2/18/2012 1:09:57 PM
A Brief Summary From Mark on Jesus’ Ministry
Mark 3:7-12
“7 Jesus withdrew to the sea with His disciples; and a great multitude from Galilee followed; and also from Judea, 8 and from Jerusalem, and from Idumea, and beyond the Jordan, and the vicinity of Tyre and Sidon, a great number of people heard of all that He was doing and came to Him. 9 And He told His disciples that a boat should stand ready for Him because of the crowd, so that they would not crowd Him; 10 for He had healed many, with the result that all those who had afflictions pressed around Him in order to touch Him. 11 Whenever the unclean spirits saw Him, they would fall down before Him and shout, "You are the Son of God!" 12 And He earnestly warned them not to tell who He was.”
In John MacArthur’s sermon on this portion of Mark’s Gospel he says that these verses are kind of like a summary of what has happened so far in Jesus’ ministry according to Mark. We have seen so far in Mark’s Gospel that there always seems to be a crowd around Jesus whenever He is preaching and teaching. For the most part the people in the crowd were interested in physical healing and we see that Jesus has healed all who have come to Him who were in need of healing, and I would suppose that it would be fair to say that this saddened Jesus in that many of those who came for healing were not looking for spiritual healing, which is one of the great reasons that He came to earth, for after all it would be His death, burial, and resurrection that would provide salvation to those who came to Him seeking that.
We also see in the crowd that is following Jesus those who are wanting to find fault with Him in order to have Him killed, but we know that Jesus would not die until it was time for Him to die for He had said that no man will take His live, but that He would lay His life down when He had fulfilled all the things that He came to fulfill.
I once read a series of books that were categorized as historical fiction and in one of the books something came up that I had never thought about before. The books were written with fictional characters that were alive at the time when Jesus was on earth and so the main character was not Jesus, but He was in the story. One of the characters was the Roman centurion who would be at the cross of Christ when He died and because of his duties he was involved in what the Romans were thinking about when it came to Jesus and His ministry. The part that was new to me was that there many people looking at Jesus to head up a revolution against the Romans and if you look at what Jesus had done you could understand their thinking, for Jesus feed 5000 men plus women and children so He could keep an army in food without having to have it supplied from outside sources, and Jesus brought back many from the dead so if a soldier would be killed then He could bring them back to life or if a soldier was injured He could heal them. This could have been fearful for those who were enemies of Jesus, and we find many of His enemies following Him around. Jesus still healed those who needed healing and He continued to teach and preach about the Kingdom of God. This is what we see in this section as after the healing of the man with the withered hand Jesus withdrew to be near the sea and had His disciples make ready a boat where He could get into if the crowd was too large.
We see many people in the crowd from Judah and Jerusalem, and also from even beyond the Jordan River, from Tyre and Sidon. All wanted to hear what Jesus had to say, but probably many of them were looking for a physical healing, and some of them were watching Him in order to accuse Him of breaking their man mad laws and traditions.
We also see people who are in the crowd who had unclean spirits in them looking for healing and again this is what we have seen before in Mark’s Gospel. Jesus is not allowing these unclean spirits to talk, and we have run into that earlier. Shortly we will see a break in Mark’s Gospel, which is also in Matthew’s Gospel between chapters 12 and 13. In order to understand this break in these Gospels we have to go back to Jesus’ baptism as seen in Mark chapter one, and we see at that event all the members of the trinity, for Jesus was there and the Holy Spirit was there descending upon Jesus and then the Father speaks of His Son. Jesus was doing things in the power of the Holy Spirit for we must remember that He gave up His glory in order to become a man and so it is the Holy Spirit who is working through Him. In this break in the Gospels we see that the enemies of Jesus were attributing the works that Jesus was doing to Satan. This is why Jesus was not allowing the unclean spirits to tell others who He was, for He did not want people to find out who He was through unclean spirit so he made them not speak of it. This is important to what happened in this break of Jesus’ ministry for when we see Jesus’ enemies saying that His miracles were done in the power of Satan that would be the end of His clear teaching and He would begin to teach in parables. We see in this break also what has been called “the unpardonable sin,” that is attributing the work of the Holy Spirit to the work of Satan. This sin could only be committed while Jesus was here on earth for that was a unique time period that would not be repeated.
There have been some people during the church age who have thought that they have committed a sin like Jesus speaks about later on in Mark chapter three, but we must remember that the only unpardonable sin is not accepting the sacrifice that Jesus made for you on the cross.
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