Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Eric Alexander: We arrive at the last chapter of John's Gospel, chapter 21, and to this record that appears here of our Lord meeting, after His resurrection, with His disciples and in a particular sense, with Peter.

We are familiar, of course, with the prologue of John's Gospel, which occurs in the first 14 verses of chapter 1, but perhaps not quite so familiar with the idea that here at the end of John's Gospel, in chapter 21, there is an epilogue to the Gospel. You might have noticed last time when we were reading at the end of chapter 20 that John points out to us: Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not recorded in this book. These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life through His name. And you might almost have expected that this would be the end of John's record of our Lord's life and death and resurrection.

But here in chapter 21, you get this epilogue where we have an example of the living risen Jesus dealing with two particular areas of His disciples' lives. You would recognize as we were reading how the chapter divides into two halves, as it were. And here, Jesus risen from the dead is bringing the power of His risen life to bear upon these two areas of His disciples' lives: first of all, to the whole area of fruitlessness in their service for Him; and secondly, as He comes closer to Peter as an individual, to failure in their devotion to Him.

Now it could be said that Peter dominates both halves of the chapter. He is the one who is full of initiative and energy in the first 14 verses of chapter 21. It is Peter who suggests, "We will go fishing," and they all go with him. It is Peter whose actions seem to dominate the whole of the first half of the chapter. And then, of course, we are sufficiently familiar with that quite extraordinary and surely embarrassing moment in Peter's life—crushing, probably more than embarrassing—when Jesus comes alongside him and begins to probe with something like a spiritual surgeon's knife into Peter's heart. "Peter," He says, "Do you truly love Me more than these?"

And here, Peter, of course, seems almost to be the only figure in the second half of the chapter. The deeper truth, of course, is that it is the Lord Jesus Himself who dominates both parts of this epilogue to John's Gospel. It is He who is dealing with these different areas in His disciples' lives—their fruitlessness. Here they are out on the ship fishing, and He calls to them—you heard it—"You haven't caught anything, have you?" And they say, "Nothing, Lord." And then it is Jesus who is dealing with Peter's disastrous failure and restoring him to a place of usefulness.

There is perhaps no sense in which we need to meet with the risen Lord ourselves so much as to learn from him in these two areas: fruitlessness and failure dealt with by the risen Savior. You will notice in the first half of the chapter how the disciples are gathered together, and it is Peter again who makes the suggestion to them. Many people see no particular significance in Peter's suggestion, "I'm going out to fish," he says, and the disciples say, "We'll go with you." And some people think the days were quiet, there was nothing to do, they were underemployed and somewhat aimless, and Peter naturally turns, perhaps even for economic reasons, to go back to the fishing again and proposes it to the disciples, and they say, "We will go with you."

I have an idea, however, and with the Apostle Paul I say to you, I speak as a man. It is only an idea, but I have an idea that John's Gospel is so full of symbolism and almost everything that you read points to something that is deeper—it is at another level than the more obvious—that I rather wonder if there is not something in what Peter is saying that captures the thought that he is going back to the old world, that he is returning to the world which had occupied them before Jesus came on the scene at all. Because you will remember that this was where Jesus found them. They were fishermen, and He came, and they left their nets and followed Him. And it is just possible that there is some idea of this contained in John's recording for us that Peter says, "I am going fishing."

You will notice the really interesting thing: it is that Peter all through the Gospel records and all through his life is a leader. We say this of some people, don't we? He's a born leader. I say it of people sometimes when I write references, which I do frequently. And I sometimes have found myself saying very honestly to somebody who's looking for an employee, "He is a true leader. Wherever he goes, he will be a leader of men." And it's true of some people. By nature they have that quality. By God's grace and gifts, He gives to some people that quality. And it is an exciting thing to see someone with these qualities.

But I want to say to you this evening, Peter is still a leader although at this point he is in a spiritually sick condition. Of that there is no question. This comes before his restoration, you see. It's after the resurrection but before his restoration. And Peter is in a backslidden condition of soul. But he's still a leader, and people still follow him. And that's the solemn thing about having gifts of leadership. Maybe I'm talking to somebody this evening who is by nature and constitution, by gifts and graces, a born leader, and born again to be a leader. And I tell you the responsibility that rests upon that kind of quality is just this: that when you slide back, when you turn your back on Jesus Christ, when you grow slack, when the things of God no longer are first in your soul, then you draw other people inevitably with you.

