Whose Son Is the Christ?

Mark 12:35-37
Richard Spencer | Sunday, May 16, 2021
Copyright © 2021, Richard Spencer

In our study of the book of Mark, we now come to a very important and difficult passage. It is important for four reasons. First, it is teaching given by the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Second, it is teaching he gave during the Passion Week, his last week of life, when he knew his time on earth was just about finished. Third, it speaks about the ultimate purpose and destiny of all human beings. And fourth, it speaks about the nature of God himself. And these last two reasons are also why it is a difficult teaching; it speaks about the ultimate purpose and destinies of men, and the nature of God, and these are very difficult topics for us as finite human beings to understand.

But before we begin to look at the passage, I want to set the stage with some background. We have been going through this section of Mark’s gospel, where he tells us about the events of Passion Week. It was the last week of life before Jesus Christ willingly went to the cross as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of his people. You will remember that the week began when Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the shouts of “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!” (Mark 11:9-10).

Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem was a major event that was known by most everyone in Jerusalem at the time. We are told in Matthew 21:10 that “When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, ‘Who is this?’” All sorts of rumors and talk must have been going around as people tried to understand who this unschooled preacher was. He spoke with authority and he performed miracles. He even raised the dead. The people must have been asking, “Who is he? Is he the Christ?”

And Jesus’ last week was an important time of teaching both in word and in deed. It was also a time of significant opposition by the religious leaders. But the people were expecting a different kind of Messiah and Jesus disappointed them, so on the following Friday we see the crowd shouting “Crucify him!” (Mark 15:30) as the rulers’ plans to get ride of him permanently came to fruition, or so they thought.

In between the triumphal entry and the crucifixion was an intense period of activity and we have been hearing in our recent sermons about Jesus’ teaching in the temple courts. These courts were around the Temple on Mount Zion and in this particular week would have been filled with people from all over Israel who had come to celebrate the Passover. We have seen that among the crowds were some of the religious rulers of Israel: Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, the chief priests and teachers of the law. And these people did not like what Jesus was teaching because it undermined and threatened their authority and status.

Jesus had violently objected to the commercialization of the temple area by overturning the tables of the money changers and telling them, as we read in Mark 11:17, “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’” As a result, we are told in Mark 11:18 that “The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.”

We next saw these chief priest and teachers of the law question Jesus’ authority. In Mark 11:28 we read that they asked him, “By what authority are you doing these things? … And who gave you authority to do this?” But Jesus saw through their duplicity and asked them about John’s baptism, whether it was from heaven or from men. And because they couldn’t answer the question without causing themselves trouble, they lied and said “We don’t know” and, as a result, Jesus said he also would not tell them by what authority he was doing these things. How sad this is. They missed the opportunity afforded by Jesus’ question, which forced them to make a clear decision about John the Baptist and, therefore, about Christ.

Jesus then told the parable of the tenants who wouldn’t give the owner of the vineyard his share of the harvest but treated his representatives shamefully, beating and even killing some. Finally, when the owner sent his son, who clearly represented Christ, they killed him as well. And we are told in Mark 12:12 that these religious rulers then, “looked for a way to arrest him because they knew he had spoken the parable against them. But they were afraid of the crowd; so they left him and went away.”

But they didn’t stay away for long. They sent some Pharisees and others to try and trap Jesus by asking him what they thought were difficult questions. Questions that would give them something to bring to the Roman authorities to have him arrested.

And so, they asked him about paying taxes, a topic that was even more controversial then than it is now, but he brilliantly avoided their trap when he famously responded, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”. But they didn’t learn their lesson. They tried again with a sophomoric question about what would happen to a woman who was married to seven brothers one after the other. Their question was, “At the resurrection, whose wife would she be?” Jesus responded, as we read in Mark 12:24, “Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?” And he then went on to tell them about the resurrection.

But again, they didn’t learn their lesson. Although they at least stepped up somewhat from the sophomoric question about marriage and went on to a senior-level undergraduate question about which commandment is the greatest. After Jesus successfully dealt with that question, we are told in Mark 12:34 that “from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.”

And that brings us to the passage we are considering this morning in Mark. They had asked Jesus undergraduate-level questions, but he now takes them to his graduate school of theology. To get a complete understanding of the passage in Mark, we also need to look at the parallel passage in Matthew 22:41-46. We learn there that Jesus asked the Pharisees who were present, “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?” And they properly responded, saying, “The son of David”.

