Mark’s Gospel Introduction (Part A)

By the time you get to John's Gospel, you're almost unmindful that he was a fisherman, because you're so taken by what he has to say. You're not interested. Well, what is his background? What college did he go to? Is he in Ivy League? Who cares, man?

This stuff is so good. But John Mark, what was he? He was a rich kid, and that's about it. God took this rich kid, and he used him to kick off the Gospels, and he does it in a magnificent way. This is the Gospel of the Servant. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher, Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel, Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the Gospel of Mark.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. But for now, here's Pastor Rick in Mark Chapter 1 as he begins a brand new message, Mark's Gospel Introduction. If you have your Bibles, please open to the Gospel according to Mark Chapter 1. An introduction to the Gospel of Mark is going to be, if things go according to plan, a lot of information.

But I know that some may not be able to keep up with the information, but it needs to get recorded so that you can go back and listen and study it if it is something you'd like to do. We're going to just read verse 1 of Mark Chapter 1. That is our text, so I will read it twice since it's so short, so nice.

I'm going to read it twice. The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. We're going to cover the Gospels first, a quick overview of the Gospels themselves. And the internal evidence of each Gospel, the information in each of the Gospels, gives to us great insights as to the methods of the writers, what they were trying to do, how they were trying to do it, and therefore how it will help all the generations that would follow benefiting from what they had put into print, what they published through the Spirit for us. And each of the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as they used to be referred to, the evangelists, they begin at a different point in the Gospel story, in the story concerning the coming of Christ. Matthew begins with the ancestry and the birth of the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. So we have all these Jewish names in the first sixteen or so verses of Matthew's Gospel. Luke, on the other hand, begins with the birth of John the Baptist.

And there's a reason why they're all doing this. I don't know how much they understood how these things flowed into the times they lived in and beyond. I don't know if they were more just focused on what they were doing, and the Holy Spirit, of course, doing what he does so wonderfully, is ruling over it all and applying it in a way that the glory to Christ would be unmistakable. In doing the Gospels, there's so much information available, probably to me, more than anything on earth, the writings concerning the Gospels, the background information, the research.

It is exciting once you can sort of catch the vision. Well, I mentioned Luke starting with the birth of John the Baptist. John, the apostle, in his giving us the record of the Gospel, he goes back before the beginning of time.

He goes back to the Lord's pre-incarnate existence as the Word of God. And Mark now, when he comes on the scene, which he probably is the first of the Gospel writers to be published, but Mark begins at a point later than all of the others, with the actual ministry of John the Baptist. Luke, he got into the beginnings of, you know, what was going, the prophecies concerning John the Baptist being born and then actually being born.

But Mark starts in the ministry, as he's an adult now, John the Baptist is, and that's where Mark begins. So back to Matthew again, who writes to the Jews with their Old Testament background, written by a Jew to the Jewish community as a piece of evangelistic literature, information. In other words, he wanted to save souls in the Jewish community by showing to them, this is your Messiah. He's fulfilling the prophecies.

That's why he keeps saying to them, as it says in the Scriptures, as it was written, he's bringing them back to the Old Testament to show them that Christ has fulfilled the prophecies of the great prophets. Luke, in his writing, he targets the intelligentsia of the Greeks. The Greeks were very impressed with philosophies and the brevity of thought compacted into a short sentence.

Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, those are the men that moved the Greeks. And so for Luke to capture those who were under that influence, impressed by intelligentsia, he packages his Gospel, concentrating on the parables of Christ, and so much information that that mindset would appreciate. The literary quality of Luke is very high. It's the highest of the four Gospels, which again testifies that he himself, being a doctor, was a man of letters, and he would appeal to those who considered themselves scholastic. John, John writes to the church, Jew and Gentile alike. John is dealing with the Gnostic heresy. He comes after all of them, many decades after Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and he is presenting for us, of course, the deity of Christ. He's saying the Messiah, the Christ, to the Jew, the Messiah, to the Greek mind, the Christ. It's the same word, same meaning, and he is saying he is every bit of God. He's not a prophet, he's not an angel, he's not a created being.

