David’s Son, David’s Lord (Part 1 of 2)

After the religious leaders had asked Jesus a series of questions, he turned the tables on them and responded with a question of his own. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg helps us understand the question Jesus asked about his ancestry—a puzzling question. Alistair has titled today's message, David's Son, David's Lord.

I invite you to turn with me to the Gospel of Mark, to chapter 12, and verse 35. And as Jesus taught in the temple, he said, How can the scribes say that the Christ is the Son of David? David himself in the Holy Spirit declared, The LORD said to my lord, Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet. David calls him Lord.

So how is he his son? And the great throng heard him gladly. Amen. A brief prayer. Make the book live to me, O Lord. Show me yourself within your Word. Show me myself, and show me my Savior. And make the book live to me. For Jesus' sake.

Amen. Well, Mark tells us that the questions that have been addressed to Jesus have now stopped. It's back in verse 27 of chapter 11 that we have recorded for us the initial challenge that has come from his opponents, and since then they have been trying unsuccessfully to catch him out. And we have, in these last studies, observed the way in which they have confronted Jesus with what, in each instance, I think they thought to be an unanswerable question, only to discover that Jesus was more than able to answer it. In the last encounter, which we looked at last time—what we might refer to as a friendlier challenge—we discover that Jesus not only addressed the question that the man asked, but he also made clear the man's condition. And you will perhaps recall that we ended there last time with the phrase, You are not far from the kingdom of God.

The man was religious, he was humble, he was clearly interested in matters of significance, and yet he was still not within the kingdom of God. And we noted then both the warning and the exhortation that that contains. Now, it's not as if these questions have just petered out over time, but it seems as though they've really come to a decisive end. And we might imagine that these individuals have finally looked at one another and said, You know, we're done. I don't think there's really any point in us continuing.

And you will notice that there are no exceptions to this. At the end of verse 34, after that, no one dared ask him any questions. It's not as if there were a few people who still had a lingering desire for a question or two. No, the whole thing has come to an end. We're done with questions.

We thought that this would be a more successful venture than it has been. So Mark tells us that the class has no more questions for the teacher, but then he immediately tells us that the teacher has a question for the class. And there in verse 35, Jesus now, addressing this great throng, described there in verse 37—he has had as his base of operations for some time now the court of the Gentiles in the temple precincts, and the crowds have been listening carefully, presumably in certain cases, standing on the sidelines as these encounters have taken place between religious orthodoxy, as it were, and this uncredentialed rabbi from Nazareth—and how they must have delighted to discover that the scribes, who are not necessarily their favorites, had their nose put out of joint on more than one occasion.

And Jesus is about to warn the people concerning these scribes in verse 38 and following. But before he does so, he poses a question for which no answer is forthcoming. It's important, I think, to realize that, that there is a sense in which this question is entirely rhetorical. We look in vain for it to be resolved within the few verses that we've just read. It's a difficult question. I want to acknowledge that freely, in case some of you might miss the point.

But we're not going to camp on the challenge that it represents. Instead, what I'd like us to do is to consider the fact that it is, first of all, a biblical question, and then that it is a theological question, and then that it is a vital question—biblical, theological, and vital. First of all, then, noticing the nature of it being a biblical question. What makes it biblical?

Well, it's about the Bible. Jesus is quoting from the Old Testament. If you want to turn there, it's Psalm 110, if you don't need the page numbers. We're not going to read it all, but this psalm, along with the psalm that was read earlier, is clearly messianic. In other words, it is a psalm that points forward to the Messiah who wants to come. And Jesus is here quoting from Psalm 110, verse 1, the Lord says to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.

And I leave you with the rest of the psalm to read at your leisure later on. Interestingly, this psalm is more frequently quoted and referred to than any other psalm in the entire Bible. In fact, it may be the most quoted Old Testament passage, I'm not sure.

And in quoting this, we should not miss what is obvious. First of all, that Jesus is quoting the Bible. He's quoting the Old Testament. Some of us might have the notion that, why would Jesus use the Bible? I mean, why, he wouldn't really need to use the Bible, would he?

But yes. And what is important for us to recognize is that Jesus knew the Old Testament, and that Jesus believed the Old Testament, and that Jesus understood that the Old Testament was inspired—was inspired. That it was breathed out by God. That the reason that the Old Testament existed was because God chose to reveal it.

And you will notice that he uses that very terminology. How can the scribes say that the Christ is the Son of David? David himself—and here's the phrase, in between two commas—David himself, in the Holy Spirit, declared. Or, if you like, by the Holy Spirit, declared. So that as David wrote, as David spoke, his words were God's words.

Now, let me just give you two cross-references, one in the Old and one in the New, and you can proceed from there on your own. 2 Samuel chapter 23, verse 1. Now, these are the last words of David. The oracle of David, the son of Jesse, the oracle of the man who was raised on high—that is, this great king of Israel—the anointed of the God of Jacob, the sweet psalmist of Israel.

Okay, we've got it now. And here we go to verse 2. The Spirit of the LORD speaks by me.

