Omnipotent Lord known only to Faith

This transcript has been automatically generated

We’ve made wonderful progress actually, I think, in our study of the first part of Mark. There will be practically nothing that has been left out except some very vital material in chapter 6, and notably the 2 great feeding miracles. I’m afraid those will have been left out. I may have a chance to say something this afternoon about them. But today we’re looking at another great chapter chunk which starts at chapter 4, verse 35 and goes on to chapter 5, verse 43.

So this is our chunk today and it is the omnipotent Lord known only to Now there are 4 storeys in this section: the storey of the storm on the lake, the storey of Legion, very well known, the storey of Jairus’ daughter, and the storey of the woman with the haemorrhage, the issue of blood.

I’m not going to read them even because they are so well known, though we will look at the detail as we come to them. And I’m going to suggest to you that though there are 4 storeys, in fact there are 3 sections. I hope you won’t think that I’m trying to force things into 3 sections. I think this is an occupational temptation and hazard, isn’t it, of being a minister, that you want to have 3 points and all starting with the same letter. And when a man has got that disease badly, it is very embarrassing to everybody.

But I’m not— I haven’t got the disease badly. What we shall find in the third one is that Mark has done that brilliant technique of his of interleaving. He interleaves the storey of the woman of the issue with the dying child. They both stand together as one section, though they are two different storeys, the one commenting on the other. And you will see the brilliant way in which they do comment on one another, on each other, in a moment.

I’ll put that on one side. I’ll bring that back if anybody wants those headings again.

Why I believe that we can say this is one chunk is because the way in which Mark has selected which ingredients in each storey he will keep shows a consistency through the 4 storeys. Each of the 4 storeys contains a genuine impossibility, and only Mark underlines that in each case with such power and strength. Then we are introduced to the omnipotent Lord, and then in the light of the omnipotent Lord able to deal with the impossibility, we come on to the problem for faith that still remains.

Right, well, now we’re ready to start. Let’s start with the storm.

Now, before this, just to get it in context, which is so important, remember that in chapter 4, the new people of Israel, conscious that their Lord is rejected, that they are going to be orphaned and left in the world in a sense without him, are given the precious gift of the Word of God. That is the first thing that Jesus gives to his church as it starts the work following his rejection. The Word of God is that precious possession which we take into the world and sow and produces its good harvest. The next section, beginning at chapter 4, verse 35, tells us that not only do we have the word of the Lord with us, but we actually have the Lord as well, invisibly hidden but nevertheless in our midst. But we’re going to see each time that there is something ambiguous about the presence of the powerful Lord amongst his people.

Once we’ll look at the storm fairly carefully because it’s very short, And once you learn how to handle a storm, you’ll learn how to handle all the 4 storeys. Verse 35: On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, let us go across to the other side. And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat just as he was, and other boats were with him. And a great storm of wind arose, and the waves beat into the boat so that the boat was already filling. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion, And they woke him and said to him, Teacher, do you not care if we perish?

And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, Peace, be still! And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. And he said to them, Why are you so cravenly fearful? It’s very strong, that. Have you no faith?

And they were filled with awe and said to one another, Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?

Now, as I say, in each of these storeys there are these 3 ingredients. And the first is a genuine impossibility, a hopeless situation. And in this particular storey, that is the certain disaster that is facing them because of the storm. Verse 37: A great storm of wind arose. The waves beat into the boat.

The boat was already filling. Now here are fishermen used to all the problems of the sea and the storm and the wind. Yet they are clear that this is an impossible situation, that they can’t survive, and therefore they say, verse 38, don’t you care that we perish if we perish?

So the first thing is a genuine problem, an impossibility for them to sort it out, a storm of enormous magnitude, they were able to see that there is no hope for them.

The second ingredient, well, that’s so simple I hardly need to repeat it: the omnipotent Lord in the boat who, when he awakes, rebukes the wind and immediately the problem is over.

Now the problem for faith.

