Under the Scope of Jesus

Mark 12:35-44.  This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on August 30, 2020.

Our passage today is broken up into three teachings that are connected.  Here, Jesus puts the scribes themselves under the microscope of judgment as they have done to him.  Jesus is not doing this out of spite.  Rather, it warns others not to follow the life of these men, and it gives opportunity for the Holy Spirit to convict some of the scribes so that they can be saved.  Truth opens the door for salvation and freedom from our sins.  This is exactly what the scribe in Mark 12:34 needed to hear.

We will all one day come under the judgment of Jesus.  If we listen to God’s Word and the Holy Spirit then we will have nothing to fear about that day.  However, if we follow the desires of our flesh then we will not be prepared for that day.  God loves us too much to leave us without a warning, or to leave us without the help that we need in order to follow Jesus.

Until that Day comes, we must be careful how we live our lives, and what purpose we pursue.  Our own judgments can be fraught with error and self-deception.  Only coming into a relationship with the Truth himself can truly set us free from our self-wisdom and the so-called wisdom of this world.

Jesus on the teaching of the scribes

Verses 35-37 come on the heels of a particular scribe whom Jesus stated was not far from the Kingdom of God.  Though the following lessons can be helpful to the rest of us, it is more than likely that Jesus is throwing a lifeline to this scribe through this first lesson.  The scribe was close, but close is not good enough.  To close the remaining distance, he would need to recognize the errors of his group and fully embrace the wisdom of Jesus.  Otherwise, he would just be led astray.  You can’t hold onto Jesus and the wisdom of the group that were in when you came to him.  You will eventually hold onto one and despise the other.

The scribes were teachers of Israel and masters of the Law of Moses.  They taught the people that God had an anointed man that He would send, Messiah.  This Messiah would be the son of David.  Everything about this teaching is correct.  Psalm 2 is the classic passage that promises an Anointed One or Messiah sent by God to be King over Israel and all the earth.  This promise of a righteous king from God was supplemented by more prophecies through the years.  God promises David that one of his descendants would have an everlasting throne.  The phrase “son of David” can mean an immediate offspring, but it can also refer to later descendants by extension.

The Old Testament does reveal these teachings, but it is best summed up by the angel who spoke to Mary the Mother of Jesus in Luke 1:32-33.  “He [Jesus] will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David.  And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

Jesus then highlights the problem.  In Psalm 110:1, David is clearly talking about the promised Messianic Kingdom.  However, he refers to the Messiah as his lord, and he does so “by the Holy Spirit,” that is under the inspiration of God.  We are not told what the typical scribe taught about this verse and the identity of David’s lord.  Today, if you go to Jewish commentaries or online articles, you will find that they give several possible answers that can point to David talking about Abraham, or someone else.  Ultimately, they will deny that it can ever refer to Jesus.  However, these are not views that were established by the scribes in those days.  Those modern views were developed in response to Christian teachings.

Basically, Jesus is showing that these who claim to be masters of the Law had a problem in perfectly explaining it.  They were correct in some things that they taught because they were using the Scriptures.  However, they did not know everything, or not nearly as much as they thought they did.  They promoted the concept of an oral tradition handed down from Moses that explained the written tradition.  It is clear that some of these traditions were not actually from Moses.  If they had taught what they knew was true, but then humbly admitted areas of ignorance, then they would have been able to hear the Spirit of God speaking through Jesus.  Pride and arrogance, declaring that you have all truth, is not what any prophet of the Lord ever claimed.

So, how can the Messiah be David’s descendant and simultaneously be his lord?  To be his son, the Messiah would have to be a descendant of David, which Jesus was.  However, in those cultures, the elder is always higher than the younger.  This is not a mere mistake either because Jesus establishes that David was a prophet and was writing this psalm as a prophecy, which is what the scribes believed.

Though God is faithful to give us revelation, that is, things we cannot know without Him telling us, He doesn’t tell us everything.  Through Jesus, the world has received a greater revelation of the Truth of God.  However, even we must not be arrogant.  We must humbly teach what is clear and be honest about what is not.  The scribes pretended to be able to identify the Messiah, and yet could not explain this puzzler.  This should have been a red flag that there was something about Messiah unexplained.

The answer is in the reality of who Messiah is.  There was something hidden about the true identity of Messiah.  In his Gospel, the apostle John describes the reality that Jesus was a man born of the woman Mary.  Yet, he was more than a man.  He was the eternal Word of God by whom the whole creation was brought into existence.  John purposefully uses the language of Genesis 1 to reveal to us that when the Father spoke, it was Jesus who went forth to make His will happen.  Thus, the Messiah would be both human and divine, man and God.

