Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Mark 16:14-18
## Reformation Covenant Church
### Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text today is found in Mark 16:14-18. As we continue with a short series on the post-resurrection appearances of our Savior. Mark 16:14-18. There are no sermon notes today. I thought, well, maybe Saturday will happen and I won’t need to do the outline. No, I didn’t really think that. Okay, let’s stand for the reading of God’s word.

Mark 16:14-18: “Afterward he appeared to the 11 themselves as they were reclining at table and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. And he said to them, ‘Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe. In my name, they will cast out demons. They will speak in new tongues. They will pick up serpents with their hands. And if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them. They will lay their hands on the sick and they will recover.’”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for this text of scripture. We thank you for your most holy word. We thank you that this is unlike any other book. We need your Spirit to understand it. And more than that, we don’t just seek to understand it, Father. We seek to be transformed by it as you’ve told us we’re to be. Bless us then with a knowledge of this text.

May your Holy Spirit empower the preaching of your word and its reception that we might indeed move from glory to glory in the maturation of our lives as followers and disciples of Jesus. In his name we ask this. Amen. Please be seated.

As we were singing, I made several notes that I wanted to include in the sermon. So I’m going to have to organize them just a bit here. The microphone’s working okay. Yeah, good. Had to shove it in my pocket when I took my suit coat off. Didn’t know if that would work. Okay. Again, I will explain why we’re singing Christmas songs if I remember. So I’ll put those notes up there so that I can remember.

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So we are continuing with these post-resurrection appearances of Jesus Christ. As you probably know, if you know your Bibles, Jesus of course was raised from the dead, which we focus on during Easter Sunday. We’ve kind of gone through that section and then we’re into now the post-appearances of Jesus. Jesus for 40 days appears to lots of people in his glorified or spiritual body. He is the new creation. And so the new creation is with us specifically walking the earth for 40 days. And 40 days of course matches up with the season the church has referred to as Lent, which matches up with all the 40-day cycles of the Old Testament in 40-year cycles.

There’s a movie I watched again last night called Get Low and the man in the movie played by Robert Duvall has built himself a prison and he’s been in there he said for 40 or 38 years now. I don’t know, maybe it’s coincidence but 40 and 38 are the years that the Bible uses to refer to the wilderness. And so Duvall is coming out of the wilderness and the wilderness is a place of judgment.

So you know, 40 is associated with the 40 years and they’re going to move into Canaan and conquer it at the end of that time. Jesus is 40 days in the wilderness and then he’s going to start his ministry up. And at the end of this 40 days of Jesus, after another 10 of waiting around for the Spirit of God, the disciples then will begin to do the work of Jesus through the empowering of the Holy Spirit that makes Jesus present with his church even while his designated space is at the right hand of the Father.

All that to say that what we’re dealing with here are the final instructions for the conquest of the world. And so this is graduate school, right? Three and a half years they’ve been, you know, living with the master and learning. And now it’s graduate school here for 40 days. And he is specifically telling them—we’re told in the book of Acts that he’s speaking of things of the kingdom. So he’s preparing them to do the work of the kingdom.

And what we have in today’s text, of course, is Mark’s version of the Great Commission. We’re told specifically in Acts 1:2 that he was speaking of the things in these post-resurrection appearances pertaining to the kingdom of God. So the text before us, like the other ones we’ve looked at, we have to look at them specifically for what they reveal to us about the kingdom of God.

After this, of course, as I said, comes the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit comes. And so we’re moving through this time up to a celebration of Ascension and then Pentecost. And in the providence of God, we really didn’t plan it this way, but Jeff Meyers will be with us on Pentecost Sunday. And then he’ll be preaching or teaching rather that whole week at family camp on the book of Acts. Wow. What better segue could we make from the first half of the church here, the life of Jesus, to the life of the church, which is still the life of Jesus because his presence has been promised to them.

Right? In Matthew’s Great Commission, “I’m with you always.” And now what we have at the end of Mark’s version of the Great Commission is his practice, his power. These accompanying signs will be with them as well. And so really the acts of the church are the acts of Jesus Christ by means of the Holy Spirit empowering the church. And so that’s what these things are moving to tell.

Pentecost, you know, is not about a bunch of sluggardly Christians sitting around and then having to be re-energized and revitalized and the Spirit comes upon them and yahoo. That’s not the right story about Pentecost. Pentecost is a mature group of men and women who had been schooled by Jesus, had 40 days of graduate school, and they were ready to go. So it wasn’t about that. And the filling of the Holy Spirit is about the coming of the presence of Jesus to conquer the whole world. Nothing less than that. And so that’s what our deal is.

The first song reference we just sang: “Rejoice in glorious hope. Our Lord, the judge shall come and take his servants up to their eternal home.” No, he won’t. Sorry, Flynn A. Let’s make sure we change that lyric. We can do that till somebody sues us for copyright violation or something. But in the meantime, let’s not sing those words anymore because it’s just not true. And it produces a way of looking at the world that hurts us as Christians.

