Mark 6:12-13

CHAPTER 31

THE MINISTRY OF THE TWELVE

Mark 6:12-13. “And having gone out, they continued to preach that they must repent; they continued to cast out many demons; they continued to anoint many sick people with oil, and heal them.” Luke 9:6 : “And going forth, they continued to go throughout the villages, everywhere preaching the gospel and healing” (the sick). This is all we have on record appertaining to the ministry of the Twelve, while separate from Jesus, pursuant to the above commission; and this, you observe, is given by Mark and Luke, who were not apostles at that time. We hear nothing of Mark till Paul's first evangelistic tour, about nine years subsequently to this transaction, when he went out as a helper of Paul and Barnabas, doubtless quite young and inexperienced, as his heart failed him in Pamphylia, so that, much to the disgust of Paul and doubtless the grief of his uncle Barnabas, he left the work and returned to Jerusalem; Barnabas, loath to give up his nephew, endeavoring to restore him to the evangelistic work and take him out on their second tour; but Paul positively refusing, they separated, thus organizing two evangelistic forces, Barnabas taking Mark, and Paul taking Silas, Luke, and Timothy. If Mark was present at the time of this commission, he was quite a youth, not coming into history till about nine years later. As Luke was a citizen of Antioch, when we first hear of him as a convert under the ministry of Paul and Barnabas, about ten years subsequently, it is hardly probable that he was present; yet he might have been, as the Jews were coming from all Gentile countries, magnetized by the preaching and miracles of Jesus. Why do not Matthew and John give us an account of this ministry? In their histories they are simply writing up the life and ministry of Jesus. They were both members of the apostleship at that time, and went out under this commission to preach the gospel to the Jews. From the chronological data we can pick up, the presumption is that they were gone about three months. Six parties of them, moving with great expedition over a region of country about the size of New England, would make great progress in a dozen weeks.

Here is a vacuum in the history of our Lord's life and ministry. Matthew and John were absent; Luke and Mark had not yet become disciples, so far as our knowledge extends; the latter yet in his home in Jerusalem, and the former, off in Antioch, studying medicine. Luke, about A.D. 42, became the evangelistic helper and amanuensis of Paul, writing for him to the end of his life. Though the Gospel of Luke was dictated by Paul, we must remember that he never came to Palestine during the ministry of Jesus; having been educated at Jerusalem, but returned to Tarsus before the ministry of John the Baptist. It is believed that Mark wrote his Gospel at Rome, about thirty years after the ascension of our Lord, as dictated by Peter, who speaks of him very kindly, calling him his son. (1 Peter 5:13.) We find from the above Scriptures that the Twelve, during their absence from Jesus, were true and faithful, giving the trumpet no uncertain sound, but laying a constant, burning emphasis on repentance, which is fundamental in the gracious economy, not only laying the bottom rock of the experimental edifice, but gilding the topmost pinnacle; as metanoia, “repentance,” is from meta, “change,” and nous, “the mind.” Hence it means a change of minds; i.e., get rid of the carnal mind, and receive the whole mind of Christ, which really comprehends the entire plan of salvation. The trouble with dead Churches is the absence of evangelical repentance. We find these Twelve were constantly casting out demons i.e., getting people converted and healing the sick, not forgetting the anointing with olive-oil, which everywhere abounds in that country, and is a constant symbol of the Holy Ghost.

Matthew 14:1-12; Mark 6:14-29; and Luke 9:7-9

MARTYRDOM OF JOHN THE BAPTIST

Matthew 14:1-12; Mark 6:14-29; and Luke 9:7-9. While the biography of Jesus is intimated by these inspired historians during the period of their absence, we find three of them favoring us with the record of the melancholy and apparently premature death of John the Baptist. As the Jews had poured out in multitudes, and hung spell-bound upon his eloquent lips, the six months of his brilliant and wonderful ministry, his name was everywhere a household word. Hence his cruel and untimely martyrdom fell on the nation with the shock of an earthquake. Mark:

“And King Herod said, John the Baptist is risen from the dead, and therefore mighty works are wrought through him. Others said, That he is Elijah. And others said, That he is one of the prophets. But Herod, hearing, said, This is John, whom I beheaded; he is risen from the dead. It being a high day when Herod, on his birthday, made a feast for his magnates, chiliarchs, and the first men of Galilee, and the daughter of Herodias having come in, and danced and pleased Herod, and those sitting along with him at the table, the king said to the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever you may wish, and I will give it to you. And he swore unto her, Whatsoever you may ask me, I will give you, even unto the half of my kingdom. And she, having gone out, said to her mother, What shall I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist. And having come in unto the king with haste, unhesitatingly she asked him, saying, I wish that you may give me here the head of John the Baptist in a charger. The king being much grieved, on account of his oaths and those who were sitting at the table with him, did not receive his consent to reject her. The king immediately sending forth an executioner, commanded that his head should be brought. He having departed, beheaded him in prison; and he brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel; and the damsel gave it to her mother. His disciples, hearing, came and took his body and buried it in a tomb.”

