These two apostles play critical roles in the life story of Jesus Christ. Both Judas and Peter walked with Jesus during His ministry days, they both followed Jesus and experienced His teachings and acts. However they also have their own share of betraying Jesus during the time when He most needed support and it is easy for us to judge their betrayals toward Jesus because we think just like Peter, that we are above rejecting God, that it could not happen to any of us. Well that is untrue and we see it especially in the case of Peter, with Judas we can justify it and say perhaps his greed got the better of him or that satan entered him etc etc, but one thing is certain we need God in order to remain faithful to God period!
So pride lets us believe we are above certain things or mistakes that people in the Bible did because we “know” better, well scripture proves that often sin is committed by people who know better take for instance Eve we think we would not have accepted the fruit but we continue right now to sin against God with the very thing we repented from last night! Hence God warns us to not judge others lest He judges us well, and we all know that there is always something that we can get judged for hence that woman found in adultery was not stoned by even single person.
Now back to Judas and Peter we see especially in John’s gospel how they betrayed Jesus, John 18 specifies how Judas betrayed Jesus and was called the traitor and in the very act of this betrayal we see how Peter heroically cut an the ear of one of the persons brought by Judas to arrest Jesus. Pretty expected since we are of the view that Peter loved Jesus and would do anything for Him right? But why do we think that for some reason Judas did not love Jesus?
Peter also betrayed Jesus but this is unexpected because we see how he cuts someone’s ear off for Jesus’ sake and is seemingly the number one disciple of Jesus Christ however in the very same chapter 18 but down to verse 15 and 25 we see how Peter denies Jesus when He most needed a friend in fact Peter saw the hurt in Jesus’ eye when the rooster crowed the third time because Jesus did predict this beforehand and Peter denied it.
But what choices did these two men who betrayed Jesus do? One made a choice to give up while the other chose to not give up and in fact repent as a result of the love that Jesus Christ showed him scripture says Peter swam toward Jesus I guess he felt he could not get to Jesus fast enough, if you remember when Mary and them found that the tomb was empty they were told to tell the disciples and a special mention of Peter was made in Mark 16v7. Peter experienced the forgiveness and true love of God by means of His Grace when Peter least deserved it and that could raise a question that could maybe Judas have experienced the same forgiveness if he chose to stay alive? this proves that separation from God really results in death because Judas still loved Jesus but he did not believe that Jesus could love him past his mistakes hence the choice he made.
God is Good, Peter experienced His goodness while Judas chose to not believe in that goodness. Our choice should be to always believe and know that God is good despite how bad things seem.