Mark 16:9-20 (April 16, 2023)

Mark’s Gospel as the Victory of Jesus

If you have a Bible, you can turn your Bible to Mark chapter 16. Mark chapter 16. It says, last summer, we began going through the book of Mark together. And throughout this book, what we've seen is that Jesus Christ is the rightful King.

Of this world.

In fact, the Gospel of Mark begins with this sentence. The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And we know that that term, Son of God, it points to his divinity, the fact that Jesus Christ is God.

But it also, it's a royal title. It points to the kingship of Jesus. And so it began with, this is the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of.

God.

And then we saw last week, or two weeks ago rather, at the crucifixion, the centurion declares, surely this man was the Son of God. Jesus is the royal Son, the rightful King, the one who defeats Satan in sin and death and secures eternal life for his people, washing away their sins by his blood.

That's what we've seen throughout the book of Mark. Today we finish the book of Mark with verses 9 through 20. So let me read God's word here and it says, beginning in verse 9. Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons.

She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe.

It.

And after these things, he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them. Afterward, he appeared to the eleven themselves, as they were reclining at table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen.

And he said to them, go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe.

In my name they will cast out demons, they will speak in new tongues, they will pick up serpents with their hands, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them. They will lay their hands on the sick and they will recover.

So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs.

Amen.

This is the word of the Lord to us. Now let me begin by just kind of telling us where we're going with this sermon this morning. The first thing that I need to do is I need to explain why I'm preaching this passage in the first place, and I'll explain even that question in just one moment.

Second thing is we're just going to go through the passage and explain what Mark has written. And then at the very end I want to tie it all together and tie the whole book together with an exhortation to God's people.

Why Mark 16:9-20 Is in the Bible

But first, why am I even preaching this passage in the first place? And the reason that is a question at all is because there is some dispute about whether these verses, 9 -20, were in the original gospel that Mark wrote.

So depending on what translation version you have, you might see these verses in brackets. And it might have some sort of note that says, some of the earliest manuscripts do not include 16, 9 -20. And so these are disputed as to whether Mark wrote these verses or not.

So the question is, is this actual Bible? Is this God's Word or not? And so let me start first with some of the reasons why some people dispute that this.

Should be in the Bible.

Some say it doesn't read like Mark, that the language is of a different style, and so they'll point to that. And they'll also say that maybe some of the content is just, if we're, you know, kind of put it in modern parlance, is just kind of weird.

I mean, the snake handling and the drinking poison. But the main argument is what it will often put either in a footnote or in a bracket right above that in certain translations. And that is that these verses don't appear in the earliest extant manuscripts that we've found.

So let me answer that. If you'll give me two minutes, I want to give a quick kind of history lesson on, you know, the history of the Bible. And I'm going to, it can get kind of tedious, and so I'm going to try to oversimplify just for the sake of our time this morning.

But here goes. So God inspired men to write the New Testament, right? God inspired men to write the New Testament. We don't have those original parchments. And so the paper that Mark actually wrote on, we don't have.

What happened is that after Mark wrote his gospel, or after Paul wrote his letters, those were copied many times by scribes. They were copied over and over and over again and then distributed. And so that is how God's word was disseminated.

It was got out to the churches. And in this way, God preserved his word. So we have lots of copies, even if we don't have the original piece of paper that Mark took pen to paper with. So we have lots of manuscripts.

And there's basically two different manuscript families. Again, oversimplifying here, but you have the received text manuscript families. We talked about this a couple of Wednesday nights ago. Had good discussion about it.

And this family of manuscripts is what the church has more or less used for the majority of church history. This is the manuscript family that was used to translate, for example, King James, New King James, Geneva Bible, those versions.

Then you have another family of manuscripts over here called the critical text family of manuscripts. And this incorporates later discoveries of earlier manuscripts, of other manuscripts often earlier, sometimes full, sometimes partial.

A lot of these discoveries were made in, if I'm not mistaken, in the 1800s. Some of these manuscripts, especially the earlier ones, they differ in some respects with the other family manuscript, the received text.

And so modern, a lot of modern translations are based on this critical text family manuscripts. So your ESV, your New American Standard, your Christian Standard Bible, all of those. What does it cash out at as far as difference goes?

About 85 are exactly the same. About 15 is, there's a difference. And most of those are relatively minor. Some of those are major, like big chunks of scripture like we have at the end of Mark verses 9 through 20, or the story of the woman called in adultery in John 8.

