Mark Part 14

Mark

ENCOUNTERS ON THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM

MARK 10:17-52 – ENCOUNTERS ON THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM

Jesus has spent the last few months ministering on the east side of the Jordan River in the region of Perea. This is known as His Perean Ministry and lasted several months. But the time has come for Him to make His final trip to Jerusalem. Do you all know what is going to happen in Jerusalem on this last trip? It is all going to happen – Passion week and then the crucifixion and all that. So, our text for today begins with Jesus “setting out on His journey.” Jesus, the Messiah heads to the place where He is going to fulfill His mission. On the way to Jerusalem Mark records several encounters that Jesus has. As Jesus travels with His twelve disciples, He uses this as an opportunity to prepare them for what lies ahead. So, with that, let’s get right into it…

READ Mark 10:17

Jesus encounters “a man.” Q1 asks who is this man? The rich young ruler. If you combine this account here in Mark with Matthew and Luke and you piece them all together – I gave you those passages (Matthew 19:16-30 and Luke 18:18-30) – you realize that, putting everything together, he is the rich young ruler that we always hear about. When you say “ruler” more than likely he is the ruler of a local synagogue. On the surface this guy appears to have it all together. He is a good Jew. He is in a position of leadership, well-respected member of his community and he runs up to Jesus (there is a sense of urgency here). He kneels before Him (a sign of honor), and he addresses Jesus as “Good Teacher.” Finally, this man asks Jesus the right question, probably the most important question a person can ask – “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Now, Jesus can see through the man’s façade and into the man’s heart. Jesus knows what is in a man (John 2:25). In other words, He sees what is going on inside. You cannot fool Jesus. This man has a spiritual need that he is not even aware of. But Jesus is going to expose what that need is.

READ Mark 10:18

In Matthew’s account Jesus adds something to that. He says, “Why do you call Me Good Teacher?” and “only God is good.” So, He is calling him out on that. But then He actually answers the man’s question when He says, “If you would enter life, keep the commandments” (Matthew 19:17). The very next verse (Mark 10:19) says, “You know the Law.” So Q2, how did most Jews believe a person inherited eternal life? By keeping the Law. Just keep the Law perfectly and you will enter the kingdom of heaven. The problem is what? You can’t do it. Nobody can keep the Law perfectly. You might do pretty good, keeping 8 out of 10 or 9 out of 10 of the commandments, whatever. But sooner or later we are going to mess up. It is not a 95 percent kind of thing. You have to keep it perfectly. 

But the Law was never meant to be kept perfectly. The whole purpose for the Law was to reveal God’s holy character and to make us realize that we are not holy like God is. Instead, we are all sinners. In Romans 3:20 Paul drives this point home when he says, “For no one can ever be made right with God by doing what the Law commands. The Law simply shows us how sinful we are.” That is the whole purpose of the Law.

So, what Jesus does is He meets this devout Jew (with a wrong theology) right where he is…

READ Mark 10:19

Jesus basically summarizes the last six of the Ten Commandments. These commandments are focused on how God wants us to treat others. The first four are about our relationship with God. These are all about other people. Like I said, on the surface this guy appears to have his act together. He seems like a really good guy. Notice his response to Jesus…

READ Mark 10:20

“I have done all that!” Then Matthew adds in his account, “What do I still lack?” (Matthew 19:20). Deep down, this man realizes that something is missing from his life. He doesn’t know what it is, but something is not right. “What am I lacking? I have done all these things!” Q3 asks, when the man told Jesus that he had kept all the commands since he was a boy, what was Jesus’s response to him? The answer comes in the next verse, right? What did He do? He loved him. That is an interesting response, isn’t it?

READ Mark 10:21a

Notice the tender compassion that Jesus has for this young man and for his soul. Jesus knows what it is that is keeping this man from being saved. He is a good guy, but something is keeping him from being saved and Jesus knows what it is. Jesus also knows that when He tells the man, he is not going to like it.

READ Mark 10:21b

That’s all. Simple, right? It sounds simple. Just this one thing. Do this one thing. Jesus’s instruction sounds fairly straightforward, doesn’t it? What happens if He told you all to do that? It sounds pretty simple, but is it easy to do? No. Well, basically though, when you think about it, this is the same thing Jesus told His disciples to do when He called them – “Leave it all behind and follow Me.” And they did. So, Jesus tells this man to do the same – “Sell it all and follow Me.”

READ Mark 10:22

See, I told you he wasn’t going to like it. Jesus knew it. So, Q4 asks, why wouldn’t the man do what Jesus said to do? What explanation does Mark provide as to why he went away sad? We know he went away sad. We know he was sorrowful, but why? He did not want to give up his wealth. He was very rich. He had a lot of wealth and property. This guy went away sorrowful because, well frankly, the cost was too high for him to pay. He did not want to give it all up. He was not willing to pay it. Thus, Jesus exposes his real problem which at its core is a spiritual problem.

