Light on the Hill

Guest (Male): Jesus is questioning what the people perceive as being the authority that would drive him away from the moment or the circumstance that he's in. Jesus is basically making it very, very clear that the thing that causes him to stay in the moment that he's in, especially in that situation, has nothing to do or is not predicated upon anything related to his blood relatives.

It has everything to do with his allegiance to the Father that he co-rules with. You understand? The picture here is: my focus on what I'm doing right now carries a deeper bond than anything that you might find in the natural world with respect to family.

Guest (Male): Hello again and welcome to Light on the Hill with our teacher and Pastor James Kaddis. Today, we return to our study of Mark's Gospel in Chapter 3. When Jesus said that doing the will of the Heavenly Father is more important than doing the will of his family, he was conveying something important to us about obedience. Let's hear what that is as Pastor James Kaddis begins.

James Kaddis: Now, he finishes dealing with all of these issues: healing the man with the withered hand, calling the disciples to the ministry that they have, addressing the issue of the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit and in essence the blasphemy that these Pharisees were delving out. And then now Jesus gets interrupted with a very monumental situation because he's in the midst of this conversation being had. He just finishes being accused of having an unclean spirit. He deals with that very directly.

And by the way, it is interesting how seriously Jesus took accusations like that because Jesus was the master of the unseen. Obviously, that makes perfect sense. And now we get to a point where something unique happens in this time period. Something really interesting. Jesus is in the midst of not only addressing these people, the crowds are gathered around him, they're watching him.

He's ministering to his disciples as well. He's just called them into the service of the ministry of the Gospel. Lots of things are going on. There's a lot of components that are being juggled around right now. And look at what happens while Jesus is in the midst of doing the work that he's doing. This is very interesting. "There came then his brethren and his mother, and standing without, sent unto him, calling him."

So this is interesting because you can picture what's going on. You can picture the fact that Jesus is having this extreme confrontation. This is probably about as confrontational as it gets. It's probably as difficult as it can probably get. It's probably as harsh as it could probably be. My guess is you have Jesus' mother and you have Jesus' brothers who have seen the behavior and the influence of the most political people of the time, the Pharisees, and were probably very bothered by what they were seeing.

My guess is Mary knows that Jesus is the true son of God. My guess is Mary is fully aware that her son is the God that created her. My guess is Mary understands the full implications of it all. Of course, Jesus' brothers and sisters for that matter don't understand. They don't see it. They don't recognize it. They're not there yet, but Mary does.

And as Jesus is getting older, I suspect that Mary is growing more and more and more fearful concerning the potential of the loss of her son's life. I suspect that she's growing more concerned about what's happening, how prominent he's becoming, and how infuriated the people are becoming that are surrounding him. So I'm guessing that she's probably prompting her children to call Jesus over because it's a very heated moment in that time. It's a very difficult moment.

And by the way, I can understand what that looks like. I think that if there's anybody that experiences the most trauma in my life watching me confront some of the people that I confront or watching me act the way that I act at times or do some of the things that I do, it's actually my family. It can be in some context a very positive light; in some context, it can be a very negative light.

My wife especially does not like watching me get into confrontational situations with other people, especially in areas that she knows I regularly contend in. It's not anything that she particularly enjoys. She doesn't like the idea of me putting myself in harm's way. She doesn't like the idea of me being in the type of limelight where people respond in very aggressive ways and oftentimes she worries about those things without ever telling me that she's worrying about it. It's very obvious.

Sometimes it's a little bit more fun-natured than that. For example, I remember I hadn't been married to my wife for even a year. We had probably been married for six, seven months, and we go to Israel. I take her to Israel, and it was her first time there. It was the first time of her mother going on that trip. My dad I think went on that trip with us as well. Yeah, he did. And we get to the old city.

And as we get to the old city, I am looking at this group of things that my wife and my mother-in-law seem to be eyeballing. And I ask them if they want this, and they say yeah, and then I said, "Okay, I'll handle it." And then I watch them almost run from the place that we're in. They literally go into the courtyard where they almost pretend as though they have no affiliation or no association with me, like they want nothing to do with me.

Why? Because over the next 20 minutes, there is a nasty shouting match like you can't even believe that ensues between me and the storekeeper who is rightfully super, super ticked off and angry at me because I'm speaking to him in English and I'm speaking in a way where when you hear me speak English, there's no way you can tell I have an accent under any stretch of the imagination.