But I would emphasize this, no major doctrines are affected by that 15%. But that's what we're dealing with. It's important because we're talking about God's word. It's nothing to divide over or get mad about because no major doctrines or anything are affected by the differences.

So what I want to do now, having explained the question, should it be in the Bible or not, why some people say that it should not be because it's not in their earliest manuscripts and it seems just different than the rest of Mark.

What I want to do now is try to argue why I believe it is original to Mark and it is God's word and it is Bible. And so the first reason for that, I would appeal to God's providence and his preservation of his word in using the received text which includes verses 9 through 20 throughout the majority of church history.

And so in God's providence, God's people have had these verses in their Bibles and I think that speaks at least in part to one of the reasons why we ought to receive it as well. There's also historical reasons for accepting the longer ending such as there are early church writers who referenced these verses and they predate those other early manuscripts that don't have it, right?

And so I think that should lead us to believe that it should be included. Early church writers knew about it and referenced it as well. But more convincing than the manuscript evidence to me is the evidence that we see for in the book of Mark itself.

So now I want us to pay attention to what's in the book itself and so we can see literary structure in the book of Mark. And so I read a fascinating article by some guys named Gage and Beck in a journal article talking about these literary structures, literary devices that Mark uses where he will write an idea and then equidistant before and after that idea, you'll find verses that use the exact same either words or themes.

And so it's like he is using this kind of triangle structure with an idea and then going either side before and after using the same words in order to highlight the importance.

Of that idea.

And so what happens is some of those on the after side, they go into, extend into the verses 9 through 20 which leads me to believe that Mark is, that he wrote these. And by the way, if you're interested in that, I might show some of those on Wednesday night.

On Wednesday night, during our midweek family fellowship, we're kind of looking at Bible, the structure of the Bible and reading the Bible on its own terms over the next several.

Weeks.

So I'm going to show some of these on Wednesday night. So I'd love for you to come join us for that. Another thing that we see in the text itself is we see that Mark, he bookends his gospel in the very first chapter and in the very last chapter with certain themes.

And so Alistair Roberts, he summarized these in his commentary and it's really helpful showing that, you see in chapter 1, it begins with the forerunner, John the Baptist, and then at the end, it ends with the successors, the disciples.

In the beginning of the book, Jesus comes from Galilee and then here at the end of the book, he goes back and returns to Galilee. He comes to Galilee to call his disciples and to make them fishers of men and then at the end, he sends them out as fishers of men.

The gospel begins with John the Baptist preaching and it ends with the disciples preaching, forerunner, successor. The gospel begins with the descent of the spirit at Jesus' baptism and it ends here at the end of chapter 16 with the ascent of Jesus into heaven on a cloud.

John at the beginning of the gospel foretells the baptism of the spirit and here at the end of Mark, Jesus foretells the signs of the spirit that will confirm the apostles' message after the spirit comes upon them at Pentecost.

And so what we see are themes from chapter 1. They find their complement in verses 9 through 20 of chapter 16, prologue and epilogue. Mark is bookending his gospel with these same themes. This also happens with words too, not just themes.

And so in Mark, the word Lord is only applied to Christ in the prologue and in the epilogue. And the word baptism is used in the beginning of the book and then in verses 9 through 20 at the end of the book.

And it's not used in the middle except for in ways that don't refer to Christian baptism. Or the phrase preach the gospel. The only times Mark uses the active form of this noun-verb combination is in the beginning and in the end.

And then lastly, we see in the beginning of the book and the end of the book a relationship between preaching and faith. So you can go back and read chapter 1 and read chapter 16 and you're going to see these same themes, these same words used to bookend, to begin and to end the gospel.

And so for these reasons and others, I believe these verses 9 through 20 are original to Mark and they ought to be included in the Holy Scripture. And so we're going to preach them as such this morning.

Witnesses to the Resurrection and the Great Commission

So now let's look at the verses and what they say now that we've given a defense for why they are in Scripture. And so in verses 9 through 13, we have witnesses to Jesus' resurrection. And yet, what do the disciples do?

Or I should say, what do they not do? They do not believe. So let me read. In 9 through 11, He appeared to Mary Magdalene from whom He had cast out seven demons. She went and told those who had been with Him as they mourned and wept, but when they heard that He was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.

And then there's a second witness to the resurrection. After these things, He appeared in another form to two of them. This is on the road to Emmaus that we see in some other gospels as well as they're walking into the country.

