(BONUS EPISODE) December 1, 2024 - Prologue for Communion with Peter D. Jones IV

I know we're going through Mark and Larry appreciates you leading that study.

It's been good.

But we started Mark as well in our men's group.

I think I mentioned that this morning with the ramble.

And I had to felt him made to fill in for our normal leader this past Friday.

So I've been in Mark chapter 2 in some detail.

Mark 2 · chapter mention

I want to just read two little sections there with us for a minute and make some observations.

We're here to remember the Lord tonight, right?

And this does a lot to reveal his heart of compassion for people.

So Mark chapter 2 beginning in verse 23 is our first section to the end of the chapter.

Mark 2 · chapter mention

And then chapter 3 verses 1 through 6.

Mark 2, 23.

One Sabbath he was going through the grain fields, and as they made their way, his disciples

began to pluck heads of grain.

And the Pharisees were saying to him, Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the

Sabbath?

And he said to them, Have you never read what David did when he was in need and was hungry?

He and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God at the time of Abathar, the

high priest, and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any but the priest

to eat.

And also gave it to those who were with him.

And he said to them, The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

So the Son of man is Lord, even of the Sabbath.

In these sections here, the Pharisees feature prominently in chapter 2 and on into chapter

3.

As those who are giving kind of apparently some of the earlier verses, the earlier stories

here in chapter 2, they're paired with the scribes.

And my thinking is that the scribes we know were based in Jerusalem, right?

They were part of that heartbeat of the Judaistic system there.

They were the professionals in knowing the Scriptures.

And I think there was a delegation sent from Jerusalem that checked him out.

And something else was interesting too in the lead up to this is that he, beginning

of chapter 2 says he returned to Capernaum and it was reported that he was at home.

Well we know that his home, his hometown was not Capernaum.

It was...

Nazareth.

Nazareth, right?

But if you go back in the Gospels a little bit, you lay out the timeline.

John McCrothers' book, you know, is very helpful.

It's a perfect life.

You find out that actually he couldn't go back to Nazareth because by this point he'd

already been kicked out.

So Capernaum was his base of operations and he struggled with being able to meet in the

towns because he was so popular.

Like you said, the people were just flocking to him and the crowds were such that it forced

him out to the wilderness to read that very end of chapter 1.

But the point is that the word was spreading and they heard about him in Jerusalem and

they sent the experts to come up and check him out.

And the Pharisees are just watching him like crazy.

You know, I've said a few times in Sunday school that the Pharisees actually listened

more intently many times than his own disciples because they wanted to catch him in some kind

of error.

I think it's Chuck Misler that says that whenever we miss the point of what Jesus is saying,

the Holy Spirit brings the Pharisees to the rescue to protest, you know, and to help us

make sure we don't miss the point.

Right?

Yeah, but so this particular, these two sections here are two stories that, it marks a very

quick account, right?

There are two Sabbaths, apparently, back to back, maybe not back to back, but they're

pretty close to one another.

And this first Sabbath, he's going through the grain fields and somehow the Pharisees

see that and his disciples are plucking the heads of the grain, which they weren't supposed

to do anyway.

And then you're probably rubbing it together to get the husk off, you know, and then blow

it to blow the chaff away and eat the grain.

And that was a violation of their Sabbath.

The thing that may be a question here is, well, you know, they don't own that field,

so are they stealing the grain?

And both Deuteronomy and Leviticus, though, make provision for this, right?

Where you were allowed to go into somebody else's field, I think in Leviticus it uses

the illustration of grapes and go into somebody's vineyard.

If you're hungry, you can eat the grapes, but you're not to just take extra, you just

take as much as you need to fill your need.

And then you know that there's provision for gleaning so that you didn't like harvest

every single grain, you know, head of grain out of your field.

You were to leave some on the corners and edges for the poor people.

So again, the Lord is showing his heart here for people, right?

But they missed that point completely.

So when they say, look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?

It's not the act of taking the grain, but it's when they were doing it.

That is the problem for them.

And then he points to an illustration in Scripture, and he's very pointed here when

he says to them, have you never read, right?

Had they read that?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

They were the professionals.

At least they considered themselves to be the professionals.

They knew all the facts, and yet the knowledge of Scripture, the deep knowledge of Scripture

they had hadn't made, hadn't penetrated their hearts.

And you see that in chapter three, there where he gets mad at them at the hardness of their

hearts, what it says.

Okay?

The Scripture is not supposed to harden your heart.

It's supposed to soften it, really, right?

If it is hardening your heart, you have a real problem.

There's a real problem there.

So anyway, David's violation of the protocol of what he was supposed to do there, the Lord

actually holds that up as something complimentary, right?

Because David was looking after his own hunger and that of his men.

He was providing for them.

And then this last verse there, I really liked that, verse 27, the Sabbath was made for man,

a not man, for the Sabbath.

The word Sabbath comes from, it's basically a transliteration of a Hebrew word for rest,

okay?

And they had turned it into this big, huge thing when in fact it was supposed to be a

blessing, right?

But it actually turned out to be more work to try to keep all their laws than the Sabbath

stop being a day of rest and become a day of stress, right?

Because they got down to such a minutia, a level of minutia that it was so stressful,

right?

Am I violating the Sabbath?

