Mark 1:14 After John was arrested, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God. 15 “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe in the gospel!”
16 As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 17 “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.” 18 At once they left their nets and followed him. 19 When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. 20 Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.
21 They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. 22 The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. 23 Just then a man in their synagogue who was possessed by an evil spirit cried out, 24 “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” 25 “Be quiet!” said Jesus sternly. “Come out of him!” 26 The evil spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek. 27 The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, “What is this? A new teaching—and with authority! He even gives orders to evil spirits and they obey him.”
Introduction
What to Look for in a Dictator
We live in a culture that despises authority, and so we don’t really have many examples of a strong authority. Our President has nowhere close to the power of a king – lots of limits and checks and balances. Police officers have very specific authority just to enforce the laws, and nothing else. We don’t have slave owners. Employers have limits on their authority. So we just don’t have much in the way of strong authorities.
But if you were going to go to another country where there was a dictator, and you had several countries to choose from, what would you look for in a dictator? Or suppose you were in debt, and you had to sell yourself into slavery for the next 5 years or so to pay off the debt, but you could choose who your master would be – what would you look for in a slave owner? What sort of qualities would you look for before you would be willing to put yourself under the total authority of a leader?
Jot down a list.
• Intelligence – you want the king to understand economics enough to know what tax rates would result in the greatest prosperity.
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• Influence – you’d want your king to be able to handle other world leaders.
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• Benevolence – you want him to care about you and your needs, and to do things that will benefit you and others.
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• Wealth – you want your slave owner to be able to provide for your needs.
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• Importance – you want your work to matter.
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• As you work for him, you want your work to be going toward something worthwhile and important.
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• Strength – you want someone who can defend you and protect you.
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• And you want someone who can succeed in his important work, so that your efforts aren’t wasted.
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• Patience – someone who isn’t going to be harsh with you when you make mistakes.
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• Understanding – someone who really knows you, your strengths, weaknesses, gifts, passions, so he can utilize you in the best possible way, where you will be most effective and most fulfilled in your work.
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• Consistency – you don’t want someone who just blows with the wind, and constantly changes direction.
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As much as our culture hates authority, just think for a minute about what it would be like to be under the authority of someone who had all those qualities. Wouldn’t you agree that life would be much better under that authority than under no authority? Actually, life under any authority – even an evil authority is better than no authority. No authority is anarchy, and that is a nightmare wherever it happens. So authority is good, and the better the authority, the better life is.
In this Gospel, Mark is going to paint a portrait of the Lord Jesus Christ that will show us the magnificence of many of his attributes. We all understand that the more you see and experience Christ’s attributes, the more you will love and trust him, right? So nothing is more valuable than getting a better glimpse of one of his attributes. And the attribute Mark wants to start with is Jesus’ authority.
That’s the theme throughout these next few sections of the chapter. If you go down to v.21 you’ll see that all the people were amazed at his authority. Mark uses various different words for amazement, but this one literally means to receive a blow and be knocked back. They were struck with amazement. Barclay translates it thunderstruck. It’s the kind of amazement that leaves you speechless, because what you just witnessed is so astounding that you can’t even process it. What was it that amazed them that much? It was his authority.
Then you go down to v.27 and you see that word again, and again, they were amazed at his authority – same word. And in our passage today, vv.16-20, Mark doesn’t use the word authority, instead he uses his paintbrush and paints us a picture of what Christ’s authority looks like. So let’s take a look.
Review
Just to refresh your memory, we finished Mark’s prologue, and now we’re just beginning Jesus’ ministry. And Mark starts by giving us a quick, 2-verse summary of Jesus’ entire ministry.
Mark 1:14 After John was arrested, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God. 15 “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe in the gospel!”
So this book is the story of how Jesus travelled all around Galilee preaching that message.
Why Galilee?
And it’s striking that Jesus focused most of his attention on Galilee. The people in Judea had a certain amount of religious distain toward the Galileans. They thought, “What really makes us Jews and sets us apart is the Temple and the holy city and all the trappings of Judaism, and those people up in Galilee – they’re kind of out there in the sticks, surrounded by Gentiles, away from the action; they’re kind of sub-Jews.”
