Mark 1:14-15 -- The Preaching of Jesus

We had this preacher come to chapel one day when I was a Bible College student whom I did not particularly care for. The guy had a reputation for stomping and spitting and screaming and jumping up and down. That has never really been my cup of tea, because I am often too distracted by the style to pick up anything from the substance. So, I decided to skip chapel (which was a cardinal offense at that institution). After chapel, I asked a friend, “How was the preacher?” He said, “The man preached it!” I said, “Preached what? What did he preach about?” He said, “I am not real sure, but I know he sure did preach it!” I have often wondered how often that might be said of me – “Not real sure what he preached, but he certainly was preaching it.”

Well, it is an interesting feature of the Gospel of Mark, that throughout it we find numerous references to Jesus preaching. Not only Jesus, but in Mark 3:14, we find that He appointed the twelve that they might be with Him and He might send them out to preach. But in all these references to preaching, Mark does not tell us what was being said in the preaching. Now, I don’t intend to suggest that the preaching of Jesus was like that chapel speaker, or many others in our day who sure do preach it, but nobody knows exactly what they preached. We know exactly what Jesus preached because Mark tells us in these verses, and Jesus’ message never changed. I don’t mean to suggest that Jesus preached the same sermon all the time.

I heard about a preacher who only preached on baptism all the time. He preached a message once on Genesis 3:9 where the Lord called out to Adam, “Where are you?” He had three points: I. Where Adam was; II. Where Adam should have been; and III. A few thoughts on baptism. Jesus didn’t preach that way. The other Gospels show us that His methods and His sermons displayed great variety, but His message never changed. The primary thrust of His preaching and that of His apostles was consistently characterized by what we read in Mark 1:14-15. The preaching we read about here becomes the frame of reference for all the rest of the preaching that He does and all that His first followers would do and all that you and I do for Him today. And it is the same message to which each and every one of us must respond as well.

Here in this passage, we find the first recorded words of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel. If you have one of those red-letter Bibles, it’s all black before you get to verse 15. And so He begins preaching. It is typical of Mark to be brief and to give very little unnecessary detail, but he gives us enough to understand the circumstances, the content, and the call of Christ’s preaching.

I. The Circumstances of Christ’s Preaching

It is rare that we find indicators of time and place in Mark’s Gospel, so the fact that we find both here means that they are significant to our understanding of what is going on. We are given a very clear indication of the circumstances of this initial preaching of Jesus with the words in v14: Now after John had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching….

A. The Timing of Christ’s Preaching

John had been taken into custody. John the Baptizer was the forerunner of Jesus. His mission was to prepare the way for people to receive the Messiah. When he baptized Jesus, the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus in bodily form as a dove and a voice from heaven announced that this was the Son of God, indicating that Jesus was the Coming One about whom John had preached. John had preached boldly about sin and the need for repentance, and while the masses flocked to him in the wilderness, the religious and political elite began to despise him. After all, he called them a brood of vipers and accused them of rank hypocrisy. But the breaking point for John the Baptist was when he stood up to Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee and Perea. We will find out in Mark 6:19-20 that at one time, Herod had enjoyed listening to John the Baptist, until he stopped preaching and started meddling. John had reprimanded him for unlawfully marrying Herodias, the wife of his half-brother Herod Philip, and for a host of other “wicked things” (Luke 3:20). And for this, Herod Antipas had John arrested.

The Greek wording of John’s fate is that he was “handed over,” a passive statement that implies that even though Herod arrested him, nothing took place outside of the providence of God. The same wording will be used later of Jesus and His followers. It is set before us as “the fate of the faithful,” who will be persecuted by the authorities of this world, but never apart from the providence of God. And it was God’s providence that restrained Jesus from public ministry until the voice of John was silenced. Jesus did not begin preaching when John’s popularity was at its height, but when opposition silenced John. This was the timing of Christ’s preaching.

