29 Peter declared, “Even if all fall away, I will not.” 30 “Truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “today—yes, tonight—before the rooster crows twice you yourself will disown me three times.” 31 But Peter insisted emphatically, “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” And all the others said the same. ~ Mark 14:27-31
Today, we return to our study of Mark 14 where the Lord Jesus has just enjoyed His last Passover meal with His disciples in the upper room. At this point in the narrative, the Lord Jesus and His disciples have left the upper room and walked to the Mount of Olives. They are now in the Garden of Gethsemane.
In Zechariah 13:7 we read about this prophesied event. Zechariah prophesied the Lord Jesus would be struck and the disciples would be scattered. The Lord Jesus knew the disciples had not grasped this fact. Their failure was central to the formation of their walk with Him, though. We should never be surprised that God strategically uses our weaknesses in the formation of our spiritual development. God does not delight in our sufferings, He delights in using them to bring us to the place that we fully trust Him.
Peter, the spokesperson for all of the disciples, always listed first in the list of the apostles, for the second time resisted the plan of God. I am sure he thought he was being spiritual, but he knew nothing of the strength of the flesh. Peter thought spiritual maturity was something he produced. Before, when the Lord Jesus had predicted his death and resurrection, Peter rebuked Him. Now, here in today's passage, when the Lord Jesus predicted the failure of all the disciples, Peter declared that he was different than the rest. But, as we know, Peter not only abandoned the Lord Jesus, he also disowned Him three times.
Like you and me, Peter believed in the Lord Jesus as the Christ, but he didn’t understand all of what the Lord Jesus was teaching. Like Peter, despite the fact that we fail, the Lord Jesus is yet at work in our lives using all things together to bring about His design in and through our lives. God looks at failure differently than we. And, like Peter, we’ve all professed dogged allegiance to the Lord in moments of confidence in self. We forget that self is our biggest enemy. And, like sheep, we all have been known to fail miserably. In fact, God expects more failure from us than we expect from ourselves.
Through it all, the Lord Jesus refines us and teaches us that our failure isn’t final. In fact, He takes our failure and forms us by showing us that our failure is a part His healing in our lives. The healing comes on the heels of being forced to run to the Lord when we have exhausted all of our resources. Following the Lord through our failures teaches us to listen to Him and to trust and to depend upon Him more fully.
It is quite notable that in His last night with His disciples, the Lord Jesus gave the disciples a meal and an enduring object lesson to impress upon them the reality of what He was doing. His words that night were powerful, but if detached from the meal and the object lesson, we are not left with much. God is not the God of second chances, He is the God who is greater than all of our attempts to accomplish anything on our own. And, as John MacArthur says, "The road to spiritual maturity is paved with an ever increasing understanding of our wickedness."