The Three-Legged Gospel - Sermon On Mark 1:1 Series

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Mark 1:1 The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Introduction

Throughout church history, Mark has always been the least popular gospel of the 4 gospels. For most of history it has been neglected by scholars, who would much rather study Matthew, Luke, or John, and by pastors who would rather preach from Matthew, Luke, or John. John MacArthur had a goal of preaching through the entire NT, and guess which book was dead last? Mark. He even preached some books twice before he finally broke down and did Mark.

And the reason for that is that Mark has very little unique material. 95% of the material in Mark can be found in Matthew or Luke, so why do we even need this book?

It’s written by a nobody, who wasn’t even there with Jesus during his earthly life, and who wasn’t an eye witness to any of the events. He wasn’t an Apostle or Prophet or preacher or church leader – he was just a guy who washed out of missions work when he deserted his group in the middle of an important mission trip. It’s kind of a quirky book – very poor Greek compared to the other gospels, and some very strange characteristics.

He seems to present Jesus is almost a negative light. Very often he’s doing and saying strange things that are hard to understand – like the fact that he’s constantly telling people not to spread the word about him. Nobody understands him, his family thinks he’s a lunatic, his disciples are failures. If you’re trying to get someone to worship Jesus and place all their faith and trust in him, there are a lot more glorious and inspiring presentations of Christ in the other 3 gospels. In Mark he seems kind of lowly and even embarrassing at times.

And the whole book ends on a big downer. The women come to the tomb, they find it empty, and then the angel appears and says, “Go tell the disciples.” And then here is the last verse of the book:

Mark 16:8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

The end. The whole book he tells people not to spread the news, then the one time he tells them to go ahead, they don’t do it. That’s such a strange ending that over the years people have written what they thought would be more appropriate endings for the book. You can find one of them in your Bible with a footnote that says it’s not in the earliest and best manuscripts. The original ends at 16:8.

And the beginning of the book is just as abrupt. Matthew and Mark give extensive genealogies, to set the background, and they talk about Jesus’ birth, and the background of John the Baptist and his birth. John gives an extended prologue introducing his gospel. Here’s Mark’s introduction:

Mark 1:1 The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

That’s it – then he just jumps right in to Jesus’ baptism. Mark says, “You want Jesus’ genealogy? He’s the Son of God.”

You’re not going to lay a foundation and then add some pieces and then build to a climax and… No. You want to know what this book is about – it’s The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. End of introduction.

Now, given all that, you might be thinking, What I’m I even doing here? I don’t think I’ll ever read Mark again! Why are we studying Mark?

Mark is a very important book and I’m excited to teach it. When they say that only 5% of Mark is unique to Mark – that’s not really true. If you divide up the various verses, yes, you can find those verses in the other gospels. But the message is more than just the collection of verses.

Four Gospels

The first 4 books of the NT – we call them “gospels,” but they are 4 biographies of the earthly life of Jesus. They stand at the beginning of the NT, because Christianity is a religion that is based 100% on history. Most religions are just philosophies. If you could prove that Confucius never lived, that would have no effect whatsoever on the religion of Confucianism. It’s just a philosophy, and if it sounds reasonable to you, you buy it to it. If not, you don’t. Same goes for Buddhism. It’s irrelevant whether Buddha ever existed. Some with Hinduism or Shintoism or Taoism or Sikhism or Bahai – none of them are dependent on any particular events in history.

Christianity is different. The Bible itself says that if you could prove our history wrong regarding Jesus, then the entire Christian faith is disproved. And so God wanted the information about Jesus to be crystal clear, reliable, undeniable, and verified by multiple reliable witnesses. So he gave us 4 inspired gospels.