CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 6
What is the connection between chapters 4, 5, and 6? Would you give a sketch of this chapter?
This chapter is, in a certain way, complete in itself. It gives the state of things in Israel in which the testimony of God was sent forth by the Lord. Previous to this we have had the Lord Himself sowing the seed, and dealing with individuals in delivering power; then in this chapter the disciples are sent out. But in the beginning of the chapter people are brought to a point, and they have to decide as to it.
Was what the Lord was doing the intervention of God?
It involved the question of who Christ was, and in a way this point comes in for all our souls. You have not merely to look at things in a human way as to the benefit you get, but, like the poor woman with the issue of blood, you have to know the Person you get it from.
The Lord here sends forth His disciples, and no doubt a measure of notoriety was connected with their preaching. People took notice of them, and of what was being done by them, and that brings out the actual state of things in which their testimony was being carried out.
An important point as to this testimony as presented [p. 132] in Mark is, that the Lord brings God into the whole scene of man’s misery. You do not get details so much, nor their bearing in a dispensational way, but in the service of the Lord is seen God’s way of dealing with man’s ruin and misery, and with the state of things then prevailing. Hence in Him there is the testimony of what God is.
We may see the misery of man and God coming in to meet it; but another thing is this, man being utterly ruined, God’s heart of love moves for itself towards man, but it is with the object of producing a response in the heart of man to Himself, and God must begin and carry on that work. It is that God may be known in the soul, and that He may get a response to His love, but if He is to get a response it must be by His working in the soul to produce it.
The mission of the disciples as looked at here, is wider than in Matthew. They preached that men should repent, but in Israel it takes the character of a final testimony which discovers the remnant, and if their testimony was not received, they were to shake off the dust under their feet for a testimony against them.
Many years ago, Mr. Darby said, ‘God commits everything to the responsibility of man, but He makes it good in a remnant;’ that is what you get here.
What we find next is, the state of Israel, which is apostate. Herodias represents the apostate state of Israel: as you get in Isaiah, “Thou wentest to the king with ointment”, etc. Now, you get the same principle in the church, it is united to the world, such is the state of things. Just as Jezebel moved Ahab to destroy the saints in that day, so it is with Herodias; and thus we come to the actual state of things in which the disciples’ testimony was borne. Then the Lord takes His disciples apart privately into a desert place.
There are three reasons given for His going into the desert. In Matthew it is dispensational on account of the murder of His witness; in Mark it is on account of [p. 133] the testimony of God. He gets the disciples apart from the spirit of the world, “the many going and coming”, into the quiet of a desert place. In Luke they are in the privacy of His own company. There they are instructed in the character of their ministry. The Lord goes forth and meets the multitude, and moved with compassion He begins to teach them many things, and the disciples are to be ministers of the compassion of the Shepherd of Israel.
He then constrains the disciples to go to the other side, and they encounter the opposition of Satan, not now using the world power, but as prince of the power of the air. The Lord goes up into a mountain; there was intercession on high and that secures all. What you get specially in Mark is, that the Lord comes to them, for us it is what the Lord speaks of in John 14, “I will come to you”. It is not Peter leaving the ship to go to Him, but the Lord coming to them in the midst of all that was contrary. In John 13 you get the enmity of man and all the state of things here, and in chapter 14 you get the Lord on high. Everything is secured there, and we have a place there, but we get His help by the Spirit; we get assistance. He comes to us, and this we apprehend by the Spirit.
In the beginning of chapter 6 it says, “And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them”, but here at the close the Lord comes back, so to speak, into the world, and there is nothing but blessing. The point for us is to get to the Lord, to get with Him apart and learn His mind, then to be able to come out in ministry in the present state of things.
It is a remarkable statement, ‘making it good in a remnant;’ the resource of the remnant is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the source, and should be characteristic at the end.
Apart from the Spirit of God you could not know the Lord coming to us. We have Him as the resource.
[p. 134] Was the Lord limited in His service by the unbelief of those among whom He laboured?
It looks like it. He could not do any mighty work there, except laying His hands on a few sick folk. It certainly held good in the ministry of the twelve among the Jews, and it holds good in Christendom. There is a difference between the testimony rendered among the people who are professedly the people of God, and the testimony to the heathen. You have to take that into account in connection with service.
