All right. Well, again, welcome to Hope St. Paul. I'm Brian, in case I haven't met you, lead pastor or only pastor here, I guess. So excited to continue in the gospel of Mark. So we've been here, this is week 48, believe it or not. So if you're checking out Hope, we've been here for a minute and it's impossible to recap, but I'll just start with the beginning like I have every week. And that is going to be in Mark chapter one, verse one, where Mark, a follower of Jesus, a disciple of Jesus, but not one of the 12, when you think of maybe the disciples of Jesus, but Peter was. And we're gonna read about Peter today. But Mark was a companion of Peter. And so Peter is telling Mark these accounts and these stories. Mark might've even been there for some of them. And so he wrote them down. And so this is the good news, the gospel of Jesus. It's not Mark's gospel. It's the gospel according to Mark. It is about Jesus. It's Jesus's gospel. Gospel just means good news. Good news. The beginning of the good news about Jesus, the Messiah. Messiah, Hebrew for Christ. Jesus, the Christ. Jesus, the Messiah. The anointed one of Israel, the Son of God. And so that's how the book starts. And Mark is just going to say, hey, here's the good news. This is the gospel. This is who Jesus is. And let's just stay focused on Jesus. So going back a couple weeks, because this is going to kind of help us in the context of what Katie had read a little bit ago. In Mark chapter 14. They went out to the Mount of Olives. So Jesus is with his disciples and he has the Lord's table. And he says, hey, one of you is gonna betray me. And they're like, no, no, not me. Is it me? Can't be me. And he's like, yep, it's gonna be one of you. But let's have this meal anyway. And he calls them to eat the meal with him anyways. And then they go out and they sing a hymn and they went out to the Mount of Olives. And Jesus said to them, you will all fall away for it is written. And he quotes Zechariah of prophecy. I will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered. So he's saying, God will strike the shepherd. Jesus is saying, I will be struck by God and the sheep will be scattered. But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee. And Peter says to him, even though they all fall away, I will not. And Jesus said to him, truly, I tell you this very night before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times. But he said emphatically, if I must die with you, I will not deny you. And they all said the same. So then, skipping forward a little bit more, this was last week, the text that we looked at, and Jesus was led to the high priest, Caiaphas, and all the chief priests and the elders and the scribes came together. This is what's called the Sanhedrin. It's this ruling class, this ruling order, kind of political and religious group of 71 men, the high priest, and then 70 people, mostly of the Sadducee class, which means that they really, really wanted to work with the Romans. And anyways, that's the Sanhedrin. And they're judging Jesus. They've already made the verdict. Hey, he needs to die. We got to figure out how we can kill him legally. We got to figure out how we can turn him over to the Romans. In verse 54, And Peter followed him at a distance right into the courtyard of the high priest. And he was sitting with the guards warming himself with the fire. Most likely, these are the same guards that just arrested Jesus. So Peter, one of his closest friends, who has just said, I'm never gonna leave you. I'm never gonna abandon you. I'm not gonna betray you. As soon as he's arrested, it says he flees. But now he's following at a distance and he's in his courtyard. They think they maybe have found Caiaphas' house in Jerusalem. This is just the rendering of it. But this is what a lot of these houses look like for the upper class, that you had this courtyard, kind of surrounded 360 by four walls in the middle. So imagine Peter down there warming himself by the fire. And then up in the upper room would have been the actual courtroom where Jesus would have been. So Mark is going to do this thing. He can't say, hey, Jesus said this, then Peter was doing this. Meanwhile, down below. And then this, he goes back and forth. So what we learned last week of Jesus being on trial is happening simultaneously while Peter is down below in the courtyard. Okay, so just keep that in mind as we dig into this text. So I've titled this passage faithfulness of the sermon, the sermon faithfulness. This is going to be Mark chapter 14, 66 through 72. So I want to first address the rooster in the room. That was supposed to be a play on an elephant in the room. So this is, earlier this week, I was talking with a few pastors and I just said, hey, is anyone planning on talking about this or should I talk about this? And the feedback I got was, why would you even bring that up? Maybe people don't even realize that that's a problem. And I was like, well, but it could be a problem for some people in the room. And I believe this. I believe that this is the word of God and I don't doubt that at all. And yet, if maybe you've