B. The Setting of Christ’s Preaching

Jesus came into Galilee preaching …. The synoptic gospels (that is, Matthew, Mark and Luke) do not record the year that Jesus spent ministering in Judea and the areas south of Galilee. That year would fit chronologically between Mark 1:13 and 14. It has been called by some “the year of obscurity,” and is captured for us in the first four chapters of the Gospel of John. During that period of time Jesus performed His first public miracles. But Galilee was the place where Jesus began to be known for His teaching and preaching. It was His home region, the home of His disciples, and the location of the greater part of His ministry. It has been called by some, “The Land of the Gospel,” because it was the location of His great receptivity, in contrast with Jerusalem where He was most vehemently opposed by the priests and Pharisees.

Luke 4:14 says that Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit. The Spirit who anointed Him at baptism and led Him into the wilderness temptations now leads Him on mission to Galilee. While some speculate that Jesus went to Galilee to avoid a conflict with Herod Antipas, we should remember that Galilee was Herod’s dominion. G. Campbell Morgan said that Jesus was “not escaping from danger, but moving into the danger zone; not withdrawing Himself from peril … but going into the very region over which the man who arrested John was reigning.”[1] And Herod took notice of Jesus and His preaching. Mark 6:16 tells us that Herod was paranoid that Jesus was really John the Baptist resurrected to haunt him. But God was teaching Herod a lesson, that though he may silence silence the voice of one prophet, he cannot rid the world of the Word of God. Jesus was the Word incarnate, and He came preaching right in Herod’s territory. This was the setting of Christ’s preaching.

And so the circumstances about which we read here in v14 teach us something about the preaching of Jesus that we will see exemplified not only in His life and ministry, and in that of His early followers, but also in our day as well. The timing of His preaching informs us, as James Edwards writes, “The gospel is proclaimed and known in adversity and suffering, not in ease and comfort.”[2] And the setting of Christ’s preaching teaches us that the gospel does not shy away from adversity, but rather advances in the face of it. If we are waiting for a day when the world will be more friendly to the gospel before we become more aggressive in proclaiming it, we are waiting in vain. A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a slave above his master, as Jesus said in Matthew 10:24. And as He preached in the circumstantial context of adversity, so every true follower of His will as well.

Now, notice if you will …

II. The Content of Christ’s Preaching (vv14-15a)

Jesus came preaching the gospel of God …. While much attention is devoted to various elements of Jesus’ life and ministry, the Gospels are clear that preaching was His characteristic activity. Isaiah had prophesied of the Messiah that He would be anointed to preach the good news and to proclaim liberty to the captives and freedom to the prisoners (61:1). His feet would be beautiful because He brings good news, He announces peace, He brings good news of happiness and announces salvation (52:7). The word Mark uses here, kerusso, means to proclaim as a herald. Preaching, in this way then, is not the opening of debate, but the closing of it. It is the full and final announcement of the official and authoritative declaration. You will notice in Mark 1:22 and 26 that the people were amazed that Jesus taught having an authority with which the people were unfamiliar.

Jesus preached with bold authority the Gospel of God. “Of God” indicates that this is His good news that is made known in Jesus Christ. And as Christ preached, He declared authoritatively that the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand.

A. The Time is Fulfilled

There are two Greek words which are commonly rendered “time” in our English Bibles. First, there is chronos, which indicates a span of time, and second is the word kairos, which indicates a specific point in time. The latter is what Jesus announced as being fulfilled. It is a decisive and appointed moment in time, a moment, Donald English writes, which is “heavy with eternal significance.”[3] This is the kairos time spoken of in Daniel 7:22 with the coming of the Ancient of Days; the fulfillment of the time of waiting for God’s deliverance that would be wrought by the Messiah. This is the precisely perfect moment of human history when God brings about His promise of ultimate redemption. This definitive event had the power to split time. We measure history in terms of BC and AD – before Christ and anno domini, the year of our Lord. Today there is an aggressive move to purge that Christian vocabulary from scholarly circles with BCE and CE – before the common era and common era – but the fulcrum of history remains the coming of Christ into the world.

Every prophecy and promise of the past finds its significance and fulfillment in the coming of Christ. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 1:20, “For as many as are the promises of God, in Him they are yes; therefore also through Him is our Amen to the glory of God through us.” And Jesus came preaching that the time is fulfilled.