The Ten Commandments – I brought these up for a reason. What is the first commandment? “You shall have no other gods before Me,” right? That is Commandment Number 1. What was this young man’s god? His money, his wealth, his possessions. God may be high on his list, but number one is a god that is before Yahweh. This man is an idolator. Jesus is pointing this out. Now, he may have loved and honored God to some degree. But this man’s real god is his possessions. So, Jesus exposes the truth about this man. His money, his wealth is his god. He is in violation of the first commandment.

We don’t know what became of this young man. He disappears from the scene right after this never to be heard from again (at least not in the Bible). We don’t know if maybe later he began to mull over what Jesus said and thought about it and realized his need for a savior and came to Christ at some point; or if he was just a good moral man who ended up going to hell. We don’t know. It is a sad story.

This encounter leads to Jesus making an application for His own disciples.

READ Mark 10:23-25

What Jesus does here, as He often does in His teachings, is uses a progressive argument. He starts out with the obvious, something they had just seen play out before them. He states something that the disciples saw the rich man do. It is difficult for rich people to enter the kingdom of heaven, to be saved, for obvious reasons. They don’t want to pay the price giving it all up. But then Jesus takes it a step further. It almost looks like He is repeating Himself but He is actually saying something different. The same point for rich people is applied now to everybody, a general statement – “how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of heaven.” That is just a general blanket statement. The first one was rich people. Now it is everybody. And then Jesus goes one step further and says, not only is it difficult, but it is impossible.

[In class I showed a Power Point slide with a normal camel standing in the background and a closeup view of the eye of a needle in the foreground]

Q5, so I have a picture up here to drive home this point. What is that? A needle. That is the eye of a needle, right? That is what you put the thread through. And that is a what? It is a camel. Now, is it physically possible for that camel to go through the eye of that needle? No. So, the answer, true or false? It is impossible for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. That is true. It is obvious and let me tell you where this comes from. It has nothing to do with some with some gate in Jerusalem called the “needle gate.” That did not even exist. That is a misnomer. This came from the Talmud. In the Talmud they were illustrating something that was impossible. They use this analogy of a camel going through the eye of a needle. And so, Jesus is borrowing from that to state something that they knew was a physically impossible that came from the Talmud (that every good Jew would know). He is using an illustration to show something that is physically impossible to make a spiritual point. It is humanly impossible also then to enter the kingdom of heaven, no matter who you are – rich, poor, middle class, Democrat, Republican, whatever. And that statement shocks the disciples.

READ Mark 10:26

Well, that is a pretty good question. The obvious question that you would ask, given what Jesus has just said, is: “OK, if it is impossible to enter the kingdom of heaven, then how do people get saved?” And Jesus answers that. That brings us to v 27 which we hear quoted a lot for a lot of different circumstances.

READ Mark 10:27

Q6 asks, what is the context of this verse? In v 26 their question was about being saved, so the context is in salvation. Now, most people do not realize that. I didn’t realize it. I’ll just confess, I have heard that verse quoted my entire life and I have quoted it myself sometimes. But it has to do with salvation. Jesus is saying that salvation is strictly a God-thing. The bad news is that we, as sinners, have no power in and of ourselves to save ourselves. The problem is our human depravity. We all have a sin nature. We are stuck. We need divine intervention. We cannot save ourselves! Salvation requires the work of God, the convicting and regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing [it is not you that did it]; it is the gift of God, not a result of works [nothing you did], so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). It is nothing of you. It is a God thing. Salvation is from God only. Only God can save you. You cannot save yourself. This is really what Jesus is getting at here.

READ Mark 10:28

Then in Matthew’s account Peter says, “What then will we have?” (Matthew 19:27). You sense a little bit of frustration here as Peter reminds Jesus that “We, Your disciples, we DID leave everything and followed You. What is in it for us? What do we get out of this?” So, Jesus answers him beginning in v 29…

READ Mark 10:29-30

So, here is a promise for those, like the disciples, who have left everything and followed Jesus. These are promises for both now and the future. Q7 asks you to check all the things that a person who follows Christ receives. It is all right there (in these verses). We know it is eternal life. That is what we all think of first when we think about getting saved, right? There are promises for now though. Houses and lands and family members that are added a hundred-fold are a reference to our church family which is filled with new brothers and sisters in Christ. We saw in our study of Acts where the early church met in people’s homes. They did not have church buildings so they would meet in people’s homes and they shared all their possessions with each other. This from 1 John 3:17 (directed to believers in Jesus Christ): “But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother [or sister] in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” So, in other words, in a Christian’s heart is to share your things with everybody and to meet their needs. That is what went on in the early church.

