Message preached Sunday, September 7, 2014 from Mark 1:14-15

Theme: Mark tells us the characteristics the message Jesus proclaimed at the beginning of His earthly ministry.

(Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture references are taken from The Holy Bible, New King James Version; copyright 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc.)

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^[2]In our study of the Gospel of Mark, we come this morning to the official beginning—as Mark reports it to us—of the earthly ministry of Jesus.

So far, the things that we have studied have been preparatory to the story of that ministry. In verses 1-8, we read of the work of John the Baptist in announcing Jesus’ coming; and of how, in the story of Jesus’ baptism in verses 9-11, God the Father Himself declared to Him, “You are My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Last Sunday, we considered our Lord’s forty-day period of testing in the wilderness in verses 12-13; and that too was preparatory for His ministry.

And now, in verses 14-15—according to Mark’s telling of the story—the Lord’s ministry officially begins. He begins by telling us the basics of the message that our Lord began to proclaim to the world. And though we’re told about Jesus’ message in only two verses, every word is of great importance.

Mark writes;

Now after John was put in prison, Jesus came to Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel” (vv. 14-15).

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The Bible tells us in several places that Jesus “went about teaching”. People called Him “Teacher”. Most people today would still call Him a great Teacher. But if you asked around, you’d find that everyone has their own opinion about what it was that Jesus taught.

Some folks say that Jesus’ message long ago was a simple philosophy of love—that His great commandment was that we should all love one another. Others say that it was a message about the fundamental brotherhood of mankind—that God is our Father and that all people are brothers and sisters under Him. Still others today say that it was a message of tolerance and respect for others—that Jesus didn’t go around condemning people or judging them; but that He accepted them and welcomed them for who they were. Many make Jesus’ message out to be one of justice and equality. They would say that “the gospel” for Jesus was a truly “social gospel”; and that He taught that we should care for the poor and needy, do what we can to alleviate the suffering in the world, and demand that the rich and the privileged should give of their wealth to meet the needs of others.

A few elements of those kinds of things can be found in the things that Jesus said—not as much as some think, but certainly to some degree. But in the end, you just can’t help feeling that most people tend to make the basic message of Jesus out to be mere expressions of their own cherished beliefs and biases—that they merely project their own values and priorities on to Jesus, and make Him out to be the great Teacher of the things that they believe. After all, if you can make Jesus out to be the great Proclaimer of your particular cause, you will have secured for yourself the greatest endorsement of them all!

But let’s forget about everyone’s mere opinion. What did Jesus really say? What did He really preach? What really was His fundamental message? I believe that the value of this morning’s passage is that Mark—in just a few words—gives us an authoritative answer to that question. It gives us the basic fundamentals that we need to know of Jesus’ message to the world—expanded in the rest of things He did and said that are told to us in this Gospel and in the other Gospel accounts, and further explained for us in the rest of the New Testament by the apostles.

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Now; I hope you don’t mind if I take the time to establish something very important in our thinking. If we are going to treat Mark’s summary of Jesus’ message fairly—and, in fact, if we are going to rightly understand everything else that this Gospel account has to tell us about Him—we have to be sure that we see it in the light of what Mark has already told us about Jesus at the very beginning.

Look at the first verse of this Gospel; where we’re told, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (v. 1). That’s who we are asked to believe that Jesus was. When we read the story of Jesus’ baptism, we see that the heavens opened up above Him, the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in the form of a dove, and the Father affirmed that Jesus was His beloved Son in whom He was well-pleased. The message of Jesus, then, was not the message of a mere man. It was and is—as the apostle John would put it—the message of “the Word made flesh”; the message of the Son of God, having come into the world and having lived among us.

But it was also truly the message of a Man. Mark has told us that this very same Jesus—the Word made flesh—was also driven out into the wilderness by the Spirit for forty days to be tempted by the devil. He suffered the trial of temptation to sin. He felt the frailties of humanity. He knew what it was like to suffer the pains of human frailty that we suffer. This, then, is the message of the Son of God who had become fully human and who had entered into the experiences of humanity that we experience. It was the message of the eternal Son of God to mankind, but put compassionately in human terms by a fellow human so that people can relate to it.

