Are you bored by Christianity? You might not be opposed to the
faith. You might not have intellectual
objections to it. You might just not find it that
interesting. It's part of the kind of
background music of the culture. It's part of the furniture of
your life. In some way, that could be true
whether you profess faith in Christ or not.
Think about some of those phrases we confess near the
beginning of the service and the Apostles Creed.
That's the oldest and most widely used Christian
confession. In some way or other, some
version of it has been confessed in Christian churches for almost
2000 years. Many of its phrases have been
worn smooth by constant use, like a penny that's just rubbed
in somebody's pocket for 50 years, and you can't really make
out the shape of the designs anymore.
The phrases just kind of wash over you without leaving a mark.
They have this kind of liturgical ring and rhythm to
it, and they don't really make an impression.
Here's one of the phrases. I mean, right at the end, I
believe in the resurrection of the body and the life
everlasting. OK, sure, Christians believe in
resurrection and eternal life. Yep, got it.
It's like what those people are saying when they put John 316 on
a poster at a football game. Whoever believes has eternal
life. OK, Yep, Christians believe in
eternal life. Sounds good.
But what is that belief in the resurrection?
It starts with the belief that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified,
that his body was put in the tomb and he got back up out of
it bodily. He died and he became not dead.
And that belief in the resurrection of the dead
continues. The implication is all those who
believe in him will experience resurrection to glory like he
did, and eternal bliss with him. That belief in the resurrection
also continues. It's not just believers, it's
all people who will be resurrected.
Only those who don't believe in Him won't be resurrected to an
eternal life of bliss, but an eternal life of torment, of
condemnation, of judgement. I understand Christians have
been saying these things to non Christians for 2000 years.
I understand if you're not a believer in Jesus, maybe
Christians in your life have been saying this to you for
years or even decades. But I just got to say,
objectively, looking at the belief itself, belief in the
resurrection of the body and the life everlasting is nothing to
yawn at. One Christian theologian put it
belief in the resurrection is a high stakes game in which the
player has bet the bank and if there is no resurrection loses.
The resurrection is everything or it's nothing.
Christianity is everything or it's nothing, and your daily
life faith in Jesus is everything or it's nothing.
Take the idea of God's grace. Another one of these common
Christian beliefs. God doesn't treat us as our sins
deserve, but has mercy on us. There's a song like Amazing
Grace. It's become a kind of cultural
anthem. You might hear it song in a
sports game or some big cultural event.
Amazing Grace, how sweet. The sound that saves a Wretch
like me again washes over you, worn smooth by repetition.
You could hear it without registering the words at all.
Is God's grace in Jesus amazing? If you asked some of the people
who saw Jesus face to face, they would tell you that amazing
doesn't begin to cover it. Amazing doesn't begin to do it
justice. Our passage for this morning is
March 7, verses 24 to 37. If you don't have a Bible, you
can put up your hand and my teenage assistant will bring you
one. Put up a hand.
If you need a Bible. And if you don't have a Bible,
like 1, you can easily read it. Feel free one right up here.
And then Derek 2. If you don't have a Bible that
you can like easily read at home, take it, keep it.
It's our gift to you. Mark 724 to 37.
Before I read the whole passage, I want to draw your attention to
the very end, I guess. Keep your hands up.
There's some delay in the supply chain.
Keep those hands high. They're coming soon.
Mark 724 to 37 Before I read the passage, look at the very end,
very last verse. And they were all astonished
beyond measure, saying he has done all things well.
He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.
There's a crowd responding to something Jesus did.
We'll see what he what he did in a minute.
I just want you to notice the response.
They were astonished beyond measure, like you couldn't
measure it, you couldn't chart it.
If you put a scale of astonishment and then you put it
as high as it could go, this would have broken the speaker.
This would have cranked up the astonishment to 11.
They were astonished beyond measure.
In other words, Jesus saving grace is anything but boring.
It's the opposite of boring. It's astonishing.
Why? Why is Jesus's grace
astonishing? Keep that question in mind as I
read the whole passage. Mark 724 to 37.
And from there he rose and went away to the region of Tyre
inside him. And he entered a house, and did
not want anyone to know. Yet he could not be hidden.
