The Rock and the Keys SERIES: Who Is the Rock?

"First, as to the rock upon which the church of Christ is built. 

Q: Is that rock the apostle Peter? 

Q: Or is it something else? 

---That it is not Peter, may be proved both by the text itself, and by the concurrent testimony of Scripture. 

It is doubtless well known that the proper name Peter signifies a stone. When Jesus first saw Simon, He said to him:
John 1:42 

You are Simon the son of Jona; you shall be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone, [or Peter]. 

But perhaps it is not so generally known that the Greek word for Peter is entirely different from that which in Matthew 16:18 is translated rock. 

Of the former, petra, Liddell and Scott’s Greek English Lexicon says: A piece of rock, a stone, and thus distinguished from petra. 

This latter word, petra, is the word rendered “rock,” and of this Liddell and Scott say, A rock generally, whether peaked or ridged, Latin, petra, which is defined as a crag. A passage in Pindar is there referred to, where the word occurs in the plural, petrai, where loose stones (petros) are not meant, but “masses of living rock torn up.” 

Q: Now with these facts before us, who can say that Peter is the rock on which the church is built?

A:  He is a stone; but the church is not built on so unstable a foundation. Peter was a man of power and was a mighty instrument in the hands of God to help build up the church; but it would never do to build that church upon a foundation which could waver in the least; and Peter at one time, long after this, wavered so greatly that Paul was obliged to rebuke him to the face. 

A fearless man of God was Peter, yet only a fallible mortal. 

The church is built on a rock, a crag, on something that is fixed. 

The difference in the terms is alone sufficient to show that the apostle Peter is not the foundation of the church. 

Let us now see upon what, according to the inspired word, the church of Christ is actually built. 

In 1 Corinthians 10:4, we are told that the Israelites in the wilderness all drank the same spiritual drink ...for they drank of

that spiritual Rock that followed went with them; and that Rock [petra] was Christ.

In Ephesians 2:20 we are taken a step farther. There the converted Gentiles are told that being now fellow-citizens with the saints, they are......built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone. 

This shows that Christ is the Rock upon which the church is built, as. 

If it be imagined from the wording of Ephesians 2:20, that the apostles are a part of the foundation, even then Peter is deprived of the position which the Catholic Church would give him as the sole foundation, the “apostles and prophets” being all included. 

**But we shall see that the apostle does not mean that the apostles and prophets are a part of the foundation, but that the church is built upon the foundations upon which the apostles and prophets built, and which they, in a sense, laid. 

**Thus, we read: 1 Corinthians 3:10 According to the grace of

God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation, and another builds thereon. 

11 But let every man take heed how he builds thereupon. 

12 For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. 

13 Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay stubble; every man’s work shall be made manifest. 

Christ then, and not Peter, 

is the foundation upon which the church is built. 

This will be seen more plainly still when it is remembered that the church existed in the wilderness of Sinai hundreds of years before the day of Peter.

When Moses identified himself with this church, he incurred the reproach of Christ. 

The Rock from which they drank 

was the Rock upon which they were built."

E.J. Waggoner