Lesson 1: “The Beginning of the Gospel”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Life Assurance Ministries
Problems with this lesson:
- The lesson speculates on Mark’s failures and worthiness to write this gospel account.
- The lesson equates the beginning of Jesus’s ministry with the “70-Week Prophecy”, the first angel’s message, and the announcement of the investigative judgment.
- This lesson defines the gospel by Jesus’ teaching and healing and not by His death and resurrection.
This new quarter’s lessons focus on the Gospel of Mark and are written by Thomas R Shepherd, a senior research professor of New Testament at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University. Shepherd introduces the first week by dedicating the first three days’ studies to Mark’s story and Ellen White’s assessment of him as a biblical character.
As usual, this focus is inside-out. The Bible is not for the purpose of finding ourselves nor for finding examples for us to follow. Rather, the Bible is God’s story; the human details within it are the setting for show-casing God’s sovereignty and His purposes. Our human failures cannot prevent His promises and plans from being fulfilled.
Mark’s failure has no significance in the purpose of this gospel. Incidentally, though, Mark’s defection from Paul’s first missionary journey with Barnabas resulted in Paul’s refusal to take Mark on the next journey. Barnabas sharply disagreed with Paul, but Paul was firm.
The outcome, which Adventism (and certainly not this lesson) did not teach, is that Barnabas took Mark and went on his own parallel missionary journey to Crete. The gospel thus spread farther and faster than it would have without this breakup of the first ministry team. Both Paul and Barnabas went on missionary journeys, and God redeemed the situation by using it for His glory.
The Gospel of Mark is regarded historically as Peter’s gospel. Extra-biblical sources record that Mark and Peter worked together, and Mark recorded and organized Peter’s teachings and accounts of the Lord Jesus. Interestingly, the first verses of Mark 1 parallel the beginning of Peter’s preaching to the gentile Cornelius recorded in Acts 10:37. Both identified Jesus’s baptism as the starting point of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Each of the gospels was written with a specific audience and purpose in mind, and Mark is aimed at a Roman, primarily gentile, audience. Mark explains Jewish customs, and he places special attention on the ideas of suffering and persecution—things that were especially difficult problems for believers in Rome.
Jesus On a Journey
Tuesday’s lesson establishes that
“…in the Gospel of Mark, the Lord Jesus is on a journey…a journey that will lead to the cross and to His sacrificial death for us. But much must happen before He reaches the cross. The journey is just beginning, and Mark will tell us all about it.”
Wednesday’s lesson introduces Jesus’s baptism, the opening event of the Gospel of Mark. The author makes the point that Mark presents Jesus as both human and divine, and he says,
Why these contrasts? This points to the amazing reality of Christ, our Lord and Savior, our God, and yet also a human being, our brother and our example. How do we fully wrap our minds around this idea? We can’t. But we accept it on faith and marvel at what this truth reveals to us about God’s love for humanity.
There is no mention of the true significance of Jesus’ baptism nor of the fact that His ministry was not essentially being a great teacher and a good example. He came to be our substitutionary sacrifice!
One of the major purposes of Jesus’ baptism was that He :
“completely identified Himself with man’s sin and failure (though He Himself needed no repentance of cleansing from sin), becoming our substitute (2 Cor. 5:21)” (NASB95 text note on Matthew 3:15).
The lesson misses the real reason Jesus came and the real definition of the gospel of Jesus Christ. His earthly ministry is not defined as the gospel. Rather, the gospel is the fact of His becoming man so that He could identify with our human sin and die a human death in sufficient payment for our sin. His earthly ministry revealed His identity as God the Son, the promised Messiah, but it was not the substance of the gospel
The good news of the Lord Jesus is that He took our sin in His body and died the death demanded by God for our sin, thus fully atoning for us.
Jesus and the 70-Week Prophecy
My biggest surprise, as I read this lesson, was finding that Thursday’s lesson, entitled “The Gospel According to Jesus”, was dedicated to charts and graphs equating Jesus’ baptism—the opening of Mark’s gospel account—with the completion of Daniel’s 70-Week Prophecy of Daniel 9!
The lesson opens with these words:
Mark summarizes here the simple and direct message of Jesus. Its three parts are illustrated in the following table:
These assertions are entirely invented and not related to Scriptural context. First, the author is equating Daniel 9:24–27 with the words of Mark 1:15:
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe”.
What does Daniel 9:24–27 say?
“Seventy weeks have been determined for your people and for your holy city, to finish the transgression, to make an end of sin, to make atonement for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint [the] Holy of Holies.
“So you are to know and have insight [that] from the going out of a word to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince, [there will be] seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; it will be restored and rebuilt, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress.
“Then after the sixty-two weeks the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing, and the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. And its end [will come] with a flood; even to the end there will be war; desolations are decreed.
“And he will make a firm covenant with the many for one week, but in the middle of the week he will make sacrifice and grain offering cease; and on the wing of abominations [will come] one who makes desolate, even until a complete destruction, one that is decreed, is poured out on the one who makes desolate.”
When Jesus declares, in Mark 1:15, that “the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe,” these words are not the fulfillment of Daniel 9:24–27! To say that the words “The time is fulfilled” refers to the “time prophecy” of Daniel 9 is to assign a private interpretation designed to support the great controversy worldview and the investigative judgment.
Galatians 4:1–5 actually tell us what Jesus meant as He declared that “the time is fulfilled.” Jesus came at a pre-determined time that God had always known. He sent Jesus when the time came to redeem those under the law. Here is Galatians 4:1–5:
Now I say, as long as the heir is a child, he does not differ at all from a slave although he is owner of everything, but he is under guardians and stewards until the date set by the father. So also we, while we were children, were enslaved under the elemental things of the world. But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.— Galatians 4:1-5 LSB
The passage in Daniel 7, though, is an eschatological passage foretelling the Lord’s final judgment of the earth. It is not the foreshadowing of the Lord Jesus’s incarnation! Adventism tells us that Daniel 7:24–27 describes the beginning of the investigative judgment in 1844 when the books were opened and Jesus began applying His blood to confessed sins. But this idea isn’t remotely found in the Daniel passage!
