WWUTT 2131 Introduction to the Gospel of Mark (Mark 1:1)

Mark is written much different than Matthew's Gospel, although some of the events it will read about in the Gospel of Mark are much the same. Mark is writing an action story, but still putting before us the Christ whom we must respond to when we understand the text.

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Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky, and greetings all. We have just finished up a year-long study in the Gospel of Matthew, and we're going to keep right on going into the Gospel of Mark. Today we want to do an overview of this second book of the New Testament, understanding who the author of this book is and who he is writing to, about the dating of when Mark was written, what are some of the themes we're going to be looking for, what is it that Mark wants to highlight about the ministry of Jesus?

How is this book different from what we read in Matthew? How is it different from Luke and John? And what is the structure of this book? We want to begin with that part, how Mark divides up this Gospel that he has written.

The Turning Point in Mark 8 and the Question of Jesus’ Identity

So let me start by reading Mark 8, beginning in verse 22, and I'm going to read through verse 33 out of the Legacy Standard Bible. Hear the word of the Lord. And they came to Bethsaida, and they brought a blind man to Jesus and pleaded with him to touch him.

And taking the blind man by the hand, he brought him out of the village, and after spitting on his eyes and laying his hands on him, he was asking him, Do you see anything? And he looked up and was saying, I see men, for I see them like trees walking around.

Then again, he laid his hands on his eyes, and he looked intently and was restored and began to see everything clearly. And he sent him to his home, saying, Do not enter the village. And Jesus went out along with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi.

And on the way, he was asking his disciples, saying to them, Who do people say that I am? And they told him, saying, John the Baptist, others say Elijah, but others one of the prophets. And he continued questioning them, But who do you say that I am?

Peter answered and said to him, You are the Christ. And he warned them to tell no one about him. And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

And he was stating the matter openly, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning around and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, Get behind me, Satan, for you are not setting your mind on God's interests, but on man's.

And that really is the dividing point in the middle of Matthew's gospel, because up to that point in this gospel, the question is being asked, Who is Jesus? And then giving the answer, He is the Christ, just as he had asked of his disciples, Who do you say that I am?

And Peter answers, You are the Christ. But then once that answer is given, the second half of the book asks this question, What kind of Messiah is Jesus? Christ, of course, means Messiah. So what kind of Messiah is he?

And the answer is, He is the suffering servant. For as is said in Mark 10 45, for the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. That's the same passage that we read in Matthew also.

But Mark seems to give a greater emphasis to that understanding. So once again, this book is divided really in half into two main parts. The first half is asking the question, Who is Jesus? And then that question is answered by his disciples.

You are the Christ. The second half is answering the question, What kind of Messiah is he? And that answer being that he is the suffering servant. So this is the theme of Mark's gospel. It is focusing on the ministry of Jesus Christ, the suffering servant for us who gave his life to be a ransom for many.

Mark is not nearly as structured as Matthew is, but you're going to see a lot of parallelisms. Mark really is quite a gifted storyteller. I didn't always used to think so because I identified the structure in Matthew's gospel.

If you remember back to Matthew, Matthew has the same dividing point down the middle like.

That.

And I had talked about that in the second half of the book, how after Jesus asked this question of his disciples, Peter answers, You are the Christ, the son of the living.

God.

Jesus says, Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood is not revealed as to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter. And on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against.

It.

Mark doesn't include that portion of that conversation because Mark is really telling a different story. But though Matthew has that same dividing line, and I said that some of the themes that we saw in the first half of Matthew begin to get repeated in the second half, as though we're following some kind of a chiasm.

Nonetheless, Matthew structures his gospel around five major discourses. And the first discourse, of course, is the most famous one, the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. And then we have the last discourse, which we read just a few weeks back, and that's the Olivet Discourse, which Jesus gave to his disciples on the Mount of Olives in the same week that he was going to go to the cross and die.

That was in Matthew chapters 24 and 25. So Matthew focused on those five major discourses. Mark is not structured that way. Like I said, it's divided really more plainly in half, though Mark is a great storyteller.

He is writing more of an action story, and the action will very quickly jump from one event to the next. It goes way more quickly than Matthew's gospel, which is part of the reason why it's shorter. Mark loves the word immediately.

You may have heard that about Mark's gospel. In fact, if we were to go back to the very beginning of the gospel and read in chapter one, you would be astonished by how much that word comes up over 40 times in Mark's gospel.

