An Ill-Timed Request (Part 1 of 2)

In baseball, you realize if you get three strikes, you're out. Does Jesus follow a similar rule with his followers? Today on Truth for Life, we'll hear Jesus' reaction to his disciples as they persisted with yet another display of selfish ambition.

Alistair Begg is teaching a message he's titled, An Ill-Timed Request. Father, thank you that we have a Bible to turn to, that your Spirit teaches us in it and through it. We humble our hearts before you. We pray that you will conduct that divine dialogue between your Word by your Spirit and our lives and conform us to the image of your Son, Jesus. For it's in his name we pray.

Amen. Well, we turn this morning to the third and final prediction which Mark gives us of the passion of Jesus. And you would perhaps think that by this time, the disciples would have learned their lesson. You remember on the first occasion, we looked at it back in chapter 8 and verse 31, Jesus explained what was going to happen in Jerusalem and that was responded to by what we refer to as an ill-conceived rebuke.

Peter sought to rebuke Jesus at that point. Jesus returns to the same issue recorded for us in chapter 9 and we find that the disciples, in response to Jesus' instruction on that occasion, respond with what we refer to as an ill-advised argument. And here we discover this morning in this third prediction of the passion of Jesus that the response of the disciples is equally poor. And what we have before us this morning, we're going to refer to as an ill-timed request. Their proximity to Jerusalem, as it's described there in verse 32, highlights the very incongruity of their response to what Jesus is teaching them. I couldn't help but think of the words of a Paul Simon song, the nearer their destination, the more they're slip-sliding away. And the closer they're getting to the events as predicted by Jesus, it would seem the less likely they are to grasp what's going on. And so, once again, we observe, as we have done on each of these occasions, they just don't get it, do we? Now, in order to trace a line through our verses this morning, I have a number of words. I think I can perhaps recall them. The first word is description, the second is prediction, the third one is reaction, and the fourth one is, I don't know what it is, it's, I guess, application.

That's probably what it is. Anyway, first of all, you will notice that in verse 32 in the first part, we have a description, both of the geographical location of these individuals and of their attitude. They are on their way up to Jerusalem. If you've ever gone to the country of Israel and have taken a tour guide, they will have explained to you that you always go up to Jerusalem.

You always, in the Hebrew word, make Aliyah. From the east, it is a steep climb up to Jerusalem, the direction from which these individuals were coming. But when you read the Old Testament, you discover that it is always a description of making an ascent to the holy city.

For example, Psalm 122, Jerusalem is built like a city. That is where the tribes go up. Come, in Isaiah 2, come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.

And that's exactly what's taking place here. They are now on their way up to Jerusalem. And Mark describes for us here, not only, as I say, where they are in the journey, but also where they are in terms of their minds. And he gives to us the specific response to the resolution of Jesus. I say the resolution of Jesus, because the phrase there, with Jesus leading the way, is clarified in Luke's Gospel when he says in Luke 9.51, And as the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem.

He set his face towards Jerusalem. So we have a picture here of the rabbi, as it were, leading the way, and his students coming behind him. He's not meandering. He is moving with a resolute commitment towards his destiny. He has told them once and twice, and now he is about to tell them a third time the nature of what is going to take place. A vivid picture of Jesus walking out ahead with his frightened followers in his wake.

A man with a mission, striding towards his destiny. And it is, therefore, presumably this steadfast commitment to all that awaits him which draws both astonishment and fear from those who are in his company. They recognized enough to see that Jesus was walking into immediate danger, that he was not strolling in the afternoon towards an event of inconsequential nature, that he was moving in light of all that he had said towards this dreadful destiny. And so, Mark tells us that the disciples were astonished, and those who followed were afraid. Astonishment and fear.

If we had been in their company, we would have felt the same thing. The disciples saying to one another, I just really don't understand why he keeps emphasizing all these dreadful events. And the sense of urgency, matched by their incomprehension, was then shared by those who followed along with the twelve, and they had a sense of fearfulness in relationship to the unfolding story. Now, it is in that context, in the description that we have there, that Jesus, we're told in the end of verse 32, then takes his twelve aside and tells them what was going to happen to them. So, from the description of verse 32, we move to the prediction of verse 33. Notice, once again, Jesus follows his pattern, his concern for privacy. He is giving this information to those who are his immediate followers. And this third statement that he makes is the most detailed of all.

Look at it again. We're going up to Jerusalem, he said, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles, who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. And three days later, he will rise.

