JOHN078 - Nice to Meet You, Also I'm Changing Your Name

John 1:35-42

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And I remember when I was a kid, the trivial pursuit cards, I used to study the trivial pursuit cards because I wanted to try to beat my dad, but he was too smart. And one of the categories of the questions or styles of questions I remember is there was a bunch of them where the question would be structured like by what more famous name is such and such known? It was like a name change question. And that's where I learned that Lou Alcinder became Karim Abdul Jabbar. That is how I learned that Cassius Clay became, do you remember, Muhammad Ali. Some other famous name changes from history. You're probably thinking of some of them right now. We've talked about one here a lot that's a famous name change. Octavian, the godson of Julius Caesar, became known as Caesar Augustus. It happens, right? Sometimes, you know, name changes occur because a person goes through a transformative moment or the legend grows or whatever it might be. But I think at an even greater clip than in history in the Bible, names get changed, like they get changed left and right. There's tons of name changes. And every time you see it, it means something. Almost every name change in the Bible teaches theology in some way. Okay, let's do the name change game. We'll start with a couple easy ones from the Bible. Abram, right? He becomes Abraham. That one's right there. Sarai, right? It becomes Sarah. That's right there. How about Jacob? This one is a stem changer, right? It's an irregular name changer. It doesn't go to like Jacobus or something. It's Israel. How about Gideon? Do you remember what he ends up getting called? Isn't it Jerubal? Jerobal, depending on how you say that. And then probably the most famous one of them all, right? Is Simon, the guy who we were talking about yesterday in John chapter 1. Simon, what is what does his name end up being? Well, it ends up being Peter or Cephas. Well, no, that's not the most famous one. Saul to Paul is probably the most famous. Ah, Jacob to Israel? That's a tough one. They're all contenders. This one's right up at the top, is the point. When we meet Simon, his name is Simon, which apparently I didn't know this. I just saw it when I was reading stuff about this passage. Apparently, Simon was like the most common name at the time in this part of the world for people of Jewish descent. So Simon, when we meet him, is named Simon, but we don't know him as Simon for very long. We come to know him as Peter, sometimes as Simon Peter. Well, right here in John chapter one is when we get that name change moment. And here's what I think is kind of wild about the name change moment as recorded in John chapter one. What's crazy about it is that it isn't some earned thing where Simon and Jesus get all of this cred together, and they have some war stories and they've been through some stuff and some ups and downs, or like maybe Simon tries to walk on water and it doesn't work very well for very long, and then Jesus gets him out. Or maybe they're like Simon denies Jesus three times and then you know Jesus restores him, and then after one of those big episodes, Jesus comes over and puts his arm around him. He's like, you know what, pal? We've sure been through a lot of crazy times, haven't we? You know what I was thinking? Maybe it would make more sense to call you Peter. You know, it means like rock because you're steady like that. You know, it'd be kind of an emotional payoff moment at the at the end of the story that would maybe be the thing that would be like the big setup for the new spin-off series that's gonna follow the crazy hijinks of Simon Peter, but it isn't like that at all. Simon has his name changed to Peter in literally his first sentence of recorded interaction with Jesus as the story is told by John. This is the way it goes. The next day, John the Baptist is out there again with two of his disciples, and he sees Jesus passing by and he says, Look, the Lamb of God. And then verse 37 of John 1, it says, When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. Probably the two disciples are, well, we know one of them is Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. And the other one, my theory is that it's probably John the evangelist, the author of this book, or he could be somebody else. So they followed Jesus, turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, What do you want? They said, Rabbi, which means teacher, where are you staying? Come, he replied, and you'll see. So they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent that day with him. It was about the tenth hour, 4 p.m. And then I feel like a lot of things happen between that right there, which is the end of verse 39 and the beginning of verse 40, because at the beginning of verse 40, it's all clear. They've heard what John the Baptist has said about Jesus. They've heard whatever it is that Jesus himself has said, and the whole thing adds up to enough certainty that uh Andrew makes his his celebratory speed dial phone call to his brother. It goes like this Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus. The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, We found the Messiah, that is, the Christ. And he brought him to Jesus. What a sentence that is, by the way. Yeah, I know we're talking about name changes and stuff today, but let's just do this aside right now. Okay, look, even if you don't think there's anything to the God thing, even if you're on the fence about that, just from a perspective of sheer appreciation of historical things of great magnitude. I mean, we're talking about the huge moments in history, the watershed moments. This is one right here. Andrew, here's the testimony of John. He has a brief exchange with Jesus, then Jesus says a bunch of stuff to him. Andrew's like, I'm convinced. And he goes and he finds his more rambunctious, more outspoken, go big or go home style brother. And he's like, Hey, I gotta, I gotta show you this. And he brought him to Jesus. Doesn't look like he dragged him against his will. I mean, I think I think Simon was cool with this, but it was Andrew who had his eyes opened to who Jesus was first. It was Andrew who somehow did the mental math on this thing. And so, you know, you you scroll forward