Chap 1: The Dance (Trinity) (Mark 1:9-11): Do you expect others to dance around you? Quotes:
Chap 2: The Gospel, The Call (Mark 1:14-20): Is your gospel good news or good advice?
Chap 3: The Healing (Mark 2:1-5): Are your sins against God or people (Ps 51:4)?
Chap 4: The Rest (Mark 2:23-3:6): Are you resting in your efforts for significance?
Chap 5: The Power (Mark 4:35-41): Do you enjoy goodness and calm in a storm?
Chap 6: The Waiting (Mark 5:21-43): Do you have peace when God delays?
Chap 7: The Stain (Mark 7:1-23): Do you feel unclean, insignificant?
Chap 8: The Approach (Mark 7:24-37): Do you know you’re a dog, yet loved?
Chap 9: The Turn (Mark 8:27-9:1): Why is forgiveness so hard?
Chap 10: The Mountain (Mark 9:2-29): What if you are filled with doubt?
Chap 11: The Trap (Mark 10:17-27): What is money to you?
"If I lead an unselfish life primarily to make myself happy, then I'm not leading an unselfish life. I'm ultimately doing [acts of kindness for others] for myself. [Basically] we are [living] unselfish lives for selfish reasons." (150)
Intro: Jesus came to die. After Peter's confession (Mark 8:29), Jesus repeatedly predicted his death (Mark 8:31-32; 9:30-31; 10:32-34), 3 times in 3 chapters, each time with progressively more detail, indicating that death was not incidental to his mission, but absolutely central to both his identity and his purpose on earth. Then in Mark 10:45, Jesus tells us not only that he will die but why he will do so: "to give his life as a ransom for many."
That Jesus came to die "sets him apart from the founder of every other major religion. Their purpose was to live and be an example; Jesus' purpose was to die and be a sacrifice." (140) Jesus came to be a substitutionary sacrifice. The little preposition for in Greek is the word anti, which means "instead of," "in place of," "substitute." Ransom translates a Greek word, lutron, that meant "to buy the freedom of a slave or a prisoner." Jesus came to pay that kind of ransom. But since the slavery he is dealing with is of a cosmic kind--that is, cosmic evil--it required a cosmic payment, his death on the cross. Why Must There be Suffering, Death and a Willing Sacrifice? A short answer as to why it had to be this way is because all life-changing love is substitutionary sacrifice. For instance, it will cost you nothing to love someone who is all put together and has no major needs. But to love someone who has needs, who is emotionally wounded, or who is in trouble or hurting, is costly. You can't love them without taking a hit yourself. A transfer of some kind is required, so that somehow their troubles, problems, wounds, transfer to you.
The cross is a hard Christian teaching, where some assume that it is like an appeasement of a bloodthirsty god. But not so. A common question is, "Why doesn't God just forgive everybody?" Why did Jesus have to go through suffering and death, and be a ransom?
It's the same with parenting, for children are in a state of dependency. So, if parents won't sacrifice for their kids, they'll grow up physically, but remain children emotionally--needy, vulnerable, and dependent. It's them or you. Either you suffer temporarily and in a redemptive way, or they're going to suffer tragically, in a wasteful and destructive way. (The evil Lord Voldemort couldn't kill Harry Potter, because his mother died to save him, according to Dumbledore, his mentor.) We all know from experience that sacrifice is at the heart of real love.
Therefore, a God who is more loving than man, a God who comes into the world to deal with the ultimate evil, the ultimate sin, would have to make a substitutionary sacrifice. Even we flawed human beings know that you can't just overlook evil. It must be paid for, and dealing with it is costly.
The ancients understood the idea of justice and God's wrath, and the idea of a debt and a necessary punishment. But they had no idea that God would come and pay it himself. The cross is the self-substitution of God. No one could imagine this, not even Jesus' own disciples (even after he told them repeatedly).
The only way that Jesus could redeem us was to give his life as a ransom. For God to just forgive is simply not the way forgiveness works. "God created the world in an instant, and it was a beautiful process. He re-created the world on the cross--and it was a horrible process. That's how it works. Love that really changes things and redeems things is always a substitutionary sacrifice." (144)
Why couldn't the Disciples "Get It"?
