WWUTT 2133 Jesus Begins His Ministry (Mark 1:9-11)

When Jesus was baptized, the voice of the Father was heard saying, You are my beloved Son, and you I am well pleased. This should cause us to ask, How can I be pleasing to the Father through Christ when we understand the text?

This is When We Understand the Text, studying God's Word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ. Find all our videos online at www .wutt .com, as well as links to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe Hughes. Thank you, Becky.

In our study of the Gospel of Mark, let's pick up where we left off yesterday. So I'm going to start our reading here in chapter 1, verse 9, through verse 28 out of the Legacy Standard Bible. Hear the word of the Lord.

Now it happened that in those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And immediately coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opening and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him.

And a voice came out of the heavens, You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased. And immediately the Spirit drove him to go out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan.

And he was with the wild beasts, and the angels were ministering to him. Now after John had been delivered up into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent, and believe the gospel. And as he was going along by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting a net in the sea, for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.

And immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, who were also in the boat, mending the nets. And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, and went away and followed him.

And they went into Capernaum, and immediately on the Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and began to teach. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.

And immediately there was a man in their synagogue with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, saying, What do we have to do with you, Jesus the Nazarene? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.

And Jesus rebuked him, saying, Be quiet, and come out of him. And throwing him into convulsions, the unclean spirit cried out with a loud voice and came out of him. And they were all amazed, so that they were arguing with themselves, saying, What is this?

A new teaching with authority. He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him. And immediately the news about him spread everywhere into all the surrounding district of Galilee. Now, right at the start of this gospel, we began with this statement, one of the plainest and cut-to-the-point statements that we have at the start of any of these gospels.

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. So we know right away, he is Jesus, the Christ, who is the Son of God. He is the promised Messiah. He is God's Son, in whom God is well-pleased.

And he is the one who has been sent to fulfill the law and the prophets. Mark lays that out right at the very start. Now, he doesn't put those things in the words that Matthew does. It's in the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus says, Matthew 1, 17, Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets.

I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Mark implies that. So it's not stated explicitly, but he implies, Jesus is the one who comes in fulfillment of the prophecies. We start with prophecy.

You have this statement about the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. That's what this is. It is the good news of Jesus Christ. And then he goes right into prophecy. Isaiah the prophet. I send my messenger ahead of you.

Jesus is the one sent from God. He is the Lord, who John the Baptist is preceding. And so he appears in the wilderness. He baptizes the people, preparing them, purifying them for the King who is to come.

And even says, I baptize you with water. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. He who is coming, who is mightier than I. I'm not even worthy to untie his sandal straps. And he's coming soon. And then, verse 9, now it happened that in those days, Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee.

Mark has already told us who this is, because he says it in verse 1. It is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. We jump to prophecy. We jump to John and fulfillment of that prophecy.

John, who preaches about Jesus, who is coming. And then Mark opens the curtain. Here's our main character. It happened in those days. Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.

Now, like I said yesterday, Mark is jumping to these events, and he's hitting them more successively than Matthew did. Matthew will have more teaching, more text there. Mark, which is being written after Matthew, doesn't feel like that he needs to cover the ground that's already been covered by the Gospels Matthew and Luke, which probably preceded Mark.

So he's getting these events in a more rapid-fire sort of a way, just laying the groundwork, the basics of who Jesus is, writing to a primarily Gentile audience. And the Gentiles may not be as familiar with some of those Old Testament scriptures that Jesus comes fulfilling.

Mark is going to write down those prophecies so that you know Jesus is the fulfillment of prophecy. That testifies to his divinity. But it's not necessary for Mark to have to lay those prophecies out and explain them in the detail that Matthew did.

And so we don't get a conversation happening between Jesus and John the Baptist like we did in Matthew 3, where John says to Jesus, I need to be baptized by you. And here you are asking me to baptize you?

And Jesus responds to John and says, let this happen now so that we may fulfill all righteousness. We're asking questions about that statement today. I spent an entire lesson talking about that. What did Jesus mean by that at his baptism?

We don't have that kind of exchange here in Mark. Mark is not trying to get into those deeply theological issues. We do need to come to those issues at some point. But right now Mark is just hitting the basic points.

Matthew thematically, in the way that he was writing his gospel, it was a major point for the people to see that Jesus is the fulfillment of righteousness. He who fulfills the law and the prophets. And so being a major point in his gospel, he says that to John the Baptist, and then it also comes up in the Sermon on the Mount.

But Mark, that's not as major a point or as central a theme in the way that Mark is writing his gospel. Again, hitting these events that you see that Jesus is the Son of God. Some of those other things definitely need to be studied, but we'll get to that later.

I just want you to see who Jesus is in this context here. And so you have Jesus being baptized by John, as of course had been testified in the other gospels. There are other gospels that have talked about this prior to Mark writing his.

Some of the people have heard this already. But here he hits the high points. He gets the major events. It is necessary to recognize Jesus is the Son of God that this was testified to by the Father himself.

John the Baptist heard it. There were other witnesses who were there by the Jordan. Remember that Mark has written in verse 5. All the region of Judea was going out to him. All the people of Jerusalem, and they were being baptized by him.