But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean
spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet.
Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth.
And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.
And he said to her, Let the children be fed first, for it is
not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.
But she answered him, Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs under the
table eat the children's crumbs. And he said to her, For this
statement you may go your way, the demon has left your
daughter. And she went home and found the
child lying in bed, and the demon gone.
Then he returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon
to the Sea of Galilee in the region of the Decapolis.
And they brought to him a man who was deaf and had a speech
impediment, And they begged him to lay his hand on him, and
taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers
into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue.
And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, Afafa,
that is be opened. And his ears were opened, his
tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.
And Jesus charged them to tell no one.
But the more he charged them, the more zealously they
proclaimed it, and they were astonished beyond measure,
saying He has done all things well.
He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.
The question our whole passage poses to us is Why is Jesus's
grace astonishing? We'll consider 4 answers from
the passage now. Our passage has two brief
narratives. Jesus encounter with the
Syrophoenician woman and his healing of the deaf mute man.
And the sermon will mainly walk through the text with a couple
of twists .1 will cover the first half of the passage, .2
will cover the second-half .3 We'll look at the very beginning
and end, and .4 will help us see something in the whole passage
.1 first half .2 second-half .3 beginning and end .4 whole
thing. Why is the grace of Jesus
astonishing .1 It calls forth bold faith.
It calls forth bold faith. We see this in Jesus
interactions with the Gentile woman in verses 24 and 25.
Look at the sorry. We see it in verses 24 to 30.
Look first with me at verses 24 and 25.
And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre
inside him. And he entered a house, and did
not want anyone to know. Yet he could not be hidden.
But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean
spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet.
The cities of Tyre and Sidon are in Gentile territory,
neighboring Israel to the north. In the Old Testament, the city
of Tyre often opposed and oppressed God's people, Israel.
Now Mark doesn't tell us why Jesus took this detour into
Gentile territory. I think the most likely reasons
are either that he was seeking rest and refreshment for himself
and his disciples, or that he was seeking to let controversy
with the Pharisees kind of cool off, or some combination of
both. But it just doesn't tell us
explicitly. What it does say is that as
we've seen throughout the Gospel of Mark, wherever Jesus goes,
even when he's trying to get quiet time to himself, people
find him. They come to him.
People are drawn to him like a magnet.
So here comes a woman whose daughter is demon possessed.
She hears about him, comes to where she is, somehow gets
access to this house that he doesn't want people to know
where it is, and she falls down at his feet.
This is a posture of humble pleading.
It's of respectful begging. She's desperate.
That's why she comes to him. Look at verse 26.
Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth, and she
begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.
This woman is a solid Pagan. She has no ounce of Jewish
blood, no shred of Jewish heritage.
All she knows, somehow, is that Jesus can rescue her daughter,
so she begs him to. As Tim Keller observes, there
are cowards, there are regular people, there are heroes, and
then there are parents. Parents are not really on the
spectrum from cowardice to courage because if your child is
in jeopardy, you simply do what it takes to save her.
That's the woman coming to Jesus, desperate and insistent
as only a parent of a child in trouble can be.
So how does Jesus respond? Verse 27?
And he said to her, let the children be fed first, for it is
not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.
This is not what we expect from Jesus.
Why doesn't he just heal her daughter?
More than that, many people have taken this passage to be
insulting, racist, misogynist, or abusive in some other way.
What's going on here? We need to start with one
crucial clue from the text, something we have to notice
right away. Look at the beginning of Jesus
response. Let the children be fed first.
So right off the bat we have to see Jesus response not as a
denial, but a deferral. He's not saying no, he's saying
wait. But wait for what?
Wait why and what? What on earth does he mean by
seemingly calling some people children and other people dogs?
I think another key to Jesus response is that he doesn't
actually call the woman a dog. It's easy to make that
association, It's easy to see why people think that, but I
don't think that's what's going on.
Jesus uses an analogy. This is a little mini parable
like Jesus so often teaches in parables.
Specifically, it's a metaphor involving animals, but that
doesn't necessarily identify her with the animal or all its
associations. If a university can't make
payroll, and someone said that the university's employees were
fleeing like rats off a sinking ship, that's not necessarily an
insult to those employees leaving an institution that's
going underwater. Sure, rat is often an insult.
