Big moments in Jesus' life, that's our theme this week on Things Unseen.

Yesterday we thought about what happened in the River Jordan, and today I want to reflect

with you in another big moment, one that took place at Cesaria Philippi.

The name trips off the tongue so easily that we sometimes forget at Caesar Ia.

It's like Washington, T.C.

We say the names of these cities and sometimes forget there's a reason for them.

If we're Americans then perhaps Washington reminds us of the privileges of independence.

But Cesaria reminded God's people of the opposite.

They weren't the land of the free, they were under the yoke of Caesar of Rome, and most

of them certainly didn't feel they lived in the home of the brave.

There were actually two Cesarias, one was the port of Cesaria which was on the Mediterranean

coast about 65 miles away from Jerusalem, and there was this other Cesaria in the north

in the Highlands, in the territory of Herod's Son Philip.

It had been earlier called Panéon, because the Greeks had built a shrine there to the

God Pan.

And Herod had built a temple there, not dedicated to Yahweh, but to Rome and to Caesar Augustus.

It's a place where the remains of pagan worship can still, I think, be seen.

And it was here.

Perhaps not in the pagan bestruened town itself, but as Matthew says in that region, it was

here that another big moment a tundling point took place in our Lord's ministry.

It had three elements.

The first was Simon Peter's confession that Jesus was the Christ the Son of the Living

...