Introduction to Mark

Take your Bibles with me and turn to the book of Mark. Mark 1.

This morning, I’m going to start something that may take me years to finish: I’m going to do a series through the book of Mark.

My very first Sunday as pastor here, almost seven years ago, I started preaching in Matthew 1:1. It took me more than two years to get through the book of Matthew. I don’t think it will take two years to get through Mark, but I know it’s going to take a long time.

This morning, we are just going to take 1 verse as our text: Mark 1:1

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

My goal this morning is to give you a foundation for the book of Mark. This is going to be more of a lesson than a sermon, but it’s important for us as we go forward through the book to understand a few things about it.

Specifically, there are four things I want us to understand this morning about this book:

1. I want us to understand the unique nature of the book of Mark.
2. I want us to understand who the human penman of the book of Mark was.
3. I want us to understand the Divine Subject of the book of Mark.
4. I want us to understand the important purpose of the book of Mark.

Let’s pray and ask the Lord to bless the word this morning, and we’ll jump right in.

Heavenly Father, I ask you as we prepare to go through this book of Mark, that you would use this book to speak to us and to change us. You’ve promised us that your word is powerful and able to divide our thoughts and intentions. You’ve told us that all of your Word is profitable for our lives and that your Word can make us perfect and thoroughly furnished to do your work. As we begin the gospel of Mark this morning, may you do a work in our hearts, may you prepare us to better serve you. We ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.

As I said, there are four things I want you to learn this morning about the book of Mark that are going to be important going forward. The first thing I want us to talk about is...

1. I want us to understand the unique nature of the book of Mark.

If you’ve ever read the New Testament, the very first thing you probably noticed is that there are these four books—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—that are all telling the same story. They are all telling the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. And that begs the questions: Why do we need four?

I think there are two reasons we have four gospels:

The first reason is so we get to view the life of Jesus from different angles. If you were a detective and you were trying to figure out what happened at a crime, you wouldn’t just want one witness. You’d take down several witness accounts and piece them together to get a full picture of what happened. God gives us four witnesses of Jesus—four gospels—so we can get a fuller picture of who Jesus was.

The second reason why we get four gospels is because they are written for four different types of people.

• The book of Matthew is distinctively Jewish and presents Jesus from a very Jewish perspective. It’s got a lot of things that have to do with the Jewish religion in it. In Matthew, Jesus is the Lion of Judah.
• The book of Luke, on the other hand, doesn’t say much about the Jewish religion. Luke is very erudite and full of Jesus’ teaching, and it presents Jesus as the perfect man. It seems to be written for the Greeks.
• John is a transcendent book that presents Jesus as the eagle. The whole purpose of John is to teach salvation and get us to believe the gospel.

And that leaves Mark. What is the angle of the book of Mark?

Well, let me tell you a few unique things about this book.

• First, it’s the shortest of the gospels. It’s about half as long as the other gospel records, and it skips a lot of content. No origin story. No genealogy. It just goes right into Jesus’ life.
• Second, Mark focuses on the ACTS of Jesus and not the teaching of Jesus. Mark doesn’t have a lot of dialogue. It’s just “Jesus did this and then Jesus did that.” In fact, the key words in the book of Mark are “immediately” and “straightway,” which occur over 40 times in this book.

I like to call the book of Mark “the Cliff Notes Gospel.” You know what “Cliff Notes” are right? When you are in school and you get assigned some massive book to read like War and Peace or something like that., you can go buy the Cliff Notes and get the summary without a bunch of the dialogue. You just get the main points.

Mark gets right to the point. It presents Jesus as a servant and as a doer. It talks a lot about Jesus’ miracles and His actions. If Luke was written to the learned Greeks and Matthew was written to the religious Jews, Mark was written to the action-oriented Romans.

There is an old saying that goes, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” Well, Jesus was the greatest teacher who ever lived, but He was also the greatest doer. There is nowhere we see that more clearly than in the book of Mark.

