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Mark Chapters 15 & 16

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Mk 15,1-32

(18a) Sin >> Unrighteous judgment >> Condemning Jesus – The resurrection of Jesus Christ is a threat to all other beliefs. The Pharisees, Scribes and chief priests believed in their rendition of the Old Testament, and they believed in their position among the people of Israel. They had prestige among the people and they lived sumptuously; their beliefs engendered their lavish lifestyles, but the resurrection of Jesus Christ diametrically opposed this. If they believed in the resurrected Christ, they would have had to give up their business of religion and their prestigious place in society, because Jesus would then be the focus of attention. Instead, they were happy to mock Him on the cross. He conquered death three days later, just as He promised, but for His enemies it was too late; they wanted Him to come off the cross right then while they were watching, but of course they didn’t really want this. Had Jesus done what they asked, they would have nailed Him right back on it again. The reason they were standing there was to make sure He died. They weren’t about to go home before He breathed His last and merely supposed He had died; they wanted to see him dead with their own eyes to confirm everything they had previously believed about Him. In their minds, if He could not stop them from killing Him, then none of His claims were true, but what they failed to recognize was that the cross was God’s preordained plan; they were all acting like puppets on a string; God was using them to crucify His Son. God was saying, ‘I knew you would do this.’ For them to crucify Him based on God’s preordained plan was to inadvertently admit to God that they were hopeless sinners desperately in need of a savior, but salvation would never come to them, because they refused to believe in Him. Essentially, they sacrificed the Lamb of God for the sake of others who would inherit eternal life. It was possibly the only selfless thing they ever did.

Mk 15-2

(17i) Sin >> Unrighteous judgment >> Ignorance >> Speaking truth without knowing it

(58k) Paradox >> Two implied meanings >> Are you the king of the Jews? / You are the king of the Jews! -- Instead of asking Jesus whether He was the king of the Jews, Pilate could have converted his question to a declaration of faith by merely switching two words: "Are you?" to "You are!," and changing his eternal destiny and possibly the course of history. No one knows whether Pilate went to heaven, but if he didn't, it is because of those two words out of order. 

(85a) Thy kingdom come >> Your words can lead to your own demise >> They will keep you out of heaven

Mk 15,3-5

(18f) Sin >> False Judgment lacks evidence >> Accusing God – Pilate wanted Jesus to beg for His life but Jesus wouldn’t do it, because His destiny was in the hand of another, His Father. Jesus was Almighty God dressed in human flesh, and He wasn’t about to beg anybody for anything. Pilate would have less believed Jesus was a king had He begged for his life, but the fact that He didn’t made the stronger case that perhaps He was a king, and this was partly the reason he wrote the plaque above his cross that read, “Jesus the Nazarene, the King of the Jews” (Jn 19-19). The accusations the chief priests brought against Him were matters of their own law, which were irrelevant to Pilate. The religious establishment in Jerusalem was a thorn in his side, not that day only but ever since he took office as the Roman governor of Jerusalem. These same people and others like them were a thorn in Paul’s side too, who followed him wherever he went preaching the gospel. Part of the reason Paul went to the ends of the earth to preach the gospel was to get away from the Jews, and Pilate felt the same way about them. There was very little they actually understood about the Scriptures, though they supposedly devoted their lives to studying them.

(49m) Judgment >> God judges the world >> Condition of the Church in the last days – The fact that the religious establishment was present when Jesus was crucified, suggests that people similar to them will also be present in the last days. Anybody who would disagree with contemporary spiritual authority is automatically dubbed as false, their evidence being that their opponents contradicted them. This was the Pharisees’ acid test to discern truth from error, and they used it on Jesus, and He proved them wrong by their Old Testament Scriptures. After smashing their teachings to pieces their belief system warped back into shape, being unaffected by anything He said to them. The Pharisees were no more seeking truth than the devil himself. The Pharisees were reminiscent of the machines on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator movies, where after pounding them into the pavement or blowing them to pieces and spattering their parts in every direction, their memory metal would seek itself and recombine and return to its original shape with the net result of its battle scars disappearing. The Pharisees were the same way. Jesus could totally destroy their understanding of the Scriptures, spattering their doctrines over the streets of Jerusalem, and shortly thereafter their skewed doctrines would find their way back to their darkened hearts, and they would be completely unaffected by anything Jesus said to them.

