The Beginning of the Gospel

1 The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. 2 As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, 3 the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’ ” 4 John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 6 Now John was clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey. 7 And he preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. 8 I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” 9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. 11 And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

If you could think with me for a moment, what's the most important question you have ever asked? It's been said that insightful people are not first people with the right answers; they’re people who ask the right questions because you don't get to the right answers without asking the right questions.

Perhaps there could be no more important questions than the three questions that are asked and answered by Mark. First one: “Who in the world is Jesus?” What an important question. Second question: “Why in the world did He come? What is this life about?” And third question: “What does it mean to follow Him?” Who is Jesus? Why did He come? What does it mean to follow Him?

Background

Mark is probably the earliest of the Gospels, and Mark answers these questions, not so much in an abstract, theological, or philosophical way, but in putting before us in hard hitting, quick-paced style, the life and ministry of Jesus. There are many narrative passages in Scripture; this is probably the most purely narrative portion of the Word of God. Mark doesn't make as many editorial comments as Luke would make. He doesn't record the lengthy teachings of Christ as Matthew does. He puts in front of you, again and again, the person Jesus, the person Jesus, the person Jesus, until it's impossible to be neutral.

You have to respond to this Jesus. You have to respond to who He is. You have to respond to what He's done. You have to respond to what He says about you. You have to decide whether you will follow Him. You have to face the reality of His cross. You can’t be neutral and read the gospel of Mark. There is a beautiful way he tells the story of Christ and how it confronts what we think about ourselves. It confronts your

deepest needs. It confronts your deepest dreams. It confronts everything you would think about your world. How? By putting in front of you the person, the Lord Jesus.

Everything we hold in our theology, everything we believe as Christians, is rooted in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ, is rooted in His historical work on earth. And so it’s right for us to go back to that again and again, to march back to the Gospels and work our way through a gospel again and again. Because without Jesus, without His work, all that we believe would be empty and worthless.

Mark tells us two simple things. The gospel is about Jesus Christ. It is not good advice about how to live. It is good news about a person. Secondly, Mark sets the scene for Jesus by telling us about the John the Baptist and the significance of his life and ministry.

Good News

Mark 1:1–3 (ESV)

1 The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. 2 As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, 3 the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’ ”

This is Mark’s ‘gospel’ (1:1)—good news as told by Mark. But who decides whether the news is good or not? In Rome, where Mark is writing, this word evangel, good news, is a proclamation throughout the empire: for instance, that a new emperor has taken power. Good news! Or is it? That would all depend on where you stand. If you don’t like this emperor, if you are his enemy, you may not think it is good news at all. Mark thinks what he is about to tell is good news—but it can only be good news if you are going to be a friend of the new emperor, this new King.[1]

Many commentators say the way this Gospel begins alludes back to the way the Bible begins, “In the beginning.” There's a way in which Mark is saying, “What I'm about to tell you, the story I’m about to tell you, the person I'm going to introduce you to, has as fundamental and as seismic implications as the creation of the world did.” As God, in that moment, creates the world out of nothing, that physical creation, this, in the same way, is a spiritual creation that happens, re-created by Christ Jesus. This is God remaking His world through Christ.

The coming of John signaled both the beginning of the joyful tidings of salvation and the intrusion of the rule of God.

The Prophecies

Mark has quoted the prophecies of Isaiah 40:3 and Malachi 3:1. Those prophets, hundreds of years earlier, look forward to a day when God is going to do something new; this is all in God’s plan. ‘Prepare the way for the Lord,’ he says. God is doing something new. This time it is not just another prophet who will come; it is the Lord God himself who is coming into the world. God is coming in human form in the person of Jesus Christ, God’s final word to humanity.

John the Baptizer

Mark 1:4–5 (ESV)

4 John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

Here are crowds of people, thousands of them, streaming out from all the places where they live, from town and country, going out into the desert. Notice the word ‘out’. They go out into the desert, called there to meet with God. Time and again in the Bible, the desert is where God takes people to meet with him. He takes them away from the places where they are comfortable, the busy situations they are embroiled in, out where there are no distractions and they can hear him speaking. It’s a biblical pattern, and here it happens again.

