The Gospel and You

Well, I wanted to continue today, in a sense, with a theme that I've mentioned to you that the classes the ministry has been taking called labor in the Word.

And I talked with you a couple of weeks ago about the unity of the Bible and how it is that the Bible, Old and New Testament, is...

...it ties together. It ties together in a number of different ways, and I'm not really going to go over those right now.

But, you know, we could discuss those even afterwards, and we could discuss them during our meal here this afternoon.

But the fact is, you know, the Bible that we carry around, the Word of God, the Holy Bible, is a Bible that we want to read and be inspired by. Not just read, because we have to, but read because I want to have understanding and I want to be uplifted.

And it's between the inspiration that we receive from the divine Word of God, and then through the leading of the Holy Spirit of God, that we're able to be firmly established in the truth of God.

Now, I was talking to those who were able to attend our Bible study that we have in Topeka the other day, and we've gone through different things in that Bible study. We've gone through different books of the Bible, or different sections of the New Testament, primarily, is where we've been.

And we were discussing the authors of the Bible, and of course, we all understand, and maybe we should read this verse as a foundational verse here, 2 Peter 1.

Peter says in verse 20, first of all, we misunderstand that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own private interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by human will.

No prophecy, no Scripture has just come out by a human idea or human will, but it says, moved by the Spirit of God, the saints of God spoke.

See, so whether it was Moses, or whether it was Samuel, or whether it was David, or whether it was Daniel, or whether it was Matthew, or Mark, or Luther John, or Paul, you know, all of these individuals were inspired by the Holy Spirit to write down what God wanted for us to be able to see His purpose, to see His purpose and to see His plan.

And I think it's fascinating to see, and I want to focus on a section that's the first section in the New Testament. Now, we have the Old Testament broken into three major sections, and here in the New Testament we have the Gospels, we have the Book of Acts, which is essentially history, we have the history of the church, we have Paul's writings, which make up the bulk of the letters, and then admonition, and then finally we have the Book of Revelation that clearly stands out to be a remarkably different book from all of the others.

But God has inspired the different men who wrote these. He's inspired them to write them down in the way that they've been written, and yet He's used many of their characteristics. And again, I know it's almost inexplicable to me, but whenever you look at or study surveys that are taken of people in general, they have a hard time naming the four Gospels. That's troubling, and I know that that's not a difficulty with any of us. We know the first four books of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But what I was saying about the people in Topeka as we were discussing this, we were talking about Matthew and Mark and Luke and John, and in some ways, at least some mentioned, oh, well now those were all apostles, and they were with Jesus, and they were all writing their perspective or their ideas about Jesus. And in essence, that's not correct.

That's not correct at all, and you can think through of how many of the Gospels were written by the apostles. How many of the four were written by the apostles? Cindy's going to venture two.

That's correct, because again, we don't always enumerate the apostles maybe in our head, sometimes there are little songs. My wife actually still remembers a song from long, long ago of going through a listing of the naming of the apostles. And there are four or five different, three at least, listings of the, you know, the listing of the apostles. But who among them, who were eyewitnesses? Who were there? Who of them were there? Well, Matthew was one of them, and clearly the apostle John was one of them. And yet the book of Luke and the book of Mark are written by people who are not named as apostles. Now very clearly, whenever you study into it, you find that Luke was writing a historical record. He was writing an orderly account. He was a physician. He was a, you know, a beloved physician, according to Paul.

And he was writing, and you see him later traveling with Paul. You don't see him right there at the time of Jesus, although he may have clearly been around, but he became a part of the church after Acts chapter 2. It would appear. I mean, everybody became a part of the church after Acts chapter 2, actually. But it would appear that he became more acquainted and more aware. I don't know whether he was around during Jesus' life, but he wasn't directly following like some of these others were. But what he says about the way that he was going to write his gospel was that he was writing it more or less as a historian. And he was writing it as an orderly account that he was presenting to Theophilus, who was apparently probably a wealthy, maybe an influential person.

That, well, let's look at it. Luke chapter 1.

This account, see what we had in the four Gospels are accounts of the life of Jesus Christ.