So by making Galilee his main focus, Jesus is already setting the stage for the rebukes that he’s going to bring against the whole religious system of Israel.
Authority to Call
Jesus Calls the Four
So now that Jesus has gone up to Galilee, what’s the first event Mark wants us to see?
16 As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen.
Jesus is out there walking along the beach, maybe skipping some rocks. And he comes up on a very, very common scene on that lake – some fishermen at work. But they aren’t out there in the boats with the big, commercial dragnets. They are standing on the shore with the little, one-man casting nets. The word here refers to a round, perimeter weighted net that they would fold a certain way over their arm and, with a little training, you could throw it and the whole thing would spread out before it hit the water. They would throw it over a school of fish, the weights would pull it down over the fish, and then the fisherman would dive down, pull the net downward, and try to capture some of the fish.
So Jesus is walking along the beach, stepping over some rocks, through some brush, and he comes out to an opening where these two brothers are out there about waist deep in the water trying to get some fish. And Jesus gives them an order.
17 “Come, follow me,” Jesus said
And these two guys stand there for a moment in stunned silence. Jesus just hit them with something, and they realize that at this moment they are facing the biggest decision of their lives. Andrew looks over at his brother Simon, who is normally mister impulsive, and sees that he is just as frozen as Andrew was. What is that look on his face? Is it bewilderment? Shock? Fear? Andrew looks back at Jesus, whose eyes haven’t left him. They are burning holes in him, and Andrew realizes at that moment that he has no choice. It’s not an invitation; it’s an order. It’s not a request, it’s not a suggestion, it’s not a plea; it’s a command.
18 Immediately, they left their nets and followed him.
Make no mistake – Jesus’ commands require immediate response. Delayed obedience is disobedience.
Unique Authority
Don’t think of this as just a typical rabbi calling some disciples. Rabbis did have disciples, but they did not do this. This was unique in a couple ways. First, rabbis did not recruit disciples. Students would approach rabbis and ask if they could be disciples, but rabbis didn’t go out recruiting.
Second, a rabbi’s disciples were not followers. No one said, “I’m a follower of Rabbi so-and-so.” If they did say that, the rabbi probably would have rebuked the student. He would have said, “Your objective is not to be a follower of me, but to be a student of the Torah (the Law of God).” Not even OT Prophets would say, “Follow me.” They said, “Repent and follow after God.”
So Jesus is calling for something much more extreme than a rabbi or even a prophet. He wants these men to become his followers, and he doesn’t do it with a polite invitation. The wording here is that of a strong, military-style order. “You, you, you, you – get in line behind me, now.” That’s the flavor of the way Jesus said this.
If you want to find a parallel, you won’t find it anywhere in that culture. I can think of one incident in the OT that comes close. In 1 Kings 19, when Elijah, the greatest of the OT prophets, is ready to pass on his mantle to Elisha. Elisha is out plowing his field with some oxen, and Elijah walks up and puts his mantle on Elisha, and Elisha immediately goes home, kisses his mom and dad goodbye, and burns all his farm equipment, slaughters his oxen and gives the meat to the poor people, and then goes and follows Elijah.
That’s the only parallel that comes anywhere close to this. It was the greatest example of discipleship in the OT, but it’s still less than what Jesus does. And what we are going to see with Jesus as we go through the gospel is that he not only does the same things that the greatest spiritual giants of the Old Testament did, but he goes way beyond what they did. Elijah calling Elisha was a unique, one-time event. Jesus does this with Andrew and Simon and then James and John and then Levi, and ends up doing it twelve times. And we find out later that he wants to make disciples of all nations.
If you want to find a precedent for this, there’s only one. The only one who calls like this in the OT is God himself. God called Abraham, and he left his family and home and culture and followed God’s call, even though he didn’t know where he was going. God called the entire nation of Israel out of Egypt to go where he would lead them. Only God does this sort of thing in the OT, and now Jesus, right out of the hatch as his ministry begins, this is the first thing he does. Jesus is saying, “I call people like God calls people.”
