SERIES: WALKING WITH JESUS
(Series adapted from Wiersbe’s Bible Exposition Commentary)
“THE SERVANT PROVIDES”
MARK 2:1-3:12
OPEN
Last week, we started our series through the Gospel of Mark called “Walking With Jesus.” We’re taking a very ambitious look at what Mark writes concerning Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
In our introductory study last week, we looked at the fact that the Savior had come. He came as a Servant and Mark’s Gospel reflects the work of the Servant. We looked at the Servant’s identity – that He was the Son of God. We looked at the Servant’s authority – that He had authority over Satan, Satan’s demons, and all manners of sickness and disease. We saw the crowds grow as people began to follow Him. But Jesus’ popularity caused the religious leaders to take notice and in today’s message, we see the conflict between them and Jesus blossom.
Most of all in our Scripture passage this morning, we see that Jesus provides those who would place their faith in Him three very precious and wonderful gifts. With each precious wonderful gift, we’re going to see some very concrete and practical take-it-home and live-it-out lessons for us to apply to our lives.
THE SERVANT PROVIDES FORGIVENESS
Mk.2:1-4 – “A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come
home. So many gathered that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to
them. Some men came, bringing to him a paralytic, carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to
Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it, lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on.”
Consider these events through the eyes of Jesus himself. When Jesus looked up, He saw the friends of the paralyzed man on the roof. Our text tells us that Jesus “had come home.” Some scholars say that this was a house that Jesus rented so that he would have a place to live. Most likely, though, He lived with Simon Peter and his family.
The custom during Jesus’ day was to open the door to your house and leave it open all day. That way, anyone who wished could stop by and visit. The door was always open unless there was some definite need for privacy.
Knowing that Jesus was there, people crowded the house where Jesus was staying. It was so packed with people that not one more person could get in and people were crowded around the door.
There was a man in Capernaum who was paralyzed. He had no hope for healing except for Jesus. The best thing is that this man had some dedicated friends. They knew he needed what Jesus had to offer. So they took it upon themselves to get this man to Jesus.
We’re not told the actual number of the friends who brought this man to Jesus. Scripture only tells us that four of his friends took a corner of his bed and carried this man to see Jesus. There were probably more in the entourage.
I am told that Capernaum has an especially rugged terrain. Even today, it is not easy to travel by foot in this town. But this man’s friends decided the effort was worth it.
When they got to the house where Jesus was, they met a wall of people. These people either wouldn’t or couldn’t move to allow this man in to see Jesus. Now, if these friends had quit at this point, they could have had a good excuse or reason to go home. But they weren’t looking for a way out.
Here’s the first take-home and live-it-out lesson for us today: don’t look for excuses to avoid doing what needs to be done. It is amazing how many of us are looking for a reason to get out of doing something we know we need to do. We always have a reason for our unfaithfulness to the things of the Lord. But these men did not want to quit. They could not bring themselves to say, “We can’t.” Instead, they said, “We must.”
They were determined that nothing would stop them from seeing Jesus. Their friend had the sickness and Jesus had the healing. And they must get the two together, even at great cost to themselves.
And that is precisely what it took – paying a cost. It cost them the time to carry him to the house. It cost
them the effort to carry him to the roof of the house. It cost them the trouble to tear up the roof and let him down. It cost them the favor of the people on whose heads the rubble was dropping as they ripped up the roof.
And it cost them the money to pay for the roof to repair it.
We need to look at these friends as examples for us to follow today. First, they were deeply concerned about the welfare of their friend. They wanted to see him receive help and healing for his problem. Second, they didn’t just pray about their friend. They put some feet to their prayers. They brought their friend to Jesus.
Their faith did not allow difficult circumstances to discourage or defeat them. They worked together and came up with a daring plan to get their friend to Jesus.
When Jesus looked down, He saw the paralyzed man lying on his mat. Imagine, sitting in a crowded place teaching people about the gospel of the kingdom of God and bits of straw and dirt start to drop on your head. You look up and a paralyzed man on a mat is being lowered by ropes and lands right in front of you.
That’s what Jesus saw. Mk. 2:5 tells us, “When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’”
Humanity’s deepest need is not for fairness, but for forgiveness. Forgiveness is the power to liberate from past sin and restore to an individual a sense of self-worth. Forgiveness is the power to deal with justifiable guilt, not by ignoring it, but by eliminating it. Forgiveness is a cool drink of water to a dry and parched tongue. Forgiveness is the medicine which heals us at the deepest level of our being.