Now I should point out that this was a real softball question Jesus gave them, we haven’t gotten to the graduate school part yet. The fact that the Messiah was to be a descendant of King David was well known by virtually all Jews at the time, not just teachers of the law. For example, after Jesus had healed a man who was both deaf and mute, we read in Matthew 12:23 that “All the people were astonished and said, ‘Could this be the Son of David? In other words, they were asking, could this be the Messiah? The Christ? In fact, we read of ordinary people referring to the Messiah as the Son of David at least ten times in the New Testament. So this first question was an easy one. It was a set-up so to speak.

But then Jesus had them right where he wanted them. Having given the correct answer to this easy question, we read in Matthew 12:43-45 that he asked them, “How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him ‘Lord’? For he says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.”’ If then David calls him ‘Lord,’ how can he be his son?” You can almost see their faces getting red. Jesus is embarrassing them in front of the crowd. He is quoting from Psalm 110, which was well-known at the time as a Messianic psalm, and even though the religious teachers had known this psalm for nearly a thousand years, they couldn’t answer Jesus’ seemingly obvious and simple question!

And so now we read in our passage for today, Mark 12:35-37, that Jesus turned to the crowd, perhaps right after the exchange we just looked at from Matthew or, perhaps, some time later, and said, “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?” Can you picture the dynamic here? Nothing embarrasses a teacher more than to be asked a question he should be able to answer but is unable to. And now Jesus turns to the crowd and asks them! Why do the teachers say this? How can this be? And we are told that “The large crowd listened to him with delight.” I’m quite certain, however, that the chief priests and teachers of the law were not delighted at all, Jesus was putting their ignorance on display for all to see.

Notice that both Jesus and these religious leaders were teachers. And even today we have many people who teach and many of the things they teach are contradictory. So we must decide which teachers we are going to listen to. In order to do that properly, you must know the Word of God, which is truth, and you must have the Spirit of truth, and then you will be able to test the teachers and see who is telling the truth and should be listened to and obeyed.

And this brings us to my first point today. Given that the Christ is to be the son of David, we must ask why David called him Lord. In other words, we must ask, “Who is this Christ?”

Who is this Christ?

There is a reason that the religious elite couldn’t answer Jesus’ question. Their understanding of the Messiah, or Christ, was inadequate. They were looking for a great prophet who would bring about a new earthly kingdom. He would use miraculous powers as Jesus had already demonstrated, but his purpose would be to establish a new Jewish nation and I’m sure the religious rulers expected to play prominent roles in that new kingdom.

We know the people of that time were looking for the Messiah. Previously, when Jesus went through Samaria and spoke with a woman, she went back to her town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” (Jn 4:29) And when the Pharisees sent people to see John the Baptist to find out who he was, we’re told in John 1:25 that they asked him, “Why then do you baptize if you are not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” And, of course, when Christ was asking his disciples what the people thought of him, we read in Mark 8:29 that he then turned to his disciples and said, “But what about you? … Who do you say I am?” And Peter famously answered, “You are the Christ.”

The Triumphal entry, the parables Jesus told while he was teaching in the temple courts, his miracles, all of these things and many others clearly pointed to Jesus being the Christ, the Messiah. And he himself said so on several occasions. But he did not come to set up an earthly kingdom as they were expecting.

And an earthly kingdom wouldn’t help them, or us, very much, for our root problem is much deeper than being under the rule of some unfriendly earthly power. Our root problem is sin, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” we are told in Romans 3:23. And sin is a huge problem because “the wages of sin is death” Paul wrote in Romans 6:23. And death is not the end of existence. In 2 Corinthians 5:10 we read that “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.” And we are told in Romans 3:20 that “no one will be declared righteous in [God’s] sight by observing the law”. So our problem is much bigger than whatever government we find ourselves living under. Our problem is much bigger than anything in this short life. We have a problem of ultimate and eternal significance.

Friends, Jesus did not come to establish an earthly kingdom. He came to “destroy the devil’s work” we are told in 1 John 3:8. The devil tempted Adam and Eve and brought condemnation, sin and death to mankind. And sin destroyed our fellowship with God. Jesus came to take away our condemnation, sin and death and to restore that fellowship. Romans 8:1 tells us, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”. In 1 John 3:5 we are told that Jesus Christ “appeared so that he might take away our sins.” In John 11:26 Jesus said that “whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” And in 1 John 1:3-4 the apostle wrote that “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.”

Can you say “Praise the Lord!”? Our condemnation is gone. Our slavery to sin is gone. Our death has been taken away and we have fellowship with the glorious, triune God who created us.