You could use rat as an insult, but what's the point of
comparison? The point of comparison is
simply escape. They're just getting out while
the gettin's good. So you can use a metaphor with
animals without importing all the associations of that animal
to that person. To understand the force of
Jesus's mini parable, you have to ask what's the point of
connection? No analogy or metaphor perfectly
maps on to the sort of two things it's comparing.
So what's what's the point of contact?
And I think it has to do with that word first.
We'll come back to that. But still, many scholars and lay
readers take Jesus's use of the word dog to be an insult.
They argue that Jewish sources often use dog as a derogatory
term for Gentiles. And they say that the
associations of dog are not lovable domestic pets, but a
wild, unruly, mangy St. dogs, you know, not cute and cuddly,
but like, don't want to have anything to do with them because
they'll bite you and you'll get rabies.
And so they would see Jesus as using an ethnic slur.
Here again, I think that's over reading and misreading the
metaphor in the 1st place. But there's one more detail in
the passage that argues against it.
It's hard to see in in most English translations, though it
does come out in many translations today in many
modern languages. And that's this.
There are two Greek words for dog, kuon and Kunariyan.
The one used here is Kunariyan, which is actually a diminutive
term. It's kind of like our English
doggy or puppy. And I think that in our passage
it does have that kind of diminutive or affectionate
force, right? You can, you can refer to a
child as a kid or you can say kiddo, you're adding a little
bit of affection when you do that.
Use that diminutive term. I think it has that force here
again, remember Jesus says let the children be fed first.
So that implies that the dogs in this metaphor get to eat after.
What kind of dog gets to eat household food after children
are done with it? A pet.
So I think Jesus's mini parable implies that the dog is a pet.
Both the logic of saying 1st and also using a diminutive word.
But what does this parable mean? Here it is in a nutshell.
Matthew's parallel to this passage makes it explicit.
It records another saying of Jesus in this same incident.
Jesus says in Matthew 1524, I was sent only to the lost sheep
of the House of Israel. The focus of Jesus earthly
ministry was to bring salvation to Israel in fulfillment of
God's promises to Israel. As we've seen, he made very rare
exceptions by going to Gentile territory.
But the focus of his earthly mission was narrow.
It was restricted. His job was to proclaim the
fulfillment of God's promises to Israel and to back that up by
the miracles he performed. As Paul proclaims in Romans 116,
the gospel is God's power of salvation to the Jew 1st and
also to the Greek. As Jesus says in John 424,
salvation is from the Jews. Jesus point here in this parable
in verse 27. It's about historical sequence,
It's about priority in redemptive history, and it's
therefore about the priority in His ministry.
He is not here to become a full time traveling medical
missionary clinic for everyone everywhere.
He's here to fulfill God's promises to Israel so that once
those promises are fulfilled, they can overflow to all
nations. Here's how Paul put that exact
same point in Romans 15, verses 8 to 9.
For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the
circumcised to show God's truthfulness, in order to
confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order
that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy.
So Jesus is saying, that's not why I came, not yet.
The children of Israel have to be fed first.
But then the woman responds in verse 28.
But she answered him, Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs under the
table eat the children's crumbs. The woman does not respond to
Jesus statement as if it is a racist or sexist insult.
Instead she picks up on the key point of Jesus parable, timing.
Who gets to eat when? When do the pets get to eat?
Jesus says after the children, but she says they also eat what
falls from the table. Now, if you have a pet dog, you
recognize how photo realistic the woman's response is.
When Kristen and I are cooking dinner, our beloved mutt Rusty
will in advance go take up his post under our dining table.
He will lie down right in the middle of the table between
where all our feet are going to go and he will wait patiently.
You'll even notice his head will face the side of the table where
our youngest child sits. He he is ready to eat the crumbs
that fall from the children's table.
He knows that we will not give him food from the table.
He also knows that he can nevertheless get food from the
table, especially by sitting next to Margaret.
You know, maybe the youngest child might perhaps drop
something in his direction, perhaps accidentally, perhaps on
purpose. This Gentile woman's response
demonstrates many spiritual strengths.
First of all, she has faith that God's provision for his people,
Israel, is enough to include her.
