Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

Watch Bible Project Video: Mark

Intro to Mark:

The Gospel of Mark is awesome, but it’s very different from any of the other Gospel accounts. If you’ve never really read the bible before, this is a great place to start. It’s action packed, fast-paced, and a look at the life of Jesus through the eyes of one of Jesus’ closest friends.

Mark wrote the book but it’s really Peter’s perspective. Mark was not one of the 12 original disciples of Jesus, Mark was a friend of both Paul and Peter. Peter told all of his stories to Mark, who wrote them down for him. So, Mark’s Gospel is kinda more like Peter’s Gospel.

Most people think that this is the first of the Gospels to be written down. And that both Matthew and Luke used Mark’s Gospel as a template for how to write their own accounts of the Life of Jesus. So you’ll see a lot of similarities between Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Mark like to move really fast, he doesn’t pause to give us lots of details, he just tells it like it happened. All with the desire to have us answer one huge important question: WHO IS JESUS?

So we’re going to jump into Mark’s Gospel tonight! My message is going to be short because I’m going to unpack just one verse:

Mark 1:1 ESV

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

I’m calling tonight’s message:

Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

Let me start off with a little story:

Once upon a time, a time before social media, before iPhones, and even before television, people found out about what was going on in the world through a newspaper. In this news paper, there were articles about current events, and politics, and sports. People would buy the newspaper every single day so they could read about what was going on in their city, in their country, and in the world.

But often times, things that are newsworthy happen during the day. What would happen if you’ve already bought a newspaper that day, but then something crazy important happened? You couldn’t tweet about it, you couldn’t send a notification to everybody's phone, and you couldn’t go on TV.

The newspaper companies would publish an extra addition of the newspaper which included the new story. And people would stand on the corners of the streets and yell: Extra! Extra! Read All About It! In order to tell the whole city that there was something new happening that they needed to pay attention to.

I’m gonna come back to this story later. But let’s look at verse 1 of Mark’s Gospel.

I think there are three things in verse 1 that Mark wants us to pay attention to:

The Gospel Starts on Page 1

Without looking it up, what are the first words in the whole Bible?

That’s right: ‘In the beginning...’

God starts out his book by taking us to the very beginning.

Mark starts his book by doing the same thing.

When Mark writes, ‘the beginning’ he intentionally uses the same words as the Bible starts with in Genesis 1.

Here’s why he does it:

Mark wants to prove to you that the story he’s going to tell about a guy named Jesus doesn’t start with Mark, but actually starts at the very very beginning of Time itself. It’s not some new thing, it’s actually a very very old thing.

It’s like if I wanted to explain to you why Fortnight became such a big deal. Some of you are like yeah yeah Fortnight is dead, we don’t play that anymore…whatever. But Fortnight didn’t just get released one day and blow up and become the most played game ever. To really understand the success of Fortnight, you have to go all the way back to 2017 when the game first came out.

The story of Jesus actually starts on Page 1 of your bible. God creates the world and creates humans. But God knows what is going to happen. Humans are going to rebel against him, they’re going to sin, and they’re going to need someone to save them from themselves.

This means the whole Old Testament is vital and relevant to really understanding the Gospel accounts about Jesus.

The Gospel Announces History

We talked about sharing the Gospel last week, remember?

The word Gospel means GOOD NEWS!

But the bible didn’t invent the word. The word Gospel was already in use in the world.

A Gospel was a piece of Good News that announced a history changing moment.

So back in the Roman Empire, when Emperor Caesar Augustus was born, messengers went out throughout the whole Roman Empire announcing this gospel that was so big that it would change the history of the world. A new emperor had been born. Caesar’s birth was called a GOSPEL.

So back to my story about Newspapers.

If something happened during the day, newspaper companies needed to publish an extra addition to account for a piece of breaking news. Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

When I was in the first grade, I remember a history changing moment. This was before smart phones, but obviously after TV news. On one day in early September I remember my mom picking me up from school early. I didn’t really understand why. Until we got home and turned on the news.

2 planes had crashed into skyscrapers in New York City. There were rumors of other planes that had been hijacked and nobody knew if there were other targets. We didn’t know if a place like Mall of America might be the next place hit.

9/11 was a history changing event. But it was the opposite of Good News.

But today, we usually just get a notification on our phones. Some notifications are small pieces of news, but other notifications are history changing pieces of news.

I remember being in Chicago in January of 2020. I was in Chicago taking pictures of Matt’s engagement to his, now wife, Jae. After the engagement, we were walking through the streets of Chicago when I got a notification on my phone. as I looked around on the street, it seemed everybody else just got the notification too. Kobe Bryant, one of the best basketball players ever, had just been killed in a helicopter crash.

For a lot of people, that day was a history-changing moment. But it was the opposite of Good News.

When Mark calls the the story of Jesus a Gospel, he’s telling us that Jesus represents a history-changing moment AND the best news ever.

The Gospel Points Out the Messiah

The last thing Mark wants us to pay attention to in the opening sentence of his Gospel is who this is all about:

Jesus.

Mark calls Jesus, the Christ. Christ is not a last name, Christ is a title. It’s a job description.

It’s the Greek translation of a Hebrew word: Messiah.

It means anointed one. Or chosen one.

If we circle back to page 1 of our bible, God says this:

Genesis 3:15 NLT

And I will cause hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”

It’s the first prophecy of the coming Messiah. The Messiah was somebody that God promised he would send to fix the mess we created. He is the one God would send to save us from our sins. He is the one God would send to bring his Kingdom.

And Mark is straight up about the identity of this Messiah: It’s Jesus. He is the Son of God and he is here. That’s some Good News if I ever heard any.

And as we keep working our way through Mark’s Gospel we’re going to be confronted with the question over and over again: WHO IS JESUS?

So if you’ve got questions about who Jesus is or what Jesus did, this is for you.

If you’ve never really taken the time to read the Bible before, this is for you.

If you’ve been looking at the News for the last year and you keep seeing bad news after bad news, this is for you.

If you need a little hope right now, this is for you.