Transcript
Okay, I'm here once again with Zane Hodges, and we're discussing today a very, very famous passage, Mark chapter 16 and verse 16. And I'll go ahead and read it. Jesus is speaking, and he says,
He who believes and is baptized will be saved, but he who does not believe will be condemned.
Now the first thing that I thought we might discuss is, as you know, New Testament scholars hold the opinion that the ending of Mark's Gospel, Mark 16:9 to 20, in which 16:16 appears, those verses are not original. They are not part of the original text. They were added on. And actually the ending of Mark's Gospel was lost, and so we don't have the actual ending. Could you just comment on the authenticity of the ending of Mark's Gospel?
Bob, in my opinion there is really no real reason to question the authenticity of the ending of Mark, despite the fact that the generally held opinion rejects it. And the basic reason for that is that the number of manuscripts which actually omit it is a relatively very, very small compared to the huge number, in the area of 900 manuscripts probably, that include Mark 16:9 to 20.
Furthermore, the high improbability that a later addition to the Gospel of Mark, even if it had ended at 16:8, could gain the wide currency that this particular long ending has gained. Furthermore, for those who think the ending of Mark has perished, there are issues that are raised about the preservation of Scripture.
No one, I think, can seriously hold, although some people have tried to defend it, that the Gospel of Mark ends at 16:8. But to end on the note “they were afraid” without any explicit reference to the resurrection stretches our credulity to the breaking point. I say absolutely so. And some very good defenses are in print or available that support the authenticity of Mark 16:9 to 20. So I don't think there's any grounds for rejecting it or even doubting it.
Right. Significantly, well, you know, you're preaching to the choir here.
Right. Well, that's a nice choir. I thought, well, my second question, and this is just kind of a warm up on Mark 16:16. It says, “He who believes and is baptized will be saved.” This is the Greek verb sozo. We have the related noun translated salvation, soteria. I thought it might be helpful, in order to understand this passage before we dig into the details of the passage, just to talk generally about what does the New Testament concept of salvation mean.
That's a very good question, and in my opinion essential to really understanding the verse in Mark here. And maybe we want to begin this way by saying that the Greek verb sozo is a highly flexible word in the language itself. So that it is used in the language in general in as wide a way as we use the term save or deliver in the English language. That has to be kept in mind because within religious context today the idea of being saved has ossified into a theological idea that is fairly fixed and does not allow for the flexibility that the word actually had and in fact had in the New Testament itself.
I did a little superficial exploratory work on the verb sozo, and I won't vouch for the complete accuracy of these figures but they're close I'd say. Okay. I think it's worth noticing that in the Gospel of John there are only six uses of the verb sozo, and out of the six uses two of the uses are clearly not soteriological. So that reduces the number. And I could explain what soteriological means. I almost read it in your eyes.
Yes, soteriological, which we'll probably be using more than once in this recording, refers to the doctrine of salvation. So if we say that the verb is used in a soteriological sense we mean it is used in a religious salvation sense. If we say it's used in a normal sense then we mean this is everyday language, something like that. Okay, you'll give some examples?
I will give some examples of that. And so in John it seems to me that there are only four references that can be called soteriological in the sense that they refer to eternal salvation. That's a little surprising if we consider that the Gospel of John is the one book of the New Testament written to convert people. But it's very clear that the central idea in the Gospel of John is to get eternal life. And that whatever he means by being saved in a soteriological sense it involves that. But his key word is certainly not the word saved.
Perhaps the best place in the Gospel of John to look for the meaning of the word saved is in John 3:17, right after 3:16. “God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world,” but the Greek word there is the word krino, so it would be better translated, “God sent not His Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.” There He juxtaposes krino with sozo. He's just mentioned in verse 16 perishing, which would be the result from krino. And then in the following verse 18 He says he that believes is not condemned again, but it's the word judged. “He that believes is not judged, but he that does not believe is already judged.” But the term already suggests that there's a reference here to the final judgment.