As a human, he would qualify to pay the price for humanity’s rebellion, but as God He would have the power to pull it off.  In Jesus, God has stepped into our world and put His back under the crushing weight of sin that lies upon us.  He has lifted it up and offers us to be rescued out from underneath of it by his grace.

Jesus on the life of the scribes

So, the scribes lacked humility in their teachings.  Next, Jesus moves to their lives and how they lived.  He starts out by telling people to beware of them.  They are not innocent and will lead people into the ditch.  Those who are supposed to be their teachers were not worthy to be listened to.  Even today, we must beware of the many teachers in this society.  We can be led astray by people who look good, but are not.  Humility will do us in good stead.

Jesus points out several things about the scribes.  First, they desire to look good in front of others with their long robes and long prayers.  These were the daily trappings of their life in front of others.  The second thing is connected to the first.  They desire public honor from others, like honored seats at public events.  Now, the problem is not that people are honored, or that the scribes were honored.  The Bible tells us to honor those who lead well.  The problem is that such honor had become their desire.  Their desire should have been to know God and to help others to know Him.  They should have worked to receive the honor and praise from God and not from the people.  Many in this world operate to get the adulation of the crowds and their co-workers.  They hope by it to be elevated.  The Bible shows us another way.  “Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time.”  1 Peter 5:6 (NKJV).  And, “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.”  James 4:10 (NKJV). 

Their desire for honor wasn’t their only lust.  We are told that they devoured widow’s houses.  The picture here is of their lust for the religious donations of wealthy widows by which they would benefit.  Instead of caring for the plight of the widow, they saw them as a means to an end.  It is fitting that the next section is about a widow, so I will save some comments about this situation until then.

Jesus also notes that their long prayers are only for show; they are a pretense.  Again, it was about getting people’s honor, not God’s.  The length of our prayer has nothing to do with its goodness.  It is the target of our prayer that matters more.  Am I truly speaking to God and desiring Him in it?  Or, am I putting on a show so that people will think more highly of me than they ought?  The scribes may have looked good on the outside to those who couldn’t see their hearts, but God had seen through them, and He brings them out into the open through Jesus.

Jesus ends by declaring that they will receive a greater condemnation.  The Bible doesn’t explain exactly what a greater condemnation would look like, but it will be greater nonetheless.  James says it this way in chapter 3 verse 1.  “My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment.” 

We could say that this makes Jesus look judgmental, but he is speaking the truth.  The previous scribe who wasn’t far from the kingdom of God was also in jeopardy of being influenced by his peer group.  He would need to change; he would need to reject that mindset that he was mixed up in.  Only embracing the Truth could set him free.  The Bible warns us of our condemnation so that we can flee to Jesus and be saved from it.  That is why it says that He is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance and believe in Jesus.  They would receive a greater condemnation, if they didn’t change their hearts and minds about Jesus.

So, their teachings and their lives were not the light that they pretended to be.

A poor widow is contrasted to them

Just as wealthy widows were the hunger and target of the scribes, Jesus uses a poor widow who could offer the scribes nothing.  In their eyes, she is practically worthless and can bring no honor to them or God.  This is a powerful contrast that Jesus reveals.

They were in the temple compound and people would be coming and going.  Some would be bringing sacrifices and others financial offerings to put in the offering box.  Many rich men had come and put in large bags of money, but then a poor widow comes to the box and puts in two small coins.  Several times up to now, we have mentioned that a denarius was one day’s wage for a common laborer.  Two mites would have been equivalent to 1% of a day’s wage.  Let’s say about $1.50.

Jesus asks who has given more.  When the honor of people is your desire, large amounts of money are more important.  Yet, God does not judge like humans judge.  We tend to honor those who give the most, and despise those who give the least or nothing at all.  However, God sees the heart.  This widow was giving all that she had.  Perhaps, she was desperate and was down to her last dollar.  She could buy her last meal with that dollar and then starve, or she could take it to the temple and offer it up as a prayer to God.  Please, God, see me; help me!  Oh, did God ever see her that day.  He just happened to be in the temple in human form that day.

We don’t know the rest of her story, but we do know that God saw her.  I think, somehow, she was taken care of from that day on.

 There are two sides to religious donations.  Those in charge of receiving are not always rotten.  It can be done righteously, and God expects it to be done so.  Also, those who give are not always pure as the driven snow.  It can be done wickedly.  The key to receiving is to recognize that it is a holy thing devoted to God.  He will hold any financial trustees accountable to the holy gifts of His people.  The key to giving is to give it to the Lord and not remain attached to the gift.  We can be overly controlling over how funds are spent.  Even in the area of charity to others, we must recognize that how they spend it is between them and God because you were giving it in the name of the Lord.  It is a holy gift.  If you receive such “holy” funds then you should fear God enough to put it to good use and not be spending it upon your lusts. 

