Beginning of Jesus’ Public Ministry

You cannot enter the kingdom of God without repentance, without fleeing from your sin and putting your trust in Christ and in Christ alone. This is how our Lord Himself did evangelism. He announced the gospel, and then He said, your response must be, repent and believe. The beginning of Jesus' public ministry began with a call to repent and believe, something that is sadly missing from much of modern-day evangelism and preaching.

But as you heard R. C. Sproul just say, you can't enter the kingdom of God without repentance. This is the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind as we feature preaching from the Sermon Library of Dr. Sproul. Today you'll hear a sermon from Mark's Gospel as we begin a series in Mark on the public ministry of Jesus. These sermons were preached at St. Andrew's Chapel in Sanford, Florida and launched the development of his expositional commentary on Mark. You can request the hardcover edition today only with a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.

Well, here's R. C. Sproul in Mark chapter 1. This morning instead of reading from chapter 1, 14 through 28 of Mark's Gospel, I'll only read verses 14 through 20, and so I'll ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God. Now after John was put in prison, Jesus came to Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God and saying, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe in the gospel. And as He walked by the Sea of Galilee, He saw Simon and Andrew, His brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. Then Jesus said to them, Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men. They immediately left their nets and followed Him. When He had gone a little farther from there, He saw James the son of Zebedee, and John His brother, who also were in the boat mending their nets.

And immediately He called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, and went after Him. He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear. Please be seated. Let us pray. Now, O God, as we turn our attention to the beginning of Jesus' public ministry in Galilee, we pray that though the account is brief, that the power of it may penetrate our minds and our hearts for Jesus' sake and for ours.

Amen. I was reading the paper this morning, and there was an article that caught my attention about a course that's now being offered in a school in Kansas. And the title of the course, as the paper reported, was this, Intelligent Design, Creation, and Other Religious Mythologies. And in that course title, The Biblical Account of Creation and of God was relegated to the category of myth. Well, myths have their place in cultural history.

Myths can be very effective to communicate a moral truth, a spiritual insight. But at the very heart of Judaism in the Old Testament is the rejection of myth as the context for divine revelation. Rather, biblical religion finds as its context for religious truth real space and time. Christianity is married to history.

If it is not historical in its foundational assertions, then it is worth less than any myth. And so we notice here that as Mark begins to give the history of Jesus' public ministry, it's important to notice that the context for it is not mythological but historical. Scholars have been quick to point out that the gospel record comes to us clothed not in the forms of ordinary history, but rather it's a particular type of record that the scholars call redemptive history. Because it's redemptive history, some have sought to indicate that it's not really historical. But we are quick to point out that even though it is redemptive history, it is redemptive history, that the sphere in which God reveals His work of redemption is real space and time, real history.

And that's at the heart of this announcement here in chapter 1. This is the beginning of Jesus' Galilean ministry that Mark introduces by putting this comment in advance. After John was put in prison, then Jesus came to Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God and saying, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe in the gospel. Now this is a very brief saying here, and really just this couple of verses that I've just read to you again, these verses are worthy of far, far more exposition than I can possibly do justice to in a brief sermon on Sunday morning. In a word, though these words are brief, they are loaded with theological significance. Let me begin first of all by calling attention to Mark's statement that when Jesus came to Galilee, He was preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God. And if you have your Bibles with you, some of you will have a different reading there.

Instead of saying preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, it will say simply in your Bible, preaching the gospel of God. Now why is there a difference in different English translations? Why do some translations say the gospel of the kingdom of God and others simply say the gospel of God?

Now I'm going to explain to you why, and this may bother you until you get a deeper understanding of it. What we have here in this chapter is what's called a textual variant. You understand that we do not have in our possession today the original gospel that Mark wrote, but rather that gospel was copied and copied and copied and copied in this country, in that country, and very carefully copied down through the ages so that there may be 2,000 extant copies of the gospel of Mark. Well, they don't always read in perfect verbal agreement one to another. We don't have any brief, as Christians, for the special inspiration or infallibility of copies or of translations. But there are various schools of copies, and those who seek to reconstruct the original text, which is a science in and of itself, pay considerations to all kinds of technical points to determine what in all probability was in the original manuscript. And here's one of those rare occasions where the textual evidence for the words gospel of the kingdom of God or gospel of God are almost 50-50 in balancing them out to make an intellectual judgment about what was in the original.

