If you would turn in your Bibles to Mark chapter 3; page 838 in the pew Bibles. We’ll continue in the gospel of Mark, picking up tonight with chapter 3.
Rest is serious business. And it can be a little awkward too. We were in the market recently for a new couch and a mattress. There’s something funny about a bunch of strangers in a big room full of mattresses taking turns laying down on the mattresses and pretending like what it would be like if you were going to be sleeping on that mattress. It can be a little strange. You just kind of ignore that there’s someone you don’t know lying down right there next to you, just a few feet over! Well the salesman told us, when we were looking for a mattress, that he was showing a man a mattress one time and he gave him a few minutes to see how it would feel, and when he went back over to check on him he was sound asleep! Just crashed out! And he left him there for like twenty minutes to take a nap in the mattress store! Again, it can be a little awkward, but that man really needed rest.
And we all spend a lot of time looking for rest, seeking rest. But actually, the rest that I’m thinking about is something much, much deeper, something that is a much bigger deal. And if I were to ask you about restlessness, if I were to ask you about your sense of restlessness, I’m sure that most of us could say something about being stressed and being overly busy. I’m sure many of you know what it’s like to be distracted and scattered emotionally, mentally. Perhaps it’s a restlessness of grief or homesickness, or spiritually – something’s not quite right; something’s missing. There’s a rest, a peace, a shalom that we cannot quite seem to find on our own. We can’t pull it off by ourselves. And we need someone, we need something to provide real, true, lasting rest. Not like the kind at the furniture store, not like the kind of the weekend or the vacation and come Monday morning and it’s gone, but rest for your souls, rest that lasts, rest that really is serious business.
And tonight we find, in this passage, we find the person who gives that rest to us. And we will notice it in three things that we see in this passage. We’ll notice, number one, the promise. Number two, the place. And then number three, the people. The promise, the place, and the people. Before we look to Mark chapter 3, let’s pray and ask God’s help and blessing. Let’s pray.
Our Father, we pray that You would point us to rest for our souls, and no matter what circumstances, no matter what situation we might find ourselves in tonight, we ask that You would break through hard hearts, that You would settle the unsettled, that You would give focus to the distracted. We can’t see and understand and find fruit from this passage were You not to work in our hearts by the Spirit. So we pray boldly for a work of Your Spirit, that You would give us ears to hear. We pray, speak, Lord, for Your servants listen, that we would see Jesus. And we pray this in His name, amen.
Mark chapter 3, verse 1:
“Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand. And they watched Jesus, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man with the withered hand, ‘Come here.’ And he said to them, ‘Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?’ But they were silent. And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.
Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the sea, and a great crowd followed, from Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem and Idumea and from beyond the Jordan and from around Tyre and Sidon. When the great crowd heard all that he was doing, they came to him. And he told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, lest they crush him, for he had healed many, so that all who had diseases pressed around him to touch him. And whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, ‘You are the Son of God.’ And he strictly ordered them not to make him known.
And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him. And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach and have authority to cast out demons. He appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter); James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder); Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.”
The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
First, the promise. In chapter 3, Jesus is back in the synagogue on the Sabbath, and at the center of this exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees is a question. It’s the question that we find in verse 4. Jesus says, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” That’s a rhetorical question. Nobody is debating the answer. In fact, Jesus had just said – if you remember what we saw last week back at the end of chapter 2 – Jesus said that the Sabbath is for man’s good. “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” The Sabbath is for doing good. It’s for promoting life. Because the Sabbath is about rest. The Sabbath is about setting aside one day every week for rest. Not an hour. Not a half-day, but a whole day, set aside for rest.