And I would add that it was a message that bore great authority. John the Baptist was a man who was recognized as a mighty prophet of God. He spoke with great authority to the people of his day. But Mark tells us that, in his preaching, John said, “There comes One after me who is mightier than I, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to stoop down and loose. I indeed baptize you with water, but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit” (vv. 7-8).

We need to remember all these things when we read what Mark tells of Jesus’ message to the world. In fact, I believe that doing so is essential to rightly understanding everything we read in any of the Gospels. We have got to constantly keep in mind how the story began. We must remember what the Gospels affirm about Jesus from the very beginning. If we don’t do that, we will make the terrible mistake that so many people make: that of trying to pull Jesus’ teaching and His actions out of the context of who He Himself is presented to be in them. We just end up treating the teaching ministry of Jesus as if it were the philosophic thoughts of merely a very insightful man; and not treating them as what they are actually presented to be—the infallible proclamations of the Son of God to mankind!

When you read the miracles that Jesus performed, or the authority that He exercised over demons, or the ways that He astounded His opponents with His teaching, don’t just look at those things in and of themselves. Remember how each of those individual stories prove what we’re told at the very start of John’s Gospel; “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”; that “All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made”; and that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”. Remember how the Gospel’s of Matthew and Luke both tell us of His genealogy—that He was born from the royal bloodline of King David, according to God’s prophetic promise in the Old Testament Scriptures many centuries before. Remember how those Gospels tell us of the miracle of His conception—how Matthew says that Joseph was told that He would be conceived in the womb of the virgin Mary as an act of the Holy Spirit; and how Luke says that Mary was told, that the Holy Spirit would come upon her, and the power of the Highest would overshadow her; and that “therefore also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God”. Remember how the Gospel of Luke tell us that His birth was announced by an angel as “good tidings of great joy which will be to all people”—and that He is born as their Savior. Remember how the angels of heaven burst in upon the earth at the news of His birth and sang, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men!” Everything that we then go on to read in those Gospels serves to prove the truth of what we’re told about Jesus at the very beginning!

So then; when we study what Mark tells us about the preaching ministry of Jesus, let’s keep in mind that it’s the ministry of that very same divine Person—the Son of God in human flesh—that we’re talking about! His teaching in the Scriptures must never be taken out of the context of who the Scriptures say He is. In fact, His preaching ministry—and everything else He did—serves to affirm to us the very truth of what we’re told about Him from the very beginning.

His message to the world is what it is because of who He is; and who He is is what His preaching ministry was all about.

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So then; what does Mark tell us about the message that Jesus began to preach in His earthly ministry? The first thing that I suggest we see is that . . .

1. IT WAS A BOLD MESSAGE.

I draw this from what Mark tells us in verse 14 about the timing of Jesus’ preaching ministry; “Now after John was put in prison . . .” (v. 14).

Mark doesn’t tell us everything that happened in the life of Jesus. If you follow the chronology of things as they are presented to us in the other Gospels, you find that there may have been as much as a year that passed between Jesus’ baptism and the time that John was put into prison. There were lots of things that happened during that time. John continued to baptize; and so did Jesus and His disciples. There was no conflict between John’s ministry and Jesus’ ministry. John’s ministry was preparatory to Jesus’ ministry; and Jesus’ ministry was the fulfillment of all that John had worked to proclaim.

Did you know that Jesus preached the same thing that John preached? If you look at Matthew 3:2, you find that John’s preaching can be summed up in these words: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” And when John was put into prison, we find in our passage this morning that Jesus took up the same message: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel”. It wasn’t that Jesus stole John’s message. Rather it was that John’s message was preparatory to Jesus’ message.

And I don’t believe that Jesus’ message was the same as John’s in content only. I believe Jesus’ message was preached in the same sort of manner that John’s message was preached—that is in a bold, fiery, authoritative way! Do you remember why John was put into prison? In Mark 6, we’re told that King Herod put John in prison for the sake of his wife Herodias. Herodias had been married to Herod’s brother Philip. But she left Philip and married Herod—in complete violation of the law of God in the Scriptures. John confronted this whole scandalous ‘soap-opera’, boldly pointed a finger at the king, and telling him, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” The result was that John was thrown into prison—and eventually beheaded. And when John was put into prison, that marked the end of his service in the plan of God; and from then on—according to Mark—Jesus’ public ministry of preaching began in full earnest. And Jesus preached with so much of the boldness that had characterized John’s preaching—and with a message so much like the one John delivered—that when Herod heard about it, he mistakenly said, “This is John, whom I beheaded; he has been raised from the dead!”

