Mrk. 8:32-33 ... "Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him. But turning and seeing His disciples, He rebuked Peter and said, 'Get behind Me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man'."
Through the prophet Isaiah Jehovah said, "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways," (55:8). The human reaction to a situation usually differs greatly from God's, for man's wisdom is to God's as a single drop of water is to the entire ocean. Furthermore, when one of us begins a course of action, we do not know what the final outcome will be; but God always knows the end from the beginning. Through Isaiah again He declared, "I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, 'My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all My course'," (Isa. 46:9-10). To know where a course of action will lead and what its consequences will be determine whether you will undertake it. God always knows and chooses the best way. Man never knows and often blunders badly in his choice. God's course of action with its various components often seems little short of foolish to man in his sophistication and self-confident wisdom. God realizes this and sometimes even chooses such an unseemly course deliberately to exhibit man's egotism and self-reliance. Paul wrote that "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God," (I Cor. 1:27-29).
If God had assigned it to man to plan the Scheme of Redemption, one wonders how it would have been conceived and designed. I think that man would have designed something easier and less painful than having the Son of God descend to live in human form, subject Himself to every temptation we face, and endure the horrible ordeal of the crucifixion and its preliminary tortures and gross indignities. One of the things most characteristic of human enterprise is the effort to find the way that is easier and more comfortable in anything to be done. This is, in fact, the underlying factor in Peter's taking Jesus aside and rebuking Him. In the previous verse it is reported that Jesus "began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again." Peter's rebuke was a denial that such an awful thing could possibly happen to Jesus.
In the supreme wisdom of God it happens that the way which seems harder to man is often the one that is best; and the one that appears more painful is nothing other than the way that is necessary. We cannot fathom the depth of the divine wisdom that Jesus' suffering and death was the best and only way to effect human redemption. But it was so! And when the apostle Peter, though with the best of intentions, sought to divert His beloved Master from such a cruel fate, Jesus rebuked him sharply. He even called him "Satan," evidently because the same proposal (though maliciously) had been previously made by Satan, (Mat. 4:1-11). Then Jesus warned Peter not to try to impose "the things of man" upon the way chosen by God.
There is a great temptation in the church today to compromise God's way for us with innovations we think will accomplish a reduction in work, sacrifice, and even suffering. There has already been enough yielding to this temptation to produce results that are quite discernible. Let us beware! Peter's blunder should convince us that God does not intend that everything should be easy and become even easier, nor that pain should be eliminated and replaced with pleasure. It may well be that as we try to make everything in God's service easy and entertaining, we are "not setting [our] mind on the things of God, but on the things of man."
