In the Old Testament, King David referred to the coming Messiah as both his Son and his Lord.
Now, on the surface, that sounds like a contradiction. But today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg teaches from Mark chapter 12, beginning in verse 35, and shows us that Jesus was both David's Son and David's Lord. 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? Well, the biblical question is also a theological question. And when we get, if you like, to the theology, to the logical dimensions of God's revelation of himself in the person of Jesus, said in the wider framework of that in the Bible, then we are on our way to unraveling the mystery. 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's 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? In other words, this is a dense one. This is a difficult one. 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. 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.
What had happened there? You will remember, 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 remained silent.
He made no answer. 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.
A tough one. They've been asking him tough questions. He answered them all.
He said, I've got a question for you fellows. 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. Now, here's an opportunity—and I hope you've picked it up already—to remind ourselves of one of the basic principles of biblical interpretation. And that is that we interpret the obscure in light of the clear. We interpret the partial in light of the more complete reference. So it's like when you're eating a meal, and you get a piece of the meal that's a bit of a nuisance to you, or you're having fish, and you find a bone, and you can either focus on that for the rest of the meal, or you can put it to the side of your plate and eat the rest of the meal and come back to it later on. One will drive you completely nuts and everybody around you.
The other way, you can just get on and be a respectable citizen. So when you come to this, you drive yourself completely nuts, or you can leave it over to the side and say, I'll get this figured out later on. The reason that I'm here is to try and increase the capacity for that taking place to save you a little bit of trouble and to point this out to you, so that you're learning to interpret the New Testament in light of the foundation, in light of all the lines that are pointing forward into the New Testament, and that you're learning, then, to understand the Old Testament in relationship to the New Testament and in light of its fulfillment in Jesus. If you go far enough back—it's like on Google Earth—you know, if you go far enough back, you just get far enough back to see the earth.
You can't see Pettibone Road at that point, but you know that Pettibone Road is apparently on the earth, because I came back from it. If you come far enough back from the Bible, what will you see? You'll see the Lord Jesus Christ. If you come far enough back from the Bible, you see Christ. Because the whole Bible is about Jesus, all pointing forward to him, all emerging from him. That's why when we take our eyes off Jesus, we immediately lose our way around the Bible. It's absolutely imperative that we recognize that the story of the Bible is the story of the bad news of the fact that we have decided, in our arrogance, to put ourselves where God deserves to be. So we want to run our own lives, run the universe, do what we want to do. That's the story of man from the Garden of Eden on.
Thank you very much. I'm gonna do it my own way. I'd like to be God. That's part of the story. The other part of the story is the amazing story—that God has come and put himself where we deserve to be on account of our sins. We seek to take his throne. He comes to take our cross. So, the mystery is solved. The mystery is solved, and it is only solved in light of the incarnation. That the answer to this question, which Jesus never gives, is that David's son was David's lord because he existed before David, and he exists after David.
That in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the question that Jesus is posing here is not just to tickle people's fancy, not to intrigue. It's not simply the kind of conundrum that you have when your grandfather comes over and they ask you, What is black and white and red all over?
And you sit around there until you figure out he's talking about the newspaper. That is a conundrum. This is not simply a conundrum.
Because this question is absolutely vital. This question has to do with the identity of Jesus of Nazareth. And what the Bible affirms is that David's lord was the eternal Son of God. David's lord was the eternal Son of God. He comes from the house and lineage of David. Paul does this all the time. For example, 2 Timothy 2—don't turn to it—2 Timothy 2.8, he says to Timothy, Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David. When he writes Romans, he starts off in the exact same way, describing himself as a servant of Christ and of the gospel which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures. Here we go, Romans 1 verse 3, concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead. You see, the amazing wonder of this—the amazing wonder of this—can only be discovered when God opens our eyes to this truth.
Without that, there's nothing there. Charles Simeon used to use an illustration—Charles Simeon was the vicar of Holy Trinity in Cambridge for fifty-four years—and he used an illustration of a sundial. He lived a long time ago.
He lived in the middle of the nineteenth century. He wasn't using illustrations from iPhones. So the sundial would be out in the churchyard or out in the back garden, and he said, When the sundial exists on a cloudy day, all that you have on the sundial is figures. It's just figures. But if the clouds part—if the sun shines and the clouds part—then the figures convey a message, and then the finger points. And he said, And that is as it is when men and women turn to the Scriptures. We turn to the Scriptures on a cloudy day. Our minds clouded by sin, whether it is indifference or active rebellion. And as a result of that, somebody tries to read the Bible to us. Our parents tell us, You know, you should read the Bible before you go to bed.
We try it. It just means absolutely nothing. A friend at work says you could come to a study. You go to the study, and you're trying your level best to get remotely excited about the thing.
You can't find a reason to even break a sweat in relationship to it. You don't know why people are exclaiming all around you. What's the problem?
You're dealing with it under the cloud. But if the sun parts the clouds and shines on the Scriptures, and the finger points, then you'll say, Aha! I see it now! That's why when Peter says, You are the Christ, Jesus immediately says, You know what? You are really blessed, Simon son of Jonah, because flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father, who is in heaven, has disclosed it to you. You see, loved ones, this morning, here's the deal. We are so blind that we cannot even discover our blindness until he shows us our blindness. It's like when you're asleep, and someone pokes you and wakes you up, and you say to them, It's a silly thing to say, Was I asleep?
But it's not really silly. Because you didn't know you were asleep. You weren't asleep going, I'm asleep. You only knew you were asleep when you wakened up, and when God wakened you up.
