[This Transcript generated with AI - my apologies for any errors]
Mark chapter 1.
I was listening last night to a Bob Dylan song.
And Bob Dylan, only songwriter to my knowledge, who has won the Nobel Prize for literature, doesn't have a great voice to listen to, but the songs are often interesting.
And the particular song that I was listening to was Gotta Serve Somebody.
And that song runs through a list of all these different things you could be, and I'm not going to remember it word for word,
But he says you could be a powerful businessman or you could be somebody living on the street.
You could be sleeping on the floor.
You could be sleeping in a mansion on a king-size bed in a fancy home.
You could be anybody in this world.
But in the end, you gotta serve somebody.
It might be the devil and it might be the Lord.
You gotta serve somebody.
And while we might question whether we should take our theology from songwriters,
He's not coming up with that on his own.
The Apostle Paul says the exact same thing in Romans chapter 6, where he says that believers or anybody, not just believers, any human being is either going to be a slave to sin or a slave to righteousness.
Romans 6 verse 20, when you were slaves of sin, you were free regard to righteousness.
But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed?
The end of those things is death.
But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.
The options are not slavery.
Freedom, it's what kind of slavery?
Yeah, there's freedom in there.
True freedom, Jesus says in John 8, is to know the truth and the truth will set you free.
But as you know the truth and the truth sets you free, God's definition of freedom is to have the free ability to gladly obey him, to gladly serve him, to be a slave.
And so the New Testament writers often identify themselves as slaves or bondservants of Jesus Christ.
That's one of the most striking things in the letters of James and Jude.
These guys were half-brothers of Jesus.
But when they write letters to churches, they don't start off by asserting their authority as, well, here I am Jude, a half-brother of Christ.
No, he says, Jude, a brother of James and a servant or a slave of Jesus Christ.
We all have to serve somebody.
Jesus makes clear in Matthew chapter 6 verse 24 that there really are only two options.
You can't serve more than one master at a time.
You can only serve one.
There in Matthew 6 24 Jesus says you can't serve God and money, but the word that we get translated as money is mammon, which is a name for a false god.
You can either serve false gods or you can serve the real God.
And as human beings, God has given us a choice.
Now we're born inclined to make the wrong choice.
Ephesians 2 says that we are by nature children of wrath following the course of this world, following the course of the prince of the power of the air, the spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience.
We are born naturally inclined to serve Satan, not God.
But we are made in the image of God.
Genesis 1, 26-28.
says that God made man in his image and his likeness.
And Genesis 9, which is after the fall and after the flood, still refers to man as being made in the image of God.
So that imprint, that stamp, that knowing we need to be serving God is something we can't escape.
Everyone has that.
That impulse, that desire to find something or someone to worship that isn't ourselves, that is
part of God's image in us.
We know we are to be worshiping.
In Joshua chapter 24, he puts before the people a really stark contrast.
Joshua 24 says, If it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, then choose this day whom you will serve.
Whether the gods your father served in the region beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites and whose land you dwell.
But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
Joshua knows you got to serve somebody.
You can serve those false gods beyond the river, the false gods that are here, or you can serve the one true God.
And when Jesus comes in his preaching ministry in the Gospel of Mark, he gives people the same choice.
He says in Mark 115, the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the gospel.
And what he's saying is you need to repent of your sins, that is, turn from worshiping the false gods and worship the true God.
And the Jews, of course, thought they were worshiping the true God.
They had the Old Testament.
They, at least to some extent, knew who Yahweh was.
And yet Jesus is going to render a verdict on their worship that says it's not true worship of Yahweh.
In the end, they're still desiring to satisfy their own lusts and to assert their own will.
And in the end, they're trying to worship themselves.
They still have false gods, even if they have the right religious system.
Jesus calls people to repent of their sins and to follow him.
He does that in verses 16 through 20 as he calls Andrew,
and Simon and James and John.
But the question we should have is, is serving Jesus a safe bet?
Is serving Jesus really what we want to do with our life?
Because his demands are pretty high.
As you go through the Gospels over and over again, Jesus, just here in verses 16 through 20, Jesus had told Andrew and Simon to leave their job.
to leave their boats, leave their nets and follow him.
