I love Peter. He was bold, brash, and fiercely loyal to Jesus, until he wasn’t. In other words, Peter was human. Brave one moment, cowardly the next. Saying the most profound truth in one breath, and something really dumb with the next.
One day Jesus was standing by the Sea of Galilee talking to the crowd that had gathered around him. Being pressed by the crowd, he got into the boat belonging to Peter. When he finished speaking to the crowd, he told Peter to “Put out into deep water and let down the nets for a catch.” [5:4]
Jesus was a carpenter, and Peter was the fisherman who had been out all night and hadn’t caught a thing. But with a cocky attitude he does what Jesus tells him to do and ends up catching so many fish they were in danger of sinking. “When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said, ‘Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!’”
In one moment over a catch of fish, Peter saw Jesus, and in that glimpse of the Holiness of God in this itinerant preacher, Peter recognized his own ungodliness. There would be another time, even more devastating.
Jesus had warned Peter that Satan wanted to sift him like wheat and that before the night was over Peter would deny even knowing Him. Peter denied that would happen, but before the night was over, standing in the courtyard of the high priest after Jesus was arrested, Peter did exactly as Jesus told him he would. Just as he was speaking his last denial of his master, the rooster crowed and “The Lord turned and looked straight at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word the Lord had spoken to him: ‘Before the rooster crows today, you will disown me three times.’ And he went outside and wept bitterly.”
I can only begin to imagine what that one look from the Lord did to Peter’s heart. In that one look, Peter saw himself no longer as the big brave fisherman, the right-hand man of his master, but as a sinner deserving absolutely nothing from God except justice.
Peter, undone, unraveled, cursing his own sinful heart, would soon discover the amazing grace God so wanted to shower upon him.
