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Reading Mark 9:43-50 where Jesus warns His disciples what will happen to them if they are not careful with what they do with their hands, what they look at, or where their feet go. Visit wwutt.com for all our videos!
Jesus said to his disciples, if your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It's better to enter life crippled than having two hands to go into hell into the unquenchable fire. What do you need to sacrifice?
When we understand the text.
This is when we understand the text, a daily Bible study in the word of Christ. For he is before all things and in him, all things hold together. Tell your friends about our ministry at www .wutt .com.
Hey, once again, it's Pastor Gabe.
Thank you, Becky. In our study of the gospel of Mark, we are finishing chapter nine. I said that yesterday, but no, we're really finishing chapter nine today. So this last section of Jesus talking with his disciples and warning them about what they must be willing to give up in order to enter the kingdom of God.
What sort of sacrifices are they willing to make in order to enter heaven? So let me pick up where I left off yesterday and I'll start in verse 43 and go to verse 50 out of the Legacy Standard Bible. Hear the word of the Lord.
And if your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than having your two hands to go into hell into the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off.
It is better for you to enter life lame than having your two feet to be cast into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than having two eyes to be cast into hell where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.
For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if the salt becomes unsalty with what will you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another. Now that statement there at the very end, it bookends this section that we've been looking at this week.
Because remember just yesterday where we had read about John trying to hinder a group of disciples that were casting out demons, but they weren't among the disciples that were following Jesus. Jesus says, don't hinder them because whoever performs a miracle in my name, he is not against us, he's for us.
Whoever gives you a cup of water to drink in my name because you are of Christ, truly I say to you, he will not lose his reward. That was the section we looked at yesterday. And so here at the conclusion of the chapter, he says, be at peace with one another.
And that's the objective in that instruction that he was giving. That you not try to be combative or competitive even, we're all on the same team. We're not trying to score more points than the other guy.
What can we do to help build one another up in love that we all reach maturity in Christ and reach glory together and rejoice in Christ around the throne on that day that we enter the heavenly kingdom.
So Jesus is going to talk further about this with his disciples in the section that we're looking at today. In order to enter that kingdom, what are you willing to put off? What are you willing to give up?
What sacrifices do you have to make? What is holding you back from progressing toward the kingdom of God? It would be better for you to enter the kingdom maimed, torn apart, even limb from limb. It's better for you to enter the kingdom that way than to have your whole body to be thrown into hell.
All the stuff that you always wanted, you got it all, but now you're going to spend eternity in that place where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. That's a statement from the Old Testament, by the way, and I'll show you where.
Now, as I was reading this section, same with yesterday when I read this section, there were two verses that I skipped, verses 44 and 46. When I did my reading, I skipped those two verses. Why, why are you skipping verses, Gabe?
I'll explain it to you when we get there, but first let's come back up to verse 43. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than having your two hands to go into hell into the unquenchable fire.
Now, remember that previously Jesus says, whoever does these things in my name will enter the kingdom. And then whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, well, he's going to have a millstone hung around his neck and be tossed into the sea.
But now he directs it to the disciples. If you do something that causes you to stumble, what would be the better thing for you? Cut that thing out of your life. Get that out of your life. Whatever it is that would cause you to do something contrary to the mission that might even cause you to fall away, to fall off the path, that you're not able to finish the race as you were never in it to begin with.
You really were still enslaved by the passions of your flesh. It was just a matter of time before your flesh took back over again. So if you are really in Christ and you are really going to make it to the kingdom, what do you have to give up in order to get there?
What kinds of things are your hands doing that are causing you to sin? Now, you know that you've heard this before of what Jesus is talking about here. This is in the Sermon on the Mount. And it's in the context of him talking about adultery.
So he says in Matthew 5, 27, you have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
But if your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you, it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.
Now, I get the impression that this was something that Jesus said several times and made applications to it in several different ways. So what we're reading about here in Mark 9, it's not the Sermon on the Mount, but it's the very same lesson with a different application.
And so it's not that Mark and Matthew got their words jumbled. Mark remembered it in a different context and Matthew recalled it in this other context. Jesus said the same thing in both places, just gave it different application.