And as I look back on it, whether I understood it well or not, at the time, even in college, when I was 18 years old, the first year Bible, the entire year, was a covering of the harmony of the Gospels. Going through and seeing how that they correlate and how that they mesh together and how that even though they don't all directly say the same thing, they're certainly talking about the same topic, talking about the life of Jesus, and they're adding what God inspired these given writers to write. And yet, you know, you find that they have different details, and you kind of, you need to be able to kind of follow along through, and at that time, and still, you know, one of the valid harmony of the Gospels that is are still available is a harmony of the Gospels by Robertson. There are others, and here are some who have even been written by people, have been a part of the church, you know, trying to, in many ways, kind of elaborate on and make it even clearer as far as some of the timing of things, especially around the death of Jesus. I mean, that's a part of what we are able to add that others, you know, might not fully add. But here in Luke chapter 1, you see in verse 1, it says, "...since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses." So, Luke is saying, I'm not an eyewitness. I didn't see all of this, but the life of Jesus has begun to be written about by many different recorders. And so, he says, "...since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have happened, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the Word, I too decided that after investigating everything carefully from the very beginning or for a long time..." He says, "...I want to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed." See, here Luke was wanting to record, and this is one reason why I have at times suggested that newer people, if they want to gain a quick insight into what is really important about the life of Jesus, well, you can read through the book of Luke, and then you can follow up with the book of Acts, because Luke is writing both of these books, and you find that Luke is writing... Let's see if we go to the book of Acts, chapter 1, because this is a record of the activity of the New Testament church or of the apostles originally, and then, later more so, the work of the apostle Paul. But Luke says in verse 1 of Acts 1, in the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning.

Until the day that he was taken up to heaven and after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. See, here's what Paul... Here's what Luke is saying about his accounts. The book of Luke, the gospel about the life of Jesus from his gathering information from eyewitnesses and from other recorders, and being able to put that in pretty chronological order. And then we see the book of Acts being a chronological telling of the beginning of the church and what it was, and even some of the statements that you see read in the book of Acts talk about people coming to an awareness of their need to repent and their need for the Holy Spirit.

And clearly, they had to come to believe. You know, we're going to see that elaborated on numerous times in the book of Acts. But as Tom already said earlier, believing is in essence beginning. It's beginning. We have to believe. And as I look back on my life, I know I grew up in a Christian church, grew up as a kid going to Christian church. And I have to say, I don't know that I learned very much. I may have learned a little bit and later learned how much of that was wrong. But I clearly learned that Jesus was the Son of God. You know, it wasn't disputed. It was projected in such a way that you would believe who Jesus was. That's what you actually find the Gospels being written. And even much of what you see preached many times by Peter in the book of Acts has come to realize who Jesus is. You know, it took us a while to figure it out. That's what Peter was having to say. We were walking with him. We were talking with him. We were watching him heal people. We were watching him cast out demons. I mean, see, he was very aware of the unseen world.

And of course, we should be aware of that even as I said our Good News Magazine this time points out that we need to realize that there are unseen forces in this world. We need to acknowledge that.

And again, I know we do. But again, since you don't directly see it, it's hard to perceive sometimes.

And yet, we need to recognize that the spirit world, at least the demon world, is evil and angry toward God's plan for man. So you don't like the fact that God is going to work with people like us and actually cause us to be over the angels. That's incredible.

They want to prevent that. They want to undermine that. They want to deceive people about that.

And yet, as our article points out, that we need to learn to resist the demonic influences, satanic influences in the world, and then draw close to God. Ask God for wisdom. Ask God for understanding, because that's the only way we're going to be able to do as Daniel did in being able to identify even what was going on in the world back, you know, 2500 years ago.

