The eyewitness testimonies of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his great commission to spread the gospel are essential for a robust Christian faith.

- SERMON TRANSCRIPT -

Turn in your Bible to Mark 16. We'll look this morning at verses 9 through 20. "If all the sorrows of God's people could be poured into one vast pile, what a mountain they would make. How varied our distresses, how diverse our depressions. But brothers and sisters, if Jesus will meet us, all the sadness will fly away. Just give us His presence and we will have all things." That's how Charles Spurgeon began a sermon on Mark 16, Jesus’s personal encounters with His church. He said there, "Jesus had a deep desire to be with His people." I actually believe that's the overarching purpose for everything He did in His incarnation, His atonement and His resurrection, that we could have an intimate, eternal love relationship with Almighty God, that we could have a close fellowship with God.

We come here week by week at this church for an encounter with the living God; at least I hope that's why you come. That encounter with the living God is, by the ministry of the word of God and by the spirit of God, so foundational that encounter we have week by week is a belief that the Word of God, the Bible is the Word of God that as we read it, we're reading God's words to us. As 1 Thessalonians 2:13 says, "When you receive the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe." God says in Isaiah 66:2, "This is the one I esteem. He who is humble and contrite in spirit and who trembles at my word."

We have a desire for an encounter with God through the ministry of the Word. This is foundational to our salvation. Saving faith comes from hearing the Word of Christ, and so we have to be confident that the facts we have about Jesus's life are true. Everyone who calls in the name of the Lord will be saved. We will not call on someone that we've not first believed in. We will not believe in that person if we've never heard of them, we don't have information about him. Where does that information come from, except ultimately through the Bible.

"We have a desire for an encounter with God through the ministry of the Word. This is foundational to our salvation. Saving faith comes from hearing the Word of Christ, and so we have to be confident that the facts we have about Jesus's life are true."

I believe with all my heart, my conviction about this is marrow deep. It's been that way for over twenty-five years as I stand in front of you week by week that I lift up this book, and I believe that it's an encounter with God through the actual words of God. I've sought to unfold that verse after verse, line after line, paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter, book after book. We have an encounter with God through the scripture. I believe that with all my heart.

This morning we have an unusual task before us. The last twelve verses of the Gospel of Mark in everyone's Bible for fifteen centuries was believed to be the word of God without question, but in the last centuries, come into serious dispute. Most of you holding actual Bibles in your hand, not your smartphones, but actual Bibles in your hand can read some notes on the page. I got the pew Bible, so I'll read you the note here. In our pew Bible, some of the earliest manuscripts do not include 16: 9-20. Some of your Bibles put a line there between verse 8 and 9, and it's like the road-out sign, like the bridge- out sign and you should stop reading or something; there's that sense. Or they'll put it in a different font or something like that.  You're scratching your head, "Well, what do I do with that information?" Behind that is the question, the burning question based on how I began this sermon. Are these verses actually the word of God or not? That's the question in front of you. Can I preach Mark 16, 9-20 as the actual word of God?

I. First, A Word About Text Criticism

When you have an English Bible in your hand, you have received the benefits of two different categories of scholars that have done their work before you ever got that Bible. Those sciences, those scholars immerse themselves in these two sciences to deliver to you your English Bibles. The first are the scientists of text critics, text criticism, and the other are Bible translators. When the text critical experts have finished their work, they give their work to the translators. Then the translators, when they've finished their work, give the English Bible to us, so preachers like me get up and we receive the benefits of those scholarly works. This, I think, is a beautiful picture of the body of Christ; people who devote their lives to different callings and then serve the entire church. The text critics, their job is to give us a reliable Greek New Testament that then they can hand over to the translators, and the translators do their work in bringing it across from the Greek into good readable English.

We in the English language are lavishly blessed with translations. When I was a missionary in Japan, they only had two translations. One of them was harder to read for the Japanese people than the KJV is for us in English and the other was a Roman Catholic translation. That's it. That's what the Japanese Christians have to read. In the English language, we get a new scholarly translation about every five years on average. They just keep coming,  we are rich in translations. But as we come to this sermon this morning, we have to do a little text criticism first.

Now, I know it's Mother's Day, and you're like, "Really, pastor? Text criticism on Mother's Day. All over the Southern Baptist Convention, there are these pastors preaching wonderful Mother's Day sermons, and our pastor began his sermon on text criticism.” But I don't see any other way. I need to be able to defend that I should be even preaching this, and I do think that I should.