But it’s more than that. It’s really more than just one day. The Sabbath was woven all throughout the calendar of ancient Israel. Sabbath was the fabric, it was the fabric upon which the people of Israel were to stitch together their life as a people, to live out their life from year to year, from decade to decade over generations. It was centered on Sabbath. There was a weekly Sabbath. There was a Sabbath year every seven years. There was a Sabbath of Sabbath years – after seven periods of seven years, after forty-nine years, there was a year of jubilee – a year of liberating, generational, radical rest. And that’s not to mention the other Sabbaths that they celebrated. There were other special Sabbath days that went with the yearly festivals and feasts – a Passover Sabbath, a Pentecost Sabbath, a Tabernacle Sabbath. And someone has added it all up, and especially thinking about the feasts and the holidays in the Old Testament, and said that if you add together the weekly Sabbaths along with the seven holidays on the calendar, add the weekly Sabbaths and the later feasts of Purim and Hanukkah, plus weddings and birth celebrations, that the amount of time off for celebration and worship exceeded three months annually. Over three months. Joy and life and rest were serious business. They were serious business in Israel.
Now, let’s just take a minute to trace that promise, to trace that promise of rest for the people who were set free out of slavery in Egypt, who were set free and on their way to the promised land, hearing that promise of Sabbath rest. Here’s what they would hear. Deuteronomy 12:9, “You have not as yet come to the rest and to the inheritance that the Lord your God is giving you. But,” verse 10, “But when you go over the Jordan and live in the land the Lord your God is giving you to inherit, and when He gives you rest from all your enemies all around so that you can live in safety.” You see, Moses, on the plains of Moab in the land beyond the Jordan, about to enter into Canaan, was holding out to this wilderness-wandering people the prospect, the promise – of what? Of rest. Of rest.
And then we come to the book of Joshua. What do we find there? After the death of Moses – you see, Moses, he was not the one to take them in – but we come to the book of Joshua, and Joshua, in the first chapter, verse 12, says that “The Lord your God is providing you a place of rest.” Chapter 11 verse 23, “So Joshua took the whole land. The land had rest from war.” Joshua 21:44, “And the Lord gave them rest on every side, just as He had sworn to their fathers.” And verse 45 of chapter 21 says, “Not one word of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed. All came to pass.” It all came to pass. Joshua brought the people into that promised rest of the Lord. And yet it didn’t last very long. It didn’t last very long. When we turn the page over from Joshua to the book of Judges, and after the death of Joshua, what do we find? We find idolatry and infidelity and there is this fleeting and diminishing rest. But rest is the goal. The goal is that Hebrew word “shalom,” the word which means “wholeness, security, completeness, peace.” That’s the goal. And where were they to enjoy it? In the land. And so we see the promise. What about the place?
Well when you look down in Mark chapter 3 to verses 7 and 8, what do we find there? We see that Jesus says that He “withdrew with his disciples to the sea, and a great crowd followed Him.” A great crowd. That’s nothing new. The crowds have been there, haven’t they, almost from the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. But this time we are told where these people came from. We don’t have to know that, and yet we’re told that they’re come from Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem and Idumea. And they came from beyond the Jordan. And they came from around Tyre and Sidon. And that is not an insignificant detail to be overlooked because what it’s saying to us is that basically the people came from all over. They came from every direction. They came from north and south and east and west.
Galilee, you see, was in the north around the Sea of Galilee. Judea and Jerusalem were in the middle and the center, basically in the hub of the whole region. Idumea was down in the south beyond the Jordan was, on the east side of the Jordan River. Tyre and Sidon were up, coastal cities on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea to the west. And what we’re finding here in this list of where the people came from is that they were all different types of people. They were urban and rural people. There were agrarian and seafaring. There were Jew and Gentile even. But more than that. More than that, there are echoes that we find in these places that harken back again to the book of Joshua and to the original boundaries and settlement of the promised land.