So here, as he's talking to his disciples about discipleship, what do you need to sacrifice that might cause you or prevent you from getting into the kingdom of God? Now, in the Sermon on the Mount, when said with regards to adultery, I would think the application would be pretty obvious.
You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery, but whoever looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. So what are your eyes looking at? What's before your eyes?
Looking at that, is that causing you to stumble? Then cut your eye out and throw it away from you. For it is better to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. Now, Jesus is being hyperbolic here, of course.
He's being symbolic. He's not saying to literally cut your eye out, literally cut your eye out and throw it away. He's not saying that. Because you could cut that eye out and the other eye cause you to sin.
You could cut your eye out and it's not solving your heart problem. It's not helping you to renew your thinking and conform your thoughts to Christ just by cutting your eye out. So that's not the solution, to literally cut a part of your body out from you.
So what is it that Jesus is saying? Whatever it is in your life that is causing you to sin, get rid of that thing. My friends, I know that we live in a society today, in a culture today, where it's really hard to get by without a smartphone.
It's almost like everyone expects you to have a smartphone. You might even work at a particular job in which your employer requires you to have a smartphone, but you don't. You don't have to have a smartphone.
Or if you do, because it's for work or your job or something like that, there's certain apps that you have to have in order to do your job well. If that's going to be the case, then you need to negotiate with your employer somehow to be able to say, hey, I just can't have a smartphone.
I can't trust myself with it. I would be a worse employee for you if I have this smartphone. And so, if your job is paying for your phone, and I've had that before. I've worked at a job before where they even bought me a phone and paid my phone bill for me because they needed me to have that phone.
But negotiate it with your employer and be able to say, if you want me to be a better employee for you, I can't have this phone. I can't have this gadget. I can't be trusted with it. I look at things that I shouldn't be looking at.
I get absorbed into it. It becomes my world. I'm ignoring other people. I forget things and it ends up going by the wayside or I'm doing worse things than that. Look at it porn or whatever else. And so, I just can't have a smartphone.
You, we don't have to have smartphones, even though that is such a common, regular thing in the world today. You don't have to have one. If you having one, if you can't keep your thoughts controlled, if it's so easy to come across something that will cause you to stumble and send you down a horrible path that now you have to explain to your spouse.
Now you have to clear this stuff off your phone. Now you've gone so far in your mind that you're seeing the images even when you close your eyes. It would be better for you to not have that thing. It's a sacrifice.
It's hard in this world today to get by without a smartphone, but you might need to get rid of the smartphone. What are you doing with your hands that might end up preventing you from getting into the kingdom of God?
Get it out of your life. Get rid of it. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than having your two hands to go into hell into the unquenchable fire.
It's a pretty harsh thing, but it's nonetheless true. Nobody was a more fire and brimstone preacher in the Bible than Jesus. And why did he talk about hell so much? So you would be warned about it. So you don't go there.
So that you make the sacrifices that you need to sacrifice and come to Christ and live. That's why he talked about hell. Yes, we are drawn to God by his love. Seeing that Jesus died on the cross for our sin and rose again from the dead.
But you come to that understanding of his love because you realize what you deserve. You know that what you deserve is hell. You deserve to be destroyed. You deserve to have the wrath of God poured out on you.
That's what you deserve. And so when you look at the cross and you see God's wrath poured out on Christ on our behalf instead, then you see the demonstration of God's love. He has not destroyed me. He gave his son.
God so loved the world, he gave his only son that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have everlasting life. You know, John 3, 16. We only come to know that about the love of God when we recognize and realize what it is that we deserve and that Christ was punished in our place.
So Jesus out of love warns us about hell and telling us it would be better for you to sacrifice and enter into the kingdom crippled where you're gonna be restored anyway, than to have your whole body be thrown into the unquenchable fire.
Now, verse 44, which I said I skipped, it says, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. This comes up twice. It said there, and it said in verse 46, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.
But those two statements were not in the oldest manuscripts of the gospel of Mark. Some overzealous Byzantine monk added that statement in there. And then when the numbering system came in, when the Bible was numbered into chapters and verses, those extra words that had been added in there got their own verse.