We are also told in John chapter 5, of course, that anyone who believes on Him who sent Him has everlasting life and does not come into judgment. There the analogy is the same. So I think it would be safe to say that in the four Johannine references which we would call references to eternal salvation, the reference is to being saved from eternal judgment and the consequence of that which is to perish in hell.
But surprisingly John has a relatively small use of this word. When we get to the book of Acts, and of course Acts was written by a traveling companion of Paul, we find that there are 13 uses of the verb sozo, of which about four of them should not be taken in reference to eternal salvation. And there are nine left, therefore, that have some reference to the spiritual condition of the people who are being addressed.
When we get to Paul we have by far the largest number of instances of the verb sozo in the whole New Testament. We've got a lot of material. But even so I counted 29 uses of the verb sozo in the Pauline material. However Paul uses the word sozo in a wide variety of senses. And as I sometimes said in connection with Romans, I think in the book of Romans where there are eight uses, the sense is primarily salvation from temporal wrath. However there's no question that Paul has a strongly soteriological sense of sozo in his vocabulary.
The famous passages of course are Ephesians chapter 2, where we have the verb sozo in verses 5 and 8, and Titus 3:5. But as particularly interesting is that Titus 3:5 gives us the whole ball of wax for Paul because if you read that, you know, “not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us.” He talks about the pouring out of the Holy Spirit. He talks about being justified. He talks about the hope of eternal life. He's got the whole ball of wax there. But it's very important to notice that in that statement the references to the Holy Spirit is part and parcel of what he means by being saved. We'll come back to that in a minute.
For general interest there are five uses of sozo in James. In my opinion none of them refer to eternal salvation, though people debate that. But of course that would be my point of view in this. And in the Gospel of Mark which we're talking about here there are fourteen uses of the verb sozo. Six of those uses refer to physical healing. Six other of the uses refer apparently to saving the life physically. Leading to one of them is the verse we're looking at and the other one is Mark 10:26 where the disciples say, “Who then can be saved?” And we probably won't want to base a lot of our theology on what the disciples understood by that term at that point. And we're not really discussing that passage anyway.
So that brings us to the verse that you asked about, Bob. And it is noteworthy therefore that this is a clear-cut soteriological use. I think there's no question about that. But the question that we have to ask is, what sense is the verb sozo used even in a soteriological way? My conclusion would be, based on context and also some of the historical background, that Mark is using this in the Pauline sense. I'm going to try to explain this in just a little while. But that may say that we need to keep in mind that Mark was at one time a traveling companion of the Apostle Paul. He went out on the so-called first missionary journey with Paul and Barnabas. It would be very natural if Mark has a citation from the words of Jesus using the word salvation that he would give us a citation that fits with the Pauline usage of that particular word.
So my suggestion is that the Markan use of saved here is the Pauline use. All right, what does that mean? It seems to me that it means that the Pauline sense of the whole experience of salvation is involved. In the sense that the person who is saved not only receives eternal life, not only does he get justified by faith, but he receives the Holy Spirit in accordance with Titus 3:5. But that's in this age, right? That wasn't always the case from the beginning of the church, right?
Exactly. And I'm going to go there. But first of all the fact that the sense here, it seems to me, is the Pauline sense in that it includes the gift of the Spirit along with those things which were not received by Old Testament believers when they believed, that were regenerated. That's very important here. And I think it's supported by the following context because it goes on to discuss miracles that are wrought by the Holy Spirit. Right.
So this suggests the kind of salvation that is being discussed is the Pauline type of salvation where the Holy Spirit has been received. Because of the Holy Spirit having been received, the gifts also are evident in the people who have been saved. Now I'm going to get to the precise problem of 16:16 in a moment. But let me add to this the observation that this is more than the Johannine sense of salvation. Because as we just suggested the Johannine sense is saved from judgment and from the perishing that results from final judgment.
All right, everybody from the beginning of human history to the end of human history who is eternally saved has to be saved from that. That's fundamental to eternal salvation, that we do not have to face the final judgment of God, that we are cleared by a justification, and that we are therefore delivered by possessing eternal life. Right. Now everyone, as I say, experienced that when they were saved. And in the early chapters of the book of Acts people who were saved experienced that.
