Mark Clark [00:00:03]:
Ephesians, chapter three. Here's what he says. All right, so we're going to look at verse five today, but let's set it up through verse four. We looked at this last week. When you read this, Paul says, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ. Remember we talked about this last week, that the mysterion, the reason, the purpose for all of existence. So some of you, you don't know the reason why you exist. You don't know the reason why you're on this planet.
Mark Clark [00:00:31]:
You have this. You're not sure what this angst is. You want beauty, you want peace. You don't like torture, you don't like violence. You have, like, this angst about the way the world is. Why is that? And so we search it out in all kinds of different avenues. We look for relationships, we look for world life, philosophies, we look for religion. We do pilgrimages, we do fasts and prayers and all of these different things, looking for the reason and the purpose, the mysterion of life.
Mark Clark [00:00:59]:
And Paul says that the purpose of your life is a person. His name is Jesus. Is what he says here, the mysterion of existence is Christ. And then he says in verse five, which we're gonna look at, which was not made meaning this mystery was not made known to the sons of men in other generations, as it has now been revealed. So here's what he's saying. He's saying that, okay, so in April 2007, I felt a clear call of God in my life. It's happened a few times in my life where I've just felt God just push something on me, speak to me, move in my heart, move in my mind, and give me a vision. And that's what he did.
Mark Clark [00:01:40]:
In April 2007, I walked into a room with one direction in my life, and he dropped on me this massive vision for planting a church, raising leaders, teaching the Bible, leading a group of people like you, who actually believe this stuff, who would actually bleed out for this being true. And so he gave me this vision about Canada and how we could actually affect Canada and plant churches around the greater Vancouver area. And then maybe, depending on what he does, affect Canada by. By hitting these very influential cities. All right, not like Manitoba, but. Because that's a province. But Toronto and Montreal, I mean, who knows where this goes, but how do we influence. How do we change a.
Mark Clark [00:02:24]:
Give me this huge vision for Canada. And now here's the reality. I did not get up on launch day, all right, January 2010, and drop that Vision on people who kind of just heard about the church who showed up on launch day. I didn't drop that on them because. And I didn't drop it on the 16 of us gathered in my house for nine months as we built up to the launch day of Village, because they all would have gone, you're crazy. All right? Only four of us have jobs. Where's this going? And so I had to reveal it in stages. And this is what the Apostle Paul's saying.
Mark Clark [00:03:00]:
It's like my six year old and my four year old, yesterday, they got to go to Disney on Ice, all right? Which is just their. I mean, that's paradise right there. So they got to go. But here's how it happened. There was this couple and they wanted to kind of bless my kids by taking them to Disneyland Ice. And so we didn't tell my kids about it. They woke up, all they knew they were going for a princess breakfast at White Spot, all right? So they dressed up like princesses, they went to White Spot. It was the whole big thing.
Mark Clark [00:03:28]:
They sat down, they're all jumped up. And then during that breakfast, they said, we're going to Disney on Ice. And wah. All right? So then they went down. Now, here's the reality. There's a reason we didn't tell them that they're going to Disney on Ice two weeks ago, all right? Cause their head would have exploded. All right? I would have had two weeks of, why not Disney on Ice now? I don't wanna go to bed. I would've had two weeks of this.
Mark Clark [00:03:51]:
So here's what you do. You release this information in stages. And this is what the Apostle Paul's saying. He's saying, listen, the idea that the God of the universe, through his agent, through his son, is going to redeem the world, save us from sin, give us new life, was not something he just unpacked in one moment. Way back. He slowly unfolded it throughout salvation history. And so if you're looking through your Old Testament, I mean, he's dropping hints in seed form all throughout the Old Testament, but it's just not fully unpacked, he says, until Jesus. So if you're reading Genesis chapter three, you get into Genesis three, Adam and Eve have sinned.
Mark Clark [00:04:32]:
God shows up. He starts to lay curses down. He says, adam, here's the deal. You're gonna work and toil and sweat, and you're not gonna be able to eat unless you toil and sweat. That's your curse, woman. Sorry, man. You're gonna have a lot of pain in childbirth. Why couldn't he have that? Wait a minute, that doesn't work.
Mark Clark [00:04:48]:
So, so then he looks to the serpent and he starts to curse the serpent. And here's what he says to the serpent. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. So the woman's gonna have people, the seed of the serpent, the seed of the woman. And he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. This is what scholars call the proto euangelion, the first proto gospel. And what it is, is it's in seed form right in Genesis 3, where God is literally saying, this person will come who's the offspring of the woman. He's the Messiah.
Mark Clark [00:05:23]:
And you're going to actually put your teeth into him. You're going to bruise his heel, but he's going to crush your head. So he's going to bleed out. That's the crucifixion, that's the cross. You're going to pain him. But in that, even as you're painting him at the very teeth that you're kind of biting, he's crushing your head. So you're biting him as he's crushing you. You see this? Satan moved to kill Jesus.
