Joel Brooks: If you have a bible, open up to Mark chapter 3 as we continue our series through Mark. CS Lewis, who, most of you are familiar with, used to be an atheist before he he came to know the Lord. And he wrote about these words, in a book that, we know as mere Christianity. Said, I'm trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Jesus. I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.
That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said that sort of things said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on the level of a man who says he's a poached egg, or else he would be the devil the the devil of hell himself. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the son of God, or else he's a madman or something worse.
You can shut him up for a fool. You can spit at him and kill him as a demon. Or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.
He did not intend to. That is what Mark chapter 3, the text we are going to be looking at is about. The accusations of Jesus being a lunatic, the accusations of Jesus being the devil of hell himself, one of the things that no one ever accused Jesus of or said he was was a great moral teacher. That's something that our culture tries to say. He was just a teacher of love.
You know, he's a he's a great moral teacher. But what we will come to discover, if you haven't already, is that is not an option that Jesus has given to us. He is either a lunatic, he is either the devil of hell, or he is the lord himself. And he pushes us towards that deciding point in this story that we're about to read. So Mark chapter 3, we'll begin reading in verse 20.
Then Jesus went home, and the crowd gathered again so that they could not even eat. And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him for they were saying, he is out of his mind. And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, he is possessed by Beelzebul. The prince of demons, he cast out demons. And he called them to him and said to them in parables, how can Satan cast out Satan?
If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but he's coming to an end. But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house.
Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man and whatever blasphemies they utter. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin. For they were saying, he has an unclean spirit. And his mother and his brothers came. And standing outside, they sent to him and they called him.
And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, your mother and your brothers are outside seeking you. And he answered them, who are my mother and my brothers? Looking about at those who sat around him, he said, here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother. This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God. Do it pray with me. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for preserving this this text for us for 2000 years that your people might gather in this place today and read it and hear from you. That's what we wanna do.
We wanna hear from you, not from me. So I pray that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore. But, Lord, may your words remain, and may they change us. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen.
So we've reached a point in Jesus' ministry, his reign, where he has become so polarizing that even his own family tries to silence him. Even though, you know, they lived all the way out in Nazareth, they had heard the rumors. They'd heard about the types of people that Jesus was hanging out with. The sinners, the tax collectors, the prostitutes. They heard about how Jesus is now breaking the law.
He repeatedly and openly would break the Sabbath. They heard how he was now picking fights with the religious authorities, the people whom they respected. And so it was just becoming embarrassing. Jesus, who was bringing shame to their family and in a honor shame culture, this was devastating. I'm sure they also were hearing the stories about Jesus and His religious fervor, and how there were times he could spend entire nights in prayer, and so he wasn't sleeping anymore.
Then they get reports about the crowds pressing in on him and him doing so much ministry, he wouldn't even have time to eat. And so they're concerned for his health. They actually even heard that sometimes the crowds would be so numerous that he was in danger of being crushed. And so as they're hearing all these things and hearing how Jesus is actually fanning into flame, The crowds and the craziness that's all around him, they're like something's got to be stopped. He's either gonna get himself killed, or he's gonna kill himself just through exhaustion.
And so they decide to do an intervention. And now for Jesus' half brothers, I mean, for them to doubt who Jesus is, it's a little understandable. Anyone who has brothers, you know the issues there. They're not always your biggest fan. But Mary, the blessed Virgin Mary.
I mean, Mary had conceived by the Holy Spirit. Gabriel himself had come to Mary, to tell her that she was gonna have a child. This child was going to be the long awaited Messiah, the savior of the world. And then when Mary heard that news, if you remember when you read through Luke, she broke out into a song, this gorgeous song of praise that we know as the Magnificat, and it's been preserved for us for 1000 of years. We read it every Christmas.
And so for Mary to doubt, like, how did we reach that point? Well, this is what happens or can happen when god's plan begins to unfold in ways that you did not anticipate, you you could not have imagined. I don't know if that's ever happened to you or not. But Mary certainly, she she had thought if Jesus was gonna the savior of the world, the first thing he would do is overthrow Rome, not overthrow the religious leaders she had so much respect for. And although she thought, Jesus, yes, okay, he's gonna become king, it probably had not crossed her mind that Jesus would leave her.