Furthermore, Galatians 4 clearly tells us that the fulness of time marked the moment that God sent the Lord Jesus to be born of Mary in order to “redeem those who were under the Law”! Adventism does not even acknowledge this fact. They argue that Jesus came to uphold and vindicate the law, to demonstrate to us that we, too, can keep the Law as He did.
This argument is at the heart of Thursday’s and Friday’s lessons!
In context, however, we see that there is NO 1844 investigative judgment in Daniel 7, and the the “time” announced by Jesus that was fulfilled was not the 70-week prophecy. Daniel describes the end of the age; Mark is describing the incarnation of the Lord Jesus!
Furthermore, Friday’s lesson uses another chart to attempt to make Mark 1 and Revelation 14 echo each other. Here is the chart from the lesson:
Once again, Revelation 14:6–12 does NOT describe Adventism being given the end-time assignment of calling the world to keep the seventh-day Sabbath, to recognize the investigative judgment has begun, and to come out of Sunday-keeping churches in order to avoid the mark of the beast!
For the author of these notes to equate Jesus’s message of Mark 1 with Revelation 14 is an egregious example of proof-texting with a private interpretation. This is EGW great controversy confusion! Revelation 14 describes an angel that flies through heaven during the tribulation calling people to remember to worship the one true God, to leave the secular, false religious monetary system of the world and to trust in the Lord Jesus! Yet Adventists claims they themselves are the featured characters in Revelation 14, not an angel from God, and their message is a heretical pre-advent judgment based on a heretical doctrine of an incomplete atonement.
Finally, the Teachers Comments reveal the bloodless core of the Adventist gospel. Horrifyingly, this lesson uses the Gospel of Mark to obscure the essence of the gospel of the Lord Jesus. The author of the comments, Teófilo Correa, PhD, Old Testament professor, Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies; Philippines, asks (on page 14) “What is the gospel?” He concludes,
[W]e may reason that Mark uses the expression “gospel” to describe the merciful acts of Jesus during His ministry, as well as to designate the idea of the gospel itself as “good news” from God.
He further says (p. 15, 17):
The Gospel according to Mark also is rooted in God’s Word, specifically in His revelation. Immediately following the statement in verse 1, “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” Mark quotes from the Old Testament Scriptures, including select verses from the book of Isaiah (Mark 1:2, 3), with an allusion to the 70 weeks of the book of Daniel (Mark 1:15; compare Dan. 9:24–27). Here we can clearly see the gospel as content, as good “news” or tidings. Mark defines this news as “the gospel of God” (Mark 1:14, NASB). Therefore, the good news is a divine proclamation to humanity.
In short, Mark implies that the gospel is both the Word of God and the acts of Jesus during His earthly ministry.
In addition to an active ministry in teaching and preaching, Jesus was very active in bringing healing to suffering souls. Jesus’ mission involved the wholistic restoration of the human being. He healed a man who was afflicted with convulsions (Mark 1:23–26). He restored Simon’s mother-in-law, who was prostrate with fever (Mark 1:30, 31). Jesus liberated and healed the demon-possessed (Mark 1:32–34, 39). He was not indifferent to the woeful plight of a leper who came to Him in desperation. Undeterred by the contagion, Jesus laid His hand upon him and healed him (Mark 1:40–42). Jesus is the incarnation of the good news, the gospel, for many people, as narrated by Mark. “And the whole city had gathered at the door” (Mark 1:33, NASB), “they were coming to Him from everywhere” (Mark 1:45, NASB). His ministry brought restoration to the entire being. Restoration is the substance of the gospel of Jesus Christ in its most practical terms.
Absolutely NOWHERE does this lesson define the gospel as having anything at all to do with Jesus’ dying for our sins and being raised to break death! The Adventist gospel is Jesus’s teaching, healing, and preaching. It is all his good deeds designed to show that God is love. The Adventist gospel is not primarily about Jesus being our Substitute to pay for sin. In fact, sin is downplayed; humanity mostly needed Jesus to meet their felt needs and to “restore” them, whatever that means
Yet Paul clearly identified the gospel:
1 Corinthians 15:1-5 LSB
Now I make known to you, brothers, the gospel which I proclaimed as good news to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I proclaimed to you as good news, unless you believed for nothing. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
Jesus’ earthly ministry was His evidence, His PROOF that He was the Messiah promised in the Old Testament. He systematically did all the things the prophecies said the Messiah would do. His earthly ministry was to reveal His true identity and to demonstrate that He had the power to forgive sins—the sins He helped people to understand they had and that needed to be forgiven!
From the very first lesson of this quarter’s focus on the Gospel of Mark, the definition of the gospel is ignored and the truth about Jesus is distorted. He came as the One sent by the Father to identify with humanity and to take our sin and to bear God’s wrath in our place. He came to pay for sin, and that reality is the purpose of Mark’s gospel.
Mark wrote to reveal the truth about Jesus and His true mission.
The only relevant question we can ask is this: have you believed? Have you acknowledged your sin and your need of a Savior? Have you recognized that the blood of Jesus cleanses you from all sin if you believe?
If not, I challenge you to read the whole gospel of Mark. Ask the Lord to show you the truth about Jesus and about yourself, and trust His finished work on your behalf. Believe Him today—and pass from the confusion of Adventism to the glorious reality of eternal life! Trust Him. †
This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
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