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Well, good morning, Northgate brothers and sisters in Christ. Happy New Year to you.

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Happy New Year.

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In fact, I wish more than a happy new year for you. I wish you a joy-filled New Year. Happiness is something that's outside of us. We are happy because we've had good happenings. We are unhappy because we have unhappy happenings. But you can be joy-filled even when you're unhappy. I was unhappy yesterday. I flew up here from Phoenix and only took, was only seven hours late getting here. Got on the plane three different times. One time we got all the way up and ready for the runway. The pilot said, Oh, there's a light on here that shouldn't be on. We're going to go back and change planes. That was not a happy time, but you could still be joyful in the midst of it. So I wish you a joy-filled new year that no matter what happens along the way, whether you're happy or not about what the circumstances are, you can find joy because of your faith in Jesus. Joy to the world. The Lord has come. Well, we're starting this new series on Mark, and I'm excited about the opportunity to be able to share with you. And it's helpful to, when you read any book of the Bible, to ask the question is who wrote it? To whom did they write it? What were the circumstances? What was going on at that time, and when was that time? And so my responsibility today for Pastor Lawrence is to uh give you some of that background. And so it's gonna be more teaching than preaching, but I'm gonna have a little bit of preaching at the end. But I hope you can bear with me as I go through the teaching. And we'll begin by asking about who Mark is. He says the gospel according to Mark, but you know, when he wrote it, when Matthew, Luke, and John wrote theirs, it they didn't put their names on there. That's what the church did later. They told us who these people are. And I think that they didn't put their name on there because of humility. You know, in our culture, you write a book, you want people to know you wrote a book. Maybe someone does it with a synonym. But as a rule, somebody went, I wrote this book. You know, give me some kudos here, buy my books, make me some money, whatever it is. And uh, but when the gospel writers wrote, they didn't do that because it was more important that that was about Jesus than it was about them. But as we're gonna see, they inserted themselves a little bit in each one of those. I'll talk about that in a moment. But who is this guy, Mark? Well, there's there's some biblical parts to him, and there's some church tradition parts. So let's look at the biblical parts at first. Go ahead, next slide. Papius says in 140 AD that Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter accurately, though not in order. So here we find early church history to say that we what we call the gospel of Mark was written by Mark. And he is an associate of Peter, which is an important thing. You see, we have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the scripture, but there are a lot of other gospels. There's the gospel of Thomas and of Mary Magdalene and of Philip and uh Peter and all kinds of different ones. And so why are our four in there and the others aren't? Well, there are some principles that the early church used to determine what books were viewed as being inspired, what we would call the canon. And three of those principles are these: that it was written by an apostle or an associate of an apostle. So the apostles were the twelve that were with Jesus. And Mark is not an associate, is not an apostle, but he is an associate of an apostle of Peter. So it gave some authority to what he wrote. We also find that the early church said that books that are in the that were accepted as canon have been accepted by the church as a whole. You see, these other gospels were accepted by a certain group of people. They were called the Gnostics, and but they weren't accepted by the church as a whole. One way of looking at it in our context is some people believe that the Book of Mormon is inspired scripture. But the church as a whole doesn't do that. So you say that that's a kind of a correlation between the two. The third is that it's consistent with the oral tradition about Jesus, that the things that we would know about Jesus, it's consistent. Let me give you an example from the Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of Thomas has 114 statements of Jesus, and the very last one says this no female can enter the kingdom of heaven. For a female to enter the kingdom of heaven, she must become a male. Now that sounds like Jesus, doesn't it? You think he would say something like that? No, probably not. So you see, that's one of the reasons why that never made it. Because number one, it wasn't written by Thomas, because it's written about 180 A.D. and Thomas is long gone. And these other gospels that use the apostles' names, they they were also long dead by the time these things were written. So it was written by apostle or associate apostle, it was accepted as a church as a whole, and it was consistent with the oral traditions about Jesus. So Mark is given that credibility. Also in 185, uh Irenaeus says a similar thing. But let's look at a couple of biblical texts, at least let me tell you about them. In Acts 12.2, it says that Mark's mother had a house church. There's a church that met in her house. In fact, in Acts 12.2, it not only calls him Mark, it calls him John. And it seems to be that John is his Hebrew name and Mark is his Roman name. Okay? So he's