The Multiplication of Christ's Kingdom

The Temptation of Christ and the Coronation of the King

This morning, we're going to be looking at Mark 1, verses 12 through 20. I'm going to read that for us, and we'll pray and get going. In verse 12, the Word of the Lord says,. 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 in the gospel. 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 to follow him.

This week, I wish I could claim it, but I can't. I was quoting Better Men. I just can't remember who I was quoting. I was talking to Corey Platt, and I told him that I had heard it said, Mainstream evangelicals are intent on evangelizing the lost, and Reformed churches are intent on evangelizing mainstream evangelicals.

And so today, I wish I'd come up with that. I didn't. And I can't remember who said it, but it's good. And I think that we do see that stuck in our little corner of evangelicalism that's called Reformed Baptists.

We are small, but we are aggressive, I think I would like to say. Today, when we look at the prologue of Mark's gospel, I think we're going to try to, if this sermon is effective, and try to blend two things together.

One of those is going to be something that's red meat for Reformed people, and that is a lot of really deep theology. But what I want to end it with is showing the connection that this deep theology which we love translates into ferociously evangelizing the lost and making disciples, which we must love, and which has not been characteristic of us, I think, as a tribe within evangelicalism.

And so to start with, to look forward, we're going to look back for a little bit, as Gandalf said. And we're going to look at a vaguely familiar route to the throne. So last week, as you go back a couple of verses, you would see that the heavens opened, and the Lord declared, you are my beloved son, and you I am well pleased.

And so there's a lot of things that are going to happen here that Mark writes with really breathtaking brevity. It's so quick and punchy, and he keeps using this word immediately, immediately. And he uses that word, and he writes the same way, that these things are just firing off one after the other.

And what I want to do is slow down a little bit and examine the theological part of this passage this morning, which is the temptation of Christ in the desert. But what matters, before we get into the desert, what you have to understand is Mark is pushing us towards something.

It's in the background. It's that Jesus has to be something for the temptation in the desert to even matter. It's not that he's a regular man. If a regular man was to go in the desert and be tempted, it wouldn't matter.

It might be a nice story to tell around a campfire, but who Jesus is, is what gives the significance to the temptation in the desert. And so I think that Mark has led us there. And so in order to understand that, I want to look back.

Christ as King, Prophet, and Priest

The first thing is the one who is going to reverse the curse of Adam has to be the king. He has to be the king. Adam was given the dominion mandate. He was told to go, be fruitful, multiply, and to take dominion over all the fish of the sea and all the birds of the air.

That meant that Adam was the king of the world. And he was anointed the king of the world because he was to image God and to place his seal everywhere he went. That's what it meant to be made in God's image, is that he was like the seal of the king that showed this stamp goes everywhere where he is.

And so in order for the curse of Adam to be removed through this temptation in the desert, Jesus has to be the king. And we see here that he is coronated in the first part of Mark, where it says, the Lord, the Father speaks.

And Barth mentioned this morning, this is the first time until, this is the last time until late in this book that Jesus accepts this declaration. In fact, he will tell people over and over who decry him to be the son of God, he tells them to be quiet.

And he binds. And he tells them to not let that out because the time has not yet come. But he does not tell his father not to say this. So his father comes with John the Baptist, baptizing him, and he coronates him.

And this matches very closely with the decree that's given in Psalm 2, which is quoted here often. Verses 7 and 8 say, I will surely tell of the decree of Yahweh. He said to me, You are my son, today I have begotten you.

Ask of me, and I will surely give the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession. Now we have seen this verse, these two verses often used in eschatology. But I think the more near meaning and the more important meaning is to say that this decree of the father that says, you are my son in whom I am well pleased.

The father is declaring before everyone, before those witnesses, this is the king of the world. My decree goes forth. Jesus is coronated. And so very clearly, we see that Jesus is the long-awaited king of Israel.

And he has the potential to be the king of kings and the king of all the world. But he has to go through some things like the first king of Israel, the first true king of Israel, David, had to go through.