What is text criticism? There are two basic issues that arise when it comes to the New Testament. The first is we don't have the original manuscript of any of the 27 books of the New Testament. We don't have the actual book of Romans, we don't have the actual Epistle to the Corinthians, 1 and 2 Corinthians. We don't have the actual book of Revelation. We don't have the actual Gospel of Mark.

Secondly, the copies that we do have in the providence and the kindness of God don't perfectly agree with one another, so you have to study those copies and compare them and develop a science called text criticism where you can get behind the actual physical copies you have to a Greek text for all 27 books of the New Testament. That's the issue. That's what text criticism is all about.

Why don't we have the originals? God, in His goodness and His wisdom, decided that we should not have them. God saw to it that they would be destroyed, all of them. We see this at the very beginning of the written word of God. The original written word of God was the Ten Commandments, as you remember, written on tablets of stone by the finger of God. You remember what happened to those? Moses chucked them down and they were shattered into a bunch of pieces. Then a second copy of the Ten Commandments was made, and so began that journey, that process of originals being destroyed.

Or again, in the time of Jeremiah when Jeremiah wrote what is the longest book in the Bible through a scribe, Baruch. Anyway, there was at that point then only one of the book of Jeremiah on planet Earth. The scroll was delivered to the wicked King Jehoiakim who, as he was reading it, cut it line by line and burned it, so much did he hate the message that was coming from the Prophet, Jeremiah, whereupon God told Jeremiah through his servant, Baruch, to write it again. And I believe Baruch complained bitterly about having to do it, and he was warned about that. “Baruch, wherever you go, I'll let you escape with your life. Stop complaining and pick up your pen." Therefore, we then had the second copy.

But it gives you a sense that the word of God is behind the actual physical thing. It's there. God knows it. And so the original being destroyed doesn't mar that. God is able to deliver His word to His people, and so it has been every original copy of the 66 books of the Bible has been lost forever.

I think it's possible that Phoebe may have carried the only copy of the book of Romans in her baggage to the church at Rome. Imagine knowing what lay inside that scroll and all the church history, including Martin Luther's conversion, the Reformation, all that in this one letter in your purse, if indeed it was. And I don't know for sure he did... or she did, but that's the original.

Why did God do this? Because our hearts tend to be idolatrous. We tend to worship physical things. Remember the story of the bronze serpent, which God commanded Moses to make. In the course of time, it became a focus of worship, an idol in the Jewish nation. Instead, what we have is an array, a multiplication of handwritten copies of each of the 27 books of the New Testament. And the same Holy Spirit that inspired the 27 books of the New Testament originally has marvelously and wonderfully overseen the process of that copying and that collating and that protection of those manuscripts, so we have a richness of manuscript evidence for the 27 books of the New Testament.

The work of text criticism, the science involves a job most of you would not want to do. Picture little scraps of papyrus or parchment or whatever floating around. They're in libraries and repositories all over the world, and they're in climate controlled labs, and there they are. It's a fragment of a chapter and a half somewhere, and it's written in a very archaic Greek script that you're skilled to translate. You do that work, that’s your life work. You're comparing that fragment to another, and you put the whole thing together in the course of time. That's how we get our Greek New Testament, which then is the basis of the translation that brings us over into English.

Amazingly, in the goodness of God, He has given us 25,000 handwritten copies of portions of the New Testament. 25,000. That's an astonishing treasure trove. By way of comparison, in second place of all ancient literature is Homer's Iliad, which has 643. That's incredible. The New Testament has almost 40 times as much evidence as Homer's Iliad. There are only 250 existing manuscripts of Plato's writing. The New Testament has 100 times that number. Not only that, but the New Testament manuscripts start chronologically amazingly close to when it was originally composed. There's a very short time gap from when that original writing happened to when we have the earliest evidence.

