Exodus 39:1-40:38, Mark 1:1-28, Psalms 35:1-16, Proverbs 9:11-12
Today is the 15th day of February. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian, it is wonderful to be here with you today. Hope you had a nice Valentine’s Day yesterday. We concluded the book of Matthew. So, the first gospel, the first book of the New Testament yesterday. So, when we get to the New Testament today we’ll be beginning the book of Mark and we’ll talk about that. And today we will be concluding the second book of the Old Testament, the book of Exodus and we’ll move on from there tomorrow. So, we’re reading from the Contemporary English Version this week and we’ll conclude the book of Exodus with chapters 39 and 40 today.
Introduction to the book of Mark:
Okay. So, that concluded the book of Exodus and like we said a minute ago, we finished the book of Matthew yesterday, which brings us to the gospel of Mark. And, so, we should know right off the bat that Mark was not a disciple of Jesus, he wasn’t one of the 12 and he wasn’t an apostle. Actually he was more of a long-term disciple of Peter and we first see him show up in the book of Acts. We also know him as John Mark and he lived in Jerusalem and came from a fairly wealthy family. His mother’s name was Mary and she had a big house and she had a servant named Rhoda. I mean we learn all of this from the book of Acts. She was an early believer and opened her home to other early believers and our church tradition tells us that her home may have been the place of the upper room where the Holy Spirit was poured out on the early believers after Jesus ascension. Obviously, that’s not explicit in the Bible, it’s tradition but totally plausible. So, Mark was around all this all his life, like even as a boy and would’ve been part of the first generation of children that were raised up to know Jesus was. So, we’ll get to the story soon enough, once we finish the Gospels a little bit more towards the summertime, but the apostle Peter was captured by Herod and was gonna be executed by Herod because Herod had put some other Christians to death and this was pleasing the religious leaders and so on and so forth and so he planned to execute Peter but an angel came and sprung Peter from jail. And, so, it was to John Mark’s house, right, to Mary’s large home that that Peter went first. And all the believers there were praying for Peter earnestly, that God would deliver him, and God answered that prayer by sending an angel to lead Peter out of jail. And, so, Peter comes to John Mark’s house and Rhoda the servant girl comes to answer the door and she sees him, and she slams the door in his face, basically because she can’t believe it’s Peter. And, so, we’ll get to that story soon enough but that gives a little bit about who Mark is. And Mark had a cousin and his name is Barnabas and Barnabas was a dear friend of the apostle Paul. So, Mark actually goes with Barnabas and Paul on Paul’s first missionary journey. So, this there’s a pedigree here and church tradition tells us that he went all over the place as an interpreter even for the apostle Peter in Italy and even in Rome and everywhere that they go Peter shares the gospel of Jesus Christ. So, Mark has heard the story told by Peter over and over and over everywhere that they go as Peter is doing his evangelistic work and then Mark remembers all of this and recalls it and maybe even at some point was asked to write it down so people could remember all of Peter’s story and eventually does. And, so, in a lot of ways we can consider Mark to be somewhat the gospel according to Peter. And, I mean, nearly all biblical scholars agree that the gospel of Mark was the first gospel written and definitely the earliest gospel found in the New Testament. And it’s from the gospel of Mark that Matthew and Luke draw a lot of their material and that is why Matthew, Mark, and Luke are known as the synoptic Gospels because they share a lot of the same material. Although Mark’s gospel is the earliest most rudimentary of the Gospels. And even Greek scholars look at the gospel of Mark which was written in Greek and would say like, you know, it’s like an elementary school level language, it’s written really roughly, like its not written beautifully, as nice prose, it’s actually clunky, which actually kind of makes it beautiful because it’s like what were about to do is read the first written account of Jesus life and ministry. So, let’s settle into that and just let it speak to us, let it wash into our lives. Ans, so, we begin. Mark chapter 1 verses 1 through 28.
Prayer:
Father, we thank you for your word and we heed the voice of wisdom today. “If you follow me”, She tells us, “we’ll live a long time.” And if we have good sense that’s good for us but if you don’t and we fall into arrogance then we’re just hurting ourselves. So, Holy Spirit, plant that in our lives. We learned yesterday from the book of Proverbs that we begin by honoring you Lord, this is the beginning of wisdom, but not the end. It’s just the beginning when we honor you. We’ve taken the first step toward being wise, toward living a wise life; however, if we will follow your Holy Spirit’s guidance in our lives and we continue to honor you and continue to listen to the voice of wisdom and obey then we’re going to be the ones to benefit. Help us to do that Lord because so often we listen to the counsel of the scoffer or the mocker and we’re anywhere but next to wisdom. But we want to string together a series of days and weeks and months where every day we are honoring you and every day we are listening to the voice of wisdom. And if we can string these days together, then it won’t be too long before we realize that we are living within wisdom, we are living wise lives, and we are becoming wise. We need this. As we just stand here and look back over the seasons of our live it is so starkly apparent which seasons we didn’t practice wisdom at all and which seasons did. Now we want the rest of our lives to be one long continuous season of wisdom where we continue to grow not only in wisdom but in awareness and vigilance so that we are wise, so that we have grown up, so that we become a mature son or daughter of the king. Help us Holy Spirit, come lead us in the way of wisdom we pray. In Jesus’ name we ask. Amen.
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And that’s it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.