That’s what happened yesterday, right? Don’t get too bad. Don’t feel too bad about yesterday and Christians getting canned or panned rather. Next year it’ll be the Mayans, right? Their prophecies won’t come true either. So, well, anyway, the point here is that Jesus is coming back to the earth. That’s where our eternal home is. Now it’s heaven and earth combined. Okay? But, you know, if I die tomorrow, my spirit goes immediately to the presence of Christ in heaven, but my body doesn’t raise up till Jesus comes back to earth. And he’s not going to come back to earth and make a new body for me and take me off to heaven. My eternal home is now. We can say that heaven is our eternal home if we mean by that heaven and earth have combined and there is a new earth.

And the danger—and you’ve heard me say this before but it’s worth repeating. The danger of saying we’re going to fly up to our eternal home is that this world doesn’t mean much then. It’s just a way station. But Jesus makes it quite clear in graduate school that this home is our field of missionary activity and it’s going to be beautiful. It’s going to be glorified and new.

And part of what that, how that is accomplished—you know, it’s the Second Coming of Jesus, but it’s also the work of the church. It’s Jesus’s coming in the Spirit on the day of Pentecost to enable his church to create a whole new world. You know, our parish group is reading through Against Christianity month by month and you know, Peter Leithart says, “Well, if Jesus is the new creation,” and we see that manifested, I might parenthetically add during these post-resurrection appearances, then you know what he’s done is nothing short of creating a whole new palace, a whole new city, a whole new culture.

Our job is not to achieve some common good out there. Our job is to preach the gospel and change the face of the earth. We’re to bring the water of life to the whole world. Now, if that’s what it is, then part of what we do is envision what it would look like as history is revealed in its eschaton, the end stage, and then work toward those goals in the context of what we do. And so Jesus is preparing his disciples for that kind of work in the text before us in Mark’s Gospel.

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Now this resurrection appearance happens the evening of Easter day or resurrection day. That first day Christ is raised up in the morning, right? And then the women first—he meets with Mary Magdalene, then he meets with some other women as they’re running to do the job that the angels told them to do. He commissions the first small apostles, okay, sent ones. He sends them off to these guys that we read about in today’s text, and they say, “Well, it’s just crazy fables or something.”

Jesus then appears to disciples on the road to Emmaus. And we know about that, and we don’t know. Could be a guy and a gal. We just don’t really know, but it doesn’t make any difference. The point is he appears to witnesses of his resurrection, and he reveals himself to them. And the text tells us that they go back to Jerusalem and they’re part of this group that Mark 16 is addressing. They’ve come back. They’ve told the disciples who are hanging around someplace, “We’ve seen Jesus.” And they also say he appeared to Peter. We don’t get that record, but that’s what they say.

So by the time this event happens, Jesus has sent, you know, the women. He sent the two witnesses. We can assume he sent Peter who bring them news of the resurrection. And that’s important to remember in terms of what happens here.

Now, when we looked at John 20, remember the twin, the cool twin structure? I thought it was really, really good. I really enjoyed it. I love the way God gives us these things. But in any event, remember we have the second meeting with Thomas present, but the first meeting Thomas isn’t there. And they’re twin accounts basically. The first meeting when Thomas isn’t there is this one. Okay.

Now, the record in John’s Gospel is far different than this record. And the record in Luke’s Gospel of Jesus meeting at this same meeting is also far different. In Luke’s Gospel, he says, “Hey, it’s okay. They think he’s a ghost. They’re terrified. He eats some fish to show them that it’s really him and he’s got a body.” So he eats with them. In John’s Gospel, remember, he speaks peace to them and assurance, and in all the versions, of course, he’s commissioning them for work.

But so there’s different emphases and Mark’s Gospel has its particular emphasis which we’ll get to at the end of the sermon. I say at the end of the sermon because I’m not sure why. Well, I have reasons, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea or a bad idea, but I’ve decided to go through the text backwards. Thought that might be fun. So we’re going to start at the end and go back to the beginning. We’re going to start with what I think answers the question of my sermon today, which is well, we’re to proclaim the gospel, but what is it? And we’re going to answer that question. I won’t keep you in suspense.

And then on the basis of that, move backwards in the text to look at practically something our Savior does with the disciples that I think is significant for us today.

Mark’s Gospel has this structure to it which we won’t—the next sermon on Ascension Day will be on the Ascension account. The last verse of Mark’s Gospel, the last two verses, but that matches up with the first verse of Mark’s Gospel. Mark’s Gospel has this nice structure that includes the verses we just read and specifically then the last verse of Christ’s Ascension. That’s where so it makes a whole unit. Mark’s Gospel does that—that’s complete and that structure is there.

