Q. Matthew records in his gospel that after Peter declared, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Jesus “ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.” Why did Jesus do that?
I think that if Jesus’ disciples had started proclaiming at that point that he was the Messiah, people would have misunderstood what this meant. People would have thought that Jesus was the kind of Messiah they were expecting. As I say in this post, they would have been expecting a Messiah who would “see his primary role as that of meeting the physical needs of people” or who would “do dazzling daredevil feats that would win admiration and an audience” or who wold “try to achieve his purposes by obtaining political and military power.” The devil tried to tempt Jesus to see himself as the Messiah in these ways.
But after Jesus suffered, died, and rose from the dead, the disciples were not only free to proclaim that Jesus was the Messiah, they were commanded to do so. The fact that Jesus had willingly undergone these things showed what kind of Messiah he actually was, and so people would not have misunderstood the disciples to be proclaiming that he was a different type of Messiah, along the lines I have described. The fact that Jesus willingly underwent these things also showed what kind of Savior the world actually needed.
Good Question 