I sound like I am born and raised in America because I am. And you cannot detect any understanding of Middle Eastern languages whatsoever. So I'm talking to him and I'm like, "No, this price is too high." And I'm letting the father and the son—it was a father and son in this context—talk about how much they paid for it, and "This American, we can get this much out of him, and if we push it over here, we make it sound like it's a high price here," whatever.

So I take it almost to the point where I get the price that I want and I basically say, "I'm walking away if you won't give me this price." And the price that I gave them was the price that they knew was like their absolute—because they revealed it to me—their absolute drop-dead price. "If we don't sell it for this, then we can't sell it because we're going to lose money, and we can go buy this if we did that," and they're but, you know, they deserve it.

Shame on them because they're talking about how they're going to rip me off grandly and pay the month's bills and making their jokes about that, whatever. So finally, we come down to that price. I bargain in English. This whole process takes about five minutes. And then I decide the mischievous side of me decides that I'm going to give them a greeting in Arabic and tell them goodbye or whatever it was.

And boy, did they lose their minds. They went absolutely nuts. "You didn't tell us you were an Egyptian! You didn't tell us you!" And at first, they thought I was Mossad because I could speak Arabic perfectly and speak English perfectly. There's this whole back and forth whatever. And then that's when the other set of things that I wanted to buy started ensuing. We got into a big old argument, and at that point, that's when we're all yelling at each other.

I mean, it's a shouting match in Arabic. It looks like we both want to just tear each other up. And at the end of the whole thing, 20 minutes later, we're sitting down and having a cup of tea. That's our culture. That's the custom. That's what you do. Well, in the meantime, my mother-in-law and my wife are like, "I just I can't handle this." They weren't even anywhere near me.

So that's kind of the more innocent side of that. But the not-so-innocent side of that, the part that's very difficult, is I can see it's not easy for my wife to see me having to contend with many of the things that I contend with. I don't even think she reads comments anymore. Stopped reading comments a long time ago from videos that I make or things that I do because, again, some of them are so absolutely brutal and some of them are so just insanely vicious that it creates this apprehension.

So you can't even imagine. I cannot—if my mom were on this earth at the time that we started really growing in this area of social media, my mom would just go berserk. I think my mom would probably just want to literally choke out every human being that ever made any—it would not be good because she is the epitome of a good mother, just brutally overprotective. I mean just insane.

So I can understand where Mary's coming from here. There's probably some significant apprehension in her heart regarding the confrontation that's taking place. And so she is seeking to insert herself in the most respectful way possible to mitigate or to perhaps attenuate what may end up being a very nasty result that came from this confrontation. That's very likely what's going on.

There's an interference that's happening here. And I want you guys to see it as such. Understand there's some overwhelming emotions that are already going on in the invisible realm that you have to discern. Number one, there's some apprehension. There's some fear. There's some concern. There is undoubtedly some very deep levels of anger going on. The Pharisees have made that very clear.

There's also this overwhelming emotion that exists in all of it that appears to be the even keel. It happens to be something that is just like a very almost a normalized kind of approach that's coming from Jesus, who is indeed the creator of the universe, who's holding fast everything. By the way, there is one dynamic that I should probably explain to you because this is really important.

And this is not me capitalizing on an opportunity to address the multiple groups of people who ignorantly on a regular basis call for me to start lowering my voice and speak with a softer tone and so on and so forth. I don't want to justify my position, but I'm just telling people—I just want to say this right now. People who tell me to use a lower voice, here's my thing: there are so many other people that you can listen to. I'm not changing.

And here's the thing that people have to understand with respect to that: in our culture where we were raised, in our background, in our world, when you communicate with authority, you speak strong. That's just the way it goes. I remember this one time, I still to this day, it was one of the most hilarious moments I had ever had overseas. I'm in Morocco.

We're in town. We're having a conversation with this Islamic family who is very, very much engaging, and we are yelling at each other. It is a very loud yelling match between the two of us. It's a very aggressive conversation. And when I say yelling, this is American yelling. This isn't Middle Eastern yelling. If it's Middle Eastern yelling, it's deafening. This is just regular conversation for us.

