Mark 1:21-28

Jesus’ Ministry Begins in Capernaum

Mark 1:21-28

“21  They *went into Capernaum; and immediately on the Sabbath He entered the synagogue and began to teach. 22  They were amazed at His teaching; for He was teaching them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.  23  Just then there was a man in their synagogue with an unclean spirit; and he cried out, 24  saying, "What business do we have with each other, Jesus of Nazareth? Have You come to destroy us? I know who You are-the Holy One of God!" 25  And Jesus rebuked him, saying, "Be quiet, and come out of him!" 26  Throwing him into convulsions, the unclean spirit cried out with a loud voice and came out of him. 27  They were all amazed, so that they debated among themselves, saying, "What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey Him." 28  Immediately the news about Him spread everywhere into all the surrounding district of Galilee.”

            As we look at verse twenty-one we see that favorite word of Mark used and that of course is immediately, which is used some twelve times in the first chapter of Mark.  Now in the last lesson on Mark we saw that Jesus had just called His first four disciples and so now in this lesson we will see Jesus begin His ministry as far as in Mark’s gospel.  We have seen that Jesus has overcome the temptations of Satan when He was in a very weakened condition and all alone, and then He overcomes sin by the power of the gospel and then He overcomes sinners by calling sinners to follow Him in His ministry and now we begin to see the ministry of Jesus as it begins in Capernaum.

            Now Capernaum was a major town located on the Northeast part of the Sea of Galilee and there was a Roman Garrison there because there were people traveling both north and south and east and west through the trade routes.  The Hebrew meaning for Capernaum means house of Nahum, Kaphar-Nahum.  Nahum is the name of the prophet Nahum.  Kaphar is the village, the village called Nahum.

            Capernaum was probably the headquarters of Jesus during His Galilean ministry.  We know that it was not Nazareth because while visiting Nazareth and preaching in the synagogue there the people wanted to throw Jesus off of the cliff.  Nazareth was 1300 feet above sea level while Capernaum was some 690 feet below sea level.

            Now we want to look briefly at the Jewish Synagogue and how it began and also what the purposes of it were.  We know that there was none mentioned in the OT, but they began while the Jews were in captivity in Babylon because they needed a place to gather together for the purpose of studying the Word of God.  The word means gathering place and it would take ten men to begin a synagogue.

            When the Jews returned from captivity under Nehemiah they took the concept with them of having synagogues and they begin to thrive.  We learn from the Talmud that there 500 synagogues in Jerusalem alone.  They were kind of like local churches like local assemblies where people gathered.  The law was explained in the synagogues and this was mostly done by the Scribes, and this was done on the Sabbath.  Scribes who taught, elders who taught would become judges who would rule in cases of the Law.  The synagogues were very important places in the towns and villages.  Josephus says there were about 240 towns and villages in Galilee and they all had synagogues.

            The synagogues were also used for school during the week and as mentioned above they also were used for deciding legal cases by the scribes. 

            John MacArthur writes “They got together.  The Law was read on the Sabbath.  The Law was explained to them.  Each synagogue had a ruler who really was the organizer, kind of the executive person, not necessarily a pastor or teacher.  Then it had elders.  Elders would be responsible for the reading and the explaining of the Law unless there was a visiting scribe who would do that.

            “Now when the Lord comes, the synagogues then provide a read-made opportunity for Him to go from place to place, town to town, neighborhood to neighborhood and teach and explain His message.  Maybe they just came into existence for this very purpose.  And their tradition was visiting rabbis would speak so it was no intrusion for a guest to come.”

            Now we see in verse twenty-one that Jesus came into the synagogue and He began to teach, but what He was teaching, and we don’t know exactly what it was at this meeting, amazed those who were there and the reason that they were amazed is because He was teaching with authority.  This was not what they were used to because the scribes would just site other rabbis and they prided themselves to the past being able to quote these various revered rabbis.  Not so with the messages that Jesus gave.  When Jesus brought His message found in Matthew 5-7 which is called the “Sermon on the Mount,” the people there said the same thing about His teaching, in that it was from authority, something they were not used to.

            I just want to mention one more thing before moving on and that is that when we read that the people were amazed we could actually say “they were blown away.”  It is a very powerful verb used here that is translated amazed.  It is used only thirteen times in the NASB and part of the time it is translated “astonished.” 

            Now let’s move to the rest of these verses as what we will see is the ability of the “Servant” to have control over demons.  We saw earlier about His temptations with Satan and how He overcame those temptations by quoting the Word of God.  The Word of God is Truth and that is one thing that demons do not want to hear, for it frightening them and we will see here that they were indeed frightened. 

