This is Mark chapter 16 verses 14 through 20. This is God’s holy word. Afterward he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. And he said to them, Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.
Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe. In my name, they will cast out demons, they will speak in new tongues, they will pick up serpents with their hands, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them. They will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover. So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went out and preached everywhere while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs.
Thus far, God’s holy inspired word. It will please the Lord to take that word and transform it in our lives into service for himself. Thanks be to God. Heavenly Father, we pray now that you’ll make this word alive and real to us. We pray, Father, that all distractions, certainly Satan has a lot of them around, that all distractions would be removed and we can concentrate on what you have to say to us. We pray, Lord, to be faithful users and appliers of your word as you give us grace to do it. In Jesus’ name, amen. Well, this is our last sermon in the Gospel of Mark. And believe it or not, if you’ve been here for every one, you’ve heard 60 sermons. That kind of amazed me too.
Well, the natural question is, what next? Well, I’m expecting that we’ll take up the book of Ruth in the Old Testament. and have a look at that. And I don’t know if we’ll get 60 sermons out of that or not. It’s only four chapters in Ruth. But we’ll have a good time looking at that portion of God’s word. It would be nice if we could just go Old Testament, New Testament, Old Testament, New Testament. There’s a lot more in the Old Testament than there is in the New Testament.
But we will take up Luke. No. Ruth, Lord willing, next Lord’s Day. Mark closes his gospel with the topics The Empty Tomb and The Great Commission. And as I said, today’s our last study in the Gospel of Mark, and so we’re going to consider the Great Commission.
If that’s an unusual term to you, it’s probably one you’ve heard many times, but it means to give out the Gospel to all the world, go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. Well, we get this portion about making disciples of all nations from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus said, go and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you and lo, I am with you until the end of the age. These passages, Mark and Matthew especially, there’s something in all the Gospels, but in these passages we have the great missionary commands of the New Testament.
Interestingly, Mark seems to say that Jesus began to speak about world evangelization even before the disciples gathered with him in Galilee. You know, the Bible says that He spent 40 days up there in Galilee before He ascended into heaven. But this seems to be, according to Mark, something that happened with His disciples as they gathered together shortly after His resurrection.
And we can say that these commands, of course, are not just for the earliest disciples, but for us as well. meaning the whole church. And I think that’s very important as we study this morning that this command to go into all the world is for the whole church. Not every individual is going to go out to Africa or parts of South America or Asia or someplace, but the whole church goes together. Some are supporting here and praying, and others are actually going. But the church goes into all the world to preach the Gospel to every creature.
And as I said, there’s various roles. There’s some who are praying, there’s some who are giving, there’s some who are communicating, and some who are actually going. Our points this morning, we have three of them, are these. First, a response to the Great Commission. What did Jesus say about going into all the world? What’s our response? And it must begin with one’s faith.
Secondly, the Great Commission is Jesus’ first directive for apostolic work. Now, an apostle is someone who sent And this is Jesus’ first directive, I should say, for going into all the world. First directive for the apostolic work. And then finally, we’re going to think about a spearhead for missions. The apostles were the spearhead. In other words, the first ones in action. And in so doing, they were given extraordinary gifts.
Some of these things that we read about, about speaking in tongues and picking up serpents and drinking poison and all this was an extraordinary dispensation from the Lord to help the spearhead as they then took the gospel into the Gentile world that largely were unaware of Christ and what he had done for all who believe. So let’s begin then with response to the Great Commission which must begin with faith.
Now when I was younger there was a famous lady named Florence Chadwick. She swam from Long Beach or somewhere over to Catalina Island, 26 miles. You say, how do you know it was 26 miles? Because there was a song one time that said, 26 miles across the sea, Santa Catalina is waiting for me.
Anyway, what was the first, the basic thing that she had to have? She had to know how to swim. She wasn’t going to go anywhere if she couldn’t swim. That’s the basic thing. And it’s what Jesus is now speaking to his disciples. He says, before I send you out into all the world, there’s some basic things that you need to take care of. And at the heart of it all is faith.
And so we read that he rebuked them because of what? Because of their unbelief, their lack of faith, and the hardness of their hearts. Whatever that would mean probably has to do with the fact that they say, well, these other people are not Jewish and they haven’t had the Old Testament, so I won’t worry too much about them. It’s a kind of hardness of heart that Jesus is talking about as well.
