Mark 1:15
“The time has come,” He said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”
It seems these days that everyone on social media is looking to string together that single sentence; the one that will knock some sense into everyone, wake them up to the big problems facing them and get them to start moving in the right direction. Truthfully, creating one sentence that can do all of these things is incredibly difficult, as individual words have power and must be used with great care. Afew times people have said this to me, "Why do people try to sum up their messages in one sentence, when Jesus didn't even do that?" It is true that Jesus spoke elloquently on thousands of issues using a great deal of words (one need only look at the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters 5 through 7 to see), but what those people said to me did make me wonder if Jesus ever condensed His message to the masses into one single sentence. To my surprise, He did and He did it perfectly.
As it is written in the first chapter of Mark, Jesus started His ministry when He "went to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God" (Mark 1:14b). The word for good news in the original text is εὐαγγέλιον (euangelion), which we today translate as Gospel, good news. Jesus' final command to His followers is to "go into all the world and preach the Gospel to all creation," so it is important for us as Christ's followers to know what the Gospel is (Mark 16:15).
Here in the first chapter of Mark Jesus says the Gospel is that the time has come! (Some translatations say that the time is at hand, and I appreciate this imagery). The time is here. It is now! Why has the time come? Because the Kingdom of God is near; the long prohpesied return of God's full glory to the world so that He may reign among us forever and ever (Daniel 2:44) is drawing close. What should we do knowing that God's Kingdom is coming soon? We should all repent! The word for repent here in the original text is μετανοέω (metanoeó), and it means to turn around. It is written that "we all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way" and turned away from God (Issiah 53:6a). We need to turn around away from our way. To follow our way instead of God's way is to sin, and it is written that "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23a). If we are all going to die because of our sins, then the only good news we could possibly receive is to know that there is a way for us to be saved from our incoming rightful punishment. That's the good news, the Gospel. We can be saved through believing the good news of Jesus Christ. As it is written in the gospel of John "whoever believes in [Jesus] will not die, but have eternal life" (John 3:16b). Jesus is saying here in Mark that to believe in the good news, the Gospel, is to believe in Him and to believe in Him is to turn from our sins and to be set free from them so that we may live forever in the Kingdom of God.
All great public speakers have tried to craft a single perfect sentence to spread their message, but only one man has been able to perfectly do so (and yes Mark 1:15 was one sentence in the original text, though modern translations have had to split it between two to three sentences). Where mankind falls short to perfectly create a single sentence message, Jesus does not fail, because He is not just a man. He is the God-man, the One who created the heavens and the earth made in flesh (John 1:1 and 1:14). Only Jesus could deliver His profound and relevant message through one sentence that perfectly knocks some sense into everyone, wakes them up to the big problems facing them and gets them to start moving in the right direction.
Sources
- The Bible (New International Version)
- Biblehub.com (good news)
- Biblehub.com (repent)
- What does the Bible say about the Kingdom of God
- What does the Bible say about Jesus is God