Daily Bible Reading, Week 13

Hello, and welcome to the Westside churches special Monday Morning Coffee podcast on this podcast, our preacher Mark Roberts will help you get your week started right. With look back at yesterday's sermon so that we can think through it further and better work the applications into our daily lives . Mark will then look forward into this week's Bible reading so that we can know what to expect and watch for. And, he may have some extra bonus thoughts from time to time. So grab a cup of coffee as we start the week together on Monday Morning Coffee with Mark.

Good morning. Good morning. Welcome to the Monday Morning Coffee podcast for Monday, March the 25th. I'm Mark, and I've got a great cup of coffee here. Special new mug. This is a Texas Rangers World Series championship mug. Pretty excited about that and I am very excited about Bible reading this week as we continue to push forward in the gospel of Mark covering the most important events in human history. Can't say enough about that, but I can't say anything about my sermon yesterday at the West Side Church because, because I was not at West Side . I'm in Odessa for a Sunday to Wednesday meeting with the Billy Hext Road Church here, started my preaching life in Odessa, Texas. So it is exciting to be here again, to connect with some people and some places that are a big part of my past. It's exciting to be here. Sorry not to be at West Side , though it's gospel meeting season. There's gonna be a couple of times in the next few weeks where I need to be somewhere else helping some brethren in a different place. But we can still read the Bible together. Let's do that. Get your Bible open to Mark , please Mark chapter 14. We'll start in verse 53. Let's get started. Our reading from Monday is Mark chapter 14, verses 53 to 65. And this is Jesus in the Sham trials. And there is a lot that is not right about what's going on here with the Sanhedrin Council , but Mark does not emphasize that what he is doing is weaving together Peter's utter failure and Jesus's tremendous courage. I said earlier, I don't think we pay enough attention to how brave Jesus is, but watch how this works because in verse 59, they can't even get their stories straight and tell straight lies about Jesus. And so the pivotal moment arrives in verse 60, Hey, what's the deal? Who are you? What do you say? What's this all about? And in verse 61, Jesus is challenged, are you the Christ? And that means all he needs to do is say, oh , come on now, fellas, that's the silliness I do. I look like the Messiah to you. Or maybe mumble some craziness and act like a zany out of his mind kind of person. And they're gonna lose the whole deal. It's all gonna fall apart. Someone's gonna say, W , why'd you drag this guy in here? He's just a nut job. Or he doesn't even make a claim to be the Messiah. Jesus could say, no, no, no, no, no, I, I'm not the Messiah. I don't know how anybody got that impression. I certainly would never say that. Oh gracious, I oh my, I just apologize if anybody thinks that about me and it's all over. Jesus doesn't do that. Verse 62, I am, and you will see the son of man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven. Jesus makes a clear claim to being the Messiah. He puts together Psalm one, ten one and Daniel seven verses 13 and 14. Mark those in the margin of your Bible. Go read those. And he says, standing on those two biblical texts that the answer to their questions is, yes, I am the Messiah. I am a true prophet. What I said about the temple's going to come to pass, I'm the Messiah and you will see me vindicated. The court is wrong. I am right. God will overturn the verdict of this sham trial, this kangaroo court. I am the Messiah. And there's such rich irony in verse 65, prophesy. Jesus has been prophesying all along. But again, what you get here in our reading today is the courageous Christ could have ducked out, could have said, I'm not the Messiah. And gotten out of the whole deal says straight up I am the Messiah. And Jesus knows exactly what that will mean for him. Tomorrow we read about someone without that kind of courage. See y'all on Tuesday. It is Tuesday. And today's reading is in the gospel of Mark chapter 14, verses 66 to 72. This is Peter's denials of Jesus. And of course there's lots of questions we can ask about this. We saw Peter in verse 54 sitting at the fire warming himself. And we wonder, what's Peter doing there? And how did he get there? How did he get away from the authorities in the garden of Gethsemane? Where does he go from here? And Mark isn't interested in any of that. This is a great, great place to learn how to read the Bible. And one of the keys to reading the Bible is that we keep our eye on what the Bible author, what the Holy Spirit of course really wants us to watch. It's so easy because we have natural curiosity about various things. And we've read this text many, many, many times. Kind of like when you watch a movie over and over and over again, you begin to notice things in the background and you see mistakes and errors and somebody dropping something or someone , uh, microphone gets into the scene, all that kind of business. 