And there's this missionary girl who was our missions secretary who had no awareness of our culture, no awareness of our people, no awareness of our background, and pulled me aside after that whole exchange and basically confronted me. By the way, in front of the missionary who was there, who had been there for probably five years, and confronted me and told me how I was a black eye in the name of Christ, that I put a black eye in Jesus' face.

I nailed them back to the cross with my actions. That I was completely unreasonable and out of control and that I probably was the worst witness of any American that any of these Muslims will ever see. The missionary that was right there, in probably one of the harshest rebukes that I had ever seen—it was very enjoyable to actually watch. It was really fun.

Tells this girl, "Here's the problem with arrogant women like you. You speak forward making statements like this." I'm paraphrasing this because I don't remember the exact words. I wish I recorded it. It would have been awesome. I'd listen to it like every other month. "This is the problem with arrogant women like you. You choose not to allow yourself to understand our ways, our people, our culture, our background."

"And then you allow your open bitterness towards another brother to influence your view on how effective or not effective he is, when in reality you should take a good look at what just happened there because I'm guessing within the next few minutes, I'm going to lead that man to the Lord. And I promise you if I do, it will be because of what happened with James today."

But, again, it speaks of our culture. There is that sort of—we are a confrontational culture. This is the Middle East. This is what we do. It's how it works. We're a very, very confrontational culture. That's why people respected Pastor Jeff so much. Anytime he went to Israel, he was the white-haired, white-bearded guy that came off, was about as American as you would get.

He would walk around the Middle East with surf clothes on and so on and so forth. But many of the people over there respected him as an elder statesman. Why? Because he knew how to talk to them. He knew how to raise his voice. He knew how to be aggressive. He knew how to walk assertively, and he knew how to not take no for an answer. It was just a very—I think all the years, I think at the time, the last time that he went to Israel, it may have been like his 55th or 56th time that he was over there. He gets the culture. He gets the background.

So already as it is, it's an uncomfortable situation. There's a lot of volume happening. There's a lot of back and forth. My guess is this is an extraordinarily difficult confrontation that's taking place between Jesus and these Pharisees. He's literally telling these men in front of the whole world that they're all going to hell. Think about that for a second. That they're not going to be forgiven by God for what they're doing. It's not an easy situation. So you can't blame Mary for seeking Jesus out and saying, "We need you."

Look at this Verse 32. "And the multitude sat about him, and they said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee." So let me just say that one more time. He's in the midst of the crowd. My guess is at this point his brethren have already signaled for him. My guess is he's already noticed that they're looking for him. My guess is there's some awareness that he has of that very thing.

And now it's to the point where the crowd is being put into use to pull Jesus out of the situation to go to his brethren, to go to his physical siblings and to his mother. So it's obviously getting a bit tense. But look what happens. This is interesting. Jesus says this—and again, remember this, by the way, when I read this, guys, just remember this: this is like the woman go get your husband.

This is like the woman go get your husband. Watch this. "And he answered them saying, Who is my mother or my brethren?" Okay, can we just stop for one moment and pause? I'm not even going to ask you to speak out loud and tell me this, but have you ever thought why Jesus would respond with a question like this? It's very puzzling. Have any of you ever pondered that for any period of time?

Why would Jesus respond by saying, "Who is my mother and my brethren?" I don't know—let me just say this: reading this in the Greek language will not give you a hint as to how Jesus said this. You're not going to understand it. I'm very curious. It's likely that the language Jesus spoke in at this point was Aramaic. He was probably speaking Aramaic.

So I don't have even enough familiarity with the Aramaic language, other than I can tell you Semitic languages all have certain commonalities that exist within them where you can guess on a very specific type of language structure that might happen. There may be only a two or three different contexts in which he could say this. But in my mind, I wish I could understand exactly how the imposition of this question was going on.

Because some people will read this and rightly assume that Jesus imposing this question was doing it in the form of that which is rhetorical. Meaning Jesus is asking this question because he's seeking to make a statement. I don't think that's the case, by the way. I just want you to know that. I don't think that this question is a rhetorical question.

I actually think that this question was designed to invoke a certain level of thought in the people that are calling out for him. I think that this question goes far deeper than anything rhetorical in nature. I don't think Jesus is making a definitive statement here by asking this question. I think that Jesus is seeking to cause the people that are hearing the question to think about that statement.

