, I just pray and ask that you would do your work in our hearts in Jesus' name. Amen.