There are 25,000n Greek manuscripts, 5,600 of which are most important. The oldest is a tiny portion from the Gospel of John called P. 52, Papyrus 52, dating from around the year 100 AD to 150 AD. The Gospel of John- since John we think died toward the end of the first century- that's within one generation of him being alive. That's incredible. The Bodmer Papyri, which contains portions of John and Luke, date from 175 AD to 225 AD. The Chester Beatty Papyri contains portions of all four Gospels and the book of Acts dates from the early 200s. Keep in mind, during the first couple of centuries of church history, the Roman Empire was set against Christianity and persecuted Christianity and burned Christian scriptures and destroyed them, so it's amazing any of these survived at all. But the small time gap between when we know the New Testament was written and the earliest manuscripts is amazing. The time gap on Homer's Iliad to the oldest of his manuscript is 17 centuries.

After the Emperor Constantine made Christianity a legal religion around the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, the persecution ended and there were many, many, many more copies of the Scripture than ever, paid for being written. Again, keep in mind the printing press didn't exist, so everything's handwritten copies, and they started to proliferate at that point.

The oldest and most significant of all the ancient manuscripts is called the Codex Sinaiticus because it was discovered in 1844, discovered to the western academic world. It'd always been there, but it was discovered to the academics in the west in the year 1844 at a monastery on Mount Sinai. It has been called one of the most significant books in the world. It is a bound book. That's what a Codex is. It's a bound book like our Bibles containing the entire Greek New Testament, and it dates from the middle of the fourth century.

The other significant ancient book is the Codex Vaticanus, which is in the Vatican. It also dates from the fourth century and contains the entire Bible. It may actually be a little older than the Codex Sinaiticus, and it's generally considered the oldest Bible in the world. How valuable would that be having the oldest Bible in the world?

It's basically based on those two manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, that the modern text critical movement started in 1881 by two scholars called Westcott and Hort. Not only do we have the 25,000 handwritten copies or 5,600 Greek copies in the New Testament, we also have a stunning level of quotations by the church fathers, scholars who have lived in the first centuries of the Christian Church and quoted the New Testament extensively. There are almost 20,000 quotations of just the Gospels in the writing of the church fathers. You can basically put the New Testament together from quotations of these ancient scholars.

All in all, we Christians have an embarrassment of riches that give us a high level of certainty that we know what the original 27 books in the New Testament said in the Greek. So things that skeptics say, not knowing at all what they're talking about, "Oh, the Bible has been changed by a powerful church over the centuries," just isn't true.

Scholar A.T. Robertson says, "We can ascertain the original Greek manuscript of the 27 books of the New Testament within 99.9% accuracy level." Even more significantly, any differences, they're so insignificant, they just have to do with spellings word order, things like that, or repetition from other gospels that are brought in, things like that, they don't change anything. There is literally not a major or minor even detailed point of Christian theology hanging in the balance on a text critical issue, which is encouraging.

"There is literally not a major or minor even detailed point of Christian theology hanging in the balance on a text critical issue, which is encouraging."

How does it work? I'm not going to bore you with the eighteen rules of text criticism because I found them boring. As I shared text criticism stuff with friends and family and people over the last three or four weeks, I realized people don't talk about this too much today. Time to move on. But basically, the way it works is the older manuscripts are given priority, the higher quality manuscripts given priority, the more difficult reading is given priority. For example, when it says, "No one knows, not even the son or the angels," “not even the son” is in some of them but not in others. You're not going to introduce that, you're going to actually take that out. The more difficult reading they tend to think is the more original. That's how it works.

Now, let's apply all this to Mark 16 in the long ending, verses 9 through 20. The two oldest books, the two oldest codices, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, don't have verses 9 through 20. They're not there. Interestingly though, the Codex Sinaiticus has a big blank space after verse 8, before Luke 1:1. Scratching your head. Maybe he just never got to it. We don't know. It's just there's a blank page there. Vaticanus has no such page; it goes on from 16:8 right onto Luke 1:1.

There are 1,653 Greek manuscripts relevant to the section that we're looking at today. That's a lot. 1,653. All but three have the long ending, 9 through 20, and one of them is a little bit strange. Basically, you're looking at these two codices and that's it. At this point, I'm like, "All right, sermon's over, let's pray because it's not Scripture." But I don't think so. I think what you're doing is you're pitting two sciences against each other to some degree. Not the science of translation at this point, it's the science of text criticism versus the science of church history because for fifteen centuries, every Christian on earth thought this was Scripture. John Calvin did commentaries on this. Martin Luther preached sermons on this. The Puritans, John Owen, all those scholars thought this was Scripture. All of them. Jonathan Edwards thought this was Scripture. Charles Bergen thought this was Scripture. They didn't even question it, and apparently, it didn't do them any harm. That's my approach here. I don't think this is going to do us any harm.