Right from the outset we see that Jesus has authority over everyone’s life. He can just suddenly command you to leave your livelihood, your property, your home, your career, or even your family you must obey on the spot. He can command anyone at any time to give up anything, pay any price, and they must do it.
And people did. That’s what’s really amazing. There are some people who have positions of authority, but people don’t listen to them. Like a school teacher whose class is out of control. But Jesus’ authority went beyond just a position or title; it also included the power to bring people to respond.
18 At once they left their nets and followed him.
This is a different word for nets. In v.16 they are casting the little amphibleson nets. But the nets they left in v.18 were the big, 100-ft long commercial drag nets that they would put down from boats. In other words, they left the whole fishing business.
19 When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. 20 Immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.
Two more men, right in the middle of their work day, drop everything, leave their property, leave their livelihood, leave their families, and obey Jesus.
Jesus was a man of awesome authority. Have you ever seen someone who, even though you didn’t know who he was, you could just tell by the way he carried himself that he was someone who was to be taken seriously? I was at a large conference once, and I was sitting in a classroom waiting for a session to begin, my face was buried in my laptop doing some work between sessions. Suddenly my eyes broke away from the screen and looked up at the door where lots of people were coming and going, but this one guy walks in, and my eyes were just stuck on him as he walked across the room. I don’t know why. He wasn’t doing or saying anything unusual, but it just seemed like I should be paying attention to him.
And I remember saying to myself, “I think that guy is in charge of this place. He’s something big around here.” Sure enough – I found out later that it was James Macdonald, the pastor of the huge church that was hosting that conference. That was 20 years ago, and for 20 years I’ve wondered – what was it about how he carried himself that communicated such an air of authority just by walking into the room?
And 20 years of wondering has gotten me nowhere – I still have no idea. The other day I looked up a website that gives 10 tips on how to come off as more authoritative. I won’t read the whole list – here’s a few of them:
1) Dress the part.
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Powerful people wear powerful clothes. Make a note of what everyone else is wearing and emulate their style in a put-together way.
3) Make yourself visible.
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Hight helps. Stand up from your desk when you talk to people. If there aren’t enough chairs in a meeting, you be the one to stand so you’ll have a bigger presence. Stand up even when you’re on the phone, because your voice will sound more authoritative when you’re standing.
5) Create powerful associations.
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Link yourself with other powerful and authoritative people by agreeing with what they say.
I think Jesus might have missed that website when he did his Google search on how to come off as authoritative, because I don’t think Jesus did any of that. He might have stood up when he talked on the phone, I don’t know. But there wasn’t anything special about how he dressed, and he definitely didn’t link himself up with powerful people by agreeing with what they said.
And yet he had awesome authority. There have been kings who could order people around and get them to obey, but usually that’s because if you disobey the king, you get your head chopped off. They get their power and authority either from their military power, or from their crown – the position they hold. Donald Trump has far more authority and sway with people now than he had a year ago. He’s the same man, but now he has a position of authority. A lot of people will obey Presidents and kings, but how many carpenters do you know who can command this level of obedience?
Impressive Faith Comes from Seeing Christ’s Authority
What goes through your mind when you see people like these disciples who are willing to give up everything for Christ? Impressive, right? How do they have such strong commitment? What’s different about these men that makes them willing to give up so much compared to someone like me who’s barely willing to give up anything? Is it something about their personalities? Some, profound virtue that they have that I’m missing? Are they emotionally stronger? Are they wiser? What is it about these men that makes them obey like this?
Would you notice please that Mark doesn’t tell us anything about the men that might answer that question? Mark’s picture of these men just shouts, “Ordinary, ordinary, ordinary.” None of them were priests or scribes or officials. Can you imagine if Jesus would’ve called 12 priests to be his apostles? We would see that and think, “That’s them, I’m me, I’m not in that category.
But these men weren’t priests. They weren’t even from Jerusalem. They weren’t even from Judea. They were Galileans. They weren’t scribes, they weren’t scholars, they didn’t study under Gamaliel or Hillel or any famous rabbi or any lame Rabbi. These are just guys who got up and went to work every day, and tried to scratch out a living for their families.
