Mark 1:35-37

Mark 1:35-37  While Jesus was teaching in the temple courts, he asked, “How is it that the teachers of the law say that the Christ is the son of David?  David himself, speaking by the Holy Spirit, declared: “‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.”’  David himself calls him ‘Lord.’  How then can he be his son?”  The large crowd listened to him with delight. 

Romans 1:1-5  Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God — the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.  Through him and for his name’s sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith. 

As far as Jewish tradition was concerned, the Messiah was to come out of David's loins.  Christ would be from the tree of David, in his lineage.  Now Jesus asked a very difficult question for the Sanhedrin to answer.  He quotes an inspired passage from Psalms 110, which was commonly held to be written by David under the unction of the Holy Spirit.  How could the Messiah be David's son and yet be his Lord?  By asking this question, Jesus was declaring the divinity of the Messiah, that the Messiah's true Father and only Father was God himself.  David could not be the natural father of the Messiah.  This of course is why we see the immaculate conception mentioned in Matthew 1.  Jesus was putting his critics on the spot, for if they said that the Messiah was merely human, they would be denying the inspiration of David's words.  This question silenced his obstructors, his accusers.   From that day on they did not dispute with Jesus before the people, for Jesus was winning the people over to his side.  The large crowd listened to him with delight.

Jesus was the divine one--the Messiah, the anointed one, God's Son--all hard concepts for humans to grasp.  The Jewish elite and teachers of the Law especially struggled with these concepts, for they knew Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary, the person who had the faculties and needs of a man.  They understood that even his brothers and sisters did not believe in Jesus' divinity.  To them Jesus was but a carpenter from a very ordinary background.  We sometimes by-pass the humanness of Jesus and go right to his divinity.  It is so much easier two thousand years from that time to just skip over the man Jesus to his divine nature.  Can you imagine what it must have been like to look into Jesus' face and consider him to be God.  That would almost be an impossible task for any of us had we lived in that time.  Even his disciples had trouble believing that Jesus was the Messiah, for they quickly fled when Jesus was captured.  They forgot about the miracles, they forgot about the healings, they forgot about the supernatural things that Jesus did.  THEY FLED.  If they would have thought that He truly was the SON OF GOD, they would have stayed with him, for who could come against God.  But their faith in him, their belief in him departed when Jesus was captured and taken into the courtyard of the High Priest.  

They still loved him, but they loved him as a man.  Peter followed the mob to find out what they were going to do with Jesus, but for him to believe that Jesus was truly the Messiah was beyond him also, for he fled when they started to identify him as one of Jesus' followers.  For his disciples, Jesus, the man, died on the cross.  Of course, his followers sorrowed after Jesus, the man they loved, was put to death.  They visited his grave to show respect and to grieve.  But after the cross, they could not believe that this man, Jesus, who walked among them, was anything more than an ordinary man.  The Romans put the people's hope that Jesus was the Messiah to the sword.  The Jewish elite and the Romans thought they were done with this MAN, JESUS.  However, the resurrection answers emphatically the conundrum of the Messiah coming from David's loins, yet being David's Lord.  Paul declares Christ's lineage this way, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead.  The man Jesus, considered from David's loins died on the cross; the Messiah from God's eternal-life loins rose from the grave.  Jesus' divinity was finally established after the cross and at the grave, for no grave could hold the Son of God.  He lives, and because He lives, we live also!  Love, Dad (Cliff)