On this resurrection Sunday we are going to continue in our study of the Gospel of Mark, because where we left off last week, by God’s providence, fits nicely with our Easter celebration. Let’s begin by reading Mark 8:31-33. From this passage see two points: The Direction of the True Messiah and the Deception of False Beliefs.
First, from verse 31, see the direction of the true Messiah. This short passage comes on the heels of what is the climax of the Gospel of Mark – Peter’s realization and declaration: “You are the Christ”. As I pointed out last week, until that point, Mark had not used the title, “Christ”, since the first verse of his Gospel. Now, everything that is about to happen flows from that realization. Jesus is the Messiah. He’s not just a good teacher or a great prophet. He is the promised king of the Jews who will establish an eternal kingdom and deliver his people from all their enemies. But, Peter’s declaration needs some clarification. Jesus knows that his disciples had been affected by the teaching of their time – teachings we will discuss in my second point. He knows this, and so he sets out to correct it. Mark says that “he began to teach them” that he must suffer, die, and rise again. This phrase, “began to teach”, means that this was the regular lesson they received from Jesus from this point on. We will see, as we go on through Mark, that Jesus continues to bring this up. He does this for two reasons. For one, he knows his disciples. They lack faith and have been impacted by their culture. So, he needs to drill these facts into their heads. But, he also does it to prepare them for the moment when all this will happen. The disciples would experience all of these events at their weakest moments. During his suffering, Peter would act in anger to cut off a man’s ear and then act in fear to deny Jesus three times. The rest of the disciples, save John, would abandon him at his crucifixion. And, even in his resurrection, the disciples would hide away behind a locked door while the women went to tend to Jesus’s body. As Thomas would say in John 20, “unless I see his hands and touch his wounds, I will not believe.” Thomas gets the bad wrap for having doubted, but they all doubted. Jesus tells them now so that his appearance will be even more affirming of all that he would do.
There is another important word that Jesus uses in his teaching: “must”. In the Greek, it is dei, which means “necessary”. It’s important that Jesus does not say, “the Son of Man will suffer” or “might suffer”. He wasn’t guessing, and this wasn’t something that he knew would happen against his will. This was the necessary plan of God. It was God’s design that Jesus would suffer, die, and rise again. The prophet Isaiah foretold it in his suffering servant of Isaiah 53. The Passover lamb foreshadowed it in its yearly blood-soaked sacrifice. Even the bread used in their Passover meals (striped, pierced, and broken, hidden and brought back) portrayed it. Friend, understand that this is the heart of the Gospel: Jesus, the divine Son of God, purposed before the world ever began that he would offer himself as a perfect sacrifice for sin. His sacrifice would cover your sins so that you might be acceptable before God. And, to prove that this sacrifice was accepted, he would rise again. Only the guilty die. Romans 6:23 says, “The wages of sin is death.” We die because we deserve to, but Jesus did not. And so, by the power of God, he rose again. His resurrection is also a sort of first fruits – a promise of something else to come. Paul says, in 1 Cor. 15, that we will be raised like Christ. This is the great promise of Easter, that just as Jesus rose again, so too we who believe in him will one day rise, too.
But, many hear that and continue to reject it. Even his own disciples rejected it when they first heard it. That brings me to my second point: the deception of false beliefs, from verses 32 and 33. When Peter hears this, he pulls Jesus aside to rebuke him. Oh, what fickle faith Peter has. In one breath, he makes the greatest profession ever recorded, “You are the Christ”, and in the next breath he is rebuking the Messiah he just confessed. Why does he rebuke him? Peter rebukes Jesus because the plan of God did not meet with his own plans. It didn’t meet with his own beliefs about the Messiah. The Messiah would not suffer. He would bring suffering to the enemies of Israel. The Messiah would not be killed by the religious leaders. He would take his seat on the throne of David and act as Prophet, Priest, and King.
Jesus turns his rebuke back on him by saying, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but the things of man.” In this rebuke, notice three problems with false beliefs about the Gospel. First, to reject, distort, or minimize the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus is Satanic. Many people reject the Gospel because they cannot stomach it. To say that God must send his son to die for my sins is to say that I am a vile sinner worthy of that same punishment… but I’m a good person. I don’t need Jesus, I just need to live by a good moral code, do more good than bad, and I’ll be fine. Wrong! Many so-called Christians distort or minimize the Gospel because they find this message to be impractical. One of the worst Sunday school lessons I ever read from Lifeway was an Easter Sunday lesson that concluded that Jesus’s death was an example of how we can suffer. At the time, we had an unbeliever that was regularly attending Sunday school, and it fired me up so much that I wrote the president of Lifeway to say, “Sir, this past Sunday, you had a perfect opportunity to present the Gospel to an unbeliever through a lesson on Easter, and you missed it because you wanted to make the Gospel relevant.” The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is relevant and applicable to you today, not because it gives you encouragement in suffering or because it shows you the great depth of God’s love or how seriously he takes sin, but because it deals with the greatest need you have: your own sin and the death that comes as a result of it.
Second, to reject Jesus’s purpose is to have the mind of men, not the mind of God. Look, there are plenty of gurus and scholars out there today who will try to sell you on some new interpretation of the Bible. They will try to say that some doctrine the church has always taught is really not what the Bible says. Or, they will call into question the very authority of the Bible itself. But, these things come from the mind of men who cannot understand the things of God. Here is the heart of the matter – the unquestionable, unshakable truth of God: Jesus is the divine Messiah who lived the perfect, sinless life, suffered for our sins, died at the hands of the religious leaders and Roman authorities, and on the third day, he rose again.
Finally, understand that we can reject this message in another way. We can deny its power. Right now, across this country, many churches are carrying on all sorts of antics to try and “communicate the Gospel in a new and fresh way.” Some churches will have cantatas. Some will do a giveaway. Some will have a concert and light show. I even saw one pastor from last Easter who rode up a ramp onto the stage on a motorcycle being driven by a man dressed as a lion. Why does the American church, year after year, do all of these gimmicks? Their stated reason seems virtuous enough – they want to win people for the Lord. But, as the proverb says, “what you win them with, you win them to.” The person who is drawn to church by a choir is won to the choir. A person drawn to church by a laser show and concert will expect that every Sunday. But, a person drawn by the Word will be won to the Word. 1 Cor. 1:23-25 says, “But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” Antioch, we will not win people with gimmicks and door prizes and concerts and self-help lessons. It is the power of the Gospel that saves, so may we commit to share that Great Gospel, that Jesus came to suffer, die, and rise again so that we might be saved.
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