And, yes, Jesus waited 30 years to finally leave her, but he left. And I wanna has has God ever done things to you to make you doubt? I mean, perhaps 20 years ago, you were told somebody came up to you, and they they they shared the gospel with you, and they told you God's got a wonderful plan for your life. And the spirit came and opened up your heart. You believed that Jesus bringing new life into you.
He gave you forgiveness, and it seems to be this new glorious life that was gonna unfold before you. After all, God had a wonderful plan for your life, and then life actually happened. And you're like, where where is that wonderful plan? As the years begin to unfold, you begin to think this is not at all what I expected when I accepted Jesus into my heart. My old mentor, my old college pastor, he would often say, you know, sight often destroys faith.
It destroys faith. And maybe some of you have seen enough evidence to think, you know what? That was crazy 20 years ago when I believed that. This seemed to even be happening to the blessed mother of our Lord Jesus, Mary. By the way, if when you read stories like this, I hope it gives you confidence that we are indeed reading the Word of God that it's true.
Because if you would just wanted to make up stories, to kind of, you know, give the church power, to make up stories about how Jesus really is the Son of God. You don't make up something as counterproductive as this. I mean, you don't write about Jesus' own mother, by the way, thought he was crazy. The religious leaders thought he was possessed. Mark tells us about Mary's doubt here because she doubted.
And if Mary could doubt, that might mean some of us in here share her doubts because the kingdom of god is not coming in a way that we imagined. We next read here that Jesus' after Jesus' own family tried to stop him, then some scribes from Jerusalem made their way over to Capernaum to try and discredit him. Look at verse 22. And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, he is possessed by Beelzebul, and by the prince of demons he cast out demons. Now if you've ever been listening to the radio or watching TV, and all of a sudden your show is interrupted by some important emergency broadcast from the White House, you know that something really big has happened.
I guess now the the White House could just send a text to everyone, you know, and if you're going and also you get a a text from the White House in the middle of your day, you know, okay, something's happened. That's similar to what we see happening here. The religious capital of Judaism, Jerusalem, They now feel that they need to step in and interrupt people's normal programming for this special announcement. But the ongoing situation about Jesus has to now finally be addressed. And so this is coming from the top.
Jerusalem was where the temple was, it's where all the priests work, and for them to feel like they now needed to send some of their top scholars all the way over to Capernaum to try and discredit Jesus tells you just how influential Jesus has become in this moment. I mean, maybe for a while, they could just kinda sit back, they could keep denying things. They could deny his power. Maybe they could, you know, ignore some of his miracles, and the and the rumors of those things, but they couldn't do so anymore because the evidence was now just overwhelming. Everyone was seeing these miracles.
Everyone had seen the power that Jesus had. They can no longer deny it. They can no longer spin it. It's time for them finally to come forward and to tell people what to think. This is what they tell people they should think about the situation.
They are thinking, well, we can't deny his power, but maybe we can discredit him by saying his power comes from Satan himself. It's a desperate tactic. They begin telling people that he's possessed by Beelzebul. We're not entirely sure where, where this name came from. If you wanna go down a rabbit hole, you can certainly look up everything about it, But this had become basically a name for the prince of demons or for Satan himself.
And Jesus hears what they're calling him, and, and he basically says, hey, why don't you guys come here and say that to my face? I mean, notice they're saying that to all the people, and it says that Jesus called them to himself. Hey. Why don't you come say that to my face? And so, he calls them.
And then rather getting caught up in some kind of name calling with one another, Jesus just calmly tells them how illogical their argument is. Verse 23. He called them to him, and he said to them in parables, how can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.
And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand. And he is coming to an end. So Jesus, he calmly tells them how their argument makes no sense at all, and it doesn't. It's a really easy argument to defeat. If if Satan starts a civil war and begins attacking his followers, well, Satan's kingdom is going to crumble.
So attacking and defeating that argument is easy, but what Jesus says next, it's explosive. You know, I say this from time to time, but there's certain verses in your Bible you should probably underline, maybe highlight, star, you know, fold the page up so you could find it later. This is probably one of those. Jesus says, but no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed, he may plunder his house.
Jesus here, he he does not deny that Satan has power, and he compares Satan to a strong man. And he doesn't deny that there's a fighting going on. But he says it's not a civil war. It's a war between Satan and someone who is stronger than Satan. And in this battle, someone who is stronger than Satan has actually entered into Satan's fortress, has bound him up, and is now plundering his house.