There was a long path to get there. And I think we're going to see parallels. The second thing we see is that there is an identification of the mission. And so we're going to see that after this baptism, Jesus is driven out.

The word in the Greek actually means expelled. The Holy Spirit expels Jesus into the desert. He's driven out of civilization. And he's driven out for 40 days. This should clue us in. There's a couple of numbers, a couple of 40s.

One of them is about Moses and the Hebrews. But the other one that's more closely significant here comes from 1 Kings 19, which is about Elijah. And what Elijah did was he went to Mount Horeb and he fasted for 40 days to hear from God.

And he eventually does hear from God. And we get all kinds of bad theology from how he hears from God because there's a tornado and he hears a small, still voice. And so we've transliterated that into thinking that's how God speaks to people, which that's not what that story is doing.

What that story is doing is showing that Elijah is another true prophet like the kind that was promised in Deuteronomy 18. Deuteronomy 18 tells us, Yahweh your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you.

This is Moses. From your brothers you shall listen to him. This is according to all that you asked of Yahweh your God in Horeb on the day of assembly saying, let me not hear again the voice of Yahweh my God.

Let me not see his great fire anymore or I will die. And Yahweh said to me, they have spoken well. I will raise up a prophet from among their brothers like you and I will put my words in his mouth and he shall speak to them all that I command him.

And it will be that whoever will not listen to my words which he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him. Moses, Elijah, I argue Samuel's in there. And then we get John the Baptist and the Lord Jesus Christ.

These are the prophets of this type. The prophets where the Lord speaks judgment to them and to not listen means that the Lord himself requires it. And so it's important for us to note that this is a parallel.

When Jesus is driven out into the desert for 40 days, it's to fast and it's not so he can hear the voice of the Lord. It's so he can be tempted by the enemy of God because Jesus is the greatest prophet.

He is the highest prophet. And he brings the words that John the Baptist is on the scene warning all of the Jews. He's warning them the axe is laid to the root of the tree. If you don't repent, the tree is going to be cut down.

And so if you don't listen to the prophet, the one who God has put the words in his mouth, then the Lord will require it of you. And if you don't listen to John the Baptist, the Lord will require it of you.

And we know to this day because Jesus is the eternal highest prophet that if you don't listen to the words of the prophet, the Lord will require it of you. To not listen to the warnings that Jesus speaks, to not listen to the words and the commands of Jesus' mouth is death.

And there is no other way. That's Jesus' office of prophet. And now we know today Jesus, the Son of Man, the Son of God, there is no mediator between us and God other than the God-man, Jesus Christ. He is the lone mediator, which means he is also a priest.

And we see that with the story of Moses. As Moses crosses the Red Sea, the water is parted, and they live in the desert, in the wilderness among the beasts for 40 years. And that's because of judgment.

That's because they don't listen. That's because they don't want what God has laid out for them. Are you seeing the word picture? The Hebrews, they sit in the wilderness because they don't believe the promises of God, because they would rather go back to Egypt, because they like the cucumbers.

They like the stability of living in the civilization. And so they're driven out, and they don't get to go into the promised land. And therefore, similarly, if you don't believe the words of Jesus Christ, then you are in the wilderness, and you will never enter into the promised land because he is the one who has made the way.

And he made the way, and we saw it last week. It's a simple word picture. Moses was able to cross through the Red Sea with the people. But Jesus stands in the Jordan, and he doesn't cross through the Jordan, but instead he symbolically dies in the Jordan.

And that's how we're saved, by the Spirit and by water and by blood. When Jesus is baptized and buried under the Jordan, he is showing that this way out, this rescue mission, is going to be a different one from the people in Canaan, from the people who inherited the land by crossing the Red Sea.

This time the mediator, this time the man of God, this time the prophet that's like Moses, he would die to enable his people to come into their own, to come into what God has promised. So Jesus is the prophet.

He is the priest. He is the king. And this is critical because Adam was all of those things. Observe, Adam was the king. He was given dominion over everything in the world. He was made in the image of God.

Adam was the priest. Eden was the sanctuary. He was in there. He was to go and commune with God in the sanctuary and to keep it free of all enemies like the priest had to do. You had to be holy to enter into the sanctuary.

