“What is the Composition of your Spiritual Parachute?” – Romans 1:18-32
Romans 1:18-20
Creation screams out God’s divine nature and His eternal power. God should never be confused with His creation.
But man suppressed this reality.
Romans 1:21-23
What you think about God determines every other dimension of your existence.
Suppression eventually progresses to exchange.
If you muffle anything the Bible is telling you about God, you will eventually believe something about God that is false.
Romans 1:24-25
Whatever you think about God trickles down into your worship. The most important thought you can have is what you think about God.
Romans 1:26-27
Whatever you think about God also trickles down into your behavior; so that a false belief about God results in natural relationships exchanged for the unnatural.
Romans 1:28-32
Every other imaginable wickedness also follows.
What you think about God will either purify you or corrupt you.
Romans 4:4-8
If you believe that God is a God who gives righteousness to those, who have no righteousness of their own, through His Son Jesus Christ, Paul wants you to know that all of your transgressions have been forgiven and you have been declared utterly, completely, and thoroughly righteous, not on the basis of your righteousness, for you have none of your own, but completely on the basis of the righteousness of Jesus Christ.
Romans 4:17-21
Know also that God is the God who raises the dead.
Mark 12:28-34
Deuteronomy 6:4-5
There is only one God. Therefore you owe Him all your love. When there is only one of something it requires your all. Obedience always begins with doctrine.
In the West, we don’t have a pantheon of gods, but we, nevertheless, have a multitude of gods. Devotion to anything that takes your attention away from God acts like an idol.
Loving God also involves loving your neighbor. Truly loving your neighbor is always in accordance with God’s commands. Never relate to your neighbor in a way that is against the standards of loving God. In most situations, loving God and loving your neighbor are indivisible.
1 John 4:19-20
The first commandment to love requires the second.
The teacher of the law commends Jesus and Jesus commends the teacher of the law but in a reserved way. The teacher was not far from the kingdom of God but not quite there yet.
Mark 12:35-37
Jesus follows this discussion with a discussion of the identity of Christ.
The teachers of the law were okay with thinking of the Christ as the physical son of David. But Jesus quotes to them Psalm 110:1, in which David calls the Christ Lord. The last time we heard mention of the Lord was in the commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart. You are to understand that the Christ is the Lord God of Israel made flesh and that Jesus is that one, the Christ, the Lord God of Israel, a descendant of David.
Being Christian means that in our love of Jesus Christ, in our adoration of Him, in our faith that He is the incarnate God of the universe, we are to love Him by keeping His commandments, the first of which is to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Mark 12:18-25
People who do not know the scriptures doubt the power of God, because the scriptures loudly proclaim His power. Many people in the church think that when they die they will continue in a state of existence without a body forever; they aren’t expecting to be resurrected physically. We will, however, always be human. This passage does not teach that we become angels, only that in the resurrection we are like angels in not marrying. When we die, our spirits do go immediately to be with the Lord in heaven, but there will come a day when our spirits are united with a new version of our old bodies that is incorruptible, immortal, and glorious.
Mark 12:26-27
Jesus could have gone to Daniel 12, which clearly talks about the resurrection or He could have gone to Psalm 16 or to other passages, but He chose to go to Exodus 3, in which the Lord appears to Moses from a bush that appears to burn.
Jesus presents the resurrection as an essential component of the Christian faith.
Exodus 3:1-7, 2:23-25
Twice in these passages, Moses reminds everyone that God has made a covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The covenant involved giving something not only to their descendants but to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, themselves.
Genesis 17:8
The land of Canaan is promised as an everlasting possession not only to Abraham’s descendants but to Abraham, personally, forever.
If God is going to give the land of Canaan to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants forever then God must raise them from the dead. Death ends the marriage covenant but death does not end the covenant God made with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants.
Psalm 118
1-4 – It begins with thanksgiving.
5-7 – The Lord sets David free from anguish.
8-9 – It is better to trust in the Lord.
10-12 – David’s predicament.
13-18 – Deliverance from the Lord because David prayed.
The two testaments should not be view as being separate. The New Testament is the account of the fulfillment of the Old Testament.
Mark 12:1-11
Jesus tells a parable about a vineyard that is an allegory of the history of Israel’s treatment of the prophets and, lastly, how they will deal with Himself.
Jesus then quotes from Psalm 118:22-23.
Verse 24 is often misunderstood. The “day that the Lord has made” should be applied to a day in which you experience a miraculous reversal from being headed toward disaster to having deliverance, from heading to defeat to having victory. It speaks of a thing previously discounted becoming the center of the universe.
Even in the midst of disastrous circumstances we can “rejoice in the day that the Lord has made” by remembering that Jesus has died for your sins and been resurrected. Jesus is the stone that the builders rejected and God has made Him Lord of heaven and earth.