And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe Him, believe them. Now legally, if you remember your Old Testament, legally, what's the standard for believing testimony? The law of Moses required two to three witnesses, right?

That's exactly what the disciples have. They have two separate appearances and three different people bearing witness to them and all saying the same thing, bearing witness to the fact that Jesus was risen from the dead.

And what do the scriptures say? But they did not believe them. They should have believed, but they didn't. They were given credible testimony from two to three witnesses. This is enough to establish the fact in court, but they did not believe them.

And so, then Jesus appears to them all at once. And when He comes to them, He is not pleased. Verse 14 says, He rebuked them for their unbelief and their hardness of heart because they had not believed those who saw Him after He had risen.

He rebuked them sharply. Some versions translate this, He upbraided them. You might say He chewed them out, He gave them what for? He gave them down the road? However you want to say it, Jesus came and rebuked His disciples sharply because they should have believed, but they didn't.

You've heard of a come to Jesus meeting? This was a Jesus came to them meeting. Chico Bolin was a long time football coach at Travels Rest High School. You sit up there in the balcony. I've heard a lot of Chico Bolin stories from my father growing up.

Some of which included, let's say, some sharp rebukes out on the football field. Jesus here reminds me of an old hardline football coach, like Coach Bolin. But here's the thing. Old hardline football coaches, they break their players down in order to build them.

Back up.

It's tough love, but it's love, right? Jesus wasn't rebuking His disciples in order to condemn them, He was rebuking His disciples in order to restore them, in order to build them back up. He rebukes them so that they will repent.

He rebukes them so that they will be ready to go out and preach the gospel when He sends them out to preach. And that's exactly what He does in the next verse, verse 15, and He said to them, go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.

Preach the gospel to every creature. So this is the great commission in Mark. You get the great commission in Matthew, go disciple the nations, baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, teach them to obey everything that I've commanded.

To you.

In Mark, the great commission is stated like this, preach the gospel to every creature. Proclaim the gospel in all the whole creation. Jesus is sending His disciples out into the world to proclaim the fact that Jesus Christ has won His kingdom by His perfect life, by His sacrificial death, by His glorious resurrection, by His kingly ascension, and that He will wash away their sin by His blood and welcome them into His kingdom.

Welcome into His kingdom all who turn from their sin and place their loyalty and faith.

In Jesus Christ.

That is the announcement. That is the message. That is the gospel that is there to go out and preach to all creation. And then verse 16, whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.

And so here we see that when the gospel is preached, there's a response. There's always a response. Nobody gets to opt out of the claims of the gospel. Nobody gets to opt out of the world that we actually live in, the one where Jesus Christ actually lived and died and rose again and now sits enthroned at the right hand of God.

The Father.

Those things are fact, and so nobody can just pass on responding. Everybody responds somehow and in some way. Belief and unbelief, it's really just two ways to live. Those who believe are saved. Those who do not will be condemned, the scripture said.

And so this is why Jesus rebuked the disciples and upbraided the disciples. He wanted them to believe. He did not want them to be condemned. He wanted them to believe. And so hear me clearly. You must believe.

God has made the world and ordered it in such a way that we are to hear the testimony of witnesses and believe. And he sent preachers of the gospel out to all creation to give testimony and to bear witness to the resurrection of Jesus so that you will believe and be saved.

Believe.

That's the message of the gospel or the command of the gospel. But what about baptism? He says here, whoever believes and is baptized. Why does he put that in there? I want to make a few comments here.

First, there's a question of does baptism itself and alone save? And the answer to that of course is no, we do not believe in baptismal regeneration. And so what I want you to see is the structure that Mark uses.

He says on one side, whoever believes and is baptized will be saved and whoever does not believe will be condemned. And so you have this asymmetrical parallelism. By parallelism, you have one idea and then another idea that either corresponds or contrasts.

To it.

But it's not symmetrical because you have two things over here, believe and baptize. And over here you just have does not believe, unbelief. And so he doesn't say if you believe and are baptized, you'll be saved.

And then he doesn't say if you believe and are not baptized. And the reason for that is because without belief, the baptism would be moot. This means that belief and baptism go together such that baptism without belief is not sufficient for salvation.

So we reject baptismal regeneration, baptismal salvation. This is also one of the reasons why we're Baptist. We believe that baptism and belief go together and when you find baptism in the scriptures, you're going to find it alongside and after belief.