(180c) Works of the devil >> Practicing witchcraft >> Wolves >> Be shrewd as wolves and more innocent than they appear >> Fighting off wolves with a clever innocence >> Being more innocent than their self-righteousness

Mk 15-3

(25g) Sin >> Poverty (Forms of fear) >> Killing Jesus -- This verse goes with verses 10-32

Mk 15-4,5

(62d) Paradox >> Anomalies >> Being clever >> Answer with wisdom 

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Mk 15,10-32

(25g) Sin >> Poverty (Forms of fear) >> Killing Jesus -- These verses go with verse 3. It says in Jn 3-16 that God so loved the world that He sent His Son, so it was the Father’s plan that Jesus should come to us. Everything that happened to Jesus was the Father’s plan. When we look at Jesus, everything seems fine, but when we look at our own lives, many things seem out of place. This is from retrospect; we have the advantage of viewing Jesus' life from a distance where everything is going according to plan, but we don't see a distinct plan and purpose in our own lives, and it is troubling. What we see is a lot of death and suffering and pain and evil; this is the Father allowing it in order to achieve His objective, which is to create a people for His own good pleasure, who have been tested by the world, the flesh and the devil and found true. We pour contempt on someone like Hitler, who had the attitude that the end justifies the means and then proceeded to murder all the people He didn’t like. God allows suffering in order to refine His people, while, men like Hitler hold the place of evil that God uses to prove His saints. God the Father is truly a conundrum to us in many respects. He is so big and powerful that we wonder if He even notices us. When we try to calculate these things, we discover our math is insufficient, and so part of the testing in this life is in trusting God in His absence in the face of pain and suffering. Should we stop trusting God? Is He so little that His plan would fail? Man thinks pain and suffering is evil, but God says that sin is evil. Man murdered the Son of God, but pain and suffering never hurt anyone. See also: God allows suffering and evil to test us like He tested Job; Lk 22-31,32; 65i

Mk 15,10-15

(199i) Denying Christ >> Man chooses his own destiny apart from God >> Rejecting Christ >> The world rejects God >> World rejects God because it does not know Him – Jesus performed thousands of miracles and many who saw the miracles were present in Jerusalem, and some were even healed by the touch of His hand, yet they cried with the rest of them for His blood. This seems impossible but it happened. They should have had the attitude that they didn’t know what this man allegedly did wrong; all they know is that He loved them, and He taught them the word of God and healed their diseases, so whatever they say He did wrong, the people should have trusted Him instead. The way it happened, though, He gave them every reason to trust Him, but they cried for His blood instead. Then again, had they trusted Him, they wouldn’t have crucified Him, and God’s predetermined plan would not have come to fruition. This was predestined to happen. Had they not crucified Him, it would have proved God wrong, because He is under the conviction that the world hates Him and does not know Him.

(24f) Envy (Key verse)

(24g) Sin >> Poverty (Forms of fear) >> Envy >> Angry at God because of their poverty -- Man's issues with God are not altogether obvious. Besides being prodded by the devil into sin, Man's greatest enemy is poverty. An easy way to arrive at this conclusion is to determine the common thread between all wars fought throughout man's bloody past. We must conclude that poverty is at the root of our dilemma. If we were not so needy, we would not be so greedy. It is our fear of the future and the stockpiling of supplies that causes us so much anxiety and grief. Once greed enters the world, those who don't have what they think they need become envious of those who have more, and start wars over resources, rather than living one day at a time. 

(170c) Works of the devil >> Manifestations of the devil >> Pursuing the glory of man turns us in the wrong direction >> Fighting God to keep the glory of man

(185b) Works of the devil >> The origin of lawlessness >> Mystery of lawlessness >> Having no grounds for your hate >> Hating Christ without a cause – This is the negative power of envy at work. There is one kind of envy that wishes we were rich and famous like some of our favorite celebrities. We sit at the television set and dream of being like them. We are jealous and wish we had what they had; we’re not angry at them but love them. The envy that the Pharisees had against Jesus was not the same; it was an envy that hated Him. Their envy was competitive. Instead of wanting to be like Him, they wanted to overcome Him. They were like Satan, who is first deceitful, and when that didn’t work, they resorted to murder. They would have done just about anything to have healing power in their fingertips, so they could charge exorbitant prices to touch the bodies of the sick and diseased, and they wished they had His wisdom and could draw a crowd the way Jesus did, so they could charge exorbitant prices for their speeches, and they would amass greater fortunes and prestige than ever. Jesus drove His enemies crazy having the power of God at His disposal and refusing to use it for evil. The religious establishment had the power of Satan at their disposal and used it exclusively for evil.