It’s these words in verse 40 that are so interesting. He said, why are you so afraid? Have you no faith?

And the implication of that was that if they had faith they would not be afraid even though he was asleep. He seemed strenuously to object to the fact that they woke him up, that they could not believe that he cared for them while he appeared to be asleep. And doing nothing?

That is the issue, isn’t it? And so he rebukes us through them, saying that if we do not have a living faith in him, we shall be cravenly afraid when the storm comes and the Saviour sleeps.

Now that is precisely the issue, isn’t it? In life. The church is often in the storm and we personally are often in the storm and we cry out to God because he seems to be asleep.

We knock on the door of heaven and nothing happens.

And because he sleeps we lose our faith instantly and say, you don’t care that we’re perishing.

It could be that the church in Rome was even then saying this as Mark wrote to them.

Why doesn’t God do something? If the risen Lord has this omnipotent power, if he is with us, why does he allow us to face almost certain extinction, sunk out of sight by the storm of persecution or whatever?

Now you see, that’s lesson for the church.

The Lord Jesus Christ does not stand up in the boat and rebuke the wind and the waves for us as far as we can see. He remains asleep in the boat. That’s the time when you know whether you have any faith. Anybody can have faith when he stands up in the boat and does it in front of you.

See, this is where the mistake comes on Jesus the same yesterday, today and forever. What kind of Jesus are we talking about? If we imagine that he’s going to repeat his incarnational miracles in every generation, then what we’re actually asking for is that we should have those basic lessons of faith done over for us again and again. But this is sufficient to warn us that we are often going to be in this position where we say to him, do you not care if we perish? Now that is melodramatic for most of us in this country because The church in this country has not yet got to that state of persecution in our time and for many years past.

But still you can see the application of this in smaller ways as well as big.

So these 3 things are repeated, these 3 tunes, if you like, are repeated in every one of these 4 storeys. Each of them is saying the same thing. Each of them is saying that the church faces problems which are beyond its power to solve.

Nevertheless, the church has with them the omnipotent Lord. He is hidden from sight. The world can’t see him, and we shall doubt whether he’s with us. Therefore, faced with that, we have a problem for faith in the church’s life.

Now let’s go on to the longer storey of Legion and apply those 3 ingredients again. Let’s look first for the impossibility. I wish there were time to put a synopsis alongside to show you the storey as told by Matthew and Luke, but if I showed you, I must ask you to believe me that neither of them point out what Mark does in verse 3 and 4. Listen to the way that Mark describes it, and you immediately become aware that this is in his interest. The man lived amongst the tombs and Now here’s Mark: No one could bind him anymore, even with a chain.

No one could control him.

Verse 4: He had often been bound with fetters and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart and the fetters he broke in pieces, and no one had the strength to subdue him. Second time. Again, there’s no doubt, is there, what he’s saying? It’s impossible to control this man possessed by evil spirits. He is out of control.

It’s a wonderful storey which of course can be preached upon in other terms, just of the way in which when people are not under control of Christ they get out of control. But I want to go straight on to the cure. Jesus is the omnipotent Lord. Verse 9: What is your name? My name is Legion, we are many.

And then the tremendous cure as the swine enter, as these spirits enter the swine and are drowned in the sea. Notice the swine say, don’t get rid of us, we live here, this is where we belong. And one of the characteristic things in this storey is that Jesus agrees with the requests that people make to him until the end. So the evil spirits say, this is our territory, we belong here, you mustn’t send us away. And indeed Jesus says no, desire to send them away to trouble other people.

So he answers the prayer by saying, all right, you can stay here, you can go into those pigs. And that proves to be the best solution.

Nothing shocking in it at all.

There is no cost too great to pay to get rid of Satan’s power.

So then, what is the problem? To faith? Well, the problem to faith comes, of course, in the next section. The herdsmen fled, told it to the city and the country. The people came to him to see what had happened.

