This is a sort of “part two” on the Parable of the Sower as we delve into Isaiah 6 to talk about parallels between God warning His people about upcoming disasters during the reign of King Uzziah and Yeshua crying out to first-century Israel. In both situations, decisions had to be made and loyalties decided that would govern the fate of God’s people. But this wasn’t a “back then” sort of thing–this is an everyday decision.
transcript below
**********
Mark 19—The Secret of the Kingdom
10 And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. 11 And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, 12 so that “‘they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven.’” 13 And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?
Alrighty then, this is the promised meat of last week’s sandwich. Remember that Mark is a gourmet and loves to make sandwiches, we will see a lot of them throughout his Gospel. We had the sandwich of the rejection of Yeshua’s/Jesus’s family and tucked neatly into the middle of it we had the Beelzebul controversy. Last week, we had the “bread” of the Parable of the Sower and the explanation and in the middle of it, Yeshua talks about who can and cannot hear and understand His parables. We will be going back and delving into the incident with Yeshua’s family and the Jerusalem Scribes this week, because that provides the background, as well as Isaiah 6. So much diverse material to pull together—can she do it? We’ll see!
Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com
All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. I don’t really care just as long as you aren’t one of those people who think that Hawkeye and Falcon aren’t real superheroes, because a gal really does have to draw the line somewhere. A list of my resources can be found attached to the transcript for Part two of this series at theancientbridge.com.
Let’s start out by talking about Isaiah 6, which Yeshua makes reference to:
6 In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. 3 And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” 4 And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. 5 And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” 6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”
8 And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.” 9 And he said, “Go, and say to this people: “‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’ 10 Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.” 11 Then I said, “How long, O Lord?” And he said: “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is a desolate waste, 12 and the Lord removes people far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land. 13 And though a tenth remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak, whose stump remains when it is felled.” The holy seed is its stump.
Long section of Scripture, I know, but I so dislike it when people just quote the bit they want to teach, or misrepresent, out of context. It’s important to have the whole thing because here we have another reference to seed, this time “holy seed” being the remnant of Israel. Prophetic books are often recorded out of order—just check out Jeremiah sometime and it’s like being in a time machine back and forth across the reigns of different kings. The order may offend our modern sensibilities, but the ancients didn’t have that problem. They were interested in the story and not in precision. We could learn a lot from that. Mark certainly doesn’t like to stick to established timelines because it gets in the way of his overall narrative of themes. If God had wanted it all chronologically arranged, I imagine it would be, right?
Now, if you listened to or read my series on Isaiah 40-55, I talked a lot about how Isaiah is set up. Chapters 1-39 are all about, “Get your act together, or else,” and 40-55 is talking to the people after the “or else” has happened and as they are nearing the end of their seventy years of captivity. And they still aren’t accepting responsibility that what has happened isn’t a failure of Yahweh but solely their own failure because of their sins against Him. But this is before, the year Uzziah died which happened at some point in the 8th century BCE. This was the same year that Pekah became king of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and he was the second to last king before they were carried away by the Assyrians. This is roughly twenty-five years before that happened.
But Isaiah preached to a generation who were not interested in waiting on, trusting in, or hearing from Yahweh. Uzziah was a king who started out well, and of course, the people would follow that lead, but he pridefully entered the Holy Place and burned incense to Yahweh, which was forbidden to anyone but the priest and Yahweh struck him with leprosy and he never recovered from it. So, we have a situation here where the nation is in rebellion and heading into the final rulers. Yahweh is issuing His final pleas and warnings through His prophets and the situation is becoming desperate. They are repeatedly told to hear, to listen, to obey, to submit, to trust, to wait, to do almost everything except what it is that they are actually doing. And Yahweh is beginning to draw a line between insiders and outsiders—between the remnant and the rabble, so to speak because unlike the first century Jews who were at least really trying hard to keep the commandments but had fallen into the trap of gratuitous hatred and fighting and even killing one another and neglecting the least of these, these guys just weren’t interested in anything Yahweh wanted. At all. Their punishment, therefore, is just beyond the pale in comparison to the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE and the subsequent banishment of the Jews from Jerusalem in 135 CE after the Bar Kochba revolt. Yahweh says to Isaiah:
8 And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.” 9 And he said, “Go, and say to this people: “‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’ 10 Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”
What’s important to see here is the question/response motif. Yahweh asks for a volunteer and Isaiah responds, eagerly. Isaiah has eyes to see and ears to hear. Isaiah receives understanding directly from Yahweh because of his response to Yahweh’s call. This doesn’t mean that Isaiah becomes suddenly omniscient and knowing everything but it means that Isaiah has been granted insider status with Yahweh where he will not be among those who are deafened, blinded and unperceptive to what is going on. Is he the only one in all of Israel? No, we hear throughout the writings of this time about thousands who are also receptive and listening. There is always a faithful remnant and Yahweh will leave their ears and eyes open. BUT it required a proper response from that remnant. As in the case with Elijah’s complaint that he is the only man in Israel faithful to Yahweh, Yahweh corrects his misconception—“Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.” (I Kings 19:18) There are always people who hear clearly—not perfectly, but clearly—and who are granted understanding—not understanding everything, but understanding—and the people who believe they are part of that number very often are not!