Have I traveled too far?

Have I eaten something I shouldn't eat?

I was sharing with the men too, this interesting little fact.

We've been looking at the stoves and we're going to eventually replace our range.

And some of the ranges actually come with a Sabbath day setting.

I don't know if you know that or not.

So what it does is you can turn it on to the temperature you need on Friday before the

sun goes down.

So most of the modern ranges have a timer after so many hours they'll turn themselves

off, right?

But this overrides that and turns that setting off, apparently.

Yeah, that was pretty amazing.

You can actually get stoves, believe it or not, that have that setting.

So that's still with us, right?

The Jewish-owned stove company.

Well, they're just trying to appeal, you know, manufacturers trying to appeal to a broad

audience.

But what's funny to me, not funny, but just was surprised to see that is that this is

still with us, right, that many of the Jewish people still feel bound to these little rituals

that they're doing, forgetting that really the whole point of it was to do no customary

work.

It wasn't just to be another business day.

That's all.

You know, just close down for the day and worship the Lord, be with your family and rest.

It was supposed to be a blessing.

And you see that in the Lord's response that it was made for man.

It was intended to be a blessing.

One of the guys there shared, I thought was interesting, said, you know, he knows a Jewish

man who was a skeptic and an agnostic, but one of the things that spoke to him in Scripture

was the fact that the Lord had instituted the Sabbath.

He said, that says to me that this is not man-made, right?

Because if it were man-made, we would be working seven days a week, right?

Yeah.

And today's economy people do work so easily.

And they do.

They do.

Yeah.

We've lost, our culture sadly has lost it.

Some of the men talked about Chick-fil-A and all that.

But let's move on.

Then, so first six verses of chapter three, again, he entered the synagogue and noticed

that again.

Okay.

And a man, probably the synagogue in Capernaum, most likely, and a man was there with a withered

hand.

And they watched him to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath so that they might

accuse him.

Some of the other parallel texts say that they kept asking him, is it lawful to heal

on the Sabbath?

All right.

That was another one of their laws was that you could not...

Do good on the Sabbath.

No, not do good on the Sabbath, but you could not help somebody who was wounded or injured.

You could help somebody whose life was in danger, right?

Lest you by inaction violate the command to not kill, right?

Really weird twisted thinking.

But there it is.

And they're asking him, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?

And they got this man with a withered hand there and they know they're watching him to

see if he will do this, right?

And he said to the man with a withered hand, come here.

And he said to them, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or

kill?

But they were silent.

And then Mark gives us one of the times in Scripture where Jesus' anger is visible.

And he looked at them with anger.

He didn't say he said angry words, just the look was an angry look.

Imagine the Lord of Glory looking at you with anger.

That's not a good place.

No, it's not a good place.

And why is he angry at them?

He's grieved at their hardness of heart, right?

He said to the man, stretch out your hand.

He stretched it out and the hand was restored.

Which is a work of God, right?

Which means that it's not just me doing some work to wipe blood off a wound on a leg or

something, right?

But this is a miracle.

It's a miracle.

And like the healing in John 9 where they were man born blind, like Nicodemus said to

him at the beginning of the Gospel of John, we know you're from God because no one can

do these miracles.

So what, you know, but look at the very end there.

The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians who they normally

would be at great odds together, right?

The Herodians were in favor of Rome and the Pharisees, generally speaking, were very much

not in favor of Roman rule.

And so these groups don't normally get along, but here they are getting along to take counsel

against him, how to destroy him.

All because he's violating their Sabbath rules and they're missing the main point.

And I was just going through that in detail for this study and so on.

What really struck me again was the heart of compassion that the Lord has for people.

And even the rules that he gives and the Sabbath keeping and all of that was supposed to be

a blessing, right?

Like you said this morning, you know, the things that God gives us, those shackles or

those, you know, they say, let's take the binders off.

But what we don't realize is that the rules and regulations, the morals that God gives

us are for our blessings, for our good, right?

It's religion and hard hearts that take it and turn it into a big burden.

But just as we're thinking about the Word of God, I just want to share that.

Well, and also they were thinking, which is interesting, that they were blaming him for

violating the Sabbath, but the violation was clearly the act of God.

Yes.

Right.

Very clearly the act of God.

That's right.

Because they blame God for violating the Sabbath.

Right.

And it really doesn't show any work done there.

No, it doesn't.

I mean, it doesn't say that Jesus doesn't need to work.

And back up in...

Did it do any physical therapy or anything like that?

Yeah, back up at the beginning, I think in verse two, they plainly accused him.

They were not there to worship.

They have the Sabbath anyway.

Why?

They came for the purpose of accusing Jesus because he was there.

That's right.

They knew it was not the Sabbath.

There's a lot of holes in that in their thinking.

You can see it was on one side, so to speak, that already had their minds made up and determined

what they were going to do if something happened.

You know, it's no different today than it was in that day.

People today just look for reasons to discredit Jesus.

Yeah, they do.

That's right.

Even when it flies in the face of what is clear, what is true, their logic is valuable,

logic, but they stick to it, no matter what.

But then there again, their hearts were hardened, their eyes were blind, all that, they just...

They didn't get it, understandably.

But they're still without excuse.

Yes, they are.

It points out how hard the heart can be.