The Sending of the Disciples

Today on Renewing Your Mind… In our last look at Mark's narrative, we saw the experience that Jesus had when He went back to His hometown of Nazareth and how He was greeted with hostility and scorn and rejection. And then we read at the end of verse 6 that He went about the villages in a circuit teaching.

That is, He left Nazareth, and He returned to the lake region of Galilee to the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee, and now we have this mini record of what we can call a trial mission of the disciples. Up to this point, the disciples had been learning. They had been being taught from Jesus about the kingdom of God. For the most part, with respect to Jesus' miracles, they were spectators.

They were students. And now He sends them on a mission where they will try out what they have learned and what power they have received from Him. And we read in verse 7, and He called the twelve to Himself and began to send them out two by two. Now there's something we don't want to miss here, that before Jesus sends anyone anywhere, first He calls them. And He had already called each one of the twelve to be a student under His rabbinic tutelage. And now He calls them again to assemble them for a purpose.

He calls in order to send, and we don't want to miss that. We like it when Jesus says, come to Me. But any time you come to Jesus, what's He say? Go ye into all the world, making disciples of all nations. And that pattern of coming and going, of being invited, of being summoned, and then being sent, we see here in this gospel account.

And so He began to send them out two by two, two things I want to observe in that little clause. First of all, when it says He began to send them, the word that He uses here, that Mark uses, is a variation of the verb form of apostleship. An apostle is one who is sent, apostolos. And we hear in the New Testament about disciples and apostles, and we tend to think that the two words are synonyms.

They're not. A disciple is a learner, a student. An apostle is one who is commissioned by the Master, to whom the Master designates His own authority. And that's critically important for us because the New Testament tells us that the foundation of the church are the prophets and the apostles. And the apostles have what we call apostolic authority over the church of all ages because they're given that authority by the one who sent them. And again I remind you, we've been over this before, that the first apostle in the New Testament, the apostle par excellence, is whom?

Jesus. Remember Jesus said, I speak nothing on My own authority, but only that which was given to Me by the one who sent Me. Our Lord Himself is the supreme apostle of the Father, and He carries in His ministry nothing less than the authority of the Father.

And when Jesus commissions men to be apostles, He gives to them His own authority. This is very important, particularly in this day and age where people are trying to tear the Bible into various parts, and people… I hear it all the time, say, well, Jesus I like, but it's Paul I can't stand, Paul the chauvinist who denigrates women. Paul says nothing to us and to the church except by the authority of Jesus Christ.

You don't like Paul. You don't like Jesus. Jesus Himself said, those who receive you receive Me, and if they reject you, they reject Me. You don't know anything about Jesus except what comes to us through the testimony of the apostles. So it's a false dichotomy to separate apostolic testimony, apostolic authority from the authority of Christ.

Now that's very important, and the church has to fight that battle in every generation. But anyway, He sent them out two by two. Why two by two? It seems to me He would get more mileage if He would send them one by one, and each one could go to a separate village, and you double the missionary outreach. But the two by two involves companionship, it involves partnership, but it also harkens back to the principle of the Old Testament where something is established as true if testimony is given to it by two witnesses.

And so Jesus sent them out to testify to Him, to testify to the coming kingdom of God, and He sent them by twos, so that what one proclaims, the other verifies. And He gave them power over unclean spirits. Now the word there is the word we've run into already. On more than one occasion it's the word aksousia, which sometimes is translated authority. Other times it's translated power.

The normal word for power, sheer power or force or might is the Greek word dunamis, from which we get the word dynamite. But here it's the power that is contained within this authority that Jesus gives to them in this trial mission. This is not the final commissioning of the disciples to become apostles.

That comes much later. But for this particular local mission to which Jesus sends them, He authorizes them, and He empowers them. Now a little bit earlier, this morning I read from the fourth chapter of the book of Exodus, and you remember the struggle that Moses had in that situation where God had commanded him to go to Pharaoh and say to Pharaoh, Let My people go. Israel is My Son, My firstborn Son, and you've enslaved Him. I want you to release Him so that He can come to My holy mountain and worship Me. You want Me to go where? You want Me to say what? You want Me to tell the people who are enslaved to follow Me? You want Me to tell Pharaoh to let them go?

It's like Moses is saying, Are you kidding me? Lord, nobody's going to believe me. You know I'm not an eloquent man. I'm slow of speech, and I have no intrinsic authority.

Who will listen to me? And what does God say to him? He said, Moses, what's that stick you're leaning on? He said, Throw that stick on the ground. When he throws the stick on the ground, it becomes a snake. Moses jumps back. He's fearful. God says, Just grab it by the tail. And so he grabs it by the tail, and voila, it becomes the stick again. Moses said, Wow.