And Adam was the prophet because he walked with God in the cool of the day and he heard directly the words of God every single day. Adam was all of these things. And for Jesus to not be all of these things, and even more than this temptation in the desert, means nothing.

Christ's Victory Over Satan's Temptations

And so now we get to the point. Tired of looking back, we will look forward and we will see that the Holy Spirit expels, drives Jesus out into the wilderness and he's there for 40 days being weakened by not eating.

He's fasting. And can you imagine the position that you are in as a man being in the desert among the wild beasts, not eating for 40 days? I'm just going to imagine you're not in very good shape. It's pretty rough.

And so Jesus at the lowest of the low is visited by the great tempter, the cunning enemy, the prowling lion who roars, the one who shoots fiery darts and the one who has spent all of his time for millennia studying mankind, studying the promise that was given in Genesis 3 .15.

He knew that God had pronounced that his head would be crushed by the seed of the woman and he has schemed and studied for millennia trying to figure out how to thwart this prophecy, how to get around this decree.

And so in his study, he finds that the time is ripe. And what he doesn't understand is that this time was appointed for him because Jesus is driven out by who? By the Holy Spirit. God, the Godhead, the triune God, the creator and sustainer, the omniscient one, has sent Jesus out for this time, for this appointment in the desert after being perfectly weakened for 40 days.

And here comes the temptation. Mark doesn't give us much, but we see it in the parallel accounts that in Matthew, there are three series of temptations. And the first one is that Satan comes to Jesus and he tells him, turn the stones into bread so that you can eat.

Now why this one first? I think there's a couple of reasons. The most obvious one is that Jesus is hungry. Very hungry. And can you imagine how good bread would taste if you haven't tasted anything for 40 days?

You're famished. But on a deeper level, I think that this temptation is the same or a very similar one that was given to Adam and Eve in the garden. The fruit of the tree, remember, it appealed to the eyes and the desires of the flesh.

They saw the fruit and they saw that it appeared good for eating. Similarly, to turn the stones into bread would make them appear good for eating. And so Jesus answers in the way that Adam should have.

And he answers and he says that he lives only on the word of God. In other words, what God told him to do is life. And to disobey God is death. Do you believe that? We live by the good pleasure of God's decree and God's will.

It's not bread that sustains us. Bread is the means by which God sustains us. But life is a mysterious thing that human beings are unable to replicate. We can't create life. We can't build it in a lab.

Life is given by God. It's given by his decree, by his sovereign will, and by his purposes. And Jesus understands that and he believes that with faith better than anyone who has ever lived because when Jesus sees the temptation of the devil,.

He says,.

I would die if I was to take this bread. Even though I'm starving, the Lord is going to sustain me. It really recalls the faith that Abraham had when Isaac was sacrificed, when he was required of him, is that Hebrews 11 tells us that Abraham believed that Isaac was going to be resurrected by God.

In other words, God's promises overrode every single thing that Abraham could see with his eyes. And similarly, Jesus in the desert, he's got to be near death after 40 days. Got to be near death. Wasting away, emaciated, and yet he knows to take this bread is to depend on the physical, to depend on disobeying the promises of God.

And I will believe what God says. And this is the greatness of Christ, is that when Adam was given this temptation and failed, he was in the middle of paradise with the best food, with food that we can't imagine.

It was not stained by the corruption of sin and he ate as he wished every day and yet he was tempted by this fruit. And Jesus, who has not seen food, who's living among the jackals, denies this temptation and depends on the promises of God.

Amazing.

This next temptation, I think, might be the most devilish, though. And Adam never got here. And I believe he would have. I believe that if Adam had passed the first test, that there would have been more testing.

Because I think that what we see is that God is working in redemption. He's working with a purpose. And to be the king of the world and to be God's image and the one who goes and spreads God's news everywhere and who rules over everything, you have to be holy.

So Jesus proceeds into new territory. Man has never seen this before. This is a new kind of temptation. And Jesus dwells among the wild beasts and Satan tempts Jesus to jump off of the pinnacle of the temple, assuring him that he was safe in the arms of Yahweh above.

