Mark’s Gospel Introduction (Part B)

Now we think the word immediately means right then, right at that instant, but John is, John Mark not using it that way. He is saying in action and boom, he does it and then he builds it out. We'll cover that as we move through the Gospel, but no one uses the word as masterfully.

It is an action word that the Roman mind would quickly pick up and we then pick it up when we're told, that's right, I keep seeing him use that word. 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. Today, Pastor Rick continues his introduction to the Gospel of Mark in Mark chapter 1. 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 among thorns, 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 his, 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, 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 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, well 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 received 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. We today, in this country, in this church and environment that we are in, being middle and upper middle class, we need to heed these words so we can understand what to do with these blessings that God has given to us for the kingdom as opposed to simply enjoying and receiving the blessings and not doing much with them. Now Peter, the apostle, does appear that he had much to do with Mark's ministry and life. He discipled Mark, as did Paul and Barnabas, and there's no direct evidence for this in the gospel. In other words, Paul starts out with his gospel, Paul the apostle of Jesus Christ. James is an apostle of Jesus Christ.

So they start out announcing themselves typically in the letters. But the gospels, none of that happens. Matthew's name does not show up in Matthew's gospel. Luke, he wasn't a believer at the time that Christ walked the earth, and his name does not show up in his gospel.

Mark's name does not show up in his. John's does, but John veils himself as to not bring attention to himself. That was the way those early Christian leaders lived. They did not bring undue attention to themselves. If they were in church, they would not stand up and run around and say, oh, I got the Holy Spirit, and you need to see it, see how holy I am, as they distract everyone. You know, the church and Christians, we should work to reduce distractions. In this church, for example, we ask you not to bring water into the sanctuary. What would happen if everybody could bring a bottle of water in? You would have here a swig, there a swig, everywhere a swig, swig, and it's a distraction. You know, you're listening to these profound sermons, and someone's bottling up on you, and the ushers are saying, they're going down, they're going down. So the idea, you say, what if someone's got a special need? You know, there are special needs that you just can't accommodate some of them, not in a public forum. You have to, you know, challenges, we'll try to work through it, but you can't, bubble boy, what would bubble boy, what would we do with, do you know who I'm talking about? Yeah. I mean, what if bubble boy wanted to come to church?

Well, we don't have that bubble for you, you have to watch online. High five. So, yeah, okay, never mind. Some folks are offended by this.

They think that there's an endless entitlement that they have, and this is not true. And I took the time to get all that in. That really wasn't part of my intention, but it worked.

I saw the opening, I took it. So, back to Peter's influence here, no direct, no internal evidence of authorship. How do we know Mark wrote this? Well, there are some hints in all of them, but we're just going to take Mark. For instance, in chapter 14, we have this account of a lad, a young boy that shows up when Christ is being arrested.

And we read in verse 52, and he left the linen cloth and fled from them naked. What does that have to do with anything? It's kind of random. Well, it's a cameo. It's Mark saying, that was me. And you learn this, you learn to pick these things up, the more you read the gospels and the more you read the scripture, you learn to pick things up. I see how Jeremiah writes now.

I understand what he's doing. I've read, let's just take G. Campbell Morgan, Harry Ironside, and Warren Wiersbe. I've probably read about 20 or more of their books. I'm not bragging.

This would be a good chance to, but I'm not. My point is, I can usually tell you a quote from them without seeing their name, because I've just been so familiar with how they speak, the words they use. It's part of reading. This is the case with the Bible, too. You read Isaiah enough, and when you get to the New Testament, you say, that's an Isaiah quote, and you find yourself right very often.

So these little benefits, they're in there. Anyway, it was the unanimous testimony of the early church fathers that John Mark was the writer of the gospel that we have associated with his name, and some of the most important evidence comes from Papias, and he quotes an earlier source than himself, and he was born about the time that Paul was making his way towards Rome. Mark, I'm going to read what Papias writes. He says, Mark, having become Peter's interpreter, wrote down accurately everything he remembered, though not in order of the things earlier said or done by Christ, he made it his one concern not to omit anything which he had heard or to make any false statement in them. If that wasn't true, there were plenty leaders in Christianity that had a chance to object to that state, those statements, but no one objects.

It's likely a very true statement. I believe it is, and this Peter, as Papias says, Peter gave the gospel account that we have known as Mark to Mark, and Mark wrote it down and published it. So there's your apostolic authority for this document being in our Bible. 1 Peter 5, 13, Peter says, see who is in Babylon. That is a reference to the church to where Peter is.

Elect together with you, greet you, and so does Mark my son. And so Mark and Peter were together even after the early phases in the book of Acts. Mark was plugged into church leaders. Acts chapter 12, as I read earlier, the disciples were praying in the house of his mother. Paul and Barnabas, in verse 25 of Acts 12, as I read earlier also, Barnabas was his cousin.