Mark Clark [00:05:51]:
And in killing him, he was killed. Ultimately, the victory was over him. So here's what God's laying down in the Old Testament. He's laying these seeds down and he's saying, here's where it's going. But it's not fully unpacked until we get to Jesus. And then it says, hey, there's been a revelation. This has now been revealed. This is no longer a mystery, it's no longer unclear.
Mark Clark [00:06:20]:
He says, it has now been revealed. Now listen, this is where this puts you in your seat. There's no excuses. This is not fuzzy. Christianity is not some middle of the road, gray area where you can kind of tap into it and go, hey, I kind of like these parts, but I don't like these parts. It's not something that you kind of go in and it's been fully revealed. It's not. I like the philosophies of Jesus and I like Jesus as prophet.
Mark Clark [00:06:49]:
But all this stuff about he's the only way to God and he's a savior and he rose from the dead and he's God. All these claims, I want to leave those aside, like many people in our culture do. And maybe like some of you, that's not the way Christianity rolls out. It says it's not gray, it's clear, it's revealed. So this is where it leaves us. It puts us in a position to have a crisis of faith where you have to deal with, what do I do with Jesus, what do I do with this? Now? I can't. It can't be some gray area. It can't be some.
Mark Clark [00:07:18]:
Well, I like these pieces, but I'll leave these pieces. It's either all in or all out. Christianity is either the dumbest idea that's ever been invented, or you have to give your life to it. That's the nature of Jesus. So we're coming up on Christmas. Christmas is the same thing, right? You walk in any Starbucks, everyone's like, hey, Christmas blend. The music's playing, they got their hats on. All right? Everything's Christmas.
Mark Clark [00:07:41]:
For two months, it's Christmas. Some of you know, I used to work in Michael's arts and crafts store. All right? Yeah, I've confessed that publicly. All right? I used to have a long red apron with my name. I knew nothing about arts nor crafts and still don't. All right? People would be like, where are the googly eyes? I'm like, aisle six. I'll take 15 and hide. Because they were not in aisle six ever.
Mark Clark [00:08:11]:
So it was this thing where every Christmas season, the Christmas tunes would start playing. And all of my pagan coworkers who I constantly talk to about Jesus, all of a sudden, they're praising Jesus. And so I wanted to put a stop to. Because here's the thing, man, it's a crisis. It's either. I mean, they're going, oh, holy night, the stars are really shining. Roar on your knees. I'm like, fall on your knees.
Mark Clark [00:08:45]:
All of a sudden you're worshiping Jesus. You can't do that. You can't come in and out of this thing. He's the king. I bring him gifts. He's the Lord. He's the Christmas king. Oh, my gosh.
Mark Clark [00:08:55]:
I'm like, okay, so you either believe that's true and you repent right now or shut up. Shut up. Why would you say these things? These are the most ridiculous things ever. Don't put on your khakis and your nice sweater and your tie and show up to church on Christmas and sit around and eat the turkey because Aunt Marg invited you over and pretend that Christmas is this nice, quaint little thing. It's either true or. And you need to give your life to Jesus or it's the dumbest thing that's ever been invented and stop talking about it and stop singing about it. You're making me sick. Might have Been a little hard.
Mark Clark [00:09:41]:
I was young. But the point is, man, what Paul is saying is, this has been revealed now. This now puts on you a choice. What are you gonna do with this crisis of faith? This has now been revealed. This is now clear. You can't claim this as fuzzy. You can't. And this is why people think it's fuzzy.
Mark Clark [00:10:05]:
This is why people think Christianity is just. You can kind of dabble in it as a hobby. And we constantly talk here about how Christianity is the worst possible hobby. You can't dip into it and dip out of it because it'll claim, it'll push on you this way of life that if you're not actually in it and following Jesus, that you'll have no power to actually fulfill. So it will crush you if it's just a hobby to you. And so it's never meant to be a hobby. It's never meant to be engaged kind of at this gray level. And the reason people view it that way, the reason people view it as if you could be half in and half out, is because we live that way.
Mark Clark [00:10:40]:
We give them the image that, hey, I can love Jesus and still sleep around. I can love Jesus and still not like the poor. I can go to church and worship God and raise my hands and then use those hands to abuse my spouse or my kids. I just want to become a Christianized version of what I already am and what I'm determined to remain. And the Gospel's going, that's not how this plays out. This is complete life change. This is everything, because he's revealed himself fully. So the question gets put on you, what are you gonna do with Jesus? You can't like him.
Mark Clark [00:11:19]:
Nobody read the Gospels. Nobody liked Jesus. You either crucified him and wanted to throw him off a cliff, or you followed him and you gave your life to him. There's no dabbling in Jesus. There's no, oh, I kind of like his teachings. He's a nice guy. Hey, he's got some cool stuff. He says, pick up your cross, follow me.
Mark Clark [00:11:37]:
Give your life no middle ground. And so here's what's beautiful about this amongst the philosophy of ideas is that this is saying, like, we have different visions of God in our culture. We have a vision of God where he's an impersonal force, like the Secret or like Star wars, where there's a force out there and it's kind of impersonal. We're not really sure about it, but it's an energy kind of this new age, you know, Oprah thing, and it's very popular among people. We have this vision of God that we kind of adopted somewhere that he's aloof. It's called the Deist God, where he's completely detached and he's watching us from a distance. We have these different visions of God. And what Paul's saying here is all those visions are wrong.