It's enough to overflow to her. God's table is set so full that
she's confident that the leftovers will be enough for
what she needs. She also beats Jesus in a battle
of wits. Jesus parable is a challenge.
It's a test. He's deferring his reply to draw
out and deepen her faith. And the woman passes the test.
She wins the battle of wits. She gets the better of Jesus in
the exchange. It's fascinating to know that
she, a Gentile woman, is the only character in Mark's gospel
to call Jesus Lord. Now, we don't know if that's
just a respectful form of address or if she's seeing even
more than that, but still, she's the only character in Mark's
gospel to call Jesus Lord. She's also the only character to
instantly grasp a parable of Jesus.
She understood it so well right off the bat that she could flip
it on its head and throw it back at him.
OK Jesus, sure you say that the children eat 1st and then the
dogs, but what about the food that the dogs can eat at the
same time without taking anything away from the children?
How about that? Jesus says wait your turn.
She says no I don't have to wait.
That is bold faith, and I think we have to see in the
interaction that Jesus is deliberately drawing it out of
her. Jesus response was not a
rejection but a delay. Jesus's initial refusal meant
she had to dig deeper and exercise more faith.
Jesus was doing what God so often does when He doesn't
answer our prayers right away, when God seems to be distracted
or distant, when he seems to be saying to us, wait, not yet.
What is God doing when you come to him with a request and He
seems to rebuff you? One of the things He's doing is
inviting you to wrestle with Him in prayer.
Abraham wrestled with God in prayer in Genesis 18 over the
fate of the city of Sodom. Jacob wrestled with the Angel of
the Lord all night, saying, I will not let you go until you
bless me. What did I do in reply Genesis
3228? For you have striven with God
and with men, and have prevailed.
That's why he named him Israel. We see the psalmist constantly
wrestling with God in prayer, asking questions of God like
Psalm 88140. Lord, why do you cast my soul
away? That question is a wrestling
move. That question is responding to
God's seeming absence, seeming indifference, seeming denial.
What do you do with that? You throw it back at God in
prayer when God seems to reject you.
What he wants is for you to not take no for an answer.
Wrestle with Him in prayer. When God invites you to wrestle
with him in prayer, he's like a parent wrestling with their kid.
When dad wrestles with a kid who wins, it's not dad, it's the
kid. That's the whole point.
When you're tempted to think God doesn't care about you, don't
drift away from him. Instead, dig deeper and wrestle
with God in prayer. Parents, wrestle with God in
prayer on your kids behalf. There may be times when your
children don't want to talk to you about spiritual things.
Those times might be times of day or might be stretches that
are years long, But your kids refusing to talk to you about
spiritual things can't stop you from talking to God about them
and for them. Kids, your parents pray for you
all the time. Do you pray for yourself?
If you're a professing believer in Jesus, do you make time to
pray? Do you take initiative to pray?
Do you know how to pray? If not, ask your parents or talk
to another member of the church. Talk to them about what it looks
like to wrestle with God in prayer in verses 27 and 28.
This woman is being strikingly assertive, but she's not
asserting her rights. Instead, the basis of her
assertiveness is God's grace. She's not saying it's wrong for
the Jews to be Jesus priority. She's just saying God's mercy is
big enough for her too. God's grace is enough for her
too. There's more than enough to go
around. And she's right.
This is a picture of what all of our spiritual posture should be.
Draw near to God with boldness. Come to Him for all you need,
and make the basis of your appeal.
Not your deserving because you don't have any, but God's mercy
because it's infinite, as Thomas Cranmer put it in a prayer in
the Church of England's classic Lord's Supper liturgy.
We do not presume to come to this your table, merciful Lord,
trusting in our own righteousness, but in your
manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to
gather up the crumbs under your table, but you are the same Lord
whose property is always to have mercy.
The woman wrestles with Jesus and wins.
What happens then verses 29 and 30 and he said to her, for this
statement, you may go your way. The demon has left your daughter
and she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon
gone. Jesus cast out the demon at a
distance. This is a remote exorcism.
Jesus could effectively work remotely, no Internet connection
required. He can do this with the text.
Doesn't even tell us how, Doesn't tell us he did anything.