As these thousands of people swarm out to meet with John, and they do want to repent and confess their sins to God (1:5), he gives them a message of hope.

Running through the dry, brown desert there is a river, with a narrow green strip of living vegetation on either side, an avenue of hope in the wasteland. And there, near the point where the River Jordan runs into the Dead Sea,1 he baptizes them and tells them their sins can be forgiven.[2]

Even today, the Lord so often takes us to a place where we have no resources of our own, a place that feels dead and dry, so that we can hear his voice without distraction. Have you been there?

John the Baptist, a crucial figure in the history of revelation and redemption.

Mark 1:6 (ESV)

6 Now John was clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey.

John definitely was not making a fashion statement. His camel’s-hair robe was the kind worn by the very poor, and his belt, unlike the fancy belts so popular in those days, was simply a leather thong.

His food was not very exciting either. His idea of eating out was to catch a few grasshoppers and visit the local beehive for dessert.

Actually John was in perfect control of his lifestyle. He knew exactly what he was doing, for he had assumed the dress and style of the ancient prophet Elijah the Tishbite (described in 2 Kings 1:8) who called his people to national repentance. John’s dress and lifestyle were a protest against the godlessness and self-serving materialism of his day. It amounted to a call to separate oneself from the sinful culture, repent, and live a life focused on God. Even his context, the desert wilderness, was meant to emphasize this, for it was originally to the wilderness that Israel came out of Egypt. The people’s coming out to John in the wilderness was a subtle acknowledgment of Israel’s history of disobedience and rebellion, and a desire to begin again.3

What was beautiful was that John’s life and actions bore out what he was. He lived a life of continual repentance and uncompromising devotion to God.[3]

The very fact of John’s appearance was an eschatological event of the first magnitude and signified that the decisive turning point in the history of salvation was at hand. It was John, the preacher of radical repentance, who initiated the messianic crisis. To speak of the gospel of Jesus is to speak of the good news which began with John.

From Mark’s perspective, John is important not for his own sake but as the beginning of the unfolding drama of redemption which centers in Jesus of Nazareth. The brevity of his presentation of John serves to project into sharp relief two features of the Baptist’s ministry which were of special significance to him: (1) John’s career was the result of divine appointment in fulfilment of prophecy; (2) John bore witness to the supreme dignity and power of the Messiah, whose coming was near.

The reference to John’s clothing and diet serves to emphasize that he is a man of the wilderness. Both his garb and his food are those familiar to the wilderness nomad and characterize life in the desert.

The One who is Coming

Mark 1:7–8 (ESV)

7 And he preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. 8 I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

John’s message is telescoped to focus upon a single theme, the proclamation of a person still to come who will baptize the people with the Holy Spirit[4]

By being baptized, these people are saying that they are ready for a new start. They are ready for God to do something new. But this is just the beginning, because John goes on to say that someone else is coming who will do far more than dip them under some water. John cannot forgive their sins; only God can do that. See how he announces this in verses 7–8.

In those times in Israel, untying someone’s sandals was the most menial task you could undertake. It wasn’t just that people’s feet got very dirty and smelly; this was simply a job for the lowest of the low. Jewish slaves didn’t have to do it at all. Now John says of the one who is coming, ‘It’s not just that I am low enough to undo his shoes: compared to him, to his greatness, I am even lower than that. There is simply no comparison between him and me: I’m just the messenger boy. He’s the real news! He won’t just dip you under this water; he will baptize you in the Holy Spirit—in other words, he will immerse you in the very presence of God. He will bring God himself into your life. I can do nothing like that,’ he says, ‘but the one who is coming can, and he will.’

By introducing his Gospel with an account of the ministry of John, the evangelist re-creates for his own contemporaries the crisis of decision with which John had confronted all Israel. It is not enough to know who John was, historically. What is required is an encounter, through the medium of history, with that summons to judgment and repentance which John issued. Because the church recognized John’s role in redemptive history as the pioneer of the kingdom of God, it accorded him a prominent place in the Gospel tradition. It refused to allow his memory to slip uninterpreted into the past, but made his witness a part of the continuing Christian proclamation. John was the first preacher of the good news concerning Jesus.[6]

The Lord in the Wilderness.

