08/19/2024 – Day 078 – Mark – Chapters 3 – 4 / 4: 10 – 12 – “… one of the most difficult passages in all of the gospels.” William Barclay’s commentary – “The Gospel of John”
Two cycles ago this day, there is a post on the unpardonable sin, verses 3: 29 – 30.
For 4: 10 – 12 today, “… The Authorized Version speaks of the mystery of the Kingdom of God. This meant mystery has in Greek a technical meaning; it does not mean something which is complicated and mysterious in our sense of the term. It means something which is quite unintelligible to the person who has not been initiated into its meaning, but is perfectly plain to the person who has been so initiated.
… How then did this passage come to be in the form it is? It is a quotation from Isaiah 6: 9,10. From the beginning it worried people. It was worrying them more than two hundred years before Jesus made use of it. The Hebrew literally runs (the following two translations are by W.O.E. Oesterley):
‘And he said, God and say to this people, ‘Go on hearkening but understand not; go on looking, but perceive not.’ Make fat the heart of this people, and its ears make heavy, and its eyes besmear; lest it see with its eyes, and with its ears hear, and its heart understand, so that it should be healed again.’
It seems on the face of it that God is telling Isaiah that he is to pursue a course deliberately designed to make the people fail to understand.
In the third century B.C. the Hebrew Scriptures were tranlasted into Greek and the Greek version, the Septuagint, as it is called, became on the most influential books in the world, for it carried the Old Testament everywhere Greek was spoken. The Septuagint translators were worried at this strange passage and they translated it differently:
‘And he said, God and stay to this people, ‘Yet shall hear indeed, but yet shall not understand; and seeing, ye shall see, and not perceive.’ For the heart of this people has become gross, and with their ears they hear heavily, and their eyes have been closed and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.’
The Greek version does not say that God intended that the people should be so dull that they would not understand; it says that they had made themselves so full that they could not understand — which is a very different thing. The explanation is that no man can translate or set down in print a tone of voice. When Isaiah spoke he spoke half in irony and half in despair and altogether in love. He was thinking, ‘God sent me to bring truth to this people; and for all the good I am doing I might as well have been sent to shut their minds to it. I might as well be speaking to a brick wall. You would think that God had shut their minds to it.’
So Jesus spoke his parables; he meant them to flash into men’s minds and to illuminated the truth of God. But in so many eyes he saw a dull incomprehension. He saw so many people blinded by prejudice, deafened by wishful thinking, too lazy to think. He turned to his disciples and he said to them: ‘Do you remember what Isaiah once said? he said that when he came with God’s message to God’s people Israel in his day they were so dully un-understanding that you would have thought that God had shut instead of opening their minds; I feel like that to-day.’ When Jesus said this, he did not say it in anger, or irritation, or bitterness, or exasperation. He said it with the wistful longing of frustrated love, the poignant sorrow of a man who had a tremendous gift to give people were to blind to take it.
If we read this, hearing not a tone of bitter exasperation, but a tone of regretful love, it will sound quite different. It will tell us not of a God who deliberately blinded men and hid his truth, but of men who were so dully uncomprehending that it seemed no use even for God to penetrate the iron curtain of their lazy incomprehension. God save us from hearing his truth like that!”
Questions for fellowship generation, the lifelong sanctification process:
- What does the text reveal about God’s character?
- How has this reading generated prayer for you and/or us?
- What themes stand out to you in this bible study?
- How does our reading fit into the bigger picture (creation, the fall, restoration, etc.)?
- What verse(s) jumped out at you like never before? Is it explainable at this point?
- Do you have any questions you would like to put before the group as to how to interpret any particular verse(s) in our reading. Let scripture testify to scripture: Share with us where you sense contradiction between passages elsewhere.
- What did you find convicting and inspiring at the same time? Share with us how the Spirit of God is working within you as a messenger, both within and outside of our fellowship group.
- Share with the group how our study is calling or confirming to you a new mission to glorify God in our times.
Soli Deo Gloria!