He's self-existent. He is God the Son. And this is, of course, critical to the church to this very day, that we understand the person of Christ, but we also need to understand how it all happened, how it all unfolded, how it all tied into what the prophets were predicting. To understand this is a spiritual document with spiritual features.

Other religions lack all of this, but we have it. And when John wrote, he appealed to the Hellenistic Jews that were the Jews that were really living in the Gentile world. I'll get briefly into how they got to be there and so prominent in those Gentile communities, but he writes to them with them in mind, he writes to those Jews that were in Jerusalem, and he writes to the Gentiles throughout the world. Very thorough in what John had to say. And so, he follows up in his gospel to Matthew, Mark and Luke to let everyone know that the Jesus Christ that those men are talking about, in case you missed it, he is divine.

But Mark, Mark wrote with the Romans in mind, and this is a sharp contrast to say Luke and Matthew, who wrote again with the Jew and the Greek in mind, Mark writes to the Romans. His writings appealed to them because they were people of action. Their ability as engineers and builders are tested to this very day. Many of the roads that the Romans put in, in the days even before the Gospels, are still there to this day. Their siege ramp at Masada is still there to this day. They built that under fire. They understood action, they understood it in their legions, and they understood it in the, in fact the Roman soldier, he was issued a sword, a spear, a shield of course, and a shovel. Because he was, see a little different from today's infantry. When I was in the military, back right before the Revolutionary War, we were issued an e-tool, an entrenching tool, a shovel to dig foxholes. But the Romans were given shovels, not for foxholes so much, but for building roads and bridges and other things that needed to be done so that they, when they built roads in a combat zone, they built it so they could get their supplies to themselves quickly or they could retreat quickly. They were very, very much into action and Mark picks up on that. It's remarkable. All roads lead to Rome.

There's a common saying. God knew what he was doing. When he had the Romans build those roads before the Gospel came along, he used aggression language to carry that Gospel on those roads to preach the Jewish Messiah.

And we see those three people groups, dominant in that, in that part of the world at that time, all being used by God. But Mark, when he begins, as I mentioned, he begins with John the Baptizer, he goes right to action and we'll cover why he skips the genealogy as we move through this morning's introductions. Now I am one of those that believe Mark is the earliest of the Gospels to be published. Some disagree and they're wrong because they disagree with me. It's a very simple formula.

I follow it and I advise you to do the same. I'm not, of course, the only one that believes Mark is the earliest of the Gospels, but it is clear that Matthew and Luke come along and they give details that Mark purposely leaves out because Mark is fast hitting. He's going to give you action. In fact, of the 35 or so parables, and it's a little tricky with how many parables because some count parabolic illustration, proverbial statements as parables when they're not. So we'll just say there's 35 of them. And Mark only gives us three or four of the parables. But he gives us about 20 of the miracles. And so again, he's concentrating on action whereas Luke pours out, pours into the parables. And so does Matthew, Luke the most because again of his audience.

Only 7% of what Mark has to say is unique. The other 93% is found in Matthew and Mark and plus with just so many more details. And so when we consider the background of the men that God chose to give us the revelation of the coming of Christ, the first coming of Christ, this good news of the Savior, we find that God uses the background of people without the people even thinking about it.

For example, Matthew was a tax collector and God, he was like the bottom. No one respected, none of the Jews respected a tax collector. They hated them. They saw them as traitors. It went beyond what you might think of the IRS if you have low feelings of the IRS.

There's far exceeded that in disgust. Luke was a physician and yet God used again his command of the Greek language to publish his gospel to those people. A fisherman was John. God of course used him nonetheless.

By the time you get to John's gospel you're almost unmindful that he was a fisherman because you're so taken by what he has to say. You're not interested, well what is his background? What college did he go to? Is he in Ivy League? Who cares man?

