John 18:18
"Because it was cold, the household servants and the guards had made a charcoal fire. They stood around it, warming themselves, and Peter stood with them, warming himself."
How wonderful it would have been to have lived with Jesus.
If you were told that on a certain day, at a certain location, Jesus would be making an appearance, would you not drop everything to go and meet Him?
What appointment, or obligation, or desire would prevent you from going to where He was?
To see His face and to hear His words and to touch Him. To bring to Him your issues and receive His solution. To cry to Him and be comforted by Him. What, in all of this world, would be of more value?
Why do we go to church on Sunday? Why do we sing praises? Why do we open The Word?
Is it not so that we can meet Him?
Is there anything else that can fill us, truly fill us, with encouragement and comfort and fellowship and compassion and love?
Do not all of these things ultimately stem from seeing His face?
Although we see now as if through a glass, darkly, even a glimpse of His light is enough to bring us through any trial. A glimpse is enough to brighten even the darkest of situations.
How much more would our problems suddenly disappear if we could see Him face to face?
How much more clarity would we have as we returned to our workplaces and homes, faced life’s crossroads, and dealt with our internal struggles if we could present these things to Him directly and receive a direct and specific answer?
Peter experienced this reality.
When Peter awoke in the mornings, Jesus was next to Him.
When Peter cried, Jesus comforted Him.
When Peter faced a dilemma, unsure which direction to take, Jesus directed Him.
Though Peter immediately cast aside his net when Jesus said to Him, "Follow me", surely there was skepticism in his heart. Surely he questioned, as the woman at the well did, "Could this be the messiah?" After waking with Him, though, and walking with Him and seeing His face and the work of His hands, Peter's eyes were opened, and he proclaimed by The Spirit, "You are The Christ. The Son of The Living God."
Any skepticism Peter had was incinerated when The Light Of The World shone into his life.
When the storms and the questions and the trials and the tribulations came, they all had to bow to the authority of Jesus.
Though Peter lacked a full understanding, as we all do, of the magnitude and the all-encompassing glory of the reality of who Jesus truly was and what He would accomplish, this one thing was clear to him: that Jesus was The Christ.
God, through His grace, had revealed this to Peter.
In seeing Jesus for who He was, Peter was filled with a zeal and an all-surpassing desire to be where He was.
Peter recognized that he was walking with the source of life.
He understood that there was nowhere else to go, nothing else of higher value to seek after, no other person or thing in which he would find fulfillment of the desire that is placed in all of our hearts.
Peter woke up every morning with an ache and a longing for something, as we all do. When he worked, he felt it. When he ate and drank and slept and cried, he felt it. This longing had driven him to work and to strive and dream, and now it had been fulfilled, and he saw with his own eyes and touched with his own hands the very thing his heart cried out for.
If you were to ask a fish to explain hydrology, there would be no answer. A fish could not tell you where water begins or ends, or how it gets to where it is going and then back again. Yet a fish knows water in a way that you never will. Though it does not have all the answers or a full understanding of water’s reality, it lives it. Every movement, every desire, every need, is found and satisfied in this water.
Peter, like a fish in water, was found in Jesus. He lived Him. He breathed His words and ate and drank from Him.
To remove a fish from water would be to present it with the ultimate dilemma.
Just as if someone were to remove your supply of air, all other issues would become secondary. In that moment, you would not consider your finances or your ambitions. Your soul's focus in that moment would be on obtaining that thing needed for you to continue on into the next second.
When Peter saw the contingent of soldiers, led by Judas, coming to take away his Lord, he saw the oxygen being removed from the room he was standing in. As a fish thrashes and rages against the entire world without care or consideration for the odds that are stacked against it, so Peter pulled out his sword and slashed at something bigger than he could ever comprehend.
When Jesus was led away, Peter followed, asking himself, "Where else am I to go?"
As the gate to the courtyard of Annas's house was shut, Peter was cut off from the source of life, and for the first time since he had started following Jesus, he was thrust back, on his own, into the world that he had grown up in.
As he looked into the eyes of those around him, he no longer saw others who had seen the very face of God; this alone may have been enough encouragement.
Instead, he saw his own face. He saw who he used to be. He saw a group of people living in the world, doing their jobs, concerned with worldly matters, motivated by earthly concerns.
He saw a group of people who were cold, had built a fire, and were warming themselves.
This Peter, who moments ago was willing to throw away even his own life in order to keep himself in an environment that he did not understand or comprehend, yet found, in it, the fulfillment of every desire of his heart, within a few moments more, acclimated back into his original way of being.
Peter, when he felt the cold of the night, surely longed for a fire built by Jesus.
Surely he desired to stand around this fire with the other disciples.
Surely he wished to fellowship about the things of God with the ones who had seen His very face.
Yet, he subjected himself to a fire built by human hands. He entered into the fellowship of people who had never seen God and did not know Him.
As the night went on and time separated him further and further from the light of the world, Peter grew colder and colder. Without the light of man to illuminate his eyes, he became completely blind. Without the source of courage, he became a coward.
Whereas Peter was once like a fish in water, gracefully gliding in bright flashes of light, completely at home in the environment for which it was designed, he was now like a fish on the bank of a river, completely inept.
Peter, separated from the source of true life, became incapable of living, truly living, the kind of living that is willing in a split second to die.
As time went on, Peter faced further failure.
Though he tried to return to the environment in which he was born, he had been too far separated from it.
His time spent in the new environment had changed him to a degree that he was no longer able to operate in the old one.
He had seen the light. He had heard it speak and touched it with his own hands. He had received the answers to the questions his heart asked. His desires had been fully met.
He cried but was not comforted.
He fished but caught nothing.
When Peter’s darkness of night suddenly turned into the full brightness of noonday, he, nor any of the others with him, had to ask what had changed, for they all knew they had entered again into the presence of The Lord.