You may think we're going to become a snake handling sect because I'm preaching this sermon. We're not going to do that. They also argue not just from the codices, but there are internal translation issues. There's certain vocabulary that they find. There are internal reasons, they say. For example, Mary Magdalene seems to be being introduced for the first time in verse 9. And I get it, I get all those things. But I find that there's similar problems in other passages that they don't question whether it's Scripture, they just have to solve the problems, and so it is with this. I'm going to venture forth with great courage and preach Mark 16: 9 through 20. I memorized the Gospel of Mark, and it so far hasn't done me any harm in memorizing it.  I think it's going benefit as well.

I also find it interesting that some scholars who believe that verses 9 through 20 are not inspired Scripture, they won't even comment on them in their commentaries, they won't preach on them in their sermon series and all that. Some of them love the way it ends at verse 8. Look at verse 8. This would be what they think is the actual ending, the inspired ending to Mark 16 in verse 8. "Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid." End of Gospel of Mark. They love it, they’re excited. They think, what a great way to end. I don't think it's so great. John MacArthur, for example, says, "The word “afraid" is a very common reaction to Jesus' life and miracles of ministry," and he goes throughout the Gospel of Mark to show that he thinks it is a perfect ending to Mark because they're stunned and amazed and bewildered and don't say anything to anybody about Jesus.

I would say you're missing two very important things if you stop at verse 8. You don't have any personal encounters with the resurrected Christ in the Gospel of Mark. None. And you don't have a Great Commission. I think those things are valuable, so I think we should go ahead. I believe that God, in His providence for fifteen centuries, allowed Christians to think this was Scripture. I think because of redundancy, there's nothing in these verses that you don't see covered in other places. There's no shocking new things except one little detail, and therefore I think it's going to be helpful.

II. Encounters with the Resurrected Lord

Let's talk about encounters with the resurrected Lord. Dear friends, isn't that what you want? If you're a Christian, isn't that what you want? Don't you yearn to see Jesus? Don't you yearn for your faith to become sight? Would that not solve all of your problems? Would you not be instantly transformed to be the perfect person you've always yearned to be? "Because when you see Him, you'll be like Him because you'll see Him as He is." [1 John 3].  Aren't you yearning for that faith to become sight?

We're not going to get that probably today unless you die and go be with the Lord and you'll be delighted to see Him face to face. But what we get now is a ministry of the Word. These personal encounters are vital to our faith in the resurrection. 1 Corinthians 15 bases its entire proof of Christ's resurrection on Scripture's prophecy but also personal eyewitness encounters with Jesus. Again, in all of the Gospels, in Matthew and Luke and John, you have significant personal encounters with the resurrected Jesus, by the apostles especially. They're the most important because that was their job description.

Jesus says to Thomas in John 20: 27, "Put your fingers here. See my hands. Reach out your hand. Put it in my side. Stop doubting and believe." Jesus saying to the Eleven in the upper room in Luke 24: 39-40, “'Look at my hands and my feet. It is I, myself. Touch me and see. A ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.' And when He said this, He showed them His hands and His feet.” Eyewitness testimony to the bodily resurrection was foundational to the of the church. 1 John 1:1, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at in our hands of touch, this we proclaim concerning the word of life." We must have these eyewitness accounts of encounters with the resurrected Christ.

Mark would be the only Gospel without them.I think that verses 9-20 gives us those beautiful personal encounters with the resurrected Christ. It begins with Mary Magdalene, but then it continues with two other unnamed disciples and the eleven apostles. Mary Magdalene, verse 9, "When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week, He appeared first to Mary Magdalene out of whom He had driven seven demons." Now, then she, in verse 10, 11, “…went and told those who had been with Him and who were mourning and weeping. And when they heard that Jesus was alive and that she had seen Him, they did not believe it." Mary Magdalene gets a personal encounter with Jesus. It's marvelous. It's very much described in John 20, the encounter He has with Mary. The loyalty and the kindness that Jesus shows toward a woman who's not going to be a significant leader in the life of the church but who dearly loved Jesus and who is yearning for that encounter with Him. When she realizes He's who He is, she falls to His feet and grasps His feet. Then she goes and tells those who have been with Him and were mourning and weeping. We see this overwhelming sorrow on the part of the disciples. They are grieving over the death of Jesus and they're bewildered by it.