The second take-home, live-it-out lesson for us today is that we all need forgiveness. We need to offer forgiveness to others. We need to be forgiven by others. And most of all, we need to be forgiven by the One who has the authority to forgive. Forgiveness is the greatest miracle ever. It meets the greatest need. Its costs the greatest price. It brings the greatest blessing and it brings the most lasting results
Then Jesus looked around. He saw the critics who had come to spy on Him. Mk. 2:6-7 – “Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, ‘Why does this fellow talk like that? He's blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?’”
Jesus’ notoriety and popularity was growing in leaps and bounds. The official religious leaders decided to check out this upstart teacher and healer. In Luke’s record of this event, he tells us in Lk. 5:17 – “…Pharisees and teachers of the law, who had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem, were sitting there.”
Notice the logic of the scribes’ reasoning against Jesus. Here was a man proclaiming the forgiveness of sins to this sick man. But only God can forgive sins. And only God knows if sins are forgiven. It is not something you can see with the eye.
We can imagine, knowing the human heart as we do, the kinds of thoughts swirling in their minds: “What does this man think He is trying to get away with? He is just a man. He is not God, yet He is saying something
that neither He nor we can verify. Is He saying that He is God? Why, He blasphemes God?”
Their argument was sound – except for two important things. First, they had failed to observe the evidence that Jesus was who He claimed to be. Second, they would not allow their minds to even consider the possibility that Jesus was who He claimed to be and thus able to forgive sins.
Jesus looked within the hearts of his critics. Mk. 2:8-12 – “Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit
that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, ‘Why are you thinking these things?
Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, Your sins are forgiven, or to say, Get up, take your mat and walk? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins . . . .’ He said to the paralytic, ‘I
tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.’ He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all.
This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, ‘We have never seen anything like this!’”
Last week, we talked about the authority of Jesus. He demonstrated His authority over Satan, Satan’s demons, and all kinds of sickness and disease. Here, in this passage, Jesus demonstrates His authority to forgive sin.
Remember the scribes had been reasoning in their hearts that Jesus could not have the power to forgive sins because He was not God and only God has such power. And they were partly right. Only God can forgive sins.
It was easy to say, “Your sins are forgiven.” No one in the room could verify that statement. However, if Jesus was who He claimed to be, let’s see something tangible. If He really has power then let Him heal this man. So, Jesus demonstrated His power to forgive sins by healing the man. He demonstrated His authority to release this man from the root cause of his sickness and thereby release him from his sickness.. Jesus manifested the invisible into the visible.
Notice that Jesus uses a special term to refer to Himself. He calls Himself “the Son of Man.” “Son of Man” was a special designation for the Messiah. Dan. 7:13-14 – “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.”
Why can’t we just trust God? When He reveals Himself to us and then asks us to do something, why do we have to try to convince ourselves that God can’t be who He says He is and that He can do what He says He can do?
There’s another take-home, live-it-out lesson for us in today’s message. Here it is: obedience to Jesus is important.
What did Jesus tell the paralyzed man to do? He told him to pick up his bed and walk home. Excuse me, wasn’t that the problem? That’s why the man was brought to Jesus. He was paralyzed. He was paralyzed in his soul and in his body. And the Lord told him to do what he could not do on his own. That’s what Christ does to us as well.
That paralyzed man had a choice to make. Will I obey the command of Jesus? It’s the same choice you have today. Will you obey the command of Jesus to do what you cannot see how to do yourself?
A lot of us are not being obedient to God in some area of our lives. Why? We cannot see how we can do it. But that’s where the grace of God comes in – just at that point of obedience.
This man could not see how he could walk. But he obeyed because Jesus asked him to. And the power came at that moment to walk. He was healed at the moment he obeyed the command. We don’t know. But more probably, they just had never witnessed the power of God in action. They had never seen the root cause of misery dealt with. And if they had, it probably wasn’t handled with mercy and grace. So they were amazed.
But being amazed is not being convinced. We have no indication that this crowd was convinced enough to do something about it. And we are sure that the scribes were not convinced. Even the miraculous does not convince those who have already made up their minds.
THE SERVANT PROVIDES FULFILLMENT
In this section, we see Jesus the Son of God as the Servant who provides fulfillment. There are three different encounters that teach us some important things.
The first encounter involves Jesus calling Levi to be one of His disciples. Mk. 2:13-14 – “Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them. As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector's booth. ‘Follow me,’ Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him.”
The town of Capernaum sat right along an important highway that went from Damascus, Syria down to the Mediterranean port of Ptolemais. It was an important trade route. In this area, Levi served as one of the agents of the government that levied taxes and tolls on imports and exports.