a. This was Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, the last king of the Jews, who was on the throne when our Savior was born, and died at Jericho while He was in Egypt, a fugitive from the infantile slaughter at Bethlehem. He had married the daughter of Aretas, king of Arabia, whom he discarded in order to take Herodias, his niece, the wife of his half- brother Philip (not Philip the tetrarch, of Iturea and Trachonitis Luke 3:1), having employed a bondman in the home of his brother to seduce her away from her husband, and get her thus unlawfully to become his wife. His enraged father-in-law eventually invaded his country with an army, to avenge the maltreatment of his daughter. I saw the battle-field, off the southeast coast of the Galilean Sea, where Aretas met Herod, and signally defeated him, thus beginning his fatal downfall, which culminated in his ruin, the Roman emperor not only dethroning him, taking his kingdom from him and giving it to Herod Agrippa, but actually banishing him and Herodias to Lugdunum (Lyons), in the wilds of Gaul, and afterward exiling them in Spain, where they died in dreary solitude and misery, their temporal misfortunes the ominous prelude of the awful fate awaiting them.

b. We have in John the Baptist a beautiful and brilliant example of that stern and uncompromising ministerial fidelity which alone will qualify the Lord's heralds for the judgment fires. John knew no fear. Bold as an archangel, he looked the king and queen in the face, and publicly exposed their sins, making the queen so awfully mad, as it was wholesale murder to her pride, that she would have slain him quickly through a hired assassin, if her husband had not defeated her purposes by shutting him up in prison. The implacable woman never relented, but studied every conceivable device to take his life. Eighteen months have whiled away since this greatest of prophets has become the inmate of a gloomy, subterranean dungeon in the Tower of Machierus, east of the Dead Sea, in the Land of Moab. During all this time, Herod frequently heard him preach, being powerfully wrought upon and deeply convicted, so that he actually obeyed the preacher in many respects. “For Herod feared John, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man; and he continued to hold him in prison, and hearing him, he continued to do many things, and hear him delightfully.” (Mark 6:20.) Herod was a member of the Jewish Church, loved to go to meeting, and as John was the best preacher he had ever heard, was delighted with him, making great reformation under his ministry, still retaining him in prison, to keep his enraged wife from killing him. Little did he anticipate his awful, impending fate. Now conceive the situation.

c. Pursuant to the custom of Oriental monarchs, he makes a great feast, to which he invites his official subordinates, and the rich and mighty men from all parts of his kingdom, to participate his bounty and contemplate his royal magnificence. In the midst of the festivities and jollifications, while all are merry with wine, pretty, little Salome comes in, and dances a pantomime for their edification, her wonderful agility literally capturing the princely audience thronging the royal palace. Amid a thousand compliments by the magnates, the king, now drunk enough to act the fool, obligates himself, by a solemn oath, in the presence of the royalty and nobility, to grant her petition, even though she ask the queenship of half his dominions a custom from time immemorial peculiar to Oriental monarchs.

d. The little girl darts away, and counsels her mother, whose constant study the last two years has been the destruction of that impudent preacher, who had the atidacity, in his public preaching, to assault her character and ruin her reputation. O how she seizes the auspicious moment, and sends the girl back, with the bloody petition dropping in livid horror from her lips, “Give me here in this charger the head of John the Baptist!”

e. The king expected her to ask some great present, perhaps a kingdom, that she might rule over it when she arrived at womanhood. Her demand strikes him like a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky. He is flooded with grief, and would give a world to rescind the whole matter. But what can he do? If he goes back on his oath, he will so unman himself in the estimation of the royalty and the nobility that they will rebel against him on the spot, take the crown from his head, and either take his head off, or banish him from his kingdom. Satan helps him. He rallies his courage; dispatches the bloody executioner at once to the prison, with the charger sent in by blood-thirsty Herodias to receive the gory head of the greatest prophet the world has seen. f. The sad fate of King Herod should be a profitable warning to all the people who have not settled the problem of personal salvation by entire sanctification; lest, like poor Herod, in an evil hour, the enemy slip in like a weasel and suck away your life-blood, blighting your hope, and sealing your doom in the gloom of rayless night.

g. In the present age of conjugal infidelity, illegal marriages, and all sorts of domestic entanglements, withering and blighting the beautiful flowers wont to bloom amid the gardens of holy wedlock, and disseminating social pestilence, like the withering sirocco that sweeps its pestilential gales over Lybia's burning sands, thus turning home into a pandemonium, O how we need the lightning, steel, fire, thunder, and earthquake type of preaching which characterized the fearless prophet of the wilderness, when he publicly scandalized the king and queen in their own presence, heroically preaching the truth, though it cost him imprisonment and martyrdom!

h. Should not that great preacher have been more cautious, and thus perpetuated his liberties, and prolonged his life many years to preach the gospel? I trow not. God makes no mistakes. Though John's active ministry in the open air lasted but about six months, till overtaken by the dark eclipse of imprisonment and death, doubtless he did more good than if he had preached a compromised gospel six hundred years.