And so we practice here at First Baptist what is called believer's baptism. We don't practice infant baptism but we baptize upon profession of faith, confession of faith. And that makes sense of Mark's language as well when he uses this phrase, whoever believes and is baptized.

Because belief is a word with a full orbed meaning. It doesn't just mean intellectual ascent. It's not less than that, it includes that but it's not just that. Belief incorporates the meanings of trust and loyalty and faith and fealty to a king.

It's one's whole person's allegiance is in view here with the word belief. And so one way we can make sense of how Mark says that, how he phrases it here, whoever believes and is baptized is this, whoever places their allegiance in Christ, belief, and pledges their allegiance to Christ, baptism will be saved.

Whoever places allegiance and pledges allegiance. So baptism is, it's a sign and a symbol of our faith. It's a demonstration in time and in space with matter of what God has done to us and what God has done for us.

He buries us with Christ in baptism and raises us to new life in Christ. And so baptism marks our entrance into the church where we receive the benefits of church membership such as pastoral care and the community and fellowship and care of the saints and the Lord's Supper.

Baptism marks our entrance into the church where we are also subject to the discipline and instruction of the church. And so as children we're under the discipline and instruction of our parents and at baptism we come under the discipline and instruction of the church for Jesus Christ has appointed his ministers to watch over our souls.

And so baptism is a pledge of loyalty and allegiance to King Jesus and it marks our formal entrance into his service. Because as believers we are priests in the kingdom of God, priesthood of all believers.

We're priests in the kingdom of God, appointed to service and called to offer our lives as living sacrifices. And what do we do with the, what do we do with the next couple of verses? Verses 17 through 18.

And these signs will accompany those who believe, in my name they will cast out demons, speak in new tongues, pick up serpents with their hands, and if they drink any deadly poison it will not hurt them, they will lay their hands on the sick and they will recover.

These are the accompanying signs that you see down in verse 20 where it says while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs. These are the signs that accompany the message of the gospel.

We see the fulfillment of Jesus' words here when you read through the book of Acts. When you read through the book of Acts you see that the apostles cast out demons. You see that they spoke in foreign languages on the day of Pentecost and that's what tongues.

Are.

They're not gibberish, they're real human languages. You read through the book of Acts and you see that Paul was bit by a snake and no harm befell him. They continued the healing ministry of Jesus by healing those affected with various diseases and disabilities.

The only one of these things that Jesus lists here that we don't see in the book of Acts is drinking deadly poison, though there are at least two explanations for that. One is it's just not recorded in scripture.

We do have it recorded in history where there are historical accounts of a Christian leader drinking poison and not dying. Again, that's not Bible, that's just human history. That could account for it.

The other is that the fact that the word poison that's in various English translations is not actually in the Greek word for poison is not there. Literally, it's drink death or drink deathly and if that's the case, this could be referring to suffering and martyrdom that we see in the book of Acts.

You'll remember that Jesus referred to his suffering as drinking of the cup and so we see the apostles suffering and being killed in Acts. We especially think of Stephen and his martyrdom and so all of these are referenced in the book of Acts.

And what we have there, they're the sign gifts, some people might call them the miracle gifts. They were operative during the apostolic age when God was establishing the church and he, we see it in verse 20, he confirmed the message with these signs.

But by the time you get to the book of Hebrews, by the time you get to Hebrews chapter 2, you see the author is speaking of these miraculous sign gifts that gave the confirming witness to the apostles' message.

You see the author of Hebrews speaking of that in the past tense as if that's been completed. That is, God, he gave these miraculous signs to Jesus' immediate successors, the apostles, to confirm their message and establish the church.

So what does that mean for these type of gifts today? I don't believe that they're operative today in the same way. And one of the main reasons I don't believe that they're operative in the same way is because we don't see them.

No one is casting their shadow on the sick and healing them anymore. And so, you know, back during COVID, all the faith healer charlatans were exposed when they couldn't just go and heal everybody. Now what does that mean?

Does that mean that God does not work miracles anymore, or that God does not miraculously heal anymore or give supernatural linguistic understanding anymore? I do not say that at all. No, God still does those things.

And he does them often, or more often we should say, among unreached peoples and places where he is, again, or still, establishing the church for the first time. And he uses people for these purposes.

And so you'll hear stories of missionaries, frontier missionaries, you'll hear stories about God's miraculous works, about healings and resuscitations from the dead, and dreams and visions, and we praise God for those things, but that's not the same thing as saying that people are gifted with these gifts in the same way that the apostles were.

