Sermon from September 10, 2000
When I think of God, two pictures come to mind. One is based on something Jesus did; the other on something He said. What He did took place when He told the woman taken in adultery, "Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more." He did not pretend she wasn't guilty, yet He forgave her and gave her another chance at life. God is like that. What Jesus said that shapes my picture of God portrays God as a grievously wronged father, who watches the road each day for the return of his prodigal son; and when he sees him returning does not act offended or stand on ceremony but runs to meet him, kisses him and celebrates his return. God is like that.

What pictures come to mind when you think of God? Nothing in your life matters more than that. No one better than Jesus Christ can draw those pictures in our minds. He once said, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." We do not read the Gospels and I am not preaching on the Gospel of Mark in order to take some nostalgic trip down memory lane.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John present to us the only authoritative and trustworthy accounts from the life of Jesus Christ available to humanity, and as we read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, we come to see the face of the invisible God.

Having come a quarter of the way through the Gospel of Mark, it is appropriate that we should pause and ask ourselves what image of God is taking shaping in our souls as a result of this exposure. The image will not be as clear as we would like, because the surface of our souls on which it is reflected is less like a mirror, which reflects faithfully, and more like water, whose reflections can easily be troubled by any motion at all. We need God's help to be as calm as possible.

My task is to present as faithfully as I can the vision of God that emerges from the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. It will take two sermons for me to do what I have in mind. I will proceed in the following manner. I will organize the two sermons around five statements. In each case I will make the statement and then show you how it grows out of the life of Jesus in Mark's Gospel. Finally, I will comment on why that statement has meaning for our lives. I will make two of the five statements today and the other three next Sunday. Please turn with me to Mark 1.

Here is the first statement. God is acting within human life so as to bless all the nations of earth with unimaginable goodness, and nothing can thwart Him in His purpose. God is acting within human life so as to bless all the nations of earth with unimaginable goodness, and nothing can thwart Him in His purpose. Let's connect this statement in four ways with the first four chapters of Mark.

That comes from a connection with Mark that is familiar to us by now. God's ultimate purpose will take the form of a kingdom. Look at Mark 1:15. Jesus preached, everywhere He went, this message: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news." The kingdom of God took center stage in what Jesus preached.

We must always remember that kingdom is a political word. It has to do with governance. It carries the idea and the exercise of power over people's lives. The kingdom of God has to do with God's governance of a people's life together. I have defined the kingdom of God with two words: authority and love. The kingdom of God refers to God's exercise of loving authority over ever increasing circles of human life. That raises a question: What would God's governance look like?

That is where these indelible images of Jesus come to mind: His hand on the leper's flesh to heal him; stooping over the paralytic to forgive his sins; dining with the down-and-out in Galilee to show them that they had worth before God; by a word reintegrating the disintegrated personalities of the demon-possessed. That anticipates how the world will be brought under the governance of God without opposition.

When He will bring the world under His loving authority without opposition is more difficult. In Mark 1:2-4 something takes place that we might miss, even if we were not in a hurry. Mark has put into his story of Jesus a powerful indication that time cannot thwart God's ultimate purpose for all the nations of the earth.

Go back for a moment to Mark's Old Testament quotation in verse 2-3. "I will send my messenger ahead of you." Malachi wrote those words half a millennium before Christ. Mark quotes them as though they had been spoken for the first time only yesterday. That is because the purpose of the speaker was as firm in Mark's day as it was 500 years earlier. After all, who is the I who said, "I will send my messenger ahead of you"? It is the God of Israel. Time had met its match. Here are purposes that endure through vast ages and across many cultures.

     The plans of the LORD stand firm forever,
     the purposes of his heart through all generations (Psa. 33:11).

The God whom Jesus reveals to us, the God in whom we believe is a God who acts within human life so as to achieve His ultimate purpose for mankind. He acts within the life of the Jewish people, preeminently in the deeds and words of Jesus of Nazareth. He is acting so as to establish His loving authority over all human existence, and time, which cuts short all our efforts, has no power to thwart His ultimate purpose.

In light of this think about something with me. We have intimations in the Hebrew Bible that this God concerned Himself with nations other than Israel, but we know very little about what He did with them. We do know that Abraham appeared about 1500 years before Christ, and then the living and true God, the Maker of heaven and earth, devoted those 1500 years to teaching Abraham's descendants what kind of God He was, culminating in the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth.

Here is my point. If God made His ultimate purpose for mankind depend on 1500 years of getting one little people out of all the peoples of the earth ready for their Messiah, do we seriously think anything we do is going to derail His purposes? Whatever horror genetic engineering may bring, whatever threats weapons of mass destruction may bring, and whatever hideous strength may be invested in the antichrist, the plans of the LORD stand firm forever.

He will overcome them all by making the actions of a thousand Pharaohs and Judases to manifest His glory in spite of their evil, and also by raising up ten thousand Josephs, Esthers, and Peters who will rise from lowly and unlikely obscurity to lead His people. And His people, you and I, in all our ordinariness will act faithfully in the confidence that our God, our Lord Jesus Christ, will work within human life to accomplish His ultimate purpose for mankind.

