Although there are always dimensions that remain mysterious, we serve a God who desires to be known. God’s self-revelation, God’s word, comes to us in various ways—through nature (cf. Psalm 19), through inner messages (cf. 1 Kings 19:11-13), through the sweeping story of the Bible (cf. Hebrews 4:12). But most of all, God spoke through Jesus, saying to us as to the disciples on the mount, “Listen to him.”

• Matthew seems to have written his gospel in terms that would speak particularly to Christ-followers with Hebrew backgrounds. Moses, the great lawgiver, and Elijah, the prototypical prophet, were two people the Hebrews saw as especially reliable. What symbolic point might Matthew have had in mind in reporting God saying of Jesus, in the presence of those two great leaders, “Listen to him”?
• When this happened, Peter, James and John (as shown by Peter’s rather inane suggestion—when Luke wrote the story in Luke 9:33, he said Peter “didn’t know what he was saying”) were still struggling to understand what Jesus was all about. In what ways do their later lives as apostles suggest that they did, indeed, “listen” to Jesus? How has “listening” to Jesus changed your life for the better?