So the first thing is the unique nature of this book; it is a book of doing. The second thing I want us to understand by way of introduction this morning is...

2. I want us to understand who the human penman of the book of Mark was.

Every book of the Bible was ultimately written by the Holy Spirit. The words on the wall here remind us that ”All scripture is given by inspiration of God.” 1 Peter 1 tells us that ”Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” The author of the Bible is the Holy Spirit. You can have confidence that when you read the Bible you are reading the very word of God!

Even though the Holy Spirit is the author, the Holy Spirit spoke through human writers and used their personalities. Each book was co-written by someone, and this book was co-written by Mark.

Remember Mark? He was one of the twelve disciples. Matthew, Peter, John, James, Judas, Simon, Mark. Right?

Just kidding. Seeing if you are on your toes. No, Mark wasn’t one of the disciples. So who was he? This is actually really encouraging.

In the book of Acts, we first see Mark when it talks about his mom. His mother’s name was Mary, and she was a wealthy woman in Jerusalem who hosted a lot of the people in the early church. When Peter was miraculously released from prison in Acts 12, the place where everyone was praying was Mary the mother of Mark’s house.

Mark was also the nephew of Barnabas. Remember Barnabas? Paul and Barnabas. He was the guy who mentored Paul and went on the first missionary journey with him. That is the second place we see Mark in the Bible, because when Paul and Barnabas went on their first missionary journey, they decided to take Mark with them.

It was a scandal. Mark didn’t make it. He got about halfway through the missionary journey and Mark quit and took off for home.

In fact, Mark was partially responsible for breaking up the great duo of Paul and Barnabas. When Paul and Barnabas were going on their second missionary journey, Barnabas wanted to bring Mark, but Paul said “No way. That guy took off on us last time.” They couldn’t agree about it, so they parted ways and found new ministry partners.

So Mark failed...the end, right? Well, no. Mark later became a helper to the apostle Peter. Peter called Mark “his son in the faith.” In fact, a lot of people think that most of the book of Mark came from Peter, that Mark just recorded what Peter said, and that view makes a lot of sense.

Later on in Paul’s ministry, even Paul sent for Mark and said he was “profitable.” And of course, Mark was given the honor of being the human penman a book of the Bible, one of the gospel records.

So before I go any further this morning, I want to say this: Just like Mark, You might have had a terrible failure in your life, but failures aren’t final. God isn’t through with you; He can use you again. Proverbs says, “A just man falleth seven times, and riseth again,” and Jeremiah taught us that God’s mercies are ”new every morning.”

Our God is a God of second chances and third chances and fourth and fifth chances.

He’s the God who made a special trip after His crucifixion to see Peter. Remember: Peter had given up. Peter had publicly denied Jesus three times while Jesus was on the cross. Peter had gone back to fishing. But Jesus went after Peter and said, ”Feed my sheep.”

You may have fallen and you may have failed, but God isn’t through with you yet. There are still things you can do for God. Let Mark’s name at the top of this book be a reminder that God uses failures. Failure isn’t final.

So we’ve seen the unique nature of this book: It’s a short book full of Jesus’ actions. We’ve seen the human penman of this book: Mark. Let’s look at the third thing I want you to understand before we get into Mark...

3. I want us to understand the Divine Subject of the book of Mark.

Look at verse 1 again:

”The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God.”

This book is all about the greatest subject ever written about: Jesus Christ the Son of God.

I love biographies. I read biographies all the time. There are some people whom I so admire I’ve read several biographies about them. They are great subjects. No one was ever a greater subject than Jesus Christ.

And I want you to understand that Jesus’ name is special. Look at the three parts of His name here in verse 1:

Jesus

In Matthew 1:21 the angel came to Joseph and said, “You shall call his name Jesus: for He shall save his people from their sins.”. Jesus is a name that means “Jehovah is salvation.” It’s the New Testament version of the Old Testament name “Joshua.”