Then there is a promise at the end that you do not normally think as being a good thing. And what is that? Persecution. Oh, I am so happy for that one! Notice that it is plural – persecutions. That is what we have to look forward to, persecutions. And did the disciples get all that? The early church, yes; they were part of this great body of believers. And they got persecutions, didn’t they?

READ Mark 10:31

Well, this is where looking at the Gospels together really helps you. This statement here is made in conjunction with Matthew Chapter 20 where Jesus is giving the Parable of the Laborers at the eleventh hour (that came at the very end). This teaching happens right here. So, it makes sense, then, that this verse applies to that parable He is talking about. No matter when a person comes to Christ, whether they are saved early in life as a young person, as a child, or later in life, even perhaps on their death bed, or like the thief on the cross, their inheritance is the same. That is the answer to Q8. You receive the same gift of eternal life no matter when you come to Christ. The same glorious inheritance is yours.

They go on down the road a little bit further and for a third time Jesus shares something with them.

READ Mark 10:32

He has done this twice before (at least that has been recorded).

READ Mark 10:33-34

This is the third time Jesus has told them this. Q9 says, what does Jesus say is going to happen to Him? All of them (all the things listed). He is going to be handed over to the religious leaders and sentenced to die. He is going to be delivered over to the Gentiles (the Romans). He is going to be mocked, spit upon, flogged and killed. And He is going to rise again (from the dead) after three days.

None of this is going to take Jesus by surprise. No. He knows what His mission is. That is His ultimate mission – a mission of redemption. But notice in this passage that there is no reaction by the disciples. Now Luke’s account says something that is important. He says, “But they understood none of these things. This saying was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said” (Luke 18:34). So, there is some spiritual cloud that is being place over them. They are not really hearing what Jesus said. We know that later by the way they react when Jesus is arrested.

READ Mark 10:35-37

James and John approach Jesus and make this request. They apparently have not learned the lesson that Jesus had taught them back in Mark Chapter 9 when they had been arguing about who was the greatest. Jesus told them, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9:35). He had already taught them that lesson, that being great means to be a servant. What is this all about? They request to sit on Jesus’s right hand and left hand in the kingdom. These are the places of highest honor. Matthew tells us that, not only did James and John come to Jesus and ask Him this question, but their mother was there with them. And Jesus responds to them.

READ Mark 10:38

Q10, how did Jesus respond to James and John’s request? Did He give them what they wanted? He said, “You do not know what you are asking.” And then Jesus references the drinking the cup and being baptized. Those talk about suffering. He basically asks James and John, “Can you handle suffering?” You see, in the kingdom of heaven those who have suffered the most for the name of Jesus here on earth are the ones who will receive the greater rewards (the crowns and all that is talked about later on in the New Testament), the greater glory. They will be given the greater honor.

READ Mark 10:39

They respond, “No problem! We are able. Sure, Jesus, we can do that.” Jesus tells them that they WILL suffer. He doesn’t give them any details, but He prophesies that they are going to suffer. It is going to happen. Now we know that James ends up being the first disciple to be martyred. And we know that John went through various persecutions. Of course, we know about him on the isle of Patmos. He suffered also. So, they will be totally different forms, but “you are both going to suffer.” And as for their request to sit on His right hand and left hand…

READ Mark 10:40

In Matthew’s account Jesus says, “It is for those for whom it has been prepared by My Father.” Those places of honor will be determined by God the Father and not by Jesus. “They are not Mine to grant. They are the Father’s.”

Well, James and John’s request doesn’t sit well with the other ten disciples including old Peter. Look at what it says in v 41…

READ Mark 10:41

“You are trying to get in good with Jesus.” So, they got angry. They think that they might get cut out of their rightful place of honor next to Jesus. So, Jesus uses this as a teaching moment. He calls them together and gives them a little word.

READ Mark 10:42

Things in the kingdom of God do not work like they do here in the kingdoms of men. Here on earth the rulers, like the Caesars, the Romans, King Herod and many others, they lord it over their subjects. They have ultimate authority and power and they use it for their own purposes, to get what THEY want from those that serve them. That is how it operates here on earth. That is how it is here. But it is not that way in God’s kingdom.

READ Mark 10:43

Jesus has taught this before. This is nothing new.

READ Mark 10:44-45

Jesus knows what His mission is. Q11, Jesus taught His disciples that a person will be great in God’s kingdom by becoming a what? A servant. In God’s kingdom one becomes great by becoming a servant. Bottom up instead of top down. It is completely different in God’s kingdom, in heaven’s economy, than it is here on earth. Completely different.

Q12, who does Jesus point to, as a model for being a servant? He points to Himself (the Son of Man). He knows what His mission is and has already shared that mission with His disciples. “This is what is going to happen…” He is going to become the Suffering Servant of Isaiah. He is going to be the Suffering Servant who will be the ransom for many. He will pay the price for our salvation that we could never afford to pay ourselves! Remember we talked about before that we need divine intervention. Well, this is it. He is THAT Person. He is going to pay the price for us. 