So, insiders and outsiders. Insiders are given understanding, not stricken with spiritual blindness, or spiritual deafness—not because they are important people but based upon how they respond to Yahweh’s message in their time. In this time, the message was very difficult—the nation was headed in a disastrous direction. They had a choice—to cry, “Peace and safety” or to repent and believe in the words of Yahweh’s warning through His prophets. They made the tough choice to believe that Yahweh was better than how he was being misrepresented by His representatives. Yahweh rewarded them with His covenant faithfulness.
In the first century, Yahweh again challenges His people by sending His one unique Son with an entirely different message—yet a message also prophesied in Isaiah. Yahweh’s Kingdom is now breaking into their reality, but it won’t live up to their very specific expectations of national independence and the destruction of their human enemies. This messenger is instead battling those things which mar, corrupt, and devastate people. Instead of battling the Romans, He is taking on the demonic powers that have the Romans enslaved (which will be a huge theme next week). He isn’t bringing in the wealth of the nations but instead healing the sick, the crippled, and accepting the outcast back into the fold. He is not making the community victorious militarily; He is making the community whole. In fact, He is redefining the community and drawing lines between insiders and outsiders based entirely on how they react to His message. He references Isaiah 6 here because He is taking on the role of Yahweh speaking to His people. Instead of asking, “Whom shall I send?” He calls twelve and gathers around Him a great crowd of others who also believe. But the message, as a whole, is mainly the same. “Go out and preach to this people, challenge them to go on ignoring me, to their own peril, and if they do choose to ignore me then they will be granted outsider status. They will no longer hear the voices of my prophets—their words will go in one ear and come right out the other. The truth will be right in front of them, but they will not perceive it. If they want to shun me, I will help them do it.”
10 And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. 11 And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, 12 so that “‘they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven.’” 13 And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?
Yeshua, right here, tells His inner circle that secrets of the Kingdom are for insiders and can only come directly from Him and insider status is granted only to those with a receptive heart toward Yeshua. But let’s backtrack a few weeks here real quick. At the end of Chapter Three, we see Yeshua’s family come from Nazareth, His brothers and mother and they make a point of standing outside instead of coming inside. As His family, they had the honor rating among the crowd to be allowed in, but they did not choose to go inside. Inside, Yeshua is teaching and some Scribes from Jerusalem are among those gathered and they have accused Him of being in league with Beelzebul, the prince of demons and somehow, he is granting Yeshua authority to put on a good show. So, we have Yeshua and His message rejected by those who know Him best (and are saying He is out of his mind) and by those in authority (who claim He operates according to demonic authority) and accepted mostly by a group of utter strangers. That there are a great many of them is evident. He is popular with everyone at this point except for the authorities and His own people. But the choices as to being inside and outside are all personal choices, all based on whether or not they looked at Yeshua and heard His message and saw His works and whether or not they decided to recognize the character of God displayed (or not) before them. In Isaiah’s time, it came down to “Who do you think God is and what do you believe His works and message are,” and in Yeshua’s day, it came down to the same thing. Who would recognize the God of Israel in this man who broke many man-made rules in order to heal, deliver, and accept the unacceptable? This man who wasn’t interested in slaughtering the nations but instead bringing them into the fold. A lot of it came down to being unwilling to let go of their hatred—and we suffer from the same problem today. To whom do we bar the door of the Kingdom of Heaven because we are not interested in their politics, or their past, or their particular sin struggles? Are we scribes and Pharisees or are we the crowds? And if we are among the crowd, are we the ones who are everywhere to be found when we need healing or deliverance or a blessing and nowhere to be found at the foot of the Cross when it becomes dangerous? And if we count ourselves as disciples, we might just find ourselves among those who lash out violently with the sword, or want to destroy a city in our anger, or run when times get tough, or grow resentful when we have the same problems as everyone else—mistakenly thinking that we somehow have earned better. Responding properly to the message is a year by year, day by day, moment by moment endurance challenge. I have had seasons where I was just not responding, and it became more and more difficult for me to perceive Him—that was on me. I have had other times of incredible intimacy with Him. I have had other times when I was so wrapped up in my own anger and bitterness that I really thought I was hearing very clearly—but I wasn’t. It’s a challenge. We can never assume that we are currently a part of that mega-insider group where the Kingdom is being revealed to us because sometimes, we position ourselves in ways that we cannot hear it. Like, say, when we are in the Torah Terrorist phase. I mean, dang. I thought I had it all figured out but I was so full of myself that the Holy Spirit couldn’t even get a room in the same city, much less get in a word edge-wise to talk with me about my appallingly prideful and unloving behavior. But man, oh man, I thought I had an inside track. I would blush but I have had to learn to laugh at myself instead.