Though Jesus repeatedly told his disciples about his suffering and death, they didn't "hear." James and John asked for the 2 best seats in the kingdom (Mark 10:35-37). At the actual moment of Jesus' greatest glory (the cross), there will be somebody on the right and left--crucified criminals. James and John had no idea what they were asking (Mark 10:37).
Nonetheless, Jesus spoke to them of the cup and the baptism (Mark 10:38); the cup being a metaphor for the just judgment of God against evil, and baptism is an overwhelming experience, an immersion. Jesus would take the just judgment on all human evil; he would take the overwhelming experience of being condemned so that we can be free from all condemnation. But they didn't get it.
Despite Jesus' elaborate explanation on substitutionary sacrifice (Mark 10:38-45), why couldn't the disciples get it? Instead of asking, "What's wrong with them?" we should examine our own hearts. When we see their repeated befuddled comical nonsensical response, "you realize how hard it is for anybody to take in the magnitude of what the cross really means, [then] you will be on your way to attaining the gift of humility. At some level, your normal assumptions, your pride and your egotistical way of thinking, are blinding you to the truth. One prime example of this is worry." (147)
Worry is rooted in arrogance, that I know better than God. "Real humility is to relax. Real humility means to laugh at yourself. Real humility means to be self-critical. The cross brings that kind of humility into our lives." (148)
The world is all about taking power and control, having the trump card and the veto (Mark 10:42). But God's people should be diametrically different (Mark 10:43-44). It's what God told his people Israel to do while in Babylonian captivity (Jer 29:7). The ultimate model of influence by giving up power and control is Jesus (Mark 10:45). "If at the very heart of your worldview is a man dying for his enemies, then the way you're going to win influence in society [or in church] is through service rather than power and control." (149) But it's more difficult than it looks.
Happiness 101 (NY Times Magazine, Jan 7, 2007)
The researcher's goal was to show that "there are ways of living that (research shows) lead to better outcomes," such as "close relationships and love," "well-being," and "meaning and purpose of life." He pointed out that when you are leading an unselfish life of service to other people, it gives you a sense of meaning, of being useful and valuable, of having a life of significance. Thus, we should live this way to achieve "better outcomes," that is, "live a selfless life because it will make you happy--not because you ought to, or because it is moral to do so." Thus, we are living unselfishly for selfish reasons.
Can we then do good for moral reasons? What if I sacrifice and serve others in order to go to heaven? Isn't this primarily selfish? Basically, I want to be unselfish and moral because there are benefits for me--in this case eternal benefits. Again, if we try to live an unselfish or moral life for selfish reasons, it doesn't work.
The Nature of True Virtue (Jonathan Edwards)
To Edwards, if you don't believe the gospel of grace, you functionally believe you're saved by your good works. Then you're never done anything for the love of others or for the sheer beauty of it; you're done it for yourself. If you haven't helped the proverbial old lady cross the street just for her sake, or for God's sake, then you're done it to feel good about yourself, and to go to heaven someday because you're done good. "It's all selfish; it will become drudgery, yet you'll believe yourself superior to others." (151)
How can we escape this self-referential trap and truly become unselfish? Secularism, psychology, and relativism on the one hand, and religion and moralism on the other doesn't really give us what we need to be unselfish. Then what does? We need to look somewhere else. We need to look at Jesus. We need to experience in a very real way that:
- I am worth everything to Jesus
- I have everything I need in Jesus
- Jesus paid for all my sins
- Jesus is my substitutionary sacrifice
- all of the above is a free gift of grace to me
"If you really understand the cross, you are blasted out into the world in joyful humility. Now you do not need to help people, but you want to help them, to resemble the One who did so much for you, to bring him delight. Whether you think they are worthy of your service doesn't come into it. Only the gospel gives you a motivation for unselfish living that doesn't rob you of the benefits of unselfishness even as you enact it." (151)
Question: Is Jesus all you want, and is Jesus all you need?
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