'cause we're not watching anymore what the director wanted us to watch. Well, of course there's no errors or texts. I guess nobody's gonna drop a microphone into this scene. But we have read this so many times that it becomes easy for us to become obsessed with some details and to start looking for answers to our questions rather than paying attention to what the Holy Spirit wants us to pay attention to, which is Peter fails at the same time that Jesus succeeds. Jesus confesses under immense pressure. Verse 62. Now Peter, under the very lightest kind of pressure, capitulates and just falls apart. And so verse 71, he began to invoke a curse upon himself and to swear, that's not profanity, that's not Peter using a bunch of four letter words. This isn't Peter using a bunch of four letter words when it says in some translations he began to curse. That's where people have gone with that. But it means call down curses on himself. And that's how the ESV has it to say, may God strike me dead , that kind of thing. If I'm not telling the truth, may God kill me here on the spot. Strong invocation of God striking, killing me if I'm saying something that's a falsehood. It's that sort of thing that he's doing. And so Peter very strongly says, I don't know Jesus. And so look at verse 72. Jesus is the true prophet. Remember verse 65, we want you to prophesy. Jesus is the true prophet, isn't he? He knows exactly what's going to happen. He knows everything that's going to happen and he has foretold everything that will occur. And Peter realizes his utter and complete failure. Tomorrow we step out of Mark's gospel and we'll see what Matthew has to say about this scene. Welcome to Hump Day. It's Wednesday and that means we are reading in Matthew's gospel. We're stepping over to Matthew chapter 26. We're going to read 69 to 75, Matthew 26 verses 69 to 75 , which is Matthew's account of Peter's denial. This is very similar to what we read yesterday in Mark's gospel. Let me give you a couple of notes here. There is some variation in the gospel accounts. They emphasize different pieces of that, maybe different people's testimony. I think about Luke who says he's talked with witnesses and so maybe he talked with somebody who was there and who remembered a specific person speaking up. And so Luke's account will cover that both in Mark and in Matthew in verse 70 of Mark's gospel, mark 14. And then here in our reading today in verse 73 , there's the mention of bystanders coming up and saying to Peter. So there , there's a group of people I , I think it's a mistake to picture this in our mind is there are exactly only three people, this person and then this person, and then this person. There's a lot of people here. So Matthew and Mark are in close agreement. There's a servant girl, then there's a another girl out by the gateway, and then there's bystanders. Luke is a little different. There's a servant girl, and then there's another person who's not specified. And then there's yet another person still not specified. There were a lot of people here. And if one person had said, Hey, you're a Galilean, I , I can tell by the way you say howdy and y'all that you're from East Texas, then other people would've said, yeah, yeah, you are one of them. And somebody else said, Hey, you are part of him. And so Peter's in a world of trouble here, and I don't wanna make Peter out as a coward in any kind of fashion. Here he is following Jesus and trying to see what he could do about this. Could he help? What? What's going on? What's gonna happen to Jesus? And he does follow Jesus right into the mouth of a lion, if you will. But it is clear that he cannot stand on his own and he escalates his responses being evasive. And then you get some denials. And finally you get this business again where he's evoking, invoking a curse upon himself. Verse 74, calling down God's wrath upon himself. If I'm telling a falsehood, wow, Peter really does fall apart here in the worst kind of way. And I think there's a powerful lesson to be learned here in two directions. One, there's some places Christians just don't need to be. We just think we're we're gonna do good to go there. Or maybe we think it's not gonna be a problem if we're there and we just get in over our head. Peter just is. He is in way over his head. Lots of people here and he cannot hold up to that kind of pressure. The other point I would wanna make here is what an incredible testimony this is to the