Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Welcome to Dishman Baptist Church.

It is a privilege and an honor to worship with you this morning.

I missed the chance last week to reminisce a bit - this weekend is the one year anniversary of our first visit here.

It seems so surprising to me that that was already a year ago.

So much has transpired over the last 12 months.

It is as humbling and as daunting a task to be here today as it was a year ago.

To have the privilege of opening God’s Word with you and to explore the depths of what He has for us in each and every passage of His Word.

And that is what we are here to do this morning so if you would - please open your Bibles with me to Mark 1 and we’ll be looking at verses 14 and 15 this morning.

Just a bit of background before we read the text for those who have missed a week or are joining us for the first time.

As we’ve looked at the beginning of this book over the last three weeks we’ve noticed that Mark is building an introduction that is leading us somewhere.

It started off with his great introduction statement in verse 1 where he wrote

Then he took a small step back to demonstrate how the prophets pointed to the events that would transpire - to the voice of one crying out in the wilderness and how this voice found a body in the person of John the Baptizer.

It’s important to note that John was not called the Baptizer because he was the first Baptist or because it was his last name but instead it was a way to designate him and separate him from the other John’s.

What we also saw was that the prophecies, while they did point to the forerunner, primarily promised that arrival of God as the King of His people and how this pointed to Christ’s divinity.

In keeping with his description John did come baptizing with a baptism of repentance and pointing the people to the hope of a greater one who would come after him.

John the Apostle records John’s answer regarding whether he was the Messiah this way

Last week we finally came face to face with Jesus.

The Messiah that Mark had proclaimed, that the prophets had promised, that John had prepared for and pointed to was present with His people to be baptized.

And what we learned was that, while John’s baptism for most people was one of repentance, Christ’s baptism was more of a coronation ceremony designating and affirming Him as the promised King and Messiah.

Then His temptation was orchestrated by God to prove His impeccability or that He couldn’t sin but also to confirm God’s sovereign plan for salvation and that nothing would prevent His plan from happening.

So now we come to this morning’s passage.

I was originally going to title this message - a message 4000 years in the making - but that seemed a bit long.

These are the first spoken words recorded by Christ in the book of Mark and so they’re pretty important.

Many of us - when we get news of any type - cannot wait to share it.

We instantly grab our phones or someone’s ear and want to share it.

Most of us can’t wait 4 seconds to share good news.

Imagine having the best news ever and having to wait to share it.

The words that you would use to deliver that news would be very significant.

So with that in mind lets look at what Mark has written for us today.

It may sound strange to you that I would say what Mark has written for us - it is important to study these words, it is equally important for us to understand that these are the words that Mark was inspired by the Spirit to write down and record for us, they may not be the exact words that Jesus spoke.

This shouldn’t shake your faith in the inerrancy or inspiration of Scripture because we know what Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 3:16 that all Scripture is God-breathed and therefore is trustworthy.

We also know, as we’re going to look at in a moment, that these are not the first words that Jesus spoke in public ministry but they are the first words that Mark has chosen to record.

We should remember, as we go through this book, that ancient biographical rules were much different than our current ideas and so Mark was not concerned with getting everything chronologically correct as it pertained to Christ’s life but instead only sought to include what was necessary to get his particular view of Christ’s life across.

Now the majority of our time together this morning will be spent in verse 15 but there are some observations that we need to make regarding 14.

Mark uses a different phrase than what he has been using to introduce these verses to us.

Our translation glosses over them but in the Greek there is a little word και at the beginning of several of the verses we’ve been looking at over the last few weeks - in his typical rapid fire style Mark has moved from event to event.

In verses 5,6,7,9,10,11,12 and 13 we could read an “and” at the beginning of each of those verses.

Essentially it would read something like - John came baptizing and the whole Judean countryside was going out to him and he wore a camel’s hair garment and He proclaimed “One who is more powerful than I am is coming after me.”

And in those days Jesus came to be baptized and as soon as He came up out of the water and a voice came from Heaven and immediately the Spirit drove Him into the wilderness and He was in the wilderness… Mark, introducing a new section and a new focus for his Gospel account, changes his wording to “now after” or as our translation has it just “after”.

Up until this point he has been laying his groundwork for Christ’s earthly ministry.

He has been giving us enough background information to get to the point that he promised in Mark 1:1 - the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

And so now he says after - a statement that is meant to provide two details for us.

The first is that some time has passed since Jesus was baptized and His temptation took place.

About six months have passed.

The other point that Mark is trying to make is to point us back to John’s statement that “One who is more powerful than I am is coming after me” - and Mark is now going to spend the rest of this book revealing that One to his readers and to us.

Some significant events have transpired in the last six months that we should not overlook.

Christ didn’t come to the Jordan to be baptized, then experience the temptations and then hide away for awhile until John’s arrest.

