Category: <span>Blog & Bible Study</span>

In our last couple of times together we have studied Mark’s recollection of Jesus’ parables. Starting with the parable of the sower and its explanation and then moving into shorter parables that use the same ideas of nature to reveal the Kingdom of God and the divine identity of Jesus. One of the main points...

Tonight we move from Jesus’ explanation of the parable of the sower into three more parables of the same nature, illustrations from daily life that reveal the true character of the Kingdom of God and that reveal Jesus’ identity as the Son of God. If we look closely, we see that the parable of the...

Our last time together we talked about the Parable of the Sower and Jesus’ purpose for speaking in parables; just by way of review, the crowd had grown to the point that Jesus finally used the boat that He had asked the apostles to have in the water for Him, He got in, sat down...

In Mark 3, in the midst of revealing the struggles that Jesus was encountering with both the religious leaders and some members of His family, we were introduced to Jesus’ teaching in parables. Mark 4 now opens with what is probably Jesus’ most famous parable. The parable has many different references, some call it the...

We closed our last class by talking about the opposition that Jesus was facing from both His family and the religious leaders of the day. It reached a new height in Mark’s account when we are told that His family concluded that “He is out of His mind” and the scribes sent from Jerusalem said...

The last time we were together we came to Jesus’ appointing of the 12 apostles. The crowd seems to be unrelenting, they are so constant and so demanding that Jesus has asked His first followers to make sure a boat is in the Sea of Galilee so that He can escape the crowd if they...

The ire of the scribes and Pharisees against Jesus had reached a new height, they were now conspiring with the Herodians as to how they could “destroy” Jesus. From that point Jesus had to withdrawn, not from people but from the religious form, He was still surrounded, in fact, He was more followed than ever before but...

In tonight’s study we find that the conflict between the Pharisees and Jesus over the Sabbath comes to it’s boiling point when a man with a “withered hand” entered the synagogue. The Pharisees watched Jesus closely with an eye of accusation to see if they could find something He would do wrong, Jesus looked at the man...

Being surrounded is often a reason to surrender. We have all watched TV shows or movies in which the police have found the location of a criminal, they surround the location and then shout out “You are surrounded, come out with your hands up!” Being surrounded usually means that there is no place to go,...

In our last time together we started to see how each move that Jesus made was being watched, examined and questioned by the scribes and the Pharisees. He touched a leper, a man that was considered unclean due to his illness; He forgave the sins of a paralyzed man rather than just healing him; He...