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Mk 15,11-16

(186da) Works of the devil >> The result of lawlessness >> Man’s role in becoming a reprobate >> The fool throws Jesus away for something better >> Israel betrayed the Lord

Mk 15,11-15

(179d) Works of the devil >> Practicing witchcraft >> Wolves stir up the crowd through jealousy – Just how close was the crowd to the opinions of the chief priests’ and Pharisees’ before they stirred up the people? How close were they to asking for the blood of Christ on their own? The attitude of the Jews was that if Jesus would not become their king and fight against their enemies the Romans and focus on the problems of this life, instead of incessantly talking about the afterlife, then they didn't want Him. This was already well cemented in their heads, so they had the sentiments of the religious establishment; all they needed was a little prodding. It wasn’t long before this that they gave Jesus a great entrance into the city laying down palm branches and praising God. What happened to make them cry for His blood only days later? Their hope was that Messiah would come and raise them over the nations, but they never stopped to think what expectations their Messiah might have of them. They considered His coming to be stipulation-free, but their past interactions with God never exhibited such a conspicuous absence of conditions. Contradictorily, Moses continually warned them of God’s conditions that He imposed on His people before He would lift a finger to help them. The entire chapter 28 of Deuteronomy is devoted to espousing the terms that God required of Israel before they saw one benefit of being the nation chosen to bear His name.

Mk 15-15

(37a) Judgment >> The cross >> God judged the sin of the world through Christ – Jesus became the blood sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin and took the punishment that belonged to Barabbas, who represents us all. He was the scapegoat that they practiced in the Old Testament prior to making the annual sacrifice of the lamb at Passover. Before killing the lamb, they would take a similar lamb and release it into the wilderness.

Mk 15,16-37

(103i) Thy kingdom come >> Purifying process >> God purifies His church >> Jesus goes through God’s purifying process -- Since Jesus is innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners and exalted above the heavens (Heb 7-26,27), why did He need to go through a purifying process? Heb 5-8 says that He learned obedience through the things which He suffered. Although God is totally complete and in need of nothing, He still lacked experience with sin. God found a way to experience sin by experiencing ours on the cross without ever personally sinning. Eph 4-9,10 says, "Now this expression, 'He ascended,' what does it mean except that he also had descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is Himself also He who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things." Jesus was already Lord of Satan, but He wanted first hand experience with the realm of darkness, so God sent His Son all the way to the bottom of human depravity to experience the full impact of sin on His soul; that is, He descended into hell, in order that He may become Lord even of darkness and evil. If God required His Son to experience the things that He learned, how much more does He require from us that we do more than just say we love God. He expects us to prove it. God's purifying process always involves suffering. Our relationship with God grows deeper as we endure His will in our lives. This process is painful because it always involves sacrifice, but our reward is experiencing God through the things we suffer in His name. 

Mk 15-21

(37f) Judgment >> Judgment of God >> Jesus’ humanity >> Jesus had human limitations

(188e) Die to self (Process of substitution) >> Separation from the old man >> Suffering >> Suffering the will of God in your life – They scourged Jesus and then crucified Him. That is a quick few words, but they represent an unimaginable amount of pain and suffering to our Lord. When we think of Satan’s absolute hatred for God’s Son, having tempted Him innumerous times, failing to make Him sin, He tried to disrupt Jesus' relationship with His Father. The only thing Satan knew after deception failed was murder, and he did it with such violence and rage, no doubt possessing the men who wielded the whips, giving them superhuman strength. The cat-o-nine-tails tore the skin off his back until He almost died, and what was left of Him they nailed to a cross until dead, which only took a few hours, because of the horrible beating he received. Each whip had nine leather strands and each strand had glass and bone fragments tied into them, so when they hit the soft flesh, it tore chunks of meat from the body. Each time the whip struck the back it was like whipping Him nine times.