When I was studying this lesson, I could not help but think about Paul’s teaching in Philippians Chapter 2 when he paints that beautiful portrait of Jesus as the Servant. Philippians Chapter 2, v 5…

“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, by taking the form of a Servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Therefore, [because of that] God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:5-11).

Eloquent! Paul stating Jesus as the model for us as a Servant – goes to the cross and takes our sin.

Well, Jesus makes one last stop before ascending up the steep road that is going to lead to Jerusalem. And that is the ancient city of Jericho.

READ Mark 10:46

Jericho is known as the city of palms. It is a flourishing place, well-irrigated. King Herod actually built a residence near Jericho. So, word gets out that Jesus of Nazareth is approaching their town. That is why there is this large crowd around Him as he enters Jericho. And then on this visit to Jericho there is something else that happens that Mark does not cover. We know about Bartimaeus here. He is named. There is another man that is named from Jericho that Jesus encounters. He was in a sycamore tree – Zaccheus. That happens in Jericho as well (the same visit). That is covered in Luke Chapter 19. There is a tax collector named Zaccheus that Jesus has an encounter with also. That has apparently already happened because now He is leaving Jericho and this crowd, including probably Zaccheus, is all there with Jesus. Meanwhile, there is this blind beggar on the side of the road…

READ Mark 10:47-48

So, this blind man, a beggar, shouts out to Jesus in desperation. Q13 asks, what title does the blind beggar use when he is calling out to Jesus? “Son of David.” That is a significant term. It is a Messianic term. In fact, it is the most common title that the Jews used for their Messiah. So, this blind beggar understands that Jesus is the Messiah. He is the Son of David. The Jews realized the promise that was made to David was the Messiah was going to be the One to reign on David’s throne eventually and be heir to the throne (2 Samuel 7). And if you track Mary and Joseph, Jesus’s earthly parents and you look at their genealogies (the genealogy of Joseph is in Matthew, the genealogy of Mary is in Luke); both of them trace their lineage through David. So, Bartimaeus believes Jesus is the Messiah.

Twice here he asks Jesus to have mercy on him. He is a blind beggar and he is a sinner. In v 48 we see the attitude that people had toward blind beggars. They were not very compassionate back then. They told him, “Be quiet!” He is an outcast in society and his crying out is bothering them. But Bartimaeus ignores them. He continues to cry out to Jesus. He is persistent.

READ Mark 10:49

Jesus hears Bartimaeus. He stops and shows compassion on this man. Jesus sees this man completely different than the rest of the people around him see him. To the crowds he is an insignificant troublesome beggar. But to Jesus, he has value. So, Jesus tells this blind beggar to come to Him.

READ Mark 10:50

It doesn’t mention anybody helping him. He just goes toward Jesus’s voice.

READ Mark 10:51a

For a second time in our text Jesus asks someone, “What do you want Me to do for you?” He takes the role of a servant. This is what He has been teaching His disciples to do. Well, what does Bartimaeus request of Jesus? That is Q14. He requests to be able to see.

READ Mark 10:51b

Now, you would expect a blind man who knows about Jesus’s reputation as a healer to request that. That is not a big surprise, is it? A blind man asks Jesus, who he has heard can heal blind people, to heal him.

READ Mark 10:52

Q15, in the end, how was the blind man healed by Jesus? By his faith. The literal Greek meaning of v 52 is “Your faith has saved you.” What a perfect picture this offers of salvation. Here you have a helpless man who can’t go anywhere. He is stuck as a beggar on the side of the road in Jericho. He is blind and hopeless. As far as he knows he will live the rest of his life that way… until Jesus, the Healer and the Savior comes by. Like Bartimaeus, we have been approached by Jesus somewhere along the road in our lives. In our blindness, in our desperation Jesus passed by, and our hearts were awakened, and we cried out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” He heard our cry, didn’t He? And that is why we are sitting here today following Him.

Well, what does Bartimaeus do now that he can see? He follows Jesus, right? Down the road he goes. We don’t know how far. Maybe he goes all the way to Jerusalem with Jesus. We don’t know. But he follows Him.

From Jericho to Jerusalem is uphill. You are going up the back side of the Mount of Olives, straight uphill all the way to Jerusalem. By the way, it is a 6-hour walk. It is not an easy hike at all. Luke’s account says, “And immediately he [Bartimaeus] recovered his sight and followed [Jesus], glorifying God. And all the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God” (Luke 18:43).

So, that is the picture as Jesus leaves Jericho and He heads up the steep incline toward Jerusalem. We will pick up the action next time in Chapter 11 with a very familiar passage, the triumphal entry into Jerusalem.