veracity of scripture. People have tried to pick apart the denials of Peter and claim some kind of biblical contradiction between Matthew, mark and Luke and I. I think that's utterly bogus. And as I said, the it can be harmonized and the details can be worked out. That's a little beyond the scope of a podcast that you're gonna listen to before you go to work this morning and get your Bible reading done instead of seeing in that fashion. What we ought see is this is an unbelievable and incredible witness to the truth of scripture. Peter is a huge character in the Bible. Why would the Bible record this horribly embarrassing moment about Peter if it is not telling us the entire truth about what happened in the night of Jesus's trial? Remember, this is not Judas Acat. We wouldn't have any problem with the Bible making Judas Acat look bad. He already looks bad. No, this is the leading apostle, the man who will preach the gospel for the very first time. That's who we're talking about here. And the Bible straight up says, Hey, look at that guy. He utterly blew it. What a complete meltdown on Peter's part. Maybe it should say this , none of us can outs send the grace of God. Sometimes we point to the apostle Paul as the consummate example of that. It's a great example. But Peter's a pretty good example too, isn't he? He denied Jesus Christ and yet we know he is forgiven and goes on to great things in the kingdom of God. How helpful is that? Let's turn our Bibles back over to the gospel of Mark on Thursday. We'll be reading in Mark 15. See you then. Welcome to Thursday, I'm back home from Odessa. Lots of great things happening today, including the Rangers opening their defense of their world championship. Just can't say that enough defense of their world championship because the Rangers are the defending world Series champions. Love it, love it, love it. But more importantly, we're in Mark 15. In Mark 15, we're reading the first 15 verses of this chapter, and here we're seeing Pilate enter the picture. Verse one tells us the entire council is assembled. So that's all of the Sanhedrin and Jesus is sent over to the Roman Governor Pilate. The charge here changes in front of Pilate to this business of being the king of the Jews. Pilate isn't going to be concerned about religious disagreements among the Jews, but someone who's running a new government, who's going to be involved in rebellion and revolution, trying to overthrow him and Roman authority, that's never going to work. So that's where the charge is. Jesus has nothing to say about this there . There's just no point in talking about this any further. These people are determined to do what they will do. And we get that clearly from verses six to 15 because Barabis , who is a rebel, verse seven, is the crowd favorite. And of course he is going to be released over Jesus lots of times. Terrorists, while not viewed well by the authorities, are certainly viewed as heroes by the local people who see that individual as uh , brave and valiant guy trying to overthrow the government and and cast off the bonds of tyranny. So there's not much question here about who's going to be released. Some scholars, some Bible commentators have made a big deal about there's no written record that a Roman governor could do this sort of thing. Listen, a Roman governor had the power of life and death over all the inhabitants of his province who were not Roman citizens. Roman governors could do what they wanted to do. More importantly, notice verse nine. Do you want me to release for you the king of the Jews? Mark will make mention of this six times in the next 30 something verses because he wants to see, he wants us to see that Jesus is the king of the Jews and this is the problem. This is the charge that they're gonna make. Stick in front of Pilate. Verse 15, Pilate is spineless. He has no backbone. Mark will visit that again later in the chapter. But Pilate falls to the crowd's pressure because he does not want word going back to Rome. Hey, somebody who claimed to be a king in opposition to the true Caesar, the real ruler over the Roman Empire. Oh yeah, I let that guy go. I didn't do anything about that. Oh , I can't have that. Jesus is delivered up to be crucified tomorrow, the darkest day in human history. See you on Friday. It is Friday. And today we read in Mark chapter 15 verses 16 to 32 . This is a very difficult reading. It is hard to read this about our Lord and Savior. The emphasis in Mark's gospel makes it even more difficult to read because Mark repeatedly shows us that Jesus is outrageously and ridiculously humiliated at every turn. Everybody mistreats, Jesus soldiers mistreat him. People keep abuse upon him while he is dying on the cross. It is just awful. And as I said when we began this section, mark has a big challenge