For instance, in the middle of the structure, the heavens are ripped in two, right? The heavens are opened and the dove comes down on Jesus at his baptism. And toward the end of the Gospel, the veil of the temple is ripped in two. Only two places where that word, which is the basis for our schizophrenia, schizo, you know, only two places where that word is used in Mark’s Gospel and it matches up the rending of the temple veil with the rending of heaven. And this affirmation of Christ as the new world and the new humanity.

So Mark’s Gospel has that structure to it and we’ll deal with the very last verse or two on Ascension Day in a couple of weeks. But for now we’re going to deal, as I said, moving backwards with these five verses. Okay. So we’re going to start with the last two verses first. I’m not going to read them backwards but we’re going backwards because we’re starting at the end: verses 17 and 18.

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So the question is: what’s the gospel, right? And what the text tells us here just before these verses is to proclaim the gospel. But it says these signs will follow those who believe. So we have signs being spoken of. And I think that these signs are certainly affirmations of the apostles, capital A, right? Most of what’s recorded here except for one of them actually we read records of in the book of Acts.

These are signs that will confirm the authenticity of the apostles and the power—actually the authenticity of Jesus working through the apostles. Right? These are things for the most part that Jesus did and now his disciples do it. So Jesus is still here present through the Spirit. And so, you know, from one the simplest reading, yeah, these are signs and these are going to accompany those that do it and we’ll see that they’re really the real deal and we have that understanding.

But on the other hand I think that this word “signs” is broader than that and I think that we could look at it as signs of what the kingdom is about. So if you’re going to choose signs to authenticate the disciples, probably those things are kind of significant to think about a little bit. You know, people have been thinking about Jesus’s miracles for a long time. And there’s some things about them. It isn’t just going about, you know, helping people. Jesus chose to help people in a particular way that was recorded in the scriptures. And here we have particular signs given that accompany the disciples. And I think we can answer the question or at least add to our knowledge of what the gospel is by considering this.

Now we have just sang about the kingdom, right? Didn’t we just sing about the kingdom? I think we did, but I’m not going to find the reference. But we were singing about the kingdom of God. Well, you can’t talk about the gospel without talking about a kingdom because in the Gospels, this is what we hear over and over again.

Mark 1:14: “After John was put in prison, Jesus came to Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God.”

So if we ask what the gospel is, well there it says Jesus’s gospel, which should be ours, is the kingdom of God.

Luke 16:16: “The law and the prophets were until John. Since that time the kingdom of God has been preached.”

So what’s being proclaimed or gospelled? The kingdom of God.

Luke 16:16: “The law and the prophets were until John, since then the good news of the kingdom is preached.”

So the gospel is kingdom. Okay.

Matthew 9:35: “Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages teaching in their synagogues preaching the gospel. Preaching the gospel of the kingdom.”

Matthew 24:14: “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to the nations.”

So we have these Gospel accounts that Jesus’s gospel was the kingdom had arrived. And not only that, but we have in this last verse in Matthew 24 the statement that’s supposed to be the gospel that we preach to every nation. It’s the gospel of the kingdom.

So the gospel is not limited to the doctrine that we’re saved by grace. The prologue to the Ten Commandments that we dealt with a long time ago—the prologue was all about the gospel, right? “I have delivered you out of the land of Egypt.” God’s grace, he pulls them out, he saves them, then tells them how to live. It was the declaration that they were saved by faith, not by their works. And so the gospel in the sense of being saved by faith, justified by God’s grace, all that is present.

It’s not news. The gospel includes that, of course, because now the one who had come to make that happen—on the basis of which its application occurred in the Old Testament—that’s actually now occurred. Salvation in that sense, my sins being paid for, you know, it was seen ahead of time by God. So he treated men graciously, but it now has been actually affected by the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. So that’s great news that part of our salvation has come.

But the gospel has to be broader than that. And I know I’m, you know, coals to Newcastle here, but it’s important that we understand this because, you know, otherwise we’re not quite sure what it is we’re supposed to be doing.

So the gospel is the good news of the arrival of the kingdom. And as we’ve been saying, if we look at these post-resurrection accounts, it’s also the good news of the advent of forgiveness of sins. It’s the good news of the advent of life. It’s the good news of the advent of the new creation in Jesus Christ. He breathes on the disciples. Mary sees him in the garden, thinks he’s the gardener, etc.

So that’s what the gospel is. It’s really good news and it’s not restricted to individual salvation.

Well, how do these signs help us to get a little picture of that gospel? You know, I like to think about how things are laid out. And here these things are laid out in an interesting way. So the text tells us that there are these five signs, right? These five signs that will accompany those who believe. What are they? Okay.

Demons—in my name they’ll cast out. New tongues, they will speak. Serpents picked up with their hands. Maybe—when I say maybe, hands isn’t really in there. Serpents will be picked up somehow. Something will happen to serpents. Death—they will drink. The word poison isn’t in there. And it won’t hurt them. The sick, they’ll lay their hands on and the sick will recover.

