Questions raised during the session, with answers drawn from the teaching.
Q: Did God intentionally close the disciples’ minds so they couldn’t understand what Jesus was telling them?
This was a common teaching in Sunday school settings — the idea that God veiled the disciples’ understanding as part of his sovereign plan.
The teacher addressed this by reframing the question: Would God hide truth from the very people he was actively trying to reveal it to? The answer, given the pattern of Jesus’ ministry, is no. Jesus consistently explained his parables privately to his disciples precisely because they were meant to understand. The crowds who heard only the surface of the parables were not being intentionally excluded — they simply were not seeking deeper understanding. The disciples were.
The more accurate explanation for the disciples’ confusion is not divine concealment but deeply embedded preconception. They had been shaped by a tradition that expected a political and military Messiah. That framework was so strong that even direct, repeated statements from Jesus couldn’t easily dislodge it. The confusion wasn’t God hiding truth — it was the disciples being unable to receive truth that contradicted everything they had been raised to expect.
Q: Why did Peter rebuke Jesus — was it doubt, or was there something more going on?
Several things were converging in Peter at that moment. First, there was genuine love and loyalty — the idea of Jesus being killed was unthinkable to him. But underneath that was something the teacher identified as vested interest.
The disciples had left everything to follow Jesus. They were part of what they believed was the entourage of the coming king. The expectation of reward — positions of authority in a restored kingdom — was real and human. James and John had even asked directly to sit at Jesus’ right and left hand (Mark 10:37). When Jesus began describing suffering and death instead of conquest and coronation, Peter wasn’t just confused — he had something significant to lose if Jesus was right.
Satan recognized that human attachment and used it as a lever. The same strategy he employed in the wilderness — offering Jesus the kingdom while bypassing the suffering — was now operating through Peter’s very natural, very human concern. This is why Jesus’ response was as strong as it was. He wasn’t just correcting Peter’s theology. He was identifying and shutting down a spiritual strategy.
Q: What does it mean to “take up your cross”? Are we all supposed to literally suffer?
The teacher addressed this carefully. Taking up your cross is not a call to seek out pain, manufacture hardship, or pursue persecution. It is also not, as some traditions teach, about personally crucifying your sinful nature through self-effort — the teacher noted that this is something Jesus does, not something we accomplish on our own.
To take up your cross is to accept the specific journey God has laid out for you — including its costs, its difficulty, and its path through things you would not choose on your own. It is an act of surrender to a life that may not be easy, in the company of a God who promises to walk through it with you.
The point is not suffering for its own sake, nor is it running from it. The model is Psalm 23: the valley is real, but so is the presence of God within it.
Q: Can you clarify what you mean when you say health, wealth, and prosperity is a doctrine from the pit of hell? Is God not going to take care of us?
The teacher was intentionally provocative in the language used and acknowledged that. The concern is not that God is indifferent to his people’s needs — he is not. The concern is a specific doctrinal system that teaches Christians are entitled to material blessing in this life as a direct result of their faith and generosity.
The problem with that system is what it produces when life doesn’t cooperate — which it inevitably won’t. Sickness, financial hardship, and loss are part of the human experience for believers and non-believers alike. When someone has been taught that faith guarantees health and prosperity, those experiences force a crisis: either God failed, or I don’t have enough faith. Neither conclusion is healthy, and both are exploitable.
The biblical picture is different: God provides, God sustains, God walks with his people — but not as a vending machine that rewards financial giving with material return. He provides as a Father who knows what his children actually need, who works through limitation and suffering as much as through blessing, and whose ultimate provision is an inheritance that no earthly circumstance can touch.
Q (Audience contribution): Doesn’t Matthew 7 and Matthew 13 actually speak directly to this — the false prophets and the thorns and thistles?
Yes, and the teacher welcomed this as strong scriptural grounding for the point.
In Matthew 7:15–16, Jesus warns that false prophets come in sheep’s clothing — they look and sound like genuine spiritual authority. You identify them by their fruit, not their presentation.
Then in Matthew 13:22, in the Parable of the Sower, Jesus explains that the seed falling among thorns represents a person who hears the word but is choked by the deceitfulness of wealth and the anxieties of life. The thorns and thistles are not incidental imagery — they are the very curse God pronounced on the ground after the Fall in Genesis 3:18.
The connection the audience member drew is pointed: what prosperity preachers offer as fruit (blessing, health, wealth) is, in Jesus’ own agricultural language, actually the curse — thorns and thistles. It looks appealing. It does not nourish.
These questions were raised during the session and are preserved here as a record of what came up in the room. They are a companion to, not a replacement for, the main chapter notes.