It's the very thing Jesus said, what happened in John 16:20. He said, "I tell you the truth; you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but then your grief will turn to joy." He likens it to the pain of childbirth in a mother who's giving birth. Then when the child is born, she forgets her grief because of the joy that the child has brought into the world. Jesus says, "You're going to grieve. Grieve."

But worse by far is their unbelief. That's the problem here; not their grief, but their unbelief, their lack of faith. They clearly are not expecting a resurrection and they doubted the testimonies. This lines up with Luke's account in Luke 24: 9-11, "When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. But they did not believe the women because their words seemed to them like nonsense.”, they don't believe.

Then in Mark 16: 12 -13, we have the additional appearance to two unnamed disciples. This parallels with Luke 24, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. In Mark 16: 12-13, it says, "Afterward, Jesus appeared in a different form to two of them while they were walking in the country. These returned and reported it to the rest, but they did not believe them either.”  In Luke 24, it says, "The two disciples on the road to Emmaus were kept from recognizing Him," stopped from recognizing Him. Somehow, He looked different than usual. I think He looked just like an average person, an average traveler on the road at that point. It seems pretty consistent that Jesus has to choose to reveal Himself or they won't believe in the resurrection. It is very important for us to realize it is by the sovereign grace of God alone that we believe in the resurrection. Hallelujah. So it is even then with eyewitnesses, He has to reveal himself.

With the two disciples in Luke 24 on the road to Emmaus, when He broke bread with them, their eyes were open and they realized it was the Lord. Here in Mark 16: 12-13, it's greatly simplified. The net result was unbelief again on the part of the eleven apostles. Their report was no more believed than that of Mary Magdalene and the women. Finally, in verse 14, the eleven apostles, "Later, Jesus appeared to the eleven as they were eating. He rebuked them for their lack of faith and their stubborn refusal to believe those who had seen Him after He had risen.”

The primary job of the apostles, as we see in Acts 1, is to be eyewitnesses testifying to the life, death, and bodily resurrection of Jesus to the rest of the world. All of our faith is hanging on the apostolic eyewitness accounts of Jesus. It's also beautiful to see the massive transformation that occurs in these eleven apostles after the post-resurrection appearance, which went on for forty days. He gives many convincing proofs that He's alive, and then even more after the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. At that point, they are transformed.

Despite Jesus's repeated warnings of what would happen, and despite the Old Testament Scriptures that predicted it, they were immersed in doubt at that point. Matthew 28: 16-17, "Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw Him, they worshiped Him, but some doubted." Some doubted. In Luke 24:38, Jesus said to them, "Why are you troubled? Why do doubts rise in your mind?"  Of course, the most famous is Doubting Thomas in John 20: 24-25, “Now, Thomas, called Didymus, one of the twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came so the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the nail marks in His hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into His side, I will not believe it.’“ He's an apostle saying these things.

But they could not, they would not continue in their unbelief, in their doubt. Look again at verse 14, "Later, Jesus appeared to the eleven as they were eating. He rebuked them for their lack of faith and their stubborn refusal to believe those who had seen Him after He had risen." Stubborn refusal to believe. Other texts translate it as hardness of heart, like their hearts are twisted, they're unyielding, their refusing.  But it would not continue that way. The rebuke from Jesus was the beginning of their transformation, their healing. He got to work on them over the forty days. Acts 1:3, “After His suffering, He showed himself to these men and gave them many convincing proves that He was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.”

The combination then of these personal encounters with the resurrected Lord in His resurrection body, the careful instruction He gave them from the Old Testament prophecies plus the power, the outpoured power of the Holy Spirit and the day of Pentecost move this band of doubting apostles to being those who turn the world upside down for God,  who transform the world for God. They would become unshakable in their faith that Christ was risen. They had no fear of death. They believed with all their hearts that death was defeated. They would become resolute and courageous, bold and direct in their proclamation of the gospel. They would be unquenchable in their fiery zeal for the glory of God and for Christ. The truth through Scripture and personal encounter, plus the Holy Spirit, led to a changed world through these men.