You know, that was what, at the time of, maybe a little further than that, the time when Daniel would have been living. And so, here in the book of Luke and in the book of Acts, you see Luke tying those two together and saying that, you know, I'm recording this, and we find Luke later in the book of Acts writing about being there with Paul. You know, at one point he's writing about Peter and many things that happened around Jerusalem, but then later when Paul was sent by the power of the Holy Spirit, he and Silas were sent to begin a traveling trip like we have discussed here in services. And Paul was, in a sense, leading that, and yet later Luke says, I'm here with him. We're doing this, we're doing that, and of course Paul even says, Luke is with me in some of his writings. And so you find, you know, different of the writers, you find Matthew, and I want to go through a little bit about Matthew, but I know that we understand he was an eyewitness. He was called by Jesus to follow him, and he had been a tax collector. He had been what you could say would be maybe an accountant or, you know, at least someone who managed money or handled a good amount of money. He wasn't always looked into on in a positive way, and yet he is writing a record of the life of Jesus Christ. And of course the apostle John was one who was not only with Jesus, but it appears that he had a special connection to Jesus, a special closeness. He writes about himself in his gospel.

He writes about himself as the disciple that Jesus loved. He writes in such an in an intimate way, and of course the book of John is remarkably different from the other three books that are synoptic. They're all pretty similar. And yet, the book of John, the book of John, in a sense, kind of covers a totally different dimension, a totally different element of the life of Jesus. Because as we all know in John 1 verse 1, it even begins, you know, way back in the beginning. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And later in verse 14 he says the Word became flesh and dwelled among us.

See, the dimension that John was adding, you know, was different, and yet it's very much needed. And there are not contradictions, but the things that we read about the life of Jesus in the four different gospels need to be viewed as they complement one another many times. And you can easily see if you look at the toward the end of each one of these books, you have a, you have a, you know, a writing of what was the inscription above Jesus, you know, the sign that was identifying him. Well, different ones say different things. Matthew 27, 37 says this is Jesus the King of the Jews. And Mark 15 verse 26 says the King of the Jews. I mean, these are the wording that they were using. Luke 23 verse 38 says this is the King of the Jews. And John 19 states Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. Now, you know, at first glance you might think, well, why couldn't they get it all right? Well, Luke adds a little more. You know, you find that John was writing, you know, or saying, and he says this in his gospel, that Pilate composed the message.

And from Luke we have the additional information as to why the words are different. The inscriptions are originally written in three languages, Greek and Latin and Hebrew. That's in chapter 23 of Luke verse 38. So the variation of the wordings logically would have to do with the different languages used as well as the different points of view of those who were writing.

And so ultimately, whenever you go through all of this, you come with the complete message.

When you put them together instead of pull them apart, this is Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. And so, you know, these gospel accounts that we have, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, you know, they don't contradict each other, but they do complement each other. And I know that, you know, all of us realize that or understand that, but I think it's good to look at each one of them, at least briefly because there are some specific things that we gain from the direction from each one of these writers. And I haven't mentioned Mark, and yet Mark is, is in a sense somewhat of a unique writer of a gospel account of Jesus Christ because it doesn't appear that he was, you know, one of the followers of Jesus. Now, he may have been there, it appears, as a younger man than many of the others, toward the latter part of the book of Mark. I think it's in chapter 15. Let's see if I have that written down. Well, probably I don't have that written down.

Oh, well, maybe Mark 14. Maybe we could look at that. Mark chapter 14, verse 51. This is actually in a discussion during the time when Jesus would have been arrested.

Verse 43, he was speaking and Judas arrived, and with him a crowd came, and so the betrayer in verse 44 was given a sign, the one I kiss is the man. And so this was at the time when Jesus was being betrayed, and he was being turned over to the Roman officials by Judas Iscariot, and says, verse 50, all of them deserted him and fled. See, the disciples were scattered. But in verse 51, a certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth, and they caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked. Now, if that's Mark, which it appears, this is the only place that it appears, it would appear that that was Mark referring to himself.

Again, being a younger man, kind of being, you know, inquisitive about what's going on, maybe not being fully prepared. I don't know why he was out there with just a sheet on.

You know, that doesn't quite make sense to me, but I mean, that's the description that you have.