And Simon Peter was that kind of man. Whatever John intends us to understand, there is no question that Peter draws people after him. It's one of the reasons, I'm sure, that the Epistle of James says to us, "My brethren, do not many of you be teachers or masters, because there is a peculiar responsibility that rests upon leaders that they guard their own soul, not only for their own sake but for the sake of those they influence in the world around them." Peter said, "I am going back to the fishing." And they said, "We'll go with you."

And then Jesus began to teach them the lesson that He had arranged this occasion, I have little doubt, specifically to teach them. Early in the morning, verse 4, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples didn't recognize Him. They didn't realize that it was Jesus. That could have been because of the mist of the early morning. It could also be that apparently Jesus in His resurrection body could sometimes be recognized and sometimes obscured to people. They now and again were unaware of who He was and sometimes recognized Him. Here we read that the disciples didn't realize it was Jesus. He called out to them, "Friends, you don't have any fish, do you?" Now they had been out that night and they caught nothing. "No," they answered.

And He said, "Throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some." And when they did, they were unable to haul the net in because of the large number of fish. And the disciple whom Jesus loved—that's John himself—said to Peter, "It is the Lord." Now I wonder if you could imagine why he immediately recognized who He was. I don't think it was simply because his eyes penetrated the morning mist or that Jesus was suddenly revealed to him. I think it was rather because of what was happening there before them. You may recollect that in Luke's Gospel chapter 5, we read of a very similar kind of incident where the disciples were out fishing and Jesus is on the land, and He calls out to them when they have caught nothing. They have been fishing all night and He says, "Throw the nets down on the other side of the boat." And they say to Him, "Master, we have been toiling all night and caught nothing." And Jesus says, "Throw the nets on the other side." And they said, "Nevertheless, at Your word we will." And the nets again were so full of fish that they began to break.

Now here the mystery and miracle is that the net did not break, but the disciples had discovered the same Lord doing the same glorious thing for them, and it's full of symbolism and significance undoubtedly for John. And the symbolism is, of course, that fishing was a symbol that He Himself used. Do you remember when He said to them, "Come away from your nets. Leave the fishing. I'll make you to become fishers of men"? Now the fishing, you see, was a symbol. It was a picture of something more significant. "I will make you fishers of men," He said. So this activity in which they were engaged stood for something infinitely more than just going out with a boat as they would do from our shores and trying to catch some fish.

It was a symbol of the service to which they had been called by Jesus. And Jesus says to them, "You have caught nothing, have you?" And they said, "No." And He commanded them to throw the net on the right side of the boat and you will find some. And when they did, they were unable to haul the net in because of the large number of fish. And Peter said, "It is the Lord. It is the Lord." Now it was, of course, and John was precisely accurate when he said, "It is the Lord." And Peter jumped into the water, impetuous as ever, to get to Jesus.

But the significant thing he probably missed—and that is that these men's lives and their service were so desperately empty at this point—and I have little doubt that what Jesus is doing in this miracle is demonstrating to them the difference between life and service when it is at the command of Jesus and lived in His will and wrought in obedience to Him, and life and service which is undertaken merely through self-will and the energy of the flesh. And He is illustrating this to them as they bring the nets in. Verse 8, the other disciples followed in the boat towing the net full of fish, for they were not far from the shore. And Peter climbed aboard and dragged the net ashore. It was full of large fish, 153.

You may have wondered why John tells us that there are 153. There are some amazing explanations of why there are 153 fish in this net. You know, perhaps, do you, that 153 is the sum total of all the numbers between 1 and 17? That is, I can guarantee you this, I tried it out on my adding machine. And if you add all the numbers between 1 and 17, you'll get 153. And the explanation is that 1 to 17 is an important range of numbers: 10 stands for the law and 7 for perfection. So if you put the two together, you get the perfect number, 17, and all these numbers are of importance, some people think. Personally, I think that it just happened that there were 153 fish and that when they counted them, they counted them because, like good fishermen, they divided the catch amongst them, and you'd probably find them doing that most places.

But they gathered the fish together and they found that Jesus had overwhelmed them by the prosperity that He had given to them. And they had lived, you see, in barrenness. The harvest of the sea is a symbol of many different things to them, but they had lived in barrenness. They knew what it was to have fruitlessness in their lives and in their service. They were making not the slightest impact on the world around them. And Jesus said, "Cast on the other side." Now the significant thing is that they did what He told them. They listened to His voice.