This stuff is so good. But John Mark, what was he? He was a rich kid and that's about it. And God took this rich kid and he used him to kick off the gospels and he does it in a magnificent way. This is the gospel of the servant. God the servant and he captures that and it is connected to his own life and again I'm not so sure he was even mindful of that.

He had so many other, you know as we would say, bigger fish to fry. But these were men of ministry and the lesson of that is regardless of what your background is or is not, you're useful to God if you will submit to God and the leadings of the Holy Spirit. If you just get out of the way and not allow yourself to be too distracted, God will use you. And so that's just a brief overview of the gospels, all four of them, but we concentrate on the gospel of Mark itself.

There are characteristics that are very helpful as we go through it the next, I don't know, 4 or 5 years. I hope you're not disappointed. I was really hoping we'd do Revelation.

Really? And then once we're done with Revelation, well let's do it again. You know, this foundational work and if the foundation is good, then you can build way up on it. Well, from start to finish, it marches on that road of action having none of the longer discourses of Jesus. The Sermon of the Mount, for example, which takes up three chapters in Matthew is not in Mark's gospel.

There's no address in the upper room which takes up three chapters in John's gospel. Far fewer parables as I've mentioned. The narrative is centered on the deeds of Jesus and rapidly, one after another, he gets right to the point. And his readers, if the Roman audience, they would appreciate that. In fact, one of the other indicators that this audience was Roman are the Latin words that he uses.

Now you've got to dig for that one in research. If you want to find the Latin words that he uses for Centurion, for example, for Denari, for other words, you're really going to have to dig, but it's there and it is an indicator that again, his audience was the Latin, the Romans at the time. Very few Old Testament quotations in Mark compared to the other gospels. He explains Jewish customs, but he ignores much of the Mosaic law as far as putting into print.

He didn't ignore the law and his practice and his behavior, but he doesn't get into it. And he tells us things about the Passover that you wouldn't know if a Jew would understand, but a non-Jew would not. And so he gives that to us. And these facts, they point to a Gentile audience and they point to a Latin, the Roman audience. Remember when Christ was crucified over his head, the King of the Jews was put into the Hebrew, the Latin, and the Greek, the dominant languages of those days.

In fact, in fact, if you lived in Rome at this time, you were forced to grasp both the Latin and the Greek language if you were going to survive there. And these things are critical because it is God making this statement. I need to use you where you are, like a lily planted among thorns. You are supposed to flower. And once you flower, you know the flower indicates the fruit's coming.

If you go to a cherry tree, and I mean a fruit cherry tree, and you see a bunch of flowers, you know each flower is going to produce the berry. And this is significant when you take that word from the Song of Solomon, like a lily amongst a thorn, so is my beloved. Like a beautiful flower amongst a world of sinners, so is my beloved church. And my beloved church is made out of individuals whom I love and died for.

Sinners saved by the grace of God. And so again, Mark shows us Jesus as worker, as servant in action, but all the time as master, still Lord. He is still the Lord, even though he is this servant. John, of course, brings that out. The deity of Christ, as I've been hitting on when mentioning John, but yet here the God the Son washing the feet of his disciples.

Unheard of. And yet, John makes sure that it's published in the Holy Spirit, makes sure that it lasts forever. And so this servanthood would appeal to the Romans, again with their engineering successes and their great legions of action, because when the Roman legions showed up, all the people knew they were going to win. It's just a matter of how much time it would take them.

At this stage in Roman history, they were unstoppable as servants of Rome, of Caesar. And Mark is going to make connections with that first verse that we read. He's going to make a direct connection to how the Caesars would announce their, or the people would announce their Caesars. He is going to take that and announce the savior of the world. He starts this, or puts this gospel into print to refute the errors and the myths that were beginning to overtake the church. Even in the early days of the church, there were Christians that had wacky ideas.

They have not stopped. You should be saying like the apostles, is it I? Just don't ask me, because you put me on the spot. Well, here's you.