You don't see that mentioned anywhere else. And yet, what we find about Mark is that Mark, when we read about him in the book of Acts, you read about him being a, I guess you could say, a reclamation project. You know, he was, in a sense, younger. It appears from the statements that Peter makes about Mark, that Mark was probably a disciple that became a Christian under the guidance of the Apostle Peter. And you see his mother's house referenced in Acts about chapter 12, I believe. That may not be right. So, anyway, you see his mother's house referenced when Peter was getting, I think it is chapter 12, when Peter was released from jail, he goes to where everybody's gathered. And this was Mark's mother's house, seemingly a prominent place, you know, where Christians would gather and where they would pray. They were all there praying for Peter. You know, it didn't seem like they believed what they were praying for a while because when he showed up, they were flabbergasted. And yet, that's kind of a beginning of an introduction to Mark and, you know, Mark being there and listening to what's going on, and later even traveling with Paul and his uncle, I believe, Barnabas, and going on one of the first trips that Paul took into what we would know of today is southern Turkey. And yet, when things got hot, when things got a little more difficult, perhaps, than he would have liked, you find that Mark left. He went back home to Mommy. He went back home to Jerusalem. He was, you know, in a sense, he felt, and we even read about this later, that Barnabas was supportive of Mark, but initially, Paul just didn't like it. Acts 15, he says, he left us. I'm done with him. And so, even though Mark was growing and he was learning as a minister and he was developing, he needed to develop under the care of his uncle Barnabas, and that's where he was for a while. And yet, later you see in records, and these are the church writers who write about, and all of them write about Mark, and how that he later was not only well received by Peter and seemingly very close to Peter, as he was a disciple who had heard Peter preach and preach and preach. What? What was Peter preaching?

Well, he's preaching the life of Jesus. That's what Peter was preaching. He was preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, yes, but he was preaching about the life of Jesus and who it was that Jesus was and how it was that Jesus was the Son of God. And so, Mark had heard this many, many times, and we find later, you know, that it appears that Mark, you know, became an interpreter.

He was traveling with and able to help Peter with some of the writing that he needed to do. Let me see if I can find a little more. This is actually out of a book that A.T. Robertson wrote, a small book, just about the gospel writer named Mark. He was one of the people like Timothy and like Titus, who were younger ministers, and yet you find, since Mark had this one difficulty, and Paul didn't want to take him with him anymore in his travels, you know, well, what happened to it?

Well, he went back home and he later may have been in Egypt. He may have been in Alexandria. That, again, is, you know, not something we think we know for sure. And yet, he was among the Christians. He was in Jerusalem. He was in Turkey. He was in areas where Peter would go, and he was even in Rome when Peter was there. And he was, let me see, Robertson writes this in a small book, Making Good in the Ministry, and it's talking about Mark's wondrous gospel.

He says Papias, and this being one of the writers at that time, says that Mark became the interpreter of Peter, and whatever he remembered, he wrote accurately, not however in order, the things either said or done by Jesus. And Papias goes ahead and adds that Peter made his instructions to meet the needs of his hearers. What Peter was preaching and teaching was, what do the people I'm talking to need to know? What do they need to learn? If he's going to be an apostle to the Jewish world, then he gave them that. If he was talking to Gentiles, which mostly he was not, but surely at times he had to, he would maybe cover something else, but he was always going to be covering Jesus Christ. And it appears that Mark would have been writing these things down, in a sense an orderly arrangement of what it was that Peter was preaching. And you go on to a number of the other church fathers who make comments about Mark and how it was that Mark, even though he was not an eyewitness, how he would have been listening to an eyewitness, the apostle Peter, in being able to recollect and recall and repeat and write down the things that Jesus said. And actually you've seen some remarkable things, you know, remarkable things that how would Mark know if he wasn't there unless he had heard these from the eyewitness of Peter.

This is just several of the, again, early church writers who comment about Mark.