The tax collector was a despised person to the Jews. Tax collectors generally paid high fees to gain the position and earned their personal incomes by overcharging on the taxes. They were seen as traitors to their people and outright thieves. Even though Jewish, tax collectors were forbidden to enter any synagogue.
As Levi sat working at his tax collector’s booth, along comes Jesus. What did Jesus see in Levi? Did he see a man conflicted with his job? Did He see a man who was looking for something that would bring fulfillment and peace into his life?
With Jesus’ notoriety, Levi had probably seen Jesus perform at least some of His miracles and heard Jesus declare the good news of the kingdom of God. Did Levi wonder if that good news included him – a despised tax collector? Jesus answered every one of his questions by simply calling to Levi, “Follow me.” Lk. 5:28 tells us, “…and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.”
Here’s the take-home and live-it-out lesson. The same principle is true today. It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. Jesus knows your deepest need. He knows that nothing else can fill that place that is empty inside of you except the decision to follow Him. Levi, the tax collector became Matthew the disciple. What is Jesus asking you to leave behind so you can find fulfillment in Him?
The second encounter happens when Jesus goes to Matthew’s house for supper. Mk. 2:15-17 – “While Jesus was having dinner at Levi's house, many tax collectors and ‘sinners’ were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the ‘sinners’ and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ On hearing this, Jesus said to them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’”
Matthew invites Jesus to his house along with some of his former colleagues and some other folks that the Pharisees termed “sinners”. That doesn’t mean that these people were outright evil people. It was a term used by the self-righteous to refer to people they thought were beneath them.
In the minds of these Pharisees, you were supposed to avoid people who weren’t as devoted to God as you were. These were people determined their holiness but outward acts that lied about their inward condition. Later, Jesus would refer to folks with the same attitude as “white-washed tombs”. On the outside, they looked clean and white but on the inside they were simply dead.
Here’s another take-home, live-it-out lesson from today’s message. One of the biggest problems with the church is that we have forgotten to be friends with sinners. That’s why a lot of churches plateau and decline. They have forgotten that we, just like Jesus are called to both seek and save the lost. We have become so “churchified” and so “good” that we have forgotten that we exist because people are lost and need the Lord.
The third encounter involves the subject of fasting. Mk. 2:18-20 – “Now John's disciples and the Pharisees
were fasting. Some people came and asked Jesus, ‘How is it that John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees are fasting, but yours are not?’ Jesus answered, ‘How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he
is with them? They cannot, so long as they have him with them. But the time will come when the bridegroom
will be taken from them, and on that day they will fast.”
For the Jewish people there was only one day per year required for fasting, and that was the Day of Atonement. But the Pharisees had wanted to show their piety to both men and God, so they began to fast two times a week. And they made a great show of it. They would put ashes on their faces and put on old clothes when they went out in public. They hoped people would notice their great piety. But Jesus was not impressed.
And on one of those fast days, He and his disciples were feasting away. Now, even John’s disciples fasted, so the question was put to Jesus why He and His disciples did not observe this tradition.
In His reply, Jesus used the illustration of the marriage feast. In Israel, marriage was a gala event, even more so than it is in the country. The bridegroom and the bride did not have a 30-minute service and short reception, and then go off into the night. Sometimes the feast would go on for a week. And those who were invited to the feast were exempted from all duties which would decrease their joy in celebrating that occasion. This exemption, of course, included fasting.
This was the illustration Jesus used concerning Himself - that He was the bridegroom, and that as long as He was present with His disciples, they should feast and be joyful.
In the Old Testament, Israel was the bride and God was the bride-groom. In this situation, Jesus was also pointing to Himself as God-in-the-flesh. He was clearly announcing that the bride-groom had come.
Our take-home, live-it-out message for today is not that we should avoid fasting. In fact, Jesus taught about fasting in the Sermon on the Mount. He said, “when you fast…” The take-home, live-it-out message for us is that everything we do should be done with joy.
During this third encounter, Jesus tells us something important about the gospel of the kingdom. Mk. 2:21-22 – “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins.’”
The biggest problem is that we want the old to be re-furbished. We’re comfortable with the old and we’d like it to be made as good-as-new. Our take-home, live-it-out lesson is that God does not just reform the old. He transforms us into the new. The old cannot contain the new. Quit trying to force the old to look new. Let God make everything in you new.
THE SERVANT PROVIDES FREEDOM
The Servant brings freedom: Freedom from sin and its consequences; freedom from guilt; and in this section of our passage, freedom from man-made traditions and rules.
Two of the events recorded here involve controversy over the Sabbath. The Sabbath was a day of rest and worship given by God to His Chosen People. It was a special sign between Israel and Jehovah. But over the years, man-made rules and customs overtook the real meaning of the Sabbath.