Now, for those of you who have been paying attention—and I'm sure that's most of you—you will recognize that this is the most detailed prediction of the three. And we ought to understand what Jesus is saying here, not simply in light of its fulfillment, as we'll discover it in a few chapters, but also in light of his prediction in the Old Testament. Jesus, we have noted, is picking up on all of the servants' songs that have been there in the Old Testament, both in the Messianic Psalms and also in the predictions of the prophets. For example, what he says here concerning his destiny ties in with Psalm 22 7, which reads, All who see me mock me.

They hurl their insults, shaking their head. Or, in Isaiah and in chapter 50 and in verse 6, I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard. I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting. And then, of course, in 53, in the familiar words, he was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering. And like one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. So the sequence that is described for us here is going to be worked out as we'll discover it in the events of his passion. And this notion of being handed over, we will see he was handed over by Judas the betrayer into the hands of the Jewish authorities.

And then since the Jewish authorities did not have the power to execute the death penalty, they in turn handed him over to the Romans in order that he might face his death. And I just say parenthetically, tangentially for a moment, that the wonderful cohesion in the Bible between these Old Testament passages—for example, in the Messianic Psalms and in the portions of Isaiah, written hundreds of years before the appearing of the Messiah—speak far more forcibly to the veracity, to the authenticity, to the compelling power of the Bible than the materials which have been offered to us this week right on cue via television and in our bookstores do anything to undermine its truth. It is important that we understand that the materials that are on offer in the Gospel of Judas, the work by Michael Bajand and so on, that the media once again picks up on because of its ability to triumph anything that challenges the authenticity of the Gospel, should not unsettle the believer.

There is nothing new in this material. This is the same challenge which has existed since the first centuries of the church, when Gnosticism, the original heresy to hit the church, sought to drive a wedge between the historicity of the Gospels and the reality of Jesus the Messiah. That kind of approach, which was picked up by Oregon in the third century, who then championed an approach to the Bible that regarded so much of the material as allegorical, caused great confusion in that time. And what it was doing was seeking to counteract, to undermine, the apostolic approach, which I hope by now we have grasped something of in our studies under Paul in Acts, where you remember that on every occasion he had the opportunity, he would go into a synagogue or confront a crowd, and his approach never changed.

What did he do? He argued from the Scriptures that the Messiah must suffer and die, because they couldn't fasten on the idea of a dying, suffering Christ, a dying, suffering Messiah. So he had to argue strenuously to show them in the Scriptures that this is what the Scriptures said would happen. And when he had brought them along that line, he then went to his second point, which was to show that this Jesus is that Christ, that the historical nature of the material is met in the reality of who Jesus is and what he has accomplished. And within a relatively short period of time, the evil one, through the mechanisms of men, seeks to challenge that same issue.

It is the essentially same matter that is in all of the materials that are before you this week. And if you take time to read them, although it will be a rather largely unprofitable exercise, you will discover that what I'm telling you is absolutely true. The real test in this is for believers not to scurry after these things and get caught on our back foot trying to respond to them, but the real test is for us to be able, as people dealing with currency do, to take a dollar bill and to examine it with such care so as to know it so thoroughly that whenever somebody comes up with something that is spurious, we are able to recognize the counterfeit. Do not run after the counterfeit.

Do not waste your time on the counterfeit. Read your Bibles. Think.

Follow the line through. Well, that's all parenthetical. Let's get back to our outline, and we come now to the reaction of the disciples to what Jesus has said. Somehow the disciples were capable of selective listening, weren't they? It's as if Jesus was giving the material in stereo, the upside of it was coming through the right speaker, the downside of it was coming through the left speaker.

Somehow or another, they managed to tune out the left speaker, only listen through the right speaker, only heard what they wanted to hear, only heard what they anticipated might happen. And in fairness to them, perhaps their expectation was that maybe all these bad parts, as Jesus was describing them, would not actually be part and parcel of the ushering in of his kingdom in the Messianic age. Perhaps they were hoping against hope that although Jesus was painting a very bad and dark portrait, that it wouldn't end up that way. Certainly, we discover again, as before, that they're very quick to focus on glory rather than on shame. They are very interested in honor rather than rejection, and they are fundamentally consumed with the possibility of great exaltation and a crown, but they just have no place at all for a cross. I think they would have been very interested in going into a book which gave them seven steps to living at their full potential. A book which said to them, you can have your best life now.

