As Paul says, even though we as human beings know God, we refuse to acknowledge him. That's what Peter did. He refused even to "know" Jesus! Peter's failure reflects all our failure. It forces us to face the reality about ourselves. But the point of the story is that Jesus foretold this - he knew it was coming. And Jesus forgave Peter, when Peter confessed his love for Jesus. So the story illustrates both the horrible nature of sin, and the amazing reality of grace. That's essential to the whole meaning of the gospel.

There are four accounts of the gospel itself! The momentous events of the conception, birth, life, teaching, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth are too vast to be adequately viewed from one angle alone. Just as we need several points of view to "see" a person's face, so we need these varied emphases and angles to gain the full perspective of all God wants us to understand.

Old Testament Israel had some foundational pillars of faith. They were true and robust and God given. The trouble was that people had come to trust in them merely by repeating them, without paying any attention to the ethical implications of what their faith should mean in how they lived. They believed God had given them their land. He had. But they had not lived in it in either gratitude or obedience. They had not fulfilled any of the conditions that Deuteronomy had made so clear.

The trouble today is that many Christians live in a kind of bubble of assumptions about what their Christianity means, especially if it places them comfortably among "the good guys," - assumptions that are likely to be drawn as much from folk-Christianity, surrounding political culture, popular pulp-books about the "End Times," or their favourite guru writer or therapist, than from sober and comprehensive reading of the Bible as a whole. Prophets and preachers have the unwelcome task of pricking that bubble with the sharpness of actual texts and teachings of the Bible itself.

The Bible itself does not seem too bothered by the idea that talking of God suffering might in any way diminish God, or detract from his perfection. On the contrary, the Bible seems to revel in the richness of describing God in ways that reflect our own human realities.

God has made us humans in God's own image. So therefore the highest way to talk about God is by some kind of analogy with ourselves. So, naturally, if we who are finite and sinful suffer in multiple ways because of sin and evil and the horrible things that happen in our world, how much more does God, who is infinite, sinless, and knows the totality of all that happens to everybody, suffer pain and heartache at the suffering of his human and non-human creation - and be angry at all that causes it?

"It is finished" means that Jesus had accomplished all that God's mission had sent him to do. It did not merely mean that his life was over like, "I'm finished". It was a statement of achievement of purpose - God's purpose to deal with sin and guilt, to defeat all the powers of evil, to bring about the reconciliation of enemies, to defeat death itself, and to accomplish the reconciliation and liberation of the whole creation.