And if you ever study the 12 apostles, you find such a wide variety of personality types. What if Jesus would’ve called 12 Peter types? Those of us with more subdued, slower paced personality type would just think, “Okay, that’s the kind of people Jesus calls to do great things. Not folks like me.” But Jesus called the whole spectrum of personality types.
They were ordinary men. But if they were so ordinary, how is it that they had such an extraordinary response when Jesus called them? Most people don’t give up everything to follow Christ, so why did they?
The impression I get as I read the way Mark presents this, is that their response was due not to anything about them, but to the fact that they were exposed to Christ’s awesome authority. I don’t think the design is for us to read this and think, “Wow, those guys are amazing.” And think the aim is for us to read this and think, “Wow, what astonishing authority Jesus must have had!” Mark is saying, “Do you want to see how awesome is the authority of Christ? Just look at how ordinary people responded when they were exposed to it.” So it’s not something special about them; it’s something special about their encounter with Christ.
And that’s a great lesson for your individual walk with the Lord. Do you want greater faith? Extraordinary faith comes from extraordinary exposure to Christ’s extraordinary authority. I think will miss the point if we read the story and walk away saying, “I want to be like those disciples. I’m going to try to have lots of willingness to make huge sacrifices for Christ from now on.” That kind of resolve is good, but in itself it’s not going to be enough. I think the intention of the passage is for us to say, “Wow, look at how those men responded. I want to see what they saw! I want to be exposed to the awesome display of Christ’s power and authority like they were so that I would have that kind of response.”
And this isn’t to say that the disciples’ response was automatic. Jesus revealed his authority to others, and they didn’t obey like this. So when you see Christ’s amazing authority, it does require a willingness to accept and embrace what you’re seeing. There is a responsibility on our part, but the responsibility is not just to muster up a lot of willpower to obey Jesus. It’s a receptiveness to learn of and embrace more and more truth about what Jesus is like.
What Had They Seen?
So what had these men seen about what Jesus was like? From reading Mark, it sounds like this stranger just walks up to 4 guys out of the blue and commands them to follow. Was it the tone of his voice or the look on his face or what? No. People don’t leave family and livelihood and everything else because the tone of somebody’s voice.
Think of how you would respond if someone walked up to you and gave you an order. Not even something this big – what if someone just came up to you and said, “Pick up that piece of paper.” “Go over there and sit down.” How would that strike you? No matter how small the command, if it’s a command, your first thought would be, “What authority does this person have? Is he a police officer, or the owner of this property – why does he think he can order me to pick up a piece of paper?”
And that’s about the smallest command a person could give. What if it’s bigger? The bigger the command, the more confidence you have to have in his authority before you will be willing to obey.
So what gave them so much confidence in Jesus’ authority? You read John’s Gospel and you find out that these men had already known Jesus for many months. They hooked up with Jesus earlier through John the Baptist’s ministry. They say him do miracles, clear the Temple, they baptized with Jesus for a long time, and they travelled with him as he made his way up to Galilee and stopped in Samaria with the woman at the well. So they’ve been with Jesus through all those events, but then, as soon as Jesus gets up to Galilee where these guys were from, they disappear. He goes to his hometown, Nazareth, and preaches a sermon – no disciples are mentioned. He heals the nobleman’s son, no disciples.
Where did they go? Fishing. Evidently, when they started following Jesus earlier, they thought it was just a short term mission kind of thing. Probably most of a year down there in Judea, but now, as soon as they get back home, they go back to work.
So they’ve known Jesus for quite a while, and they’ve seen him perform miracles. In fact, they saw a miracle this very morning that Jesus calls them. In Luke’s account we find out that they had fished all night long. They were commercial fishermen, and they worked at night because that’s when the fish would come up closer to the surface. And this particular night they didn’t catch a single fish. That’s a miracle. The Sea of Galilee is jammed full of fish. They would drag these huge, 100 ft nets from the boat and would catch massive numbers of fish on each pass. To fish all night like that in that lake and not catch a single fish required a miracle. They must have been thinking, “What in the world? Are we in the twilight zone, or what?”