They say it's not a complete story of the life of Jesus. So they're making a reference to what is what is the book of Mark? Again, I know all of you are familiar with the Gospels, and you're familiar. Mark's the shortest of all of them. It's only 16 chapters as opposed to 24 or 28, you know, more that are written in others of the Gospels. But it's really written in a way that it almost looks like an outline of Jesus' life. And it's almost written in a way where, you know, it seems like he's hitting the highlights. Let me go ahead and back up here in the book of Mark. Mark chapter 1. This is an example of the, it almost seems like Mark is when he's writing the life of Jesus, when he's writing what he does about Jesus. And of course, he starts off quite differently than the others. Luke and Matthew write about Jesus' genealogy, they write about his human birth. John doesn't write about that at all. You know, he says he has always existed. He is in the past and present and future. John writes completely differently than these other writers. But Mark in Mark 1 verse 1, he just starts out, he doesn't start out, Jesus was born to mare. He doesn't start off in any of that. He just says the beginning of the good news or the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He just launches right into the life of Jesus as he had understood it from Peter. And when I say it's almost kind of a, you know, and if you look at, and I know I've kind of studied this in the Bible that I normally use, and they put headings in, you know, some of the Bibles, at least the King James Bibles that I've had in the past, you know, it's all been together. It's been very hard to decipher, you know, where does one section end and where does one begin? But you can see it really easily in my Bible because it's, you know, each section is about this long. It just jumps from one to the next. And an example would be here in verse 12. Because, see, what do we know about Jesus having been tempted by the devil about what, you know, Jesus had been fasting and then he went into the wilderness and he was tempted of the devil and the devil said this and Jesus said that back and forth. Well, you read that in Matthew and you read that in Luke. You know, they're elaborating on more of the information that Matthew may have heard, or at least be heard Jesus tell about. And Luke would have come with records of, you know, what happened and putting all of that together. But this is what Mark says in verse 12. The Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness, 40 days tempted by Satan. He was with the wild beasts and the angels waited on him.

That's all he says. He doesn't have to give every detail. He's giving whatever it was, it appears, that Peter may have passed on to him. And this is what I was wanting to mention, that many of the church fathers write about the fact that the Book of Mark is not complete in every way as far as giving every piece of information. But they say it is accurate.

And for the most part, chronological. Justin Martyr calls this gospel Peter's memoirs, Uranius says that Mark has delivered to us in writing the things preached by Peter.

Tertullian says that this gospel may be ascribed to Peter, whose interpreter Mark was.

Origen says Mark has composed it as Peter guided it, who therefore in his epistle acknowledged the evangelist as his son. And so when Peter would later write about Mark, he says, Mark my son. You know, he was his son in the faith, in the sense. He was so very close to Peter. Eusebius says Mark indeed writes this, but it's Peter who so testifies about himself for all that is in Mark or memoirs of the discourses of Peter.

Jerome says this gospel of Mark was composed Peter narrating and Mark writing. Now, you know, how much of all of those are directly accurate? I don't know. But they all seem to indicate that they know, you know, Mark was not only traveling with Paul and interacting with Peter, but even around the church at Rome, which you have to say, if you read the book of Romans, you see that Paul was writing that before he ever got there.

He's writing that to them before he would ever actually travel and be at Rome. And so he wasn't familiar with them in a sense, and yet Peter was. Peter was very familiar with the people in Rome. And this is where you see Mark actually interacting, interacting with Peter a great deal. And you find, you know, that Mark is able to, even though he's writing a brief gospel, seemingly it may have been the first one written.

And that, you know, with this outline of what the life of Jesus was about, Matthew and Luke elaborate on many of the details. They go into a lot of other things. And of course, Luke goes into things that are not in any other gospel. And John clearly is completely different. Matthew covers a lot of the things that the Jewish world would want to know about Jesus Christ. If he is the Son of God, you know, what genealogy does he have? Is he a descendant of David? And clearly, you don't see that in Mark, but you do in Matthew. And so you find different things that are entered into different parts of the gospel record about Jesus Christ.

And I think whenever you think about the fact that Marcus is writing about what Peter would have preached to him and what he said and what he did with Jesus, you know, whenever you read about the transfiguration, now John could talk about that as an eyewitness. Peter would know about it and could have easily told Mark in being able to write about it. Luke had to take that for somebody else's, you know, record.

And so I think it's fascinating whenever we look at, you know, the different gospels, how it is that God has organized these four accounts and records of the life of Jesus so that we can synchronize them and come to an understanding, a marvelous understanding of not just the unity of the Bible, but the unity of the gospels, the unity of how it is that they can be harmonized and how that in many ways they reflect different views from the authors, from the ones who were writing them down.

But they also give us, they also give us, each one of them give us particular direction. I want us to look at Matthew chapter 24. See, what is it that we see written here in the book of Matthew about what the work of the church is? Well, in Matthew 24, we know that this is an account of the Olivet prophecy that Jesus gave shortly before He was going to be taken and put to death.