Mark Clark [00:12:27]:
Here's the God of Christianity. He's revealed himself, Meaning he's not aloof, he's not distant, he's not impersonal. He wants a relationship with you. That's what he's saying. He's saying, remember when Jesus talks about this, ask, seek, knock, ask, and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be open. This is.
Mark Clark [00:12:43]:
The point is, he's saying he wants to actually have relationship. He's revealed himself. He doesn't want you to stay ignorant of him. He wants to know you. He wants to walk with you. He doesn't want you pounding against heaven like it's brass. He doesn't want you confused in life. He wants to walk with you, to have relationship.
Mark Clark [00:13:00]:
This is what he's saying. He's revealed himself. And so some of you are like, well, how do you know that? I mean, I've come here with questions. I don't know God yet, but I'm wondering about Him. How do you know that he wants to reveal Himself to me? Because you're here. And there's a thousand other things you could be doing on a Sunday morning rather than being here. You could be prepping yourself for the gray cup. No one's watching that.
Mark Clark [00:13:19]:
But I'm just saying, all right, you could be elsewhere, all right, you could be doing anything else. Why are you here? Some of you came here to find a date. That's how I entered church. I was looking for a girlfriend. I mean, I had one, but I wanted a different one. True story right there. So I was 19. I'd been a Christian for two years.
Mark Clark [00:13:50]:
I never entered the church because I knew it was going to be old and stuffy and orange and brown and. And it was all of those things when I entered. But as I shared here before, there's a beautiful girl singing up front of yes, Love the Gospel. And so came in, started dating her, married her. It's been great ever since. So the point is, I mean, you can enter here with a thousand motivations that are messed up, but Jesus can enter in and reveal himself in the midst of those really messed up motivations. I mean, some of you. I mean, you're already married, so hopefully you're not here looking for a hot date.
Mark Clark [00:14:29]:
But some of you, you know, you run a business and you're like, well, I could maybe make some business. I see some people around here, I mean, cut some business, real estate cards out there. Hey, what's going on? You looking for a house? Boom. Or a lawyer? Churches, good place to find people who need lawyers. Hang out here. I'm a lawyer. I'm a lawyer. Mooney's a lawyer.
Mark Clark [00:14:54]:
A thousand motivations for why you could be here. He's going, I'm revealing myself to you. I'm revealing myself to you. I want to know you. I want to know you. I want to walk with you. I want to be in relationship with you. He's revealed himself.
Mark Clark [00:15:04]:
He's not some aloof, weird deity that's trying to hide from you. He's saying, I want to walk with you. Now, what is the way that he's going to reveal himself? Paul says it in the middle of the verse. He's made himself known to the sons of men in other generations he hadn't. And then, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. So here's what he says. The holy apostles and the prophets. This is Paul's way of saying the Bible.
Mark Clark [00:15:29]:
So we're gonna spend some time on the Bible. What is the Bible? How does it work? Why would it reveal God to us? Every week I get up here. I mean, the reason it's the Bible is because the holy apostles, Those are the 12 guys who saw the resurrected Jesus, were sent out. Once big A apostle, they had the authority to write scripture, write the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, all these guys are writing the Bible. And they wrote it in a way where they had the authority to write it because God, they had seen the resurrected Jesus. God was speaking to them by his spirit so that they could write it down. It is the authority for life and practice. We don't take as the authority the preaching of a pastor, the teachings of a scholar, anything like that.
Mark Clark [00:16:09]:
And what we would say is this has the ultimate authority. And what is called the canon of the Bible is closed. The canon means measuring rod. It's the idea that all the books in the Bible, it's closed. No one can write a book of the Bible anymore to reveal God to you. It's over when the apostles died. And the reason that's important is because there's no gospel text that can be trusted. That was written after the time that all the Eyewitnesses had died off, or else you don't have anybody around to correct what's written.
Mark Clark [00:16:38]:
And so the reason that we take Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as authoritative is because they were written early enough to say, hey, if this didn't happen, there were a whole bunch of people around that could say, hey, I was there. And that didn't happen. And so it carries this authority. And then he's saying the apostles, the prophets, the Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah, Moses, Isaiah, that the Bible, the biblical text, is what changes your life. It's how God, it's what he uses to reveal himself to you, to change you. It's life and practice for you. Now, there's a lot of people who don't trust the Bible. There's a lot of people who come against it and say, this is an ancient book.
Mark Clark [00:17:12]:
It's silly, it's goofy. Why would you ever pay attention to it? There's so many mistakes and contradictions, and it wasn't even. So there's all these conspiracy theories, right? So if you talk to people in your life, I know, family, friends, as I talk, they raise all these conspiracy theories about the Bible, all right? They would say a whole bunch of things about it. They say the New Testament wasn't chosen until the 4th century AD. It didn't include a whole bunch of gospels that it should have included the divinity of Jesus was something that was voted on at the Council of Nicaea. Why didn't we include the Gospel of Thomas? It's because the church is out to just form and it only included books because it had a particular worldview it was trying to. And so it's all a big conspiracy. Everything's a conspiracy.