Praise God that when we have a clean heart in this area, both as givers and receivers, then a true blessing can be upon the community in which we live.  This widow, who would be despised by the great teachers of the day, gave far more that day than they would ever know.  She would receive the pleasure and honor of God in far greater amounts than the trickle that the scribes would receive from others.  God is the husband of the widow and the Father of the orphans, and if we want to be like Him, we will be too!

Scope of Jesus audio

The Lord of All Creation

Mark 6:45-52.  This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on Sunday, October 20, 2019.

In our story today, we have a miraculous event that makes it easy for some to scoff and discount it as a myth, at best.  There are even some Christians who will say that this didn’t actually happen, but that the story is designed to teach what the writer believes is the truth about Jesus.  To them, these mythical and miraculous stories are merely vehicles to take us to the truth.  They are not the truth themselves.

All of this may seem good in some halls of academia (note: not all schools of higher learning teach this), but these men were not university professors with the desire to make up and use myths in order to teach truth.  They were humble fishermen, hated tax collectors, and men who did not think in such ways.  Their world had been turned upside down by an almost incredible man named Jesus.

Something else we should keep in mind is this.  God does not present himself as an “ends justifies the means” being.  His Holy Spirit was not encouraging these disciples to spin mythic yarns in order to get some people to believe the truth.  This is important in our day and age because it is becoming an increasingly common method of “persuasion.”   In truth, such methods are actually manipulation.  No, God really is as great as He is presented in the Scriptures, even the miracles of Jesus.

In this life, we will face much difficulty.  Some of it is simply life; some of it is the effects of our choices; and some of it is spiritual opposition.  Regardless of what we are facing today, may God help us to trust His power over the natural and the supernatural creation that He has made by His power.

Jesus walks on the water

Last week we stopped with Jesus and his disciples picking up 12 baskets of leftovers from a miraculous provision of food for over 5,000 people.  We are then told that evening was upon them and dark was approaching.

There are two other narratives of this event in the other Gospels in Matthew 14, and John 6.  In John 6, we are told that Jesus recognized that the crowd wanted to take him by force in order to make him king.  This leads to Jesus doing two things.

First, Jesus makes his disciples leave in a boat without him.  Most likely, he doesn’t want them to get caught up in the fervor of the crowd, and he has other plans for why they will be on the water in a boat without him.

Second, Matthew records that Jesus sent the multitude away and went up on a nearby mountain alone in order to pray.  It was not the time for Jesus to present himself as king, and he was destined to be rejected by the nation.  Jesus was not looking to crowds as an opportunity for self-advancement.  He was looking to His Father for the proper advancement that comes from Him alone.  This is why it is a common theme throughout the Gospels that Jesus would get alone to pray.  Believe me, he had even less time to pray than you do.  Yet, he took time to commune with Father God late at night and early in the morning.

In light of the rest of this story, we must also recognize that Jesus knew that his disciples had not completely understood the magnitude of the miracle that had just happened with the feeding of the multitude.  He is setting them up to see just who he really is in an unmistakable way.

It appears from the different accounts that the disciples took off in their boat across the Sea of Galilee as it grew dark, and began rowing across the large lake.  It is around 6 to 7 miles across.  At some point, the winds begin to pick up and they are not tail winds.  Now, oaring is difficult enough without the resistance of the wind.  However, this wind becomes very hard and the waves very large.

This account is very similar to the storm we saw earlier in Mark 4.  There the storm was swamping the boat and the disciples feared that they would perish.  However here, the storm seems different.  It is impeding their progress and exhausting their efforts more than it is jeopardizing their lives.  This is important because, when you think about it, we face exhaustion and giving up far more often than we face physical threats against our lives.  When we become physically exhausted, it commonly leads to emotional and mental exhaustion.  This can then lead to spiritual exhaustion wherein we simply give up and quit.  It is a good thing to guard against spiritual exhaustion by taking care of ourselves physically, and making sure we are not physically exhausted.  We can be our own worst boss, driving ourselves harder than is good for us, and harder than God desires for us.  Yet, sometimes life does not give us a choice in this matter.  We can be assailed by ill winds that just won’t quit, and by things that sap our strength in every way.  The good news is that Jesus knows this.

Jesus wasn’t only praying on the mountain.  Verse 48 tells us that he was also watching the progress of the disciples across the lake.  Of course, he wanted to spend time with the Father and would not forgo that.  However, he also allows them to oar, and oar…, and oar, for hours against the wind.  Yet, he eventually does come to them in the last watch of the night.  The last night would be anywhere from 3 AM to 6 AM.  Clearly, these guys had been oaring for a long time and were not getting very far.

