Chapter # 4 Paragraph # 9 Study # 1
July 21, 2020
Moss Bluff, Louisiana
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Thesis: Jesus intentionally "sets up" His disciples in regard to what He had been teaching to confront their rather typical tendency to not take His teaching seriously.
Introduction: For the last six months we have been considering Jesus' teaching in parables. In Mark's final comments about that, He said that Jesus stuck with His teaching in parables with Him explaining them to His disciples. In all of those studies, one thing has come bubbling to the surface. Jesus called it "the mystery of the Kingdom of the God". In our last study I put forth the major issue regarding that "mystery": that God fully intends to press His agenda in bringing about that kingdom in the actual history of men. It is "mystery", not so much because it has not received a lot of "press" over the years, but because there are so many "permitted", apparent, contradictions to His intention that men have despaired of the promise. When Jesus began His ministry as Mark recorded it in
1:15, He announced the Kingdom as "at hand" because "the time has been fulfilled". This announcement attracted at least one "zealot" (
3:18), but, His actions did not meet the expectations of many. Instead of gathering an army and confronting the power of Rome, He went about confronting the false teaching of the leaders of Israel and casting out demons. Therefore, there remained in Israel a very large degree of disbelief regarding His fundamental announcement.
Now we are moving on from the parables and Mark's first "after the fact" record is one which brings this disbelief to the surface. Our study this evening will focus upon how Jesus goes about to address this "problem".
- I. That The Point of Mark's Record of This First "After The Fact" Event Is Unbelief Is Indisputable.
- A. At the end of the record Jesus confronts the unbelief of His own disciples.
- 1. The significance of this is found in 4:34.
- a. Jesus "was speaking" (laleo) many parables to the crowd with the understanding that they, for the most part, would not understand.
- b. But He was "releasing all things to His own disciples".
- 2. Thus, His own disciples were "supposedly" now "prepared" to go forth and preach the nearness of the Kingdom with its attendant principles of "on-going repentance" and "on-going belief" as 1:15 declares these issues.
- 3. But, instead, they are terrified out of their minds.
- a. Their first "terror" was that they were going to perish (1:38), immediately revealing the characteristics of the second and the third of the "landing places": too shallow to endure conflicting issues, and too many established roots of thorns and thistles for "fruitfulness".
- b. Their second "terror" was that they were in the presence of, and under the control of, One Whose identity they did not grasp.
- B. Thus, at the end of the record Jesus' own disciples are "greatly afraid" and asking "Who is this?" so that "faith" is patently absent.
- II. Then There Are The Details... .
- A. The first rattle out of the box is Mark's switch back to lego from a double use of laleo in 4:33-34.
- B. The second is Mark's use of the present tense of lego, rather than the imperfect, as a matter of deliberate focus and a "summons" to slow down and give thoughtful attention.
- 1. Mark's rather obvious implication is that he wants his readers to sidestep the fault of the disciples: passing too quickly over critical truths.
- 2. What Jesus "is saying" is really important.
- C. The third is Mark's focus upon "that day".
- 1. It disallows any sense of a passage of time that would allow the disciples to "forget" or "overlook" what Jesus has just spent "that day" teaching.
- 2. Yet it is clear from the record that the things Jesus had taught had not been taken seriously by His own disciples even though He had made the effort to explain His parables to them.
- D. The fourth is Mark's mention of "the evening" as a thing that had arrived.
- 1. In the only earlier record of an "evening that had come", Mark pressed the issue of Jesus' identity by tying the "evening" to "many" exorcisms and healings (1:32) in the face of the legalism of the culture of death in Judea in those days.
- 2. In the most immediately following record in which an "evening" is significant (6:47-52), the themes are the same (water, wind, powerful demonstration of Jesus' identity, and disciples with no clues) so that the point is much the same.
- 3. Thus, Mark's record is burrowing down into the "problems" involved in getting men "prepared" for a life of faith in the promises of God, the chiefest of which is a kind of on-going hardness that blunts the development of "faith".
- E. The fifth is the actual words Jesus "is saying".
- 1. The words seem simple enough: "Let us pass through unto the other side".
- 2. But...
- a. "Let us pass through" is a verb Mark only used here and in 10:25 and, in both cases, it turns out to be "an impossible task".
- 1) In this record, the impossibility is rooted in the onset of a "hurricane".
- 2) In the other record, the impossibility is of a camel being able to "pass through" the eye of a needle.
- b. The developments indicate that what is considered "easily accomplished" is, suddenly, a terrorizing impossibility.
- 3. Thus, Mark is recording how Jesus "is saying", again, something the disciples easily dismiss.
- a. The "other side" was first mentioned in 3:8 as a record of Jesus' spreading reputation (a hint that His identity is the crucial issue, as this text also indicates).
- b. And the very next mention after this text is in 5:1 where Jesus and His disciples "arrive" just in time to run smack into a confrontation with over 5,000 demons.
- III. Point: The Disciples Are Not Yet Really "Prepared" For Their Task Because They Are Too Preoccupied To Pay Attention.