But once we have the full library of the manuscripts that have been preserved and we're able to digitize them and put them in a library that people can access from all over the world, you don't have to travel to those different places in order to find those manuscripts and study them by going from place to place and all these different places where all these manuscripts were kept.
But again, we have them digitized and we can just look at them from a computer, from anywhere. Once we had that library compiled, we were able to look at the totality of those manuscripts and realize that these two statements in verses 44 and 46 were not in the earliest manuscripts.
And so when some of these later translations have come along, like the English Standard Version and the Legacy Standard Bible, then those verses get taken out. The ESV omitted them entirely. The LSB puts them in brackets, but you know that as they appear in brackets, they weren't in the earliest manuscripts.
It's not written by Mark. It was added by someone later. So that's why I skip them when I'm reading them. They're still there in the LSB. It's just not, you know, it's marked, it's labeled, marked, yeah, no pun intended.
It's marked so that you know it wasn't written by Mark. Some monk took the statement that's in verse 48, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched and felt like it needed to be added in the two other places where Jesus talks about a person being cast into hell, but it's not necessary.
The statement is in verse 48. It's not like the Legacy translators or the English Standard translators took words out of the Bible. They just returned the manuscript back to the oldest existing manuscripts that we have to see what Mark had originally written.
And it's not necessary to take that line in verse 48 and stick it up in the other two places where Jesus mentions a person being cast into hell. So that's why I skipped those verses and that's why they might be missing from your text.
Verse 45, and if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame than having your two feet to be cast into hell. Now this past Friday, Becky and I were reading from Proverbs 1.
We like to start with a little bit of scripture before we do our Q &A. So the first chapter of Proverbs was what we used and it's there in Proverbs 1 where it says, I'm starting in verse 10 here. My son, if sinners entice you, do not be willing.
If they say, come with us, let us lie and wait for blood. Let us ambush the innocent without cause. Let us swallow them alive like sheol and whole as those who go down to the pit. We will find all kinds of precious wealth.
We will fill our houses with spoil. Cast in your lot with us. We shall all have one purse. My son, do not walk in the way with them. Do not walk in the way with them. Withhold your feet from their pathway for their feet run to evil and they hasten to shed blood.
Don't go along with those that are gonna walk in the unrighteous paths. Turn your feet away from them. Or as Jesus puts it here in Mark 9, cut your feet off so that you don't even have the ability to go and fall in line with them.
Now, in a lot of situations, in most situations, you're not gonna be falling in with a gang of people, although that may literally happen. I have had to counsel teenagers before that had been caught up, like teenage young men, for example, who had been caught up with a bunch of boys that were going around and doing vandalism.
They were actually committing crimes. And having to sit down with those young men and tell them, if you continue with this group that you think are your friends, they're gonna get in trouble and you are gonna have to face it as well.
You will be just as guilty as they and it will tarnish your record for the rest of your life. And I've had to give those warnings before. And sometimes young men listen to me and sometimes they don't.
End up going with the gang of thieves instead of keeping their feet from evil. With young women as well, they're hanging out with a bunch of other girls and these girls kind of act like prostitutes. And they're sleeping around with boys and doing all manner of things, slander and all other kind of stuff to beat down their competition and be more popular and be the it girls and all this other kind of stuff.
And I've had to approach this with these Christian young ladies or those that had professed to be Christian. Said, you continue on with those girls, you're gonna be just like them and it will be to your destruction.
We have to be careful about the company that we keep and going along with them will bring us into ruin just as they go to ruin. So don't set your feet in paths that are going to lead to your destruction, that leads you off the path of righteousness and onto the path of destruction.
Whatever it is in your life that is causing you to go that way, cut it out. Whether it's certain friendships, certain people that are in your life. Whether it's a temptation that you have at work, a temptation that you have in recreation or whatever it might happen to be.
What do you have to cut out of your life so that you don't end up in hell and keeps you focused on Christ and on the path of righteousness. As James puts it in James four, draw near to God and he will draw near to you.