His word is on my tongue. So David's awareness of what he is doing includes his awareness of the work of God in inspiring him. Now, when we reference the notion of inspiration, we're not talking about the kind of inspiration that is represented in the work of Chopin or Beethoven or Lennon and McCartney—that they were inspired in some way to be able to do what they did. What we're referencing here is the fact that the Bible is breathed out by God. That in the same way that if I stood here in complete silence before you, for any period of time at all, it would be impossible for you to know what was going on in my mind. The only way that you can know what is going on in my mind is if I verbalize things. Words are the building blocks of communication. Words—individual words—are the key to sentences.

Sentences are the key to paragraphs and so on. And so the Bible is God's Word to us spoken out. The New Testament reference is Acts chapter 1, as Peter speaks concerning what has been going on in the past.

Acts chapter 1, and in verse 15, in those days, Peter stood up among the brothers. Brothers, he says, verse 16, the Scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand… How did the Holy Spirit speak beforehand? Answer, by the mouth of David.

Now, he's not saying that the only way in which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand was by the mouth of David, but he's saying that the words that David wrote, all that we have of the Davidic record, is there as a result of God raising up David and David becoming the very mouthpiece of God. Now, what makes this a biblical question is that the scribes shared this view of Scripture. The scribes believed that the Scriptures were the Word of God.

The scribes believed that the Old Testament Scriptures pointed, referenced, the Messiah who was to come. Let me just parenthetically point out to you what the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture is not. The doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture is not that God used individuals the way that we might use a typewriter, or the way that we might use a dictaphone, or, in old-fashioned words, a stenographer. That actually is a Muslim view of Scripture. The Muslim view of the authorship of the Qur'an is that Allah, through the angel Gabriel, dictated in Arabic to Muhammad. Muhammad, then, took down the dictation and wrote the Qur'an. That's their doctrine of Scripture—that all that Muhammad had to have was two good ears and a pen.

That is not what the Scriptures teach. The Scriptures teach that the Holy Spirit spoke his words through the human authors in such a way that their words were simultaneously his words. That is something vastly harder to comprehend and vastly more significant than the idea that people like David and Paul in the New Testament, or the Gospel writers, they all just sat in a room somewhere waiting for it to hit them.

Clearly, that isn't what happened. For example—and now I'm off on a diatribe, but anyway, I'll just stay in there, I'll come back—but if you take, for example, the beginning of Luke's Gospel, you realize how vastly different that is. Because research into the history of things and the doctrine of inspiration that God breathes it out are not set in opposition to one another.

They are set in apposition to one another. And that's why Luke says, What I've done in writing this Gospel for you, O Theophilus, is do a lot of research. Someone said, Well, why would he have to do research? All he has to have is two good ears and a pen, and God dictates it and he writes it down.

No. Luke, given his personality, given his historical context, given the influences upon him and given the resources available to him, took up his pen and wrote the Gospel. And as he put his Gospel out, simultaneously the words that he wrote were the very words that God himself inspired.

Now, you may go on from there on your own and think these things out, but they are of importance. Back to our passage. It is because, as I say, that the scribes believed that the Messiah would come from the family of David, that Jesus is able to pose this question. If they didn't believe that, he couldn't then ask about meaning.

Because you will notice that it is a question about meaning. How can the scribes say, The Christ is the Son of David, given that? Comes back to it in verse 37. David himself calls him Lord, so how is he his son?

How do you put these two things together, he says? This is apparently in the realm of potential contradiction. What father calls his son Lord?

In the scheme of things, it should be the other way around. So what is going on here? Now, we've already had this Son of David reference, haven't we, in the story of blind Bartimaeus? But they were leaving Jerusalem, they were leaving Jericho, they're on the outskirts of Jericho, and a blind man arrests the crowd as they go, shouting, Mark tells us, that when he heard—I better check that this is true—and they came to Jericho, and as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples in the great crowd, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the roadside. And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, when he heard that it was the man who had grown up in the carpenter's workshop, when he heard that it was the son of Mary and Joseph, when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. He could have cried out, Jesus of Nazareth, have mercy on me, but he cries out, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.

And the people tried to silence him, and he comes back at it again. What is he doing when he uses the phraseology, Son of David? He is using the most common phrase for messiahship. He is shouting out, Jesus, you're the Messiah, you can heal me. What an embarrassment to the people who were the proponents of Jesus who couldn't get the picture clear in their own minds.

And here is a blind man who can see better than the sighted people can see. He is able to name him in this way. And so, the phraseology, Son of David, is built into the very heart of this biblical discussion. Now, the fact that Jesus, throughout the Gospel of Mark, urges his followers to refrain from making much of the notion of his messiahship is not because they had the terminology wrong, because Son of David is fine, Son of Man is fine, but because their expectation of what it meant for him to be the Messiah was wrong. The terminology wasn't wrong. Their understanding of the terminology was wrong. They saw it in nationalistic terms. They saw it in political terms. Jesus had not come as a national hero.