You need to feel not only your own people’s needs, but those of the people around you. So response to the Great Commission must begin with one’s own faith. Stop being an unbeliever and believe. Now he’s not saying they weren’t saved at this point, he’s saying that they’re lacking in faith.
At one time they went to Jesus and said, Lord, increase our faith. Because they were aware themselves that their faith was fairly weak. Jesus said, you know, if you have enough faith, just like a little mustard seed, you can move a mountain. You can say to a tree to be uprooted and moved elsewhere. Without question then, Jesus was concerned not for their salvation, but for their spiritual maturity.
If you want to be one who is a participant in the Great Commission and getting the Gospel out, well, you need to be strong personally in your relationship to the Lord in faith, and that’s true for the whole church. We need to hear that rebuke for our unbelief, our doubts that maybe this is not the right thing to do, or the hardness of heart saying, well, so what? Other people are kind of lost and don’t feel much about them.
Okay, so until this issue, you see, of belief or unbelief is settled, then the Great Commission is going to sputter. That was my word, at least the word the Lord gave to me. It’s just going to sputter along. The Great Commission is a great and wonderful thing. Go into all the world and preach the gospel. And so you get into your hot rod or whatever you’re driving, and it just sputters along, sput, sput, sput, sput. It doesn’t get very far.
Again, our weakness of faith, hardness of heart, Jesus says, you know, you need to soup up that engine. And of course you can’t do it, but the Holy Spirit can do it. But you need that engine to quit sputtering and start moving, start humming, start taking you where you need to go.
And that’s true not only for those who are going to go out personally to the uttermost parts of the world, but also it’s true for those who stay and pray. We just had a big time of prayer next door at the church about missions and missionaries going out, and that was a part of the motor humming along We need to be in prayer.
And of course, a lot of us don’t have the resources, but the church needs to give and support missions and send them out in that way and to be communicative back and forth about what’s going on with the gospel. The next challenge that comes along here is our ignorance and uncertainty with respect to the Bible. You need to know what God’s Word says. And that’s why most missionaries, I won’t say every single one, but most missionaries go to school a little bit before they go overseas, before they go to some foreign place. And it would be true even if you’re just going across the street or in the next state or something. You need to know the Bible. And so Jesus is telling these disciples who are gathered to them there, you need to take up the word.
Now the word that they had at that point was the scriptures in Hebrew, the Old Testament. But things were being revealed and what Jesus had said. And the Holy Spirit needs to bring that to their memory. And then as the letters of the New Testament were written by the Apostle Paul or John or Peter, the letters of the Hebrews, we could name them all.
But they need to study that eventually. That will come along. But Jesus says, as you go, even as your motor is humming and running, you need to have a message. You need to know how to do missions. and what to say when you go out to do missions. And that all comes from a thorough study of the Word of God. The apostles then were to become familiar, acquainted with, knowledgeable of, expert in the Bible, the Word of God. I’ve heard people say about this preacher, that preacher, oh, he certainly does know his Bible, doesn’t he? Yeah, but that’s not just for that preacher, you see.
That’s for everybody. We need to know the Bible, and this is going back to the swimming illustration before. We need to be good swimmers. We need to be swimmers that have strength and know what we’re doing, and then we can make that passage, figuratively speaking, across.
When finally those disciples took the rebuke seriously, and I think we can rejoice in that, what Jesus told them, they took seriously. They didn’t just pass it off. Oh, you know, he’s always saying this or that. Of course, they were still excited and amazed about the resurrection. But also, they were aware of their own need. to really get down and understand and to be able to be teachers of the Word, either that Word that had been given already or what was coming to them.
They took Jesus seriously, and when they did that, then they got up, They were reclining, it says, at meal. They got up off their eating couches and went out and took the Gospel into all the world. So, the response to the Great Commission begins with our own faith and the removal of the hardness of heart that we might have. Then secondly, the Great Commission is Jesus’ first directive for apostolic work.
It won’t be long, I know the baseball season hasn’t quite ended yet, but it won’t be long, it’ll be April again, and all these ball players will be gathering in Arizona or in Florida, wherever they have their training. Interestingly, you know, Mr. Wrigley, he had a baseball training camp in Catalina. Catalina figures a lot in the sermon. But when they get to that camp, you know what the coaches and managers do?