God said, I'm not finished yet. Put your hand in your bosom. He puts His hand in His bosom. Pull it out. He pulls it out.

It's white as snow, covered with leprosy. Now Moses is terrified. God said, Put it back. He puts it back, brings His hand out, and it's like the rest of His flesh with no sign of disease. Finally, He says, Take the water. Throw it on the ground.

It becomes blood. What's the purpose of that? One of the things that Christians seem to misunderstand more than anything else is the purpose of miracles in the Bible. The fundamental purpose of miracle, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament, is to authenticate agents of revelation. Remember Nicodemus came to Jesus at night and said, Teacher, we know you are a teacher sent from God, or else you wouldn't be able to do the things that you do. See, God does not empower demons to perform authentic miracles.

They do lying and counterfeit works. But true bonafide miracles are restricted in the Bible to those whom God is placing His seal of approval upon. That's what's going on with Moses. When Pharaoh won't believe you, and I'm going to harden his heart, turn that stick into the snake.

Turn the water into blood, and you will demonstrate My power in such a way that even Pharaoh will not be able to gainsay. And the same thing happens with Jesus when He says, if you see Me casting out Satan by the finger of God, that is by the Holy Spirit, then you know that the kingdom of God has come upon you. And so before He sends out the twelve two by two in this mission, this teaching mission, He gives them power and authority over the demonic realm. And so our Lord imparts His power to those who represent His name and teach His truth. And then He commanded them to take nothing for the journey except the staff, no bag, no bread, no copper in their money belts, but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.

What's this all about? Well, first of all, Jesus says you're going to travel light. Again, this brings to mind Exodus and the Passover, the night in which the children of Israel were commanded to be ready at a moment's notice to leave their homes to the summons of God that they should be dressed to move quickly, travel light, no time to pack, get up and go.

And now Jesus does the same to His disciples. When you go, all you can take with you is a staff. And He said, no bag, no bread, no copper in their money belts. No bag. It's not no suitcase. It means no beggar's bag. Notice when we take up the collection every Sunday morning, we pass the bags in order to collect the money for the church. Jesus, when He sends out the twelve on this occasion, said, no bags, you can't beg for money on this trip.

You're going to have to depend on My Father at every point of this mission. No bag, no bread. You can't even take anything to eat with you.

No copper, that means not the slightest bit of change, small change even in your purse, but wear sandals and do not put on two tunics. Why no bread? Because Jesus says when you go to these villages, as soon as you enter into the village, look for somebody who will house you and feed you and grant you hospitality. It will be their burden to provide bread for you. It will be their burden to provide housing for you.

You don't give that a thought. You are to concentrate on your mission, and we want you to be free from concerns about food and money and housing. And notice this. He says when you go into the village, if somebody receives you into their home, you go into that home, you accept their hospitality for how long? As long as you're in the village. Now what's that about? Listen carefully what Jesus is doing here. He's saying, look, if when you enter the village, some poor person comes up and says, I offer you My humble abode for your headquarters while you're ministering here among us, and you go into that person's house, and you know that the accommodations are Spartan, and then the next day the wealthiest person in the village said, Oh, I didn't know you were coming. Why don't you come over to my house? I have grand quarters for you.

Too late. You get a better offer, you don't take it. I see this in the ministry all the time. A small church invites you to speak. You accept the invitation. You put it on your calendar. They put it on their calendar, and three months later some big national event comes along and said, R.C., can you come speak at this?

Five thousand people are going to be in the audience. Wonderful honorarium. What do you do? You say, I'm sorry.

I have a previous commitment. Merchants do this all the time. They say, I'm going over to your house to do such-and-such a work for you.

It's a small job, but they make the appointment. And then they don't show up, and they don't show up because in the meantime somebody gave them a better offer so that we don't let our yay mean yay and our nay mean nay. And Jesus said, you go there, Jesus said, you go there, and whoever welcomes you, you accept their hospitality for the duration. Why not two tunics? Why does Jesus say you can only have one tunic?

Again in the ancient world, people who were travelers and had to stop at the night where there was no inn and sleep outside, the purpose of the second tunic was as a covering from the elements as they slept under the stars. Jesus said, I'm not going to let you sleep under the stars. You're going to be cared for by those who host you in the villages. And listen to this, whoever will not receive you nor hear you, when you depart from there, shake off the dust under your feet as a testimony against them. There is no such thing as indifference to Christ.