Now, those are five things and a couple of brief comments that I just started and should have articulated a little bit longer. So they’re going to cast out demons. They’re going to speak in new tongues. Serpents will be thrown away, thrown up, moved. That’s basically what the text tells us in the original language. The emphasis is not on grabbing them. The emphasis is on what you do with your hands as you grab a hold of them. And so something, there’s a movement of the serpents, okay, involved with the action of the disciples.

And as I said, if they drink any deadly poison, it won’t hurt them. Well, poison isn’t there. It actually literally says if they drink death, it won’t hurt them. So you can infer that there’s dead things, maybe poison that creates death, but they’re going to drink death and it won’t hurt them. And they’ll lay hands on the sick and they’ll recover.

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Now, I thought about that sequence and I thought, well, there’s five things there. There’s five aspects of that. And the outer two, yeah, I’m always thinking that way, have to do with helping other people, right? So they’re going to cast out demons and they’re going to heal people. Okay? You don’t cast demons out of the rocks, right? You cast demons out of other people. You cast demons out of other people. And so the outer edges of these five-fold structure is this helping other people—casting out demons, bringing them back to health by laying on of hands. Okay?

And as I said, these all have, you know, I’m not trying to explain away the miraculous here. There were miraculous occurrences that are recorded in the book of Acts authenticating the ministry of the apostles. I’m not saying anything against that. That’s true. But digging a little deeper, do these signs have some reference? Are they picturing for us the work of the gospel of the kingdom? And I think they are.

Now the inner two around the center have to do with each of us, right? They’re going to speak in new tongues and if we drink death it won’t hurt us. So we’re going to help other people by casting out demons and healing their sicknesses. And we’re going to speak individually. For us now, the thing going on is new tongues of course, which does help other people, but it’s a thing in us—new tongues—and we’ll drink death under certain circumstances and it won’t hurt us.

And so the center of this five-fold structure is this action with the serpents. Okay. So it seems to me that we can imply, we can make application from these things in a broader sense. And this is why we were singing about serpents several times this morning already.

This is why we sang that Christmas song. I said I had to explain why we sang the Christmas song. Well, what is the Christmas song? What verse about the serpent? Did you remember it? What did it say? Was a reminder of Romans 16:20 where God will shortly crush Satan under your feet. But what it actually said was “Bruise in us the serpent’s head.” So, you know, part of the destroying the work of the serpent is the sanctification of the believer.

So I think the center of this is this serpent aspect. And of course we know the Bible tells us that Jesus came for the very purpose of destroying the work of the devil. That’s what we’re told in 1 John—that was why he came: was to destroy the work of the devil. In one summary statement, that’s the gospel. He destroys the work of the devil. That’s why he came. And the work of the devil is manifest in us and in our community. Everything’s broken, right? Like Bob Dylan said, “Everything’s broken.”

And as a culture moves away from Christianity, the brokenness increases. The world was shattered, right? And our job is to kumaam, to bring things back together. Jesus came to heal the broken world.

Jack Phelps is down in Atlanta talking to CRC churches about confederation and whether that’s an offensive term to him in the South or not. I think it is. And a suggestion by John Stew was that we refer to it as the community of reformed evangelical churches. And so we changed the confederation to community. And John’s slogan, as I recall, when we were sitting around in Texas in February, was “producing community in a broken world.”

So everything’s broken. And what churches of Jesus Christ are supposed to be doing is proclaiming the healing of everything through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ to destroy the work of the devil—who came to divide man from God, man from woman, all these other divisions in humanity. Is the work of the serpent. And Jesus said his job was to destroy the work of the devil.

Romans 16, as we said, Jesus is going to crush the serpent under our feet. And in Genesis, that was the promise, right? The woman would crush the head of the serpent. So I think at the center of the signs that are listed for us in Mark’s version of this version of the Great Commission, at the center is the destruction of the work of Satan.

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Now, now we do have one instance of serpent salvation kind of thing in the book of Acts, right? So Paul is sitting there and this bundle of sticks he gets for the fire and this viper or snake comes out and bites him and hangs on his arm or wherever he was hanging on his body, right? And so the people say, “Well, he’s a bad guy. He’s a murderer. Only murderers get bit like that.” And he just shakes that thing off.

And he shakes it into the fire is what I think it says. He shakes it off. And I think it says that he goes in. Do I have it here? Maybe I do. I believe it says he shakes him into the fire. I don’t have the verse here. Anybody know that verse? Yes. Does it say into the fire? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Why wait for me? Got good guys who know their Bibles. Good women who know their Bibles. Okay.

So, I think that’s again, it’s a picture of what the gospel is. Man has been bitten by the serpent. Jesus says he’s going to save us. He’s going to destroy the works of the serpent and the works of the serpent will be cast into the fire into the place of eternal fire. That’s where Satan is cast.