And in Matthew 24, you see the statement, and this of course has been a driving statement for the Church of God in this era, a driving, in a sense, commission of what the Church is to do. But it says, after the disciples are talking with Jesus, verse 13, it says, the one who endures unto the end is the one who's going to be saved. So you not only want to believe, but you want to endure unto the end. But Jesus said in talking about the end time, He says, this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come. Now that has been understood by the Church of God as our mission.

Our job is to proclaim what? Well, the true gospel. Now there is a false gospel. There is a false perception about what God is doing, or even about who Jesus is. But see, Jesus Christ, you see in the book of Acts and several times, you see that what was to be preached and taught and what Paul taught was he said he taught Jesus Christ, who is clearly the foundation for the gospel. But the message that Jesus gave was a message about the coming kingdom. And so clearly we need to understand Jesus Christ. That's why we would read the gospels. That's why we would read an account of what Jesus did and where He went and what He said, but what that means to us. What the parables mean, because Jesus said, I'm saying this in this way so the most won't understand. That's what He very clearly says. He says, I'm saying this so your eyes can see and your ears can hear, but to these others they're on the outside. That's a description that Jesus is using. They're on the outside. They don't understand. They don't understand the spirit world. They don't understand the deception. They don't understand God's purpose for my life because I'm here on a mission. I'm here on a mission to give my life, give the blood of the Lamb of God for everyone. I'm here to offer salvation. So you have to understand Jesus Christ and understand Jesus Christ intimately to have salvation. But see, His message was not solely about Himself.

It wasn't really so much except to say who He was and what He was doing, but He says, I'm proclaiming the Kingdom. You see that written so much in the Gospels about the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God. Both of them referring to what? The government that is going to come to earth. A government that is going to replace all of the kingdoms of men.

See, it's very important that we identify with that government, that we make that government, that kingdom that is coming, our kingdom. We identify with it. We yearn for it, but in essence, we are in subjection to that government even today because we want to follow the rules of the government. We want to follow the rules of the Kingdom of God. And of course, that's in God's law. His law and His Word are going to enable us to identify with the Kingdom of God. And so, Jesus clearly is a part of the Gospel and clearly He is the King of the Kingdom.

And yet, we want to identify with that Kingdom today. You see in Mark 1, Mark 1, we read this a couple of years ago when we were doing some seminars here.

It says in verse 14, after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God or the gospel of God, and saying, the gospel of the Kingdom of God, saying the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God has come. Repent and believe this good news.

See, that was a part of what Mark was going to highlight and encourage people to understand.

You know, the book of Luke chapter 24 reveals the fact that not only should we study the Gospels to learn about the life of Jesus, we should understand some of the background of some of the writers and how that they were inspired by the Holy Spirit to add different dimensions to the life of Jesus. One thing I didn't mention, but I can't just say about Mark, when you read through the book of Mark, you see some words used in the Greek that you don't normally, wouldn't normally see here in the English as far as being able to identify them. You see some words that describe some emotion and some impact on Jesus as a human being that you don't see in some of the others. You know, you see an intimate closeness there that surely Peter had. Peter felt close to Jesus Christ. He was exposed to everything that Jesus appears to have done.

You know, you often had everybody, but sometimes you'd take a few, but Peter would always be one of them.

And as I was saying here in the book of Luke 24, he says in verse 44, see, realizing that there is a wonderful unity in these gospels is important.

But God opening our minds to truly see and to make those connections is even more remarkable.

And what Jesus says in verse 44, he said to them, and this was of course after he was resurrected, these are my words that I spoke to you while I was with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses, and so here he's verifying the Old Testament, everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and in the Psalms or writings, all of that must be fulfilled.

And you see Jesus written about in each one of those sections of the Old Testament.

But in verse 45 it says, then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.

And he said to them, thus it is written, and again referring that to the Old Testament, it was written in the Old Testament giving a veracity to the Old Testament, thus it is written that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem, and you are witnesses of these things.

And see, I'm sending upon you what my father promised, and I want you to stay here in the city until you are clothed with that power from on high, telling them to stay there until the day of Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit. But what I'm focusing on in verse 45 is that he enabled them to have understanding, understanding of the Scriptures and being able to put together and to enable the Scriptures to complement one another and to enhance our understanding.