In the one case you are affected by the unbelief of people: you would not be affected by the attitude of the heathen, they were readier to listen than the Jews were. The testimony of God is going on in the midst of a people professedly the people of God, but who are practically apostate from the truth; the consequence is you are not to be surprised if you meet with unbelief.
Would you say that the apostasy in 2 Thessalonians exists today?
In principle it does, but it is not full blown. It has not yet taken an open manifest form. Professedly Christ is honoured, but in principle Christendom is apostate. They have turned back to Judaism.
So now the testimony brings the remnant to light.
The good are being gathered into vessels. What is going on today is selection.
The testimony is very testing, as it is being used of God to bring the church, that is, the elect to light; the light is going out to separate from the mass of profession. A great many of us have been brought to light in a way which we would not have been, had it not been for the Spirit of God. Our being here this morning is the effect and result of the Spirit of God, or else we should not have been here. Some of us were very well content with what we were in, and very unwilling to leave it, but the astonishing thing is to see a man go back to it.
Would the parable of the virgins apply to what you say?
[p. 135] Yes; there comes a moment when nothing is of any account except the Spirit of God.
Take the character of the present day, higher criticism and the like, you can only meet all that sort of thing by the power of the Spirit of God. No human ability or cleverness could meet it, it can only be met by the Spirit of God, and very many Christians in the world are shaking in their shoes for fear that the foundations of Christianity are going, they are afraid of its being invalidated.
Is the present condition of things the consequence of rejection of the Spirit?
Yes, and what we have to do is to fall back upon the Spirit.
We have an indication of this in Isaiah 59, “When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him”.
Exactly, and Israel’s power is our power today.
The only man who can help saints today is the spiritual man.
We do not want higher criticism and so on. If you want to find evidences of Scripture, seek them in Scripture. People do not always attack Scripture from the outside, but when they question Scripture they do so from Scripture, and therefore you have to meet them from Scripture. They know nothing of Scripture spiritually, and our wisdom is in meeting them by a spiritual apprehension of Scripture.
The sorrowful thing is, there is scarcely a pulpit in the country where the authority of the word of God is not undermined as to eternal punishment, and so on. The so-called teachers accommodate themselves to the times, and they are regular traitors.
How is it so many people are caught by the doctrine of non-eternal punishment?
Simply because they look at things in a human way, instead of a divine way.
Can anything shake the foundation of God?
[p. 136] It has been tried very hard. What we want is the seal of it.
Truth carries its own weight. When the truth was here in the Lord He had no support from the religious world; He stood simply in the power of the truth and nobody could resist it. The same thing may be the case now, that is the character of the standard that the Spirit of God lifts up. You yourself present the truth in having your loins girt about with truth, you have the power in yourself.
Is it illustrated in that way by Stephen?
Yes, in that way the thing is simply irresistible.
In connection with the gospel of Mark we had better take up the three chapters in conjunction, 6, 7, 8.
We may regard these three chapters as being the education of the apostles for their testimony. Their testimony in chapter 6 was final. John was killed, so that in that line of things it was very evident that nothing could come out, that is, with Christ after the flesh. Properly speaking, the apostles became really the continuation of Christ Himself, in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Why were the seventy sent out after the twelve?
That proved that the testimony was going out wider, but it did not in any way invalidate the testimony of the twelve. It was consequent upon Christ going into glory.
Paul very carefully identifies himself with the twelve, but there is also his own special testimony.
Is his name with the twelve in Revelation 21?
No. When the twelve were preaching, Paul was persecuting. The heavenly city comes out on the basis of the twelve. Paul’s testimony had another result in connection with the city from that of the twelve; it does not set aside the city in any way, but brings in another element in connection with the city.
What is the element Paul brings in?
Peter’s testimony was to an exalted Christ and the [p. 137] presence of the Holy Spirit is witness to it, but with regard to Paul’s testimony the essence of it is that he develops what was here consequent upon the coming of the Holy Spirit. He brings out all the counsel of God in connection with the Son of God: all the counsel of God was brought out through the Holy Spirit being here.
John’s testimony comes in more in connection with the Jew, to confirm what had come out by Paul. The effect of Paul’s ministry is to carry the saints to heaven, whereas, John’s brings God to the earth, and brings the city out of heaven.
Is not the heavenly city also the bride, the Lamb’s wife?
The bride is the heavenly city.
There is a thought abroad today that the bride is Israel.