And the two of them were together with Paul for a while. A big argument developed between Barnabas and Paul over John Mark's failure in service, and then Barnabas and Mark went off and did ministry together apart from Paul for a while, but Mark ends up coming back. This account that we have of Mark's gospel to show the influence of Peter in chapter 10 of Acts, Peter's, the outline he uses to share the gospel with Cornelius is the outline Mark uses for his entire gospel.

It starts off with the baptism and works its way through the miracles and the wonders that Christ had done, and then it ends with the crucifixion and resurrection, and Mark follows that pattern. There are other distinctives that belong to this gospel that should excite you as believers, its connection to the Old Testament, in presenting Christ as this servant of God, God the servant, servant of God the Father, in the power of God the Holy Spirit. Isaiah chapter 41, God speaking to Isaiah about the coming Messiah, he refers to him as my servant. He says, Behold, my servant whom I uphold, my elect one in whom my soul delights, I have put my spirit upon him. He will bring forth justice to the Gentiles. Nobody can, nobody fulfilled that anywhere in scripture or in history but Christ. Again Isaiah 52 verse 13, Behold, my servant shall deal prudently. He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high.

These superlatives belong to Messiah. And so he outright, Mark does, declare the servanthood of God. We see, he doesn't have to say, Oh, you see Isaiah, he said this and now we see Jesus doing it. He doesn't do it that way. He could have done it that way, but he does not. I would have done it that way. I would have cross-referenced Isaiah, but they didn't have a Bible in the way we have it today.

We just thumbed to the page and boom, you've got, it still had scrolls and codexes and other things that were just not as smooth as what we have in our age. Instead, what he does to declare the servanthood of God is he has a single word that he uses more than any of the others. In fact, the word in the Greek appears 80 times in the New Testament, 40 of them used by Mark in his gospel. And the word is immediately. And immediately, and immediately, and it's boom. Now we think the word immediately means right then, right at that instant, but John is, John Mark not using it that way. He is saying in action and boom, he does it.

And then he builds it out. We'll cover that as we move through the gospel, but no one uses the word as masterfully. It is an action word that the Roman mind would quickly pick up and we then pick it up when we're told, that's right, I keep seeing him use that word. And I see that he doesn't use it as I would expect him to use it, but then when I think about it, I see how it's connected to the man of action, the servant who is in action and not just claiming I'm a servant, but actually doing something.

Action, results, influence, can't separate them. We say about other Christians in the church, I love that guy, he's such a servant. I want to be like that guy. We want people to say that about us.

What would you say to me? That guy's okay. He's a terrible servant. I don't want to be anything like him.

I don't want that one. There's something compelling about Mark being the one to emphasize the servanthood of God. Again, Matthew makes the connection that this is your Messiah.

Luke says, consider the wisdom that came from this one is greater than Aristotle and Socrates and all the rest put together. And Mark says, watch him work. Watch what he does.

You tell me. Because Mark himself failed as a servant. He was the rich kid that was used to all of the nice things in life there in Jerusalem. But, you know, he wanted to be in ministry, wanted to serve, and he had a chance to serve with Paul no less and his cousin Barnabas. And then he goes out there and he finds out the food was disgusting.

So were the mannerisms. So did the lifestyles of the Gentiles with just too much for Mark and he just couldn't stomach it. God, instead of saying, well, you know, Mark, you weren't tough enough. I don't really have much for you now.

No, God doesn't do that at all. He says, you know, I have a niche for you. I'm going to take you and I'm going to have you write the Gospel according to Mark.

And as I said earlier, it's going to be the springboard for the others. And Matthew says, you know what, Mark, man, there's so much information that I can add to what Mark has because I was there. Luke will come along and say, I've researched this. I have the word he uses, Luke, when he opens his Gospel up, he says, I performed an autopsy on the facts. We get our English word autopsy from Luke's word that he has explored these things. So thorough Luke was in his research. He brings things that Matthew and Mark did not have, not because they didn't have the ability, but Luke had the time and he traveled around.

He interviewed people and he got witnesses and substantiated the testimony of these witnesses. And it is quite refreshing to see it and it is this niche of Mark that gives us this Gospel and says this to us, you can fail in ministry because you just haven't found yourself yet, but I'll help you get there and I will use you and you will be used. No genealogy of Jesus Christ in this Gospel, like we have in Matthew and in Luke. And I'll get to why we don't have it in John.

But what we have here, well, I'll just take John first. In John's Gospel, the genealogy is not given because Christ has no ancestry. He is the Word. He is self-existent and that's where John is coming from.

So let's look beyond the incarnation and let me tell you about the existence. 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 can 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.