Resist the devil and he will flee from you. And that right there is gouge out your eye, cut off your hand, cut off your feet because it's better for you to enter the kingdom lame than to have your whole body thrown into hell.
And here we get to the eye in verse 47. If your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out. For it is better that you enter the kingdom of God with one eye than having two eyes to be cast into hell. You know, the old Sunday school song, be careful little eyes what you see.
We need to be careful about the things that we put before our eyes. And no matter how strong you think you are, I can watch this and it doesn't cause me any problem. You're probably weaker than you think you are.
You think too highly of yourself. Be careful of the things that you put before your eyes. Even the things that you put in your ears, beware of those things also. The kind of music that we listen to has more of an effect on you than you probably want to admit.
It's a great Sunday school song, still with a lot of wisdom, even for adults today. Oh, be careful little eyes what you see for the father up above is looking down in love. Oh, be careful little eyes what you see.
Be better to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than having two eyes to be cast into hell where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. Interesting thing about that line. That line is the very last verse in Isaiah.
That's where that comes from, Isaiah 66, 24. Then they will go forth and look on the corpses of the men who have transgressed against me for their worm will not die and their fire will not be quenched and they will be an object of contempt to all mankind.
And that's the way Isaiah ends. We get to the last chapter in Isaiah tomorrow. So I'm reading this verse right as we're on the cusp of a conclusion to our study in the book of Isaiah. But anyway, that's the picture of hell that Jesus gives.
Just as worms would eat a corpse, well, the worm that is in hell never gets satisfied at that corpse. It is continually eating away at that corpse because the body is always there in hell. It is perpetually in death, burning in eternal punishment.
The fire is not quenched. Those fires never go out. They never completely incinerate the person that is there. They will continue to burn forever. Eternal punishment is what Jesus calls it in Matthew 25.
And so Jesus says in verse 49, for everyone will be salted with fire. Now, what this means when Jesus says that is exactly that. Everybody will be salted with fire. For the person who is going into judgment, the fire that they will receive will be the fires of judgment.
But the person who is walking in righteousness, the fire that they receive is the baptism of fire that comes by the Holy Spirit. So everybody receives a fire. The unrighteous, it is a fire of punishment.
For the righteous, it is a fire of purification. We're being purified. And salted just being another word for this being a verb, not the noun salt, but the verb to salt something or to scatter or to season it with.
I guess you could put it that way. But then Jesus makes this statement in verse 50, salt is good. So to be salted with something isn't always bad, it is good. Salt's a good thing. Salt was something that kind of ruled the world at this particular time.
Wars were fought over salt. It divided people. It was a hot commodity. Everybody loved salt. Salt is good. But if the salt becomes unsalty, with what will you make it salty again? Now, this is in reference to the kind of salt that would be taken out of the Dead Sea.
It's not the same kind of mineral salt that would be pulled out of the ground or mined from a salt mine. And that kind of salt that comes from the Dead Sea, indeed, it could lose its saltiness. And once it does, you can't make it salty again.
It's dirt. Have salt in yourselves, Jesus says, and be at peace with one another. The way this is put in Colossians chapter four is may your speech be seasoned with salt so that you will know how to answer each person.
Have the flavor of life in yourself. That very thing that God gives to us that preserves us from the fire. Speak those words, that kindness, the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ to others, that you may have this salt in yourselves.
And being at peace with one another, you demonstrate the fruit of that gospel. That we're not hostile with each other. We're not divided from one another. We are unified in Christ. Before we came to Christ, as said in Titus 3, 3, we were hated by others and hating one another.
But now in Christ Jesus, we've been reconciled to God and to his people. And so may the fruit of that reconciliation be apparent in the way that we love one another and build each other up, preparing each other for the day of eternity.
Heavenly father, we thank you for what we've read here as we finished up Mark chapter nine. And I pray that these are words that we have read that we apply to our lives and we live according to, to the glory of our great God and savior who gave himself for us.
We see the love of God demonstrated in the sacrifice of Christ so that we will not perish, but we will have everlasting life. The only way anyone escapes judgment is by faith in Jesus. So give us the boldness and the courage today to share the good news of the gospel with others and be the salt of the earth.
In Jesus' name, 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.