One of the sternest rebukes Jesus gave was when Peter allowed his love for Jesus to be expressed in his desire to protect Jesus from pain and suffering. Peter first acknowledged that Jesus is the Son of God, and then:

From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!” (Matthew 16:21–22 NIV84).

Imagine your closest friend, whom you love with a deep Christian affection, tells you that they are going to go to a foreign mission field, one known to be hostile to Christians, and they expect to be kidnapped, tortured, and executed—if you love your friend, what might you say to them?

We can empathize with Peter. His heart was in the right place. He recognized Jesus as Messiah. He put himself on Jesus’ side. He loved Jesus, so when he heard what Jesus told them, his heart recoiled at the thought of his friend experiencing such pain and suffering. He didn’t want to obstruct Jesus. His goal wasn’t to derail Him, but to protect Him, because Peter loved Jesus. But notice Jesus’ response:

Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men” (Matthew 16:23 NIV84).

Can you imagine how this stunning response must have been received by Peter? What a shock!

But this response is further evidence of Jesus’ wonderful love, grace, and compassion—and of the certainty that He is our Creator and Savior—for this response is exactly what Peter needed to protect him from being ensnared by the enemy through positive feelings of affection that would take him down destructive paths. It not only confronted a distortion with truth, but it did it in such a way that it provided enough emotional significance to create an opportunity for change in Peter. It would have been one of those moments of shock that put Peter’s system, brain, the electrons encoded on his tubulin, back into a position of uncertainty for new encoding, for maturing.

What was it that Peter was missing? Paul tells us,

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth (1 Corinthians 13:6 NIV84).

God is the God of truth and love, and the Spirit of truth always brings both truth and love to bear for healing and restoration. Satan is the father of lies, and if we believe lies, they eventually break the bonds of love and trust. So the enemy of God will often seek to introduce lies to cause a misunderstanding of events, to lead to actions that are motivated by love, but that are, in fact, contradictory to how reality works, opposed to the laws of health, in violation of the designs and principles of God—not out of malice, not out of a desire to hurt, not out of an intention to cause harm, but out of goodwill and motive to seek to avoid pain and suffering, yet which, if followed, would actually cause harm. This is the situation in which Jesus was dealing; Peter’s love for Him is advancing a cause motivated by a desire to protect Jesus from suffering, but would, if followed, destroy Jesus and the plan of salvation and doom all humanity to eternal ruin.

Consider you are a parent whose child is dying of renal failure and you are a kidney match. Without hesitation, you commit yourself to be the donor of a new kidney to save your child. You tell your friends, “I must go to the regional medical center and suffer many things at the hands of the nurses and chief surgeons, and to have my body cut open and my kidney removed, but on the third day, I will recover and be able to come home.”

What if one of your friends doesn’t understand why you must do this? What if they didn’t realize the purpose, the reality-based necessity of why you are choosing to voluntarily undergo such a painful experience (and this analogy is infinitely insignificant when compared to what Christ had to suffer), and they said to you, “Never! You should never go and let doctors do that to you”?

Would you, knowing that if you don’t go, your child will die, hear their words as a comfort and encouragement or an offense and obstacle?

If they really knew you, knew your heart, your mission, the reality of the situation, they would never suggest not going but would instead ask how they can support you.

Jesus’ response to Peter was the response of God’s heart of love and truth—love for all humanity, understanding His mission, the terminal sin-state of humanity, and that if He doesn’t go, He loses the people He loves. But more than this, Jesus loved Peter and knew that Peter loved Him, but Jesus also knew that Peter’s ability to functionally love—to love Jesus effectively—was being interfered with by Peter’s lack of understanding of reality. Peter’s mind was still infected with the misconceptions and distortions of his upbringing, the legal theologies of the Pharisees, the false belief in a system of power and domination, the hope in a messiah who would use physical might and power to destroy their enemies. Peter didn’t yet understand the fullness and reality of God’s kingdom of love.

So Jesus stunned him with His response, truth spoken in love, to disrupt Peter’s long-established encoded belief system and create an opportunity for Peter to reflect, think, and choose truth.

There is no salvation without God’s love being restored in the heart. But love always rejoices with the truth. As we move ever closer to Christ’s return, let’s be vigilant in helping each other advance in both truth and love, to have our hearts established in love and our minds settled into the reality-based truths of God’s kingdom. So love, love fully, deeply, and constantly, but always love with eyes wide open, advancing and embracing the truth!

If you haven’t had the opportunity to watch our God of Reality: Separating Truth from Fiction seminar, I encourage you to do so. In that series, we walk through how our God of reality has built life to function and how both love and truth are encoded into the operations of our brains by our free-will choices about what we choose to believe.