They say, let’s go over what? The basics. Let’s learn to bunt. Let’s learn to cover the right base. Let’s learn, again, how to field properly and to know everything. And so Jesus is now at that point, you see, he’s gathered these disciples there. This is spring training, as it were. And it actually was spring, but he’s gathered them together and he says, now listen, Make sure you have everything the way it should be.
And if you go through the Gospels, and I’m going to quote from a couple that we don’t have here, because I said the Gospel of Mark, which we’re using today, and also Matthew. You can go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations and so forth. But there are other places, too. So in John’s Gospel, they are having a meeting in the upper room. Whether it’s the same one or not, I don’t know. But it says that Jesus breathed on them. He said, receive the Holy Spirit. And then he said, as the father has sent me, and he said, I’m an apostle, the father has sent me, so send I you, so send I you.
And that’s part of the great commission too. We’re being sent by the Lord. We’re not specifically apostles in the sense of these 11 or 12 men here, but we are apostles in the sense that we’re being sent. We have an apostolic mission. Now we may be sent to the prayer room, and we may be sent to the counting room, whatever. We’re all involved, the church is involved, in sending out this Word throughout the world. So send I you, Jesus said. That’s from John as Jesus talks to His disciples at that point. And then from Matthew, once again, He says make disciples. He says, I’ve impressed upon you that you’re not quite prepared yet. Your faith is weak. You have a hard heart. You need to have a softer heart. There are a lot of things you need. You don’t know your Bible as well as you should.
But he said, once you have this in hand and you go out to all these other nations, then you make disciples, that is learners, of all those people too. And why? Because they’re going to become apostolic in their life and work. They’re going to share the gospel to this nation and that nation, this visitor and that one who comes by. Go and make disciples of all the nations.
There’s still plenty to learn. The Lord said, you disciples here, you have plenty to learn, but when you go out and preach the Gospel and people are saved, then you make disciples of them. You make learners of them. You start teaching them all that I’ve commanded you, He said. And remember, Jesus referred many, many times to the Hebrew Scriptures that spoke of Him and that spoke of the interests and the work of the Lord.
And He says you need to make disciples of all those people. Teach them. Give them training. Give them opportunities to practice. Go out with them. Some of you will stand in judicial situations where the judges will say, how come you’re not worshiping Caesar like you should? Make disciples of them all by putting them through all these things.
The Holy Spirit will lead you. The Lord will direct you. But this is your mission, this is the work. This is why the Lord is not coming back immediately, or if Jesus is speaking in the first person, this is why I’m not coming back immediately. There’s still many to be saved and many to be my disciples, and they’ll make more and more until the host of heaven will be such a large number that it will seem to be beyond counting. There’ll be so many of them. That’s the whole idea. So send I you. Make disciples.
And then from the book of Acts, He says to those who are now about to see Him ascend into heaven, He says, You shall be witnesses unto Me, but don’t leave Jerusalem. No, He didn’t say that. He said in Jerusalem, in Judea and all Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. There you have the great commission there too. So I just point out, it’s not only Mark and Matthew, but it’s John, of course, and Luke too. I didn’t quote from him except from Acts, where Luke also wrote, of course. And he says, be witnesses. Jesus is quoted there when he addresses the apostle.
Saul of Tarsus as he was then, but the one to become the Apostle Paul, he says, be witnesses unto me, you’ll be my witnesses everywhere. He said that first to those disciples that were gathered to see his ascension, but then that became the message that was continued on to all the people. There were thousands who came to Christ in the preaching of Peter and so forth there and then in other places. You will be my witnesses where you are and then in the next location and then on out and more regionally and finally throughout the whole world.
Great commission is Jesus’ first directive for His apostolic work. Go and make disciples of all the nations. I’m sending you with an apostolic ministry. Be witnesses everywhere of the things you know. And if you weren’t there personally, then you’ll have enough of the Word to witness out of that as well.
Now, the apostles, as they were going out and following Jesus’ directive, they were given special gifts. And some of those gifts, quite a few of them, interestingly, are mentioned here in these verses in Mark that we read earlier about, first of all, he says, casting out demons. Demonic activity was a great problem there in Palestine, but not just in Palestine, because the devil thought that the whole world, and he was trying desperately to hold on to Palestine, but the whole world was his kingdom.