Let me make the same point in a more intimate way. If God made His ultimate purpose for mankind depend on 1500 years of getting one little people out of all the peoples of the earth ready for their Messiah, why should we think anything in our personal experience is going to derail His purposes? In Christ you and I have been united to the irresistible intentions of almighty God, the Father of Jesus Christ, and neither our successes, sins or sorrows will thwart His intentions nor separate us from participating in the glad fulfillment of those intentions. The life of Israel and preeminently the life of Jesus Christ stand as pledge and symbol of God's mighty work in the world.

This brings me to my second statement of the vision of God in the Gospel of Mark. God elected Israel as the human community in which He would anticipate and guarantee the unimaginable good He has in store for all the nations of the earth. God elected Israel as the human community in which He would anticipate and guarantee the unimaginable good He has in store for all the nations of the earth. 

To begin with God's ultimate purpose for mankind appears to be worked out specifically within the life of the Jewish people. Look, for example, at Mark 1:2: It is written in Isaiah the prophet ... and the beginning of verse four finishes the thought: And so John came. Clearly, Christianity saw its origins within the life of Israel. The Old Testament prophets anticipated uncannily the life of Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, the Gospel of Mark takes place exclusively in a Jewish setting. The River Jordan, Nazareth, Capernaum, the Sea of Galilee, the synagogues, Jerusalem – all are Jewish places. Andrew, Simon, James, John, Matthew, Nathaniel, Judas, Jesus – all are Jewish names.

But surpremely, God's choice of Israel as the instrument for achieving His ultimate purpose for mankind centers on Jesus Christ. Jesus was a Jew – reared in a Jewish carpenter's household, of a Jewish mother, and with siblings who played and worked in the Jewish village of Nazareth. He had a profound grasp of Jewish scriptures and Jewish traditions. Jewish authorities found Him a threat to their national interests. All His disciples were Jews. Jesus reflected awareness of His unique place within the chosen people when He preached, "The time is fulfilled." Jesus saw His life as the climactic moment for which God had brought Israel into existence. He is not only thoroughly Jewish, He is the supreme Jew.

Unlike some of its later readers, the New Testament never wavers in affirming its indispensable connections to Israel. God made those connections, because God chose to work out His ultimate purpose for mankind within the life of Israel.

When Jesus said, "The kingdom of God is near," to say it was near putting the fat in the fire. Upon hearing that, every listener should say, "Prove it! Show me!" In one sense the whole Gospel of Mark was written to show us. Mark wrote his Gospel as if to say, "If you want to see what human life would look like under God's love and authority, then you need to see what Jesus did and hear what Jesus said." His words and particularly His deeds become the garment in which God's character and ultimate purpose come within reach of human sense and sensibilities. It will be as we reflect on what Jesus said and did that I am able to make the other five statements about God.

Mark's language also reflects the unique place that Jesus holds in Israel's life. I am talking about the different names of Jesus that appear in Mark 1-4. I want to mention two of them, both of which are present in the opening sentence of the Gospel of Mark. The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Jesus is called Christ, which means Messiah, and He is called the Son of God.

When we hear the word Christ, we think of it as a proper name like Joe or Mary or Jesus. But Christ is a title. Christos, which we translate as Christ, was itself the Greek word for a Hebrew title, Machiach, Messiah. First-century readers, especially Jews, would have read the opening line of Mark's Gospel as, The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Messiah, the Son of God.

We are going to let Mark's story of Jesus define what those two names mean. For our purposes today, it is enough to take the name the Son of God and make some observations about it. If we knew nothing else about this name, we could say that it points to a family resemblance. To say of any boy, "He is so-and-so's son," means that we will expect to see some likeness to the boy's father.

To call Jesus the Son of God means that we should expect to see some likeness to God. However, do you see the situation we are in? If I know a boy's father and then I meet the boy, I can compare the two. But if I have never met his father, I will have to base my picture of his father on the son's character, actions and purposes. We are in the situation of never having seen Jesus' Father. We have only seen the Son, and as a result, we must base our picture of God on Jesus' character, actions and purposes.

Two moments in Mark 1-4 encourage us to do this. The first takes place at Jesus' baptism. Mark 1:11 says, And a voice came from heaven: "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased." It is as if God had said, "If you want to see what I am like, watch what this Man does and listen to what this Man says. It is as if you were watching and hearing me, because He is my Son."

The other moment happened later in Mark 3:11. Whenever the evil spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, "You are the Son of God." If the voice at Jesus' baptism came from heaven, these voices came from hell. But whether from heaven or hell, they recognized Him and no one else as the one in whom the character and purpose and power of the unseen God had broken into our world.

So, we say, God manifests His character and His ultimate purpose in the person and ministry of Jesus. That has two powerful meanings for us. First, the word god is used often in our society. It has become a word, which can mean almost anything, depending on who uses it and how it is used. The word god on the lips of a Christian, a Muslim and a character on a TV sitcom will have radically different meanings. Phrases like "God bless you!" and "God loves you" have no certain meaning.

When we Christians use the word God, we mean the God that Jesus Christ reveals to humanity. Our church and tens of thousands of others like ours are Christocentric. Jesus Christ is at the center of our understanding of God and of Christian faith. Taking that away from us is not so much like removing stripes from the tiger; it is like turning a real tiger into a paper tiger. Jesus Christ must be preeminent in all things.

Second, is your life Christocentric? Do you confess that Jesus Christ is the center of your understanding of God and of Christian faith? Is that the conviction on which you are building your life? Is that where your loyalties lie?