Doesn't tell us he said anything.
He just declared it done and that was the case.
It was a proof of his divinity. He could intervene in power
without being there physically. It's a proof of his divine
nature that he fills all things as God.
He cast out the demon secretly and now tells Mom the good news.
Jesus grace is astonishing because it calls forth bold
faith. Because Jesus delays in order to
draw our souls closer to him, He stays silent to provoke us to
speak. He seems indifferent to get us
to care. He denies us to provoke us to
wrestle with him. And then in response, he hears
and answers our prayers as only God can.
What does that look like .2 It restores all that sin ruined.
Why is Jesus's grace astonishing?
It restores all that sin ruined. That's the main point we should
take away from the passages. Second-half verses 31 to 37,
verse 31. Then he returned from the region
of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee in the
region of the Decapolis. Now the text doesn't say why,
but Jesus travels in a circuit through this Gentile region.
He kind of goes up and around before coming back toward
Israelite territory. He winds up back in the
Decapolis. That's where he healed the man
who had the legion of demons back in chapter 5.
Do you remember what Jesus made the guy do after he healed him?
Instead of getting to come with Jesus, he made him go back and
proclaim what Jesus had done throughout the Decapolis.
Now Jesus returns, and apparently that man's
evangelistic work had at least some impact because now that
Jesus is back in the Decapolis, people bring him someone to be
healed. They know who he is.
They know what he can do. Verse 32 And they brought to him
a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment, and they
begged him to lay his hand on him.
When it says speech impediment, we shouldn't think of someone
who has like a mild stutter. But the text tells us he's deaf,
so this means he can hardly speak at all.
Jesus acts right away. Verses 33 to 35 and taking him
aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears
and after spitting touched his tongue, and looking up to
heaven, he sighed and said to him, Ephatha, that is be opened,
and his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he
spoke plainly. We know that Jesus can heal
simply by speaking a word. So why does he take all these
elaborate steps? What's Jesus doing?
I think there are two reasons for these actions Jesus takes.
First, Jesus is communicating kindly to the man that he's
healing. The man can't hear, but he can
see, he can feel. And so Jesus touches his ears to
indicate he's going to heal him. He touches the man's tongue to
show he's going to enable him to speak.
He sighs because all creation groans under the weight of God's
curse, and he looks up to heaven to show the man from where his
help is going to come. Jesus is acting here like a
Doctor Who tells you each step they're going to take before
they take it, so nothing catches you by surprise.
What's Jesus doing? He's entering into this man's
world. He's speaking the language this
man can understand. And that's actually what Jesus's
entire incarnation is about. It's an act of loving
accommodation. It's an act of loving
condescension. Jesus entered into our world.
He became flesh and blood. He spoke the only language we
could understand. His whole human life is a kind
of sign language pointing to his divine nature and power and
purposes. But I think there's another
reason Jesus goes through all of these particular steps to heal
the man. I think he's showing us that
this man's condition is a picture of all of our condition.
What do we all need Jesus to do? We need him to touch our ears so
that we can receive spiritual truths.
We need Him to touch our tongues so that we can speak rightly of
God and His ways. Each of us, by nature, is
spiritually deaf and dumb. None of us understands our true
condition. None of us understands the
things of God. Sin not only effects our
actions, it destroys our faculties of spiritual
perception. Sin doesn't just condemn us, it
also ruins us. And the saving work that Jesus
came to accomplish came to deal with both.
He lived a perfect life. He died on the cross.
He suffered the penalty due to all the sins of all those who
had turned from sin and trust in Him.
He freed us from sins, condemnation that way, And he
rose from the dead, proving the validity of his offering, his
sacrifice. He also came to transform us, to
renew us, to heal us spiritually, to make us whole.
And he holds out all those benefits.
He holds out all those blessings to everyone who turns from sin
and trusts in Him. The only way to get right with
God through Jesus is to repent and believe.
And if you do repent and believe, He will deal not only
with the debt of your sin, but with its effects on you.
That's the two fold hope of the gospel in this life, that you
can be not only forgiven, but even transformed.
If you're not a believer in Jesus, what in your life is most
broken, most ruined, most miserable?
Do you have a good explanation for why that is?
