Mark 1

We now begin the briefest of the four gospels, a message that could be delivered in one sitting to an attentive group of hearers. It has not only brevity, but great power; and there is no doubt that it has a point. Mark does not make us wait very long in order to understand the facts about the book that he is writing, and the identity of the man who is at the center of this book and of our lives. In the first words of the first chapter we are told that the message that we are about to hear is the gospel, or good news, of Jesus. We are also told that this Jesus is the Christ, or Messiah, and the He is the Son of God.

Naturally those who are hearing this message for the first time may not yet know what all these words mean. They may see Jesus, whose name speaks of Yahweh and salvation, and they may see this Jesus as a Savior of some kind, but they may still have some very wrong ideas about the saving work that He does. These are not easy things to grasp. God sent someone before Jesus, John the Baptist, who prepared the way for Him, yet that preparation was a matter of repentance and moral righteousness. It was not primarily a preparation of spiritual knowledge.

Even during the days of Jesus' earthly ministry, His disciples would remain very confused about who He was and what He came to accomplish. Those matters would be more widely understood and proclaimed after Jesus had ascended to heaven and poured out the gift of the Holy Spirit upon His disciples. It is that event described in Acts 2 for the Jews and then later in Acts 10 for the Gentiles, which is referred to as an overwhelming baptism of the Holy Spirit upon the people of God. Through the gift of the Holy Spirit, together with the Spirit-inspired preaching and teaching of the truth eventually recorded in the New Testament writings, the church would come to a better understanding of the Messiah, the one identified by God's voice from heaven as "my beloved Son," well-pleasing to the Father.

This same Spirit who would be an Agent of grace and truth to the church sent forth from the ascended Son of God, was the One who at the beginning of His ministry led Jesus out into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. This spiritual battle was the beginning of our Lord's great work. After His accomplishments in that mysterious arena of angelic battle, Jesus turned His focus toward humanity, and went forth preaching the good news of God. He powerfully called men of His choosing to repent, believe, and follow Him as His disciples, and spoke to them of the task ahead for His church in the centuries to come, that we would be fishers of men.

Jesus not only went forth preaching and teaching, He was also demonstrating the power of the kingdom of heaven with many miracles. He displayed complete authority over oppressing angels known as demons. If we consider the fact that evil and misery have no place in the kingdom that Christ was showing to us, it should not surprise us that Jesus cast out demons, healed the sick, and give many signs of a new kind of life beyond the curse that has come to mankind because of sin.

People knew that there was something very different and powerful about this man, but not every person who observed Him liked what He said and did. Jesus did not live for the approval of the majority, nor did He seek the comforts that the powerful bestow upon their friends. He lived for the glory and joy of obedience to His Father, even when that led to the cross. His life was a life of prayer and service. His teaching had a power that was a display of divinity together with completely consecrated humanity together in one person.

One thing that we do not think about enough is the fact that Jesus worked very hard. He walked everywhere, preached and taught about a kingdom that people generally could not understand, had compassion on the weak, and faced the opposition of the strong. All of these things are very tiring, and though Jesus did take time to rest, very often people came to visit Him seeking His blessing and help, even when He was attempting to be alone.

It was not His goal to draw unnecessary attention to His own abilities. They were obvious, and needed no public relations campaign. Those who were healed by Him often found it impossible to keep themselves from spreading the word all around their spheres of influence concerning the greatness and power of this teaching Healer. Even now, anyone who knows Him for who He is, anyone who has come to see Him as the Lord's salvation, as the Messiah who delivers us from bondage, as the divine Son of a covenant-keeping God, cannot help but be enthusiastic about the aid that has come to us through His atoning death for undeserving sinners. In Him the deepest stains of our disobedience against God have been covered, and a complete release from all of the consequences of the fall has been definitively promised and displayed. There is no better news than the good news of what Jesus has done for us, and there is no better Lord than the God/Man at the very center of this good news.