gone through and you've read the accounts of Jesus and you go, hang on a second, there seems to be a contradiction here. So if maybe you've not picked it up before, let me point it out for you because, I have no problems with this and I'll explain why. So let me, I'm going to get the nerdery out of the way. Okay, we're going to start off with being a nerd and then we'll get into the text. So how many times does the rooster crow? What's going on here? In Mark, we have before a rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times. Okay, so there's going to be two rooster crows, and then you'll deny me. And then Mark says, immediately, I rooster crowed a second time. So Mark's got the two thing going. But then Matthew, Luke, and John all say one time. Now, there's only going to be one, right? Before a rooster crows, you will deny me three times. Well, which is it? Is it two times? Is it three times? Is it one time? What's going on here? How do I know what to believe? Because the question that you can do when you come to a text like this, even something like roosters crowing. And we can say, well, how can I believe my Bible if there's seeming contradictions or if there are contradictions? This says two, this says one. What is it? One of them's got to be wrong. I thought this was supposed to be the word of God. I thought God breathed this. How could there be any kind of contradiction here? What's going on? And those are very good and very valid questions. 2 Timothy 3.16 says, all scripture is God breathed. The question is, what does that mean? Does it mean that it's dictated? Does that mean that God like whispered in the ears of the writers, like, I want you to write this down. I want you to say this exactly this way. So that if it was that way and there were some contradictions, well, then we've got problems here. Because that means God changed his mind. We can even look at later accounts. So Matthew and Luke, they use Mark as a source and they use the same story, but they change and fix the grammar. So does that mean the Holy Spirit was like, hey, it's okay to be kind of sloshy on your grammar in Mark, but in Matthew and Luke, I'm going to get it right the second time. No, that's not the case at all. So when we think about God using people and all scripture being breathed by God, it doesn't mean that it was dictated. It means that he uses human beings to write it and they have their own perspective. They have their own background. They have their own stories that come into play into their writing of passage. Which they didn't know was going to be scripture when they were writing it. We can look at this, different vantage points, different perspectives. We see this very clearly in our gospels. We have Matthew, who's going to look at, this is the promised king and the Messiah. And he starts with the genealogy of Jesus. This is who he is. He's a descendant of David, of King David. Mark, as we've been walking through, looking at the suffering servant, over and over, Jesus is going to say, I will be delivered and suffer, and I will die, and I will rise again. That's who Mark is focusing on, that perspective, that facet of Jesus. Luke, he's the savior of all people, Jews and Gentiles, all ethnicities. Everyone is welcome with Jesus. And then John is going to focus on the eternal son of God. And he's going to start it with, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. That's Jesus. He is the eternal son of God. So we've got these different vantage points, different perspectives that are going to be taken into place. But what do we do with this text? How do we wrestle with this? Are there contradictions or seeming contradictions? Let me introduce you to Tatian, the Syrian. He's got a bunch of different names, but early in the second century, he tried to consolidate all the four gospels. He actually does it, and he does it quite well, where he says, well, there's some different things that the order, chronological order seems a little weird, so let's just get it all in the right order. Let's take out Mark. There's just one rooster crowing. We won't even, we're not even gonna try to do that. And he kind of just makes one mega gospel, right? And it kind of starts to gain some steam and gain some ground. And then the bishops, you know, they get together and they go, this is trash, right? We have four accounts. Let's actually use the four accounts. We don't need to shy away from this, right? So we can say, well, maybe that's one way we could do this is we can say, yeah, maybe they got it wrong. So let's try to edit it out and let's just fix it that way. That's one way to go about it, which they tried and it didn't work. We didn't want that. Another way to do it, this is Harold Lintzel. He wrote a book called The Battle for the Bible. He was a founding member of Fuller Seminary in the 70s. He says, okay, well, if we can't do that, then we take the Bible as God's word and he meant everything he said, then we have to read this very literally. And Jesus clearly says two plus one, there's three rooster crows. That means Peter has to deny Jesus six times, right? It's