But it is noteworthy that in the book of Acts the word saved is not going to the use of those people. So that what happens is that the book of Acts adopts the Pauline idea of salvation and refers the term salvation primarily to people who are saved in the Pauline sense. So in the book of Acts the author chooses to reserve the term saved primarily for those who are saved in the Pauline sense and have received the gift of the Spirit as well as what we would call justification and eternal life.
For example, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved,” as spoken to a Gentile who got everything when he believed on the Lord Jesus Christ. They said the word saved. The use of the experience of Cornelius, but Cornelius got it at the moment he believed, much to the surprise of Peter. Right. And so I think it's very important to keep in mind that people can be and were in the early stages of the book of Acts born again and justified without being saved in the Pauline sense.
So let me just follow up on this. In Acts 11 Cornelius says that an angel appeared to him and says, “Send to Simon Peter and he will give you words by which you and your whole household must be saved.” Right. That doesn't mean by which you and your household will have eternal life. It means more than that. It means that you will have the full experience. It's not just that, not just that. In other words this is the Pauline sense of salvation. What Cornelius gets at the moment of saving faith is, first of all, he gets the forgiveness that Peter preaches about in Acts 10:43. And he also gets eternal life. Nobody can have eternal salvation without eternal life. Right. He also is justified by faith. None of these things are explicitly mentioned. The forgiveness is explicitly mentioned, but not the regeneration and the justification, which can be assumed by the intelligent Christian reader. But what is particularly noted is in the case of Cornelius he gets the Spirit along with all this. Right.
And then Peter said, “Well, who can forbid water that these should not be baptized?” He's got the Spirit, you know. But that was an important point because the Spirit was not given in chapter 2 of Acts until baptism had occurred. The individuals who hear the Petrine message on the day of Pentecost apparently believed the message when they heard it. The ones who respond to him, right? They say, “You know, men and brethren, what shall we do?” And it takes them to the heart. That's right. Yeah, they obviously are accepting the premises of the speech, which means that they were born again. But they are not yet admitted to the church. They're not yet allowed to receive the Spirit until they undergo baptism. And the whole separate discussion. But what's important to notice is that it is possible for a person to be saved in the Johannine sense and not to have the Holy Spirit. To be saved in the Johannine sense but not in the Pauline sense.
That's right. And that's exactly where we're going. When Mark quotes the Lord Jesus Christ as saying, “He who believes and is baptized will be saved,” he means to cover everybody who is saved in the Pauline sense. And that required some of them at the beginning of the church age to be baptized. Right. So this is what we would call a summary statement of the experience of salvation in the Pauline sense, which involved the gift of the Spirit. And as I said the gifts of the Spirit are evident in the following context.
So “he who believes and is baptized will be saved.” It is also true that some who believe are saved before they're baptized. But if you're going to make a summary out of that and you want to include the people that are saved before they receive the gifts of the Spirit, you have to say it this way. Right. So especially if you're thinking of Jewish Palestinian Jewish people that were guilty of crucifying the Messiah. That's right. And you would be thinking also later in the book of Acts of the Samaritans, but that's all you'd be thinking of. Right. But nevertheless if you're talking from Jesus' standpoint and the gospel is yet to go out to these places, right? You're going to summarize what happens. So Jesus summarizes all this by saying, “He who believes and is baptized will be saved,” in the Pauline sense. It does not deny the fact that people can be saved without being baptized in the Johannine sense though. Jesus is summarizing.
But the converse of that is of course the simple statement, “He who does not believe is condemned.” And obviously people who did not believe didn't get any of the basics that go into salvation, much less the gift of the Holy Spirit. So it seems to me this is a perfectly accurate statement. As I understand it the Markan example here is a use by Jesus of the term saved in the Pauline sense, the sense that Paul uses for example in Titus 3:5.
Very good. Well, that you may already have answered this, but just to bring it out, then it is interesting that there are two conditions here of quote/unquote salvation, of being quote/unquote saved. But only one condition of escaping condemnation or one condition of condemnation. The two conditions for being saved are believing and being baptized, which clearly aren't the same thing. But you only have one condition of the person who is condemned. That's the one who does not believe. He doesn't say he who does not believe and is not baptized or he who doesn't do both. And so your point is that's because the word here is broader than escaping condemnation, escaping the judgment at the great white throne judgment.