Do you have an explanation that gets down to the roots of
things? I want to encourage you to
consider the Bible's explanation of where all of our deepest
problems come from. God created us good, and the
very first human beings sinned, and in response to that sin, God
put a curse on all of creation. That is why this life is a
strange mix of glory and groaning, of beauty and
brokenness. As CS Lewis put it, nature has
all the air of a good thing spoiled.
Both the blessings in your life and all the problems can be
explained most fully and only explained completely by
recognizing this whole world was created by God.
Good and sin ruined it. So Jesus heals this man of his
deafness and dumbness, just like he heals all of us who trust in
him. The people responded with
amazement, astonishment, verses 36 and 37, And Jesus charged
them to tell no one. But the more he charged them,
the more zealously they proclaimed it.
And they were astonished beyond measure, saying he has done all
things well. He even makes the deaf hear and
the mute speak. Now Jesus wanted to keep this
quiet because the more people swamped him with healing
requests like this, the harder it would be for him to fulfill
his primary mission. But the people disobey, and they
tell everybody. We'll come back to that in a
moment, but for now our focus is on their astonishment.
They're astonished beyond measure because, as they say, he
has done all things well. That statement, He has done all
things well, echoes creation and implies new creation.
After God finished his work of creating the universe and
forming and filling this world, Genesis 131 tells us, and God
saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good in
creation. God created everything and He
made everything good. He did all things well.
Now in his saving work of new creation, Jesus does all things
well. He shows power over creation by
restoring ruined faculties. He gives people a new beginning
by granting them to hear truly and speak rightly.
He does what only the Creator can.
He restores all that sin ruined. This is astonishing grace.
This is miraculous grace. This is grace that deals with
our problems not externally but internally, not superficially
but completely, and best of all, not temporarily but permanently.
If you want to be amazed by Jesus grace, then remember there
is no problem in your life that He cannot fix perfectly and
permanently. When we gather as a church, why
do we worship God together? It's because we're astonished at
His grace. That's where worship comes from.
It comes from being astonished at God's grace.
Corporate worship is a response to who God is and what He's done
for us in Christ. So in our corporate gatherings
we come again to take in what God has done for us.
In our corporate gatherings we do that in order that we would
be newly astonished by God's grace, and having taken it in
again, we would send it back out to him as astonished praise.
Take in astonishing grace, send up astonished praise.
That's the rhythm of corporate worship.
In corporate worship, we breathe in God's grace as we hear his
word, as we hear it read and preach, and as we sing and pray
and we breathe out awestruck adoration.
Jesus grace is astonishing because he restores all that sin
ruined in this passage. This man's deafness and dumbness
were not necessarily a result of his own sin.
The text doesn't tell us enough to say one way or another, but
these conditions were downstream from sin's original act of
plunging the whole world into ruin and misery.
Adam and Eve's sin in the garden shipwrecked humanity, and we've
been floating, grabbing whatever pieces to hang on to that we can
ever since. But Jesus came to begin the work
of rescuing, renewing, and redeeming.
He came to remake all that sin unmade.
That is the farthest thing from boring, which means when you
know it, you want to tell it .3 It can't be kept quiet.
Why is Jesus grace astonishing? Because it can't be kept quiet.
This is what we see in the very beginning and very end of the
passage. Verses 24 and 25.
Verses 36 and 37, Just to briefly revisit those verses.
In verse 24, Jesus entered a house and did not want anyone to
know, yet He could not be hidden.
And in verse 25, the woman heard of him and came to him.
Then at the end, verses 36 and 37, Jesus charged them to tell
no one. But the more he charged them,
the more zealously they proclaimed it.
And in verse 37, as we've seen, they proclaimed some pretty
profound truths about who Jesus is and what He's done.
Now, we've seen again and again throughout Mark's gospel that
Jesus wanted to keep things quiet during his earthly
ministry for a few reasons. He wanted to limit the amount
that he would just get swamped and flooded by requests for
healing. He wanted to limit the ways in
which people who had a very weak and imperfect understanding of
his Messiahship would go out and kind of perhaps unintentionally
spread disinformation about who this Messiah is.