It is a very serious matter, because it brings in a divergence between the teaching of the twelve and Paul’s teaching. Peter, Paul, and John all taught Christianity; they were working really to the same end; though they give different phases of the same thing, it is all to one end. It only betrays the very greatest ignorance to bring in a distinction in that way as to the work of the apostles.
There is another thing, namely, the determined effort of Satan to lower the privileges of the saints in the present day, so that people may go on comfortably with the world. If we could but present Christ to souls, to get them delivered from the system around them things would become clear to them. They want their souls lifted out of the world.
It is very important for us to see the place the Lord takes in these chapters. He is outside of everything political, the order of the world, in a wilderness (chapter 6). In the next, chapter 7, we have the ecclesiastical order, and we get the complete exposure of the whole system of ecclesiasticism. The Lord shows the principle at work.
[p. 138] They taught for commandments the doctrines of men, making the word of God of none effect through their tradition.
And it goes still deeper in the house. The Lord says, “There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him; but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man”. What really goes to the root of the matter, is what the Lord brings out here; man is defiled from within. He is corrupt at the core, and they were trying to gloss this over with the commandments of men.
How does the Syrophenician woman come in here? In the way of contrast?
The Lord really has to do with a Gentile, and that is an important point. There was a very good lesson to be learnt in it. The Lord comes to this poor woman, and the wonderful thing is that He found faith there.
That proves that the work of God was going on outside of Israel.
Exactly, it was a great lesson for the disciples in the corrupt state of Israel, that faith was found outside of Israel. It was part of their training for their testimony.
Could you give us the marks of their education?
The Lord gives them to see the character of the moment. He exposes to them everything political and ecclesiastical, and then He shows His own position. He takes the position of administrator, and thus they come in as intermediaries to dispense the blessing of the Lord. They had all their resources in Christ. They had to go on independent of everything around them as the ministers of His bounty.
If you take people today, ministers and the like, they want a good deal of recognition on the part of man, and accommodate themselves to the existing state of things. A real servant of the Lord would not care to be in any arrangement of man’s; he is the servant of the Lord’s bounty.
The apostles did not learn these lessons very well?
[p. 139] Not at the time perhaps, but the effect comes out afterwards in the Acts of the Apostles.
What is the idea of the loaves and fishes? Was it the making use of what was there under their hands?
People go far afield to try and get something to suit them for ministry. If they had dependence on the Lord they would find ability where they did not expect it. The first men sent forth by the Lord were Galileans, but they turned from their fishing to be servants of the Lord, who Himself fitted them for it.
There is another idea connected with it. What light you get in the Old Testament would be very small if you had not the New Testament. The disciples had a certain amount of truth that they learned from the Old Testament, which you might look at as the five loaves, but when they brought it to the Lord and let Him fill it out — He fills out all Scripture — it becomes sufficient for their ministry. Look at the millions and millions of souls that have been blessed through the supply that has come in through the Lord. What was so feebly apprehended in the Old Testament is connected now with the Lord, and you will never get to the end of it. The disciples had with them certain truth, and the Lord says, “bring it to me”, then He looks up to heaven and connects it with heaven, and now you see what becomes of it, a full result, the whole Church in glory; that is the result, because Christ is the filling out of all that Scripture speaks of.
Does the Lord say, “Give ye them to eat”, that they might find Him to be the resource?
He will put them in that place. What they had was converted into very great abundance in the hand of the Lord.
What is the meaning of the fragments being over?
It only shows how the means were multiplied in the hands of the Lord.
You have to take into account that they had something in their hands, He says, “Give ye them to eat”.
[p. 140] In a sense they had to act the part of the scribe in regard to the kingdom; they had to bring forth things new and old.
They had a certain amount of knowledge of Christ, they were acquainted with Old Testament truth as bringing out what Christ was on earth, but now He is outside of things here altogether in chapter 6.
This seems to give us great encouragement to go on in view of all that is round about.
They were to be thoroughly efficient; you must have Christ. He takes the place of administration on high, and you cannot accept support of any kind whatever from earth. The resources of Christ are communicated from Him in the power of the Holy Spirit. One should have the sense that one’s resource is in the Lord Himself. If you are ready enough to serve, you are entirely independent of human support.
Not only is Christ outside of the state of things here, but He is outside of man. He is outside the human element altogether. The great difficulty with us is to see that the human element will not do.