He gets to James and John and says, leave, leave your father, leave your work and follow me.
Later on, these guys are going to be called to leave everything for three years to follow him, to leave their families behind as they travel around and serve him.
Ultimately, these men will lose their lives, all except John of the original apostles, lose their lives.
Jesus, following Jesus can cost you everything.
So is it a smart thing to do?
We all have authorities in our lives.
We all have to serve somebody, but we should pick the right somebody to serve.
And in Mark 20, chapter one, verses 21 to 34, Jesus demonstrates that he indeed is the one who has all authority and he is the one that we should serve.
Following Jesus is the only safe bet.
Verses 21 and 22, we see that Jesus teaches with authority.
Verse 21 says, And they went into Capernaum.
So this is right after he's called these first four disciples.
They were alongside the sea.
They go into town, into Capernaum.
And immediately on the Sabbath, he entered a synagogue and was teaching.
The synagogue was the center of Jewish worship outside of the temple.
So the temple is where the sacrifices were and there was teaching that took place in the temple courts.
A lot that happened there, but during the time of the exile when the people, the temple had been destroyed and the people were not in the land of Israel, they started having these gatherings where they had basically like a worship service that was centered around the word of God.
They would read from the scroll.
Somebody would explain what was taught and they would pray and they would sing.
A modern, like a Christian worship service.
You think like, where did that come from?
What is it based in?
And some people would try to tie it back to the temple system, where the center of what's happening is a sacrifice.
But I think if you look at the New Testament, that's actually not where our structure for a service comes from.
We're a lot more closely based to the synagogue system.
The temple system finds its fulfillment in Christ.
Calvin's favorite quote from the catechism is that Christ died once for all, which is just taken out of Hebrews.
Christ's sacrifice is sufficient.
There is no more need for a sacrifice.
So our service isn't based around sacrifices and blood and all of this.
Our service is based around God speaking to us through his word, which is
What the synagogue was all about, God speaking to his people through his word.
And so it became to pass that even after they rebuilt the temple, anytime there was a place where more than 10 Jewish men were present, they could have a synagogue.
And so here in Capernaum there is one and Jesus shows up as a traveling rabbi essentially at this point.
He's a traveling teacher and he's invited as the visitor to come in and to read from the scroll and to give the teaching.
And he does so.
He goes in and was teaching, verse 21 says.
And his teaching floors them.
They are taken aback.
They are in awe of what Jesus has to say.
Verse 22, and it says, They were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as one of the scribes.
If you do some reading on like the Jewish style of teaching that day, a lot of times, especially if you didn't have like one of the trained scribes, like you just had literate men who were standing up to do the teaching, a lot of it was question based, like and you would work through questions and go back and forth and discuss it until you kind of came to
Conclusions.
But Jesus doesn't teach like that.
Jesus got up and he spoke with authority the word of God.
And the question I have as I read that is, why is that an indication of his divine authority?
Why does that strike them as different?
The book of Isaiah has a couple of different places where it tells them
That God is coming and he will be their teacher.
That he is going to be the one who will teach Israel.
And all through the Old Testament, God's speech is authoritative.
God's speech does all kinds of things in the Bible.
It's creative and it's power.
All of the universe exists because of the speech of God.
In Genesis chapter 1, ten times it uses the phrase, God said.
Everything that exists is the result of God speaking it into existence.
In Exodus chapter 3, when God reveals himself especially to Moses, he speaks from the bush.
And when Moses says, well, who am I supposed to tell the people sent me to go save them?
And God says, I am that I am.
God speaks to him and his name is I Am.
In Exodus chapter 20, when God gives the people the law, we think of the Ten Commandments as kind of being the center of the law, the Decalogue, the Ten Laws.
But actually, in Hebrew, those Ten Laws, those Ten Commandments are called the Ten Words.
It's the Word of God has been given to the people.
And in Psalm 19, Psalm 19 is one of my favorite psalms because the first half of it
talks about like the splendor of God, the revelation of God in creation, how the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
And when you just, you walk outside, you can kind of see some stars around here, but like if you get someplace where it's really dark and you can really see the stars, you think, yeah, the sky above is proclaiming God's handiwork.
But even with all of that, like it's not enough to actually get us to God.
You can walk outside and you can look and marvel at the world around you.