Relax. There's no significant difference in the meaning of the text which of the two you settle on. Some translators say, no, the original simply said that Jesus came preaching the gospel of God, while others insert the gospel of the kingdom of God, because in the second half of the sentence, the phrase kingdom of God appears. So both are true in the sense that Jesus came preaching the gospel of God, which was the gospel of the kingdom of God.

There's no difference theologically content-wise in those two readings. But just to point this out, that if we look at the option that Jesus came preaching the gospel of God, I like that, for the very simple reason that that's the same way the Apostle Paul begins his letter to the Romans, where Paul sees himself as set apart to the gospel of God. And why that is significant is this, that the gospel of God, ladies and gentlemen, is not the good news about God.

Rather, the grammar that is used here is possessive. It means it is the gospel that belongs to God. God is its author.

God is its owner. God is the one who is giving this message, not John the Baptist and not even Jesus. It's not Jesus' gospel as such. It's the Father's gospel that the Son is now declaring. Also notice in passing, as I mentioned in the first week that we looked at this, that Mark developed this whole literary genre called the gospel, which was a kind of writing. But we also see that then the term gospel refers to the coming of the kingdom of God, and finally in the epistles the term gospel points to the person and work of Jesus. It becomes then the gospel of Jesus Christ. But early on at the beginning of Jesus' ministry when Jesus comes preaching the gospel of God, the content of that good news, the content of that announcement is the coming of the kingdom of God. It's the gospel of the kingdom. If there's any motif that runs all through the Old Testament and is fulfilled perfectly in the New Testament, it is that central idea of the coming kingdom of God.

Well, what does that mean? What are we talking about when we're talking about the kingdom of God? Didn't the kingdom of God always exist?

Hasn't God been the Lord God omnipotent who reigns from all eternity? Well, of course, but when the Old Testament speaks of the coming kingdom of God, it refers to God who is the King of the universe of His personal visitation to this fallen world to manifest the rule of redemption that He brings to pass with the coming Messiah. And so the people of Israel in the Old Testament looked forward to the day when God's rule would be manifest here on earth in the coming of His anointed one. And so now John, who had announced the coming of the kingdom and is now in prison, Jesus follows in His footsteps, comes into Galilee preaching the gospel of God, and He preaches the kingdom saying the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe in the gospel. Oh, just the first phrase, the time is fulfilled. Back in the middle of the 20th century, a Swiss scholar who undertook the task of answering existential theologians who were trying to snatch the biblical message out of the context of history and make it basically mythological in a theology of timelessness, this Swiss scholar said, no, you can't do that and be true to the documents themselves because Christianity, as I said earlier, is totally tied to real history. And this Swiss theologian by the name of Oskar Kuhlmann wrote three books, a trilogy dealing with this subject, including salvation in history, Christology, but the first of the three volumes was entitled simply Christ and Time. It was one of the most important works of the 20th century, Christ and Time, in which Professor Kuhlmann examined all of the timeframe references in the New Testament. And he noticed, for example, that there are two basic words in the Greek language that are translated by the English word time. There's the word chronos, and you've heard that term. You know what a chronicle is or a chronology or a chronometer, which is a wristwatch. Chronos refers to the moment-by-moment passing of time, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, year by year, just ordinary time is chronos. But in addition to that word for time, there's a special word in the Greek for time that is the word kairos. And the word kairos means a particular moment in time that is so important, so significant, that it defines everything that comes after it. Now we don't really have corresponding distinctions in the English language that are exact to chronos and kairos, but the closest thing we have are this, the term historic and historical.

And you notice how many times the newscasters mess this up. You know, they'll say that the assassination of John Kennedy was a historical event. Well, of course it was a historical event. Everything that takes place in space and time is historical, but not everything that takes place in history is historic. Nobody's going to write a book talking about the significance of R.C. Sproul preaching at St. Andrew's Chapel this morning.