Jewish tradition listed thirty-nine things you couldn’t do on the Sabbath. Originally, Moses communicated that God had decreed that work was prohibited on the Sabbath. But not many specifics were given. The Jewish religious leaders came up with minute details concerning what you could and couldn’t do on the Sabbath. and it went even to the absurd.
For example, it was fine to spit on a rock on the Sabbath, but you could not spit on the ground, because that made mud and mud was mortar, and that was work. The Sabbath Day, instead of being a day of delight and rest became a crushing burden on the children of Israel.
Mk. 2:23-28 – “One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?’ He answered, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.’ Then he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.’”
Jesus and his disciples walked along and picked some heads of grain as they walked. The problem was that it was on the Sabbath. This didn’t violate any law in the Old Testament. It didn’t dishonor God in any way. In fact, it was permissible according to the Old Testament law. Any traveler was allowed to pick enough grain to eat as long as he did not put a sickle to the grain. But it violated religious rules created by man and not God.
Jesus declares himself again as the Son of Man and also as Lord of the Sabbath. You might say that Jesus told them that He ruled over the rules. Jesus reminds these religious leaders that they had missed the point of the Sabbath. The Sabbath was created for the benefit of human beings and any religious rules that were not beneficial to helping instead of hindering were rules that needed to be disregarded.
But the confrontation between the authority of God and the authority of men continued. Mk. 3:1-6 –“Another time he went into the synagogue and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, ‘Stand up in front of everyone.’ Then Jesus asked them, ‘Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?’ But they remained silent. He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.”
Jesus next went to the synagogue on the Sabbath. And in that place, there was a man with a withered hand. And even though these Pharisees would not see the truth of His teaching, they were starting to understand Him, because they knew that He would seek out this man with the withered hand in order to help him. Jesus would not be at the front of the synagogue rubbing shoulders with the honored scholars, but He would seek out the needy. They were counting on it.
What was their motive? They were looking for a way to trap Jesus and they knew He would help the one who was hurting instead of ignoring his disease until a more convenient time.
Notice again that these religious leaders were blind to who Jesus really was. Instead of asking themselves how this man could and how this man could know what was in their hearts, they were looking for a way to make Jesus look bad.
What did Jesus do? Mark says that Jesus called the man with the withered hand to Him. He asked the Pharisees if it was lawful to do good on the Sabbath, as He intended to do, or evil, as they intended in their hearts. They were silent. Mark says that He looked on them with anger, being grieved at their hardness of heart. Then, He healed the man with the withered hand. He showed that He cared more about healing than hurting. He exposed the evil of the Pharisees in doing that, and they hated Him for it.
Early on in Jesus’ ministry, the Pharisees began to work with their own political enemies to kill Jesus. Christ had forgiveness and healing in His heart. They had murder in theirs.
Here’s our take-home, live-it-out lesson from the section: the thing we discover in these stories is that our religion can help us miss Jesus rather than find him. The thing that kept the religious leaders from seeing who Jesus is, and entering the celebration, is they couldn’t see Jesus for all their religious traditions and preferences. The people who missed God when He came were the people who were most convinced in their hearts that they knew God. They couldn’t see Him for all their rules and religion. They were like the elder brother of the prodigal son.
Mk. 3:7-12 – “Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the lake, and a large crowd from Galilee followed. When they heard all he was doing, many people came to him from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, and the regions across the Jordan and around Tyre and Sidon. Because of the crowd he told his disciples to have a small boat ready for him, to keep the people from crowding him. For he had healed many, so that those with diseases were pushing
forward to touch him. Whenever the evil spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, ‘You are the
Son of God.’ But he gave them strict orders not to tell who he was.”
There is one final take-home, live-it out lesson for us today. We need to model the methods of Jesus as seek to be the body of Christ where we live.
Tim Keller put it this way: “Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.”
CLOSE
You probably know the hymn Amazing Grace. You may know that the person who wrote that hymn, John Newton, was a slave trader. In 1750, at the age of 25, he commanded an English slave ship. He purchased slaves in Africa. He put them on board below deck in two-foot-high pens to prevent suicides. As many as six hundred slaves lay side by side like fireplace logs, row after row. There were no facilities and there was no ventilation. The ship had chains, neck collars, handcuffs, and thumbscrews, a torture device. Newton allowed the crew to rape female slaves, as he did himself. Sometimes a quarter of the slaves died on the journey. Newton blasphemed God and engaged in brutality and immorality.
So when John Newton wrote, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me,” he knew what he was talking about. Years later, at the age of 82, shortly before his death, he said, “My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things: that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Savior.”