Does he use that word immediately? Another word that's used fairly often is either astonished or amazed. Mark uses those words more than the rest of the gospels combined. The people were astonished or they were amazed at something.

In fact, Mark will spend time focusing on the people's reaction to something that Jesus said and did. Mark is one of what we call the synoptic gospels. That's Matthew, Mark and Luke and synoptic meaning same.

So a lot of the things that we read in those three gospels are similar, though Mark adds his own style. Like I said, seems that he is writing an action story here. He doesn't spend as much time as Matthew did on some of those discourses, though there are occasions where Mark will spend more time on the action of an event than Matthew did.

It is common among the skeptics of the New Testament to say that Mark was written first, and they love to say that Mark was written first because Mark is the shortest. And then after that comes Matthew and then Luke and John.

And the skeptics want to be able to say that a mythology was developing here. And so you see things beginning to balloon or or get more prominent with Matthew. He's now expounding, expounding on things that Mark said.

And Luke adds even more details. And then you get to John's gospel, and Jesus is even making declarations of himself being the Christ, which he wasn't saying in the other three gospels. And that's just frankly not true at all.

They're developing their own narrative when they tell that story. Mark is very is very clear about the fact that Jesus is God. I mean, that even comes up in Mark's gospel. I had mentioned this a little bit when we were in the crucifixion of Jesus in Matthew, where Matthew records that at Jesus trial, he is asked, are you the Christ, the son of the living God?

And Jesus says, you say that I am. Well, Mark straight up gives Jesus answer as I am. So he he point blank just says, yes, I am the promised Messiah. That is me. There is no way that you could say that Jesus was just kind of trying to back off of any of these messianic claims.

And it was people later on who ascribe those claims to him. Jesus plainly says that he is divine in Mark's gospel. Even a skeptic like Bart Ehrman acknowledges that Jesus claims to be divine in Mark's gospel.

So this is, again, an action story. We have action that goes very quickly through the story. It's and because these things are are fast paced and jumping from one event to the next and you get the highlights of Jesus ministry in a more concise package.

It's a great gospel to give to somebody as a as an evangelistic tool. Matthew is an easy one to go to because it's the beginning of the New Testament. More often than not, you'll hear somebody say if they're giving someone a book who is a brand new believer and they want to learn more about Jesus, they'll give them the gospel of John.

I remember it was the Gideons, I believe, who would put together these short New Testaments as evangelism tools that you can hand out to somebody. So it would be a shorter book or something a little bit more concise instead of handing them the entire little New Testament that the Gideons are fond of handing out.

And so they would put the gospel of John in a in a smaller leaflet book. So it's common to give out John. I don't I don't do that. I have never given out John as an evangelism tool. I think John is actually rather complicated.

John is a difficult book to understand. If I am going to tell somebody a new believer or even somebody who's asking questions about becoming a believer, if I'm going to give them a book, I'll give them either Matthew.

Or Mark.

Those are the two books that I'll hand them. And Mark is even shorter, so it might be more appealing. And again, Mark jumps from the action a lot more quickly. And it's not as difficult to follow Mark's train of thought.

Matthew is building a story. He is helping the Hebrews see that Christ is the promised Messiah. Mark is writing to a primarily Gentile audience. In fact, in the Greek structure, if you know Greek and you can read the Greek of Mark, you'll find there that there are Greek translations of Aramaic terms.

Matthew might use the Aramaic word, but Mark uses the Greek translation. And then there's also Greek transliterations of Latin words in Mark's gospel. So this lends credibility to the claim to those who will say that Mark was written to a primarily Gentile audience.

It's also understood that Mark was probably an understudy of Peter. So he's writing the gospel the way that Peter preached it. Matthew is writing Matthew's gospel. And it could have been the way that the gospel was preached by most of the apostles to the Hebrews.

Mark was writing the gospel as it would have been given to the Gentiles. And it's likely that Mark is one of the later gospels. Much as the critics want to say that Mark was the first gospel, that's very unlikely.

Mark could have been the third written gospel, if not the last written gospel. Now, I tend to believe that John is the last one. And when we get to the gospel of John, I'll explain why. But I think the order in chronological, the order in which these books were chronologically written, the chronology, I guess that would be the right way to say it.

Matthew was first, Luke was second, and then Mark, and then John. I think that's the order in which Mark was given. There's historical evidence to back that up, that Mark may have been written in the.

