I recently listened through the book of Mark on my awesome audio Bible (The Bible Experience). I think there’s something I get by listening through a whole book in one sitting that I don’t quite get when I read it piece-by-piece or even the whole way through. So the next series of posts is going to be about things I picked up as I listened through Mark that struck me in ways I hadn’t experienced before. The first is on the power and limitations of Jesus.
The Scripture makes it pretty clear that Jesus was incredibly powerful. Meditate on his own words (from Matthew 28:18):
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”
The stretches of his earthly authority are incredible: He has authority over chemical phenomena (John 2:1-11), biological phenomena (Mark 5:39-42 and countless others), and physical phenomena (Mark 4:37-41, Mark 6:41-44, Mark 6:48). His disciples saw his power to perform miracles, and knew He was someone to be followed.
And his “authority in heaven” is apparent in his ability to rebuke demons and their absolute powerlessness against him (Mark 5:6-13). But I was struck by some inherent tension in a very short passage in Mark’s gospel. Take a close look at Mark 1:40-45 and see if you find anything strange there. A man comes to Jesus and wants to be healed. Jesus has compassion on him, desires to heal him, and so he needs only to say “Be clean!” and the leprosy leaves the man immediately.
That’s power.
But here’s what I found a bit odd: Jesus doesn’t want the guy to go and tell people about what he’s experienced, so he tells him not to tell anyone, but the guy does it anyway. If it’s still unclear to you what I found strange, let me state it plainly:
Apparently leprosy has to obey Jesus, but people don’t.
Apparently Jesus’s “all authority in heaven and on earth” doesn’t include Jedi mindtricks to keep people from sharing information. It’s clear that Jesus doesn’t want the man to tell others, but he can’t force him not to. When I read the passage, I was just struck by the immediacy with which I was shown Jesus’ incredible power over disease starkly contrasted with his lack of power to control a human being. Now, I realize that pretty much anyone gets into trouble when they begin sentences with “Jesus can’t…” and I’ve read plenty of the philosophical papers on things that the Trinity can’t do because it would contradict their character, but I’m not so interested in all that. Whether this situation of a man disobeying Jesus’s desires is more a matter of “Jesus can’t” or “Jesus doesn’t” isn’t particularly important to me.
What is important to me is how God sees me, and what that means for who I am to be in this world. Like I mentioned earlier, Jesus has all authority in heaven, and passages like Mark 5:6-13 speak a similar truth to the one outlined above:
Apparently demons have to obey Jesus, but people don’t.
Jesus exercises authority over demons (heavenly beings), making them do things they don’t want to do, but there isn’t a single biblical story I can think of where God does the same to a human being, who are his unique image-bearers. It seems that he honors our desires and wills immensely, to the point where he would never exercise his earthly and heavenly authority to make us violate our will, even if it violates his. This is why we can even claim we have choice. God is sovereign; I believe he knows the future perfectly, and yet he allows us to do things that He doesn’t like, which is why Jesus can pray in Matthew 6:10 that God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven (meaning that it isn’t already).
Unlike some, I don’t believe God is evil for allowing us to disobey Him, as this healed man did in Mark’s gospel. To disallow it would mean we would no longer be creatures in His image; we would be like demons or like leprosy, under his control, coerced for his glory.
But He does not coerce us, because it would not bring Him glory.
We bring Him glory as we bear His image to this world, making choices freely to incarnate His essence, creating goodness and spreading love. This is something a choiceless being cannot reveal to the world about God. A choiceless being cannot create good as God does (in fact, he cannot create anything), and we know that creating good was God’s first (and in some ways, trademark) act (Genesis 1:3-4).
So live your life knowing that God honors you. He honors your ability to choose between Him and darkness. And He does it in the hopes that you might choose Him, and thus fulfill your purpose in life to make his character known to this world, bringing it back into reconciled relationship with Him. May your goal be that the world witnesses a God who creates goodness out of darkness by the way you do the same thing here on this earth.
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Mikey,
This is an excellent, insightful blog post! I think that you can even find this notion of the bounds of authority in the Fall of Man. Like the passage in Mark you shared, we see God display His incredible power of creation; nature obeying His words. Then we see mankind disobeying God and how that changes our relationship with Him, similar to how Jesus had to interact with people differently after the Leper blabbered.
Anyway, if this is part I, I cannot wait to see where you go from here.
“I was just struck by the immediacy with which I was shown Jesus’ incredible power over disease starkly contrasted with his lack of power to control a human being.”
I love this sentence. It’s a poignant contrast & a great reminder of the sort of “control” (or lack thereof) that the God of the universe employs in His relationships with people, as He models to us how we are to interact with those to whom we long to reveal truth, hope, & love. We can’t control them—which is different from God, Who could control people’s wills, desires, & actions, but chooses not to—and we imitate the One Who loves freely, gives generously, & waits patiently for relationship, maturity, and full redemption.
Thanks for your reflections, which to spur me on in my own – toward love & good deeds & freedom in relationship.
While there is great mystery in God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility we are saved by grace from beginning to end.
God gives us the faith….without God changing our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh we would never turn to Him. He gives us hearts to love Him, obey Him and desire Him.We are dead in our trespasses and sin and would remain that way unless God monergistically gave us life. I do not know for what purpose God allowed the leper to disobey Him in the book of Mark, but it wasn’t because Jesus didn’t have the power over the leper. Providentially the leper’s disobedience was used by God to bring about His sovereign plan of salvation.
In Isiah we are told that God’s plan cannot be thwarted. God may chose many times to allow man to keep on sinning and be disobedient, but a God that doesn’t have control and authority over everything is not really Sovereign. It leads to Open theism among other things.
God has power over human beings. If He doesn’t it makes man sovereign by the very definition of the word and puts into question God’s ability to save completely. Or in other words it might mean His children will not persevere until this end and Satan might win in the end.
“The Scripture makes it pretty clear that Jesus was incredibly powerful. Meditate on his own words” You’re absolutely correct.
I love what Jess says. Its exactly what I was thinking only explained much prettier
. Something God has been teaching me through my attempt at being a godly husband and father. I’ve been trying to learn from my father and the husband of the church, and just realized that very lesson just yesterday. I wouldn’t have put it into those words but in many ways I was trying to control peoples actions, and getting frustrated when things didn’t go my way. I love what you said about revealing truth, hope, & love. I know that is what I am to do as well. I also know that everyone has a choice and just as God has been patient with me and gives me the freedom to rebel and make mistakes, I need to do the same for others.