Mark Clark [00:17:56]:
And so all we need to do is just for a few minutes, we need to stop, calm down, and look at these unfortunate things called historical facts. Sometimes we gotta deal in the world of facts instead of mythology. Cause here's the thing, when it comes to the scriptures, they're important because they inform our life. They informed our thinking, they inform our worldview. And it's important that we trust them. See every person as they live their life, every person who walked into this room, you have a philosophy of life. You have a worldview. You have a way that you think about God and the universe and what your life and your friends and what's going on right now.
Mark Clark [00:18:41]:
You have certain answers to the fundamental questions of our existence. Who are we? Where are we? What's the problem? What's the solution? You've built up questions and you've got it from the media and magazines and Twitter feeds and all of these different ways that you think about the world. Your education, your parents and the Bible will constantly push up against you. And so what's really important is we have to know that our worldview gets informed by what we study. Everything is about what we study. What do we spend time in? And so what Paul's gonna say is, listen, this text is what you need to spend your life in, your time in. Cause it's gonna build your philosophy, it's gonna build your worldview and how you live. Martin Luther would study St.
Mark Clark [00:19:29]:
Augustine and the book of Romans and the book of Galatians, and it informed his life. He then rebelled against the Catholic Church. He protested against it. That's where we get Protestant. It caused him to free a nun from a convent and then marry her. Katie Hitler had stuff that he read and informed what he did. He read Nietzsche, and it informed how he viewed humanity and what he was gonna do with his life. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mark Clark [00:20:00]:
Read the old Testament prophets and informed. Here's what civil rights is gonna look like. Here's how I'm gonna be. See, we take the stuff in and then we push it out of our life. So it's very important as we come to the text and we're saying this needs to be the foundation for your life. How you think, how you breathe, what you do with your time. Because it's gonna inform how you think and what you do and do. We trust this.
Mark Clark [00:20:21]:
There's a lot of people who don't raise all these questions. All the Gospels were too late. Council of Nicaea, devoted on the divinity of Jesus. Gospel of Thomas should have been included. So let's just work through a few of these things. Firstly, it's very important to understand against the charge that the Bible was decided, you know, when Constantine was the emperor, like if you've read the Da Vinci Code, if you watch the Discovery Channel, if you go to university, this is kind of what they say. Everyone got together. The Council of Nicaea.
Mark Clark [00:20:50]:
They voted on the divinity of Jesus. They voted on the Gospels. So first off, we gotta understand this. The Old Testament canon, what we understand as the Old Testament right now, was already established 400 years before Jesus. So nobody's voting on it in the 4th century, established 400 years before Jesus. The reason we know this is because even Jesus himself, in the first century, he said this in Luke, chapter 11. From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zachariah. And he's making a point about the Bible and what he means by that is Abel was the first martyr, happened in Genesis, chapter four.
Mark Clark [00:21:26]:
And then Zachariah was the last martyr of the Old Testament. And that happened in second Chronicles. And what Jesus is saying is from Genesis to second Chronicles, the entire Old Testament. Now for us, we're like, well, wait a minute. No, the Old Testament ends with Malachi. Not to Jews, it doesn't. Jews. Even today, Second Chronicles is the last book of the Bible.
Mark Clark [00:21:46]:
They have all the Malachi, they have all these prophets in there. But it ends with, so here's what Jesus saying from Genesis to second Chronicles, from the first martyr to the last. I affirm the Old Testament canon even in the first century. Second, big thing about the question against the Gospels, they were decided on in the 4th century. Not true. We have early church fathers who were already writing about the four Gospels and list the entire New Testament. By 160 AD 160 AD a guy by the name of Irenaeus, who was a disciple of the apostle John, he actually knew John before he died, writes out, here's the New Testament canon. Here are the four gospels that we trust.
Mark Clark [00:22:29]:
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Everything else is a sham. This is the New Testament already locked in. So people aren't voting on this and deciding about it in the 4th century. They're deciding about it very early on. The early church knew, here were the Gospels, here were the New Testament books that we trust. And then there's people say, well, why not include the Gospel of Thomas? Right? Isn't that why. Why would you exclude it? Why only Matthew, Mark and Luke? For a bunch of reasons.
Mark Clark [00:22:57]:
First, the Gospel of Thomas was written probably in the second century. Definitely in the second century. Probably late because of the language that it was written in. Secondly, because it's not even a narrative. It's just pithy sayings of Jesus that are listed out like the Book of Proverbs without context. And thirdly, because its theology is really messed up and it counters everything to do with the New Testament and the Gospel. So for instance, and this is funny. Cause I never understand why liberal scholars want to include the Gospel of Thomas.
Mark Clark [00:23:27]:
Because in it, Jesus says in if a woman wants to become. Come into the kingdom of God, she has to become a man. Huh? Be like, I'd be cool to kind of watch that try to take place. I guess I feel like converting to Jesus. All right, here we go. What does that even mean? What does that look like? So here's the thing. All through history, people come up with these same arguments. Don't trust the Bible.