So the heart, I think, of the signs here has nothing to do with snake handling down in the South. The heart of this is taken up serpents and thrown them into the fire. We’re like Saint Patrick. We’re clearing the land of serpents. We’re clearing the land of the deadly influences of the serpent who wants man to disbelieve that there’s a loving God who has his best interest at heart and creates nothing but chaos. That serpent’s work is found in us and it’s found in our speech and it’s found in our fear of death.

So we’re going to speak in new tongues. Now, I think the tongues were foreign languages. The whole New Testament is written in tongues. It’s not in Hebrew, it’s in Greek. They spoke in tongues that people from other nations could understand. They weren’t inarticulate speech of the heart or something. They were, I think, languages. Could be wrong, but that’s what I think.

But I think what’s going on here is certainly that’s true that the apostles have that verifying sign, but beyond that, you know, what we have is new tongues, new ways of speaking, new speech. The new man, the new creation talks differently than the old man. Another line from that song we sang, you know, what was it? It was about facing the image of Adam in us. “Stamp thine, okay, Adam’s likeness, Lord, a face means get rid of it. Stamp thine image in its place.” Adam’s, the old man speaks differently than the new man. God gives us new tongues. He gives us new words. He gives us a new language.

Ask yourself this week, you know, throughout the day, think about this. Okay? So when the alarm clock rings tomorrow morning, think new tongues. And then think about how you speak. Is your speech exhibiting this sign of the new creation of who you are by speaking things of Christ? Or is your speech old speech? Okay, so it’s a real good way to think about the implications of the gospel, the destruction of Satan and his work in your heart, bruising us, the serpent’s head by getting rid of our bad speech and replacing it with new tongues.

Now, I know that’s an application of the text, but I think it—if we’re going to look at these things as signs beyond just this one one-off thing with glossolalia or whatever it was, I think that’s a good way to think about it. I think it’s helpful to us and I think it’s there.

Additionally, in ourselves we’ll drink death, but it won’t cause us any harm. Well, again, we can think of this in terms of martyrdom, right? Jesus drank the cup of martyrdom and some Christians are called to drink the cup of martyrdom. We’re all called to drink the cup of death. And what we have here is a promise that in whatever form it comes, death can’t hurt us any longer.

Remember Hebrews says that’s, you know, what empowers sin is the fear of death. And fear creates sin. That improper fear of dying is what gives what empowers sin. And Jesus comes to take away the fear of dying. So if death is coming upon you, don’t need to fear it and you don’t need to, as a result of fearing it, sin then.

So the work of Satan wants you—his whole deal was a twisted tongue. And he wants your tongue to be twisted. And the work of Satan was to bring in your heart the fear that you know you violated God’s law. You’re under his judgment and he doesn’t love you. And so fear is what the serpent uses—Satan uses—to empower sin in us.

And I think this sign of the gospel, the gospel is that the work of Satan is being destroyed, is being cast out of the world. And this has immediate application to us in how we speak and in how we conduct our psyche, our mind. We can drink death and it won’t hurt us.

And then in the outer layers there’s this—this has implication as well for community. So the implications for community are that we’re going to cast out demons and we’re going to heal people from things that they’re sick with. And you know, this was true literally of the apostles. But I think that, you know, it’s kind of like there’s more sophisticated demons at work today. And I think this can—this has application for us as well.

You know, there’s kind of like overt forms of state worship, Moloch and the big statue and passing the child through a literal fire. And then there’s Moloch worship that everybody agrees to. My brother Mike is fond of this image that what we have now is “big mama” instead of “big daddy.” Big daddy the state in Germany was oppressive and powerful and everything was power and authority. And big mama just wants to coerce you into the complete loss of your freedoms over time by ticking you under the chin and providing everything you need and all that stuff.

So a “kindler gentler machine gun hand” as Neil Young said in his song “Freedom.”

Well, I think it’s the same with demons. Demon-possessed people are kind of obvious. You sort of see what’s going on and you can deal with that. But now you know there’s a sense in which our battle of course is not against demons directly. It’s against principalities and powers. It’s against demonic ways of viewing the world.

And you know, one of the present demons we could say that needs to be cast out of America shaken off is this whole eurosocialism. This whole “the state will take care of everything.” The whole getting rid of any sense of private property in its usual sense of the term, etc. And so this is a destructive doctrine. It’s a doctrine out there that people believe in and vote on the basis of. And I think part of the message of the Christian church is teaching the Ten Commandments and talking about don’t steal. It’s not a good thing to do.

And when we do that, when we take the word of God, we cast out demonic ideas that enslave people. If we look at what’s happened to poor people since the Great Society, it’s not been good for them. And so, you know, these doctrines—they have a deleterious, a bad effect on the people that are experiencing their effects.

And then the other side of it is restoring people to wholeness. And you know, when you restore somebody physically, they can get into the church again. In the Old Testament, the healing of the man at the gate of the temple is a reminder that he was healed so that he could walk into the courtyard and worship and then he could also walk out into his neighborhood and do work rather than just sit there and be unproductive.