And it’s a bummer of a miracle because this was their livelihood. They have overhead, employees, payroll, equipment costs. So to do the exhausting work of fishing all night and not to catch a single fish puts them in a real bind. Not only can they not pay their workers, they can’t even feed their families now. So now, after a whole night of exhausting failure, they are on the shore just casting the little 10-foot casting nets along the shore just to see if they could get some breakfast.
Then Jesus walks up and tells them to go back out and try again, this time during the day when you never catch anything, and they get so many it tears their nets and almost sinks their boats. And it’s at that moment that Jesus says to them, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. This is a person who controls the creation and can guarantee massive success if we obey him. He also has the power to guarantee massive failure if we don’t obey. What choice do we have?
Did the readers of Mark know all that? It’s very possible. They had heard the preaching about Christ and all the oral traditions. So they may very well have known those details. We’ll see later in the book that Mark sometimes assumes the readers have knowledge of details that he doesn’t mention, but that are in other gospels. So maybe the readers knew that stuff, maybe they didn’t, but either way, Mark doesn’t mention them because he doesn’t want us to lose sight of his point. His point is that Jesus called these men with awesome authority. And so Mark tells us just enough of the story to show us that, and only that, so you can’t miss it. Jesus called these men like God calls men, and something Jesus had done showed such awesome, un-resistible, non-negotiable, divine authority that 4 out of 4 of these ordinary men immediately gave up everything and obeyed.
Keep this in mind as you read about Jesus in the gospels. Some things that sound strange wouldn’t sound strange if you knew all the various circumstances. But the circumstances aren’t mentioned, because they would distract us from the point being made.
And as an aside, I love how this shows the reliability of the gospels. At first it sounds like Mark made a mistake – using the two different words for nets. But when you put the whole story together from the other gospels you realize that Mark didn’t give us the various details, but he did preserve the right words. They were casting the little nets when Jesus walked up, and at the end, when they left their nets, they left the whole commercial enterprise – the big nets.
Fishers of Men
So Jesus commanded them to follow and they left everything and followed. But that’s not the whole story. We left something out. Jesus didn’t just command them to follow; he also gave them a promise.
17 “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.”
Think of how that would have sounded to ears that had never heard that phrase before. That language comes from Jeremiah 16:16. Jeremiah 16 is describing how God is going to allow Israel’s enemies to come and defeat Israel and carry them off into captivity. First Assyria, and later Babylon.
Jeremiah 16:16 “But now I will send for many fishermen,” declares the LORD, “and they will catch them. After that I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them down on every mountain and hill and from the crevices of the rocks. 17 For my eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from me, nor is their sin concealed from my eyes.
Your enemies are going to come like hunters and fishermen and find you wherever you hide and drag you off into captivity. That was a common image for OT prophets – to describe the coming judgment in terms of the Jews being captured like fish in nets or by fishhooks and dragged away.
Now Jesus uses that same imagery to describe the spiritual restoration that he, as the Messiah, is going to bring about. He’s going out with some nets to recapture those fish that have been dragged off into captivity. In fact, listen to the promise that Jeremiah put in right before that verse about the people being captured by the hunters and fishermen.
Jeremiah 16:14 "However, the days are coming," declares the Lord, "when men will no longer say, 'As surely as the Lord lives, who brought the Israelites up out of Egypt,' 15 but they will say, 'As surely as the Lord lives, who brought the Israelites up out of the land of the north and out of all the countries where he had banished them.' For I will restore them to the land I gave their forefathers.
The rescue from Egypt has always been the standard for the greatest example of salvation and deliverance from God. But some day an even better one is going to happen, and God will bring back his people, not just from Egypt, but from all the various nations where they were scattered. It will be such an amazing rescue that the Jews will forget about the Exodus, because this will be so much greater.
That didn’t happen when the people came back from Babylon. The return from Babylon was a partial fulfillment, but it wasn’t on a scale that would make people forget about the Exodus from Egypt. No, they knew that this great restoration was still to come. It wouldn’t happen until the Messiah came and made it happen.
So now the Messiah is here, and he’s going to begin this great restoration and rescue of God’s people who had been scattered all over the world. He’s going to bring them back and set up the glorious Davidic kingdom that will endure forever. And so Jesus is recruiting these men to do that work with him.