This world’s heroes want to be known; they need to be admired; the last description they would want is ‘anonymous’. Yet when Mark introduces us to his main character, his hero, it seems that anonymity is exactly what he is aiming for. When Jesus makes his appearance, he does so as an unidentifiable figure in a great crowd. The crowds are still coming out to John, out from Judea and Jerusalem to be dipped under the water and hidden somewhere among those crowds is the man John has been talking about (1:9). He simply appears.

What kind of a grand entrance is this? But Mark’s brief account of the baptismal scene and what follows is packed with clues to Jesus’ identity and mission.[7]

John’s appearance in the wilderness, his call to repentance and his baptism signify that the time has come when God will execute a decisive judgment from which a new Israel will emerge. Jesus acknowledges this conviction which has roots in the prophetic tradition. He comes to John as one willing to assume the brunt of this judgment. The bearing of its burden constitutes his mission.

The Unexpected Baptism

Mark 1:9 (ESV)

9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.

John has been telling people to come out to him, to turn away from their sins, and be baptized in water to show their clean break with their past. But why should Jesus need to do that? Why does he need a baptism of repentance?Mark points it up for us: if you put verse 5 and verse 9 side by side, you can see how pointed he makes it. Only the mention of ‘confessing their sins’ is missing from the second verse, for Jesus has no sins to confess. This is the perfect man. We have already had strong hints about this. In verse 3, the message was: ‘Prepare the way for the Lord’—this is no ordinary man; this is God himself in human flesh.

From the point of introduction Jesus shares the heritage and predicament of the people, and like Moses in the first exodus (Ex. 32:23), he does not set himself apart from their sins. This is the startling emphasis of verse 9, that the bestower of the baptism with the Spirit humbles himself to receive the baptism of repentance. With a company of others, he heeds John’s call to the wilderness as the place where Israel’s sonship to God must be renewed.

The crowds are there with John to acknowledge that they have done wrong and that they are under God’s judgement. Jesus joins them, not because he has sins to confess, but because he wants to identify with them. That is his mission. He is here to place himself deliberately under the judgement and condemnation of God. The sinless one is standing with the sinners; he is going through the water with the sinners: as Isaiah put it long ago, he is here to be ‘numbered with the transgressors’ (Isa. 53:12). All of this points ahead to the day when Jesus will take that judgement on himself even though he deserves none of it, when the one who has come from Nazareth will take the place of the many by suffering God’s punishment on the cross and, crucified between two criminals, he will again be numbered with the transgressors.[8]

Many had come to the Jordan to be baptized by John, but only in the instance of Jesus, in whom true submission to God was perfectly embodied, was the “coming up” from the water answered by a “coming down” from above. The divine response to Jesus’ acknowledgment of the judgment of God was the descent of the Spirit as a dove and the voice from heaven

Words of Assurance and Affirmation

Mark 1:10–11 (ESV)

10 And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. 11 And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

As Jesus emerges from the river, with the water still streaming off him, something amazing happens. As he looks up, he can see what seems like a tear in the fabric of the sky and, descending from above, the shape of a dove, flying down and alighting on him; at the same time he hears a voice that speaks to him words of assurance and affirmation. However anonymous Jesus may appear in the surging crowds around the river, however little they may recognize his real identity, with God there is no doubt. Far from it! This is an apocalyptic moment—heaven is opened to show that God is breaking through, intervening in human history in a new way.

At the moment of his baptism Jesus is the one true Israelite, in whom the election of God is concentrated. The descent of the Spirit “as a dove” indicates that he is the unique representative of the new Israel created through the Spirit.

In the voice from heaven God addresses Jesus as his unique Son, the object of his elective love. In this expression of unqualified divine approval there is recognition of Jesus’ competence to fulfill the messianic task for which he has been set apart.[9]

Jesus did not become the Son of God, at baptism or at the transfiguration; he is the Son of God, the one qualified to bestow the Holy Spirit. The rending of the heavens, the descent of the Spirit and the declaration of God do not alter Jesus’ essential status, but serve to indicate the cosmic significance of Jesus’ submission to the Servant-vocation and affirm God’s good pleasure in his Son. As such, the passage marks the high point of revelation in the prologue to Mark’s Gospel and provides the indispensable background for all that follows.[10]