William Hamilton (03/09/1924 – 02/28/2012), a professor of theology on the east coast, taught that God was dead because He was nothing more than a concept, someone made up to sooth the soul.
He argued that for people to live moral and ethical lives, to behave well toward each other, to serve one another, for society to be stable, we don’t need the idea of a self-existent Creator and Sustainer. However, he wanted to hold onto the ethical teaching of Jesus. Until the day he died, Hamilton called himself a Christian because he was a follower of the ethical and moral teachings of Christ. He believed you can argue for the existence of the religion, Christianity, without the need for a self-existent Creator and Sustainer, because Christianity is essentially a life of well-behaved people. This became known as Radical Theology and the Death of God.
Mark 11:27-33
Jesus challenges this idea.
The chief priests, teachers of the law and elders challenge Jesus’ authority to cleanse the temple and quote the prophets authoritatively.
Jesus responded by asking a question of them – was John’s baptism from heaven or from men? Jesus takes them back to the beginning. Was John’s coming something arranged by heaven or something a human being could dream up? Hamilton thought that Christianity was something that could be produced entirely by natural means.
Christianity is not in its essence about discipline. Christianity is in its essence about a supernatural in-breaking of God into this world and into our lives. So the question to the religious leaders of Israel is: Is it supernatural or is it natural?
Isaiah 40:1-5, with which the Gospel of Mark begins.
Isaiah 40:6-8 tells us that the only thing that is self-sustaining is God. The natural is contrasted with the super-natural in these verses.
Isaiah 40:9-11 tells us the One for whom the way is being prepared is the sovereign Lord, not just for another human being.
Isaiah 40:12-14 describes this sovereign Lord; He is the maker and the sustainer.
Isaiah 40:18 – With whom can you compare God?
The answer to Jesus’ question is, of course, heaven.
But the religious leaders discussed it among themselves, considering that, if they said “heaven,” Jesus would ask why they didn’t believe him; but they feared the people if they said from men because the people held that John really was a prophet. They were wind-testers who relied on polls.
Christianity is at its heart the reality of the supernatural. We are committed to the God who exists outside of time and space but has invaded time and space out of His miraculous goodness to us and because of His wrath and judgment. We are a people who believe that there is a realm outside of the natural; and, therefore, we are not wind-testers. We approach everything with this presupposition that God exists and He intervenes into the natural realm and He did it most wonderfully in the incarnation of His Son.
Editor’s note:
Thus Spake Zarathustra, used the phrase. Nietzsche was a favorite of the Nazis, who came along in the late 1920’s and 1930’s; and Nietzsche spoke in his writing of man as having made his way from the worm and advanced the idea that a new kind of man could be cultivated, a “superman.” Nietzsche said, in speaking of his ideals found among warrior nations, “One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness.” Nietzsche also blamed Jews and Christians for all the world’s troubles. His ideas led to the killing of the infirm, the practice of genocide, and war.
Jesus withered the fig tree to remind everyone to read Isaiah 56:1-7 and know all who come to the Lord in faith are welcome into His presence and should not consider themselves a dry, withered tree.
The holy mountain in Isaiah 56 is the temple mount.
Mark 11:22-24
Jesus speaks of a mountain casting itself into the sea. This is again the temple mount; not the Mount of Olives.
If you think it is impossible for a foreigner or a eunuch to enter the presence of God, you must believe the impossible, such as telling the temple mount to cast itself into the sea, and know that these can be brought into the temple and become as close to God as a son or daughter.
When you pray in faith (confidence) that God can do something and, if it is according to His will, it will be done.
The corollary to faith in prayer is forgiveness.
Matthew 6:14
Colossians 3:13; Ephesians 4:32; 1 Peter 4:8
“Jesus comes to clean house, like a new Jehu” – Mark 11:11-21
Jonathan Edwards wrote a book where he argued that conversions are surprising. There is nothing we can do to bring about conversions; there is no methodology. The Holy Spirit must invade a persons life and change him from hating God and shunning God to finding God beautiful, to loving God, and believing that the cross brings salvation and forgiveness of sins. Conversions are surprising, and so is true worship because it requires the presence of the Spirit in our hearts. It requires conversion so that we can worship in truth and in Spirit.
Mark 11:11-17
The next day, on reaching the temple, Jesus drove out the money changers and those buying and selling.
As in the days of Jehu (2 Kings 9), worship had become corrupt.
Jesus quotes Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11.
Jeremiah 7:1-11
It’s so easy to appear spiritual when you are in the temple.
If you really are spiritual there are virtues that come with it. Only if you have the Holy Spirit living in you can you possibly be virtuous.
