why Jesus told his disciples to not tell anybody who he was

Jesus warned his disciples not to tell anyone who he was. “The Son of Man  must suffer many terrible things,” he said. “He will be rejected by the elders, the leading priests, and the teachers of religious law. He will be killed, but on the third day he will be raised from the dead.” (Luke 9:21-22)

Have you ever wondered why Jesus would tell his disciples, the people who were entrusted with spreading his gospel, to not tell anybody who he was?

“Okay, guys, your job is to spread my message to the world. Now don’t tell anybody.”

Does that really make sense?

Two views of this come out.

The first is that Jesus figured that people will always do the opposite of what you say. So he tells them to not talk about him so it will make certain they do.

This really doesn’t make sense. it presupposes that people will not obey him and will do the opposite of what he says. Jesus never worked that way. in fact, God never worked that way. When anybody, God the Father, Son or Spirit, told someone something, they really figured that the people to whom they were talking would pay attention.

So that cannot be it. That would just be encouraging disobedience.

The second is the most logical view. They didn’t know what they were talking about yet, and he wanted to instruct them further before they ran around shooting their mouths off about stuff they didn’t understand.

You could tell they didn’t understand because of the questions they kept asking him. one of these questions was trying to figure out when he was going to set up his earthly kingdom. He kept telling them that his idea of a kingdom and their idea of a kingdom were different.

And he knew that the last thing they needed to do was to try and tell others about who he was. It was best to just lie low and wait until they understood.

After he had died, and had resurrected, after he had ascended and they waited for power on high, and then after the Spirit came on them with tongues like fire – then they knew what they were talking about and they went to town.