III. The Great Commission

In verse 15 and 16, we have the Great Commission, Mark's version of it. Look at it. "He said to them, 'Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.'" This is the great final work that Christ has entrusted to the church. There are five versions of the Great Commission. They're all different from each other. There's one in each of the four Gospels and there's one in the book of Acts.

Mark's version, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation," focuses on the verbal proclamation of the Gospel message in the entire world, "the good news.” The good news is that Almighty God is reconciling the world to Himself through Jesus Christ, not counting people's sins against them. Sins have been fully atoned for by the shed blood of Christ. Christ has been raised from the dead, so death is defeated. God Himself is ready to be our treasure. He's ready to be our father, the lover of our souls. God is the Gospel, God is the good news. God is the treasure hidden in the field. God is the pearl of great price. The glory of God is our inheritance for all eternity. That's the good news. 

"The good news is that Almighty God is reconciling the world to Himself through Jesus Christ, not counting people's sins against them. Sins have been fully atoned for by the shed blood of Christ."

Go into all the world and preach that good news to all creation. This is not going to just stay in Jerusalem, this is going to spread from Jerusalem through Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth, and it says, "Preach to all creation." It's a fascinating expression. Certainly it means to all people, people in all nations, all individuals within those nations. No one is exempt categorically. Male and female, rich and poor, old and young, slave and free, Jews and Gentiles, barbarians, Scythians; it does not matter. To all people preach this good news.

Should we preach to the trees? It says, "Preach to all creation." It's  an interesting question, as I pondered it. These are the kind of things I do when I write sermons. Should we preach to the trees? But interestingly, creation is personified in Romans 8: 19 -21. It's given a mind and an intellect and feelings and a choice. It says, "The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed." The creation is waiting for us to be glorified. "The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed, for the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of him who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to the decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God."

Take a minute. Put your finger here at Mark 16 and go back to Isaiah 55, one of my favorite chapters in the book of Isaiah. This is an extended version, Isaiah 55: 1-2, "Come all you who are thirsty. Come to the waters. And you who have no money, come buy and eat. Come buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me and eat what is good and your soul will delight in the richest of affair." Verse 6 and 7, "Seek the Lord while He may be found. Call on Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the Lord, and He will have mercy on him, and to our God and He will freely pardon."

Look at how it ends. Look at verse 12-13, speaking to the messengers, speaking to the apostles, the missionaries, the evangelists of this message. "You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace. The mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the fields will clap their hands. Instead of the thorn bush will grow the pine tree, and instead of briars, the myrtle will grow. This will be for the Lord's renowned for an everlasting sign, which will not be destroyed." There in Isaiah 55, the trees are pretty excited, and they're clapping their tree-like hands, I guess. I know it's all poetry, I know it's all image, but it is absolutely true that the physical creation is in the chains of decay and the bondage to futility until our salvation is done.

Go back to Mark. It says, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation." With that comes the promise and the danger. Verse 16, "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. It is by faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ that salvation comes." Salvation from what? Salvation from hell, salvation from damnation, which is mentioned in the rest of the verse. That's what “saved” means. We're delivered from a great threat, and that threat is eternal torment in hell. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.

Now, the command to be baptized as part of the great commission, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son the Holy Spirit. It's an outward, invisible sign of an internal transformation worked by Jesus through the Spirit, the baptism of the spirit that comes on us, which converts us and makes us Christians from within. Then that having been done, then we do the outward invisible sign of water baptism to show what has happened in our hearts by Christ and by the Spirit.

Baptism is not required for salvation. Some people look at this and think it teaches baptismal regeneration. But we know the thief on the cross was not water baptized. We know that Paul says, "I don't even know who I baptized in Corinth, for the Lord did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel." No, if baptism were essential to salvation, he would never have said that. But it is the beginning of an obedient life as a disciple to King Jesus. When He tells you to be baptized, you should be baptized in water. He's going to ask you to do much harder things than that after that. It's just a simple way of testifying publicly to your faith in Jesus Christ.

On the other hand, rejection of the Gospel is eternally devastating. Whoever does not believe will be condemned. Earlier, Jesus had made it plain what hell was about, it is eternal conscious torment. Mark 9:48, "Where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched." Unquenchable fire; that's hell.  The great joy of the Gospel is this: There is, therefore, no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. No hell for us. Praise God. Praise God.

