Chapter # 4 Paragraph # 3 Study # 1
March 3, 2020
Moss Bluff, Louisiana
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Thesis: There is a "primacy" of place in regard to the parable of the soils that makes it a kind of "key" to the proper understanding of the rest of the parables that reveal the "mystery" of the Kingdom of The God.
Introduction: In our last study we saw that Jesus' explanation of His use of parables to hide the truth about The Kingdom of The God was actually couched in the origins of His appeal to
Isaiah 6:9-10. Understanding the roots of Isaiah's prophecy is required for our understanding of Jesus' declaration that He was deliberately hiding the truth from a great many of those who flocked around Him so that they could not be forgiven. There was a point in God's dealings with Israel and Judah when He had gotten "fed-up" with their wicked duplicity and high-handed hypocrisy. When He reached that point, He made a decision to bring upon them what they had coming because they had hardened in their rejection which He described as "a covenant with death and with hell" (
Isaiah 28:14-22). Jesus was telling His disciples that Judea, in His/their day, had returned to the fulness of the nation's rebellion as in Isaiah's day, and He did not come to enable the scoffers to escape.
Now, this evening, we are going to turn to His "grace" ministry to His disciples in the face of His "wrath" response to the high-handed wickedness of those who were rejecting Him.
- I. His Turn to His Disciples.
- A. "And He is saying to them..."
- 1. The verb is lego and it continues to signal "absolute doctrinal truth" as it has up to this point in Mark's record.
- a. Mark uses this verb in his Gospel in 248 texts and this is his 42nd use of it.
- b. The 248 texts in a Gospel of only 16 chapters write "TRUTH" across the whole of it.
- 2. The verb is in the anomalous "present tense" in "historical narrative" meaning that it is of higher than normal significance and indicates Mark's desire for His readers to attempt to picture in their minds what is being said (get out of whatever "setting" they are actually in, and put themselves right into the record).
- B. The "Saying": Two questions and a declaration.
- 1. The questions.
- a. "Do you not understand this parable?"
- 1) The translators drop the ball once again.
- a) There are two different verbs in the two questions.
- b) But they are treated as if they are the same verb by the translators.
- i. This reality presses us to consider, first, the issue of "translation theory".
- ii. This reality also presses us to consider the significance of the "jot/tittle" thesis of Jesus in respect to what we call "synonyms".
- i) "Synonyms" in the larger error of calling Matthew Mark and Luke "synoptics".
- ii) "Synonyms" in the smaller error of translating different Greek/Hebrew words with the same English word.
- 2) The word "understand" in this question is "oida", which is a word that has the "form" of a Perfect Tense, but the "sense" of a Present Tense (A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature).
- a) Mark's first use is 1:24 where he records the unclean spirit's claim, "I know You, Who You are, 'The Holy One of The God'".
- i. This descriptive title is, at its heart, a declaration of the absolute moral superiority of Jesus of Nazareth because "The Holy One" means "without any imperfection of any kind" at both His essence of character and His precisely legitimate words and actions.
- ii. This is directly tied backwards to Mark's introduction of Jesus through John's words in 1:7 where John said of Him, "I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose the latchet of His shoes".
- i) This was said by John who was "filled with the Spirit from his mother's womb" (Luke 1:15) and who "leaped" in his mother's womb at the sound of Mary's voice (Luke 1:41).
- ii) This points to the thesis of Jesus' absolute moral superiority, upon which our redemption absolutely depends.
- iii. That this "knowledge" did not gain any good for the unclean spirit is a strong assumption in this record, but it is "knowledge" of some kind.
- b) Then, he uses it again in 1:34 as a part of his summary of Jesus' evidence of His identity.
- i. In this text, the oida is in the Pluperfect Tense. In this case the verb is used to explain why Jesus refused to allow "demons" to "speak" (laleo).
- i) He did not want their "revelation" of His identity to complicate the thinking of the people.
- ii) The pluperfect tense indicates a "knowing" that had once existed in the demons, but did no longer (this is not to say that they "did not know" (as in 1:24), but it is a significant (pluperfects are not common in the New Testament) revelation that the prior "knowing" had been stripped of its "core" as a part of true learning.
- ii. Given the pluperfect tense, any "speech" that came out of their mouths would carry the now-faulty "knowledge" to any hearer who gave it heed.
- iii. Clearly, Jesus did not wish for the people to "hear" what the demons had to say for some reason (most likely the "outcomes" of former knowledge now stripped of its proper content: if "demons" can "know" Jesus and retain their demonic character, so also can people).
- i) There is this probability: the "unclean" spirit saw "holiness" in the powerfully negative sense of "absolute bondage to the will of 'The God' so that a "holy" person has completely lost his/her identity in God and cannot, therefore, be "his/her own person" (something highly valued by sinners of all kinds).
- ii) Thus, any "speech" from an unclean spirit was going to convey the strong aversion/distaste of the speaker regarding "holiness".
- iv. This is a "hint" that Jesus is not interested in "revelations" that do not produce "Love" directed outcomes.
- c) His third use is 2:10 where Jesus pointedly declared that the oppositional scribes would "know" that He, as "The Son of The Man", has (Present Tense) the "authority" of "forgiveness of sins" upon the earth.
- d) There are 31 texts in Mark's Gospel where this word is found and the fourth of them is the text under our present consideration (4:13).
- 3) Jesus is asking the disciples if they "had come to know" the meaning of this parable.
- a) Clearly, they had not "come to know".
- b) This means that His "speech" had entered their brains but they did not have the required "associated facts" so as to be able to grasp the "connections" within the "mystery".
- c) The words and sentences were not "hard" to understand; what was "hard" to understand is their "setting" as a parable: What did a farmer planting his fields have to do with the Kingdom of God?
- b. How shall you "know" all of the parables?
- 1) He switches his words for "knowing": ginosko instead of oida.
- a) This verb's use in Mark's record begins here (no previous references). After this one there are eleven more.
- b) The strong implication of this verb for "knowing" is that it has roots in experience (as in 5:29, the very next use by Mark: the woman's "healing" was "known" by her as she experienced its sensations in her body).
- c) This implication is reinforced in 6:38 because the disciples "knew" how much food was available because they searched it out, and in 15:45 where Pilate got his "knowledge" from questioning the centurion.
- 2) This switch indicates that Jesus wants His disciples to go beyond oida by moving into gnosis.
- a) As we have already seen, oida can be stripped of its "inner core" of data links so that a "truth" may be known, but its relevance cannot because of the absence of "links".
- b) God's goal for finite creatures of sensibility is ginosko because, in a most technical sense oida is going to forever be deficient (finitude in respect to knowledge means that some "necessary data" will be missing). [Matthew 7:23 and John 17:3 both insist that "experience-based knowledge" is what God seeks for men.]
- 3) The "parables" are, thus, to be "known" for their ability to enable the disciples in their task of "preaching" (3:14 and 6:12).
- 2. The declaration (to be continued).
