“Divorce, Children, & the Rich Young Man” – Mark 10:1-31
Deuteronomy 24:1-4
The first verse is what the Pharisees have in mind when speaking to Jesus.
In verse 23, the word in Hebrew, translated as “indecent,” is actually a Hebrew euphemism for sexual perverseness such as adultery, incest, etc.
Mark 10:1-12
Jesus, however, goes back to Genesis 2:23-24, to the fundamental inauguration of marriage, which holds that the man and woman when they join in marriage become one new flesh and are related by flesh as being of the same family, blood relatives. This should govern our concept of marriage rather than the concession of Moses. What is joined together should not be separated.
Mark 10:13-16
People were bringing children to Jesus for Him to touch them, but some disciples rebuked them. Jesus was indignant, however, and ordered them to allow it and declared that the children coming to Him were a demonstration of how everyone should come to Him.
Mark 10:17-31
The rich young man.
Jesus shows the young man that he was not worthy of heaven by his works because he was greedy.
Jesus calls His disciples “children,” reminding everyone of what He said about children and the kingdom of heaven in the preceding incident.
Who then can be saved? With man this is impossible but with God all things are possible.
God needs to regenerate everyone into children, who come to him with nothing checked off, with nothing to offer God.
Come to Him with an attitude of needing to be totally dependent on God.
Last week we covered the first of three unexpected things, that some things happen only if people ask for them to happen; and even if God’s people pray with just a little bit of faith and cry out to God to help them in their faith, some things will happen if they pray.
Isaiah 66:22-24
In the end everyone will bow down to the Lord and Philippians 2:9-11 tells us that it is the Lord Jesus Christ to whom all will bow.
Bowing down will take two forms. The way that God’s people bow down is in the exercise of faith and reliance on Him and they will be rewarded with eternal life. The wicked will bow down also, but will be made to do so, then will be taken away into eternal mortality, decay, and pain forever.
In today’s lesson, Jesus wants you to know that the first way in which you are to bow down before history’s end arrives so that you are not in that group which experience the unending fire is by unending, enduring prayer even if that prayer comes with a little bit of faith. Every time you pray with even a tiny bit of faith you are classed with the Israel that will be resurrected and ushered into the land of blessing in the final days. If you are a people bowing the knee now, one of the things that characterizes you is prayer even when you no longer have the heart to pray. Praying when you don’t have the heart to pray characterizes the people of submission and faith today.
Jesus tells His disciples that He will be betrayed, killed, and resurrected from the dead. This was puzzling to them after witnessing Jesus in His ascension glory and power during the transfiguration.
The disciples were still in a state of awe from the transfiguration when they began to discuss among themselves who was the greatest among them.
The second unexpected thing is, if anyone wants to be first, he must be last.
A servant is someone who seeks to make someone else successful.
The third thing Jesus wants you to know in this lesson is that if we are of the spiritual family of Abraham this side of the end days, we are to value people simply on the basis that we share the same faith in Jesus Christ.
Mark 9:42-48
All of this language about cutting off body parts and plucking out this and that is “exaggeration language” to impress the hearer that it is better to suffer loss ourselves rather than to do anything to cause fellow believers to sin.
Mark 9:50
Spice up your relationships by being at peace with each other.
Isaiah 66:1; 65:17; 66:22-24
These verses speak of a future day when Israel is restored and those who trust in God are redeemed and rewarded but the unrepentant receive everlasting punishment.
The worm in the last verse is indicative of decay.
Mark 9:14-29
Some things will only be done if you earnestly pray for them in faith.
If you plead with God to help you in your unbelief, God will have mercy and help you just the same.
It is unexpected that an answer to prayer doesn’t come just to those who have faith as big as a mountain but to those who have faith only as big as an ant hill but who confess their weakness of faith and cry out to the Lord to increase it.
God will not provide everything that is asked in prayer, only those things that are according to His will (1 John 5:14); and there are things the Lord wants to do for you that He will only do if you ask for them faith.
Mark 9:30-35
The last shall be first.
Mark 9:42-48
Jesus reconfirms the division of humanity into the saved and unsaved as recorded in Isaiah 66:22-24.