Listen again from the book of Joshua. Joshua 13:8 tells us that the Reubenites and the Gadites and the half-tribe of Manasseh, where did they settle? They received their inheritance beyond the Jordan, eastward. Joshua 15:1 tells us the allotment for the tribe of the people of Judah reached southward to the border of Edom, which is the same as Idumea. Joshua 18:28 says that one of the cities of Benjamin was Jebus or, that is, Jerusalem. Joshua 19:28 says that Asher’s territory extended as far as Sidon the Great, reaching the fortified city of Tyre. And in Joshua 27, it says that they set apart Kedesh in Galilee in the hill country of Naphtali. Now these are all there in the story of Joshua. In fact, they are all there on the map that is on the back of the hymn sheet. And that is a map of the settlement of the land at the time of Joshua. And you can almost work your way counterclockwise around to find all of these place names as they are listed in Mark chapter 3. You have the Sea of Galilee. There’s the Jordan River and the land beyond it to the east. There’s Edom in the south. And coming up into Judah and Benjamin, there’s Jerusalem. And going further north, you come to Tyre on the lefthand side on the Mediterranean Sea. All of these places are here on this map and the original settlement of the land of Israel.
There’s a t-shirt shop in New Orleans and they used to have a t-shirt with the map of the United States on it. And all the states on the map are the same greyish color, but then there’s this big central portion of the country and it’s colored in red. It goes from the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River, and then goes up through parts of Texas and up into the midwest, all the way up to Canada and even to Idaho. And it’s in red. And underneath this map it’s labeled “Louisiana Purchase.” And the caption at the bottom of the map says, “1803 was a good year” because 1803 was when Louisiana’s borders reached their furthest boundaries.
You see, what this map in some ways is saying to us is, “1405 BC was a good year,” or whatever year they actually settled the land of Canaan. This was the land that was promised to Abrahan, and it was again conformed to Moses, and then it was fulfilled in the time of Joshua. And yet even then, there was an incompleteness. Because in the story of Joshua, we find that they didn’t drive out all of the inhabitants in the land beyond the Jordan. They didn’t drive out the Jebusites that lived in Jerusalem or the inhabitants of Sidon or the inhabitants of Tyre. They didn’t drive out all of the people of Galilee. Joshua told the people of Israel that if they attach themselves to the remaining nations that they would become a snare and a trap to them. And that’s what happened.
And even in these verses, in Mark chapter 3, what do we find? This is all Roman territory. This is all a part of the Roman empire. This was a fragmented and a volatile region, and different sons of Herod the Great had authority over different parts of the province as we find it in these days, in the days of Jesus. And now, and yet we find here is Jesus and Jesus’ influence extends throughout the whole land. Verse 7 and 8 says, “a great crowd followed, from Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem and Idumea and from beyond the Jordan and from around Tyre and Sidon.” You see, the reach of Jesus’ ministry is to the whole of Israel. In fact, His name, His authority is what unites part of the land that were never fully assimilated into the nation in its earliest days.
Now make no mistake, Jesus’ ministry, Jesus’ kingdom, it stretches beyond the borders of the places listed in verses 7 and 8. But this is symbolic. This is symbolic in the way that the land was always symbolic, in the way that the land always represented the place in the old covenant where God’s blessing was to be enjoyed. And even then in those days, something better was in view. Abraham, you remember, as the writer of Hebrews tells us, “he was looking forward to a city that has foundations whose maker and builder is God.” Abraham desired a better country, that is, a heavenly country. It’s just that at that time in those days, in God’s timing and dispensation, this land mattered. And now we find in Mark chapter 3 that Jesus was doing something new. Jesus was doing something better for His people.
And so we see the promise and the place. What about the people? This time, it’s not Reuben and Simeon and Gad. It’s not Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Ephraim, Manasseh, Benjamin, Dan, Asher and Naphtali. No, the names have changed. Those are the names of the sons of Jacob. Those are the names of the tribes of the people of Israel. No, we don’t find those names, do we, in Mark chapter 3, but it’s still twelve, isn’t it? It’s twelve. Verse 14 says, “And he appointed twelve whom he named apostles.” Verse 16, “He appointed the twelve: Simon Peter, James, John, Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot.” And it says that “He appointed the twelve so that they might be with Him,” verse 14 and 15, “and He might send them out to preach and have authority to cast out demons.” In other words, these twelve were to be His apostles; literally His “sent out ones.” And they were to represent the ministry and the influence of Jesus wherever He sent them. That’s what He called them to do. That’s what He appointed them to do. They were, in a sense, to stake the claim of Jesus’ authority on the land as the people of God, to stake Jesus’ claim of authority as the Church.