here. People, Christians, particularly in the New Testament world, would've been very embarrassed that their leader was crucified. This is a horrible way to die. It's an embarrassing way to die. Mark does not run away from that at all. He embraces that to show the meekness of Jesus. Remember Isaiah 53, like a lamb to the slaughter, but he opens not his mouth. Meekness today often means weakness. That's wrong. Meekness is what we see here in our reading today. Meekness is strength under control. And so these soldiers vent their spleen probably a little weary from these troublesome Jews in this backwater province. They think they're so important and they have these weird religious customs and they're just a bunch of losers. And we're gonna show 'em what a bunch of losers they are. And so the soldiers beat up on Jesus something terribly, and then they head out for the crucifixion. They brought him to the place called Golgotha, verse 22. That place is unknown today. There are several sites that are given as potential sites, but no one is exactly certain where this is verse 23. They offered him wine mixed with myrrh . Some have said that this was a drug to dull the pain and that's why Jesus didn't take it. Others have noted that myrrh mixed with the wine would make it taste better and that this may have been a very cruel joke. Jesus is probably dehydrated by this point and very, very tired and maybe a sip of wine to clear his mouth would be most welcome. And instead it tastes awful and it's a terrible joke and they're laughing at him. And then of course, Jesus is crucified. None of the New Testament readers would have needed a lecture on crucifixion and the horrors of it to understand all about it. They knew about it. They knew everything about it. And so we don't get great long descriptions of everything. We don't even know for sure whether Jesus was crucified on a cross the plus shape or whether it was on a T . Very certain that this is not Jesus. 50 feet in the air. Sometimes paintings and other depictions of the crucifixion have Jesus way up high. And there's a lot of engineering difficulties with doing something like that. Probably not very far up in the air, just can't do that sort of thing. But they would know readers of Mark's, gospels would know what Jesus is going through and what they are doing to Jesus. And so Mark doesn't emphasize the physical agony of dying on the cross, and we ought to talk about that and we ought to be aware of that. This is not death by lethal injection, by any stretch of the imagination. It's not even death by electrocution, which may be very painful, but is very, very short. This is long drawn out torturous death. But the key to that is to know that thousands of people died this way. The Romans use this all the time. People saw this all the time, which is why Mark puts the emphasis on Jesus' mental suffering, the agony of bearing the sins of the world, and people screaming horrible things at Jesus as he dies. Verse 29, oh hey, how about a sign? Show us something and then we'll believe. Really, Jesus has done dozens of signs including raising Lazarus from the dead, not very far from the very spot that he is dying. They have seen plenty of miracles. They are determined not to believe him. Come down from the cross, then we'll believe. But Jesus doesn't come down from the cross. That's the wonder of this. He could have called 10,000 angels in a moment's appeal. The heavens could have been torn us under . Angelic armies would have come to his rescue, but he will not call for them. Jesus will die for you and for me, it is an incredible illustration of the meekness of our savior. And we need to pray about that and we need to be impressed deeply by that because Jesus calls us to follow in his steps to have that kind of strength under control even when we are persecuted. I hope that helps you in your Bible reading today. Thank you for listening to the podcast this week. If it's helping you, please give it a rating, a review, tell people about it, make sure you're following it. Subscribe to it so that it will download automatically upon your device. So until next week when we'll open our Bibles together again. And yes, there will be a Zoom meeting West side folks on Tuesday evening. I'm excited about that. Get to talk more about Bible reading on Tuesday. Look forward to that. Mark your calendar. So until then, I'm Mark Roberts . Wait, I guess I said until then, like it's not gonna be till Tuesday. It will be Monday. I'll have a cup of coffee. My Bible will be open. I'll be talking about the resurrection sermon that I preach Sunday at West Side , all of that and more on the podcast. I'll see you Monday. I'm Mark Roberts and I want to go to heaven, and I want you to come to see you Monday with a cup of coffee.

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