“Jesus conformed to the Law and transformed the Law” – Luke 2:21-39
Theophilus, to whom Luke wrote his gospel, was probably a Roman official. Because Rome was suspicious of anything new in religion, Luke was probably trying to show Theophilus in these verses that Christianity was something that grew out of the well established religion of Israel by showing that Jesus conformed to the Law of Moses in all He did and in all that was done to Him.
Eventually, however, Jesus will transform the Law into something else.
Genesis 17:1-14
Circumcision. Abraham was given a new name as a result of God’s covenant with him.
The Son of God also went from having the name Yahweh to having the name Jesus (Yahweh saves).
Circumcision was not unique to Judaism. It was widely practiced in the middle east. In Egypt we have drawings on caves that probably date back to about 4000 BC that show a circumcision being performed. There is Biblical evidence that all the nations surrounding Israel practiced circumcision.
Jeremiah 9:25 – “Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord, “that I will punish all who are circumcised and yet uncircumcised — Egypt and Judah and Edom and the sons of Ammon and Moab and all those inhabiting the desert who clip the hair on their temples; for all the nations are uncircumcised and all the house of Israel are uncircumcised of heart.”
God, in requiring circumcision on the eighth day, alters the custom of the middle east, which performed circumcision as a rite of passage into adulthood at age 13.
Jesus also changes circumcision from a circumcision of the flesh to a circumcision of the heart.
The eighth day turns up often in Luke.
Luke 9:28 – Luke, in differing with other gospels that have the sixth day, is putting a theological interpretation on the transfiguration that compares it to the transformation Jesus underwent when He was circumcised on the eighth day.
Jesus was resurrected on Sunday and the early church referred to this as the eighth day instead of the first day of the week because His resurrection fundamentally changed everything.
When Jesus ascended 40 days after His resurrection, the early church also refers to this as an eighth day.
Now regarding the name Jesus:
Jesus became a popular name because the Jews living in Babylon were having trouble keeping the people conformed to the Law and Jewish culture and Jewish mothers began naming their sons Jesus to reflect their hope that someday Yahweh would make things right. Jesus Christ answered their hopes by being the Jesus that would fulfill the hope that name represented. Jesus Christ transformed a common name by living an uncommon life, being the only man to live a sinless life and dying on the cross to provide salvation to all.
Likewise, when Jesus calls us into a relationship with Him, we cannot stay the same as we were. We must be transformed.
Galations 6:15
The Name, Jesus, which is the Latin form of the Hebrew, Yeshua, was originally Yehoshua and centuries later was shortened. For translations of the Old Testament into English, it has been rendered as Joshua. It is associated with the holy name of God in the Old Testament where He is introduced to us as Yahweh which, alternatively can be pronounced Jahweh, from which has come the pronunciation, Jehovah. The letters in the Hebrew are the same, only pronounced in a different way.
Jesus’ name (Yeshua/Yehoshua) means “Yahweh saves.” Jesus pronounced according to Latin rules would be Yay-sus. The name was in common use in the first century AD and before.
Jesus was to be a savior of a particular kind. He is not meant to be, in this life, a savior from disease, bankruptcy, or danger or any other kind of physical trouble; but He is to be particularly a savior from our sins.
Naming Jesus is a fulfillment of a particular Old Testament prophetic teaching and promise. But in what way? His name means “Yahweh saves” but Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14 in which the child is called Immanuel, meaning “God with us.”
Isaiah 1:1-20
(Isaiah has been called the fifth gospel because it contains so many prophecies of the coming Savior.)
In these verses, Isaiah heaps great condemnation on Israel because of her unfaithfulness in sin.
Isaiah 59:1-8
“At the end of Isaiah’s prophecy, he is still overwhelmed as the Lord burdens his heart and gives him words to speak and to write about the sin, the transgression, the iniquity, the evil that characterizes the people that God has chosen as His own.”
“Our basic, fundamental problem is sin.” The Lord could say the same thing about us that He said of Israel.”
“All of the sorrows that humanity knows arises out of a world that is fallen and perverted by our most basic sickness, which is the sickness of sin.”
“So, when the angel appears to Joseph and tells him to name the child Jesus, he is telling him to name the child “Yahweh our Savior,” who will be with us as Immanuel to deal with the problem that is most fundamental and basic to us.”