In order to accomplish all this, Jesus Christ had to be more than just a man. Yes, he is a descendant of David, but he is also the eternal Son of God. He is the unique God-man. That is the only way to answer the question Jesus posed to the religious leaders. David calls the Messiah his Lord because the Messiah is not just a man, he is also God. Two natures in one person. Fully divine and yet fully human.

Paul explains this dual nature of Christ in the beginning of his letter to the Romans. In Romans 1:1-4 he introduced himself by writing, “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.”

This is the full answer to the question Jesus posed, “Whose son is the Christ?” As to his human nature, he is a son of David, but in his divine nature, he always was, is and will be, the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity. That is why David calls him Lord. It is because he is Lord. He is the Lord of all creation. And we are told in Philippians 2:9-11 that because of his great work, “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Jesus himself also gives a clear answer to the question he posed to these religious leaders in the last chapter of the Bible. In Revelation 22:16 he says to the apostle John, “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.” He is the Root – meaning the creator, the source, the God and Lord of David, and he is also the Offspring of David. He is God and he is man. The only mediator between God and man, the only Savior. In his humanity, he is the son of David. In his deity, he is the eternal Son of God, the second person of the holy Trinity.

Jesus’ favorite way of referring to himself was to call himself the “Son of man”. This expression is Messianic. It refers back to Daniel 7:13-14 where Daniel wrote, “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days” who is God the Father of course “and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.” Jesus was the son of man in his humanity, but this vision clearly shows that the Son of man referred to is divine: people worshiped him, his dominion is everlasting, and his kingdom will never be destroyed. This Son of man, this son of David, is also the eternal Son of God.

Friends, we all have a decision to make. You can bow now, confess Jesus Christ as Lord and be saved, or you can refuse. In which case, you will bow and confess him to be Lord before you are sent to eternal hell. The choice is yours. As Paul told the Athenians in Acts 17:30-31, “In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.”

Now let’s move on to take a look at what else Jesus said to the crowd. He was quoting from Psalm 110 as I noted earlier and in Mark 12:36 we read that he said, “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.”’” In the original Hebrew of Psalm 110, the two words translated here as Lord are not the same word. You will note that in the psalm, the first one is written in all capitals in our Bibles, which indicates that it is the tetragrammaton, the Hebrew word usually translated as Yahweh or Jehovah and clearly refers to God, the Creator of all things. The second word Lord is Adonai, which can mean Lord, master, or sir. In other words, the first line of Psalm 110 says that “Yahweh said to my Adonai”.

Also note that Jesus tells us that David was speaking by the Holy Spirit. So this verse in Mark presents us with the Trinity; the Father, Yahweh, the Christ as Lord, and the Holy Spirit as the author of the Scriptures. We can’t fully understand the idea of one God in three distinct persons, but it is the clear teaching of the Bible and Jesus Christ was pointing out here that you cannot properly understand the Old Testament without this information. This was a graduate seminar in theology of the highest possible order.

Also note that the verse from Psalm 110, which Jesus quotes, hints at both the purpose of creation and the final estate of all people. It tells us that God the Father, said to God the eternal Son, “Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.” This is speaking about Christ being exalted to the right hand of God the Father after he had accomplished our redemption. We read about this in Ephesians 1:20, where Paul tells us about God’s mighty strength, “which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms”.

The right hand is, of course, the preeminent place of honor and power. The verse also says that Christ is to sit there until God the Father puts his enemies under his feet. This refers to the practice in the ancient near east of a king putting his foot on the neck of a vanquished foe as a sign of his total and complete victory.

We also read about this in the book of Hebrews. In Chapter 10, Verses 12-14 we read that when Christ, “had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God. Since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool, because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.” What a wonderful picture of Christ’s total victory this is. And we, as God’s blood-bought children, are among those who have been made perfect forever and who are being made holy. In other words, in our own nature we are in the process of being made holy even as we are already, in Christ, accepted as perfectly holy and adopted as God’s children. We are told about this in Ephesians 1:4-6 where we read that God, “chose us in [Christ] before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.”

But all those people whom God has chosen to leave in their sins will go to eternal hell for the praise of God’s perfect justice. Paul speaks of both groups of people in Romans 9:22-24 where he wrote, “What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory—even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?”

Brothers and sisters, if you are in Christ, your salvation is for the praise of God’s glorious grace. Hallelujah! We cannot grasp the infinite gulf between the joys of heaven and the terrors of hell, but it is very real. These are the only two possible eternal destinies for men and your destiny is decided by your response to Jesus.