And you know, on this Easter Sunday evening, my friends, it may seem a mundane lesson to learn, but it's probably one of the crucial lessons of the whole of life for those of us who are Christian leaders, for those of us who seek to serve God, for those of us who are aware of a barrenness and a uselessness in our lives. The vital issue for these men was to listen to Jesus. "At Your word, we will do it Your way." And one of the easiest things in the world is to be like these fruitless disciples and never really to be aware of it—to go on spending your energies and spending your days and doing nothing for the kingdom of God.

And here, says Jesus, is the difference between fruitlessness and fruitfulness in My service. And it depends on hearing Him and obeying Him. And that really is one of the great issues that this incident presents to us—the question: whom am I obeying? Whom am I trusting as I seek to serve the Lord Christ? I think sometimes God sets us aside for a time to enable us to ask that question and to find an answer to it in our own souls. I had a letter some time ago from a friend of mine in the United States who quoted this very passage to me and said that during a period when God had, as he wrote, put him on his back, he had to learn afresh this lesson of how easy it was to be struggling and busy and yet barren and fruitless. And how desperately he needed to recognize that it was easy to serve the Lord without ever knowing His presence or hearing His voice or giving your whole being to obeying Him.

And he said, "I thank God for these days of illness for that reason." Well, Jesus gathered them together, and you can see the grace with which He brings them to the shore to this breakfast that He has cooked for them. Charles Haddon Spurgeon says, "How gracious the Lord Jesus is. He gives them a cooked breakfast whereas a cold snack would have been good enough for a bunch of backsliders." But Jesus brings them to the shore and gives them their breakfast and communion with Himself, and He begins to sit down amongst them. And that's when we slide into the second half of the chapter. Because at this point, the risen Jesus has one of them to single out. You find him doing that, you know. He is not usually found talking just to the multitude. Here is Jesus rather like the schoolteacher who confronts the whole class, and then he moves down through the rows and sits alongside one pupil, Simon Peter.

You know how teachers sometimes do that. We used to have one up in Alan Glen's school when I was a schoolboy who did this in the Latin class to my great embarrassment regularly to me. I was never very sure whether it was because of my weakness in the Latin language or for some other reason, but he used to come and sit down beside me and put his arm around the back of the chair and say, "Now, what have we got here?" And all the rest of the boys would be tittering. But Jesus came and sat down beside Simon Peter, and He said to him, "Simon son of John, you and I have got a great deal to talk about." It's true for many of us, isn't it? How the Lord Jesus comes down the aisle, as it were, and recognizes that, as though there were no one else in the world, there is something in your life that desperately personally needs to be put right by Him.

And He sits down beside you and says, "Simon son of John, do you truly love Me more than these?" Now I think the reason for all of this conversation is to be found in so much of the background of Peter's life. I've got no doubt, for example, that the three occasions when Jesus asks him the question are closely related to the three times that Peter denied Him. I've little doubt that when He begins His questions to Peter, "Simon son of John," He says, "do you truly love Me more than these?" He's referring to not just one but more than one occasion when Peter had said to Him, "Though all of these desert You, Lord, I never will." He says, "Do you really love Me more than they do?" And Peter says, "Yes, Lord, You know that I love You." And He says, "Feed My lambs." Do you notice how Jesus is beginning with a reassessment of Simon Peter? Then He moves on to a recommissioning of him.

Nobody in the whole universe wanted Simon Peter to be brought back to the place of usefulness so much as Jesus. Nobody had wept tears of love over him as Jesus had undoubtedly done as he drifted further and further away from him. But there was a reassessment that had to precede the recommissioning. Now the trouble is that we often want the recommissioning without the reassessment. Now if you like to change the metaphor, Jesus is not just like the teacher moving down the class and sitting alongside him and saying, "Now we really will need to sort you out, won't we? We really need to get to the root of your problem and deal with it, won't we?" In another sense, He is rather like the physician who comes—or would it be the surgeon, maybe it would be—who comes to you when you're ill and has a kind of general look at you, and then he begins to probe here and there, you know, and says, "Now is that sore? Is that the point where the trouble comes from?" And he puts his hand here and there until suddenly you're left screaming, "That's it!" you say, "That's it!" "Ah," he says, "well now, that's the place that we'll need to deal with."

And with Simon Peter, it was this issue: "Simon son of John, do you really love Me?" I think that Peter was a man with great emotions—mixed emotions, powerful emotions—and they were part of his greatness. But one of the things that he desperately had to learn was that there was a difference between emotion and devotion to Jesus—that love was not a sentimental thing. It didn't belong to the world of high profession and great protests. "Though all of them desert You, I never will. I will gladly die with You," says Peter. And Jesus is beginning to teach him the lesson that loving Him and obeying His commandments are inseparable things.