Then the famous verse 15: They find the demoniac sitting there clothed, in his right mind. Sitting, clothed, sane— those 3 great words. They’re afraid. And those who had seen it told what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine, and they began to beg Jesus to depart out of their neighbourhood. And as is characteristic of the storey, if people beg Jesus to do something, he does it.

So here is a rejection scene again. They ask him to go. We won’t stop on the reasons. And he goes. We’re used to this now, aren’t we?

He withdraws. And as he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed with demons begged that he might be with him. Now so far he has agreed with every prayer that has been given to him, every request. But this time he refuses.

Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how he’s had mercy on you. And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and all men marvelled.

Now what is the problem for faith? Well, the problem for faith stands out, isn’t it? The problem for faith is that here is the omnipotent Lord to whom a legion of devils is no problem, And yet he allows these foolish people to drive him out of their land.

And the illustration I used on the first day is as good as any. There was the omnipotent Lord building his church in China, and in 1951, to the amazement— though they wouldn’t necessarily say it because we’re full of spiritual clichés and so on with which we cover up our embarrassment— to the amazement of the Christian church in the West, especially perhaps the more vigorous American church that sometimes is tempted to feel that without its missionary efforts nothing can ever happen. We’re all amazed that God allows us to be driven out.

We can’t understand how the omnipotent Lord can be driven out.

But what does he do? Well, what he does is to say to the native Christians in whom he has done this mighty thing, you are not to come with me, you’re to stay in your own country. Because of course the native Christian feels that he no longer has any part in the Christ-rejecting world and wants to come with the Lord.

But he’s told to stay, and that is God’s answer, isn’t it? But it’s a great problem for faith when Jesus is cast out. What we often forget is the man who’s been left behind. And in China, of course, it took 30 years for us to realise what had happened when this young man went back into Decapolis to say how much the Lord had done for him.

Nevertheless, it is a constant problem, isn’t it, for Christians as they look at church history and look at the mission field, the problem of the shut doors, the problem of the fact that Jesus apparently is weak and allows himself to be shut out of this place and that place, even though he has all control over the work of the devil.

Now let’s look at the next 2 storeys. I’ll fit them together later. Let’s look at each of them in turn and find the ingredients. Let’s look at the woman with the issue of blood. She’s one of my favourites, I think, as a storey.

It’s a grand little evangelistic sermon, actually. But we’ll leave that on one side for the moment. And Mark is very candid about her. She had suffered many things under many physicians, verse 26, spent all her savings, and far from being any better, she was actually getting worse. It’s often been pointed out that Dr. Luke is not quite so candid about this, but Mark doesn’t pull any punches.

That as usual the doctors know what they’re doing.

I can’t say that, you see, at St. Helen’s full of doctors. I can only say it to you.

So there’s the impossibility. The specialists and consultants at Jericho and all the rest, they were helpless. They took her money and made her worse. But there’s an omnipotent Lord and she comes up to him, touches him in the crowd and instantly she’s healed of her disease, verse 29.

So it’s no problem to the Lord but it is a problem for faith, isn’t it? You see, it’s a problem to the disciples. He says, who touched my garment? And the disciples say, well look, It’s a ridiculous question to ask because everybody’s touching you. The press are here and the children are here, and, uh, I mean, you can’t move for being touched.

And he pays no attention to them. I always loved that bit. Verse 32, he goes on looking around to see who had done this, because Jesus can tell the difference between the touch of curiosity and the touch of faith. And here is the one exception in the Gospel to people being sent away to say nothing. She’s to tell to come out into the open and say what has happened to her.

And then in verse 34 he says to her in effect, it is not your superstitious touch nor the fringes of my garment that made you well, for that was her superstitious belief, but it is your faith in me and my will, God’s will through me, to heal you. That’s why you’re well. So he explains it to her.

And you can’t have proper assurance unless it’s explained to you. Superstitious faith never has assurance.

Now what is the problem of faith? The problem of faith here is surely that it is so difficult for us to see that the omnipotent Lord is doing anything.

I often think that this is a very good illustration, incidentally, of those countries that are wrapped in superstitious Christianity.