In fact, he quotes Scripture at him. Psalm 91, Satan says, Jesus as the Logos, Jesus as the Word, knew this Word, and Satan comes to him and says, all you have to do is trust in God, Jesus. Trust in the promises of God and jump off of this pinnacle and we will see a mighty spectacle as the angels of heaven bear you up and you don't even bruise your foot.

Do you see the symbolism there? And in a weakened state, this temptation is especially brutal. And yet today, even still, we find that Christians are consistently led astray by the twisting of Scripture.

It's one of the devil's greatest tricks and it's one of his most subtle deceptions, is to take the plain meaning of Scripture and to twist it around for our own ends. Even to not necessarily make it mean what it doesn't mean, but to twist it and use it in the wrong situation.

And that's what Satan wants to do, is he wants to test Jesus by making him listen to the promises of God in a self-promotional, presumptive way. It's kind of like saying, you don't have faith unless you're going to climb out on the limb and cut the limb off behind you.

Can God not save you? Of course he can. And when Jesus looks at this, are not all the promises of God in Jesus based on his immortality and his resurrection from the death? Jesus says this over and over again.

And so Jesus knows that he's not going to die from flying off the pinnacle of the temple. That is true. But Jesus also knows that his time has not yet come. And that's where it goes full circle, right?

His time has not come to declare this aspect of his ministry. And yet we're going to see a foretaste of it in this section, right? What Jesus responds with is he quotes another scripture that's more timely, Deuteronomy 6 .15.

And if you read Deuteronomy 6, it's a text that we look at a whole lot because Deuteronomy 6 is the instructions for the people of God to not forget what God has said and to disciple their people over and over again by putting the words of God everywhere they go.

And in Deuteronomy 6 .15, it says, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. That was issued as a warning after God had commanded Israel to love him with all their hearts and that they would enter the promised land.

And yet the people of Israel tested God over and over again. We sing a song, well, Jake wants us to sing a song that has this line in it about how God was giving them manna and giving them meat and they just kept testing them.

Are you going to give us more meat? Are you going to give us something else? And they put the Lord God to the test. And that's exactly what Moses was telling them not to do and that's exactly what Satan is doing here.

He is putting the Lord God to the test. Yes, you said this, God, are you really going to do it? And Jesus' heart is different because Jesus says, I know the plans that God has and I know what I'm sitting here to do and it's not to make displays of grandeur by jumping off the pinnacle of the temple in a totally self-indulgent, self-promotional scheme, which is what Satan wanted him to do.

Jesus never forgot, as Israel did, that God was with him and that all authority came from his Father. He says it over and over again in the Gospel of John. I do what the Father has sent me to do. There is submission to the Father in his earthly ministry.

And so there's a parallel again. Jesus is the true Israel. Have you heard that said? There's a reason that we say that and that's the reason that at every turn where Israel failed, Jesus succeeded every turn.

And that's why it's important that Jesus is the seed of David, right? That's why it's important that he has gone through the lineage from Abraham because he is the true and better Israel. That's not just a pithy thing we say.

That's a thing that's true in every sense of it. He's the true Israel because every single time Israel fails, Jesus is given the same opportunity and succeeds. And this is no exception. The final temptation is Satan offering Jesus what he already owns.

He says that he will offer Jesus all of the kingdoms of the world. Everything your eyes see, Jesus, this will be yours. It would be an appeal to take at the wrong time. You remember I said this is a vaguely familiar approach to the throne, right?

Jesus has to go through this temptation to be the reversal of the covenant of works, right? The covenant of works, if you'll remember, do this and you will live. Adam is told you will have all of these blessings.

Just do not eat from this tree. Adam eats from the tree and those curses are given to all mankind through him. For human beings to have any hope, any hope to be with our God, one of two things has to happen.

Number one, we would have to live perfect lives and be born perfect. So that's impossible. Number two, we would have to have that curse removed by the fulfillment of the covenant of works, which is what Jesus did.

