Mark 4

Mark 4:35-5

Section 2. The work of God in its salvation power. We have now the other side: how God nevertheless manifests Himself to faith, carrying out His purposes unfailingly, spite of all opposition; and as the Saviour of all who put their trust in Him. The three subsections here as the closing part of a septenary series naturally speak of divine manifestation; while the second section as naturally speaks of that salvation work in which He is most fully manifested.

1. The stilling of the storm upon the lake is found earlier in Matthew, but with little difference in detail. In it Christ’s power over the elements, is exhibited to the wonder of His disciples; and in it probably all His people have seen without any question the sign of His supremacy over all circumstances of the disturbed scene through which we pass. When the storm comes, how often He seems asleep! But this is for practice of faith, not for the overthrow of it. Yet unbelief in them is importunate and querulous: “Carest Thou not that we perish?” as if waves could sink the slip in which He was!

But there was the logic of fact: the ship was filling. They wake Him, and at His rebuke the tempest stills; but have they not missed something? and do not we often gain; perhaps, a speedier deliverance through our unbelief? when faith, like the tropic-bird, would find its rest amid the tempest, and see more the “wonders of the Lord.” Mark notices most distinctly His rebuke: “Why are ye fearful? have ye not yet faith?” And why indeed do we not trust Him with absolute rest of heart? Surely it is true that “he that feareth is not perfected in love.” But then; how good to know that His love is such - so true and omnipotent - that to learn this perfectly is all that we can want for absolute deliverance. 2. The familiar story of the demoniac follows, as in the two other synoptists, showing the power of the enemy in its fullest and fiercest display entirely, subject to Him. We have already looked at it in Matthew, but who in this case is much briefer in his account than Mark. Mark dwells more upon the desperate condition of the man, his being infested with a horde of demons - as he says, a Legion, and depicts his after-condition as delivered, of which Matthew says nothing. These things lie more within the scope of the present Gospel, in which the quality of the deliverance, the service done to man, is more before us, as in Matthew the Deliverer. (1) In the first place, Mark shows us in a very distinct way the enemy’s power. His victim’s abode is in the tombs, he who had the power of death finding a congenial abode amid the tokens of the ruin which his hand has wrought. There he lives in the lawless freedom secured by supernatural strength. Men cannot bind him and cannot tame him: fetters and chains are broken in pieces by him; and bent upon self-injury, he is always in scenes of desolation, - on the mountains or in the tombs, crying out, and cutting himself with stones. Here are features by which we may see still in many different forms how great a hold Satan has of men still and everywhere. Spite of their pride and self-love, they pursue eagerly the paths of self-degradation and self-torture; breaking asunder every restraint which the wisdom bred of bitter experience has taught men to put upon one another. The heights of self-exaltation and the charnel-houses of corruption are alike their haunts; and these, though apparently so far apart, come often-times together. (2) But the power of Satan; while to the fallen creature so hopeless to overcome, finds in Christ a power to which it must succumb. Throughout these evangelic histories there is not a trace of open resistance on the part of these demons, if as here there were a legion of them. They deprecate the judgment they foresee, but for which the time is not yet come, and plead this in their own behalf. They beseech Him not to send them out of the country, and ask leave to enter into the herd of swine. What purpose they might have in this, and whether it was in the end thwarted or suffered, we may have little ability to understand. The demons are still demons, and seeking their own ends as such; while the wisdom of God taketh still the wise in their own craftiness. (3) We are then given the picture of the delivered man. Three things show the transformation wrought: he is “sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind.” Restlessness, vehemence, passion, are gone; the shame of his nakedness is covered; he has come to himself and his mind is cleared. Is there any coming to oneself, where there is not coming to Christ? (4) But the world is a fallen world, and Satan is the prince of it. Here we see how it is that he is this. Those who beg Christ to depart must needs have the devil to remain. It is but a question between the two, for nature abhors a vacuum. The Lord has shown us how an empty, swept and garnished house waits and invites such a tenant: Christ is too costly a guest: one soul to cost two thousand swine is too high a reckoning. They beg Him therefore, courteously, to depart: for He can be refused with courtesy, and yet refused: and He does depart. (5) But the rescued man is of another mind than this: divine grace has wrought in his heart, and the deliverance of which he has been the subject is too real and great. He prays that lie may be with Him; but the Lord has other purposes as to him: “Go home to thy people,” He says, “and declare to them how great things the Lord has done for thee, and has had mercy upon thee.” Thus is the saved sinner made to be a witness of the salvation which he has received, in the world out of which Christ has gone rejected. “And he went his way, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him; and all men wondered.” 