There will be signs that will accompany the spread of the Gospel. Verse 17 and 18, "These signs will accompany those who believe. In my name, they will drive out demons, they will speak in new tongues, they will pick up snakes with their hands. And when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all. They will place their hands on sick people and they will get well.”  The strangeness to some people of these verses has tended to lend skepticism about the long ending of Mark. Scholars that reject this as Scripture say, "Mark doesn't use the word “signs” anywhere else," they'll say. But Luke definitely uses language like this when the 72 went out on their practice mission and came back and they had driven out demons, and they're thrilled about it. Jesus answers them, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I've given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy. Nothing will harm you." [Luke 10:19].   The book of Acts speaks of lavish signs that were done as the Gospel spread from Jerusalem through Judea and Samaria toward the ends of the earth. Acts 2: 43, "Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles." Paul says specifically in 2 Corinthians 12:12 that miraculous signs mark an apostle. "The things that mark an apostle, signs and wonders and miracles, were done among you with great perseverance." The book of Hebrews says in Hebrews 2:4, "God also testified to the gospel by signs, wonders, and various miracles and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to His will."

In that apostolic era, these signs did accompany the preaching of the Gospel as it spread everywhere. They actually did drive out demons, they actually did speak in tongues. Paul actually did shake off a poisonous snake into the fire and didn't die. They actually did lay their hands on sick people and they were healed. Now, admittedly, there is no record of anyone drinking deadly poison and not dying anywhere else in Scripture, but my feeling is, based on the veracity of the rest of this, that probably happened too.  It is well known that this passage gave rise to interesting sects of Christianity that did do snake handling, and we understand that. But we need to understand as we study also in the book of Acts, Jesus is not commanding that these things should be done and saying that they will be done in every case by every disciple for twenty centuries. He's not saying that. He's just saying these signs would accompany the spread of the Gospel, and they did.

IV. The Lord’s Heavenly Power Predicted and Fulfilled

It finishes in verses 19 and 20 with the Lord's heavenly power predicted and fulfilled. "After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was taken up into heaven and He sat at the right hand of God. Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere and the Lord worked with them and confirmed His word by the signs that accompanied it." Isn't that a beautiful picture? The clear implication is Jesus’s ascent from earth through the sky, through the clouds, and up into the heavenly realms to sit at the right hand of God is for the purpose of spreading the Gospel all over planet Earth. He's at the right hand of God and is exercising all authority in heaven and on earth on behalf of the church and the spread of the Gospel. 

Beautifully, Mark says, "He's working with us. We're co-laborers with Christ who's at the right hand of God." How awesome is that? The text says that Jesus confirmed the message by the signs. We see this again and again in the book of Acts, as when Philip preached in Acts 8:6 in Samaria, "When the crowds heard Philip and saw the miraculous signs he did, they paid close attention to what he said.”  How beautiful is it that we are co-laborers with Christ? He's working with us in completing the Great Commission. As it says in 2 Corinthians 5:20, "We are, therefore, Christ's ambassadors. As though God were making his appeal through us, we implore you on Christ's behalf be reconciled to God."

The next two times that I preach from Mark, I'm going to focus on verses 15 and 16 and exhort our church to be more active than ever before in evangelism.

V. Applications

First, stand in awe of and drawn near to the resurrected Christ. Christ has risen. Whatever problems you carried with you here today into this sanctuary, cast them on the resurrected Christ and know that He is your future. He's your present by the Spirit. He's your future. Someday, you're going to see Him face to face. He deeply yearns that you see His glory and be with Him for all eternity, so draw near to Him in faith.

Secondly, just stand in awe of God preserving the copies that are behind the Bible that we read so that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this thing wasn't changed over twenties centuries by a powerful church. We are actually reading what the Holy Spirit wants us to read. We're leaning on scholars to do it, we're thankful for their labors, but praise God for His faithfulness in overruling that.

Thirdly, this week, find an opportunity to share the Gospel with someone. Let them know of your own salvation, of your faith in Christ. Talk to them about Christ as a savior from sin and death and hell and the joy of Christ's resurrection from the dead.

Close with me in prayer. Father, we do thank you for the power of the Word of God. Thank you that we can trust in its reliability and its faithfulness. We thank you that it presents to us a glorious, crucified, and resurrected savior, Jesus Christ, and that we can put our faith in Him confidently and trust in Him for the forgiveness of our sins. It's in His name that we pray. Amen.