            Verse twenty-three shows us that in this synagogue where Jesus was teaching there was a man who had an unclean spirit and the meaning of the unclean spirit is a demon.  We know that God did not create anything that was evil, but evil angels exist along with evil men and the reason is that both fell into sin.  Satan was the most beautiful of the angels every created and it was because of this beauty that pride entered into him.  We see this story in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28.  We also see in Revelations 12:4a these words, “And his tail *swept away a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth.”  This verse tells the story of how one third of the angels that God created chose to follow Satan.  The Bible says that hell was made for these angels, but it will also have people in it, those who have not trusted Jesus Christ as their personal Savior.

            We see in this verse that there was a man in that synagogue who had this demon living in him or we might say that he was possessed by this demon.  This man comes into the synagogue and he may not know that he had this demon in him, and then he may have known it and when he gets there he finds a guest speaker, the Son of God and so after Jesus gives His message the demon becomes frightened and begins to speak using the man’s voice to talk to Jesus and we see that this demon “cried out” or “screamed.”  “To raise a cry from the depth of the throat, to cry out” is how the Greek/English dictionary describes this word.  I think that we can be safe to assume that this demon was frightened, and with very good reason, for he knew that his fate was the burning fires of hell and we see that he thought that it may have been his time to go there for he says to Jesus, “Have You come to destroy us?”  It seems that this demon was asking this question for all of the demons for he uses the word “us,” and he has also used the word “we.”

            What was it that terrified this demon?  It was the truth that he was hearing in the message that Jesus was giving.  As stated earlier demons are afraid of the truth and we know from John’s gospel that Jesus is the Truth.  Demons know who Jesus is for we have already stated that they all were “good” angels at one time and would have known Jesus then, and just because they are “bad” angels doesn’t mean that they don’t know Him now.  James writes these words, “You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder.”  The word James uses for shudder means “1) to bristle, stiffen stand up 2) to shudder, to be struck with extreme fear, to be horrified.”

            We mentioned that this demon was in this service and John MacArthur give a reason why when he writes, “The demons knew that they had developed an untrue false system of religion that was highly successful in Israel.  And it held people captive unto their damnation.  They again are disguised as angels of light.  They hide in the idle of false religion.  Satan is before all other things a liar and a murder.  He wants to catch everybody in deception and then kill their eternal souls.  Truth is therefore deadly to the demonic operation…deadly.  This is where the initial conflict comes.”

            We know that Jesus was very hard on the Pharisees while here on earth and that is because they were a large part of the false religion that was prompted by now knowing the truth, and not wanting to understand the truth, therefore they were described by Jesus as sons of Satan, “You are of your father the devil and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

            In his sermon on this section John Macarthur points out for reasons that demons scream and we have just looked at the first reason, and this is truth.  The second reason is Jesus has the authority to Judge them, and we spoke briefly about that earlier.

            The third reason demons scream according to John MacArthur is “the authority of His purity.”  The demons called Jesus the “Holy Son of God,” and this also makes them scream.”

            The last reason they scream is because of the authority of His power.  Jesus tells the demon to come out of the man and he has no other choice but to come out of him, but before coming out of him he does “throw him into convulsions, the unclean spirit cried out with a loud voice and came out of him.”  In Dr. Luke’s writing on this account he reports that the man was all right.

            I want to make one last point and that is that Jesus told the demon to be quite and come out of the man and we will see this in other parts of Mark’s Gospel too.  When we look at the first part of the book of Mark the only ones who know that Jesus is the Son of God for sure are the demons.  When we get to the middle of Mark’s Gospel we will see that Peter answers Jesus’ question “Who do men say that I am?” by answering that Jesus is the Messiah the Son of the living God. We will then see in the last part of Mark’s Gospel that others will also see this truth.

            There were men in that synagogue that though that what they heard was amazing, but did not come to realize that Jesus was the Son of God, and there was a demon who knew that Jesus was the Son of God.  The demon could not be saved, but it seems that the men did not want to be saved so both were as bad off as they could be.

            Jesus made the demon stop talking because He did not want the demon telling other who He was, Jesus did not need that kind of publicity, that coming from a demon.  We will see later on that the Pharisees claimed that Jesus was healing people through the power of Satan and so this is why Jesus caused the demons to stop talking about who He was.  This also happened when Paul was ministering on one of his missionary trips that a woman who had a demon kept telling others who Paul was and he finally told the demon to come out of her, because Paul did not want publicity for a demon possessed girl.

            We have two choices as we look back at this lesson from Mark’s Gospel, and that is are we going to be like the people in the synagogue who were blown away at the message of Jesus and then do nothing about it or are we going to look at this amazing message from the Amazing Son of God and accept the Gospel message offer which Paul writes about in 1Cor. 15:1-4 “1 ¶  Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, 2  by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. 3  For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4  and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.”  The choice is yours.

12/31/2011 12:30:20 PM