“Jesus” reminds us that He is our Savior. He didn’t just come to act and to serve and to do miracles. He didn’t just come to teach. He came to save. He came to die on the cross for our sins.

The second part of his name is:

Christ

A lot of folks think “Christ” is Jesus’ last name, like “Hayden” or “Roberts.” That’s not so. “Christ” is actually a title. Many times in scripture Jesus is called “the Christ.”

“Christ” actually means “messiah” or “anointed one.” When we call Jesus “the Christ” we are acknowledging that He is the one that all the Old Testament scriptures were pointing to. He is the one that is the fulfillment of all of the Old Testament.

The Jews didn’t understand this, but all of those Old Testament stories, rites and prophecies were just foreshadowing Jesus the Christ.

• In the story of Abraham, He was the lamb caught in the thickets that became a replacement for Isaac.
• In Exodus, He is the Passover lamb whose blood covered the households and kept away the angel of death.
• In the wilderness, He was the serpent on the pole that people could look to and be saved.
• In the tabernacle, He is the blood sprinkled on the Holy of Holies on the day of Atonement.
• In Ruth, He was the kinsman redeemer.
• In Song of Solomon, He was the chief among ten thousand and altogether lovely.
• In Isaiah, He is the one who Isaiah wrote about when he said, ”Surely He hath born our griefs and carried our sorrows.”
• In Haggai, He is the one that Haggai called ”The desire of nations”

And we could go on and on and on.

He is the Christ. He is the Messiah. He is the fulfillment of all of the Old Testament promises.

But Mark doesn’t just call Him Jesus and Christ. Mark calls Him:

The Son of God

He isn’t just a Savior. He isn’t just the anointed one. He is Divine. He is Emmanuel, God with us (Matthew 1:23). He is the only begotten son of God.

Many people will read the gospel records and the life of Jesus, and they’ll say, “He was a great man and a great teacher.” No. No, He was much, much more than that; He was the Son of God. He is a member of the Trinity. He is coequal and coexistent with God the Father.

Nobody could do the things we’ll read about in Mark but God. Nobody could command the storms, walk on water, raise the dead, and heal the blind. He’s God, folks.

And do you know what that means? That means when we read the acts of Jesus here in the book of Mark, we are seeing a living example of the character of God. You’ve all known someone who was “all talk.” You’ve all known someone whose “bark was worse than his bite.”

Here in the book of Mark we get to see that Jesus’ walk matched His talk, and we get to understand that His actions represent the Heart of God on display for us!

• When we see Jesus healing, we know God is a healing God.
• When we see Jesus raise the dead, we understand our God has power over death and life.
• When we see Him calm the storms, we know that God has power over the storms of life.
• When we see Him care - we know our God cares.

So, I’ve talked about the nature of this book, about the human penman, about the divine subject. There is just one more thing I want us to understand this morning and it is...

4. I want us to understand the important purpose of the book of Mark.

Look at verse 1, one more time:

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

Many people believe that this book was written in Rome, right after the book of Romans. The timeline goes like this: Mark is in Rome, and he gets to read the book of Romans and He thinks, “That’s good; that’s really good. Maybe these Roman people need to hear the backstory of this.”

So Mark sets out, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to write the story of Jesus’ life. “The beginning of the gospel.”. And like all of the gospel records, it’s going somewhere. It’s headed to the cross.

The word “gospel” means “good news.” The “good news” here isn’t Jesus’ life. It’s Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. Mark is just preparing us to hear that.

The good news is that Jesus died on the cross for your sins, He came to be your substitute. The good news is you just have to believe on Him, and you can be saved.

Have you trusted Christ as your savior? Have you believed the gospel? Has Christ been your substitute? It would be a shame to know all about Jesus as we study of the book of Mark, but not to know Him as your savior.

I want to give you the opportunity to trust Christ this morning. Let’s all stand together with every head bowed and every eye closed.