And it’s a great problem to faith, isn’t it? Because there is devotion and all the rest of it but there’s no understanding.

And we feel that the Lord is— it’s impossible for God to do anything in these places without understanding. I think one of the things this storey is telling us amongst many others is that God knows His own people. And that in many superstitious churches and countries there are many people who, who put out a hand of desperate need to Jesus in the crowd, and though their faith is superstitious and ill-formed and ignorant, it is real demand and desire for his saving help, and that he heals them.

But we can’t tell, we don’t know.

That’s our problem, isn’t it? We see crowds around him, especially in times of great interest in God and Christ, cultural Christianity if you like, but we don’t know whether anything is happening or not.

It’s invisible to us half the time. That’s one of the problems, isn’t it? We don’t know whether anything is going on.

That’s one of the reasons we want to have visible signs like tongues, you see, because we’re not men of faith. We can’t— we must have something to prove to us that it’s going on.

We can’t walk the life of faith.

Now the other storey is even more striking. Let’s go back to verse 21. Let’s look at the impossibility.

Jairus comes and asks him to see his daughter. She’s at the point of death. And he went with him. Then comes the interruption, the interleaving, and what an agonising interruption it must have been. You know your daughter is hanging on the point of death, and instead of rushing along, the Lord Jesus stops to this stupid woman, or whatever it is, and the disciples.

There’s a long search for her, and then she has to come out and explain what she’s doing. And all the time Jairus is jumping up and down looking at his watch.

Verse 35: And while he’s still speaking, there came from the ruler’s house someone who said, don’t worry, your daughter’s dead. There’s no need to trouble the teacher any further. Jairus must have been absolutely infuriated at that point, wasn’t he? Well, perhaps that’s the wrong word— despairing. Why did you wait?

Why didn’t you come immediately? Why did you, why did you delay?

However, Jesus as usual pays no attention, just like the storey before. He says, don’t fear, only believe. He allowed no one to follow him, and you get this lovely arrival at the house with all the tumult of the people weeping and wailing. He says, what are you making this noise for? The child is not dead but sleeping.

And they laugh him to scorn. Scorn. It’s an impossibility to raise the dead.

So he with the inner 3 go in, he lifts her up from her bed of death, not sickness, and she walks in newness of life.

So we have a genuine impossibility, death, the final impossibility, even more so than the sickness of the woman. You see, they both speak of sickness and death that is inevitable. The woman would have died too. Inevitable death and a genuine impossibility. An omnipotent Lord, it is no more difficult for him, uh, well in fact it is easier for him to get that girl out of her bed than it is for you to get your daughter out of bed on the first day of the holidays.

You knock at the door, mother goes up 4 times and says, come on, it’s time to get up, your breakfast is ready. There’s no sign. It’s easier for Jesus to get somebody up from the dead.

What’s the problem? Well, the problem for faith stands out, doesn’t it? The problem for faith is the delay. That’s what the church is going to experience. The delay that Jairus had is exactly the problem of the early church, as we know from Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15, that Christ has conquered death that we’re no longer under condemnation.

The death, the sting has been removed, and therefore the early church expected that they would see the Lord without dying.

But then the first and second generation begin to die, and on the mortuary slab there is no way in which the undertaker can tell the difference between the Christian and the non-Christian. It’s a great problem to faith, isn’t it? It’s not a problem to us because we got so used to it, but it was to the early church. Why does he delay his coming? Why does he allow us to die?

Surely this slab of decaying clay can’t be an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.

Since I was just telling you about Peter Erwin Clark’s little boy who died in this cot death 10 days ago. That verse here is precisely the Christian message, isn’t it? The child is not dead but sleeping.

Now, of course, when they say that to the undertaker— and both he and his wife are very brave witnesses through this— you see, the undertaker goes away and says, To his friend, of course, these Christians kid themselves about this sort of thing, but nice that they can feel that, isn’t it? Of course, he doesn’t believe it. That little baby that he has to take away— and there’s nothing sadder than a little child’s funeral. It’s just the same as any other cot death, isn’t it? Why should he see any difference?