known as John Mark. It's not like first and last name or first name and middle name. They didn't have that sort of thing back then. They are identified by their parents or the places they came from. In this case, it's by the language. So there's a church within his mother's home. We then find in Acts 13, 13 that he is not only associate of Peter, he is of Paul. He goes on a first missionary journey. Paul's the one who wrote many of the books of the New Testament: Romans, 12 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, etc. And so he is on this missionary journey with Paul and he wimps out. He goes home in the middle of the missionary journey. They're planting churches, they're preaching all around the area of the Mediterranean Sea, and he goes back home. He's called an hooperetus, which means an under rower. An under rower was somebody who rode the boats. Now I don't know if he rode the boats, if he was a person like a slave underneath, or more likely, maybe had to swab the deck or do the laundry or wash the dishes, menial tasks, and he gets fed up, he gets homesick, and he goes back home. In the 15th chapter, they're going on a second missionary journey. And Barnabas says, Let's take John Mark with us to Paul. And Paul said, You're nuts. We're not taking him. He's a wimp. He's immature. We can't rely upon him. This work is too important. We're not going to take John Mark with us. And they split ways. And Paul takes a man by the name of Silas, and Barnabas takes John Mark with him. He saw his potential. He saw the diamond in the rough. And even though he had made some of some mistakes and he wasn't one who could be relied upon at one point in time, Barnabas knew that he could do that. In one of Paul's later letters, he says, Bring John Mark with me, with you, for he has been a great help to me. They've made up as time went on. And Paul also saw his uh his potential. And then the last one is in Mark for excuse me, go back to Mark 14, 51. The gospel writers, as I mentioned, don't say who they are, but they insert themselves in the story. Matthew is a tax collector, and he tells a story about a man by the name of Levi who is follows Jesus. That person, Levi, is Matthew. But he writes about it in the third person. So he puts himself into the story, but says so in the third person. In the Gospel of John, John talks about the disciple whom Jesus loved. And it's pretty well understood that it is John. He's doing the same thing. He talks about himself in the story, but he didn't say, I, John, did this, and I am the disciple who Jesus loved. He inserts them in. Luke doesn't do that at all because he is not an apostle, but he is an associate of Paul as they go on a missionary journey. So here it seems that John Mark inserts himself. Jesus is being arrested. People are interested. John Mark is following the entourage of the soldiers that are arresting Jesus to see what's going to happen. Apparently, he just gets out of bed because he just has a linen cloth on him. When they see him following, they think he's suspicious, and they grab him and they grab his linen cloth and he runs away naked. He was the first New Testament streaker. Bare bottom and all to get away, but he got away from them. And that seems to be who he is. Well, let's go on. There's a little bit more. The Gospel of Mark is believed to be Peter's sermons. And I have a little thing here of stump-fingered. There's a tradition that he had small hands. Now, my hands and my feet are pretty good size. I should be about 6'1, 6'2, but my legs never caught up on the idea. I can palm most basketballs, all right? Might depend on the texture of it, maybe a little bit on the size, but I can palm most basketballs. I had a friend in high school, his name was Ned. He said his hand was so big he could palm a golf ball. Apparently, Ned and Mark had something in uh in connection with each other where they had small hands. It's just a tradition. Don't know anything else about it. But I found out something very interesting to me. And there may be two or three of you Bible nerds in here that might be interested in this as well. I was in uh in Egypt uh three years ago teaching some pastors there. It was at a retreat center outside of Alexandria. Went to Alexandria and learned all kinds of things about Jesus' escape when he was a baby into Egypt. Very, very interesting. They've got places where you say, oh, they stayed three weeks here and three months there because they were continually moving so that Herod couldn't find him to kill him. But it also talked about Mark. Mark, it is said, was born in Cyrene, which is in today's Libya. And that according to this book, it's called the African Memory of Mark. The African Memory of Mark. And it says that Barnabas that I've mentioned to you was actually his uncle. And that Peter was married to his cousin. And so there's a there's a family connection here as why there, as well as a faith connection as well. It's very interesting. But then there's something very disturbing about Mark's life, and that is he was a first missionary in Alexandria, and people were being converted. But whenever people are being converted with any culture, there's opposition. And some of the people wanted to stop him from what he was doing, and so they decided to kill him. And the way they decided to kill him was to tie him up behind a horse with a rope and take that horse and ride it through the town. And they did that all day long, but he didn't die. But they took him out the second day, and he did die as a martyr. Now, that's our mark. Some of it's biblical, some of it is tradition, some of it is church history, uh, but it gives us a little bit