like, I don't know if that's the natural reading of the text either. There's a guy I'm going to mention here a little bit, Michael Lacona. He calls it, I love this phrase, he calls it hermeneutical waterboarding. Meaning, right, that I'm going to torture this text until I can get it to say what I want it to say. That's bad, right? That's not what we do to the text. It's not doing anything right. And so let me introduce you to this guy, Michael Lacona. And he wrote a book, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? And he talks about how that there are techniques that were used in the first century in the writers. And there's a book by Theon in Greek and Quintilian in Latin. And we have these, we have copies from like 2 AD, where they were teaching teenagers how to write better. So they already knew how to read and write. They said, let me teach you some skills on how to actually be a better writer. Here are some methods of writing, the same way that all of you, most of you, had to take in school in some way, shape, or form. And one exercise was to paraphrase a text in a variety of ways, four of them, which I'm going to mention here in a little bit. And these apply to every kind of writing. They would actually give them a paragraph and say, I want you to use this method of writing and rephrase it. Whether it's your own paragraph or someone else's paragraph, we have copies of these, which is phenomenal. So we should expect that the gospel writers who were trained, that we would have been trained. The gospels that we have, our four gospels, are the standard of which all standards of biographies, which is what these are. These are biographies, not historical. That's a different category. They are historical, but they're biographies primarily, saying, I want to show you Jesus. They would have been taught these things, these methods of writing. So let me just real quick give a couple examples of this. Ancient biographies in their writing. So when we say, oh, I mean, is there a contradiction here in this text? No, they just said we're writing and using a different writing style and using a different method here, which fits what we have in the historical record. So first one's transferal. Words or actions of one person are given to another or aimed at a different audience. An example of this would be when Jesus is baptized and he pops up out of the water. There's a voice from heaven and it says, you are my son. But then in Matthew, it says, this is my son, right? The voice changes in the sense of who is Matthew writing to? He wants the readers to understand that, oh, this is the son of God versus the voice saying, you are my son, right? It's the same thing, but it's just a different voice. That's what transferal means. Displacement is an event, is moved from one setting to another. The gospel of John has Jesus cleansing the temple or when he's flipping the tables and yelling at everyone in the temple. He starts his gospel with that, but Matthew, Mark, and Luke end it with that before his crucifixion. Well, which is it? This seems, well, we do this all the time. One of the memes that have gone, you know, kind of viral, like kind of the scratch frame, right? Yep, that's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation. All right, you know what I'm talking about? Right, kind of you see this chaos and then you go, how did we get there? What happened? Right, we do this. Movies do this all the time where we'll start with the end. Hey, guess what? I do this sometimes in my sermons. I almost did it today. I almost was like, let's look at Peter. Let's look at him in Acts chapter 2 and he's preaching. Look how successful he is. Well, how did we get there? Well, let's look at him deny Christ, right? So I didn't. Cat's out of the bag. We're just going through this chronologically this morning, right? But this is what, we do this all the time. We still do these, and they come pretty natural. Conflation, two events are merged into one. Mark, for example, has two temple visits. Matthew combines them into one, right? We don't, it was a one temple visit, was it two? It was probably two, but it's just easier to read as one, right? It doesn't mean it's not historically accurate. It doesn't, None of that, it's just one of the methods that they use. And the other one is compression, where events are shortened into a smaller frame of time. Um, Mark, uh, was, we looked at months ago, a year ago where he curses the fig tree. Um, and he says one day later that it was withered. Whereas the other gospels, it says that immediately it withered. Um, and so it's just compressing and saying, yeah, this happened, but do we really need to take the time? Again, you gotta remember paper was really expensive and writing was really expensive. So he's like, Hey, we're just going to shorten the story. It's not taken away from the facts. And so it's no surprise to me and to a lot of ancient historians, I'm not an ancient historian, that the gospel writers would have used these methods of writing as well. They would have been trained in a very similar method. These are not contradictions. They