Mark Clark [00:23:55]:
The Bible can't be trusted. Don't you know that? It's nonsense. And over and over and over again, the Bible has just been vindicated sociologically, historically, archaeologically. Listen, scholars used to make the claim about the Bible that it can't be trusted because there's no way that Moses could have written the first five books of the Bible. And the reason they argued that was because they said there was no such thing as writing at the time of Moses. All there was were hieroglyphs and kind of paintings on caves. No one wrote languages. And so here's what happened.
Mark Clark [00:24:28]:
A whole bunch of students for hundreds of years, and a whole bunch of people gathered in this room, went, the Bible's a joke. I can't trust this. So forget it, I don't want it. It's garbage. It can't be authoritative. Moses, it claims that Moses wrote it, but he couldn't have wrote it because there was no such thing as writing. And then over the last couple centuries, scholars went, oops, there was writing during the time of Moses. We found some.
Mark Clark [00:25:01]:
In fact, they were writing thousands of years before Moses. Sorry about all those people that died. There were a bunch of people who said, dropkick your Bible, Walk away from it. It's a joke. Because the Bible talks about the Hittite people. There's no such thing as Hittite people. We've done the work on a secular level. We've looked for the Hittite people.
Mark Clark [00:25:25]:
No such thing as the Hittite people. The Bible's a lie. It's a joke. It's a sham. All of you are so naive for believing this. You hear this for all different reasons. This kind of happens in every generation. There's always a reason never to believe the Bible.
Mark Clark [00:25:36]:
It's a joke, it's a sham. You have to be dumb and naive to ever walk with it. And then in the last century, they were digging around in Turkey and they dug a little deeper. Oh, my goodness, we found the Hittites. And not only did we find the Hittites, we found an entire library. The Hittites kept books. Oops, sorry for all you people who drop kicked your Bible, walked away from it, walked away from faith and died. See, this is what we do.
Mark Clark [00:26:06]:
Mankind has this pride and this swagger where we walk before the, the God of the universe. We're like, we're smarter than you. We got this. We know. And every single one of those people dies. And as the Psalms say, they get blown off the ground and the ground forgets that they were even there. And then that ground gets replaced by another person saying the same dumb things, and we just hit replay. See, we tend to come at this text and go, man, let me exegete.
Mark Clark [00:26:40]:
Let me take you apart. Let me show everybody. And the Bible goes, wait a minute. No, I'm the authority here. I get to exegete you. I get to pick you apart. I get to rebuke and correct you. I get to come and deconstruct your heart and your life.
Mark Clark [00:26:55]:
See, I'm the authority. And so this text is the reason we get up here and preach it every single week, is because we're saying, look, this is what. This is what reveals God. This has the power to change your life. Not only can it be trusted, it's got power. Second Timothy, chapter three. Here's what it says about the Bible. Verse 16, very famous verse.
Mark Clark [00:27:15]:
All scripture is breathed out by God. It's inspired, it's perfect, it's true and profitable. For what? Not only just for knowing, but for living your life, he says, for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped with, for every good work. Here's what it's saying. It's saying, these are verbs I wanna translate into your life. That you're actually living this thing out, and this book is the thing that's given you the power to do it. And then he says, man, you live in a crazy world. And how are you gonna live in that world without getting torn by the empires that surround you? So he gives this list, and it's a snapshot of our world.
Mark Clark [00:27:55]:
He says in chapter three, verse two. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self control, brutal, not loving, good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. That's just epidemic in churches. We got the appearance that I'm this, an appearance that I'm that. I only listen to this, I only watch that. I sound like this, I dress like this, but I deny the power of God to actually live this stuff out. And he's saying, you're gonna live in a world like that.
Mark Clark [00:28:37]:
Do you know how you're gonna survive in that world? Not by coming up with your own philosophy. Not by gathering your friends in a room. Not by, you know, putting committees together. He's already told them. Chapter two. Listen. Verse 15. Do your best to present yourself to God is one approved.
Mark Clark [00:28:50]:
A worker who has no need to be ashamed. Rightly handling the word of truth. You want to survive in that world, you got to rightly handle the word of truth. You got to clench onto this thing. And here's what happens. You and I do not live a life where the scriptures are central and informing everything about us for a whole bunch of reasons. One of those reasons because when I approach the Bible, it's just really messy. The God I meet in the Bible, I don't understand him.
Mark Clark [00:29:26]:
He does weird things. He moves to harden Pharaoh's heart, and then he keeps him accountable for why it's hard. I read these crazy stories where it's like, oh, and this concubine got cut up, and they sent the 12 pieces of her body to the 12 tribes of Israel. And awesome. With my devos in the morning, Awesome. When I want to sit down with my kids. All right, Hayden, here we go. Let's read.