He has been to Jerusalem where He cleansed the Temple the first time (an event that He will have to do again and that we’ll study when we get to Mark 11), has His evening meeting with Nicodemus and then travels back through Samaria meeting the woman at the well until He arrives back in Galilee.

During this time there was some overlap between John’s ministry and Christ’s.

The Gospel of John tells us that Christ originally leaves Judea and heads towards Galilee because of some sort of perceived competition between His ministry and John the Baptists.

The Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John and so Jesus chose to remove Himself from the scene rather than to appear to have His ministry in competition with John’s.

It was also during this time that John made his great statement to his own disciples that “He (meaning Christ) must increase, but I must decrease”.

(John 3:30).

And so Mark tells us that after John had been arrested - and we may think this is a rather pedestrian comment because our translations have made it that way but it is a very significant comment both for John’s ministry and later for Christ’s.

It is another example of how John prepared the way for Christ to the cross and eventually His death.

The Greek word here is παραδιδωμι (paradidomi) and it has several meanings but the meaning or sense it carries in this passage is “to be handed over”.

The verb here is also in the passive tense and it is what is known as a divine passive - in essence meaning that what Mark is saying here is that “after God delivered John over” or “handed John over” Jesus came into Galilee.

This same verb and tense is used by Christ in Mark 10:33 when He tells His disciples

Just as Jesus will be, John is handed over to the secular world for several reasons.

John’s mission was completed.

He had prepared the way for Christ’s arrival and now the King was present.

In John 3, John the Baptist uses the metaphor of a wedding to demonstrate that his time would be coming to an end saying that “the groom’s friend, who stands by and listens for the groom, rejoices greatly at the grooms voice.

So this joy of mine is complete.”

(John 3:29) Another is the consistent demonstration of Scripture that all those who are called to stand up for the truth will experience persecution.

God demonstrates His sovereign control of both John’s and Christ’s ministries to accomplish His purposes.

This should be a great comfort to us as Christians that our good God, even when events may seem contrary to our desires, is moving everything together for His purposes and ultimately for our good.

God again demonstrates through Christ’s arrival and the location of His ministry that this New Covenant will be anything but what the people would expect.

It was always a little intriguing and frustrating to me after you all extended the job offer to me when I would talk to people about moving here they would always make a comment about the rain.

It’s almost as if people outside of Washington don’t realize that there’s a whole other state besides Seattle and the Seattle area.

Yet this is exactly how the 1st century Jewish society thought about Jerusalem.

For Christ to center most of His ministry in Galilee would be like someone coming to Spokane instead of Seattle.

To the outskirts, the region that people mispronounced and even looked down upon a bit.

Unlike His presentation for His baptism, Christ doesn’t come into Galilee quietly.

Instead He comes preaching and proclaiming the good news of God.

In his Gospel account John tells us that He was welcomed in Galilee because of the things He had done in Jerusalem during the Passover.

The significant piece of information that we gain from this verse is the gospel that Jesus is bringing has been subtly shifted from the gospel of Jesus Christ in Mark 1:1 to now the gospel of God.

Mark is reiterating for his readers that this good news that he has promised is not simply the announcement of another human king or a human kingdom which will, as all the others were, be superceded by a greater king and kingdom later.

This was the announcement, the proclamation, of the King of Kings and the ushering in of the final Kingdom that would reign supreme for all time.

And so now Christ comes proclaiming the good news of God - and he does so in three defining statements.

The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has come near and repent and believe the good news.

The Time is Fulfilled

Writing to the church in Galatia many years later Paul would write these words

Much the same as Jesus came proclaiming in Galilee - the time has been fulfilled.

The waiting was over, the long awaited Messiah had arrived.

Even the word for time here is significant.

It is the word καιρος (kairos) and instead of speaking to clock time, which is referred to by the word chronos (where we get the word chronograph from), but instead is speaking of a specific point in time.

It’s not even so much pointing to the end of one time period and the beginning of the next.

It is more the fulfillment of the promises made throughout the Old Testament that are now being realized with the advent of Christ to the earth.

There are several factors that made this time in history most propitious for this moment.

Just as promised in King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream several empires had swept across the Near Eastern landscape with the Romans following the Babylonian, Persian and Greek empires.

Now the power of the Roman military had quelled all opposition and the pax Romana or Roman peace was the order of the day.

The Roman empire had built or rebuilt roads and major communication and commercial hubs so that information, people and goods could flow throughout the Empire with relative ease (at least by 1st Century standards).

The existence of a common language throughout much of the Empire would ease the spread of the Gospel.

And so the time was fulfilled - the environment was perfectly suited for the coming of the Messiah.

Even the verb choice here - fulfilled is in the perfect tense meaning that it has been definitively completed and fulfilled - demonstrates the finality of this statement.

There was no need to continue to look because the Messiah was present.

Paul would also write about this in Ephesians 1:10

The time promised to the Old Testament saints had been fulfilled - the promised moment in time had come and Christ was present - and not only Christ but the Kingdom of God as well.

The Kingdom of God