So Jesus priority is on secrecy now, but that's limited to his
earthly ministry. After his death and
resurrection, that switch flips from secret to proclaim it
everywhere. And there's a parallel here.
What's also limited to his earthly ministry is his focus on
the lost sheep of the House of Israel.
That also is for now, not later. Those two things go hand in
hand, as as Jesus declared in Mark 1310 in the context of
prophesying his own return, he says, and the gospel must first
be proclaimed to all nations. So on the one hand, these people
in verse 36 who spread around what Jesus has done are
disobeying his orders. They're frustrating his purpose
for secrecy. But on the other hand, they also
illustrate the inherent power of Christ's grace, and they preview
our work of proclaiming it. Once you've experienced Jesus
grace, you can't keep quiet about it.
It's a little bit like trying to keep a kid from spreading good
news. Maybe a younger sibling learns
what a certain older sibling is going to get for their birthday
or for Christmas. Maybe Big Brother or sister
learns that mom is going to have a baby.
You might become Privy to that news without even asking.
Because the kid was just excited.
They're so happy about it. You don't blame them.
You don't get mad at them. It's hard for kids to keep
secrets. They're just too excited.
Brothers and sisters, I know that's not always our experience
of the gospel, but when you are freshly reminded of the power of
Christ's grace, it does inflamed excitement.
It leads to a childlike joy in Jesus.
It makes it hard for you to keep it to yourself so that it starts
to just spill out of you like the good news that mom's going
to have another baby. That kind of childlike joy comes
from being astonished at Jesus's grace.
The more excited you are about God's grace in Christ, the more
that news will spill out of you and the more boundaries it will
cross. As it does .4 it breaks through
every boundary. Why is Jesus's grace
astonishing? It breaks through every
boundary. As I mentioned at the beginning,
this point comes from the whole passage.
It's one of the themes that emerges in the whole thing.
So in this section of Mark's gospel from kind of the middle
of chapter 6, the beginning of chapter 8, Jesus is going
through Gentile territory and he's doing some of the same
stuff in Gentile territory that he did when he was in Israel,
including, as we'll see next week, a miraculous feeding.
Why is there this whole other miraculous feeding that's so
similar to the one before? Well, one of the key reasons is
that it is a whole different people group receiving it.
But we also see some more details in this passage.
In the In the first half, the first narrative, Jesus grace
breaks through barriers or boundaries of ethnicity,
culture, historic animosity, and religion.
In the second-half of the passage, Jesus again heals a
Gentile breaking through those same boundaries.
And in addition, his healing breaks through the boundary of
the man's natural inability and incapacity.
Jesus's grace breaks through every boundary.
We can see this in a whole other way by recognizing that our
entire passage has deliberate links with Isaiah 35, which
Barbara read to us earlier. If you have a Bible, go ahead
and turn there. I don't usually do this, don't
usually do like a mini exposition on another passage,
but I think you're going to see close connections.
Here's some context for Isaiah 35, which I think is going to
sort of backlight our passage in this chapter.
God is promising through Isaiah to end his people's exile.
He's going to gather them back to himself.
He is going to breakthrough every barrier that separates
them from him and separates them from true flourishing.
Not only that, but he promises to come to them in person and to
renew creation. I'll read the whole chapter
again. The wilderness and the dry land
shall be glad. The desert shall rejoice and
blossom like the crocus. It shall blossom abundantly, and
rejoice with joy in singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be
given to it. The majesty of Carmel and
Sharon. They shall see the glory of the
Lord, The majesty of our God. Strengthen the weak hands, and
make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who have an anxious
heart, Be strong, Fear not, Behold, your God will come with
vengeance. With the recompense of God, He
will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall
be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
Then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of
the mute sing for joy. For waters break forth in the
wilderness, and streams in the desert.
The burning sand shall become a pool in the thirsty ground,
springs of water in the haunt of jackals where they lie down.
The grass shall become reeds and rushes, and a highway shall be
there, and it shall be called the way of holiness.
The unclean shall not Passover it.
It shall belong to those who walk on the way.
Even if they are fools, they shall not go astray.
No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up
on it. They shall not be found there,
but the redeemed shall walk there, and the ransomed of the
Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing.
Everlasting joy shall be upon their heads.
They shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow, and sighing
shall flee away. Look again at verses 5 and 6.
The ears of the deaf will be unstopped.
The tongue of the mute will sing for joy.
In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the word for mute
is used in exactly one place. In the New Testament, the word
for mute is used in exactly one place, here in Isaiah 35.
And then in our chapter and Mark, what's the point?
Jesus is fulfilling this promise, and by fulfilling this
promise, he's bringing a grace that breaks through every
boundary. Why does Jesus's grace
breakthrough every boundary? How can we see this at work?
3 reasons that we get from this passage as background to our
passage. First, because it's been God's
plan all along to include the nations in His saving purposes.
So Jesus sent first to the lost sheep of the House of Israel,
but this is going to go to all nations.
We see that even here in our passage.
Look at verse 2. The glory of Lebanon shall be
given to it. What's the Lord saying?
The neighboring Gentile people of Lebanon will be included in
this act of salvation and restoration.
Tyre, a city that has opposed God's people, will be included.
Tyre is a city in Lebanon. When Jesus meets this
Syrophoenician woman, he's in Lebanon.
He's fulfilling this promise to the letter.
God has intended to include the nation's in his saving purposes
all along, which means that our purposes as a local church need
to include helping the gospel get to and take root among all
nations. As a church, we should
preferably consider what boundaries we need to
breakthrough in order to fulfill the Great Commission, both at
home and abroad. What barriers stand in the way
of fulfilling the Great Commission?
Geography, language, culture, and especially here at home,
class, socio economic status. That's especially relevant to
local evangelism. Sometimes the firmest barriers
can be the least visible and the least acknowledged.
Whether you're a well off person interacting with someone who's
worse off or the other way around, those barriers can often
be maintained from both sides. The gospel does bring them down.
The gospel must bring them down. How can God use us in the
process of breaking down those barriers by the gospel.
A second reason why Jesus grace breaks through every barrier is
because he is God himself come to restore his people in person.
We've seen the evidence of that in our passage.
Isaiah 35 also proclaims it. Look at the very end of verse
four. He will come and save you.
That's God himself coming and how he did it initially is
through the Incarnate mission of the Lord Jesus Christ.
So this verse shows us what Jesus is doing is not just
fulfilling expectations for what the Messiah would do when he
came. Jesus is filling fulfilling
God's promises of what God himself would do when he came to
restore his people. Nothing can stand in the way of
Jesus grace because Jesus is Incarnate omnipotence. 3rd and
finally, how does this grace breakthrough every barrier?
Why? Because of the work is new
creation, and it won't stop till it remakes everything.
Jesus came to inaugurate the new creation, and at his return he
will consummate it. That's what all the imagery in
verses 6 and seven of Isaiah 35 about nature being transformed
is about. Nature hasn't been transformed
yet, but when Christ returns, it will be.
When we receive our glorified bodies, nature itself will
become a glorified paradise fit for them.
Which brings us back to the resurrection of the body and the
life everlasting. Does that sound boring to you?
Does the grace that promises it sound uninteresting, dull,
lifeless? I got to say after being a
Christian for almost for 27 years, almost to the day, that
the basics of the faith, those time worn simple truths do not
get older. They get fresher.
They grow richer and deeper with the passing months and years of
following the Lord. They grow more real, more
precious. The phrases you might be tempted
to pass over because they're so familiar.
The longer you walk with Jesus, the deeper you go into them and
the more riches you find. Either Jesus is astonishing or
he's nothing. Resurrection of the body and the
life everlasting. That's just another way of
saying what Isaiah 35 verse 10 promises.
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion
with singing, astonishing grace. Astonished praise, everlasting
joy shall be upon their heads. They shall attain gladness and
joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
In our passage, right before Jesus healed the man, he sighed.
Jesus's sighs will one day take away all of yours forever.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you
for these demonstrations of your faithfulness to promise in these
incidents of Jesus healing and casting out a demon.
Father, We thank You that what looks on the surface like just
more good stuff Jesus goes around doing.
Here's a clue to the deep meaning of what you are doing
for all of your people and what you will do for the whole
creation. Father, we pray that we would
hope in your promises and be astonished by your grace in
Jesus name, Amen.