So we're entering into the Advent season near Christmas time. The reason I know this is because Christmas music has been playing for a month. I mean, 965, if you anybody actually listens to the radio, I mean, come on. When we think of, you know, all the Christmas passages out there, I mean, we we think of we think of Luke telling us about the shepherds abiding in the field. We think of Matthew telling about the the Magi coming from the east.
But we don't typically think about texts like this one, where Jesus talks about blasphemy of the Holy Spirit and and Beelzebul. But make no mistake. This is a Christmas story. What Jesus when Jesus says here that he has entered into this into the strong man's house, what he is saying is that he's speaking about the incarnation. He's saying, I came into this world.
The world that we live in, the the world is the strong man's house. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, the world fell underneath his dominion. Even Jesus himself would call Satan the ruler of this world. Adam and Eve had previously been the rulers of this world, but Satan came and bound them up and took what had been theirs. Earth then became the place where Satan lived, where he ruled, and he reigned, and he would defend to the bitter end.
Thus, when Jesus came and entered into this world, he enters Satan's house, his fortress. And then there's a fight. If If you remember back in Mark 1 or another accounts of this story, the devil did not initiate that fight. Jesus did. After Jesus was baptized and he's starting his ministry, you will read that the Spirit of God led Jesus out into the wilderness, where he took on Satan in battle.
And there for 40 days, Satan defended his turf, gave Jesus his best shot, and Satan lost. Now up to that point, Satan had never lost. Never had he lost a battle. I mean, he had beaten Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, King David, Solomon. He had defeated all of Israel.
He had defeated every single human. This is the first time he had ever been defeated. He was no match for Jesus. Jesus resisted every temptation and bound Satan. Now, this temptation is Satan's first defeat and Jesus will defeat him for good at the cross.
But here we see that he's binding him. The temptation is where Jesus fought and bound him. Then after having bound Satan, Jesus plunders his house. What exactly is Jesus plundering? I mean, what is he what is he taking?
What valuable possessions is he taking from Satan's home? It's us. Satan had been holding us. We were we were held underneath his power. Long ago, when Satan had entered into Adam's house, he bound Adam.
This is what the Bible talks about when it says that we are in bondage to sin. We have been captives to the devil, slaves in our sin. But Jesus, then now he's he's coming in and he's setting us free. All those demon possessed people that were screaming, saying, I know you who you are. You're the son of God.
And and then Jesus casting out the demons. That is Jesus binding Satan and setting us free. Setting us free. So put that all together. Do do you see how explosive Jesus's words are here?
Do you see the power of what he is saying? I mean, I get chill bumps when I read these words. When the religious leaders had the audacity to confront Jesus and try to silence him up and put it into his ministry, Jesus, he says, I have come to this world. I have defeated the ruler of this world, and I will take whatever I want. Amen, church?
I'm not giving a TED Talk. This is good, good news. Christ has called me to be a herald of this good news, that he has liberated us through the power of Jesus. Recently, I I had a probably shouldn't share. This is just popping in my head.
Here we go. This past week, I had a dinner with a number of pastors, and pastors whine more than any other group of people you can imagine. They're all whining. And and and they're talking about just how hard it is to compete with the volume of our culture. I mean, I get up here.
I've got, you know, 30, 35 minutes. But I mean, there are there are endless social media posts, TikTok videos, all this that are shaping your views of, like, all these other things. And, and they're they're bemoaning these things. And first off, as a pastor, like, I I can't bemoan. I'm getting paid to do what cost the apostles their lives.
Come on. But I I told these guys, like, hey, we cannot keep up with the volume of media out there, but in no way can it compete with our power. In no way. When the gospel goes forth, it goes forth in power. Do you believe Jesus has bound the devil or not?
So the gospel goes forth. It's it's breaking things. It's binding things. And so we we we clearly see that this is what Jesus is teaching here. Like, you wanna try to silence me?
I came to this world. I have bound the devil, and I will take whatever I want. Now, I don't I don't wanna go all super charismatic on you.
Caleb Chancey: I'm I'm like a charismatic with a seat belt.
Joel Brooks: Okay? Not I'm Not Little control. But but when the early church fathers, like, you know, you read Athanasius and and others, when they talked about this, they talked about how before Jesus came, idolatry was rampant in the world. They talked about how the power of the occult was real. Then Jesus came and bound the strong man.