are within the lines of writing practices of the time. And so if you go, if you're reading this and maybe you came in and you were like, yeah, man, I'm struggling with the rooster. Maybe this would just help a little bit. Okay, we don't need to shy away from hard questions. So if you have more questions about that after the service, we'll have a little bit of Q&A over here at the side, maybe 10 minutes after the service, we can ask some questions because there's a lot more, a lot more that we could say about that. But that is not our text for this morning. It was, it was the rooster in the room. All right, the contrast, let's get into this. This is our text for this morning, 66 through 72. So it says, and as Peter was below in the courtyard, again, where's Jesus? Jesus is above him in the court, the courtroom of Caiaphas. So these are happening simultaneously. As Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the servant girls of the high priest came and seeing Peter warming himself, she looked at him and said. You also were with the Nazarene Jesus. But he denied it and said, I neither know nor understand what you mean, right? What do you mean Jesus? I don't even know what you're talking about. I have no idea what you're talking about. And he went out into the gateway and the rooster crows. This is the first time the rooster crows, right? We don't really get any kind of understanding from Peter. This could just be signaling the dawn of a new day. And so maybe Mark was trying to signal that, hey, Peter was He's kind of getting a second chance here, but he doesn't. Okay, so either way, we don't know, but the rooster crows. Peter doesn't acknowledge it. Mark doesn't even really acknowledge it, just as it happens. And the servant girl, but my guess is, if I had to guess from the three accounts that we have, the four accounts of this, I would trust Mark as being the more literal or accurate because Peter was the one telling this to Mark, right? And he's probably the one who is remembering this pretty clearly, all right? Not that it matters, but just to throw that out to him. And the servant girl saw him again and began to say to the bystanders, this man is one of them. But again, he denied it. So that's the second time Peter's gonna deny that he knows Jesus. And after a little while, the bystanders again said to Peter, right? Just warming him by the fire and they're just kind of eyeing him the whole time. Like what's going on? He's obviously interested in what's going on with Jesus upstairs, trying to listen. He's got to get his ear towards it. And you say, certainly you are one of them, for you are a Galilean. Now we don't know, nobody knows, what in the world made Peter stand out? Was it a facial feature? Was it the way he dressed? Was it just an accent that he had when he spoke there? They're like, oh man, you're from Galilee. Of course, there's no way you could be from the same region as this guy Jesus and not know who he is, which is pretty condemning if you are caught in that situation. But he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, right? And this goes back to the Ten Commandments of not bearing false witness, but he's using this, that he's making a curse of himself, right? Of kind of what we would do, like, no, no, no. No, I didn't do that. I crossed my heart, hoped to die, right? Like, that's kind of something we do. And I'm going to pinky promise, like, I swear on my grandmother's grave, I do not know the man, right? That's kind of what's happening here. They say, I promise, I swear I don't know. I do not know this man of whom you speak. In verse 72, and immediately the rooster crowed a second time. And Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him, before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times. And he broke down and wept. Breaking down, it's an interesting word. just means like getting gripped by, being held onto, being held down by his sadness. When I was first studying this passage, it kind of felt like Good Friday, meaning like Jesus dies on the cross. And like we're told, like when you're like in preacher school, they're like, hey, on Good Friday, Jesus dies on the cross. Don't mention the resurrection. It's like, well, yeah, but we all kind of know that that happens, right? And so, but it just kind of felt like because we're just supposed to sit in, the weepiness of Peter and our own brokenness and just sit in the dark. It was like my only application for this passage should be, well, you shouldn't deny Jesus the way that Peter did. And Peter's warning us, he's telling us through Mark, don't deny Jesus the way that I did. And it's hard because in some ways we are all Peter. We all can in some way maybe sit in Peter's shoes, but we might say, well, I wouldn't do that. So C.S. Lewis, in some ways, maybe a little adjacent called the chronological snobbery of saying, no, no, no, I know better. If I were in his shoes, I would never deny Jesus. But Peter says the same thing. He says multiple times, if everyone denies you, I will not. Even if I have to die, I won't deny you. Now here he is the very first, I