in this story to a more dramatic moment after a bunch of adventures in Matthew 16. And I don't know why I'm turning there. I'm probably not going to read you Matthew 16, but you know, Jesus is saying, who do people say the Son of Man is? And you know, some of them are like, oh, maybe he's like John the Baptist come back to life. Other people say, you know, maybe it's Elijah or still other Jeremiah or one of the prophets. I mean, so the rumors that are floating around in Matthew 16 are all the same rumors that were floating around about John the Baptist in John chapter one. People don't know what they're talking about. And then Jesus says, But what about you? He asked, Who do you say that I am? And then Simon Peter, and Matthew records both names here, he answered him, You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God. And then Jesus puts this huge blessing on Simon Peter. He says, Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my father in heaven. Well, when did his father in heaven start doing that revealing? I think he started doing that revealing when John the Baptist said for the second day in a row, what we're calling Thursday, look, the Lamb of God, guys, look, the Lamb of God. When John the Baptist said that to Andrew, and then Andrew and this unnamed disciple go and have this little exchange with Jesus, and then they follow him and then they hear from him. That's kind of when God started revealing this thing to Simon Peter. It was all the way back then. It wasn't even just that God miraculously bestowed upon Simon Peter eyes to see. He kind of gave Simon Peter eyes to see by first giving his brother eyes to see. I just think it's uh it's so cool. And what an honor for Andrew. How funny the way this phrase is in English. Andy brought him to Jesus. Andy brought him to Jesus. That's the kind of thing that gets real funny when you're a dad and you get into your 40s. And he brought him to Jesus. So in this moment, Andrew, unnamed disciple, we're gonna say probably John, and Peter are now in the presence of Jesus. I assume Jesus knows that Andrew kind of spilled the beans and was like, I kind of thought you might be the Messiah. So I just told my brother that you're probably the Messiah. This is my brother, Simon, by the way. He's pretty cool. A lot of paraphrased there is mine. We don't get actually any of the exchange between them, but I can kind of imagine this first meeting. I can imagine a healthy skepticism on the part of Peter as he's walking in and being like, okay, well, what does it look like when you meet the Messiah? I mean, does he have like a little hat or something? Is there a sash? How do you know? What does he does he glow? Does he fly? How do you know when it's the Messiah? I'm sure he had many perfectly reasonable questions. And this is what happens. Jesus looked at him and said, remember, this is only Jesus' third line in all of the Gospel of John, according to John's account. I mean, maybe other stuff was said here. Maybe John is condensing things. The account we have is the account we have handed down to us by John. This is the first thing John says that Jesus ever said to Simon, and this is it. Jesus looked at him and said, You are Simon, son of John. You will be called Cephas. I've never had that social interaction with anybody I've ever met in my life. I've had some weird first meetings, and I've even known some people who've changed their names or grabbed a nickname. I know one young lady who I think very highly of who had a lovely name given to her at birth, and then later on she was like, I want this other lovely, elegant girl's name, and now I have that. Okay, cool. Yeah, I've known people who have taken on a new name or a new nickname as a way to mark a you know a moment of passage in life or whatever. But I've never heard of anything like this. What kind of authority and confidence would it take to do this? I mean, think about Jesus just from a social perspective here. He's in a room with presumably three people, or maybe, you know, a little hut and made a couple sticks and a blanket or something. There's three people there and himself. He met the other two yesterday. Maybe, I mean, who knows? Maybe this is much later the same day. I guess it doesn't exactly spell it out. One or two of these guys you just met, they scurry off for a minute and they come back with a real swarthy, husky looking third fellow who's kind of doing the like, why am I here? What am I supposed to expect? What are we doing? And the first thing you say is you are Simon, son of John. I mean, that's kind of I mean, there's just a lot of looking at people and knowing who they are here in John chapter one, right? The religious leaders, they can't do it. They can't look at John the Baptist and figure him out. But John the Baptist, whose eyes are opened by God, he can look at Jesus and be like, oh, I know who that is, and he can do it again the next day. And Andrew, it would seem, has the ability to look at Jesus and figure out pretty quickly who he is. Well, Jesus has the ability to look at Simon and be like, I know who you are. You are Simon, son of John. But it's not just knowledge that Jesus wields here, it's also authority. You will be called Cephas, which when translated is Peter. Now, as the story of the Bible and as the story of Christian history unfolds, we get a better sense of maybe why Jesus picked that, what he was driving at with that. Surely that passage I was referencing and quoting a little bit from earlier in Matthew 16 gives us a bit more clarity on that as well. But you kind of picture the immature version of Simon Peter as being full of bluster and panache. Like picture people you know who want to be thought of as very tough and very big and very unafraid of confrontation, but it's kind of a a mask, the bluster is. And now picture people who you know who actually have that kind of confidence and their lack of fear of confrontation or difficult things is because of this deep mooring they have to principles and truth, guiding principles. Well, that's kind of that is who Peter becomes along the way. So early on, it's kind of like he's bowing up to impersonate a rock. And it's kind of like later on, through his encounter and his time with Christ, he actually becomes worthy of that name. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.