Mk 15-28

(141f) Witness >> Validity of Jesus Christ >> Old Testament bears witness to the new >> It bears witness to Jesus >> Prophesy about Jesus’ death – The Bible says that Jesus hung with sinners; what choice did He have? Everybody’s a sinner. When it says He socialized with sinners, it meant that He made His company with people whom the religious establishment considered sinners, because they didn’t worship at the temple or participate in the festivals and ceremonies, nor did they tithe. In this case, when Scripture was fulfilled, those with Him were His own disciples, and they were said to be transgressors. This was partly due to the fact that they carried weapons and actually used them against their enemies when they came to arrest the Lord. The disciples were also sinners in other ways; they were the kind of people Jesus came to rescue from death through His own death, that they might believe in His blood sacrifice, in order that God could count them righteous through faith. The disciples were sinners in the eyes of God, yet they were upstanding citizens according to our standards. Therefore, if these good men needed salvation, how much more do transgressors who are sinners according to our own standards need the blood of Jesus to cover their sins?

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Mk 15,29-32

(19m) Sin >> Nature of sin >> Unwilling to believe >> Spirit of unbelief

(243b) Kingdom of God >> Opposition toward the Kingdom of God >> Persecuting the kingdom >> Mocking Christ – Jesus’ enemies mocked Him saying, “You who are going to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save Yourself, and come down from the cross!” Later Jesus rose from the dead, but He didn’t appear to everyone. He didn’t show Himself to the high priest; He showed Himself to His disciples and those who believed in Him. His enemies who mocked Him never saw Him alive again, so they continued in their unbelief. This is what God is willing to do for us; if we believe in Him, He will go out of His way to help us believe all the more, but if we refuse to believe in Him, He will give us reason for that too. This is based on the kingdom principle: “For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him” (Mat 13-12). This principle is threaded throughout Scripture. Had Jesus shown Himself to the high priest, he would have had Him crucified again. We all have an opportunity to believe in God, but if we choose not to believe in Him, He will leave us in our unbelief. God has expectations of us; He wants us to show Him a little faith so He can work with us.

Mk 15-29,30

(58j) Paradox >> Two implied meanings >> The temple building / The temple of His body

(140e) Temple >> Temple made without hands >> Hiding place >> The entrance exam -- Heb 9-24 says that Christ did not enter a holy place made with hands, but into heaven itself to appear in the presence of God for us. The way into the holy place for Jesus was through the cross, then in Mat 26-24 Jesus told us to take up our cross and follow Him. We are all going to die some day; that day will be the point of transition and will be our ticket to the holy of holies in the most literal sense, but until then God has commanded us to deny our petty pleasures that conflict with the life He has prepared for us behind the veil, a spiritual realm where we can go and experience God until we meet Him face to face.

(184k) Works of the devil >> The origin of lawlessness >> Abusing the grace of God >> Dragging God’s Grace Through The Mud >> Dishonoring the grace of God – Those who hurled abuse at Him may have been throwing stones, but another passage says that one who was crucified next to Him also hurled abuse at Him. With his hands nailed to a cross the only thing He could have been hurling was mocking words and spittle (Lk 23-39). It is amazing that God allowed people whom He created to mistreat Him to such an extent, but He did it as a way of proving to mankind that we are all sinners. The problem with many people, they don’t think they’re sinners. If we were willing to hurl abuse of all forms at our maker, then we must be sinners, yet people simply refuse to believe it. Instead of seeking truth, they look for teachings that appeal to their flesh and then throw them in God's face.

Mk 15,33-37

(26b) Sin >> Consequences of sin >> Death is separation >> Death is hell >> Sin has the sentence of hell – That loud cry may have been the sound that everybody makes after they die and goes to hell. The Father forsook Jesus at His death; no one was there to catch Him when He fell, and as His Spirit slipped from His body it fell into the recesses of the pit, and there He spent 3½ days preaching to the people who lived there. He probably informed them of His identity and that He was only there temporarily and that He wasn’t taking anybody with Him when He left. He didn’t go there to rescue anybody; He only went to tell them how big a mistake they made in their former lives by rejecting all that was right and good and living as though there was no God. Three days later He returned to a resurrected body to the light of day, only He was in a tomb, and the angel rolled away the stone, and He walked out alive forevermore. Death will never touch Him again, and He holds out the promise to anybody who would believe in Him for eternal life that they would not have to see that evil place from which He had returned. They will become immune to death, and life will take hold of them and they will live forever with Him in paradise.