This scene is full of echoes from the distant past—echoes of creation itself, when God spoke the word and brought the universe into being, and we read that the Spirit of God was moving over the formless waters. Here, once more, God speaks and the Spirit descends from heaven and moves over the waters, to show that, in his Son Jesus Christ, he is beginning his new creation, the new people he will call to himself. Once again Father, Son and Holy Spirit are here together to fulfil their unique roles.[11]

However anonymous Jesus may appear in the surging crowds around the river, however little they may recognize his real identity, with God there is no doubt. Far from it! This is an apocalyptic moment—heaven is opened to show that God is breaking through, intervening in human history in a new way. Here, once more, God speaks and the Spirit descends from heaven and moves over the waters, to show that, in his Son Jesus Christ, he is beginning his new creation, the new people he will call to himself. Once again Father, Son and Holy Spirit are here together to fulfil their unique roles.[12]

So, with the Spirit descending from heaven and with the words that he speaks, God the Father publicly sets the seal on the mission of his Son. He smiles down at the Son he has sent into the world out of his love to save it. Jesus himself knows his unique qualification for his mission. Looking back, we too can understand and know.

This is the Lord Jesus, who is both God and man so that he is able to stand in the gap that separates us from God: the man who can identify with us in our weaknesses, who feels the cold as he stands on the riverbank and the wind dries him off; but who is also God the Son, with the authority and power of God, the authority that will be seen throughout his ministry as he heals diseases and drives out demons with a word—the one who is qualified and able to save us.[13]

Conclusion

This introduction to the ministry of Christ is like a great knife that slices its way through the middle of humanity, because if you believe these words, if you believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, the Mighty One, the Savior who will give you new life, it changes you and everything about your life. It becomes the single most important thought and pursuit of your existence. It defines everything you think about you, everything you think about your world, everything you think about others.Or, it's a silly delusion. How could you believe such a thing? What are you doing with Jesus? Have you placed your faith in Him? If you're a believer, do you live by faith in Him? Does that belief in Jesus the Christ shape the way you think about your marriage and the way you think about parenting, the way you think about your life at your university, the way you think about your job? Do the radical claims of the Gospel of Jesus Christ move and motivate you? Do you come with a deep sense of need with the enthusiasm of worship? Or, could it be that you've lost your awe and you need to confess that it has all become too familiar, too commonplace, that your life maybe isn't driven by worship of Jesus as it should be. May God help us to celebrate the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and may that celebration not just be with a theology that we embrace and with hymns that we sing, but with every word and thought and desire and decision of our lives.

[1]Wilmshurst, S. (2011). A Ransom for Many: The Gospel of Mark Simply Explained(pp. 21–22). EP Books. 1 The most likely site for John’s baptizing—though there are other contenders. [2]Wilmshurst, S. (2011). A Ransom for Many: The Gospel of Mark Simply Explained(pp. 22–23). EP Books. 3 3. William L. Lane, The Gospel According To Mark (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1975), pp. 50, 51. [3]Hughes, R. K. (1989). Mark: Jesus, servant and savior (Vol. 1, p. 21). Crossway Books. [4]Lane, W. L. (1974). The Gospel of Mark (p. 51). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. [5]Wilmshurst, S. (2011). A Ransom for Many: The Gospel of Mark Simply Explained(pp. 23–24). EP Books. [6]Lane, W. L. (1974). The Gospel of Mark (pp. 52–53). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. [7]Wilmshurst, S. (2011). A Ransom for Many: The Gospel of Mark Simply Explained(p. 25). EP Books. [8]Wilmshurst, S. (2011). A Ransom for Many: The Gospel of Mark Simply Explained(pp. 25–26). EP Books. [9]Lane, W. L. (1974). The Gospel of Mark (p. 57). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. [10]Lane, W. L. (1974). The Gospel of Mark (p. 58). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. [11]Wilmshurst, S. (2011). A Ransom for Many: The Gospel of Mark Simply Explained(pp. 26–27). EP Books. [12] Wilmshurst, S. (2011). A Ransom for Many: The Gospel of Mark Simply Explained(p. 27). EP Books. [13] Wilmshurst, S. (2011). A Ransom for Many: The Gospel of Mark Simply Explained(pp. 27–28). EP Books.