It’s just sentimentalism to say the child is sleeping and not dead. He can see it’s dead. The doctor said so.

That’s the problem for faith, isn’t it?

Exactly the same. The omnipotent Lord is with his people, but their children die like anybody else’s children.

In each case you’ve got exactly the same pattern being worked out. So you’re— it couldn’t be clearer that in this passage In this section we’re being told what kind of Lord Jesus he is in our midst. In other words, how he manifests himself to us.

I got this this morning from Vijay. It’s a report from a vicar in Essex who is, I suppose, a moderate charismatic, and he’s a very thoughtful person. He’s just been to California for 3 months on a sabbatical, been to many of the big churches there. And I’m going to read you some more from it this afternoon, but here is what he says about the nature of the person of Christ: Having wrestled with these and many other issues, we are of the opinion that there is such a thing as biblical renewal, but it is not available without sacrifice personally and collectively. The cross of Jesus is the key to renewal, and sadly we heard very little about this in California, although we heard a lot about Jesus.

Time and time again we were forced back to our New Testament to see if they were talking about the same Lord Jesus. On occasions we felt the congregations were being offered a Jesus of the imagination through a process called visualisation. This is a kind of Christian meditation similar to yoga in which people are told to relax empty their minds and imagine Jesus walking toward them.

Imagine underlined. The results of this approach we consider to be detrimental because it makes Jesus in our own image. See, empty your mind, imagine Jesus.

It’s very like the Oxford Group, isn’t it? Empty your mind, any thought that comes into your head must be from God.

At one communion we attended, instead of reading out the words of institution, the minister told us to sit back and imagine Jesus handing us the bread and wine. Now you can’t have a better example there of existentialism, can you really? The mould, the framework of today. Whereas those of you who are Anglicans know that the Old Prayer Book service at that particular juncture insists that we say the words of institution spoken 2,000 years ago in order that we should be careful that the Jesus we’re remembering is actually the Jesus of history and that we can’t have a Jesus of today who’s not the Jesus of history. We mustn’t divorce those two.

At precisely this moment in the service they do the opposite. They say, forget all that, make your mind empty, imagine Jesus giving you the bread and wine. Now of course that’s thoroughly sincere and earnest and within a Christian context of teaching might not do any harm. But set that going for a generation or two and where will you finish up?

Now that’s why, you see, we’ve been coming back to this Jesus of Mark throughout all these lectures.

We’ve been coming back to a chapter like this to understand who is the Jesus we’re to believe in. And the Jesus we’re to believe in is indeed the omnipotent Lord, but he doesn’t look like it.

The storm swallows the church up. The church gets barred from Libya, or whatever it is.

Uh, the crowd, the curious crowd goes laughing on its way without apparently any effect, and our children die like anybody else’s. So what’s the point of believing that the omnipotent Lord is in your midst?

You see, if you’re going to imagine Jesus, you’d never imagine him like that, would you? See, because sentimentalism takes over and it’s inconceivable that you can imagine a Jesus that would allow a cot death. Inconceivable. Would any of the ladies in your congregation be able to imagine that? I was going to say they’re sentimentalists to a man, aren’t they, on that sort of subject?

Naturally, naturally, it’s their nature to be so on little children. It stretches our minds, doesn’t it, to grasp it?

What possible sense is there in it? Don’t think that we can ever— we can sit here for 3 weeks, we can’t come up with an answer to that, can we? That’s the problem for faith. So I need to know. You see how it’s the same as the Word.

The Word is given to me, and I know that Word is the powerful Word of salvation. But as we saw in chapter 4, It lies on the soil and the bird comes and plucks it away and I might just as well not have preached it.

How often that happens on a Tuesday. You go up and talk to somebody and they just haven’t got the foggiest idea what you were talking about. And this was the Word of God we’d all prayed in.

