[Machine transcription]
Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another.
You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints of God, I think this morning we might be best served to walk through this
Gospel reading a little bit slowly and take a look at a few of the things that Jesus is
getting after.
And then we want to come back and try to understand what this business is of cutting off hands
and feet.
We’ll remember the context. Mark chapter 9, Jesus was traveling through Galilee to
Capernaum. He had taught them, and this should be the shadow that overcasts the whole chapter,
Jesus had taught them at the beginning of the chapter that it was necessary for him
to go to Jerusalem and to suffer and to die and on the third day to be raised. But they
didn’t understand what he was talking about and instead they are arguing about who’s
the greatest, remember? So they come into the house in Capernaum, and Jesus says, what
were you guys talking about? And they’re too embarrassed to say anything, and so He
puts a child in the midst of them and says that the one who would be the greatest must
become as the least, and anyone who receives a little child like this in My name receives
Me. No, not Me, but the one who sent Me.
Now, this seems to spark something in John’s mind, and this is where our Gospel text begins.
Jesus said, if you receive the child in my name, you receive me. And, and John says,
oh yeah, there was a guy who in your name was casting out demons, but he wasn’t one
of us, and we tried to stop him, but we couldn’t do it. It’s not a question. John is just telling
Jesus, but he’s expecting an answer. I think he’s expecting Jesus to say, well go try harder.
You better make sure that guy stops, but Jesus doesn’t.
And this sets up the whole picture, the whole question that Jesus is getting after.
Where should the fighting be?
Where should the argument be?
Where should we be upset?
Jesus says, don’t get mad at him, that Christian who’s not a disciple, who’s out there rescuing
people from demons in the name of Jesus.
Don’t be upset with him.
him. No one can quickly use my name to cast out demons and then turn around and speak
evil of me. He⦠he’s not the⦠he’s not the problem, guys. The one who’s not
against us is for us. Jesus, in fact, goes on to say, verse 41,
“‘Truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong
to Christ,’ in other words, who serves you in the name of Jesus will by no means lose
his reward.” In other words, all that’s done in the name of Jesus, all that’s done
in the truth of the Scriptures is good, from the casting out of the demons to the giving
a little cup of water.
But if you want to find someone to be upset with, if you want to find someone to go and
stop what they’re doing, Jesus says, this is what you’ve got to look out for. Look at
verse 42, whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be
better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.
There’s some interesting vocabulary in this particular verse that I think is helpful
for us.
The words for little ones here is the Greek word mikron, where we get micro, microscopic,
the little ones.
But Jesus says these are the little ones who believe in Me.
Jesus always loves to talk about how the babies have faith and trust in Him.
Jesus says whoever causes one of these little ones to sin, that’s one word in the Greek
and that’s the word skandalon, the word where we get scandal from. It normally means
a stumbling stone. So like, you know, if you have a pavement made out of brick or stone
and one of the bricks gets kind of pushed up like this so you always trip over it or
you⦠or you stub your toe on it or something like that. That’s the basic idea.
But here I think it means something more specific. The⦠the skandalon can also be the trip
wire, the⦠the⦠the baited stick that causes the pit to⦠the trap to fall. Maybe
think of it like the⦠like that little piece on a mouse trap where you put the cheese,
and when the mouse hits that little trigger, the⦠the thing snaps and it kills him. That’s
the scandalon of the children. It’s the one who causes the little children, who Jesus
loves and desires, to believe⦠to⦠to quit believing in Him, who kills their faith. Jesus
Jesus is saying, if you want to find someone to look out for, someone to fuss against,
don’t look for the guy who’s casting out demons in the name of Jesus. Look for the ones who’s
causing the children to stop believing. It would be better for him if a⦠look at what
it says there, a great millstone were hung around his neck. That’s another curious word.
The millstone, remember, I don’t know if we know⦠millstone was a stone, like a round
stone. You’d have these two stones together and the top stone would have like a funnel
in it, and you would put the grain into the millstone and you’d turn the millstone and
the grain would go down and it would get ground up between the two stones and it would become
flour. And there’s two kinds of mills, at least for the Greek words, there was two kinds
of mills. There’s the one that you can turn with your hand. You can walk around and turn.
That was a smaller millstone. But then they had the donkey millstone, the one that was
so big that people couldn’t turn it. You had to latch a donkey onto it and drive the
donkey around to press it around. And that’s the word that Jesus uses here. That’s why
it says a great millstone, a donkey stone. It would be better for that one who causes
the little ones to stumble. It would be better for him that he had a huge big rock tied around
his neck and he were thrown into the depths of the sea. That’s who you should fuss after.
her. And Jesus goes on. Because the trouble that we find with sin and with affliction
and with scandalizing, scandalizo, is not only out there, it’s also with us. If your
hand scandalizes you, says Jesus in verse 43, cut it off. For it’s better to inner
life crippled, then with two hands go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.