(208g) Salvation >> The salvation of God >> Personal relationship >> Being the friend of God >> Father & son relationship – The centurion heard many of the claims about Jesus, but he never considered them to be true, until He died. It was the way He died that convinced Him that He was the Son of God. How did Jesus die to convince a skeptic of His divinity? His cry just before He died revealed His deep and abiding relationship with His Father. Jesus knew God on a personal level, having known and loved His Father from eternity past; nobody but the Son of God could have expressed the feelings He had that welled inside Him that He never expressed throughout His life until His death. This is probably true about all of us. We will probably have feelings at our death that we never felt until then, a summary of our whole lives. Jesus summarized eternity past in a moment’s time, expressing a genuine relationship with God that He had always known.

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Mk 15-37

(192a) Die to self (Process of substitution) >> Result of putting off the old man >> Gain by losing >> Life for life >> Losing your life to gain God’s life

Mk 15-38

(205h) Salvation >> Salvation is based on God’s promises >> New covenant >> The old one is obsolete -- The veil of the temple covering the Holy of Holies was torn from top to bottom, symbolizing that the ministry of the old covenant had reached its end and that a new, better covenant was being inaugurated in its place. An angel grabbed the top of the curtain and ripped it in half from top to bottom. Had it been an earthquake, it would have ripped from bottom to top as the earth split beneath it. The tearing of the veil represents the access God has given us into the Most Holy Place, not only in the life to come, but also in this life.

Mk 15-39

(86e) Thy kingdom come >> Belief >> God’s works act as evidence to support our beliefs

(150f) Witness >> Validity of Jesus Christ >> Works of the Church bear witness of Jesus >> Confessing Jesus as the son of God – For the centurion to make the claim that Jesus was the Son of God and then to thrust a spear in His side must not have been easy, but it was required of Him. Had he not made sure Jesus was dead, he too would have ended up on a cross, and somebody else would be shoving a spear in his side. After the centurion realized this was the Son of God, he had to inflict wound in His body, fatal had He not already been dead. For this man to have confessed Jesus indicates that he got saved. If he didn’t get saved at that moment, he probably got saved later after hearing the gospel message of His resurrection. Many were unwilling to believe in Jesus no matter how much evidence was presented to them. The Pharisees may have known Jesus was the Son of God, but they refused to believe it. Putting it in those terms, it really shows their depravity. His countenance alone was enough for the discerning believer to accept Jesus Christ as the Son of God.

Mk 15,40-47

(14e) Servant >> Ministry of helps >> Being in charge of the details – The disciples came to the women to ascertain where they laid the body of their Lord. Women are servants by nature, and this is the way it has been throughout all time. Women generally have a beautiful spirit, and men have been the breadwinners, and together they have raised families throughout the generations. However, we see that the world today does not fit this nice pattern anymore, indicating that we are reaching the end of the age. We now must deal with cultural change going in directions that no one is controlling so that no one knows his or her place anymore. For thousands of years, the genders were well defined, but the world has been blurring the distinctions in social order and the result is confusion about our roles in society. When a woman tries to be a servant, she gets mocked and told that it is no longer her job and that a man could just as easily do it. Now a woman doesn’t know if she should obey her culture or her instincts that she received from God. Paul said the woman has received the ministry of angels, for they too are servants (1Cor 11-10).

Mk 15-40

(170e) Works of the devil >> Manifestations of the devil >> Seeking the glory of man >> Greed and lust are the glory of man >> Woman is the glory of man -- This verse goes with verse 47. It is no wonder more women go to church than men; many women followed Jesus in His day. Women understand the gospel seemingly better than men. Jesus was a man devoid of violence, and women gravitate towards gentlemen. He had a very attractive personality and His gospel was attractive to women. His whole teaching and ministry revolved around love, which is very attractive to women. Love integrates into their nesting instincts; this is what women are striving to emulate as mothers. Love is primary to mothers in raising their children. Mothers have kept this world alive all these thousands of years, not just giving birth to the next generation, but also nurturing them, so it shouldn’t be surprising that women are attracted to Jesus, because He has a motherly way about Himself. Jesus said in Jn 14-2,3, “I go to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also.” That has a ring of nesting instincts, like a mother bird builds a nest to raise its young. That place, by the way is the New Jerusalem.

Mk 15,43-47

(123d) Thy kingdom come >> Manifestations of faith >> Love >> Spiritual affection >> Compassion >> Reaching out to those in need