And so Mark says that. So that when you get to this statement in verse 11, with the voice of heaven saying, You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased. It was not just John the Baptist that witnessed that.

It was all the people who were there. Judea and Jerusalem would come out to hear John the Baptist teach and to be baptized by him. Those same people witnessed Jesus' baptism. And we know there were many others that were there at Jesus' baptism than just John the Baptist and Jesus.

It was not just the testimony of John the Baptist, although that would have been sufficient. And that is, of course, the testimony that he gave at the start of John's Gospel. John doesn't lay out the events as they happen at Jesus' baptism.

But you do get the testimony from John the Baptist. John the Apostle, writing John the Baptist's words, testifying as to what he saw when the glorious voice from heaven was heard saying, This is my beloved Son.

It's a very important point in the beginning of the ministry of Jesus. And it is certainly an important point at the start of Mark's Gospel so that you see that he is the Son of God. But not just John the Baptist was witness to it.

There were many people who were witnesses to it. At the start of Acts, in Acts 1, when the disciples are gathered in the upper room and they need to decide who is going to succeed Judas. Who is going to take over his office?

Because he is the son of perdition. He betrayed the Son of God. He went out and offed himself. And so who is going to fill this office that has been left vacant? And there's two men that qualify. And it says there in Acts 1 that these men qualified because they had witnessed the ministry of Jesus from his baptism to his ascension into heaven.

So all of the apostles there, the remaining 11, as well as these two men, Matthias and Justice, they had witnessed Jesus' earthly ministry from his baptism to his ascending into heaven. So there were many who were there that heard John the Baptist preach and witnessed Jesus being baptized and the voice from heaven saying, this is my beloved son.

In you I am well pleased. So Mark is not just writing something that one guy heard. He is writing something that many people could have testified to. And that's one of the reasons why he puts in verse 5 that all the region of Judea and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to John the Baptist.

There were many people that could have witnessed the things that happened from the very beginning of the very public ministry of Jesus Christ. So immediately coming up out of the water, verse 10, he saw the heavens opening and the spirit like a dove descending upon him.

And a voice came out of the heavens. You are my beloved son. In you I am well pleased. It was just a week ago, Wednesday, that we were reading the Great Commission at the end of Matthew's gospel. And it's there that Jesus commissions his disciples to go out and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

Just as the Father, Son, and Spirit are witnessed at Jesus' baptism, so the Father, Son, and Spirit are with you at your baptism. All of us who are in Christ, all of us who are Christians, we have fellowship with God through Jesus Christ.

And we have come into fellowship with the triune Godhead, Father, Son, and Spirit with us from the moment that we believe, the Holy Spirit who quickens our hearts to hear the gospel and believe it, and will remain with us and bring us into his kingdom on that day.

Philippians 1 .6, saying, I am confident of this very thing that he who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it at the day of Christ. In Romans 8, Paul talks about how the Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead also gives life to our mortal bodies.

And we are, as mentioned in Ephesians 4, children of the Father adopted into the family of God through faith in Jesus Christ. We have fellowship with the entire Godhead. And Mark even highlights this here as the triune Godhead, Father, Son, and Spirit is there with Jesus at his baptism.

So we likewise have fellowship with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Immediately the Spirit drove him to go out into the wilderness. That's verse 12. And he was in the wilderness 40 days being tempted by Satan.

And he was with the wild beasts and the angels were ministering to him. Now we know from Matthew's gospel that when Jesus was in the wilderness, tempted by Satan, this is in Matthew 4, that Jesus responded with Scripture.

You have three temptations and you have three responses from Jesus, all of which were quotations from the Old Testament. Satan attempted to tempt Jesus in the way of the world, the flesh, and the pride of life.

That's what we have in 1 John 2 .16. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life is not from the Father, but is from the world. And so those three things, the way that those are mentioned there, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, those were the three temptations that Satan attempted to gain Jesus with, and they were the three things that Jesus resisted.

So that in Christ, we too have the power to resist those temptations. It's like all temptations could fall into those three categories, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.

That's what Jesus resisted, and that's what we have the power to resist as well for us who are in Christ. Now again, Mark doesn't go into all of that. He doesn't lay out that teaching, that exchange in the detail that Matthew did, because again, we're just hitting the highlights here, especially at the very beginning.

We're a lot more rapid fire here through chapter 1. As Mark is getting the story started, we're seeing right away the power and the authority that Jesus has. Remember that that was one of the things that I mentioned yesterday, or Monday, I guess it was, in our introduction to the Gospel of Mark.

I mentioned that authority is something. It's a common theme that comes up a lot in Mark's Gospel, and we're seeing that here in chapter 1, him coming to that theme of authority. So this authority, of course, comes from God.

He is God. He's the Son of God. But an authority that's even bestowed upon him by the Father. You are my beloved Son, and you I am well pleased. And so we go on from here. After Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, we go to verse 14.

Now, after John had been delivered up into custody. Once again, hitting these events in really rapid fire succession. We don't hear about John the Baptist being arrested. It's just that Mark briefly mentions it, and then he goes on.