I take this to mean that the picture we characteristically have of Jesus in His teaching ministry—a picture of the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, teaching quietly in the lily-covered meadows to whoever might wish to hear Him—was probably very rarely how things really were. Jesus’ message was delivered with stunning boldness! Just like those who once went out to arrest Him said—after they came back without Him—“No man ever spoke like this Man!” (John 7:46).

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I note a second thing we see about this bold message of Jesus . . .

2. IT WAS PREACHED TO THE WORLD.

We’re told, “Now after John was put in prison, Jesus came to Galilee . . .” (v. 14). Galilee was the third division of Palestine in Jesus’ day. Judea was in the southern region, Samaria was in the middle, and Galilee was way up north. And though He certainly spoke and taught occasionally in Judea and in Samaria, it was after John was imprisoned—and because of the growing animosity that He felt from the Pharisees—that He began His preaching ministry in earnest in the regions of Galilee.

In Galilee—of all places! He did not begin in the regions of Judea—in the religious center of His people where it would have been considered a worthy place to begin; but in Galilee! Galilee was a most unworthy place! People in Judea tended to look down on Galileans. Do you remember when the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, and how the disciples of Jesus began to speak the mighty works of God in languages that they had not learned? Do you remember how the people were amazed and said, “Look, are not all these who speak Galileans?” (Acts 2:7).

Galilee, in the time of Jesus, was at the crossroads of the nations in the ancient world. It was near the ancient ports, and lots of armies and merchants and politicians passed through it. It was a thoroughly cosmopolitan area where Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic was heard in its marketplaces, and were Syrians and Romans and Barbarians and Jews were all mixed together. One historian called it “a land of passing excitements and dangerous fashions, of a barbarous dialect and offensive manners”.^{1 [3]} If Jesus had wanted to stay in His homeland, and yet get as close as He could to the edge of the rough and needy Gentile world and—as it were—preach “across the street” to them, there would have been no better place to go than to Galilee.

And that’s a mercy from God. Did you know that God promised this would happen long ago in the Book of Isaiah? In a prophecy about the coming Messiah, God said;

Nevertheless the gloom will not be upon her who is distressed,
As when at first He lightly esteemed
The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali,
And afterward more heavily oppressed her,
By the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan,
In Galilee of the Gentiles.
The people who walked in darkness
Have seen a great light;
Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death,
Upon them a light has shined (Isaiah 9:1-2).

What a gracious thing it is that Jesus preached His message in the regions of Galilee! It makes His message to truly be a message for the whole world!

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Here’s another thing we see about this message . . .

3. IT DECLARED THE GOOD NEWS FROM GOD.

We’re told that Jesus went to Galilee, “preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God . . .” (v. 14). That’s how it reads in the translation I’m using. If you are using a different translation, it will just say, “preaching the gospel of God”; and that represents the way it is written in the most reliable texts of the original language. It is certainly a gospel about the kingdom; because it says so in the next verse. But what Mark is wanting to stress to us is that Jesus preached “the gospel of God”. It is not a message from man. It is a message to man from God.

And it’s the gospel of God. We use the word “gospel” a lot; but do you know what it means? (We’re speaking here not of one of the four authorized ‘biographies’ of the life of our Lord in the Bible—that is, the four Gospels; but rather of the message itself that those four Gospels proclaim.) The word “gospel” means “good news” or “glad tidings”; and that’s what we’re told that Jesus’ message to the world was—“good news” of God!—the “glad tidings” that have God as their source. God has a message to the world; and He sent His Son to boldly proclaim it; and it is very ‘good news’!

Think of that! The message that the Son of God boldly proclaimed to the world from God His Father was not a message of doom and gloom. It was not a divinely wrathful message to this sinful, fallen world of condemnation and rejection and judgment. Jesus—in His famous conversation with Nicodemus in John 3—said;

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved” (John 3:16-17).

When we hear the word “gospel”—the good news—I believe we should take it to be the news of the story in the four Gospels of all that Jesus is and of all that He has done for us—how He left His glory in heaven, was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the virgin Mary, was born into this world and lived a sinless life; who taught about the kingdom of God and proved Himself by doing good and performing miracles; who took our sins on Himself and died in our place on the cross, was raised from the dead three days later, has ascended to the Father, and will come again for His people!