Well, anyway, don't be a wacky one. Don't go for things without a basis, without fact behind it. And I know I'm building up, we'll get to those statements, we'll get to that, we'll get to that. But I hope to get to that when we get to how Peter influenced Mark in his writings. But before we do that, having now passed the gospels, the characteristics of Mark's gospel, now we come to Mark the man. That's a double entendre.

There's a dual meaning. Mark the man himself. Write it down.

Mark it. John Mark, that's his full name. He was the son of a well-to-do Jerusalem woman named Mary. And the apostles and the early church met often at her house, often enough to find it said in Acts chapter 12. I'll read some of it in a moment, but to be able to afford a large house in Jerusalem, you had to have some cash.

And that was, again, Mom's house. Acts chapter 12, we read about it. Verse 12, so when he had considered this, he came to the house of Mary, the mother of John, whose surname was Mark, where many were gathered together praying. And then again in verse 25, we read, and Barnabas and Saul returned from Jerusalem when they had fulfilled their ministry, and they also took with them John, whose surname was Mark. It's a Roman name. Marcus is how it would appear in the Latin. And gradually, that Gentile name superseded his Jewish name, John. John, the gracious, you know, having grace in that name.

But because he, as the church became less and less Jewish and more and more Gentile, his ministry, of course, a natural course, began being more centered in the Gentile community and the name sort of stuck with him. It was a popular name. That surname, Mark, was popular amongst the Romans.

And you, of course, look in the history books and you find great men from that culture. Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great statesman and philosopher and orator. Marcus Aurelius, one of their Caesars, it was a common name. That's where I'm going with that, as John was also a common name amongst the Jews.

I think one of the reasons why Mark eclipses John as far as the use of his name is to distinguish him from John the Apostle, John the Baptizer, and so many other Johns that may have come out of that Jewish community. That's the man in brief, but the times that he lived in. You know, we ask and we say to ourselves the time, you know, we live in an exciting time. As even though we're surrounded by some of the dumbest human beings and their decisions known to humanity. I mean, it's just, I've got a good idea.

Let's get rid of the police. Man, you know, that's really not dumb. That's sinister. But anyway, I digress. I'm holding down the hairs on the back of my neck.

I don't want to appear like. Anyway, the times he lived in. Now I talked about the Jews, how they prospered in their communities. They, when they were taken into captivity into Babylon, they did very well.

They developed commercial and later banking skills that were extraordinary as people go. And in that exile, they became very comfortable. When the exile ended, many of the Jews did not want to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the promised land.

Quite challenging. We covered some of this when we went through Esther, Nehemiah, and Ezra. So after they receive their freedom from the Babylonian captivity stage, they spread throughout the Gentile world, taking these commercial skills with them. The diaspora, the diaspora, the dispersion.

Not the diaspora, diaspora, dispersion. And doing very well for themselves, this is the kind of people that Mark would be ministering to throughout the world at his time in establishing the gospel. It would work in favor of the apostles as Jews were saved and the Jews of means could finance much of the work that was being done. But this is the ministry, the world that Christ preached in while on earth and during these days, the Jewish people, they needed to hear a gospel that was centered not on prosperity of materialism, but of course on spiritual prosperity. And Jesus worked in his parables and his lifestyle. You know, the birds of the air have nests, foxes have holes, but the Son of Man has nowhere to hang his hat, you could say. And he was trying to say to them, listen, you can minister as a servant of God without all of this material. There are other things in life.

Life does not consist, Jesus said, in the abundance of things. Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio for this study in the book of Mark. Cross Reference Radio is the teaching ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. To learn more information about this ministry, visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com. Once you're there, you'll find additional teachings from Pastor Rick. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of each new edition of Cross Reference Radio. You could search for Cross Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. That's all we have time for today, but we hope you'll join us next time as Pastor Rick continues to teach through the book of Mark, right here on Cross Reference Radio.