Because it would appear that that was really what they were interested in. It's not unusual that people today are interested in these same things, that they're interested in a kind of gospel that offers all the upside and none of the downside. But such a gospel is neither true to what Jesus is proclaiming, as we're about to see, nor is it true to human experience. During the course of this week and just following up on mail that has come to me through Truth for Life, I've had occasion to call people around the country, just because of the material that has come our way, speaking to a lady who is suffering from cancer herself. Her twenty-year-old son has a virulent form of leukemia. He's hoping to get into remission so that his twenty-one-year-old sister can provide for him a bone marrow transplant. But at the meeting of the physicians, as it was on Wednesday or Thursday, there is very little hope of remission and very little prospect of the bone marrow transplant. And as I spoke with the mother, coping with her own issues and trying to uphold her husband and trying to look on her son in the prospect of his loss, I'm sure you understand that I didn't suggest to her that she could have her best life now.

I'm sure you don't think that for a moment I suggested there were seven principles for her to be able just to swim beyond this. Or when I spoke to a thirty-two-year-old man in his hospital in Washington, a trainer, just having opened his gym, off on vacation with his wife of a few years and his one-year-old daughter. He fell asleep at the wheel. His car hit the center reservation. They were run over by a truck. His wife died. He survived. Before I spoke to him on the phone, he'd had his pelvis put back together again, a steel rod in his left leg, his back and his ribs all reinforced, and they had just finished amputating his right foot above the ankle.

So I told him about his best life now. No, of course I didn't. No, Jesus says, let me tell you what it means for me to go, and let me tell you what it means for you to follow. And then look at these fellows.

It's quite incredible, isn't it? And then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, from the fishing business, they came to him, and, Teacher, they said, We want you to do for us whatever we ask. However he was going to accomplish it, they recognized that somehow or another he was going to introduce the Messianic age. By the time the resurrection has taken place and before Pentecost, you will remember in Acts chapter 1, it is these same disciples who come to Jesus and ask him the question, Are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel? When does the good stuff start, Jesus?

When do we get all the good business? You're going to reign on David's throne forever and forever. We understand that part. And that's why, Jesus, we want you to do for us whatever we ask. Well, what do you want me to do for you, he asked? Well, they said, We'd like to get our reservation in for our seats.

It's never too soon to reserve good seats. Jesus is talking about suffering. They're talking about status. But maybe somehow or another, they said, You know, there's a reason why he took us up on the mountain of transfiguration. We are the key guys.

So why don't we just go ahead and ask him and see if we can make sure our seats are reserved. One on the right, one on the left. That would be nice, Jesus, if you could do that for us. Unbelievably ambitious.

Unbelievably insensitive. And what about their buddy, Peter? Weren't there three of them on the mountain of transfiguration? What about Peter, James? Yeah, what about Peter? There's only two seats. There's only one right hand and one left hand. We asked first.

Unbelievable selfishness. They just don't get it, do we? Now, his question in verse 38 anticipates the answer no, obviously, doesn't it? You don't know what you're asking, Jesus said.

In other words, you just don't get it, do you? Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I'm baptized with? The answer is obviously no, because Jesus is going to drink the cup of God's wrath. God's wrath poured out against the sins of men and women. Jesus is going to be baptized or, if you like, overwhelmed by the reality of God's judgment. What Jesus is going to accomplish is unique. But what he identifies as he looks into the faces of these dear disciples is that they, too, are in walking in obedience to him, in following along with him. They, too, will face suffering. They, too, will face death.

But he says, you need to know that your experience down that road is not the condition for secure during the best seats. Each one of us is saved by God's amazing grace, not by our accomplishments. We'll hear the conclusion of this message tomorrow on Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. Now, in today's message, Alistair encouraged each of us to read our Bibles and think through what we've heard to be convinced of the Scripture's authority and to be able to recognize counterfeit teaching. Here at Truth for Life, we have complete confidence in the authority and sufficiency of God's word. That's why Alistair teaches from the Bible every day.

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And if you give $20 a month or more, you can request not just one, but both of our monthly resources. Today we're recommending a fantastic book to read with younger children, children between the ages of three and seven. The book is called His Grace Is Enough, How God Makes It Right When We've Got It Wrong. This is a book that takes the important topic of God's grace and presents it in a fun and understandable way that keeps little ones engaged. Request your copy of the book His Grace Is Enough today when you sign up to become a Truth Partner. You can also request the book when you give a one-time donation at truthforlife.org slash donate. I'm Bob Lapine. We may be tempted to shake our heads in disbelief at the rivalry among Jesus' disciples, but listen tomorrow to find out why their imperfection is actually encouraging. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.