So it is that we have the Lord in our midst but the outside world does not obviously understand that. But since, you see, we can’t live like that, we can’t live by faith, we have therefore to put alongside the Word something in our ministry that will have an immediate and dynamic effect. And since we cannot bear for people to think that the Lord in our midst is weak, we have got to say something different.

Well, there it is. Myself the job of being shorter and not so waffly, and I finished in nearly half time. Does anybody want to discuss that before we go to our personal study?

Let’s just open that up for discussion for a little. Does it make sense to anybody what I’ve been saying, or are you all far away? Steve, does this make any sense to you? You’re too kind, Steve, I think.

Percy, is there anything you want to comment on?

We’ve got to use the means of grace God has given us, of course, the Word, haven’t we?

Yeah, that’s right, Percy. Well, we’ll be remembering you in prayer as you take that up. It’s nice to hear things that we can pray for.

Please do tell us if there are any special things we can pray for you in regard to Peter? There he is. Yes, absolutely.

Yes, absolutely.

And in the second part of Mark, we shall have one or two very striking cases of With God all things are possible and we are to expect that. It’s actually one of the latter, later themes of Mark. You remember in Mark 10 you’ve got the rich young ruler with— and Jesus says that men like this can’t be saved, but with God nothing is impossible. So these men saved is a mark of the omnipotent Lord amongst us. And that may happen quite quickly.

Again in Mark 11, the grain of mustard seed, you remember the— not the grain of mustard seed, the fig tree. I told with faith all things are possible. With God all things are possible to faith and prayer.

So yes, I’m not meaning to say from this that we, we never see the omnipotent Lord at work amongst us. That would be absurd. It’s just that the omnipotent Lord amongst us is a hidden Lord.

Hamilton.

Which haven’t had a decent word ministry, that most of them have been doing it for a long time. In other words, they don’t have a visualised picture of Jesus. Yes, I don’t know, John. That’s a very interesting comment, I think. It’s not true to say that it’s only for recently.

I mean, the fact of the presence of Christ is a prayer that they need to do. Is that so to say? Yes, yes, yes. Well, I mean, I’m out of my depth here, but I suspect that you’re right. And what you’re really saying is that this is something that must have been going on all the time, but here it’s come out in this particularly ugly way.

Well, let’s stop on this point for a moment. How are we ourselves, because we are open to exactly the same temptations, aren’t we, to identify Jesus with our successes and our understanding of the church and so on. And you see, we’ve got continually to keep the Jesus of faith of today in a sense in line with the Jesus here. Of history and the Gospels, haven’t we? And anything anybody would like to say on that would be helpful on how you do it.

As far as I can see, the obvious point is that we’re going to be studying this Jesus all the time. If we think of the Jesus of the Gospels as the Jesus of the past in principle, then we’re going to be in difficulties, aren’t we?

This is, this is the real Jesus.

Somebody help us on that. Alistair, where are you? Are you awake? Come around, help us on this.

I haven’t, John.

No, I have no wisdom on that. I never liked this sort of thing myself. I don’t like films of Jesus really, and yet I see that they have some power to move people. I think the cost of them is probably greater than the benefit, but I may be prejudiced on that.

I— every statue and picture of Jesus I’ve ever seen, I think, is so awful. And I get this some book— Christian bookshop, and I see these terrible pictures of a head of Jesus that I’m supposed to put in my living room. I can’t imagine putting such a picture, can you? How does it ever come to people that they should think that that helps us to understand the real Christ? I don’t know how that happens.

Chris Stewart.

Can you speak up, Michael? Yes. Isn’t it that it’s not so much thinking wrong, but it’s the wisdom of thinking things left out? And surely if we know the gospel, we can read other places in scripture, we can only get better from meditating on it and making it active in our individual imaginations. Doesn’t that help to get a new picture in our minds of what it is like to hold to the storey of heaven?