The ultimate purpose of creation is the manifestation of God’s glory. In accomplishing that purpose, God chose to save some people to be his church, the bride of Christ, and to bring them into his presence perfected to spend eternity in perfect fellowship with him and with one another while he leaves all others to be justly judged for their sin and rebellion in hell for all eternity. And so, my second point is a question we must all answer; Will you sit at the Father’s right hand with Christ, or will you be under Christ’s feet?

Will You Sit at the Father’s Right Hand with Christ, or be Under Christ’s Feet?

That is the choice we must all make. If you have been born again, then you are already seated with Christ. Paul wrote in Ephesians 2:6 that “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus”.

But, if you have not been born again, then you will be a footstool for Christ’s feet. In other words, you are an enemy of God and will suffer eternal punishment. But I have great news for you! Today is the day of salvation. If you are able to hear me preaching this word, you have the opportunity to repent and surrender to Christ now. He will lift you up and change you from being an enemy to being a brother or sister. You will be seated with him. You will be translated from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. You will be brought from death to life, eternal life in Christ.

God told us about this through the prophets of the Old Testament. In Ezekiel 36:25-27 God says, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”

The clean water is the Word of God as we see in Ephesians 5:26. Through that Word we are saved. We read in James 1:18 that God “chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.” And then God tells us through Ezekiel that he will give us a new heart and put a new spirit in us. This refers to the new birth, or regeneration. It is a very real and radical change that God brings about in all those whom he has chosen to save. Christ said to Nicodemus in John 3:3 and 5, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again” and “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.”

Friends, we need new hearts to respond to God’s gospel with repentance and faith. And we need new hearts to enable us to obey. Notice that God said through Ezekiel that he would put his Spirit in us, that is the Holy Spirit, to move us to follow his decrees and to be careful to keep his laws. That is what discipleship is. As his last words on earth before ascending into heaven, Christ gave us the great commission. In Matthew 28:18-20 we read that Christ said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

And so, based on the words of our Lord himself, to be his disciple we must be baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and we must obey everything Christ commanded. And we need the Holy Spirit to recognize and understand God’s teaching. This is the fundamental reason the Jewish religious leaders couldn’t answer Jesus’ question; they didn’t have the Holy Spirit. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 2:14 that “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

Do you remember Jesus’ response to the sophomoric question about marriage at the resurrection? In Mark 12:24 we are told that Jesus said to them, “Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?” The power of God regenerates us through the work of the Holy Spirit, which enables us to believe, properly understand, and obey the Scriptures. That is what we all need. Without these things we are destined for eternal hell.

And so, that is the question we must all answer. Are we seated with Jesus at the right hand of God, or are we an enemy waiting to have Jesus place his feet on our neck? There is no more important question in the world for you to answer. You must decide. And none of us know for certain that we will have another day in which to decide. Christ may return today, or we may die today. So make your calling and election sure. Romans 10:9 says that “if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

If you have never trusted in Jesus Christ for your salvation, do so now. You must confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord. Which means that he rules your life. As we saw, a disciple is one who obeys everything that the Lord has commanded. And you must believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead. This means you must believe the Bible, which is where we learn about Jesus and his resurrection, and where we learn about God’s purpose for creation, about God himself, about our sin, and how to live lives that are pleasing in God’s sight.

Don’t be like the religious leaders who contemptuously questioned Jesus. And don’t be like most of the crowd who listened to Jesus but never surrendered to him as Lord. If you are still questioning by what authority he speaks, or if you are waiting for him to somehow prove himself to you, or if you are waiting for a worldly savior who will take away all your troubles and give you a wonderful life, then you are at this moment an enemy of God and can only look forward to being utterly defeated on that day and being part of the footstool that God has prepared. Jesus himself told us in John 18:36 that his kingdom is not of this world, so don’t look for a worldly savior.

You have enough information. So humble yourself. Repent of your sins and trust in Jesus Christ this day and you will be saved and you will be seated with Christ at the right-hand of God the Father now and for all eternity.

And be careful! There are many false teachers in the world. You must personally know the Word of God so that you can see whether or not what is being preached is in accord with the Word. You must have the indwelling Holy Spirit. You must know the Scriptures and the power of God. Don’t be led astray by false teaching. The false teachers will pay a price for their destructive heresies, but you will pay the ultimate price if you fail to know the Word of God and listen to them.

Listen to Jesus, the son of David, the Son of God, the only Savior. He came to save his people from their sins.