That's right. Another way of saying this is nobody who has believed but not been baptized will go to hell. Right. Because if the people on the day of Pentecost who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ were saved in the sense of having eternal life. Yeah. If they had died on the spot they'd have gone to heaven. They would not have been condemned. But they would have gone without having the indwelling Holy Spirit. That's right. They would have gone into eternity in the same way that the millions who were saved in the Old Testament went into eternity, with eternal life and justification but not with the Holy Spirit. Okay.
So we get more or less summarized the first part of verse 16 as he who believes and is baptized will have eternal life and the Spirit of God. Yes, you could say that he will be saved in the full-fledged Pauline sense, which is the same thing as what you just said with your words. A little explanation, a bit more elaborate. Okay.
Well, let's see. I got a couple of other questions here. If you go back to verse 14, this paragraph starts, “Later he,” referring to Jesus, “appeared to the eleven as they sat at the table, and He rebuked their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they did not believe those who had seen Him after He had risen.” And the thing that seems a bit perplexing here is here He is rebuking born-again people who have believed in Him, and yet He's rebuking them for not having believed that He had risen from the dead, which is pretty much comparable with saying they didn't believe He was the Messiah. Especially when from the other Gospels we know when the two disciples on the road to Emmaus are talking to Jesus they say, “We thought He was the one,” like that. You know, but they really. So how is it that you can have someone who's a believer that's being rebuked for unbelief?
Well, let me answer that question in two ways. First of all, the Bible does not teach us that our faith is undefeatable. It teaches us that our regeneration is undetectable. I've often used the illustration, and this is not an original illustration with me, but the hand of the beggar. It reaches out for the gift that God gives and receives it again. All right. Using that analogy, if I reach out by faith and receive the gift of everlasting life and imagine that it's some kind of a thing that I could put in my pocket. So I received the gift using the hand of faith, and I possess it now. However, in a bit of insanity I cut off my hand. What do I have? The gift but not my hand. Right. You have the gift but I still have the gift which is in my pocket. So the point here is that faith is the means by which we appropriate the gift of God. But once it's appropriated it's ours. And even when our faith wavers or fails completely God is faithful. If we believe not, Paul tells us, yet He remains faithful. He cannot deny Himself. 2 Timothy 2:13. Exactly.
So even after I've received the gift of life I lose my faith, and I've known people who had lost their faith, I don't lose my salvation because God would be unfaithful to His promise and therefore untrue even to Himself in breaking His promise to us. So that's an important consideration. But there's another factor that's involved here it seems to me in this passage. And it's this: despite the tendency of some who may wish to say that the disciples readily believed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the fact is contrary to the Scriptures. Nothing surprised the disciples more than the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Now what that tells us is, for example, in the early ministry of Jesus when these men came to faith in Him they recognized Him as the Christ. They understood that their eternal salvation depended upon Him. But they were also thinking of Him in terms of a triumphant and victorious King. And they were anticipating the establishment of the kingdom. They were definitely not anticipating His agonizing death and His burial, even though in a number of places in the Gospels Jesus explains that to them. “Let this sink down into your ears,” you know. He says this and if the text sometimes says they were ignorant of it, it was hid from them. You know, this doesn't compute. Or Peter even rebuked Him. That's right. You know, “This shall not happen to You.” So the disciples simply could not take in the fact that Jesus had to die and be raised again, even though they believed in Him for eternal life, even though they recognized Him as the Messiah.
So when He died hope seemed to die for them. And you mentioned the two on the road to Emmaus. “We had hoped,” they used the imperfect. “We were hoping.” But they couldn't say to Jesus, “We now hope for this,” you know. They are definitely saying we've lost it. Yeah. We thought this was the right one but apparently not. And it was very hard for them to believe that He actually rose. And when the women came they, you know, they were the original misogynists not really, but they didn't take the woman's testimony very seriously. Right. They probably thought them emotional and that maybe they've had a vision or a dream and they confuse that with reality. But when they dismissed it. Yeah.