And so when people are healed, it creates wholeness. And of course that’s what the gospel is—new life. But I think it’s also, you know, a restoration to vocation, vocation and worship ability.

So these are signs that accompany the apostles. They show the presence of Christ working still in the world. That while he’s at the right hand of the Father, the Spirit of God brings Christ and his power of new creation into the world. He casts off the devil’s influence over time. He does this through our sanctification of our speech, in our mind, and our driving out our fears. And he does this also through, then, results in community. We have obligations communitywide to drive out demonic philosophies, ideas that compete with the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ and his word.

So that, I think, is what the gospel is. It’s good news and it’s good news in five different directions that are related and at their heart it’s the good news that Jesus has indeed come to destroy the work of the devil, to cast him into eternal torment.

Okay, so that’s verses 17 and 18.

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Now the second verse we want to look at, going back upstream, is verse 16. “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.”

As this process of the gospel is being worked out, not everybody becomes part of the new creation. They’re old creation people that just refuse to move into the new world. They want to cling to the past and they don’t believe the gospel. And when they don’t believe, then they’re condemned.

And we’ve said this before, but one of the most demonic doctrines out there right now is in the church. And it’s this whole loss of the idea of hell, loss of the idea of any kind of discrimination or judgment in how we evaluate people’s response to what we do as the emissaries of Jesus Christ. We have to make judgments and evaluations. That’s what Jesus is telling them here. Here’s how it works: some people are going to get with the program. Others are going to reject you. And they’re condemned. They’re going to hell.

Your job is not to make their journey nice. Okay? Your job is to help them to understand this is real. You’re not helping some poor shnook on the bus to hell if you don’t tell him that bus he’s on is going to hell. Now, I know you on the bus and the first thing you—if you just tell him immediately that, well, maybe that’s not going to get you a hearing. Maybe he doesn’t even listen, doesn’t take the headphones off. But if you help him, great. If you serve him, good. If you try to make his life better in the short term, great. But it’s got to be to the end of telling him that the most important thing he needs is salvation from hell.

And if he rejects the good news of the new creation in Jesus—that Jesus is going to free him from Satan, free him from demonic doctrines and restore him to health again—if he rejects that, then he needs to know that rejection brings upon himself condemnation, hell, you know, in another word.

So the gospel is good news for most. And I guess it’s really good news, too, that people who would be so obstinate against a loving God who mercifully calls them not to save themselves, but to simply accept the salvation of Jesus—I guess it is kind of good news too if they’re sent to hell. It’s part of the gospel.

The other thing I might want to talk about just briefly here is that it doesn’t say “whoever believes will be saved.” It says “who believes and is baptized will be saved.” Big controversy here but doesn’t have to be, right? You know, Paul says, “Well, whoever confesses with his mouth that Jesus is Lord shall be saved.” Can deaf mutes be saved? Well, sure. I mean, that’s kind of obvious and we see it in the scriptures. And can men who aren’t baptized be saved? Yeah. A guy on the cross, right? He believes, but it’s not in the providence of God able to be baptized.

This thing is not saying that baptism is required so much as baptism is not to be rejected. Okay? I mean, it is saying it’s required, but not in all cases. We have a church today that has uncoupled baptism from salvation. Now Jesus here quite clearly couples them up. “If you’ve believed and baptized, you’ll be saved.” But the church has decoupled them.

And so you know, God isn’t about fooling people. If you’ve been subject to doctrines that have you know brought you into improper understandings of what baptism is, and your child dies when they’re 10 or 12 and they love Jesus, they haven’t been baptized, they’re not going to hell. Okay. But if we’ve got an adult person who says, “Yeah, I believe in Jesus.” And we say, “Well, Jesus says in order to be united to him, you got to get baptized.” He says, “No, I’m not doing that.” See, if he doesn’t do that, he’s not really believing and trusting in Jesus, is he?

So baptism is an act that one submits to and it demonstrates belief. Belief and actions are united. Well, our actions don’t save us, but our actions demonstrate whether there’s belief or not.

Another thing about baptism—in our in our strategy map at RCC, you know, we based our map on the Great Commission found in Matthew 28. And so “as you go, you have this mission: disciple the nations. How? By baptizing them and teaching them.” You bring people into the church, the visible community of Jesus Christ under the jurisdiction of Jesus’s reign. Okay? And you also then teach them. Okay?

If people just want to be taught and haven’t submitted to the government of Christ in his church, then that’s no good. You know what the Bible says? If you believe and are baptized, if you’re willing to submit yourself to the government of Jesus Christ and to see that your salvation happens in the context not just of you and Jesus, but you, Jesus, and the church. See, then you’re saved. But if you rebel against that, you’re rebelling against true belief in Jesus Christ as demonstrated by the scriptures.