Mark Clark [00:29:53]:
There was this concubine. She got cut up in her body. So we approach the text, and it's intimidating and it's weird and it's messy. And the God that we meet there, we don't really know what to do with him. One of the major reasons that we run away from the scriptures, we trade out spending time in the text for pop life meaning instead of spending time in the Bible doing our devos, whether it's like Bible in a year or Bible in two years or a chapter a day, whatever piece of this we need to just digest. Instead of doing that, we do X Factor and Glee. What do you do with your time? We trade out pouring into this for publishing ourself because someone might want to know about the dinner that I ate. So I'm going to Instagram it, and my 13 friends can like it.
Mark Clark [00:30:53]:
And we're obsessed with publishing ourself. Right. John Piper, back in the day said the one major thing that Facebook and Twitter, the role that they will play in the scope of eternity will be that when we stand before God, the excuse will be removed. That we had no time to pray, that we had no time to push in to the scriptures. I had no time. I was so busy. Really? You scrolled Facebook two hours a day and you published yourself. You had no time.
Mark Clark [00:31:36]:
Do you want to know how many tweets you sent out? Let me pull it up for you. No, that's good. That's good, that's good. Some of us find it hard. I mean, there's a hundred things that we could go Through. Some of us find it hard to get into the Bible because there's just so many things about it that bore us, right? I mean, we just open it, we're like, okay, I gotta read this thing. Here we go, here we go. Here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go.
Mark Clark [00:32:02]:
Ah. And we can't. We can't. Kind of. It's like, why is it talking about foreskin? Again with the foreskin. I don't. I don't. I'm struggling.
Mark Clark [00:32:25]:
So then we don't let the guy into church who's got one crushed testicle. What? I don't understand what. We're just bored, man. We don't know what this has to do with anything. Genealogies. I mean, the whole New Testament starts off with one long list of somebody begat somebody that begat somebody that begat somebody, and you're sleeping. By verse three, you're just bored. Major reason you're busy, busy, busy.
Mark Clark [00:32:57]:
You got a young family, you got a business to run. You got dating to do. All of these reasons practical. So there's this great story in Second Kings about us, about our busyness. They're rebuilding the temple, they're reconstructing it, and they're busy. They're putting together decor and curtains and painting, and they're kind of rebuilding this thing to gather again. And in the midst of the rubble of the temple, they find a Bible, which is this crazy moment because the Bible hadn't been publicly read in Israel in years. And so they're just dried up, and they're like, man.
Mark Clark [00:33:47]:
And so King Josiah, the king at the time, King of Israel, he gets this guy and he says, here, read this thing to us. Read it publicly. And this guy gets up and he's just like. I don't know where he read, but he's just like. If one ventures a word with you, will you be impatient yet? Who can keep from speaking? Behold, you have instructed many, and you have strengthened the weak hands. Words have upheld him who was stumbling, and you have made firm the feeble knees. But now it has come to you, and you are impatient. It touches you, and you are dismayed.
Mark Clark [00:34:19]:
And this guy reads the Bible. And King Josiah, just this public reading just gets ruined as this guy is just preaching this thing, and he repents of all of his sin, and he starts weeping, and he rips off all his clothes, which is crazy, but that's what they did back then. They would repent, and I'd be like. And he goes out after this has been read, and he starts ripping down all of the idols, all that have been built up all over the country. And he starts ripping them down, all these pagan gods. And he comes back and he says, read it again, read it again. And the guy opens it up. He just starts, woe to Nebo, for for it is laid waste.
Mark Clark [00:35:04]:
Chiratham is what is put to shame. It is taken. The fortress is put to shame and broken down. The renown of Moab is no more. And then all of Israel just hears this word and they all repent. And they say, we're gonna live by the Bible now. And it's a beautiful story. Cause it's us.
Mark Clark [00:35:24]:
Because, man, we are religiously busy. We are cleaning up. We're serving in village kids. We're in four Bible studies. We're going to school for this. We are busy, busy people. And this thing gets buried under the busyness. And the hope of that story is, man, you can pull that up and resurrect it.
Mark Clark [00:35:56]:
That you don't have to go a year. Why would you go a year without opening this? Why would you have to dust this off your shelf in order to grab it to come to church? Paul says in Philippians, hold fast to the word, man. If I said to you, the God of the universe has written his thoughts and ideas down in a book, don't you want to kind of come at the book and grab it? And the whole point of it is, man, this thing's alive, right? It's alive. It's not dead. It's like it's jumping. It's talking to you. That's the image for alive. I speak, I rebuke, I teach, I correct.
Mark Clark [00:36:36]:
I train in righteousness. These are verbs about this. This isn't just dead text. And that's why it's central to everything we do. It needs to be central to your life, where you gotta find space. You don't have any margin in your life. You go from this to this to this to this to this. You gotta find space for the Word to be the foundation.
Mark Clark [00:37:01]:
It can be trusted. It can change your life. Now, I think one of the solutions to understanding the Bible and actually being able to read it excitedly rather than be bored with it, rather than be intimidated by it, rather than have to defend it to all your friends, is what he's already set up in verse four, which we constantly preach here, which is the mystery of Christ, meaning. And you gotta hear this or else the Bible will crush you. That the entire Bible is about Jesus. And what we mean by that is, see, we've been raised in a setting. If you've been raised in the church, where you read the Bible as if it's first and foremost about you. And it's hard to read those passages that don't make any sense.