Now nothing about this list, nothing about this list of names would instill much confidence in that, would it? It wouldn’t instill a whole lot of confidence that this group of people could actually build and establish the church, that they have very many qualifications or effectiveness on their own. Because most of the names in this list are just names. We basically know nothing about them. Some of them are just fishermen, uneducated fishermen. Nothing particularly noteworthy. Nothing special about their occupation. And then the ones that we do know something about, there’s something tumultuous about them, isn’t there? We’ll find out more about Simon Peter than we will about anyone else on this list, but we know from the information about Peter that he was impulsive. We know something about his force of character and about how he was sometimes larger than life. But surely James and John were that way too. What was their nickname? Boanerges – Sons of Thunder. I mean that has to be an all-time great ———— nickname, “The Sons of Thunder!”
When I was growing up, I had a poster on my wall of a couple of baseball players from the Oakland A’s. It was Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. They were called “The Bash Brothers,” and whenever they’d hit a homerun, they come in and they’d bash their forearms with each other and it was the coolest thing! You get the sense that the Sons of Thunder, they could cause some trouble for people. They were probably not chill, probably not easygoing dudes. And neither was Simon, because verse 18 tells us that he was Simon the Zealot. Who were zealots? Zealots were fighters. Zealots were passionate about the overthrow of the Roman occupation. They were serious about the defeat of the Roman government. Now pair that with someone who was a tax collector. We saw a few weeks ago that Jesus called Levi the tax collector. In the gospel of Matthew, Matthew is the one who is identified as the tax collector. So likely, this is the same person – Matthew and Levi – known by two different names. And that’s oftentimes a common thing in the Bible, isn’t it? But that’s a volatile mix, a volatile mix – a zealot and a tax collector; a Roman agitator and a Roman collaborator. There’s Thomas. He was a doubter.
And then we come to Judas, verse 19 says, “who betrayed Jesus.” Judas will turn. He will fall aways. Judas will be replaced as one of the twelve. But nobody knows that yet. At this point, all anyone knows is that Jesus called Judas to be one of His closest disciples, to be one of the twelve. And all anyone knows at this point is that Jesus called Judas to be with Him and to send him out to preach and to heal with authority.
The point is this – two things. Number one, this is an unlikely and imperfect group that Jesus called. And number two, this is who Jesus called together to build His Church. And just like those twelve tribes of Israel, the names of the tribes in the book of Joshua, the ones who settled the promised land, and they were no model citizens either, but God gave them an inheritance. He gave those tribes an inheritance in the land according to His word, according to the promise. And now here, here are twelve apostles through which Jesus is doing a new thing. He’s doing something better. Yes, there is a connection back to the ancient promise. There is a connection to the promised land and to the covenant people. But something bigger, something better is in store. And that something bigger, something better is going to be accomplished through Jesus and through those He chose to be His apostles.
And in fact, when we get to that something bigger, when we get to that something better, something new, when we get to the true fulfillment of the land promise in the book of Revelation, what do we find? It’s a new heaven and a new earth. It’s the new Jerusalem. And Revelation 21 describes the Church. It describes this holy city coming down from heaven in symbolic and figurative language. And it says there in the city there’s a great high wall with twelve gates. And on the gates, the names of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel are inscribed. But there are also twelve other names. And we’re told in Revelation 21:14 that the wall of the city had twelve foundations and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles.
You see, this is what Jesus is doing in Mark chapter 3. God’s ancient promise to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, His promise to the people of Israel, the promise which found its initial yet incomplete fulfillment in the land of Canaan in the days of Joshua, Jesus is bringing about something new that includes not only the believers from the twelve tribes in the old covenant era, but also believers in the new covenant built on the teaching and the ministry of the twelve apostles. “Behold, I am making all things new.” And in the new heavens and the new earth, it’s the nations that bring glory and honor to the Lamb that was slain, to Jesus on the throne. And there’s rest. There’s rest. This is the promise in the book of Revelation. “The dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them and they will be His people. He will wipe away every tear and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” That’s the promise. The promise and the place and the people. That is the kingdom of God. In fact, that is a common definition for the kingdom of God – that it is God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule and blessing.