He had not come as a political icon. He had come as a Savior. And if these people took their expectations of messiahship and charged, as it were, into Jerusalem with that, then the whole thing would go skewn with. And so he is urging them, Just leave that alone just now. Once you understand what it means for me to be the Messiah, then you can go make a fuss about it, but until you do, you really should just button your lip.

Now, here's the question, then, in light of that. Is that, then, what Jesus is doing here in this question? Is Jesus simply addressing the fact that they have a faulty view of things when they say, How can they say that the Christ is the Son of David? Is he saying, How can they say that he's the Messiah? Well, now, if you think about that for a moment, he's surely not saying that. Nor is he disagreeing with the scribe's interpretation of the Messiah as coming from the line of David. So what in the world's he doing? When Jesus asks, How can they say, that the Christ, the Messiah, is the Son of David, he is clearly not suggesting that the Messiah is not the Son of David.

Right? What he is leading his listeners to is the conclusion that the Messiah is the Son of David, but he is not just the Son of David—that he is both Son of man and he is Son of God. And that's why he is able to take verse 1 of Psalm 110 and point out that in this passage the Messiah is referred to as David's Lord and not as David's Son. So he says, How can they say that the Messiah is the Son of David? I'm just quoting to you from the Bible, and in the Bible here in Psalm 110 verse 1, there's no reference to him being the Son of David. It says that he is David's Lord. How can the great King of Israel speak of his Son as his Lord?

This, actually, I think, fits the dictionary definition of a riddle. Because here you have two notions, both of which are actually true, but it is very, very difficult to understand how they fit together. And so Jesus' question must be considered in the light of all of the gospel, so that Mark, who's writing his gospel, recognizes that when the people—the readers, namely ourselves—come to this little difficult session here in verse 35–37 of chapter 12, and they're saying to themselves, Well, what in the world is Jesus doing here?

How does this work? How do we resolve this? Mark assumes that we're going to seek to resolve it not by taking a microscope and fastening in on these verses to drive ourselves to distraction, but actually standing back from the verses far enough to put them in context. What context?

Well, the context, for example, of Peter's declaration in chapter 8 and verse 29. Jesus was asking, Who are people saying that I am? What's the word on the street concerning me? he says. And they give him a variety of answers, and then he narrows it down, and he says, But who do you fellows say that I am?

Here's the question. Who do you think I am? And that's when Peter says, You are the Christ. Wow! You're the Messiah!

Boom! Now, that has landed right there in chapter 9 of the gospel of Mark. Mark is writing the gospel. So he expects that when we come to chapter 12, we won't neglect what we've just seen in the previous chapter.

And he also anticipates that we're going to read the whole thing, and so we will be able to get, for example, to chapter 14 and to verse 61 and 62, where Jesus is before the council. They're asking him questions. Have you no answer?

He remains silent. And then the high priest asked him, Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? And Jesus said, I am. I am.

Okay? So here we are in chapter 12 with this enigma, this enigmatic encounter, this rhetorical question. Jesus now gives the class a question. You know your Bibles. You believe the Bible. You believe the Bible's inspired, don't you? You know that the Messiah comes from the house of David.

Well, let me ask you a question. How, then, could he be called the Son of David, when in actual fact he is David's Lord? One of the benefits of studying through Mark's gospel is we get to see Jesus engaging with religious leaders, with his disciples, and with a wide variety of the people he encountered. This is Truth for Life, and today's message is titled, David's Son, David's Lord. Alistair Begg has more to say about this rhetorical question from Jesus and the conversation that followed.

We'll hear that on tomorrow's program. Today's message is part of a comprehensive study through the Gospel of Mark. There are 13 complete sermons in volume 6 of Alistair's study, The Gospel According to Mark.

You can download all of them by using our mobile app or by going to truthforlife.org. Mark's account of Jesus provides a vivid picture of discipleship. You see, becoming a disciple isn't a one-time event that happens at conversion.

That's where it starts. But as Mark's gospel shows us, discipleship is a process of learning to be more like Jesus. At Truth for Life, we've selected a book that addresses this subject in a way that is thoroughly biblical and highly practical. It's written by the late pastor and theologian John Stott. His book is called The Disciple, God's Word for Today. In this brief book, John Stott addresses four dimensions of active discipleship. First, he says, followers of Jesus should be good listeners. Second, both the mind and the emotions have an indispensable place in discipleship. Third, discipleship is about finding God's will. And fourth, it's about adopting the distinguishing mark of a Christian.

And that's love. We'd love to send you a copy of John Stott's book called The Disciple. It's yours when you request it along with your donation to support Truth for Life. Make your donation and request the book online at truthforlife.org slash donate or tap the book image in the mobile app. You can also give us a call at 888-588-7884. If you'd like to send your contribution and request a copy of the book by mail, write to us at Truth for Life, P.O.

Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio 44139. I'm Bob Lapeen. Hope you can join us tomorrow as Alistair describes the remarkable dialogue Jesus had with the temple crowd. It's a beautiful lesson on how to engage our critics in meaningful conversation about the Gospel. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.