Those gifts, in that way, are not operative anymore. And then we get, in verses 19 and 20, they end Mark's gospel. So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God, and they went out and preached everywhere while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the accompanying signs.

And so here we see the ascension of Jesus into heaven to the right hand of God the Father. This is his coronation where he receives the kingdom and the glory and the dominion that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.

He assumes the place of authority at the right hand of God the Father. And so what this shows us is one of the main themes of Mark, and that is Jesus is King. That right now, not some point of time in the future, but right now Jesus is King over this world.

Jesus is King over South Carolina. Jesus is King over Troubled Dress. He has authority over this world currently. He's the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And Jesus, as King, is active in this world right now through his church, through his.

Spirit.

He sent the disciples out to preach the gospel everywhere. He worked with them, verse 20 says. He confirmed the message by his accompanying signs. And at Pentecost the Spirit came upon the disciples, and by the Spirit they went out with the authority of Jesus.

They went out with the presence of Jesus, and they went out with the power of Jesus. And that same Holy Spirit indwells us today. And so we carry on that great commission that we have inherited from our fathers, the apostles.

And what is that commission? It's to conquer in the name of Jesus Christ. We conquer in the name of Christ our King. We're sent out to proclaim the gospel to every creature, to announce the victory of King Jesus to all creation.

For the nine months leading up to when you called me to be your pastor last summer. So when I first heard about the opening until you called me, my prayer was this. God, I want to go to First Baptist, and I want to be a part of taking northern Greenville.

County for Christ.

And just about every time I prayed about this opportunity, that's what I was praying about, in part. I want to take northern Greenville County for Christ, or be a part of taking northern Greenville County for King Jesus.

We want to conquer in the name of Christ. But conquer what? Well, first of all, human hearts.

That's the first battleground.

Yes, faith in our hearts always comes out of our hands, and it's going to come out in culture, and it's going to come out in civilization. It's going to come out in every arena of human existence. But first, it must begin in the heart.

Faith comes first. Belief and unbelief, those are the two responses to the gospel. And so by God's spirit, working through His word, proclaimed by His people, I want to see the majority of people in northern Greenville County, those people, those eight out of ten in tribal dress, we want to see them confessing Christ as Lord.

Because right now, eight out of ten, they're not making that profession, and they're not living in accordance with it. And so we've got work to do. We have the authority of Jesus. Jesus is King. He sits on the throne, and He is with us into the very end of the age.

He is with us by His spirit. We have the authority of Jesus. We have the presence of Jesus. He sent His Holy Spirit to indwell us. We have the power of Jesus. His spirit and His word do the work. And He's given us a weapon, the preaching of the gospel.

And so we testify to the death and resurrection of Jesus. And by two to three witnesses, they ought to believe. Multiple witnesses obligate belief. They compel it. And so the nations are obligated to believe.

Tribal Dresstians are obligated to believe. And if they believe and are baptized, they will be saved. If they disbelieve, they will be condemned. And so what do we do? We proclaim the gospel to all creation, especially our little corner of it.

If you watch any of our sermons on YouTube, you'll see that back last summer when we started the Gospel of Mark, I made a little graphic thumbnail to go on there and titled our series going through Mark as The Victory of Jesus According to Mark.

Because that's what the word gospel means. It's an announcement of victory. That's what this whole book's been about. It's been about the victory of Jesus. Jesus winning His kingdom, and He's done that.

It is finished. So what's left? To announce that victory.

To proclaim it.

To preach it to all creation that Jesus has won His kingdom. And so go announce the victory of Jesus. Let's pray. Our Father, we praise You that You have sent Your Son to redeem and restore and make this world new.

We thank You that Jesus has won His kingdom, that He perfectly obeyed You in every turn, that He lived in our place, died in our place, was resurrected from the dead, declared to be the Son of God in righteousness at His resurrection.

We praise You for that. And we believe it. We trust it. And our allegiance and our loyalty is in Christ Jesus, pledged in our baptism. We serve King Jesus. Lord, I pray that You will empower us to proclaim the gospel to all creation, especially our little corner of it here in Traveler's Rest, northern Greenville County, and that we will devote ourselves, offer ourselves as living sacrifices, that we would win glory for King Jesus throughout the week.

Strengthen us, encourage us, propel us, help us. We ask it all in the name of Jesus.

Amen.