So “he who believes and is baptized is saved, and he who does not believe is condemned already.” Okay. Verse 15: “And he said to them, ‘Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.’” That’s the ESV version.

The only point I want to make here is that last night I was thinking about this. I was outside meditating on the sermon and I started talking to the rocks and the flowers and the grass. You know, it says “proclaim the gospel to the creation.” The definite article is there and I think that ESV is right here: you’re proclaiming the gospel to all the creation.

Now, yeah, we know that, you know, first application it’s to every man, right? As we go. But it doesn’t say that. It really says the creation. And Paul tells us in Romans that the creation groans waiting for the manifestation of the glorious sons of liberty. When sinful men rule the world, the creation suffers. Okay, it suffers when people evil people do things in the world.

It’d be interesting studies to see what’s the relationship of animal behavior and what have they learned from men and their violence and wickedness. I don’t know any of the answers to that, but I do know that the creation groans waiting for the manifestation of who we really are. And the better we get at that, the better we get at identifying ourselves as those that Satan is not to have influence over, who have new tongues, who have new psyches, and who are here to help other people. The more we do that, the more the creation won’t groan.

And so the gospel is proclaimed to all the creation. I don’t mean talking the word to the birds. Maybe that’s okay. But anyway, the point is there is a creationwide benefit or proclamation of good news. Jesus’s work isn’t just for men. It’s for all the creation. Okay? Not just for the earth, for all the creation—cosmic significance. The gospel. Okay.

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Now we’re ready to deal with verse 14: “Afterwards he appeared to the 11 themselves as they were reclining at table and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart.”

Well, if you’ve been listening, you know that there weren’t 11. There were 10, right? Thomas wasn’t there. Well, the 11 is a designation like the 12. It’s referring to the group of them, the group of the apostles. And even though every last one of them wasn’t there, the 11 is still there.

And what does he do? What does he specifically tell them now? He’s told them some inferences from the signs we’ve looked at, but how does he prepare them to do that wondrous work of proclaiming the gospel to the entire creation that will be accompanied by signs that show that what’s at work is a brand new world? That the new world and reality and life has invaded now the old world and is displacing it. That’s heady stuff to do.

How does he prepare them for it? Well, he does it a lot of different ways, right? We said in these other parallel accounts, he gives them assurance not to be fearful and he gives them peace and all that stuff. But here in this part of the textbook for students who want to go out today and be equipped to preach the gospel in your little neck of the woods and proclaim the effects of the casting out of Satan by our Savior, here what he does to prepare them is he rebukes them. He rebukes them.

Now this has application. You know, I’ve—the church is a voluntary organization. We got three paid staff. We could say but the rest of you who do all the ministry of this church and all this work, you’re all volunteers. And so how do you handle volunteers? How do you encourage them, motivate them, etc. And that’s a difficult task.

Well, I’m drawing the point here because these were volunteers too at this stage in history. These guys were volunteers. Okay? And Jesus wants us to know that part of working with anybody—whether it’s a volunteer, whether it’s a paid staff, whether it’s your husband, your wife, your son, your daughter—part of equipping them to fulfill the Great Commission is rebuking them.

How many times have I said that? But you ask yourself, ask your wife, ask your husband, when was the last time you got rebuked around here? I’ll bet you it’s been quite a long time. We don’t like doing that. We don’t even like the stuff that leads up to rebuke. Before you rebuke somebody, you try to encourage them in what they’re doing and then it fails. Then you encourage them again. Well, I’m really serious now. You know, you’re forthright with people leading up to a rebuke, right? We have trouble with that, don’t we?

I know we do. You know, I know what goes on. I hear stuff here all the time. I know it’s happening. And I know that we have a hard time telling each other, “That doesn’t cut the mustard.” Let alone telling them, “Man, you should be ashamed of yourself. It was so bad.” We don’t do that.

You know, we don’t want to be meaner than Jesus, but we don’t want to be nicer than Jesus. And sometimes when we’re nicer than Jesus, we’re meaner than Jesus. You know what I mean by that? When you try to be nicer than Jesus, you end up being meaner than Jesus.

Leviticus tells us this. I’ve talked about this just a few months ago, but here it is again. “You shall not go about as a talebearer among your people. Nor shall you take a stand against the life of your neighbor. Boy, you gossip. You’re taking a stand against the life of your neighbor. You’re destroying his—you’re you’re you’re picking away at his life when you’re a talebearer. I am the Lord. You shall not hate your neighbor or your brother rather in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your neighbor and not bear sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the children of your people. But you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”

Man, if I, you know, I think maybe this would be like a lifetime couple of verses here in our day and age when people want to be nicer than Jesus. When we have, and don’t take me wrong, ladies, but a kind of a feminized version of the whole thing. When men can’t be men and strong women can’t be strong women anymore. We have a feminized version of the whole thing.