And as far as we know the first person to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ was John the Apostle. When they went to the tomb he went to the tomb with Peter. And of course we don't know at what point Peter believed the resurrection. But John is able to tell us he went in and saw the head cloth folded by itself and he believed. Right. But that's the first time he had believed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a long time after he got saved. That's good.
So what we see here is something that the Gospels as a whole present to us. And when Jesus comes to them and there's no excuse for this because Jesus had told them, you know, “I'm going to die. I'm going to rise on the third day. And this is what the Scriptures say about Me.” So He comes to them in this situation here. He rebukes them for their hardness of heart. And there anyway they couldn't, they didn't get it. They didn't take it in. And right until this point they don't really believe it. But they should have. God, they should have gotten it. And therefore they are deserving of the rebuke. That's good.
How about verse 15? In verse 15 Jesus said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” Now this is what the Great Commission here in Mark is. But the question is, in light of what we've just said about verse 16, should we understand this term gospel as slightly different than for example what we see in the Gospel of John?
I think we can, given the statements that we've made about verse 16. I think it would be correct to say that this must be the gospel in the Pauline sense. It is the gospel as described by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. Right. And one of the things we keep in mind is that as hard as it was for the disciples to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that is now a foundational point for us for the gospel. Right. We tell people that Christ died. This is in our quasi-Christian culture. People know that. They know He was supposed to have risen from the dead even though they may not believe that. Right.
But we proclaim Him as the one who died for their sins and rose from the dead. He was delivered, Paul says, for our transgressions and raised again for our justification. So our justification rests on the reality of His resurrection. So in the gospel as we proclaim it we proclaim the facts that lie behind the gospel. But the terms of the gospel are still the same: to trust in Jesus for eternal salvation. So in our presentation we bring these truths to bear upon people because they are helpful in the hands of the Holy Spirit in persuading men to believe.
One of the things that I have found in dealing with people, for example, is that it's very hard for them initially to believe that salvation is absolutely free. And so deeply ingrained in them that you have to do something to deserve it that it doesn't compute exactly that it could be free. And what I have found is the most functional and helpful way to explain that to people is to say, “But look, when Christ died on the cross He died for all the sins that you would ever commit, that you've ever done or ever will do. He paid entirely for all your sins. He rose from the dead. And there's nothing left for you to do but to trust Him for eternal life.”
And therefore the facts that are part and parcel of the Pauline proclamation of the gospel are functional facts and very important to us in communicating the basic message of the gospel. But the fact remains that people who didn't understand how it got done before it was done, and even afterwards if there are people like that who don't understand how this came about, but they're willing to believe the testimony of the Scripture that the believer in Jesus Christ is guaranteed eternal life, they're saved. With coming back to verse 16 then, a person might not even understand they've received the Spirit. That's right. They might not understand not only how this was accomplished but they also might not understand all of what accompanies eternal life. They may just believe in Jesus for eternal life. And at the very beginning of the Christian experience that may be it. That's right.
From that matter which of us fully understands all that happens to us when we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ for eternal life? Nothing. Yeah. I think probably none of us. And we grow in our comprehension of what it means to be a born-again, justified individual. And God doesn't do this, but it's thankful for God's sake you have to understand everything before I'll save you. That's not God's purpose. This is, here's my Savior. Believe in Him and you have everlasting life. And I will raise you again at the end. And then we can come to understand increasingly what that means.
People who have thought, for example, that after they got saved they needed the second blessing of the Holy Spirit, our vision understands. Right. Assuming that they were really saved in the first place, which they could be by just believing that Jesus was their Savior forever. Okay. Right. But they could also fall into the trap of thinking now I have to get the Holy Spirit later. Very good.
So Mark 16:16 is not teaching baptismal regeneration, far from it. But it is teaching that at least for some people in the early church baptism was a condition for the reception of the Spirit. And we'll get into that later on when we talk about Acts 2:38 and other passages like that. But that's the point. That's the point. Gotcha.
Well, thank you very much.