In Job, when Satan comes to answer to the Lord, he says, what have you been doing, Satan? He says, I’ve been out walking to and fro in the earth. Well, why? Why, do you just need the exercise? No, he says, the earth is mine, and I’m going to hold on to it.
But you see, these disciples are to go out and cast out the devil, the demons who are his representatives in all people in the world. That’s part of the Great Commission. Go and deal with these demons. Now, there is still, I should say, demonic activity in the world, so it’s not like we can’t ever encounter that. In many cases, Christians now can testify that before they became Christians, the devil had a hold of them. Or if they were Christians, somehow the devil was opposing them. And I could give you some examples of that. I don’t have time to do all that this morning.
But the fact is that out in the world there, Satan still thinks he owns it all. And that he just needs to kick Jesus out, get rid of the Christians, and then he can have his way. But the Bible says God has given special gifts, and one of those gifts is to cast out demons. So the spearhead, these disciples who are leading the way there, they have this gift to cast out demons.
They will speak in new tongues. Well, we saw that on the day of Pentecost. And it’s not just, you see, that you hear someone gibbering and jabbering about stuff, but the message is given out in the languages that need to hear it. Well, do these disciples all have time to go to school and learn the different languages? Some of them, I’m sure, were able to speak two or three languages. Maybe more than that, but the point is that in these early days when they go out and they need to communicate to people in languages that they have no idea how to use, the Holy Spirit then takes them in His power and gives them these new tongues to speak the gospel. That’s how more and more people, you see, are gathered into the kingdom. and then next after the tongues it says they’ll pick up serpents.
Now people make fun of this because back in the mountains where I used to live there are some churches that if you wanted to prove that you were saved and a real Christian then you had to go over to the box where the rattlesnakes were and pick up one and hold it and A lot of people did that, but they’re sorry that they did that afterward because they got bitten. I hope not many of them died, but I don’t know too much about it other than that they did it. But the point is not that you should find snakes and try to hold them. The point is that in the course of your ministry, you may run into creatures that could hurt you. And it may be the Lord’s will sometimes, like in Daniel’s case, to shut the mouths of the lions and they can’t hurt you.
In another case, like the Apostle Paul, when he was on the island of Malta, he reached to get a piece of wood and a snake came out and bit him. And it was a venomous snake. And everybody who was a resident of that island knew it. And they were waiting for Paul just to drop down dead. at any moment, but he just shook off the snake and went on with what he was doing.
Well, that’s what’s meant here, that you may encounter snakes, or lions, or tigers, or you name the beast that you might encounter, and you work, and the Lord says you’ll get away with that, because the Lord will keep you safe, even if he has them bite you, as in Paul’s case, the Lord will keep you in his care.
Will not hurt them if they drink poison, it says. Now, I don’t know any Instance, I can cite for you about drinking poison, but you get the idea that maybe someone is out and they think they’re eating a good mushroom and they eat a bad mushroom. Or maybe they eat some other plant, they’re hungry, they’re starving, and the Lord provides something for them to eat. It turns out, in normal cases, to be poison.
But the Lord prevents that. That’s what all this means here. These spearheaded Christians who are going out, these disciples, they’re going into unknown territory. There are very few Christians, very few interested. And they’re going to encounter everything that Satan can throw at them to try to stop them.
And Jesus is saying, You’ll come out all right if you’re doing what I want you to do, if you’re being faithful in what I’ve called you to do. And he says on top of that, if you encounter sick people, I’ll even give you the gift of healing so that you can heal.
Now, of course, in modern times, we have medicines. We have over at Biola, I think they still have it over there, the School of Missionary Medicine. There’s training for people to do medical work on the mission fields, and that’s good. But in this case, they didn’t have any training. And the Lord says, I’ll give you the gift of healing as part of your thrust into the unknown, into the realm of Satan, into where believers don’t hardly exist anywhere.