And it shows you that God is there, but it's not actually enough to get you saved, to make you right with God.
But here, starting in verse 7, it says, The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.
The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.
The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.
The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.
The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever.
The rules of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold.
Sweeter also than honey and the drippings of the honeycomb.
Moreover, by them your servant is warned.
In keeping them there is great reward.
God's word imparts wisdom.
It is life-giving.
It revives the soul.
And when Jesus came and spoke with divine, direct,
Authority, it pointed to the fact that this is not a mere man.
Because no man can just stand up and declare, thus says the Lord, with that kind of authority.
If I say that, you have not just the ability, but the obligation to say, but is this actually what it says?
If I stand here and say, thus says the Lord, which sometimes I do, you have to look at the Bible and say, did he get it right?
But when Jesus stood up, the people were just taken aback.
Like he has authority.
He's not like one of the scribes.
This is someone who's speaking with God's authority himself.
How do we hear God with that kind of authority today?
I once taught an adult Sunday school class on the subject at LBC, and I thought it was going to be like a five week subject.
Like, how do we hear God speak today?
I don't even know how long that class wound up being because I just got stuck on this deep dive.
I think I spent five or six weeks just in Deuteronomy looking at how God uses his word to speak.
His written word, his revelation to us is how God speaks today.
So often we're waiting to hear some kind of voice or impression from the Lord.
We're waiting for him to show himself specifically to us while at the same time neglecting what he has already written down.
what he has already said.
And if we're not going to pay attention to what he's already said, he's not going to give us more than that.
You can count on that.
We should, like the psalmist, look at the word of God as sweeter than honey from the honeycomb, more to be desired than gold, even much fine gold.
We should take and eat, metaphorically speaking, and be astonished at the words of God.
We should be astonished that Jesus, who John chapter 1 calls the Word, would speak to us in this way.
And that same Word who spoke the universe into existence will shape and heal and revive our souls through his Word.
The second thing we see in this text is that Jesus has authority over demons and demonic power.
Verse 23 of Mark chapter 1, And immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit.
And he cried out, What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?
Have you come to destroy us?
I know who you are, the Holy One of God.
But Jesus rebuked him, saying, Be silent, and come out of him.
And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying out with a loud voice, came out of him.
And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, What is this, a new teaching with authority?
He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.
Just imagine how jarring it would be.
We're sitting here having church and somebody just like stands up randomly and starts acting demon possessed, acting totally out of their mind.
This demonic power has taken them over and is speaking.
How jarring would that
Before we talk about Jesus' interaction with this demon-possessed man, I think it's interesting, how does the demon seem to notice him?
We had this conversation last night at the dinner table.
The demon doesn't start acting this way toward Jesus the moment Jesus walks into the synagogue.
It's after Jesus has been teaching.
It's after Jesus has spoken with the authority of God himself.
And it's that divine authoritative preaching that the demon recognizes and says, I know who this is.
This is the Holy One from God.
This is the eternal Son of God who is speaking.
He recognizes Jesus by the teaching.
And in verse 24, it seems that the demon is terrified by the presence of Jesus.
What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?
Have you come to destroy us?
I know who you are.
You're the Holy One of God.
Have you come to destroy us, the demon asks.
As we look at the scriptures, the answer to that question is,
Yeah, that's exactly why he came.
That is exactly why Jesus came.
1 John 3 says Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil.
In Hebrews chapter 2 verses 14 and 15, Hebrews 2, 14 and 15 says, Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself, that is Jesus,
Likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.
So we think, why did Jesus come?
Well, Mark 10, 40, 5 and following says that the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.
So Jesus came to save us from our sins.
But in that death, which paid for our sins, he is also destroying the devil.
He's destroying Satan's power.
He's destroying the works of this, the one who has taken hold of this man.
And one of the themes in Mark's gospel,
is
He offers Jesus, hey, if you will worship me, I'll give you authority over the world.
And I think Satan has the right to say that, that he would give Jesus this authority, but Jesus didn't come to borrow Satan's authority.
Jesus came to crush Satan, to bind him and plunder his house and to take the authority from him and receive true authority as the God-man from the Father.
Jesus says in Matthew 28,
All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.