One of the qualities you look for in a good dictator or slaveowner is someone who is doing a great work. And who will involve you in that great work. If you’re going to be following someone’s orders, you want those orders to come from someone who is ordering you to do great things. You want it to be someone who, every time he orders you to do something, you can go to bed that night thinking, “Whatever his reason was for telling me to dig that ditch (or whatever it was), it’s part of accomplishing a huge, great mission. So by digging that ditch, I accomplished something great today!”
That’s one quality of a great authority, and that’s what we have in Christ. Isn’t it amazing that Jesus spent so much of his time recruiting and training the disciples to do his work? If anyone could be justified in saying, “I don’t want to try to train people to do what I do. I’m uniquely qualified for this, no one else is going to be able to do it like I can do it – I think I just need to do this myself” – if anyone could be justified in having that attitude, it would be Jesus Christ.
Tell me – who was more gifted, Jesus or the disciples? Even after they were fully trained, who was the better preacher – Jesus or those guys? Who had more skill? Who had more wisdom and more love and a greater measure of the Holy Spirit? Jesus did. So why not just do the work himself?
John 14:12 I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these
Jesus never went outside of an area smaller than Colorado.
He never wrote anything, and the outcome of his ministry after he died was about 120 believers. The Apostles turned the whole world upside down, and reached millions of people over thousands of years through their ministry. Even though Jesus was far more capable and far more qualified, the Holy Spirit was pleased to do the greatest work of reaching the world through the church, not through one individual. So Jesus pours huge amounts of time and energy training these men.
To do what? To undo what Assyria and Babylon did. Assyria and Babylon came in like fishermen and hunters and captured God’s people and dragged them away. The disciples are going to go out into all the nations like fishermen and hunters and recapture God’s people and drag them back to God.
Method: Preaching
But how? The fishnets in Jeremiah 16 were swords, right? The Assyrians and Babylonians came with military force to capture the people. Is Jesus saying that will be the method for these men?
The answer to that question is in the structure of this passage. Here’s something you need to know about Mark: Mark loves sandwiches. Not literal sandwiches, but literary sandwiches, where he brings up a topic, then brings that same topic up again several verses later, but sticks another topic in between those two pieces of bread to show us the connection between the two topics. We’re going to see that again and again in Mark, and he does it here. Look back at vv.14-15. That’s the introduction to the body of the book, right? That’s the summary of Jesus’ whole ministry – he went around preaching the gospel. So after that summary, you expect a story about Jesus preaching or teaching. And you get that down in v.21 - They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. So the two pieces of bread are teaching and preaching and teaching and preaching. That’s Jesus’ ministry. But what does Mark sandwich in between all that teaching and preaching? Jesus calling disciples and promising to make them fishers of men.
So what does that tell us? It tells us that this work of capturing men and women – going throughout the world and rounding up the souls of God’s people to restore them and establish the Messiah’s kingdom; it’s not going to be done with the sword; it’s going to be done through teaching and preaching. That’s the Messiah’s method, and that’s what we’re going to see Jesus training the disciples to do.
I Will MAKE You
So what is it about being fishermen that will make these guys good at teaching and preaching? Nothing. Jesus doesn’t pick them because they are good at teaching and preaching. Look what he says: Follow me and I will make you. I’m going to make you something. I’m going to turn you into something that you aren’t right now. Literally he says I will make you to become fishers of men. It wasn’t, “Follow me, because you are great preachers.” It wasn’t, “Get some training in evangelism and then follow me.” It’s a promise: I will make you.
Conclusion
How’s that for a quality to look for in dictator, or a slave owner – someone who has the ability to make you into something a lot better than what you currently are. He doesn’t just demand that you be something, he promises to make you into that thing.
I hope you have a pretty good list now, on your paper, of things that make for a great authority. I would urge you, this week, to spend some time thinking about how Christ fulfills those qualities, and then as much as possible, consciously enjoy the experience of those qualities of Christ over the next 7 days. That will move your heart to love him more and trust him more, and you will have stronger faith. Great faith comes from great exposure to Christ’s great authority.