I'm doing it in real time. This is a chronological event. My preaching this morning is historical, but I guarantee you it's not historic. For it to be historic, it has to be something so important, so momentous, that it shapes history. Of course, the most kairotic event in all of history was the birth of Jesus. In fact, all of history is defined by that moment, isn't it?

We talk about the year of our Lord, A.D.B.C. Christ's birth is the divining line of history in the Western world. His death on the cross is a kairotic moment. His resurrection is a kairotic moment. In the Old Testament, the exodus of Israel was a kairotic event. Well, this is what Mark has in view because he uses the word kairos here.

Because when Jesus comes preaching the kingdom of God, Jesus makes this announcement, the kairos is fulfilled. And the word that he uses there is the word playroma, which means super fullness. If I give you a glass and say, go and fill this glass with water, please, I hope you don't fill it to the brim because if you fill it to the brim and you try to hand it to me, it's going to spill out over the top and onto the floor and make me wet the floor, wet everything else wet.

When we fill a coffee cup or fill a glass, we leave some room at the top so that we can maneuver it without spilling it. But that's not playroma. When you fill something in the sense of playroma, it's bursting at the seams. It's spilling out over the edge.

There is no margin left that isn't totally filled. And what Jesus is saying when He comes into Galilee, He says to these people, the kairos and the playroma have come together. Time history, all of history up until this moment has been prepared by the Lord God omnipotent, the Creator of the universe who stands over all time and space, that God has so prepared history for this moment that that moment has now occurred. The time is right now. The time is fulfilled for the manifestation of the kingdom of God.

Let's read how He says it. The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Again, the word there, if you look at it carefully, means near. And it's near.

It has a twofold reference. The kingdom of God is not at hand or near simply in terms of the clock. It is that. Remember, the time is fulfilled. And that time is at hand. The kairotic moment is right now. And the kingdom of God is near, but not just temporally, but it's physically at hand.

How's that? What Jesus is saying here, the kingdom of God is at hand because the King is right here. The King of the kingdom is in your midst.

You can reach out and touch it. The long-awaited Messiah is here. That's what Mark is indicating with Jesus' words when he says, the time has been fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand. And that moment where the King comes brings the most profound crisis to every Jew in Israel that they've ever experienced.

The word crisis comes from the Greek kresis, which means judgment. And when Jesus comes and the kingdom breaks through and the Messiah appears, it is the most critical moment in human history. It brings the most profound crisis that any human being can ever face, and that crisis or judgment comes down to this. Those who receive Him receive eternal life.

Those who do not pass into the judgment of God. So Jesus is saying to the Jews, your crisis is right now. And He says it to everybody in the world today who ever hears of Jesus.

It's a crisis. You cannot hear the gospel and walk away indifferent. When you receive the gospel, it is the greatest moment of your lifetime. When you don't receive the gospel, it's the greatest judgment upon you. The gospel is a two-edged sword. And what Jesus is saying here, you're not ready for the coming of the kingdom.

Therefore, repent and believe. Those are the two things that are absolutely necessary to receive the Savior. The coming of Christ requires repentance and faith by all who hear of Him. You know, it bothers me today when I see so much of evangelism that is going on, so-called gospel-ing in this world. If you want to have purpose for your life, if you want to have a personal relationship with Jesus, if you want to have a meaningful relationship with God, then come forward to the altar, raise your hand, sign a card, pray the sinner's prayer. We bunch all that stuff together and call it cheap grace because what is noticeably absent from those attempts to evangelize are any serious call to repentance.

You cannot enter the kingdom of God without repentance, without fleeing from your sin and putting your trust in Christ and in Christ alone. This is how our Lord Himself did evangelism. He announced the gospel, and then He said, your response must be repent and believe. Then quickly Mark moves on to the calling of the first disciples of Jesus. We read, As He walked by the sea of Galilee, He saw Simon, that's Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. Jesus said to them, Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men. Now who among you has never heard that story?