It's been given to him, Daniel 7 says, by the Ancient of Days, God the Father gives this authority to Jesus.
And in doing so, it's removed from Satan.
Jesus came into this world and in making payment for sins and in preaching the gospel, Satan is losing power all the time.
In Revelation 12, it talks about
Satan being cast down from heaven and he's furious and I was reading a book by Michael Horton who's a theologian down in California and the way he put it is that Satan no longer has prosecuting power because he's been cast out of heaven.
He no longer has the ability to accuse the saints before God's throne the way he did for Job.
All he's got left is persecuting power, roaming around like
Like a roaring lion, 1 Peter 5 says, seeking whom he may devour.
Satan's still active in this world, but he's so visibly active because he knows his days are numbered.
His scope of authority has been bound and it's getting smaller and smaller all the time as the gospel goes forward.
We live in a different age than those did before Christ came.
And what a blessed age it is where the Spirit is at work
in a New Way
has power over this demon and over demonic spirits.
He speaks to this demon and the demon must obey him.
He's not happy about it.
The man convulses, he cries out in a loud voice, but he comes out of the man.
The man is freed from this demonic oppression.
And this serves to validate the authority of Jesus' teaching.
See that in verse
27, and they were all amazed so that they questioned among themselves saying, what is this?
A new teaching with authority, with authority.
He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him.
The people seem to connect rightly the dots between if he has power over demons, then we should probably listen to what he has to say.
And because of that, his fame spreads.
verse 28, and at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all of the surrounding region of Galilee.
And that's a theme that's going to build as the book goes forward.
Jesus becomes so popular that by the end of chapter one, he can't even go into town.
He can't even get into town because people are coming to him at such a number that he can't enter town without just being swarmed with people.
The third thing we see here, beginning in verse 29,
is that Jesus has authority, not just in his teaching and not just over demons, but Jesus has authority over the human body.
Verse 29, And he immediately left the synagogue and entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John.
Now Simon's mother-in-law lay ill with a fever, and immediately they told him about her.
And he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her, and she began to serve them.
They would have gone from the synagogue service, so that would have been on a Sabbath day.
And the Sabbath went from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday.
And so they would have gone to this house, then after the Sabbath officially ends, there would be a meal prepared.
And they would eat this big meal together at the home of Simon and Andrew.
And as they go in here,
They're told or Jesus is told about the illness that Simon's mother-in-law is facing.
And yeah, I'm not gonna go down that rabbit hole.
Never mind.
But she lays here and Jesus is brought to her.
And it's so simple and straightforward.
Because every time I read it, I was like, there's no fanfare in this miracle like there is in some of them.
You know, he just walks up to her, doesn't really
I took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her.
That's all he does, and she's healed.
But one thing I had passed over is like you think about when you have a fever and the fever breaks, you still generally feel pretty worn out.
Like it's hard on your body, right?
And so it might still be another day or two or three before you feel quite yourself.
Listening to J.C.
Ryle's commentary on this, and he pointed out that, you know, she gets up and she immediately begins serving.
The wholeness she receives is full.
It's not just that Jesus took the fever away.
Jesus made her fully well to the point where she's able to get up and go make Sabbath dinner for these guys.
And as sundown comes, well, word gets out still more.
that said, okay, Sabbath is over.
We can start carrying our sick people to Jesus.
They weren't allowed to bear burdens on the Sabbath, but as soon as that sign goes down, everybody is flooding to Jesus at the house of Simon and Andrew.
And as they do, I mean, it's just like the whole city is gathered at the door.
We don't know how big Capernaum was, but it's probably a pretty sizable city.
There's a tax booth there.
That's where Jesus calls
Matthew from the tax collectors booth is in Capernaum and there's all this fishing commerce that happens here on the Sea of Galilee
So it's probably a pretty decent sized town.
And while it's probably not literally the whole city, I mean, he's just using the figure of speech here to say that everybody's coming to see Jesus.
Everybody wants to get in.
Anybody who's got somebody sick wants to get their sick family member or friend to Jesus.
Anybody who knows someone that has problems with demon possession wants to get that person to Jesus so that they can be freed.
And if you don't have either of those problems, you want to see what's happening.
You want to see him at work.
Everybody's coming.
to See Jesus.