There is another thing we find in the distributing of the loaves. We have had in chapter 6 the perfection of administration; that came out at the beginning with the twelve; we have not got that now as in apostolic days. But in the second miracle with the seven loaves, what comes out is this, after grace to the Gentile, the Lord goes back into the land of Israel, that is, to administration upon earth. You find that there is a double testimony to His administration, and here it is spiritual perfection, and that is a very great comfort for us. We are not at the beginning but at the close, and the Lord is the same in compassion and power. The seven baskets in the second miracle were much greater baskets than the twelve, though there is not the idea of administration in man, yet the result is greater — certainly it was so morally.
Where are we outside of man here?
[p. 141] The Lord warns them against the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod. He warns them against the working of the human element.
Here the disciples had but one loaf, and that was Christ. They should have known what was in Christ, and should not have been looking to their own resources at all. Afterwards Christ leads a blind man outside the town to open his eyes, that is, away from man; but the disciples really did not see men clearly, and Peter puts the Lord in chapter 9 on a level with Moses and Elias.
The idea of the human element comes in in connection with the leaven of Herod.
That is the human element in a bad sense.
There is the tendency to humanise things, to reduce everything to the natural understanding. When the Lord began to speak to them about the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod, they thought He referred to the natural bread.
Why is there the leaven of Herod in Mark and the leaven of the Sadducees in Matthew?
The leaven of Herod is, the spirit of time-serving.
What is the leaven of the Pharisees?
Orthodoxy.
And of the Sadducees?
Rationalism. The leaven of Herod is accommodation to the world.
Is not the position illustrated by the Lord taking this man outside the town? That illustrated the Lord’s position. He was outside of man, but at first the man saw nothing clearly, he saw men as trees walking, but in chapter 9 they saw no man any more.
The disciples themselves saw things indistinctly; their vision was not clear. It gives to us a picture of the apprehension of the disciples at the moment. They came under the second touch afterwards. The truth is this, they got no clear spiritual apprehension of things until they had the Holy Spirit, then they saw every man clearly.
In the history of souls today is it so?
[p. 142] Undoubtedly. Now all closes up with the most important instruction of all, namely, that they had to be in accord with the death and resurrection of Christ, and that is true discipleship.
“If any man serve me, let him follow me”.
That is the principle now. No man can serve Christ efficiently if he is not in accord with His death and resurrection, not simply has accepted it, but is in accord with it. The disciples had to accept the fact of His death and resurrection, and nothing was more painful to them than the thought of His death.
You see it in Paul, “Bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus”.
What is the difference between losing his life in verse 35, and losing his soul in verse 36?
There is a little ambiguity about it by reason of the same word being used as both life and soul.
Everything has to be on the ground of resurrection really; that is the point.
Why does the Lord personate the gospel in verse 35? “For my sake and the gospel’s”.
The special point in Mark is the testimony, it is the personal service of Christ and the apostles. In the last chapter you get that completed. There is no continuing commission. “They went everywhere preaching the word”, etc. They went and the Lord wrought with them. It is the record of their service.
It is difficult to say much as to the difference between life and soul seeing that the same word in Greek is employed for both. ‘If a man should gain the whole world, and lose his own life’, means life morally.
There is what you get in the Psalms. The truth of resurrection dawns upon us there, but the first idea of a Jew was to save his own soul or life, now the Lord reveals that if he loses his own soul or life he gains it. You have to think of, and take in Jewish ideas, and also to take into account that this was a moment of transition.
You do not get resurrection so much in the second [p. 143] book of Psalms, but the remnant look to being set up on earth. In the first book the light of it comes out fully, “Thou wilt not leave my soul in hades”, etc. Here we get what is analogous to what is in the first book of Psalms.
A man might lose his life in a natural sense, but he gains it in a moral sense.
Is it the same as John 6?
There is a little more light comes in there.
It is perfectly intelligible that in the first book of Psalms there is more in regard of Christ than there is in any other part of the Psalms. If anything was to be effected for Israel Christ must die and rise again, and Israel has to come in on the platform of resurrection. It is all the principle of life out of death.
Would it be right to use verse 38 in preaching the gospel?
It would be all right, but it is not gospel.
Well, it might make a man anxious if it is not the gospel; it might prepare the ground.
Nothing is much more important in preaching than knowing that you are dealing with moral beings who have a conscience, thus there is a sense of responsibility to God. I should seek to appeal to the conscience.
Paul’s appeal to Agrippa was very beautiful.
An appeal to conscience would leave a man hopeless but that God has come in in grace.