Jesus lived a perfect life. He was not born with the stain of sin because Adam was not his father. Remember, he was born of a virgin. And so because he was born of a virgin and he lived a perfect life, he could remove the curse that Adam brought on us through the covenant of works.

That's why our kids reflexively sin, is because they're born in Adam. That's why it's not hard for us to tell lies. We're born in Adam. It's natural for us. And so Jesus has taken that curse away and this is truly his moment of testing that we see in that tragic chapter in Genesis 3 where Jesus goes into the desert and he's tempted to an infinite degree higher than Adam ever got tempted and he passed the test because he's alike us in every way, yet with no sin.

And that's how Jesus has saved us. And Jesus answers this and he sounds like his father, David. Remember David, every single time, take Saul. We got him right now. Remember, we just read it. We can take him.

No, will you not touch the Lord's anointed? David waited on the Lord time and time again for his throne, what had been promised to him to be delivered to him through God's action and not through his own action, not through his presumption.

And Jesus here echoes it to a much greater extent because Jesus owns all the nations of the world and the devil offers it to him because the devil did own all the nations of the world because God had given them to him.

And Jesus says, no, and this time is the fiercest rebuke to Satan. Jesus says, go Satan, for it is written, you shall worship the Lord your God and serve him only. Can you worship the Lord your God by disobeying his commands?

No, we know that that's preposterous. Over and over in the New Testament, we are instructed and we learn that there is no way to worship God by disobeying him. If you love your parents, you will obey your parents.

If you love your God, you obey your God. Our salvation is not placed in our obedience, but our ability to obey has been placed in us by our love for God that's been given to us by the Holy Spirit. All Christians agree with that.

To disagree with that is a false gospel. And so what happens is we get great hope and there's a cool tie up to this passage. When Jesus gives this command, it's interesting and it's very critical to notice what Satan does.

Jesus says, go. And what does Satan do?

He leaves. He leaves. He flees.

And then we do get a shadow of this fulfillment of Psalm 91 is that the angels do come and minister to Jesus as promised. So Jesus obeys God. Jesus trusts the decree. He trusts his mission. And the angels come and minister to him in the desert and Satan flees.

But Mark shortens this account because as we're going to see in the coming weeks and months, we're going to see if this battle is not over and that Satan is going to rejoin time and time again. And Jesus is going to be tested over and over again.

But what we're going to see is Jesus, when he's not fasting in the wilderness, Jesus is going to be making war with Satan. And the tide gets turned. The tide gets turned. This is definitely Satan on the attack, is it not?

Jesus weakened. Satan comes to him. Satan comes in his weakest moments and he brings his best stuff. When we turn it around and we see in Mark, Jesus is going to be stamping out the kingdom of Satan over and over again until it culminates in Jesus owning all the nations because he finally binds up Satan and destroys his power over the nations.

That's what the resurrection did. Whatever you believe about when that occurs in history, one thing you have to understand is that in a biblical theological sense, the resurrection of Christ destroyed Satan's plans.

There is no way to thwart the promise in Genesis 3 .15 right now because it has happened, because Jesus has secured victory over his enemy. And we're going to see it over and over again.

All right.

Repent and Believe: The Kingdom of God Is at Hand

Last part here. This is a two-parter. Could be short for me. We'll see. And this is where we got the title of the sermon. I'm calling this the New Adam's Expanding Kingdom. And first of all, we see in verse 14 that John is taken out of the picture in Mark's gospel.

John has been the forerunner. And John, we see manifest what is mentioned in other gospels is that John has declared that he must increase while I decrease. That's what John has said. And so John is taken away into captivity by Herod for prophetically speaking to the magistrate, and he's eventually going to be beheaded in a very unlawful way, in a murderous rage, in a ridiculous decree by a tyrant.

But John is given into custody, and he's out of the picture in Mark, and Jesus comes into Galilee, and he's wasting no time because what Jesus is doing is what Christians have been called to do in his name ever since he came and rose back up and ascended into heaven, and that is to preach the gospel of God.