And this brings us back to the Parable of the sower last week. The sower, Yeshua, is generous in the extreme, throwing the seed, the Word, absolutely everywhere. It’s the soil that’s the problem and like how agriculturally we have seasons where the seed always needs to be resown and the soil always needs to be reploughed, we are like that as well. If we don’t keep plowing and getting rid of those rocks and thorns, the soil isn’t going to keep accepting the seed. Now, that doesn’t mean a loss of salvation but definitely a loss of spiritual perception. There is more than one way to walk away from God. Heck, you can read your Bible three hours a day as a habit and be as far from Him as the east is from the west. It’s the—you guessed it—response to the Word not the ingesting of it. We can take it in endlessly like a great academic quest, but if it does not change the way we interact with people it is a useless quest.
Let’s finally start going through this short section one verse at a time within the context of everything we’ve talked about today:
10 And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables.
So, Yeshua has left the main crowds behind. He was in the boat, sitting and teaching. Perhaps He has retreated to a more private setting and everyone has gone home to work and/or eat. But He isn’t really alone—the Twelve are with Him plus “those around Him.” Is this the seventy-two we see later? Is this the “them” that listened as He was teaching despite the opposition of His own family and the scribes? Quite probably, as they were the ones singled out as the ones “doing the will of His Father”—“His brothers, sisters and mother.” But this isn’t quite the intimate gathering we usually imagine, like up on the mountain when the Twelve are commissioned and there are, in theory, only thirteen people there. Perhaps this is in the courtyard of Peter’s mother-in-law’s home. But, regardless, these gathered people plus the Twelve, they ask Him about the meaning of the parables—and remember from last week, the language makes it clear that there were more than one but Mark only records the one.
11 And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables,
The word for mystery is mysterion, a well-known word in Greek which often is used to refer to the mystery cults, of which we know next to nothing because, I mean, duh—they were mystery cults. Of course, Roman Mithraism is the most famous and I am going to just insert this here. If anyone tries to teach you about Mithraism and calls him Mithra, just stop listening. They haven’t studied. It’s a pet peeve of mine. That and the idea that he was born of a virgin and had twelve disciples. One, he sprang up full-grown out of a rock. Two, he isn’t recorded as having any disciples, and pretty much all the rumors out there are also totally fabricated. But that’s beside the point. Unlike our modern word mystery, which is something that we can unravel if we are clever enough, mysterion is a word that refers to something that must instead be revealed. If I was going to rewrite this in order to make more sense to a modern audience, I would put it this way, “To you has been given a revelation about the inbreaking of the reign of God into your reality, but for those outsiders who aren’t responding properly to His message, all they get are vague metaphors that won’t reveal anything except the shallowest of meanings.” In other words, God is revealing to His insiders important truths about growth and discipleship in this new reality that He will be inaugurating at the Cross (although that part is still a secret) but to outsiders all they got was a “no duh” story about agricultural realities. Let’s face it, on the surface, the Parable of the Sower is pretty much a yawn-fest. Gee, a guy wastes a bunch of seed, and not all of it takes. What an amazing revelation—not! Thanks for giving us the heads up. Dang, this will change agriculture forever…sometimes we don’t really stop and think about what it would be like without our narrator filling us in. What if we only heard half the story. Sure, it was entertainment in a time without television, but it wasn’t blowing anyone’s socks off.