Mark Clark [00:37:49]:
And so you struggle to figure out how to apply it because you've made the false first step that it is about. You always read the Bible as if it's about him first. And so when you read the Joseph story, don't read it as looking for yourself in it first. Say, what does this have to do with the gospel? What does this have to do with the death, the resurrection of Jesus? Because the whole Bible is about him. It's about the mystery of Christ. And so when you're reading Joseph a story about a guy who leaves his father, gets beaten up by the people who love him, get thrown and left for dead, sold out for pieces of silver, and then rises out of that death to a newfound power, and then uses that power not to condemn the people who killed him, but to set them free. If you don't see gospel in that, then you're not reading the Bible properly. Cause you're looking for you, and you're like, well, if I can be faithful and sing like Joseph, then I'll get a Technicolor dream Coat.
Mark Clark [00:38:49]:
If I can be like Joseph, faithful. And that's not what the text is telling you. It's saying, you're not Joseph. Who are you in the story? You're the brothers who beat up Joseph and threw him in a well and sold him for pieces of silver. And yet he rises out of that and declares you free and feeds you, even though he should condemn you. There's the children's Bible that I read to my kids. It's called the Jesus Storybook Bible. And the subtitle is every story whispers his name.
Mark Clark [00:39:22]:
And that's the point. And I'll be sitting with my daughters and I'm training them to read the Bible as if it's about Jesus first. And so they'll read the Noah story and they'll be okay. There was all these people, and they were all sinful and they were all wicked. So what happened? Jesus came on a boat. Sure. Good enough for me. Because what's that Noah story really about? I mean, if you read that Noah story through the scope of the gospel, I mean, we read that thing and it's like, God is an angry God and he leaves some people.
Mark Clark [00:39:54]:
What is that story about? He judges all this wickedness. He brings a flood down on all these People. And then at the end, he puts a rainbow in the sky. And we're like, oh, it's so nice of a story. He likes colors. And so he put a colorful thing in the sky to all remind us he won't flood us again. And we miss it. Man in the Hebrew, you know what he puts in the sky? A bow.
Mark Clark [00:40:24]:
But you know what it is? It's a war bow. See what he's been doing? Flood you. Judge you. You're wicked. You hate me. I hate you. I'm going to flood you out. I'm going to kill you.
Mark Clark [00:40:40]:
I'm going to leave 8. I'm at war with you. And now let me hang up my bow. And not only let me hang up my bow, but now we're going to see where the bow is pointing. See, the next time this bow makes any sense, it's because I'm going to shoot myself. I'm going to shoot this into the heart of heaven. The next time you hear about my wrath coming down, it's going to be because I came down and took it for you that I'm taking the bow, the arrow of my own wrath. It's what we were singing about.
Mark Clark [00:41:22]:
That the wrath of God would be fully satisfied when I send myself, when I come in the person of Jesus and the bow in the arrow is now pointed at me. I mean, that's what that story's doing. The whole thing's about Jesus. So a guy named Sinclair Ferguson helps us out. He writes. It's a long quote, but I think it's helpful for you. He writes something called Jesus is the true and better. He goes to the Old Testament story.
Mark Clark [00:41:49]:
If you're new to church, you won't know some of these stories, but here's what he says. Jesus is the true and better Adam who passed the test in the garden and whose obedience is imputed to us. Jesus is the true and better Abel, who, though innocently slain, has blood now that cries out not for our condemnation, but for our. Jesus is the true and better Abraham, who answered the call of God to leave all the comfortable and familiar and go out into the void, not knowing whither he went to create a new people of God. Jesus is the true and better Isaac, who was not just offered up by his father on the mount, but was truly sacrificed for us. And when God said to Abraham, now I know you love me because you did not withhold your son, your only son, whom you love, from me. Now we can look at God taking his son up the mountain and sacrificing him and saying, now we know that you love us because you did not withhold your son, your only son, whom you love from us. Jesus is the true and better Jacob, who wrestled and took the blow of justice we deserve.
Mark Clark [00:42:50]:
So we, like Jacob, only received the wounds of grace to wake us up and discipline us. Jesus is the true and better Joseph, who at the right hand of the king, forgives those who betrayed and sold him and uses the new power to save them. Jesus, the true and better Moses, who stands in the gap between the people and the Lord and who mediates a new covenant. Jesus is the true and better rock of Moses, who struck with the rod of God's justice, now gives us water in the desert. Jesus, the true and better Job, the truly innocent sufferer, who then intercedes for us and saves his stupid friends. That's us. Jesus is the true and better David, whose victory becomes his power, people's victory, though they never lifted a stone to accomplish it themselves. See, we read the David and Goliath story.
