Ken Fish: The Gospel Invasion of Christ - True King of Kings (Mark 1:1)
Channel: King of Kings Worship Center
Date: 2022-07-08

Ken Fish: The Gospel Invasion of Christ - True King of Kings (Mark 1:1)
Ken spoke at King of Kings on June 11, 2022. Quotes: “A good term to substitute for gospel is invasion. God's invasion. That's what we are about. After the Roman army defeated a nation in rebellion, the herald come running through the gates of Rom with a message: "Citizens of Rome, let me tell you the gospel. There is a new king in power, and he has fought a battle on your behalf. Now partake of the spoils of a war which you did not fight."

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But anyway, we have this two-edged framework, the now and the not yet. And so there's this growing hope of the age to come, and when Jesus comes, we see in the Gospel of Mark some rather unusual language, and it's directly relevant to the message of the Kingdom of God.

So if you want to, you can go with me to the Gospel of Mark, and we're going to look at Chapter One. This is actually one of my personal favorite passages of the Bible, even though it's deceptively simple. I think people tend to say, "Well, you know, there's not much there. Let's move on to the more heavy stuff." But Mark 1:1 says, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God."

Well, the beginning means the initiation point, we could say the detonation point. This is how the gospel began. And it's kind of strange if you think about it. We call it The Gospel of Mark, and yet this book begins by saying this is, "The beginning of the gospel." It doesn't say, "My gospel," meaning Mark's gospel, it's the beginning of the gospel, of which the gospel of Mark is simply one version, or one recounting.

That's not to say that there are many different gospels. There are some people who want to argue that. It's rather to say that there are different perspectives on the same truth, the same story, and so this is Mark's version of that. It's, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God."

Now we could ask, "Why would you open a book like this?" Well, the Gospel of Mark is written to Romans, a Roman audience, not just people who lived in the city of Rome, but who were members of the empire. And so this is the beginning of that gospel. Huh. Why would they care? Well, because to a Roman listener, the word gospel actually had a very defined meaning, and everyone within the Roman empire knew it. 

But you don't, because you live in the 20th century, not the first century, because you're not a Roman, you're, I assume, an American, or at least a visitor in America right now. So you may have never heard of gospel, but in ancient Rome, when a new king, emperor, came to power, by the way those emperors were always known as the King of Kings.

That's where we get the term. It's not merely that Jesus is the greatest of all Kings. He is. It's rather that the preachers of the gospel in the first century were trying to take the language that the listeners, who were pagans, understood, and apply it to Jesus so they would have a concept. And so the Roman Empire had many sub-kingdoms among it. You had the kingdoms of the Germans and of the Hungarians, and the Slavs and the Spaniards and just all over the empire and ultimately what the King of Kings what the Emperor required was that they swear fealty, loyalty, to him, with the objective that Rome would have peace and be one integrated empire. 

And within that framework, there was a certain amount of, we could say liberty, given to them, provided they didn't get too far off the path and start rising up and saying, "Hey, we don't want to pay these taxes. We don't want to live according to these customs," etc. This is why, for example, the Jewish people could still have their temple in Jerusalem, worshiping Yahweh under Roman occupation, because the Romans were pagans, they had no interest in Yahweh at all. 

They didn't believe in monotheism, they were polytheists. Many of the things that were valuable and dear to the Jews, the Romans didn't value at all. Things like chastity, things like not being drunk. In fact, the Romans had a God of drinking. His name was Bacchus. He was the God of wine. So guess what you did when you went to worship Bacchus? You got three sheets to the wind. And then you usually went and had sex with everybody who was at the party. 

Well, this was abhorrent to Jews. The Romans thought the Jews were quaint, and not really enjoying the pleasures of life, but they were like, "Hey, if you want to live that way, that's okay. Just keep paying us our money."` But if you got to where you weren't really willing to submit to the rule of Rome, well, now things changed rapidly.