No, no, some of the greatest preachers and teachers of the truth have been those able to imagine and visualise these storeys. That gift of imagination in the storey is vital. I mean, the thing that worries me is that I could have read these storeys so often in Mark all my life and not understood them. That’s what frightens me, that we think we know this Jesus and we read these storeys but we haven’t begun to get ourselves into them. I mean, you ask yourself this morning, did you know that that’s what these storeys really stood for in Mark?

That’s what we’ve got to do. That’s hard study, really more than imagination, isn’t it? Chris?

Can you say something about simple-mindedness? Why do people look at you and say you’re doing something terribly unfair? Have you even grounds for their faith? They give you their opinion to be self-justified.

Yes. Well, it’s universal. We’re all like that by nature, aren’t we, as fallen creatures? Michael? It’s absolutely safe to have a view of Jesus in that sense is inevitable.

And the question really is whether that view of Jesus is founded on the real Jesus or not, rather than whether it exists or not. And once you accept that premise, that every person inevitably must have a sort of a worldview of Jesus and the way he impinges on the world, the question of Bible study and preaching then becomes, well, Not how does— how do I get a direct application out of the model, but how in fact does it change my worldview of Jesus, because that’s going to affect my application for the rest of my life. That’s absolutely right. Yes, as we teach these storeys it’s going to affect everything, isn’t it? Not just one application that day, it’s going to affect my whole view of who Jesus is and how he acts.

John, this question of meditation interests me because there’s a lot of pressure on people to meditate these days. I think it’s because there’s so much pressure in life itself, people want to withdraw from it. And the teaching always seems to be this thing we’ve been saying about emptying the mind. If you use scripture, there’s only just one verse, for example, you go on circulating that around your mental machinery and see what comes out of it. Whereas meditation, I to have thought biblically is much the same thing as studying.

That’s right. That’s very helpful. Alistair, have you come to?

I have to prod my old friend from Northampton.

Yes, that’s right.

No, no, no, I’m sorry I didn’t mention it.

No, I don’t know. Yes, I might have given that impression. I would want to link verse 41. I ought to have said that it’s, uh, it’s because we know the answer to verse 41 that we shouldn’t behave as verse 40 implies that we do.

So I should have brought those 2 faiths together. They’re very vital, aren’t they?

Winds, he do obey him, and yet he appears asleep in the storm. I think that’s all I wanted to say there.

And as you say, these things happen to each other.

In this storey, James Blake doesn’t say— I know, it’s hard.

This in my mind brings us to 2 Corinthians 4:7-12, Paul talking about the situation of apparent disaster all the time.

Afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, and so on. These all say, death is at work in us but life in you. And it was Alan Sibb who pointed out to the conference years ago, and who also mentioned this, that all these things that pressed upon Paul were life to us because it showed the power of God at work. I think that is a very good cross-reference. Yes, yes, I think it is.

I mean, you never expect these storeys, do you, to be in a forced way identical? Obviously, if they’d all gone down in the boat, that would have been the end of the storey.

So there are these differences in them, but in each case, the omnipotent law doesn’t do what people expect him to do if he is omnipotent. I think that’s the point. In other words, I think that’s clarified. If we know him to be the omnipotent Lord, verse 41, we expect him to act in a way that shocks us when he doesn’t act in that way.

And so the storeys are reminding us that faith allows the omnipotent Lord to act in in his hidden way and not give him the position of being the omnipotent Lord in our midst.

Yeah, just a question. Do you think that the early Christians, Martin Luther and the others, expected Jesus to come I don’t think that really is the question. I think that the question is that the early church expected there to be very little delay in people— no, well, not so much that. I’m not sure I even believe that. I think they found death a great problem, physical death.

And so when I see in the last 20 years, people praying for their children to be raised from the dead and believing all this stuff from Indonesia. I’m not surprised because I think it’s an expression of a very natural belief in Christ as the victor over physical death as well as spiritual death.

It’s just that it’s realised eschatology gone wrong, isn’t it? We have to say— it isn’t that we, we oughtn’t to say just, oh well, Jesus never raises the dead, because he is going to raise the dead. The question is, when is he going to do it in the New Testament? I think it’s awfully important to be clear about that. When people say, well, why doesn’t he raise the dead now?