You're either for Him, or you are against Him. In the kingdom of God, beloved, there is no neutral ground. We have it in our culture today that if we do evangelism, the standard technique that we do in mass evangelism is after the sermon is proclaimed, then we offer the invitation.

As many as would like, please come. We don't say, as many who would like to respond to Christ, come now, and those who don't want to respond to Christ may go to hell. We don't say that.

That would be politically incorrectness with a vengeance, wouldn't it? But the gospel is a two-edged sword. If you receive it, the benefit is eternal life. If you reject it fully and finally, you do so to your everlasting peril. Jesus said that when He came, He brought a crisis a crisis into the world. Croesus is the Greek word for judgment. And He tells His disciples, when you go in there and they don't receive you and they don't receive your teaching, you leave that town, but before you leave, you shake the dust off your feet. Now that goes back to antiquity, to traveling Jews who for business reasons would go to pagan countries, to Gentile communities selling their wares or whatever. And when they would come back home to cross the border once again into Israel, the rabbis required that they literally shake the dust off their feet lest they bring the contamination of the pagan community into Israel. And that symbolized God's judgment upon paganism. And so now Jesus is sending these men to the villages of the Jews, and He says, if they don't hear you, you shake the dust off your feet, just as they shake the dust off their feet that belongs to pagans, because if they don't heed the preaching of the gospel, even if they're Jews, they're pagans.

That's the message here. Now here's the scary part. Shake off the dust under your feet as a testimony against them, for assuredly I say to you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city.

Now there are a couple of things we need to learn from that, friends. One is this is one of many, many times when Jesus talks about a last judgment. There will be a last judgment, and every last one of us will have to appear at that last judgment. Also, we need to see from this text a principle that occurs at least twenty-five times in the New Testament that is God's judgment will be a matter of degrees. There are degrees of sin. There are degrees of works of obedience. Though our works carry no intrinsic merit, Jesus at least twenty-five times tells us that our reward in heaven will be according to the measure of obedience that we give in this life. Paul warns the Romans, the impenitent Romans, that they are heaping up, piling up wrath against the day of wrath. I don't know how many times I've heard guys say, well I've lusted. I might as well go ahead and do it. Or I've committed this sin once.

What's ten more? Oh, every sin will be brought into the judgment. And here we see in this text that there is a greater judgment given to these people who heard the very apostles of Jesus than even the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which symbolize the nadir of human decadence in the Old Testament. So that if you reject Christ, your judgment will be worse than the judgment God poured out on Sodom and Gomorrah. We don't believe that. We don't believe there is judgment. We don't believe in a God of wrath. We don't believe in a God of justice.

And if there is a judgment, you're either in or you're out, and it doesn't make a difference how far out you are. I'll never forget when my professor in seminary said the sinner in hell would give everything that he had and do anything that he could to make the number of his sins during his lifetime one less. Now who talks like that today? No wonder people don't want to listen to this book. No wonder people don't want to listen to our Lord Jesus Christ. But it was the Lord Jesus who developed this theology of scaring people, if there ever was one. We need to be scared of God. We need to be scared of His wrath because Jesus saves from what? From the wrath that is to come.

And so we have a micro picture of the history of the mission of the church. This little trial mission, go to the little villages here, preach the kingdom of God with my authority. If they reject it, shake the dust off your feet and consign those people to my Father's judgment.

Did you hear R.C. say there, we need to be scared of God. We need to be scared of His wrath. That's a message you won't hear from many pulpits today, but we need to hear it.

It is knowledge of sin and God's wrath that are the means that God uses to bring us to repentance. Dr. Sproul's sermon series, From the Gospel of Mark, is our focus every week here on Renewing Your Mind. We encourage you to join us each Sunday for this verse-by-verse study. And we have a resource that we think will help you in your study.

It's R.C. 's commentary on Mark. It's nearly 400 pages of insight from one of our generation's leading theologians. You can request it with your gift of any amount when you go online to renewingyourmind.org.

Again, that's renewingyourmind.org, and this is an online offer only. You'll also find helpful commentary from R.C. and other trusted pastors and teachers on our free mobile app. There are daily Bible studies, videos, audio clips, and articles.

Just go to your favorite app store and type in Ligonier, and Ligonier is spelled L-I-G-O-N-I-E-R. Next Sunday, we'll continue Dr. Sproul's series. Mark's narrative began with John the Baptist proclaiming the coming of the Messiah. We'll also learn about his tragic end. It is an important part of God's unfolding plan of redemption. John the Baptist is our focus next week here on Renewing Your Mind. you