3. In the intertwined stories of the daughter of Jairus and the woman with the issue of blood, Mark again is fuller than Matthew, and the dispensational application which we have seen in his account seems to give place here to an individual and spiritual one. We have, no doubt, the divine and human sides of what is, in fact, one glorious work of the God of resurrection. From one side we are sinners dying in our sins, and we lay hold upon Christ in our need and prove the virtue that is in Him for our healing. From the other, we were not dying simply but dead, and are raised up from the dead. Both sides are true, but we are not concerned just now with any reconciliation of them. They are in the main the views respectively of Romans and Ephesians, and we reach them in the order indicated by this. (1) Jair, “the enlightener,” as ruler of the synagogue, may signify to us by name and position both the failure and the power of law. The law had said, “Do this, and thou shalt live,” but life, as he owns, is only in the hands of Jesus, to whom the conviction of his extremity brings him. Faith springs out of his daughter’s need: “My little daughter lieth at the point of death: I pray thee that Thou come and lay Thy hands on her that she may be healed, and she shall live.” It is the right effect of law when we are shut up by it in this way to the faith of Jesus. (2) The Lord listens to his prayer, and follows him toward the house, a multitude thronging Him upon His way there. Amidst them all comes one who has conscious personal need of Him, - an issue of blood, a steady quiet draining of the life away, for which all the help that she has hitherto sought has been but aggravation of the evil and impoverishment. Now she has heard of Jesus, and without means, without hope, she too has reached the place in which she is ready to be attracted. Faith says in her heart, “If I touch but His garments I shall be healed”: and the event confirms this; coming in the press behind she touches; and “she felt in her body that she was healed of that scourge.” This is one of the not infrequent cases in which the spiritual application is so easy to be made that in fact it is made generally by the common consent of Christians, and needs little enforcement. The twelve years of unhealed misery are marked by the number of divine government as that which issues, after all other means of healing has been proved worse than vain, in the exaltation of Christ. The touching of the garments is the appeal to those ways of His which manifest His character, the “habits,” in Him so safely to be relied upon. We see in her also how necessary faith is to feelings, producing these, not built upon them: “joy and peace” found “in believing.” The details of the picture sustain the interpretation: it is not casual resemblance that we find, but the consistency of truth. She illustrates also the confirmation found in open confession of Christ: how the Lord looks for this on the part of those whom He has healed. He owns her also as one of whom He is not ashamed and assures to her the quiet enjoyment of what His grace has given. Of what immense importance to our spiritual life is the confession of Christ, as He Himself has emphasized it for us! (3) But now the news is brought that the child is dead: why trouble the Teacher any more? Death, for man; is the end of hope; and, as far as he is concerned, designed to be so. On this very account, it is in this that God can show Himself where man is impotent. “Be not afraid,” says the Lord in answer to such a message; “only believe.” Unbelief may claim its right to mourn and weep, unreal as much even of this is; but faith it is that alone can see the glory of God. The same twelve years measure the period of the woman’s issue of blood and the age of the child when raised from the dead: the same meaning must attach to them in both cases. “God, for the great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, has quickened us together with Christ, and has raised us up together” (Ephesians 2:4-5). This goes, indeed, beyond that which we find in Mark; but “with Christ” shows Christ to be, in a deeper sense even than in the Gospel, the Worker of the miracle of resurrection. “With Him” only, as the fruit of His precious death for us, and by grace “bound in the bundle of life” with Him, could we have been brought up out of a death so different. In the Gospel it is a miracle of power that is seen; in the epistle it is a miracle of righteousness and yet of grace toward us.