of idea of who this person is. Well, what about his audience? And his audience will be the Romans. Now, before I get to this particular slide, uh one thing that I didn't have for the slides was this. There is no birth narrative in Mark. Everything you know about Christmas comes from Matthew and or Luke. In fact, what we've done is we've put those two stories together, and we have wise men there who didn't actually show up for a couple years, but they're there with the shepherds at the same time. No big deal, one level, it's just not historically accurate. But here we find that he doesn't have a story about Jesus' birth. John doesn't have much, he just says the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and that was his birth. So why doesn't he do this? Well, I think it's because he's writing to a Roman audience, and the Roman audience had this tradition in the first century that Augustus, who is the emperor, there was a tradition that he had a virgin birth, and that Zeus impregnated his mother, just like God impregnated Mary. So I think he left that story out because they would say, Well, we've got one of those. We've got a virgin birth. What else have you got for me? So Mark begins at Jesus' ministry, he and John the Baptist. So there's something else that tells us why this is not a Jewish audience and it's a Gentile audience or a Roman audience. And one is he interprets the words. In the fifth chapter, a little girl has died. Jesus comes in and she's laying on the table and he leans over her and says, Talitha Kum. That's Aramaic. And then he translates that, saying, Little girl, I say to you, get up. In this chapter 7, he's with a man who can't speak. And so when he he prays the guy and he says, Ethathah, which is being translated means be open. And then on the cross, Jesus cries out, Eloy, Eloy, Lama Sabakani, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? So Mark gives these Hebrew words, Aramaic words, and then he translates them. If his audience was primarily Jewish, he wouldn't have to do that because they would already know what those words mean, you see. So he's writing to people who don't know. And you say, well, why even put them in there? These are dramatic events. A little girl comes back from the dead, somebody can't speak, and they can now speak, somebody, Jesus dies on the cross. These are significant events, and I think Mark wanted to give the exact words that Jesus spoke in those particular times. Another reason that it might be the Romans, and probably is, is that uh practices are uh explained. Practices explained. It was there. There it is. So in the seventh chapter, uh the Pharisees would always wash their hands before they ate. It wasn't for hygienic reasons, it was for ceremonial reasons. They had a special way that they washed their hands and they they drip their hands so that the sin would come off of their hands. So you would have clean hands, not just hygienically clean hands, but spiritually clean hands when they would eat. Jesus and his apostles didn't do that. And so these Pharisees, these teachers of the law, would criticize him for that. And then Mark goes on and says, and they have other customs as well. They have customs of cleaning dishes and and sheets and all these sorts of things. Well they would have known those things if they were Jewish people. He's writing to an audience that that doesn't know. And then we find this, and I think this is what really is significant. Fifty-one times the Greek word Uthus, which means immediately is found in the New Testament. Forty-one of those 51 are in Mark. Mark is writing to a Roman culture, a culture that is militarily oriented, one that has an emperor, and when the emperor tells you to do something, you do it. When a commanding officer tells you to do something, you do it, and you do it now. Mark presents Jesus in such a way that when he speaks, immediately there's a response. People, demons. When Jesus does something, immediately there is a result. The wind and the waves, they stop. He presents Jesus in a way that would appeal to his audience and says, immediately his power is seen. We also have something that is one of my favorite. In chapters four and five, there are four miracles that Mark puts together. We don't know if these happened one after the other. I don't think they did. I think they came at different times. And Mark, because of what he's trying to write, puts these miracles together. The first is a woman who excuse me, the first is when they're out on the lake and the wind and the waves are going on and they're about ready to drown, they think. And then Jesus gets up and says, be quiet, be still, and there's a calmness. Jesus is a conqueror over the disaster of nature. In the second story, we find a man who's a wild demoniac. I mean, this guy runs around naked, he can't be chained together by he can't be held together by chains, and Jesus casts out the demons because he's a conqueror over demons. In the third story, we find a woman who has an issue of blood. She's been bleeding for 12 years, and she touches the hem of Jesus' garment, and he immediately it stops because Jesus is a conqueror over disease. And then we have this little girl again that I mentioned. She's dead. She has taken her last breath. He says, Talitha coom, and her heart begins to beat, and her lungs get filled with air because he's a conqueror over death. He's saying, You guys think that you're conquerors, you Romans, here's somebody who can conquer nature. Here's somebody who can conquer demons. Here's somebody who can conquer disease. Here's someone who can conquer death itself. And I think that would appeal to that audience. I