I don’t know if it’s the hormones and the—I don’t know what it is. It’s bad doctrine. It’s poisonous doctrine seeping into the land. We need to memorize Leviticus. Leviticus says you’re trying to be nicer than Jesus. You don’t want to rebuke your neighbor. But what you end up doing is you then end up talking to somebody else about them. Did you know this? “Oh, guy’s doing this again.” You gossip. We talebearer against one another when we don’t want to rebuke each other. We destroy the life of our neighbor. We hold grudges against each other.

You know why people leave church usually? I noticed this a long time ago before RCC. Well, you’re going to a church, you know, a few years and everything’s great. And then a few more years and you got a few little dustups with folks. And then a few more years and now you got a number of dustups that have happened over the years. They’ve never been made right. You got all kinds of grudges going this way and that. You never know what people are thinking about you. And you come to church and you look around, you think, “Wonder if that guy’s ticked off at me. What are they saying about me to somebody else?” And after a while, you know, you know what you should do? You should work this stuff out.

But you know, after a while of all that stuff building up, you just say to hell with it. You walk out the door. There’s always lots of churches down the street. And then you start it up anew. You see, now that’s what happens. Can we talk about reality here? That’s what happens in churches. That’s what happens in this church. We don’t have great community, folks. I mean, we do have some aspects of great community. But we got a lot of gossip. We got a lot of holding the grudges. And we have even a lot more failure to address each other when things fall short.

No, we’d rather just cut the person out of the herd—the active herd—marginalize them to the side, and then we don’t got to deal with their weird eccentricities in ministry. We just sort of stop using them rather than talk to them directly and bring them up.

Jesus loves people. He loved his disciples. He empowered his disciples by rebuking them and not overlooking their hardness of heart and their unbelief. They were hard-hearted and hard-headed in their hard-heartedness. Jesus tells us that if we want this great gospel being preached to the land, it starts, at least in Mark’s account, with rebuke.

And when we fail to do that, when we fail to be honest with each other about the shortcomings we observe—and we talk to others about them and we just sort of, you know, move people to the side of the church and they end up kind of not knowing who likes someone and who doesn’t and they’re not involved in ministry because they’ve not been really worked with, exhorted, and if necessary, rebuked for failure—you’re just out.

When we do that, we are meaner than Jesus. Jesus created apostles and disciples who would change the world, who would turn the world upside down by proclaiming another Caesar, another ruler, another emperor, another king—the Lord Jesus Christ—another reality, another creation had invaded this world. Those men failed. They failed on the very day of his resurrection.

First those women come running and they say, “Oh, well, out of your women, you know, then you know the two from Emmaus. ‘Oh, we don’t know. That’s too good to be true.’” Well, Peter, “I don’t know.” They sit there in their unbelief and Jesus comes to them and he has no problem. He instructs us that rebuke is an essential part of the Christian life. And if you haven’t received one or given one, oh, you know, maybe things are going real good in your relationships with folks. But over time, something’s going to happen. And you have an obligation.

You know, we put these filters up the front cover of the worship service today. When people do try to rebuke us, we just kind of muddle the message in our ears.

To give a rebuke and to hear a rebuke. You’ve heard me give all these verses. I won’t go through them all again. Maybe I’ll post them up on the website or something, but you’ve heard all the verses from Proverbs. Rebuke is absolutely essential.

And what I’m telling you is rebuke is an essential aspect of graduate school—getting men and women ready to do their mission in the world.

And today, I want you at the end of this service to rejoice and to give God glory and praise for the wondrous things that he’s accomplished through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. I want you to commit yourselves afresh to having new speech, new tongues, to putting off fear. And I want you to commit yourself afresh to be honest with people within your sphere of influence that you find trouble or difficulty with.

Speak to each other. Don’t speak about each other. Speak to each other. Be wise. Be gracious. Don’t be meaner than Jesus. But if necessary, do that. And then rebuke one another. Don’t rebuke me, though. I’m exempt. Yeah, I am. That’s what God said. He said, you know, those old men, don’t rebuke them and treat them as fathers.

So if you’re going to talk to Howard L. or Brad, you know, that gospel of the kingdom stuff—Brad has a great paper on that. We’re going to talk to these old guys, Dan Prenis, Schubin, S.H., you know, half the congregation. You can’t rebuke and treat us as fathers. And then the text goes on to say treat each other as brothers. So I’m not saying jump to flamethrowing mode, but I am saying let’s commit today to be real with each other in this church, to get work done. Not to be flailing about for months on end trying to get something done, but to get the work done by having honest speech, by loving each other enough to talk to each other and not to other people. And then if necessary, to rebuke each other.

Jesus did it and the end result was the effects of Satan were cast out.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your love for us. We thank you for this statement here of the events leading up to the Great Commission. We thank you for the importance of rebuke in our lives. Help us to hear them. Help us to give them. And help us, Father, before we get to that stage, to at least be honest and open to each other about the difficulties we see.

Bless us in this, Lord God, that your kingdom, your new creation may be manifest in the world. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.