12 so that “‘they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven.’”
And here, obviously, is where Yeshua alludes to but does not quote, Isaiah 6:9, which is by the way a very Jewish thing to do. They didn’t share our fussy sensibilities about absolute direct quotations but, that being said, it is not our culture so we really shouldn’t try to mimic it. And it doesn’t always mean that when it was done, it kept the spirit of the text in question or even made sense. Just check out the Dead Sea Scrolls and other sectarian writings and look at the wacky liberties they took with the Word. Extra-biblical Jewish writings after the first century also did this, to varying degrees of both good and bad sense. Yes, people have been abusing Scripture for thousands of years. But Yeshua is absolutely following the sense of Isaiah 6:9 here, really of the entire chapter, when He created varying degrees of revelation for people based upon how they are responding to God’s message. But, this verse here is also abused and has been used by dispensationalists and anti-Semites to somehow put forward the point that no Jews would perceive and no Jews would understand and no Jews would be forgiven. This, of course, only makes sense when we forget that Yeshua’s entire audience at this juncture is, in fact, very very Jewish!
Which reminds me of a funny exchange in a movie from back in the ’70s called Little Big Man, and in one scene, Jack, (played by Dustin Hoffman who is, of course, Jewish in real life) who has been living with the Cherokee since he was a boy but was “rescued” by soldiers—if I am recalling the plot correctly, is telling the very seemingly devout Mrs. Pendrake, “I love Jesus and Moses and all of them…” to which Mrs. Pendrake corrects, “There’s quite a difference. Moses was a Hebrew, but Jesus was a gentile, like you and me.” And it’s funny but it isn’t funny because that is how a lot of people were trained to look at Scripture for a long time. Not scholars, of course, but laymen and sadly quite a few pastors. But when we look at Yeshua as a Gentile, and His disciples as Gentiles (all except Judas, of course), it just warps everything. But He and His followers for the first ten years after the resurrection were almost exclusively Jews. Jews were the first evangelists, apostles, prophets, teachers and shepherds and the first martyrs. They were the first church bishops, deacons, and elders. They were just, frankly, the first! So, any idea of them, en masse, not perceiving, hearing, or understanding or being forgiven is just rooted in faulty paradigms. In fact, scholars believe that as many as 20% of first-century Jews in the Roman Empire were believers in Yeshua. This was no small number!
But there is a very real phenomenon being referred to in alluding to Isaiah and that is, again, that one’s ability to perceive is directly related to listening to Yeshua. Note that these guys didn’t magically understand the parable just because they were insiders. No, they sat at His feet and He revealed the meaning to them. Just as He does with us when we listen today, and read His words as recorded in the Gospels. There is nothing mystical about it. He gave them the interpretation!
13 And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?
A lot of people say this like He is exasperated, but I don’t think He was. I think He is proving a point. He gave the parable, but without His further guidance, they would be just as blind, deaf, and unperceiving as the outsiders. “Do you not understand this parable?” No, of course, you don’t–how could you if no one has taught you the interpretation! “How then will you understand all the parables?” You won’t. You can’t. Not on your own. You need to listen to me and stick close and keep asking me questions.
But people take this last line, How then will you understand all the parables? And reinterpret it as some sort of indication that the key to the Parable of the Sower will unlock every single parable but as I have said in the past, it doesn’t. Seed has multiple meanings not only throughout Scripture but also throughout the parables. It isn’t always the word and quite often it is people, both good and bad. BUT, that being said, this is the beginning of a new theme in Mark and that theme is growth. Our growth as disciples, the growth of the Kingdom, etc. Because growth is of utmost importance to us, we need to get this right. We need to understand (1) how we grow and (2) how the Kingdom grows.
Alright, if there is one thing I want you to remember out of the last two weeks, it is this. Insiders can become outsiders (like Judas) and outsiders can become insiders (like Yeshua’s family). Nothing is static. We can’t write anyone in or out. I’ve tried, it just doesn’t work.