mean, hours later from saying that, he's now there being accused. You know Jesus, you're going to get beaten. You should maybe be killed. And he says, I don't know this guy. I don't know what you're talking about. So is that the lesson of the story? Well, the truth is, I think we do this. Maybe not within physical eyesight of Jesus who's being in the courtroom. But man, how many times have I had a conversation with a friend or a neighbor who doesn't follow Jesus and they bring something up and I'm like, boy, that'd be really easy to talk about Jesus right now. And then I don't, because I'm, why? I'm afraid they're gonna like look at me funny. And I've got an easy out. I'm a pastor, you know what I mean? Like, there goes Pastor Brian again. Like, I've got an easy out. And I still, a lot of times, don't take that. In essence, I deny Christ because I don't bring him up maybe when I should or ought to. And while I think it's good to be aware, maybe of those moments, that we should repent of that and we should point people to Jesus when the opportunity arises, I want to look at what Jesus was going through while Peter is denying him. Peter is actively denying that he's ever even heard of him while Jesus is up in the room. So we looked at this last week. Says the high priest stood up in the midst in the midst and asked jesus have you no answer right hey we're accusing you you are going to be condemned to death have you no answer to make what is it that these men testify against you, but he remained silent and made no answer and as we looked at last week isaiah 53 this beautiful messianic prophecy looking at who the christ was going to be and Jesus is just fulfilling these things over and over. In Isaiah 53, he says like a lamb led to the slaughter, he spoke not a word. So he's fulfilling this prophecy while Peter's denying. And then it says this, and again, the high priest asked him, are you the Christ? Are you the Messiah, the son of the blessed one, the son of God? And Jesus said, I am. And you will see me, the son of man, seated at the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven. And the high priest tore his garments and said, what further witness do we need? You have heard his blasphemy. What is your decision? And they all condemned him to deserving death. And some began to strike, to spit and to cover his head at his face and to strike him and saying to him, prophecy, prophesy. And the guards received him with blows. This is such a wild thing to me, that you have Jesus being punched in the face, being yelled at, saying, I want you to prophesy. Jesus, prophesy. Who's hitting you? Tell me what's going on. Meanwhile, in the court below, he's fulfilling prophecy. Peter, you will deny me before the rooster crows. And Jesus is here taking the blows, is physically getting beat up. He's going, I am. I am prophesying. This is all happening exactly the way I ordained this to happen in eternity past. Everything's going according to plan. And they're mocking him for it. Jesus is remaining faithful in what's happening to him while Peter is throwing him under the bus and completely denying him there. Jesus remains faithful. faithful to the end to die for sinners. And Peter, if we write ourselves into the story as the bad guy, we also do the same. We are unfaithful. We deny the very existence of Jesus in so many ways. So when we go back to verse 72, and immediately the rooster crowed a second time and Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him, before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times. And he broke down and wept. We could end here. Could just sit and sad and betrayal. I don't think that's what we get to do as Christians. I don't think it's what we have to do as Christians. We have the rest of the story to remember, oh, Harvey, oh, what was his name? Who was the WGN radio guy? I'm looking at the old guys in the room now. No, not Harry Carey, Harvey. Paul Harvey, now you know the rest of the story. Thank you, old timers, I appreciate it. Grew up in the back of the car, with no seatbelt in the 80s, listening to Paul Harvey. Okay, we know the rest of the story. We know how this ends, so let's look at this. What's going on here? So let's look at the reveal. We're gonna kind of skip forward in the passage, but actually this is going back in Mark chapter 14. Jesus is praying, he's in the Garden of Gethsemane. This is the night before, it's the night he's betrayed. And he says, Father, Abba, Father, just Aramaic for Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me, yet not what I will, but what you will. And he came and found his closest friends, Peter, James, and John sleeping. And he said to Peter, Simon, are you asleep? Earlier on, Jesus changes Simon's name to Peter, to Petros, to the rock. And in this moment, Jesus doesn't call him Petros. He doesn't call him Peter. It's the only time Jesus does this. He doesn't refer to him whose new name. He says, you're acting like Simon again. You're sleeping, you're not staying vigilant. You're not watching, you're not caring for me as your friend. You are not acting like the rock right now. Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour? But now we're going to skip forward. Now we get to the resurrection. This is so beautiful how this all works out. Mark chapter 16. We'll come back to this in a few weeks, but I just want to point this out. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man. This is Mary Magdalene. She comes to the tomb, which is really significant. We'll look at that in a couple of weeks. Sitting at the right side, dressed in white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen. He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go and tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. He said that. How many times did he say to Peter, I'm going to suffer, I'm going to die, but I'm going to be risen and then I will go before you to Galilee. And Peter's like, no, that's never going to happen. Well, now it happened. Now it's past tense. And the angel is telling Mary, I want you to go to the disciples and Petrus. And Peter, I want you to go to the rock. And if we skip forward into Acts chapter two, Peter, now the one who had denied Jesus, denied his very existence when he needed him most, is now preaching Christ crucified. And he says, men of Israel, hear these words. He's a man of Israel. Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst. Just as you yourselves know, this Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. Well, how do you know that, Peter? Because I denied him and he told me I was going to deny him. And I promised I wouldn't deny him. And he said, I'm still going to deny you. And it all happened. He's completely in control of this. You crucified, including himself in this, and killed by the hands of lawless men. And God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death because it was not possible for him to be held by it. Peter denied him. Peter doubted him. Peter thought there's no way that this guy could actually be the Messiah. And then Peter sees him raised from the dead and the entire world gets flipped up on its head. It was so easy for Peter to deny, to reject, maybe I don't know this guy, to then all of a sudden he literally is being crucified on behalf of his faith in Jesus. Why? Because he saw something, really believed it. We'll get there in a couple of weeks, but this is wild. So I don't think the the only takeaway from this morning is well we shouldn't deny Jesus when we get a chance talking about Jesus we should okay yes, but I think what's more important is the good news is the gospel, that even when we are unfaithful that it's Jesus who is the faithful one even when we deny him, he will never leave us or forsake us. That even if our faith leads us into the jaws of death, he faithfully walked into his death knowing it would pay for our sins. That is good news. That is the gospel. And so just in application, Jesus remained faithful. And so we get to celebrate that through the Lord's table. We get to celebrate his faithfulness in communion with one another. Those who have at one point in our lives, we've betrayed Jesus. Those who at one point in our lives have denied Jesus and even as a very existence, and have questioned his validity, Jesus says, come eat. Come eat. You denied me. You've dipped. You're going to deny me. I want you to eat this with me. Oh, you're going to reject me. You're going to say I don't even exist. Come eat at the table. This is my body, which is broken for you. This is my blood, which is set for you. This is a new covenant in my blood, that the faithfulness and the forgiveness of your sins isn't a result of your faithfulness. Matter of fact, your unfaithfulness is almost a prerequisite to receive my faithfulness, that we come broken and beaten, not physically, but because he already did that. What a joy it is to take these elements together because Jesus remained faithful. You don't need to be a member of this church or any church, but if you say, man, I want to take these elements. I want to remember the faithfulness of Jesus in my life. Even if it's only your first time doing it, the worship team's going to come back up. They're going to sing two songs. And as they're playing, feel free to grab these elements. And you can sit back down and take them as you see fit and feel led. Repent, confess, worship Jesus as the faithful one. Repent of our unfaithfulness and take these elements because he invites us to do that. Let me pray. The worship team will come and sing. Father, thank you for just our time. together this morning. And as we look at this text, the text that is heavy, a text that looks at one of your closest friends denying you, denying even your very existence. God, as we take these elements, would we just remember your faithfulness? Great is your faithfulness. Oh God, my Father, thank you for that. That in the spite of our unfaithfulness, in spite of our wavering, our wandering, our skepticism, God, you remain faithful. You've got us in the palm of our hand. You will never leave us or forsake us. Would we remember that this morning? We love you and we pray these things in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.