Even Plutarch, who lived just late in the 1st century, I mean, very close to this time, Plutarch, who was not even a Christian, he wrote about how the oracles of the world had all of a sudden mysteriously lost their power. He wrote about how even the oracle of Delphi had become silent, and he couldn't understand why. It's because there was a cosmic power shift when Jesus came. He came, and he bound the strong man. Jesus is stronger than the evil powers of this world.
And he is stronger than whatever thing you think is binding you. If there is some evil thing in your life, and you think that you are helpless to get out of, it's got its hold on you, believe the gospel. Jesus is stronger. Satan has no hold on you. And Jesus is offering you freedom in this place.
Now, all of this, this is good news. If you haven't figured, this is good news, but it comes with a warning. We read about this warning in verse 28. I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.
Jesus is warning these scribes that they're at least they're at least really, really close to doing something unforgivable, blaspheming the Holy Spirit. A whole lot, once again, if you wanna go through another rabbit hole, a whole lot has been written about that. A lot of confusion about it. The context, I think, actually makes this quite clear. Blaspheming the Holy Spirit is when you refuse to accept who Jesus is, or even go so far as to say, the works of Jesus are actually evil.
I've actually known a few college professors when I was at the University of Georgia that came dangerously close to attributing the works of Jesus to the devil. Why why is this sin unforgivable? Well, if you reject the savior, then you reject salvation. If you reject the means for forgiveness, well, then there is no forgiveness. If you reject your only hope, well, then there is no hope.
That's why it's unforgivable. And if you've ever here wondered, like, have I done this? Have I committed blasphemy of the Holy Spirit? Can't I just say you haven't? You haven't?
Someone who has done this, who has committed, they're they're not pondering that question in their hearts. That shows a sensitivity to the Spirit's work. Now, when Mark mentions here Jesus's family again after this, he goes back to Jesus's family coming to see him. I want you to notice how Mark is writing this story. He writes about Jesus's family thinking it's crazy at the start of it.
Then we have the sectional blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Then he goes right back to Jesus' family again. You're gonna find this kind of literary device found throughout Mark. It's called a Markian sandwich. It's a aba pattern.
He does this over and over. And what he wants you to show is that the first part of the story and the last part of the story, the same thing there, they shed light on what's happening in the middle. And what's in the middle sheds light on what's happening on the outer parts of the story. In other words, Mark brings up Jesus' own family, and he says, they are becoming dangerously close to committing an unpardonable sin. Even Mary, they're coming dangerously close to blaspheming the Holy Spirit.
The reason is is that they might think they have a special status or privilege when it comes to Jesus, and he says, no. No one has a special status or privilege when it comes to me. The only way for anyone to receive forgiveness, the only way for anyone to receive eternal life, it is not through blood. It is through bowing down to me as savior. Even Jesus' own family must do this, and they will after the resurrection.
Then Jesus goes on to teach what true family is here. Read verse 32. It says, and a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, your mother and your brothers are outside seeking you. And he answered them, who are my mother and my brothers? Looking about at those who sat around him, he said, here.
Here are my mother and my brothers, for whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and my sister and my mother. Now, in a culture where family was of primary importance, honoring one's father and mother was not just a good idea, it was a commandment etched in stone. What Jesus says here, like how he acts, it's beyond shocking because Jesus is redefining family. He's now, to be clear, he's not severing ties with his blood family. He's gonna speak later about honoring your your your blood but he is speaking to a new family of greater importance.
He's saying that there is a spiritual family that has greater priority. So I'll end here. Don't miss what Jesus is saying. He said, I've come into this world. I've come into Satan's house.
I have fought him. I have bound him, and I am taking what is mine, which is you, and I'm gonna take you out of that and make you family. Isn't that good, good news? Let's pray to Him. Jesus, I cannot think of anything more glorious.
Thank you for the love you have for us. Thank you that Satan is no match for you, that you came into this world to defeat the works of the devil. Thank you, Jesus, that you proved yourself victorious over all the evil powers of this world when you were crucified and you rose again. And we read, Lord, we read that in Ephesians, how when you ascended, you led out a host of captives. Those who were bound, you plundered Satan's house, and you brought out a host.
May we live in the freedom that you have provided for us. Thank you, Jesus. We pray this in your name. Amen.