So, the apostles then received these special gifts. But most of all, they had the Holy Spirit. The Spirit empowered them. The Spirit led them. Now, when Jesus was talking to these disciples, the day of Pentecost had not really come yet, and so there’s a kind of a waiting on what will do. You will receive power after the Holy Spirit comes upon you. But you do get the idea that the Lord was going to lead in the missionary work by Spirit. And then you have the apostles becoming the reshapers, if you will, of the Old Testament church. Some people say, well, there’s no church until the day of Pentecost. I don’t think the Bible teaches that at all. Where was the church in the Old Testament? Where was the church before Abraham? All who were believers from Adam and Eve on, who became believers, They were the church of the Lord. And then, of course, you have the Jewish people arise as descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
And the Lord is working through them, and He makes an Old Testament church. It’s even a nation with political things and stuff going on. The Lord says, come the New Testament, things are going to be reshaped. There’s not going to be a new church or a different church in the sense that God says, do away with that and start again. God says, I’m going to take and reshape now what’s come this far. And we have what we know today as the New Testament church, the evangelical church, the believing church. And it’s this believing church that’s going to carry out the Great Commission.
The Apostles, especially Paul, with the Spirit’s help, actually formulated a standard Gospel message. And Peter refers to that in his letters. He says, you know the Apostle Paul, he’s really got it all down. And he says, the rest of us Apostles are very indebted of course, to the Lord, but indebted to Saul of Tarsus and Paul the Apostle, we’re indebted that he was able to give us a standard gospel message. And if you look at the end of 1 Corinthians, he said Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, and he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. Well, there’s your basic gospel message. Who wrote that down?
Apostle Paul. Did Peter know about that? Of course. John and all the others. But it took Paul to kind of put it into some order in his letters and so forth. And we benefit greatly. And missionaries who go out today are very much dependent on that same message. Christ came into the world. He died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and buried and rose again from the dead. And then you extrapolate from that all the other things that the Bible teaches as well. And so I think what we see in this particular part here is that as Jesus directed the apostles, so he directs us via the scripture and the Holy Spirit.
In other words, we’re not meeting with Jesus in an upper room at a dinner time. But Jesus continues to speak to us and direct us by the scriptures and by the Holy Spirit. And we don’t have to scratch our heads and say, what is he saying to us? What are we supposed to do? It’s all there in the Bible. Go and make disciples of all the nations.
One last thing before we close, and that is, As a spare head for missions, the Apostle used these extraordinary gifts and they were successful. If you use the gifts that God has given you, and they don’t have to be these special, extraordinary gifts, but if you use the gifts that God has given you, whatever those gifts are, you’re going to see success.
Back in World War II, someone developed this idea of the frogmen, and they later became known as underwater demolition teams. But they would take their explosives, and they would attack ships or dock facilities or whatever. But you can imagine these frogmen, and they come up to the place where they’re supposed to do their work, and somebody says, do you have the explosive? No, and I thought you had it. No, no, no, you’re supposed to have it.
Their time is wasted, their mission is wasted if you don’t have what you need to do the work. And one of the things that you see is the Lord says, I’m going to give you what you need to do the work. The idea of the paraclete, which is a term that’s also used about the Holy Spirit, is someone who’s able to give you what you need. He’s your helper. You don’t have to say to the Holy Spirit, did you forget the explosives? The Holy Spirit’s got them and he’s ready to use them through you for his kingdom’s sake.
And thank God we have the Bible, you see. Again, to know your Bible is to know what the gifts are, what gifts have sort of stopped and what gifts continue on. But you continue to use those gifts to see success, to see people saved. So again, the apostles were the spearhead of the gospel invasion, if you were, and that’s what we’re participating in. You know, all those soldiers, or if you saw that movie about the soldiers that landed on D-Day and so forth, you know that they had to invade a hostile territory, but that’s what God says to the church, go and invade all the world.
And what are we going to do? The gifts are there for you. The spearhead has used those special gifts and now you have still great gifts to go and use in the service of the Lord. And we are the successors of these people to whom Jesus was speaking in the upper room. We’re their successors. What a blessing to know that. Well, what am I supposed to do? I’m just a poor person that can’t do very much.
And God says, no, you’re a successor. to those to whom I have said, I’m sending you, go into all the world, preach the gospel to every creatures. And so, in just closing today, in closing this book that we’ve been studying, what is God saying to us? All these chapters that we’ve read and studied, the Lord says, now, take that work and see that it’s applied in the world as God has given you grace to do that.