60s.

So in that decade, right before the destruction of the temple was when Mark wrote his gospel. And that's one of the reasons why he doesn't focus on some of the things that Matthew does. Like, for example, in the story that we just read, where Matthew includes Jesus saying, I will build my church, the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Mark doesn't find it necessary to have to write that. He doesn't have to put that in there. Also, Matthew, in saying that Jesus said, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Matthew was actually making a connection between Israel and the church, again, writing to Hebrews. Because in the Old Testament, in the Septuagint, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, Israel is called the church.

They're called by that same word, ecclesia, or ecclesia, the word that gets translated church in the English. That same word is used to describe Israel as the ecclesia in the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

So Matthew is making a connection for the Hebrews that the church is the people of God, that those things that Israel failed to fulfill, Christ fulfilled. And now all who are in Christ are the church, whether they are Jew or Gentile.

And again, by the time Mark gets to writing his gospel, he doesn't have to put an emphasis on making that particular point since he's writing to a primarily Gentile audience. Now, like I said, he may have been an understudy of Peter and is writing the gospel the way that Peter preached it.

And some of those connections between Mark and Peter, we find in Acts chapter 12, for example, when Peter goes to Mark's house after he escapes from prison, we know that from 1 Peter 5 .13 that Mark was with Peter when he wrote his first epistle, may have even been a scribe for Peter writing in some of the writing that Peter did.

In fact, there is a first century church leader named Papias who personally knew some of the disciples. And he said that Mark wrote everything that Peter told him about the sayings and the deeds.

Of Jesus.

So Mark really could have been writing. Peter is saying, hey, I want to write my gospel down, so you're going to be the one to do.

It.

And Mark is the guy that writes this down. Now, what are some of the things that Mark focuses on in terms of what we are to understand about Jesus and his ministry? Before getting to that, let me come back to that story right in the center in Mark chapter eight and why I began with Mark 8 .22 and ran through that question where Jesus asks his disciples, who do you say that I am?

So look at the miracle that immediately precedes that. And only Mark records this miracle here. Matthew did not record the miracle, but Mark does. So they come to Bethsaida and a blind man is brought to Jesus and Jesus heals his eyes.

But the man really doesn't understand what it is that he's looking at. It's almost as if his eyes were atrophied, just like you would have somebody who may have been paralyzed for a while, and now they've been given movement and mobility in their legs, but their legs are atrophied.

So you got to get those muscles working so that they can learn to stand up and walk again. For this man who is blind and his eyes have never functioned before, when he sees, he doesn't understand what he's seeing.

So he says, I see men and I see them like trees walking around. So the text indicates to us here that he doesn't he can't perceive what it is that he is looking at. Jesus healed his eyes, but did not heal his mind to understand the signals that his eyes were sending.

So in verse 25, Jesus laid his hands on his eyes and he looked intently and was restored and began to see everything clearly. So it's like a double miracle. Jesus first heals his eyes, then heals his mind to understand what his eyes were seeing.

In both instances, he's laying his hands on the man's eyes. But that's what we understand was taking place. So then what happens after that? Jesus is talking to his disciples and he asks them, who do people say that I am?

And the disciples give the answers of the people. John the Baptist, some say Elijah, others say one of the prophets. So the people see Jesus, but they don't really understand what it is that they are seeing about Jesus.

And then Jesus asked the disciples, who do you say that I am? And Peter answers, you are the Christ. And that's the turning point in Mark's gospel, because now we do see him clearly. And so knowing that he is the Christ, knowing that he is the Messiah, what kind of Messiah.

Is he?

And that's the theme in the second half of Mark's gospel. So what does Mark emphasize about Jesus? What do we ultimately want to see in this particular gospel? Every gospel writer has something different that they focus on.

It's because of their own writing style. It's because of the audience that they're writing to. So what are the themes that we see in Mark's gospel? Well, first of all, we come to understand that Jesus is the son of man.

16 times in this gospel, Christ uses the term son of man to refer to himself. Now, it's not like Mark uses that expression more than the other gospels do. Both Matthew and Luke use the expression twice as much as Mark does.

But nonetheless, Mark does make a point of emphasizing that Jesus is the Messiah that the Jews were anticipating, according to Daniel's prophecy in Daniel 7, 13 to 14. In my vision at night, I looked and there before me was one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven.