That’s the story of all that God has done to make it possible for us to be saved! That’s very, very good news to needy sinners like us! Oh, how we need to hear it! How glad we should be that Jesus faithfully proclaimed it!

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Look when this message made its appearance. Mark tells us . . .

4. IT ANNOUNCED THE FULLNESS OF TIME.

Jesus went out preaching it, “and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand’” (v. 15).

You can’t see it in the English translation; but Jesus is using what is called ‘the perfect tense’ in these words. The perfect tense refers to a completed action. The ‘time’ or ‘fit season’ is now ‘fulfilled’ or ‘accomplished’; and the kingdom of God is now ‘at hand’ or ‘brought near’. Jesus didn’t, of course, say that the kingdom itself is now fulfilled or accomplished or completed; because He would yet need to die on the cross, and be raised, and go back to heaven, and one day return. There would yet—as we know—be at least two-thousand years of the spread of the soul-saving gospel around the world. But the long wait was over; and the beginning of things that would set His reign in motion had come. The kingdom was at hand; because He—the King—was now present with them and was speaking to them.

This means that Jesus’ coming into the world two-thousand years ago was the absolutely right time—the absolutely perfect season—for Him to come. All the promises of God had been established, all of His people were where He wanted them to be, all of the political situations of the world were right, all the roads and languages and cultures were as they needed to be. As it says in Galatians 4:4;

But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law” (Galatians 4:4).

As the apostle Peter said in Acts 3:24;

“Yes, and all the prophets, from Samuel and those who follow, as many as have spoken, have also foretold these days” (Acts 3;24).

As Paul put it in 2 Corinthians 6:2.

“Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2).

Jesus did not come into this world one minute too soon or one minute too late. He came at just the right time in history—in the perfect providence of God—to announce His message to the world that, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.”

* * * * * * * * * *

And there’s one more thing to note about this message from our Lord . . .

5. IT CALLED FOR A RESPONSE.

He put it this way: “Repent, and believe in the gospel” (v. 15). To “repent” simply means to ‘change one’s mind’—to think differently. It means to have encountered the message of Jesus in such a way as to turn away from old thinking and old ways, and to change to new thinking and new ways. It means not only a transformation of mind, but also of action—to turn away from sin. But Jesus also said, “and believe in the gospel”; and that would mean to place one’s faith in the good news of all that Jesus is and of what He has done for us.

This two-fold call is not put in the perfect tense—as if Jesus expects a once-for-all-time response from us. Instead, the two words “repent” and “believe” are put in what’s called the “present tense” form; which suggests that the response is to be an ongoing habit of a transformed life. Jesus is calling people—in the light of the fullness of the times and the nearness of the kingdom—to get into the habit of continually repenting of sin and continually conforming our beliefs to the truth of the gospel. And that is to be our response to Jesus’ message. We ourselves are to continually, habitually respond to the teaching of Jesus with repentance and faith in the gospel. And we are to take up the message of Jesus and proclaim this same call to the people around the world—that in the light of the fullness of the times and the nearness of the kingdom, they too are invited to repent of their sin and believe the good news of what Jesus has done for us.

In fact, I would even suggest to you that this ought to characterize the ministry of our church. There are a whole lot of things that a church can feel pressured to do. But our Lord’s call to us isn’t necessarily to develop new programs, or to entertain people with great performances and exciting events, or to become a busy hub of activity. Rather, our Lord’s call is to become a community in which we ongoingly, habitually, continually, progressively help each other to repent of our old sinful way of life, and grow together increasingly to believe the truths of the gospel that are told to us in God’s word and apply them to everyday life. If we did just that, we would be busy in the work of this church for the rest of our lives!

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So just think back again to all the things that people speculate that Jesus taught! How wonderful it is that here, in a few simple words, we’re told the basic message Jesus proclaimed to the world. We’re not left to guess at it and speculate about it anymore. The message is simple: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”

That is the authorized summary of Jesus’ message to the world. Let’s make very sure we responded to it as He said!

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Stuart Blanch, Encounters with Jesus (Hodder & Stoughton, 1988), cited in Donald English, The Message of Mark (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1992), pp. 48-9.

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