Mark Clark [00:43:36]:
How do we slay the giants of our life if I can only have courage to be like David? And the story's going, you're not David, you're Israel, sitting way up in the corner, shaking because you're afraid, not able to do anything. And you need somebody in your place to go out and win a battle for you and then impute that victory to you, even though you did nothing. And that's what Jesus. Jesus is the true and better Esther, who didn't just risk losing an earthly palace, but lost the ultimate and heavenly one, who didn't just risk his life, but gave his life to save his people. Jesus is the true and better Jonah who was cast out into the storm so that we could be brought in. Jesus is the real rock of Moses, the real Passover lamb. Innocent, perfect, helpless, slain. So the angel of death will pass over us.
Mark Clark [00:44:20]:
He's the true temple, the true prophet, the true priest, the true king, the true sacrifice, the true lamb, the true light, the true bread. The Bible's not about you. It's about him. Now, how does all this become real to us? The last part of the verse, verse 5, is this. He revealed it through the holy apostles and the prophets. The Bible, he says, buy spirit. Here's what he says. The way God's gonna reveal himself to you, the way God's gonna transform and change your life is by his spirit.
Mark Clark [00:45:04]:
Meaning, contrary to the gospel of our culture, that you need to tap into yourself, that you need to tap into your spirit. All right? Contrary To Eckhart Tolle, Oprah, Deepak Chopra, that you need to go inside your own self and find your own salvation in yourself and push yourself forward. Jesus comes along and goes, no, it's outside of yourself. It's by my spirit that if you want to follow me, you gotta deny yourself. Not going deeper inside yourself, you gotta deny yourself. What does that look like? And he's saying, back to what we talked about at the beginning. All of you sitting here, you have an angst about the world, all right? You see wars, you see destruction, you see violence, and you hate it. And you want beauty and you want justice, and you want forgiveness, and you want all these things to rain on the.
Mark Clark [00:45:57]:
I mean, you got this angst in you. And philosophers all through time have wrestled with, what is that angst? And some philosophers said, you know what it is? It's just. It's a dream. It's the fact that your evolutionary spirit is. Is disappointed with the raw reality of nature. Or other people say, it's just a dream, but we gotta fight for it and create programs and try to build a utopia on Earth. All these philosophical options. You know what Paul's saying? It's not a dream.
Mark Clark [00:46:22]:
The angst that you have in you, it's a voice. He says, it's by the spirit. And the spirit is saying this to you. You're broken. You hate this world. There's something messed up about it. When you turn on the tv, you see genocide, you see rape, you see torture. What is that? And the spirit's going, I'm talking to you.
Mark Clark [00:46:49]:
It's not a dream. I'm saying to you, I want to rebuild you. I want to give you new life. And so here's the question. What do you do with that? Where do you go with that? You're sitting here, maybe you never made a decision for Jesus, never followed Jesus. What do you do with the fact that he's saying, man, I'm talking to you. I'm a voice. I'm a person.
Mark Clark [00:47:13]:
I'm saying I wanna draw you to myself. Cause you know, what our thing tends to be is God will never accept me. You have no idea what I've done. I'm so horrible. I'm so bad. You don't understand the things that I've done. That's a religious way of thinking about the world. That's a way of thinking about the world, that you can earn this before God.
Mark Clark [00:47:32]:
And that's to misunderstand the gospel, because what Paul's already said is, you can't earn this before God. That's why God had to come and earn it for you in Jesus. I'll close with this image from a guy named Martyn Lloyd Jones. He's an old preacher. He would say there'd be a city and there'd be people coming to attack the city. And they would send warriors out to fight that battle. And when they went out and fought that battle, if they lost the battle, a messenger would come back to the city. And he would say to the city, bear your arms.
Mark Clark [00:48:07]:
Men, women, children, you gotta fight for your life. And all the women and children and the men would scurry around and get the swords and the shields, and they'd get ready to fight. You gotta fight for your life. You gotta earn this. Or they would go out and fight a battle, and they'd have victory. And they'd come back to the city and they'd say, hey, we won. Live in light of the freedom. And Martyn Lloyd Jones used to say, every religion in the world comes back to you and says, you gotta fight for your life.
Mark Clark [00:48:39]:
You gotta earn this. You gotta work it. You gotta be a good boy, a good girl. You gotta help old ladies across the road. You gotta do pilgrimages. Only the gospel comes along and says, he fought it for you. And now the question is, what are you going to do with that? See, it's not his move. He made his move.
Mark Clark [00:49:05]:
It's your move. Father, I pray that in light of the historical reality of what you've done, the concrete thing you did in Jesus, that you died for us instead of us. And because of us. But you rose again. That that reality would change every single one of us. That we would follow you not in order to earn it, but because you've earned it for us. And that those in this moment who've never really asked or seeked out or knocked, that they would do so even as in this, as we worship you, as we give, that all of this would be wrapped in a response to the beauty of what you've done in Jesus, to what Paul has said here. That by the spirit and through the scriptures, you have revealed yourself to us.
Mark Clark [00:50:23]:
And now the question on us is, what are we going to do with that revelation? Let us have the courage to make our response to trust, to put our faith in you instead of continuing to walk, trying to earn this in our own strength. In Jesus good name we pray. Amen.