They’re asking a proper question, aren’t they? But the question is the timing of it.

Oh, I’m sure, sure, these early apostles and teachers knew that very well. And yes, I, I’ve never— have you ever swallowed the sort of liberal line that they were all expecting him immediately? I never have.

Yes, yes, there are. Yeah, that’s right.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, if we, if we may not get sidetracked from that now. It’s not that I want to funk it, I just want to stay on this. It’s death that is the problem.

There is a real problem, isn’t it? And so that when people are asking for these things and saying they believe in them, they are actually trying to say, look, I believe in the Jesus of the Gospels who did raise people from the dead. And to that we say amen, but that is not a sign that he’ll raise people from the dead today because that is not the natural order. And that’s 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 8, isn’t it? It’s just a disorder rather than a— that we— it isn’t that we don’t share their faith in a Christ who raises the dead.

Well, I think we’ll leave it at that now. We’ve had enough on that. But may I say something about this, dear brothers? Here we have 12 curious questions. I’ve not actually asked, you know, the big questions so that you write an essay on it, because I think we haven’t time or strength for that.

I’ve written down these 12, which I hope will just stimulate your mind to go back to things that may have been forgotten or slipped over very quickly in the conference so far.

And you may like to do this now on your own. I think that is a good idea. Shall we say until half past 10, and then I think we’ll— at some time I’ll ring a gong and we’ll join in groups or in twos and threes, but we’ll have coffee at 11 anyhow. And then, as you know, I am concertina-ing this. We’re going to have the workshop earlier before lunch when we discuss these.

If there are any other questions you want to raise in your group, please feel feel free to do that, but I hope you won’t ignore these 12.

So please get to work on it. Any questions on that? John? Oh yes, those silly numbers. I put those down because I wanted to make plain that there are at least 2 answers in 4 and 5.

Well, then I stopped doing it because I discovered in 6 that there are lots of answers and I didn’t know how many. So that’s how that came to an end. But when I said, what is the essential blessing of the New Covenant, I didn’t want somebody to put down one word, verse 4, because at least 2.

David. Can I be cheeky and ask you to read through them quickly? Because of my writing, yes, all right. Number 1: Mark 1:2 and 3 is the only place where the author introduces an Old Testament quote in his own name. What is the significance of this?

In other words, What’s Mark’s interest in the Old Testament with regard to his storey? 2, if 1:11 is a combination of Psalm 2:7 and Isaiah 42:1, then Mark has radically reinterpreted Messiah’s role. How? We haven’t dealt with the baptism, have we? So that opens up something new.

3, a Spirit-led ministry begins like 1:12 and 13. What does that mean?

4, what is the essential blessing of the New Covenant? 5. If Jesus is to come to do his saving work among men, the way must be prepared. How is this to be done?

6. Discover service hints in 2:1-12, 2:13-17, 6:7-10, and 6:30-32, because as we know, there are hints on service all the way through the book. 7. Turn 5:25-34 into a sermon on faith and assurance. Because what I wanted to make plain there is that nearly all these storeys are actually sermons taken from the, from, from the file, and this is undoubtedly a sermon on faith and assurance.

That stops us limiting its use to what I’ve said today as the only use. 8, was the Syrophoenician woman rewarded for her wit? A stupid thing that comes out still in the commentaries. Or what was she rewarded for then? 9, identify what in false religion God hates.

10, compare the 2 feedings and learn from their dissimilarities. Anybody who can learn more from them, I’d be very grateful to hear from because there’s still work to do on that.

11, Jesus abolished the Word of God in 7:19, not just the traditions of men but the Word of God, so how can he talk?

Well, somebody please solve that. 12. If Jesus can do his work only through suffering, presumably his servants must suffer too. How is this shown? Right, thanks David.

I’m glad I read that out because they’re quite incomprehensible otherwise.