And so He begins to touch the area that needs the divine surgeon to deal with his problem. You will know that some people tell us there are different words that John uses, and it's true, for "love." He uses the word that's commonly used for God's love, for divine love, for the love that speaks of abandonment in self-giving. And He does so on the first two occasions when He answers Peter, and Peter uses a different word as John records it for us, the word from which we get our word "philanthropy" and so on. It's the word that rather speaks of a brotherly love, an affection. I'm not really sure whether the difference is intended to be the kind of difference on which we can build a great deal. What I do know is that three times Jesus penetrated into Peter's spirit, and we read that Peter was hurt because Jesus said to him the third time, "Do you love Me?"

It's an amazing thing that Peter didn't seem to begin to ask the question: how deeply had Jesus been hurt when three times he had denied Him? But he was hurt when Jesus said, "Do you really love Me?" And this kind of faithful dealing with a man's soul that Jesus was engaged in, Peter shrank from. I suppose we would all have done. But you notice that Jesus, having penetrated into Peter's soul, says to him, "If you do love Me, feed My lambs, take care of My sheep, feed My sheep." And there is a profound and wonderful sense in which the Lord Jesus is recommissioning Peter for service. Now I don't think that it was something that ended that day, you know, so that there was a mighty climax in Peter's life and from then onwards everything was wonderful and he never had any other failures or problems. I don't think that was in the slightest sense true.

Indeed, in the very next breath, do you notice he's doing the thing that you and I do again and again? I see myself in Simon Peter so much. When Jesus says to him, "Follow Me"—He says, "This is the thing that really matters, follow Me, follow Me." Now you know the trouble is that so often we want Jesus to follow us. That's what Peter's problem had been all along. When Jesus said to them, "I am going up to Jerusalem and the Son of Man will be mocked and crucified and the third day He will rise again," Peter said to Him, "This be far from Thee, Lord. We're never going to allow You to do this kind of thing. We want You to be the Savior, but we want it in a different way from this. We have other plans for You altogether. You just follow me." And Jesus says to him, "Simon son of John, follow Me."

And He began to tell him the kind of death by which he would glorify God. And Peter almost immediately did the thing that you and I do. He turned round and he saw John. And he said to him, "Now what about him?" he said. "There are a lot of important things that need to be settled about his life, are there not? There are many issues that he needs to face. What are You going to do about John?" It's one of the classic ways of avoiding God speaking to your own soul and turning aside the sharp edge of His sword by concentrating your attention on other people and trying to get God to do the same. And Jesus again was firm and faithful with him, and He said, "If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? There's only one thing you need to remember, Peter, and it's not My plans for John: you follow Me."

Now nothing else in the world mattered than that for Peter. And this is what Jesus came down the class to say to him. This is the surgery that he needed, if you like. He needed to be cut loose from everything else that he might follow Jesus. And that's what Jesus comes down the pew to speak to every one of us about this evening. This more than all else is what we need to learn—that living the Christian life is just following Him in a total, glad, unquestioning obedience. And that's the issue on which fruitfulness itself depends. "At Your word, we will do it Your way." Jesus said to him, "You follow Me."

It's a glorious thing to know as we close that right at the end of the New Testament, we can find that Simon Peter had learned so many of these lessons by the time he was an older man. And he writes to the dispersed people of God, to the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder: be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care, serving as overseers, not because you must but because you are willing as God wants you to be, eager to serve, not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. And when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away. He was feeding the sheep and creating by God's grace others who would do the same. May God teach us the lesson and make us a great company of followers. Let us pray.

Our Father, we bow before You conscious that the risen Savior so often wants to come to sit alongside us, as it were, and to probe into our lives that He might change us by His resurrection power. And we pray that You would make us willing to be made different, for the glory of the Lord Jesus we ask it. Amen.

Mark Daniels: You're listening to Hear the Word of God, with the Reverend Eric Alexander, a minister in the Church of Scotland for over 50 years. To access more Bible teaching from Reverend Alexander, visit hearthewordofgod.org where your generous contribution will help us sustain and grow this ministry. That's hearthewordofgod.org. You could choose instead to mail a check to this address: 600 Eden Road, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 17601. Or call 1-800-488-1888. This program is a presentation of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. I'm Mark Daniels. Thank you for listening. Please join us again next time for Eric Alexander and Hear the Word of God.