You see, you associate these people that are my flesh and blood as my family when in reality you're making the wrong association and you're asking the wrong question. Jesus is redirecting the issue. Jesus wants them to understand that the work of his Heavenly Father is the one that actually takes precedence more than any other work, more than any other desire, more than any other need.

Jesus is already driving us down the path of the discussion of obedience. I'm going to get into why he asks this question this way in just a second. But the one thing that I want to make clear is that if you spend time thinking about why Jesus would ask this question, you'll begin to realize very quickly that Jesus is questioning what the people perceive as being the authority that would drive him away from the moment or the circumstance that he's in.

Jesus is basically making it very, very clear that the thing that causes him to stay in the moment that he's in, especially in that situation, has nothing to do or is not predicated upon anything related to his blood relatives. It has everything to do with his allegiance to the Father that he co-rules with. You understand? The picture here is: my focus on what I'm doing right now carries a deeper bond than anything that you might find in the natural world with respect to family.

My obedience to God is me dealing with the fire instead of my submissiveness to the family structure, which would be straightening out the picture. Make sense? Are you guys following me here? This is important because something bigger comes into play. And it's really important.

By the way, let me just make this one statement before we need to read the next verse. This in no way is a passage that teaches you how to be belligerent. This in no way is a passage that discourages you from developing relationships with your blood family. As a matter of fact, there are passages in the Bible that very effectively argue that if you don't take care of your family, you're worse than an infidel.

So this is not a term that's being thrown out to redefine family as many cult leaders might do. There's a lot of people that will play on this and will create these cult-like families based on this passage when this passage doesn't even have anything to do with that. So I want to make myself clear: that's not what's happening here.

Guest (Male): This is Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis, and on the weekends, we're going through the Gospel of Mark together. Listen to this study and more at lightonthehillradio.com. Pastor James Kaddis' teachings are also available through the Light on the Hill app and at oneplace.com. Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts too.

When you have a moment today, send us an email. We'd love it. It's encouraging to hear what the Lord is doing in our listeners' lives, and it's an opportunity to thank the Lord for what he's doing. There's a place to contact us at the website, lightonthehillradio.com. If God is leading you to support this radio outreach, there is also a place to make a secure donation at lightonthehillradio.com.

Throughout the week, you can watch our live shows and short videos, many of which relate to Bible prophecy and help you see current events through a biblical worldview. Look for those at jameskaddis.com. Let's return now to Mark Chapter 3 for the rest of today's message: Who is your real family?

James Kaddis: Look what it goes on to say. "And he looked round about on them which sat about him and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother and my sister and my mother."

Do you want to picture—develop a picture of what's happening here when Jesus says what he's saying? It's really important. You guys cannot lose sight of this. This is really, really important. He asks the question, "Who are they?" You're saying my mom and my brother are calling me. Who's my mother? Who's my brethren?

And then he points around and he looks at all the people that are sitting with him seeking to learn about the kingdom of God, and he makes this statement. Let me read it to you again. This is really important. He says, "For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother and my sister and my mother." He's very likely communicating several principles here.

The first thing that he's probably communicating is something that I know hit the heart of at least one of his brothers, and that would be James. My guess is James was there when this situation happened. And the only reason why I can guess that James was there when this situation happened was because of what we read about James in the Book of Acts and what we read about James especially in the letter that he writes to the Hebrew church.

There's a principle that directly ties to what we're reading here that I am guessing James took very, very deep root into, that he took heart with. That's the first thing. The second thing that I want everybody to understand here, and this is critical: Jesus is speaking about obedience. Jesus is speaking about the forfeiture of your own will for the purpose of embracing the will of the Father.

Jesus is saying here that obedience to the Father is the most important aspect of anything that we're going to do in this life. That if we're going to allow something to bring a bond within us, if there's going to be something that allows a common bond to exist, it's going to be understanding the will of the Father.

Let me go back and say this because this is where it gets difficult for some people. This isn't Jesus redefining family. That's not what he's doing here. This is Jesus explaining the fact that doing the will of his Heavenly Father is more important than doing the will of his family. This is Jesus saying that doing the will of his Heavenly Father is more important than the components that would traditionally be tied to the family that would pull a person away from their calling or their purpose.