think it might appeal to our audience as well, because there's a lot of similarities to the Roman culture and our culture today. So these are all part of the reasons of his audience. About 60 AD, because he died somewhere in the 60s, and uh written to show that Jesus is the Messiah. But we have a problem. We have a problem with Mark that I'll get to at the end of the gospel, and that is has four endings in the manuscripts. Ends at verse 8, 9, 14, or 20. And the question is, which one is it? And I've written for you the two major manuscripts of the complete New Testament. The oldest manuscripts we have of the Complete New Testament in Greek come from about 350 AD. They are called Vaticanus, because it's kept in the Vatican. And Cyanidicus, because it was found near Mount Sinai. These are considered by biblical scholars to be the best Greek manuscripts and the most reliable Greek manuscripts that we have. And verses 9 through 20 aren't in there. And I'll tell you in a few moments why I think that's true. I think it ended at Mark 8, and that later scribes thought there's got to be more, we know there's more to this, and they give us a little bit more. So I'm going to take a few things now and look at some details of his writing style. Because I don't know if you've ever much thought about it, but every writer has a style of their own. That's true of the biblical writers. And sometimes we miss some of the insights or we miss some of the points because we don't think about how it's structured. I'm going to give you a couple little tidbits of that. The first is that Mark makes sandwiches when he's writing. He makes sandwiches. And what I mean by that, we have a story here in the fourth chapter about a woman who is, and the man, there you go, the bleeding woman and the dead girl. So the story begins with a man by the name of Jairus, whose daughter is dying. And so that begins our story. And then he brings in another story. I better do it this way, where this bleeding woman comes in, and then he comes back to the story about the little girl. That's what I mean by making a sandwich. I had a turkey sandwich yesterday, had you know, we're in, so here's the bread, here's the turkey, and here's the top of it. He he intertwines it. It's a literary style to kind of engage the reader. We also find that it happens in a dramatic way. This is to me very interesting, and I hope it is to you in the eighth chapter of Mark. There's a story about Jesus healing this blind man. And Jesus spits on his eyes. Kind of gross, isn't it? He spits on his eyes. Why in the world would he do that? Well, back in that culture, spittle was an indication of healing. And it's not too far-fetched for us to do that either. Ever cut your finger? Ever burn it a little bit? It's soothing. There's some value in our our spit, at least temporary value, to before we can we can go on. They just put this principle on steroids, okay? And so they said there's whenever there is spit like this, there's healing. So he's conveying that process. So then he does this. He touches a man's eyes, and the man opens his eyes, and Jesus asked him, Can you see? And he said, Yes, I see people, but they they look like like trees walking. He was blurry-eyed. And then Jesus puts his hands on him again, and he can see clearly. He said, Well, that's kind of weird. Why does he go through a two-step process? We know he could do a one-step process. What's going on there? Well, here's where the sandwich comes in. That story is between two other stories about the apostles. The first one, right before it, they're in a boat and they they forgot the bread. And they start arguing about that. And then Jesus says, Beware of the yeast of the scribes and Pharisees. And they think they're talking about the bread that those guys make. But he's not making talking about their bread. He's talking about their teaching. And he says, Don't you remember how many people did I feed the five loaves and two fish, Ofo? Five thousand. How about our miracle with the baskets of bread? 4,000. He said, Don't you understand? Their eyes were blurry. He did these miracles. They were in his presence. They heard his teaching. They saw him do incredible things, but they didn't get it. Then after this miracle, he says, Who do people say that I am? They said, Well, yeah, some say John the Baptist or Jeremiah or Isaiah, I mean Elijah or one of their prophets. And he says, Who do you say I am? He says, You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Peter now sees clearly. He was blurry-eyed. Now he's clear, just like this man. This man is a visual, objective illustration of what the apostles went through. And I would suggest that for many of us, that's our story as well, isn't it? You heard about Jesus, you know some things about him, but he's a little blurry as to who he is. Is he real? Is he someone who I can really relate to? And it seems like, yeah, I can kind of see him, but I don't. And then maybe there becomes a point where you say, ah, now I see I understand. And so that's part of what Mark is doing. It happened to the apostles, it can happen to us to be able to see differently. Well, there we go with that. Now we we go to one another aspect of this, and that is a redaction of Mark. And so I just want to show you a couple things here is that Mark would have a statement, and the other writers change it a little bit. It is believed that Mark is the first gospel written, and that Matthew and Luke used it as a template, and then they added material according to the audiences that they were writing to. And so here he Mark says, if a man divorces his wife and marries another, she commits adultery. And