Isaiah 56:1-7
Even a eunuch who comes before the Lord God with a true heart is accepted into the temple. In Deuteronomy, eunuchs were banned from the temple.
Mark 11:20-21
In the morning, the disciples find the fig tree, that Jesus had cursed the day before for not bearing fruit, had dried up.
In Isaiah 56:3, God said, “Do not let the eunuch say, ‘Behold, I am a dry tree.’”
Those who belong in the temple are those whose heart has been converted by the Spirit of God, that has as its signs mercy, compassion, justice, righteousness, forgiveness, and acceptance.
At the time of the First Great Awakening, 100 years after the establishment of Protestant Christianity in the British Colonies of North America, people had become comfortable with substituting the acceptance of Christian culture for Christian conversion. It is so easy to imitate Christianity.
The Great Awakening began with the preaching of Theodore Frelinghuysen, who began to preach the gospel to his congregation, then spread to the Presbyterian community because of the preaching of Gilbert Tennent. Jonathan Edwards in Massachusetts also began preaching the gospel to his congregation and preached five sermons to his congregation on justification by faith. Because of this, for two years, conversions burst forth in the Dutch Reformed churches of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Then they suddenly died down; this was also the case among the Presbyterians. It was also the case for the Congregationalists of Massachusetts. Jonathan Edwards explained this sudden abatement by saying this: “Because conversions are surprising.” In other words, there isn’t a thing anyone can do to make someone convert to Christ. It requires the Holy Spirit to invade someone’s life and draw him to Christ. As further explanation, Jonathan Edwards used John 3:8 that describes the Spirit as being like the wind.
2 Kings 9:1-37
When God wants something done, it happens.
Mark 11:1-6 is another example of when God wants something, it happens.
Mark 11:7-8 – Think of 2 Kings 9 where Jehu’s men spread their cloaks before him to declare him king.
Mark 11:9-10 – Hosanna means “save us.” It is from Psalm 118. Hosanna became a typical way of hailing the king of Israel.
“Grant us success” (or grant us victory), which is in Psalm 118 was not quoted by the people welcoming Jesus. Although Jesus came as king, this wasn’t the time.
God was doing His will as much in accomplishing the death of Jesus as in bringing about His resurrection.
We must always be ready to submit to God’s will no matter what it is.
Atonement means reconciling two parties that are estranged.
Leviticus 16
The Day of Atonement
It was inaugurated right after Aarons’s two sons were killed while making an unauthorized offering a short time after Aaron was consecrated as High Priest and they were consecrated as priests. They approached God without the proper preparation of sacrifice.
It was given as an act of grace to the Israelites. For the first time, a man would be allowed to come into the presence of God on a regular basis.
Before Aaron is to go into the presence of God, he has to change out of the exalted clothing of the High Priest and put on the clothing of a bond servant.
Aaron makes atonement for himself before entering the Most Holy Place.
Two goats are set aside and one is chosen for a sin offering for the people by casting lots and the other becomes the scapegoat. (“Scapegoat” is a word coined by William Tyndale to describe the goat that would be taken away into the wilderness and set free, bearing the sins of the people.)
The goat offered for sin is a substitutionary sacrifice in our place.
Aaron’s entrance into the Most Holy Place shows our need for a representative before God.
We also need a way for the people to identify with the work of the sacrifice and with the representation. This is done by the High Priest laying hands on the scapegoat and confessing all the sins of the people before it is taken out into the wilderness and turned loose. Early Christian writings describe the scapegoat as having a scarlet cord tied around its neck and the people spitting on it and kicking it as it was taken away, evoking for us the imagery of Christ being taken to be crucified.
Hebrews 9:22-28
Jesus’ sacrifice was superior to the one offered on the Day of Atonement and He did not enter into a copy of the heavenly places but into heaven itself.
Jesus’ sacrifice was only needed once to last for all time.
Jesus was our substitute in sacrifice, who bore the sins of us all, and our representative before God.
Jesus asks a question of two different people in this passage: “What do you want for me to do for you?
Mark 10:32-34
For the third time in as many chapters, beginning in chapter 8, Jesus predicts His death.
The Jews were expecting a messiah who would come in glory and power not in humility ending in suffering and death.
Mark 10:35-45
The disciples are still filled with the vision of the transfiguration and, disregarding His words about his coming death, can only think about what Jesus can do for them. They want the most privileged places in glory.
Jesus demonstrates His humility in answering the disciples.
See also Matthew 20:23.
Some things are foreordained by God.
Don’t confuse God with someone you are used to manipulating.
The ten who were indignant were just as guilty.
Your relationship with Jesus in this life should be an opportunity to imitate Him in being a servant to others.
Concentrate on a prayer life that makes you a better servant.
Mark 10:46-52
It is the blind man who really sees, who knows how to answer the question – be merciful to me.