The gospel of God. And it's interesting what he says in verse 15. He says, There's an indicative. The time is fulfilled. That means the time is here. All the time that you've been waiting for, all of the history of Israel has culminated in this moment, and the time is ripe.

It's ready.

Everything has been put in place. And so now what? What's going to happen? The kingdom of God is at hand. Because the time has been fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand, and then what do we do because of that?

Repent and believe. This is such a simple thing that is our message, and it's a thing that's been clouded and almost lost in obscurity in the church in America because what we want to do is entice people to come in the door, right?

We want to entice people to be able to listen to us, and so we might say things like believe, but we rarely say things like repent. Because to repent is the forerunner of believing, and that's not because it's our work, but it's because from this pulpit, I think we've been taught thoroughly from 1 Samuel that repentance is a gift of God.

Human beings are not looking around trying to get themselves right with God. Human beings are looking around trying to make themselves as fat and happy as they possibly can. That's what motivates us. We want to be comfortable.

We want to be powerful. We want to be wealthy, and we want to have what we want when we want it. But God breaks into our life, and he gives us repentance through the Holy Spirit, and when we repent, we turn from that way of looking at things, and now we live for God, and that is the gospel.

That's the nuts and bolts of the call of the kingdom. So what has happened is the time is ripe. Jesus comes on the scene, and he says this. A new king is here. The king has arrived, and the orders of this king are repent and believe, and the rest of the New Testament is basically telling us how we do that.

It fleshes it out for us. What does it mean to repent and believe? Well, that's where we get the commandments, of which there are far more in the New Testament than there are in the Old Testament. Did you know that?

God didn't change, but when Jesus came, and now he has revealed what was hidden before, what is revealed is that God is even more holy than we thought before, and it's unthinkable that in his holiness, in his unapproachable light and splendor, that he has manifested himself through the person of Jesus Christ so that we can enter into the holy places through the blood of Christ, and Jesus has made a way.

The time is fulfilled, and what we do is we shortchange the Bible when we say things like, God loves you, love him. Well, in our culture, look, that's true, but in our culture, the problem that we run into is we have stripped the word love of any meaningful definition, because according to God's word, loving is obeying his commandments.

So if we love one another, then we obey his commandments. If we love God, we obey his commandments, and there's no way that we can love his commandments and obey his commandments without repentance. And so the church, we have to basically get courageous and tell people that they are dying in their sins, but there's good news.

That's what the gospel is. That's what the word means, good news. For everybody that's going okay the way they are, and they just need a little bit more, they don't need good news, and they're not ready to hear good news.

And so what we do, the most tried and true way of fishing for men is we help people to understand that they are in a bad situation, a very bad situation, because they are at odds with the king, and you know this, we know this internally.

If you're at odds with the government, it's a stressful place to be, isn't it? Because they're powerful. And in our modern age, we can see it even more. They can probably hear you. They hear you right now, okay?

And they can bust in, and we know that every average American commits like a felony or two a day because our law is so complicated, right? And so we can be nervous, and if you're explicitly at odds with the king, you are in a dangerous position.

And so to be at odds with the king of kings who knows every thought, who knows every word that proceeds from your mouth, and who is going to judge you for every thought and every word that comes out of your mouth and every action, to be at odds with him is a terrifying thing indeed.

And so the good news is that you don't have to be at odds with him, that we can pray to not be at odds with him. And for us, in our reform camp, we start asking stupid questions about verses like this.

And one of the questions that we ask is, when is the kingdom of God, is that present or is it future? Does Mark give us any illumination there?

What does he say?

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. What does at hand mean? Does that mean in 4 ,000 years? Could it possibly mean that? That would mean that the Bible is written in such a way that it's like Lucy pulling the football out from under you when you're trying to kick it and you fall down.

God does not play games that way with us. When he says the kingdom of God is at hand, he means it's right here. Jesus is the kingdom of God. Jesus is the king of the kingdom of God. And so today, when we start to get in our little arguments and our little theological dust-ups, and we're, well, when is the kingdom of God?

Is it present or is it future? No, the kingdom of God is.