Now go back to that question from the very beginning. Verse 4, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” The Pharisees missed it, didn’t they? The Pharisees were not the answer. No, the Pharisees, they angered Jesus. They grieved Him. We’re told in verse 5 that Jesus was grieved at their hardness of heart. And when Jesus restored the hand of the man with the withered hand, what did the Pharisees do? Verse 6 says that after Jesus did good to him, after Jesus healed him on the Sabbath, verse 6, “The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.” You see, they wanted to destroy Jesus for doing good and for bringing rest on the Sabbath. And neither the Pharisees nor the Herodians brought rest. Here they were, the religious leaders and the political leaders of the people of Israel, and they could not do it – neither the Pharisees nor the Herodians were able to fulfill the promise. But Jesus does. Jesus is the one. Jesus is the one who can do what neither the Pharisees nor the Herodians could do. Jesus is the one who can do what only God can do. And that is to bring true rest – rest for your souls.
Now one more link. One more link back to the promised land and to the books, the early books of the Old Testament. Who was it that led the people of Israel into the land? It was Joshua. Joshua led them in and Joshua allocated to them their inheritance. Now who is Jesus? Jesus is Joshua. Literally, Jesus’ name in Hebrew would have been “Joshua, Yeshua.” “Jesus” or “Yesus” is Greek for the Hebrew name, “Joshua.” Yeshua – “Yahweh is salvation. God is salvation.” That’s who Jesus is. “His name shall be Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” You see this? Jesus is the new and better Joshua. Jesus is the one who brings new and better and lasting rest. The writer of Hebrews talks about how Joshua was not able to actually bring that rest. That’s why there still remains a Sabbath rest. When we come to these verses and we find the promise and the place and the people, we find the kingdom of God, and we find that rest that is the deepest desire of our heart, and who is going to bring it to us but Jesus and Jesus alone? He will save you from your sins and give you rest.
The classic example is that of Augustine. Someone has said that in his confessions is one of the greatest sentences ever written where Augustine says at the beginning of his concessions, “You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” And Augustine, you see, he was restless. And he tells us that he delighted, that what he delighted in was to love and to be loved. And yet he could not discern between what he called the brightness of love and the fog of lust. And it produced all manner of unholy desires in him. He says that those unholy desires boiled up into immorality and he was sick, he was sick of welldoing. It tells us that he and some friends, they went and sneaked into a pear orchard to steal a bunch of pears, just for the sake of stealing them. After they had stolen, they just threw them away and let them rot. He said that they did what they liked because it was misliked. Pride, ambition, luxury, waste, greed, anger, learning, sport, all of it, Augustine calls, “a twisted and tangled knottiness that no one can unravel.” “But with Thee,” he says, “with God is perfect rest and life unchanging.” And at the end of his confessions, he writes about rest. And his prayer is, “O Lord God, give peace unto us, the peace of rest, the peace of Sabbath, which has no end.”
And that’s the rest that Jesus, the better Joshua, gives to all those who rest in Him, who place their trust in Him as Lord and Savior. “Are you weary, heavy laden? Come and lay your burdens down. Jesus calls you, Jesus draws you. Rest in Him. Are you waiting in your sorrows for this broken world to heal? He is coming, soon returning. Rest in Him.”
Let’s pray.
Our Father, we ask that You would break us from all the folly and fragile things that we lean on and cling to to seek joy and satisfaction and rest. Would You help us instead to cling to Christ by faith, knowing that by Your grace You have accomplished redemption and salvation, that Your death and resurrection have overcome the grave and all those things that rob our rest and joy. Would You help us to see Him, to trust in Him, to rest in Him, not anything that we can do or have done. “Nothing in our hands we bring, simply to the cross we cling.” We pray all of this in Jesus’ name, amen.