That's what we do whenever we read these marvelous Gospels. And I think we find it fascinating when you look at the book of John that John was writing again far later than the others. It appears that Mark was the first and may have been an outline for what Luke and Matthew later would elaborate on.

But then the book of John was written much later. And John is adding, in a sense, what you might say would be, you could almost say it's supplemental information. You read verse chapter 12 through 17.

Now, it's not in any of the others. But it's recording what it was that Jesus had said to them in that very last time when he would meet together with them and establish new symbols for the Passover service and connect that to his body and his blood, you know, being shed. And you see, you know, other things in John that you just don't see. You actually find a number of signs in the book of John. Now, signs would be another word for just miracles. Now, clearly, you see miracles in all the other gospels as well. But see, John highlights something or some things that some of the others don't. You know, the water to wine. You know, actually, most of the others, I think that John is referring to, are very similar to what you find in others of the gospels, healing of a man, the bread and the fish, the multiplying of the bread and fish.

You know, that's recorded in all four of the gospels. You know, where Jesus, and in John 6, he's referring to or he's feeding the thousands and then he's referring to the fact that I'm the bread of life. See, this was, that was extremely significant. And you find, of course, John 11 is about the raising of Lazarus. Now Jesus healed others and appeared to raise others from the dead, a little girl, and yet he specifically made an elaborate show of the raising of Lazarus from the dead. And of course, he referred to himself throughout the book of John as the bread of life, the light of the world, the door for the sheep, the good shepherd, the resurrection, the life, the way, the truth, the true vine. He represented himself in so many ways. All of those come out of the book of John. Now you see that corroborated in other of the books, but clearly our understanding of who Jesus is and how that Jesus had been with the Father for all eternity. And that how, of course, he's again at the Father's right hand awaiting the Word, awaiting the time to return and to stop.

The kingdoms who are at war here on this earth. But we find in the very last verse, or close to the last verses of the book of John, in chapter 20, you see in a sense of concluding information after Jesus is resurrected and appears to his disciples. You see in verse 30 what the purpose of John's writing the book was. He says Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples.

So he said, I'm not writing down everything. What God wants to have written has been written. It is not only a part of my writing, but of the other gospel records. Jesus did many other signs, many miracles in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. So John makes an admission. There's no way you could have written down everything Jesus did because there's just way too much. We have put in what we recall, what we remember, what was emphasized, what was repeated, what was talked about, what stood out in people's minds. And yet, he says in verse 31, these things are written. And so he understood this is why he was writing a part of a record of the life of Jesus. These are written so that you may come to believe. And again, as we had mentioned earlier, that's where we all begin. That's where we all start.

We ultimately have to follow through with that, with baptism and repentance and baptism, and with the receipt of the Holy Spirit, and with growth and continuing unto the end.

But all of that begins with an understanding that we have come to believe that Jesus is the Christ.

He is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

See, our belief in Jesus, our gratitude for his life and his impact on the world, and the impact he's going to have in the kingdom to come, say he's going to rescue the world from the chaos that we're in today.

You know, John, I think, understood, even as he may have been finishing this book and then later writing a book of Revelation, which in many ways I'm sure he felt, I don't understand this, because it's written so that you can understand it in the end of the age.

It's written so that we can understand it right now, and yet we're the ones who benefit from the fabulous way that God has in a united way enabled us to put the Old and the New Testament together, put the Gospel records together to understand the life of Jesus, understanding their complementary and not contradictory. But I hope that, perhaps in just introducing this, that we can study the Gospels with a greater awe. That's another thing that Mark mentions more often than the others, that whenever Jesus was doing something, people were just stunned.

They were just amazed. They were astonished. These are different words that Mark uses in order to impress on the reader how impressive Jesus Christ was, how He was as the Son of God and as a physical being, but of course how He is in being able to inspire and uplift and for us to be in awe of Him. And so we want to truly relate to and rely on Jesus Christ. And I hope that we can study the Gospels and think about the way God put it together in a way that can truly be inspiring and uplifting to us at all times.