Verse 33, The whole city was gathered together at the door.
Verse 34 is interesting.
And he healed many who were sick with various diseases.
It's not like Jesus is a one-trick pony where he can heal this kind of thing over here, but not this kind of thing over here.
He healed all kinds of stuff.
And he cast out many demons.
But then here at the end of verse 34, it says something interesting.
And he would not permit the demons to speak.
Because He Knew Them.
He would not permit the demons to speak because they knew Him.
If you notice back in verse 25, I believe it was, Jesus speaks to that first demon.
Jesus rebuked him saying, be silent and come out of him.
He says, be silent right after the demon has said, I know who you are, the Holy One of God.
And here, Jesus will not let the demons speak because, for the reason that they knew him.
It's not that the demons were saying something wrong.
It's not that the demons were going to mislead people when they said, this is the Holy One of God.
They're exactly right.
But Jesus, knowing that they're right, won't let them speak.
Some commentators
think that Jesus didn't want the demons to be the witness to the truth because then Jesus would be tied to the demons.
I don't think that makes any sense at all.
Number one, because of what Jesus says later on in chapter three, that he's casting out the demons.
What good would it do Satan to cast out demons?
And secondly, Jesus is having to answer that objection in chapter three.
So if he was not wanting the demons to witness to him because, well, he might be tied to the demons,
Well, then it didn't work because the religious leaders are still saying, well, you're doing this with Satan power.
So that doesn't make any sense to me.
I think a better explanation is that the demons knew who Jesus was, but the people didn't.
And Jesus did not want at this point in his ministry, people to know that he was the Holy One of God.
He's demonstrating it.
His teaching proves it, but he's not explicitly telling people this yet.
That builds more and more.
As you get further into Jesus' ministry, he gets clearer and clearer.
But early on, I don't think he wanted people to know exactly who he was.
His identity was veiled.
Multiple times we're told that Jesus taught in parables so that the people would not understand him.
So that seeing they would not see and hearing they would not hear.
Quoting there from Isaiah chapter 6.
He did not want the people to embrace him as the Messiah before he had first corrected, through his preaching and through his ministry, their expectations of what the Messiah was supposed to be.
His work on the cross was necessary, and if they would have
Seeing Jesus as the Messiah before he had taught them thoroughly about the Messiah and gone to the cross, then they would have still been embracing the wrong God.
They would have a Messiah of their own making, not who he actually was.
They would have been looking for him to just save them from their oppression, from their sickness, and from their pain.
They would have a faith that took no account of sin.
Jesus didn't want that kind of faith from the people in that day.
He doesn't want that kind of faith from us.
He calls us to repent of our sins and to submit our lives to him.
He doesn't want us to just make him a physical king.
John chapter 6, when the people want to take Jesus by force and make him king, he gets away from them.
It's not enough to just know who Jesus is intellectually.
That's the other thing we see with this interaction with the demons.
The demons know exactly who Jesus is and it doesn't save them.
You can know exactly who Jesus is and have it do you no good at all.
James chapter 2 verse 19 says, You believe that there is one God.
You do well.
The demons believe and tremble.
This demon in verse 24 believed and trembled before Christ.
The demons that Jesus is casting out in verse 34 know exactly who he is, but because they are not repentant, I don't know that as demons they're capable of that, but as human beings, we can know who Jesus is and still fail to be repentant.
And that will lead us to being very knowledgeable on our way to hell.
To be saved by Jesus, we must believe
in who he is, which means believing what he says to us when he says, repent and believe the gospel.
Repent of your sins, hate your sins, and trust in Jesus as the only savior from those sins, which will lead us to following him and submitting our lives to his authority.
The true belief will lead to embracing Jesus, not just as a savior, but as our Lord, as our King.
We've got to serve somebody.
We can't help it.
Make it Him.
Serve Jesus and follow Him.
Let's pray.
Father God, we so desperately need a Savior.
We so desperately need Jesus to remove our guilt and our shame and our wickedness.
And we thank you that on the cross, He did just that.
That for those who trust in Him, He effectively removed it, nailed it to the cross,
We bear our sins no more.
Praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord.
Oh my soul.
Help us to gladly submit our lives to you.
In Jesus name.
Amen.