Now you get bonus points, by the way, if that â as we were reading the Gospel text and
you were reading along, you noticed that we skipped some verses, that the text itself
skips from verses 43 to 45, and then from 45 to 47. You win a prize if you notice that.
Tell me after church. I’ll get it for you. We’ll find something in the office. Just
grab a book or something.
The reason why those verses are missing is because in some ancient texts, there’s an
addition that’s there and it’s not, I’m not 100% sure if it should be there or not.
I couldn’t quite figure it out, but if you read your, if you go home and you read your
King James Bible, it’ll have verse 44 and it’ll have verse 46, and those verses are
the exact same as verse 48, where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.
The manuscripts differ here if Jesus said that after each warning or after all three.
Either way, it’s pretty intimidating. Jesus is saying that you not only find cause for
sin out there, but you find cause to sin right here in yourself, and that we
cannot treat that lightly, that we cannot treat that indifferently, that we cannot
act as if it did not matter what we do, what we say, what we see, where we go. We
We have sinful hands, sinful feet, and sinful eyes.
Let us pray.
Oh Lord, we pray for your son, Ray, that you would visit him and keep him and uphold him
with your care.
In the name of Jesus, amen.
God. Jesus does not want the disciples to think that the cause of sin is even this far
away from them. In other words, we might be able to say, well, I sinned but it was my
hand that caused me to do it, or I sinned but it was my foot that caused me to do it,
or I sinned but it was my eye that caused me to do it. Jesus says, no, that won’t even
work, because if it was your hand, then cut it off. If it was your eye, then poke it out.
If it was your foot, then chop it off and throw it away to be saved. But even this is
not enough. There’s a reason and there’s a way, and we should pay very close attention
to this, there’s a way that Jesus points out the things that we have in pairs, and
there’s a reason, because we know that if we cut off our hand, we would still have another
one to sin with. If we cut off our foot, we would use our other one to hop to trouble.
If we poked out our eyes, our eye, we would still have another one to get up to mischief
with, and this is the point. We think that Jesus is teaching us how to treat our sin
harshly, but in fact, if it were that easy, if it were just a matter of removing from
ourselves the limbs that cause us trouble, if it were that easy, then all of us could
enter into heaven ourselves by our own efforts.
But it’s not.
It’s not your hand that causes you to sin.
It’s not your foot.
It’s not your eye.
It’s your heart.
The heart is wicked above all things, exceedingly wicked.
Who can know it, says the prophet Jeremiah.
And we don’t sin because we have sinful hands and feet and eyes.
We sin because we have a sinful heart, and we need a new one.
It reminds me⦠it reminds me of Adam and Eve in the garden.
Do you remember how they were with their fig leaves, and the Lord comes and rebukes them
and promises the gospel, and then He takes an animal, and He kills the animal, and He
wraps the⦠He wraps the⦠the hide of the animal around their flesh, and how Adam and
Eve must have looked with horror at this⦠at this bloody flesh to say, is this what
it takes to cover our sin? Is this what it takes to cover our nakedness and our shame?
Him, and the Lord says, just wait. It’s even worse because it’s not the death of the bulls
and the goats and the animals, but the very death of the Son of God.
I think this is what Jesus is talking about with the whole salt business. Salt is good,
He says, but if salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again? Have salt
in yourself. There’s a very strange instruction that Moses gave to the priests in Leviticus,
and it was that every sacrifice should be salted. The lamb before it was burned and
the bull before it was burned would have salt rubbed over them. And the question is why?
Salt in the ancient world was used as a preservative. It was used to store meat. They didn’t have
refrigerators and freezers and all that sort of stuff. So you would salt the meat if you
wanted to last, but you would never salt the meat right before you put it on the sacrifice.
It didn’t need it. So why? Why would they have the salt for the sacrifice? My best guess
is that the Lord wanted to show that this sacrifice is the sacrifice that preserves
us, that keeps us, that brings us through death to life eternal. This salt is the gospel
of our Lord Jesus Christ, which keeps us through sin and trouble and brings us to life everlasting.
This is what it means to have salt in ourselves. Because it is not possible to escape sin by
cutting off our hands, but rather, we find perfection in the hands that were nailed
to the cross. It’s not a matter of cutting off our own feet, but of looking to the feet
that bled and died for us on the cross. It’s not a matter of tearing at our eyes, but looking
to the face of Him who looks on sinners like you and me, and instead of seeing us with
But wrath sees us with pity and mercy and kindness and love.
In Christ and in Christ alone are we preserved from death to life eternal.
And you have this salt in yourself.
life. Jesus is pointing out to the disciples that He will die and rise again to bring us
to life eternal. And with that confidence and with that peace, we live and we die. In
the name of Jesus, amen. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard
your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