B. The Kingdom of God is at hand.

The Psalmist says in Psalm 95, “The Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.” In Psalm 47, it is written, “The Lord Most High is to be feared, a great King over all the earth.” When Israel demanded a king for themselves like all the other nations had, they did not realize that for all their history as a nation, God Himself had been their King, and they were rejecting His rule and reign. But God promised that there would be a King born of the line of David whose reign would be eternal. Jesus is that King, and that eternal kingdom is what He announced to be at hand.

“At hand” speaks of a nearness, and in Jesus Christ, the Kingdom makes a personal appearance.[4] It is the major subject of Christ’s preaching in the Synoptic Gospels, and in Mark the reference is nearly always present rather than future. Here in Christ, God Himself had come to establish His throne, His reign, His dominion, and His sovereignty – but in the political sense that many had hoped.[5] That will come later. Christ has come to establish this kingdom in the hearts of those who will follow Him. In this sense, the Kingdom has come. In another sense, it is coming.

C. S. Lewis put it this way in Mere Christianity:

Enemy-occupied territory – that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church, you are really listeing-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. … Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? … He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. … God will invade. … When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole world melting away like a dream and something else … comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise …. It will be too late then to choose your side. … That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we have chosen, whether we realized it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it.[6]

And with alarming reality, we move to consider…

III. The Call of Christ’s Preaching (v15b)

Christ summons us all to respond, saying, “Repent and believe in the gospel.” This is not two things. It is one thing, which involves two inseparable components. To repent is to turn away from something. To believe is to turn toward something. And you cannot have one without the other. To repent without believing is to despair. To believe without repenting is to presume.[7] Both are destructive in the end.

A message of repentance is not popular in our day. The preachers in the big-time media markets have purged the word from their vocabulary so it won’t hinder their financial contributions. The liberal theologians have purged the concept from their theology because it violates their man-centered worldview. But it was the message of John the Baptist (1:4), the message of Jesus (1:15), the message of His disciples (6:12), and it must be our message as well.

Paul said in Acts 17:30 that God is now declaring to all men that all people everywhere should repent! Why should we repent? Because we are all guilty before God because of our sins. Romans 3:23 says that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. You don’t need to have this pointed out in your life. Your conscience has been telling you this since the first moment you knew right from wrong. Only, by the time you learned it, you were already aware of much wrong that you had done. And if your conscience does not point it out to you, it is only because our indifference has numbed us to the pricking of the conscience. We have become immune to it because we cherish our sin more than we cherish righteousness. Because we are all sinners, we are all under the just condemnation of God. And if we don’t come to realize this about ourselves, then the cross is of no value to us. Jesus came to save sinners by dying on the cross as our substitute – the innocent for the guilty. But as long as we ignore our sinfulness, we remain outside of the kingdom. We cannot respond in belief in the gospel until we acknowledge our need of the gospel, and this we do in repentance.

Notice this little word in. This is not a summons to agree intellectually with a set of historical facts. It is a call to put your personal trust in Christ as the only hope we have of being reconciled to God. We are to rest in Him securely confident that He alone can save us. The writer of Hebrews declares that “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son.” And what has He said to us? He has said repent and believe in the gospel. And we repent as we turn in total surrender to God believing the Gospel that Jesus died for our sins and is risen again to life completing our redemption. This is not two separate actions – it is one. Because we believe the gospel of salvation in Christ, we turn from sin to Christ. If we do not believe, we do not turn. If we have not turned, it means we do not believe.

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[1] G. Campbell Morgan, The Gospel According to Mark (Grand Rapids: Revell, 1927), 29.

[2] James R. Edwards, The Pillar New Testament Commentary: The Gospel According to Mark (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 44.

[3] Donald English, The Message of Mark, 49. Cited in D. Edmond Hiebert, The Gospel of mark: An Expositional Commentary (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1994), 42.

[4] Edwards, 47.

[5] James A. Brooks, The New American Commentary: Mark (Nashville: Broadman, 1991), 47.

[6] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 51, 65-66.

[7] Hiebert, 45.