He approached the ancient of days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory, and sovereign power. All peoples, nations, and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away.

And his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed. So when Jesus calls himself the son of man, when Mark identifies him with that title, Jesus is calling himself this figure that Daniel saw that inaugurates the everlasting kingdom that is to come.

And so in this first half of Mark's gospel, this is the side of the son of man that Mark presents, his divine authority. But from the people's perspective, he's not quite meeting their expectations. We talked about that when we were in Matthew's gospel.

They were anticipating a strong and valiant king who was going to come like David, and he was going to ascend to David's throne, and he was going to kick out the Romans. Well, the same is the case in Mark's gospel, only he doesn't quite paint that same picture the way that Matthew does.

But he does show how the people expected someone more than a suffering servant. But instead, what they got was the suffering son of man. And that's what Mark draws out in the second half of his gospel.

So first of all, we have Jesus presented as the son of man. Secondly, we see that Jesus has authority, even though he is the suffering servant. He is still the son of God who possesses authority. And this is a striking feature in the first half of the book is to see Jesus authority in the differing realms.

He doesn't just have authority here on earth, but he even has authority in the heavenly places. And you'll see that with the authority that Jesus demonstrates over the demons. You also see this in the way that Jesus controls the elements that exist in the heavens, talking about like the storms, the wind, the rain, things like that, where the disciples will marvel and say, who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him?

So we see that he is the son of man. We see that he has authority. And then we also understand his mission, that he came to die as a ransom for many. Let me come back to that section in Mark chapter eight, and let me keep reading.

I read through verse 33. Let me read the rest of the chapter. So this is 34 to 38. And he summoned the crowd with his disciples and said to them, if anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospels will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

For whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the son of man will be ashamed of him when he comes in the glory of his father and with his holy angels. So Jesus talks to his disciples about how he is going to suffer and die.

But then he also speaks to the people about how he reigns on high. So indeed, he's a suffering servant, but this is still a great king who has much authority and his mission is to accomplish all that God had sent him to do.

But do not think for a moment that he has somehow lost his authority in the heavens for a day will come in which he will return in the glory of his father and with the holy angels. Those who were ashamed of him will be destroyed on that day of judgment.

And I also said that Mark will focus on the reaction of the crowd. Jesus is preaching in such a way that he demands a response. He demands a response from his disciples. He demands a response from the rest of the crowds.

So how is it that the crowds respond to him? Well, some believe we see his disciples believe in the question that Jesus asked of him. Some are even confused, just like how when the blind man was healed, he was confused at first.

He saw something but wasn't sure quite what it was that he was seeing. And then there are others who were antagonistic. Some of them were just straight up opposed to Jesus and would not submit to him or his message.

But the purpose of the book, the thing that Mark emphasizes here most of all, is that whether there is opposition, whether there is confusion, whether there are wrongful expectations for who we might want the Messiah to be.

Nonetheless, there is a response that we must give. It is being presented to all of us to know who Jesus is and how are we going to respond to knowing who he is, knowing that he is the Christ. He is the son of God.

He is the one who was sent by the father. He is the one who came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. And how are you going to respond to that? Those who believe in him will have everlasting life.

Those who do not believe will perish when Christ returns on the day that he comes back in the glory of his father and with the holy angels. So there is a response here that is being demanded of the hearers.

It may not be as clear as the exhortation that we have at the end of Matthew's gospel concerning the great commission, but it is nonetheless implied that you must know who Jesus is and you are going to respond one way or the other.

Ambivalence is not a response because ambivalence actually turns out to just be veiled opposition. So who are you going to be? One who opposes Jesus, one who is confused about him, or one who acknowledges that he is the Christ, the son of the living God.

Let's finish there with prayer. And then we're going to begin in Mark chapter one tomorrow. Heavenly father, we thank you for what we've read here and what we've considered about this book today. And I pray that you would bless us as we come into this study, as we come into yet another gospel account of who Jesus is, that it draws us closer to the Christ, that it makes us love and appreciate what it is that Jesus did for us.

And that we would give a response, responding in faith, in faithful obedience to the savior who has called us out of the world into his glorious kingdom, a kingdom that we inhabit.

Now.

And we will live in glory forever on that day that Christ brings us in to the kingdom he suffered and died for on our behalf. Forgive us our sins and lead us in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

It is in his name that we pray.

Amen.