“In other words, what the prophet is telling us and what the evangelist, Matthew, is telling us is that you are to name Him Jesus, for Yahweh, the God of Israel, will be with you for one basic, fundamental reason. In this life, it may not be to alleviate your sorrows and your heartaches, sickness or the grief of your friends turning their backs on you, or the agony of circumstances that repeat day after day after day. But what Matthew wants us to know is that God has become present with us in the baby born in Bethlehem who is named Jesus. He has become present with us to deal with that which is our great and unyielding enemy, our sins. He has delivered us and He has saved us from our sins. There isn’t a person in this room who has claimed the name of Jesus as his savior who, as Isaiah said in chapter one, has not been washed as clean as snow, who has not been forgiven their sins, removing them as far as the east is from the west, as far as the north is from the south. Their isn’t a person in this room who has claimed the name of Jesus as his savior, whose sins have not been washed away and has not arisen clean, forgiven, and purified in the eyes and sight of God. Because the baby whose birth we honor and remember this season is none other than the eternal Son of God who is by nature divine and who by nature is the Yahweh of the Old Testament, who has become present with us in His humanity and who is now present with us in the form of the indwelling of His Spirit, who has passed on to us deliverance from our sins. We may have to wait until the child returns in the glory of the heavens before we will know freedom from sickness and death and betrayal.”
“Becoming a Faithful Disciple is a Process/Feeding of 4000” – Mark 8:1-21
“Mark, more than any other gospel, gives us a glimpse into the faithlessness of the disciples in relationship to the teaching and the miracles of Jesus. Despite witnessing all that Jesus has done thus far, they are still struggling with who Jesus is.”
Mark 8:17-21; 6:51-52; 7:17-18; 8:33; 9:9-10; 10:35; 14:37, 50, 66-68
It is wrong to “demand signs from He who has already manifested Himself to us. The problem is not with the insufficiency of God in providing information about Himself, but the problem is with us; we need our hearts remade. God has already shown us in Jesus Christ everything necessary for faith and Godliness.”
Luke 1:46-55, particularly verses 54-55
God is proved to be a keeper of promises.
Luke 1:68-74
“We don’t need any more signs, because God has already spoken to us in his prophets and, now, in these last days through His Son Jesus Christ; and He has already said to us everything that we need to know. We don’t need Him to part the Red Sea today; we don’t need Him to raise a dead person today; we don’t need Him to heal a sick person today. He does not need to do anything more today because He has already been shown to be faithful to what He has said through His prophets and His apostles and in these last days through His own Son Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus teaches how He will suffer, die, and rise from the dead” – Mark 8:27-10:45
Martyr is best translated as “witness.” In early Christianity, witness was born by living as Jesus lived and dying in faith in Christ. For Christians, bearing witness was fundamentally the way in which we live with each other and with the world.
To tell only about the miraculous healings only tells half the story.
With Mark 8, a new phase of the gospel account begins.
Peter’s understanding of the term, Son of Man, is that of a powerful, victorious leader.
But Jesus presented Himself as suffering and dying. Peter then rebuked Jesus and Jesus then strongly rebuked Peter.
We must deny ourselves and take up our cross and follow Jesus.
We are never more like Jesus than when we deny ourselves for each other.
Jesus is not only the King of Kings but the Man of sorrows.
Mark 9:30-35
Again, Jesus says that He will be betrayed and killed and will rise from the dead.
If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last and the servant of all.
Mark 10:32-34
Again Jesus tries to correct the disciples incorrect view of Him.
Mark 10:35-45
To be known as a disciple of Christ is to be servant of all.
“Judgment comes before Salvation – Syrophoenician Woman – Decapolis” – Mark 7:24-37
Isaiah 35:1-10
God will come with vengeance and divine retribution and save you; then will the earth and our bodies be permanently healed.
Isaiah 34:1-4, 8-10
God’s judgment of the nations.
The heart of a human being is dark and perverted.
The Syrophoenician Woman asks Jesus to cast a demon from her daughter.
Jesus’ term for a dog was a domesticated dog.
God’s omnipresence means that God can accomplish anything in any place without having to be there.
It doesn’t matter what you are or where you are, Jesus can save you.
Jesus while in Decapolis heals a deaf and dumb man.
Jesus told the people He healed not to tell about it because it only tells half the story.
None of the healings He has done are permanent; it remains for the future for Isaiah 35 to be fulfilled.
Before Isaiah 35 is fulfilled, Isaiah 34 has to be fulfilled.