You've all heard that. It's taking place by the Sea of Galilee, Inland Lake really. It's about thirteen miles long and about seven miles wide. One of the most productive bodies of water in the ancient world for the fishing industry. In the year 68 when the Romans were invading the land of Palestine, Josephus made the observation that they commandeered some 250 fishing boats from the Sea of Galilee.

That just mentions the ones they commandeered. There were a lot of fishermen going fishing in the Sea of Galilee. It was a huge industry in the ancient world. In fact, there were so many varieties of fish in the Sea of Galilee that were not found elsewhere that the fish that were caught in that sea were exported to other countries. We think of the disciples as poverty-stricken fishermen that are trying to eke out a living like people standing along Lake Monroe trying to catch their dinner in the afternoon.

No. These men were businessmen, and they had lucrative businesses with respect to the fishing industry from the Sea of Galilee. Josephus also remarked about the great beauty surrounding the sea, how fertile was the district watered by the lake and so on, and he said it was the pride of nature.

If you've ever been to the Sea of Galilee, you would understand even today what Josephus was saying towards the end of the first century. Well, it's on that occasion by the shores of the Sea of Galilee that Jesus walks along the shore, and He sees two men, Simon and the patron saint of our church, Andrew, and they are casting their nets into the sea. These nets were about 15 feet in radius, in diameter I should say, and on the edges of these nets, which were circular, there were these weights that held them down, and the fishermen would throw them in a circular motion, and they would land on the surface of the water, and the weights would sink down to the bottom and sort of close up the nets, catching several fish in the nets. There were two kinds, or there were several kinds, but the two most common kind had a rope right in the middle of the net, so after the net sank to the ground, the fishermen would just stand there, pull that rope in the middle, the outer hems of the nets would close in trapping the fish, and they would pull it to the surface, get their catch, and sell it in the marketplace. A more primitive form was that the men would take these nets, throw them into the water.

They didn't have a rope in the middle of it. They would have to dive down in the water and scoop up the net together and bring net and fish to the surface before they ran out of breath. But I suspect that in this case with Simon and Andrew that they had the more efficient nets that they were using, and Jesus observed them. And He says to them, Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men. They immediately left their nets and followed Him. Then Mark goes on to say, He went a little further, and He saw James the son of Zebedee, John his brother, who were also in the boat mending their nets, and immediately He called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and went after him.

Now again, what's going on here? Jesus is calling disciples. Now we hear about the twelve disciples, and we talk about the twelve apostles. And so lots of folks think that a disciple is just another word for an apostle, or an apostle is another word for a disciple, but that's not the case. Jesus had at least seventy disciples, and many of them were never included in the apostolic band because a disciple was a student, a learner. The word disciple means somebody who is under the discipline of a tutor or of a rabbi. And so Jesus goes out as a rabbi, and He enrolls disciples into His rabbinic school. There are a couple of things we need to understand about this. In the first place, in the ancient Jewish world, rabbis never went out and recruited students. Students would apply to study with a rabbi, just as we do in our educational systems today, and they would have to jump through hoops, pass examinations, make sure that they were qualified before they would be accepted to study under Hillel or Akiba or Gamaliel or whoever.

But in this case, this rabbi who's different from any other rabbi in Israel, he goes out and hand-picks his students. I want you. I want you. I want you. You're fishing for fish?

Follow me, and I'll have you fishing for men. Now the words follow me are also interesting because there's a literal sense to them. We think back to ancient Greece and the great cultural center of Athens. Plato established his academy there where students would come through the gates and across the gates at the top it would say, Let none but geometers enter here, and they would enroll in Plato's school and study under the master. And of course, his most brilliant and famous student was Aristotle.

Well, later on, Aristotle started his own school in Athens called the Lyceum. But Aristotle was different from his teacher because he was called a peripatetic philosopher. Now everybody knows what a peripatetic philosopher is. Not a pathetic philosopher.

Many of them are pathetic. But this is peripatetic. It means somebody who walks around because what Aristotle would do is that he would walk while he was lecturing, and his students would follow along behind him with their little notepads, taking down the notes, trying to consign them to memory, and so on. Well, Jesus was a peripatetic rabbi. And so he would go from town to town, and on the way he would lecture, and his disciples would literally follow him. They'd walk behind him, memorize the terse, pithy little aphorisms that Jesus would teach and the parables that he would give.