Do you ever wish that God would show up sooner than he does?  Of course, we all do.  Yet, the testimony of saints through the ages is that God’s timing was always for their good in retrospect.  The problem with hindsight is that you don’t get it until you reach the other side of the story.  Can we keep faith and trust in Christ in the midst of difficulty, or will we quit oaring the direction Jesus sent us and go back?  These stories, the stories of other believers today, and our own past experiences, all teach us that God can be trusted to take care of us.

This time, Jesus is not going to dramatically tell the storm to stop.  He is going to come to them in a way that will help them understand that the storm is not bigger than him.  This may seem cliché, but God help us to hold on to the truth that He really is bigger than all of our problems.  We don’t have to fear.  He doesn’t always help us in the way that we want, or in the same way, but help He will and none too late!

The disciples are rowing as best they can, probably taking shifts, but they are making little progress if any.  It is at this point that Jesus comes walking on the water looking as if he is going to pass on by them.  This is an important point.  Jesus is coming for them, yet they need to recognize his presence and call out to him.  We can get so caught up in our difficulties, with our head down towards the ground, and not see him in our situation, and not cry out to him.

The comedy of this situation should not escape us as these grown men think they are seeing a ghost, and give a cry of fear.  This is not anything they would expect to see.  Someone is walking on the water, and, as if that wasn’t enough, it is in the middle of a storm.  Another boat would have been surprising to see, but normal.  However, this scared them.

When we come face to face with the mighty power and ability of God, it can be a hair-raising experience.  He is more powerful than we can imagine, and we definitely do not want to be His enemy.  Yet, even His children can be caught by surprise and have a sense of fear at how great His power really is.  It is not God’s intention to cause us to fear, but it will happen nonetheless.  Thus, Jesus states, “Be of good cheer!  It is I; do not be afraid.”  Ah yes, the classic statement of angels, and now Jesus, to those freaked out by their presence.  “It is I” is the promise Christ makes to all who trust him.  “I will never leave you nor forsake you…I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”  These are the words he gives to us.  God help us to hold on to them in our storms, and even when we are exhausted.

We should note that the episode of Peter, sort of walking on the sea, happens at this point, but only Matthew 14 records this event, and so we will not go into it now.

Essentially, the disciples go from fear that Jesus is a ghost (some kind of shade from the Hebrew equivalent of Davey Jones’ Locker) to amazement at what they had just witnessed.  The waves, the wind, and the water that impeded them so greatly were no such impediment to Jesus.  We can almost hear those words again, “What manner of man is this?”  Mark uses three different ways of telling us their minds were blown: they were “greatly amazed,” “beyond measure,” and “marveled.”  That is our God, and we must never forget it.  When He needs to do so, He can blow our minds with His power and ability.

When Jesus gets into the boat, the winds cease.  There was no command of Jesus.  It just simply calms down.  There is a good historical reason to believe that Peter was the main source for Mark in these stories.  So, it is interesting that Mark’s account is the one that points out that their inability to grasp that Jesus was more than a man was due to their hearts being hard.  After they saw Jesus speak to the storm, cast out the legion of demons, feed the multitude with a paltry amount of food, surely then they should have understood the power of Christ and what it says about him. 

We are used to seeing the phrase “hard hearts” with unbelievers like Pharaoh, but not with believers.  They were believers in Jesus, but they were also disciples, which implies that they had much to learn (that we have much to learn).  Discipleship is not easy, and is filled with moments that challenge our faith to step up to the next level.  May God help us to understand that no force of nature is greater than He is.

There is a final point to be made with this story.  Jesus literally walked on water and that is a tribute to His power as the Son of God.  Yet, there is some purposeful symbolism here that also gives tribute to His power over supernatural forces as well.

Revelation 17:15 clues us in to the fact that the waters of the sea are sometimes used as symbols of the peoples of the earth.  The waves picture the forces from within humanity and beyond it that cause a turbulent movement of societies in every which way.  Ill winds blowing upon the waters is often a picture of supernatural forces, whether good or evil, interacting and affecting the nations of the earth.  Also, there is a theme of the Bible that is explicitly seen in Isaiah 27:1, where the devil is pictured as an aquatic reptile, or a water dragon.  He is like a sea monster, slithering throughout the peoples of the earth, mastering the chaotic seas, and causing havoc wherever he wishes.

These are the kind of things that scare us and make us feel puny, but Jesus is the Lord of all creation, both its natural aspects and its supernatural ones.  He will slay the fleeing serpent and we need not fear even when all the forces of hell are marshalled against us.  How?  We can know that Christ is always watching over us, and praying for us.  He will come to us at just the right time, and we will grow to know His power and grace even more.

Lord of Creation Audio