Now, there are always people wanting to take advantage of words like “mystery” and they flat out ignore the fact that Yeshua interpreted His own parable and they come up with some wacky interpretations that I suppose only make sense either to 21st-century people completely devoid of Scriptural knowledge, or else people who really and truly want to believe that they know something special that, in turn, makes them special. This is how cults get started but we have to remember that Yeshua didn’t work that way. Yes, He gave His insider group special revelation but it wasn’t wacky stuff. It was very down to earth and practical, even if it was shocking and surprising. It wasn’t for the purpose of drawing people away from God and to Himself. It wasn’t for the purpose of drawing a sect out into the wilderness like the Essenes, apart from all the other Jews. It was for the purpose of creating a worldwide community of peace—peace even at the cost of His own life.
But we humans are dangerous creatures and we love the thought of being “in the know” on something deep and mysterious. It’s a sort of false, artificial, gnostic set-apartness. We get some charismatic person who tells us that he knows a bunch of secrets and he will share them with us and when we know them our eyes will be opened and we will be more like Yeshua and more pleasing to God and, well, wait a minute—is that Yeshua’s message? Salvation by knowing stuff? Salvation through allegiance to a particular teacher or denomination? Salvation based on what shape you think the earth is? No, Scripture is clear—Salvation is by allegiance alone, allegiance to God through believing His chosen messenger, Yeshua who told us to live in a certain self-sacrificing and radically giving manner.
Gosh, I’ve seen so many things over the last twenty years. Lemme see—there’s a Hebrew Roots guy out there who has since denied Yeshua as Messiah. He had this revelation that women had absolutely no relationship with God except through their husbands or father. And I read his reasoning and it was so insanely convoluted, of course, he had to ignore so much of the Bible that it would have been funny if he hadn’t roped so many people in. But he felt this special revelation set his group apart from everyone else. And that’s the problem, there is nothing so crazy that it won’t rope people in.
I once knew a guy who believed that there would be 144,000 two witnesses who would go around nuking unbelievers and apostates with fire from their mouths and this guy really wanted to be one of them. In fact, he was sure he would be. I mean, longing for the day he would get to murder people in cold blood.
Two weeks ago, one of my Facebook “friends” announced that her husband (and I use the term loosely because she was really his mistress, he had a wife and took this other much younger gal into their home of his own accord)–well, she believes that this guy is Michael the archangel and announced that everyone had better be careful about their responses or else they would be running the risk of blaspheming the Holy Spirit.
I have met or known of eleven of the two witnesses from the book of Revelation. Others who have boiled the Bible down, not to a radically loving way of life, but into number codes that reveal secrets to them. People who manipulate paleo-Hebrew to come up with secret codes. You name it, people are out there doing it and not just doing it but judging as inferior and even unsaved those who do not. But Yeshua didn’t speak in code to His insiders. He interpreted His parables for them. This isn’t an esoteric gnostic religion where we are saved by knowledge, this is a nitty-gritty practical religion that shows us how to live and how to sacrifice and how to serve and how to die on behalf of God and one another. There is no mystery. And we are supposed to be so committed to it and surrendered to it that unbelievers look at us joyful and self-sacrificing in the midst of trials and say, “They’re different! The world needs more people like that! I aspire to be like that!”
I recently read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. He spent time in a concentration camp and it is probably the most honest account in existence of what life was like, physically and psychologically, within them. He said something I will never forget. It was a stunning admission. He said that the best of them did not survive the camps. My jaw hit the floor. He spoke of men of great faith, his fellow Jews, who would literally starve to death in order to give away their own food. They didn’t last long. He spoke of men who didn’t try to avoid strenuous work camp duties that got people killed but went on behalf of others. They didn’t last long. He spoke of sacrifice after sacrifice by men and women who didn’t last long. And yet here we are today focused on doing anything we can think of to try and survive. The absolutely shameful hoarding that went on in March and April. Goodness sake—and it ended up being irrelevant. People who lived paycheck to paycheck didn’t get what they actually needed because people with space and money were snatching up supplies that they had no need for. People like that last longer in the concentration camps, right? But what would Viktor Frankl have said about them? That shouldn’t be us. Prepping during times of plenty is fine and hurts no one, but it isn’t prepping in times of lack. It’s hoarding. It’s faithless. It’s taking advantage. It’s shameful. I find myself wondering about the people who died in the camps now more than I think about the survivors.
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.” That’s a quote from Frankl.
Goodness, may we all aspire to be the ones who died.