You see, this is perfectly logical. The same Holy Spirit who inspired the Scriptures, the same Holy Spirit who provided the words so that simultaneously, without turning Luke into an automaton or Mark into an automaton, the same Holy Spirit who inspired Mark is the same Holy Spirit who illumines the minds of the readers of Mark. So suddenly we say, Through the clouds and mist of my indolence, my ignorance, my rebellion, whatever it is, suddenly I once was blind, but now I see. Can I ask you, has that happened to you? Or is the exercise of reading your Bible, of listening to me and my colleagues teach the Bible, is it simply like looking at a sundial on a cloudy day?
Figures that mean really nothing at all? Has the sun broken through the clouds? You know, you might be helped, as I am helped, by just getting a book of Christmas carols and reading them. And I'm thinking particularly of the work of my present famous favorite lady's writer of children's hymns, Cecil Francis Alexander—this will pass eventually, I'll move on from her, but for now I'm staying with her. And it occurred to me as I wrestled through this passage this week how thankful I am for the fact— and I've told you this a hundred times—for the fact that my parents exposed me to these truths even when I was a wriggling maniacal nuisance of the highest degree. I mean, if you have any perception of me that is anything other than that, you do not know me. If you think that I was sitting in church blissfully just saying, Oh, pastor, what a wonderful speaker thou art, you know. No, no, no.
You know me well enough to know that's not the case. But here's the mystery of it all. The light penetrated through that darkness.
And so… Okay. This is once in royal David's city. This is a lady writing a hymn so a child will understand the doctrine of the incarnation. He came down to earth from heaven. Who is God and Lord of all?
Okay? Then she goes on to say, And our eyes at last shall see him. How are you gonna see somebody who existed over two thousand years ago in a backwater province of the Middle East? And our eyes at last shall see him through his own redeeming love. For that child, so dear and gentle, is our Lord in heaven above.
That's fabulous! She's able to encapsulate the mystery of the incarnation. Our God contracted to a span, as Wesley put it, incomprehensibly made man. She takes all of the vastness of this, and she makes it palatable, at least, for the mind of a small boy or a small girl.
I haven't really advanced any further than once in royal David's city. When I came to the end of my studies this week, that was really where I was. And my eyes at last shall see him through his own redeeming love. For that child, so dear and gentle, is our Lord in heaven above. Why is this so vital?
I'll tell you why it's so vital. Because it is not only a vital question, a biblical question, and a theological question, but it is a question that has eternity hanging on it. The identity of Jesus actually matters. My wife is an hour away, in Los Angeles, from the funeral of our dear friend, who always wanted me to be a Unitarian, because he is a Reform Jew. And in all of our discussions, the question hinged on the identity of Jesus, of Nazareth.
Either God has entered into time in the person of Jesus, of Nazareth, to save and to redeem. Or the Bible is the record of a lie. It is a monumental fraud.
It is an elaborate hoax. You are sensible people. Ask God to shine through the clouds of your investigation or your aggravation and turn all these vowels and consonants and verbs and adjectives and pronouns and prepositions. Turn them into the finger that points right into the heart of your being and says, You know what? You are a sinner, and this Lord Jesus Christ is the Savior that you need. But if he is not the person he claimed to be, he is no more capable of saving you than I am. So now we're with C. S. Lewis, a man who was merely a man and said the things that Jesus said would either be a lunatic on the level of someone claiming to be a poached egg, or he would be a madman or something worse. So you can either spit at him and call him a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But do not come to him with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great moral teacher. He has not left that option open to us.
He did not intend to. Difficult little passage, isn't it? You're listening to Truth for Life and a message from Alistair Begg called David's Son, David's Lord.
Keep listening. Alistair will conclude today's program with a closing comment followed by prayer in just a minute. Now let me offer some context for today's study in Mark chapter 12. Alistair's message is part of a careful verse-by-verse study through Mark's Gospel. And while these daily programs are 25 minutes in length, Truth for Life offers you complete access to every full-length sermon in the collection.
You can hear Alistair's complete messages by downloading the audio files from truthforlife.org, or it might be easiest to simply use our mobile app. At Truth for Life, we carefully select resources that complement Alistair's teaching to give you an opportunity to grow deeper in your relationship with God, deeper in your understanding of God's Word. And today I'm pleased to tell you about a classic book written by the late British theologian John Stott. It's called The Disciple, and in this brief book, John Stott helps us think through what it looks like to follow Jesus in our day.
He encourages us to view ourselves as living between the now and the not yet, meaning the time after Christ but before his return. During this time, we can become true disciples, genuine followers of Jesus Christ, by addressing, John Stott says, four key areas. First, we have to learn to listen to God. Second, we have to learn to trust what we know and to be suspicious of things we feel. Third, Stott says, we have to get in touch with God's will for our lives. And fourth, we have to become ambassadors of God's love. We'd love to send you a copy of this practical book. It's called The Disciple, and it's yours when you give to support the ministry of Truth for Life. To make your request, click on the book image on the mobile app or go online to truthforlife.org.
You can also call us at 888-588-7884. And now here's Alistair to wrap things up. Just a moment of silence as we respond to God's Word, believing that when God's Word is truly preached that God's voice is really heard. God saying to some of us, you're going to have to start reading your Bible a bit more, thinking about things.
Cluelessness is not necessarily the best testimony. For others of us, we get the sense that somehow or another Jesus is pulling back the corner of the curtain where the mystery is revealed, and the light shines in the darkness. Come then, Lord, to us, we pray. Meet with us. Save us. Keep us.
Fill us. Use us in this Advent season, both by good deeds and the proclaiming of good news, to tell others about this fantastic story. And may the grace of the Lord Jesus and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit rest upon and remain with all who believe, today and forevermore. Amen. As a follower of Jesus, using discernment, how can we tell the difference between a Bible teacher who has integrity and someone who's merely masquerading as one? I'm Bob Lapine, hoping you can join us again tomorrow as Alistair challenges us to beware and be aware. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
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