then Matthew says, if you get divorced except for marital unfaithfulness, you commit adultery. And then Luke says, if he marries a woman divorced from her husband, he commits adultery. Matthew has an exception clause. Mark doesn't have it. If you only had Mark, he said there's no reason, no acceptance of what divorce is. Matthew adds something else. So how do we deal with that? Well, on the one hand, maybe Mark was making a point, maybe it was different teachings at different times. Jesus said it in different ways. I don't know. But the point is the wording is a little different. And in some of these cases, we have to kind of struggle with that a little bit. One other example I want to give you, if we go on, uh this one here, yes, the one with the tiles. I find this very interesting. You remember the story? There's a man who is paralyzed, and his friends want him to get healed. They put him on a mat, carrying him to the house where Jesus is, but they can't get in. There are too many people there. So they get up on the roof and they dig a hole in the roof and they they let him down in front of Jesus and Jesus heals him. Mark says that they dug through the roof. And the reason he says that is because that's literally what they did. Their roofs were made out of mud with straw, and so to get through it, you'd have to dig through it to make a hole. Luke, however, says they went through the tiles. But in Israel they didn't have tiles. But Luke is writing to a Greek audience who did have tiles. And rather going through the architecture of talking about what things were like in Israel at the time, he just says they took off the tiles and went in. The point was they went through the roof. That's all that matters. The details different Luke contextualizes the story to his audience. Okay, I hope that makes some sense. And that's something I think that's part of the reason why we see some differences. Well, the final thing I want to talk about goes to the point of uh the secret gospel. Many people say that Mark is a secret gospel. And the reason is because he's always telling everybody, don't tell anyone. Don't tell anyone. That little girl that was raised from the dead, first thing he tells the parents is, don't tell anyone. Are you kidding me? I just saw my little girl rise from the dead, and I'm not going to tell anyone, don't tell anyone. The demons come up and they say, We know who you are. You're the holy one of God. Don't throw us into the abyss. He says, Don't tell anyone. You can see why he wouldn't want the demons to tell, just because that's not a very good witness, testimony. But every time he does something, don't tell anyone. He's going to heal somebody, takes them out of the village, and he heals them. He says, Don't go back in the village. Go and tell, show the priest, says, Don't tell anyone. Why is he saying don't tell anyone? And so if you could just scroll through those, there's many of these over and over again. Just go ahead until we get to the 16th chapter. I just want you to see there's a bunch there. I can't don't have time to go through it all. Here's something that happens in Mark. The bad actors know who Jesus is, but the good actors don't. The demons know who he is. But even his family doesn't. In the third chapter, the family comes and they think Jesus is crazy. They're gone to protect him from the other people. They don't get it. With the exception of the Mark passage in Mark 8 that I talked to you about with about Peter, where he says, You're the Christ. That's the only time a good actor understands who Jesus is. We even get to the end of the gospel, and when Jesus dies, the Roman Caturian says, Behold, this man was a son of God. The demons know, his executioner, his murderer knows. But the apostles are clueless, the family's clueless for the most part. The good guys know and the bad guys don't. Why does that why does he do that? And then when we get the verses seven and eight of chapter 16, where I think the gospel ends, let's look at seven, if you will. Mark 16, 7 should be the next slide. The angel says, But go tell his disciples and Peter that he's going ahead of you to Galilee. And then verse 8. So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Don't tell anyone, don't tell anyone, don't tell anyone. Angel finally says, Tell somebody, and they don't tell anyone. Why is Mark doing that? He's creating tension. Creating tension. The bad guys can't be the only ones who know who Jesus is. The bad guys can't just know. Here people go to the tomb and it's empty and they talk to an angel and they know he's resurrected. They don't tell anyone. I gotta tell somebody. I know as a reader, I read this and I understand who Jesus is. I see that the resurrection happened, that what Mark is saying, that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. He is the Savior of the world. He has died on the cross to forgive our sins. He's resurrected to give us eternal life. And we need through our actions, through our words, through our attitudes, to tell someone. Because it's not meant to be a secret gospel. Dear Jesus, thank you for the power of how you inspired Mark. Though we don't understand all the pieces totally, we do understand the outcome. Lord, you are Lord, you're Savior. You're the conqueror over nature and disease and demons and death. And I pray that we will know that, believe that, and live that through our words, through our actions, through our attitudes. Bless this study as the church continues through the Gospel of Mark. And most of all, bless our lives through the continuance of our day-by-day life that we might live with that conviction. In your name we pray. Amen. Amen.