Now, Mark is going to give us great detail into John the Baptist's time in prison and what eventually led to his death. We're going to get quite a narrative later on in Mark's Gospel, but that's not yet.

He's just hitting events here so that you see the start of Jesus' earthly ministry. Jesus came into Galilee, and he's preaching the Gospel of God and saying the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe the Gospel. Very similar to Matthew 4 .17. Those were the first words that Jesus spoke there at the start of his earthly ministry. Of course, Matthew makes the connection to the fact that John the Baptist also preached those words.

So as the precursor to Jesus, he preached the same words. Jesus then comes out preaching the same words as John the Baptist, because this shows that John was the one fulfilling the Isaiah prophecy who was going to prepare the way of the Lord.

Once again, that's details we get in another Gospel, not in Mark's. But nonetheless, we understand that Jesus' ministry starts the same way that Matthew had said. So Mark says, the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand.

Everything that the Law and the Prophets was pointing to is happening now, and I am the one who's fulfilling that. So even though we don't get a statement like in Matthew 5 .17, where Jesus says that he came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, we certainly see that here with this declaration that that's exactly what he's doing.

The time is fulfilled. Here's the kingdom of God as it was promised in the Law and the Prophets. Repent and believe in the Gospel. Jesus has come to inaugurate this kingdom of which he is the King. How do you become part of that kingdom?

By turning from your sin and believing in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Now whenever we find these statements of repenting in the New Testament, especially in the Gospel, it's not just repent. Repent doesn't just stand on its own.

It is a call to turn from something to something else. So in repenting, you're turning from sin. In believing, you're turning to Christ. So you are repenting, turning away from sin and the way of the world, all of those things that are contrary to God, and you're turning to Jesus Christ in whom is forgiveness for your sin and righteousness and peace with God.

So Jesus making this statement to repent and believe the Gospel, and those who are his followers will do that very thing. We'll turn from sin to Jesus Christ. It's not possible for a person to simply turn from sin.

You might be able to stop doing some bad habits, but that doesn't purify you from those sins that you have committed in order to be purified. Remember, just as John the Baptist came with a baptism for those who were confessing their sins.

You must be purified in order to come to God, and that purification comes from Jesus. Once again, John the Baptist saying a moment ago, he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. So in believing in Christ, you are baptized in this way, with a holy baptism to be made right before God.

Now, our repentance when we come to Jesus Christ is not perfect. It's not perfect repentance. You're turning from the world, the flesh, and the devil, the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life.

You're turning from those things to Jesus Christ. You're turning from those things is not perfect. You are going to grow in that. You're going to become better at it as you grow in sanctification, but still the beginning of that process starts with, I hate my sin, I love Jesus.

So you're turning away from those things that you know that you have done against God and for which you deserve judgment, and you're turning to Jesus Christ, the hope of the gospel that was proclaimed in his death, his resurrection, everything that he accomplished with those things, and the way that he brings us into fellowship with the Father.

Mark has even highlighted the fact already up to this point that Jesus is in fellowship with the Father. This is my beloved son in whom I am well-pleased. How can I gain the pleasure of God? How is it that he will look at me and say, I'm well-pleased with you?

You must come to Jesus Christ. You must turn from those things that the wrath of God is burning against, and you must turn to Jesus. You can't still have a foot in the world, a foot in your temptation, and the other foot in heaven, the other gaining ground with Jesus.

It doesn't work that way. You're either all in or you're all out. So turn from your sin to Christ. Jesus will do that work in bringing you farther and farther away from your sin, but your orientation must be toward Christ, not toward your sin, but to Jesus Christ, desiring his holiness and growing in his gospel and knowledge of who he is and growing in his likeness, that we would be made more like Christ.

This is what Jesus comes preaching. It is often asked of me, is repentance a requirement in order to be saved? The answer to that is most definitely yes. You can't believe in the gospel without also repenting.

You're turning from your unbelief, you're turning from your sin, you're turning from your rebellion against God, and you are orienting yourself in the direction of God. And this is the work of Christ that he does.

It is the work of being baptized in the Holy Spirit, that he cleanses you of those things that your flesh had formerly desired, and instead your heart is being drawn more and more after Christ. Be in obedience to this call that Jesus gave at the beginning of his earthly ministry.

Repent and believe the gospel. And that's where we'll pick up next week with verse 16. Let's finish here with prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you for what we've read, and I pray this is a reminder to us that we need to not be oriented to the ways of the world.

We need to stop going after the passions of our flesh, lest we perish with the world, but we would instead come into the presence of God through Jesus Christ our Savior, being cleansed by him that we may be pleasing before God.

We know that you love us as our Father in heaven and as our Father you discipline us so that we would become good children of God. We are pleasing in your sight because of what Jesus has done for us, so grow us all the more in his likeness that we may be pleasing to you today.

It is in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen.

You've been listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Gabe will be going through a New Testament study. Then on Thursday, we look at an Old Testament book.

On Friday, we take questions from the listeners and viewers. Tomorrow, we'll pick up on an Old Testament study, When We Understand the Text.