They would commit them to memory. That's why so much of the teaching of Jesus survived in the oral tradition after His death before His words were written down because His disciples were skilled in memorizing His teaching because that was their task. But not only when He called them to discipleship did they call them to learn at His feet, but also a disciple of a rabbi was a servant. He would take care of the shoes of the professor, make sure that the professor had his evening meals prepared for him, and wherever the professor went, the students would go, the disciples would go and serve their master. That's why Jesus would say, Is the servant above his master?

No. So it was a rigorous pursuit, and Jesus walks up to Simon and to Andrew. He says, Follow Me. Come into My school.

Be My student. Be My servant. Without any further discussion, Simon puts down the net, Andrew puts down the net and leaves to follow Jesus. They go down the road a little further. There's James and John, the sons of Zebedee, and they're in their father's boat with their father and the father's servant. And Jesus says to James and John, Come on.

You follow Me. Can you imagine the astonishment of Zebedee? His sons whom he has prepared this business for get out of the boat. They leave their father. Zebedee is scratching his head, and all he has left are the servants, the hired hands, not his sons. He watches them walk down the road in the distance with two other fellows that he knew were fishermen and this rabbi.

And away they go. Some of you saw the movie fifty years ago, a man called Peter. It was about the Senate chaplain, Peter Marshall, who was a famous preacher in the middle of the twentieth century. His sermons were so lyrical that they called him Twittering Birds Marshall. And his widow, and when he died young, his widow Catherine Marshall had a book of sermons of Peter Marshall's published under the title Mr. Jones, Meet the Master. It's one of the first books I read after my conversion in 1957.

And there was a sermon in there from Peter Marshall I'll never forget. He tells a story, a modern-day story that takes place in the waterfront, I believe, of Baltimore. In the shop of a man by the name of Joe Botts. Joe's a fishmonger. He loves the business. It's a lucrative business. Every morning he goes in and he unlocks his store, puts the open sign on the door, and the aroma of fresh fish hits him. It's packed in ice. The brine, all of that was part of the trade.

Like if you would go to Seattle and watch the fishmongers and the market there where they're throwing the day's catch to each other. Joe Botts loved all of this. And this one morning he was preparing his shop for business when the bell rang over the door and he looked up, and this strange-looking man in a blue serge suit walks in the door and looks at Joe. And he said, Joe, close this shop and come with me. And Marshall said, when Joe Botts saw this man, he said there was something about him. He couldn't ask any questions. He couldn't proffer an argument.

Instead he took off his apron, sat it down on a chair, went over and turned the sign from open to closed, and left his shop forever to follow the man in the blue serge suit. This was Peter Marshall's modern parable of what happened by the Sea of Galilee when Jesus said to four men, from this day forward, you're mine. You serve me.

You're my student. And every Christian who has come after that is called to be a disciple of Christ, to be a servant of Him, to leave everything to go after the Christs. Let's pray. O God, that You would give us hearts to follow Him, body and soul, wherever He leads us, to learn whatever He teaches us, to serve whatever He commands us to do. We know that You have called us, as You called Simon and Andrew, James and John, to be His disciples. Give us the grace to be faithful to that call.

Amen. Are you a disciple of Christ, a learner, a student, a follower of Christ? You're listening to the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and that was R.C. Sproul. Over the coming Sundays, you'll hear sermons from Mark's Gospel as Dr. Sproul teaches on the public ministry of Christ. But if you'd like to study Mark's Gospel line by line, then request Dr. Sproul's verse-by-verse expositional commentary on Mark when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. We'll send you this hardcover volume to add to your library, and you can use it for deeper study or devotional reading. Give your gift today at renewingyourmind.org, and don't delay, as this offer ends at midnight. Jesus' ministry was accompanied by many miracles. Next Sunday, R.C. Sproul will preach on the healing of the man with the unclean spirit. Join us then here on Renewing Your Mind. .