Luke 9

It was not the Lord’s intention to accomplish His Kingdom purposes without using people. One of the first indications of this came when He sent out His disciples to do the things that He Himself had been doing. It is amazing to consider that He shared with them the signs of His own divinity. He gave them power and authority over demons and diseases. Even in our day the heavenly work of proclaiming Christ and the resurrection for the salvation of the elect is entrusted to the church. This incident of using His disciples to extend the Kingdom is the beginning of that movement. In their mission, they were called by Christ, empowered and supplied by Him, and were agents of blessing and judgment according to His Word. They went forth everywhere in Israel, preaching the gospel and healing.

This preaching and healing ministry drew the attention even of Herod, who came to his own wrong conclusions about what was happening. Large crowds followed the Lord and His disciples upon their return, with plenty of their own confusion, and without apparent concern for their practical needs. They followed him though they lacked adequate supplies of food, presumably because of their zeal to see Him, hear Him, and experience His heavenly provision. That provision included not only the healing ministry that He had entrusted to His disciples, but even the provision of bread for the hungry in the multiplication of loaves and fish for the hungry. In all this work, the Lord chose to use the disciples as agents of the mercies of heaven among men.

This use of us in tasks that can only be done by God does not take anything away from Christ, but only serves to give further witness to His divine authority. Not only can He do great works Himself, but He can confer the ability to do these same works upon others as a matter of His own sovereign will. This is the great Messiah, as Peter now confesses. Jesus is the Christ of God. But as Jesus instructs His disciples, and as the Old Testament itself taught in ways that were not well understood at the time, the Christ would suffer for us on His way to the establishment of His heavenly kingdom in the great event of His own resurrection.

This way of the Kingdom was not only the way for the Messiah, but for all who would claim to be His disciples. Here again the disciples are granted the privilege of sharing in the divine ministry of the One who came to save. He alone could atone for our sins, but the pattern of suffering that leads to glory is one that they will share with Him. We need to trust Him through our days of suffering, not turning away as those who are ashamed of Jesus Christ, but growing in our understanding that it is our privilege to face troubles for the Kingdom. We have been given the gift of seeing and loving the glory of the cross of Christ. For those who will follow in this way, this encouragement is granted to us, that when Christ returns with the fullness of resurrection, He will not be ashamed of us.

We imagine that our walk of faith would be much easier for us if we were simply given a glimpse of heaven. Perhaps it would be easier that way. Peter, James, and John were given a glimpse, and though they saw Moses and Elijah alive, the One who was exalted above them in His physical appearance was their Master, Jesus the Christ. He was the One that was set apart in His dazzling glory cloud. When God spoke from heaven, He did not speak about Moses and Elijah, though they were truly great men. He did not even refer the three key apostles to the Law or to the prophets that these two Old Testament heroes represented. He said, “This is my Son, my Chosen One; listen to Him!” This was the glimpse of heaven that they were granted. When we know Jesus, the One who has now departed to the place where Moses and Elijah dwell, we know heaven’s best gift.

We often think about what it was like for the disciples to come down from that glory mountain, but we should probably consider what it was like for Jesus. His time on earth was not over. He had a desperate man to talk to, a man who complained about what the disciples could not do. He had disciples who did not really understand what He was doing, and what their part was in this new Kingdom. Most especially He had the horror of the cross ahead of Him, and none of these followers could understand that cross the way that He did. That’s why He says to them, “Let these words sink into your ears: The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men.” They understood so little about the life of cross love that they were being called to, that they were still arguing about who was the greatest among their number. He told them the answer by pointing to a child and telling them something sort of mysterious, which is the way He drew them in to what they could not really perceive as of yet, but at the end of that day, it is hard to think that they were not still thinking in their sleep about which one of them would be the greatest.

There was so much for these men to learn, but it is a fact of our spiritual life that disciples cannot learn from this Master what they need to know in one second by some magic snapping of our fingers. They want to use the powers of heaven and earth in judgment against His enemies. He is preparing for the sad reality that the power of heaven will soon come against Him on the cross so that many of His enemies will be saved. They want to send fire from the sky against a Samaritan village. He has a plan of blessing that goes far beyond the borders of Judah and that will take their sacrificial living in order to accomplish. They are thinking of places of honor near the king, and He knows that He has no place to lay His head upon the earth and that His body will soon hang from a tree as the cursed One who brings us eternal blessing. They want to do what is customary and what seems good in the eyes of people all around them. He has a heart only for His Father’s good pleasure, and is willing to follow Him in every specific, even if it means that He must be all alone.

It is shocking, then, and the greatest testimony to His continued power where He sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven, that He uses us. These disciples will preach the kingdom of heaven, a kingdom that they only have a glimpse of. They will do this by the power of Jesus Christ at work within His church. He has entrusted to us work that is far beyond our ability, and with sufferings that we are likely to complain about that are in fact a high privilege of faithful living. He is using us to do things that only He can do. That’s how wise, how powerful, and how kind He is; and this is all going to work out extremely well, both for Him, and for us.