The Remarkable Career of John Mark And What it Says Especially to Pastors & Pastoral Students: Pt. 1 – The Bible Tells Stories About People

by | Apr 21, 2020 | New Testament, Practical Theology

The Bible Tells Stories About People

One of the special things about the Bible is that it tells stories—stories not just about God, but about human beings. This makes it much more interesting actually than the Koran which simply provides saying after saying and is in my opinion not only terribly wrong but deadly boring.  Usually stories in the Bible about particular persons are told in one book.  Sometimes you will get the same story in two books of the Bible.  Occasionally, as in the supremely important story of the Christ, these stories are told in four gospels.

But the story of the person I want to talk about in this blog series is actually told in bits and pieces across the New Testament. It is not told in any one, continued account. These bits and pieces of the story I have in mind are told in six books of the New Testament.  This is the unusual way in which the Holy Spirit decided to tell the story of the man called, John Mark.

I have been preaching on the Book of Acts on and off for a couple of years now to GRBC Owensboro.  Recently, I took the time to enlarge on the little statement in Acts 13:5 about John Mark. It reads as follows: “When they reached Salamis, they began to proclaim the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews; and they also had John as their helper.” 

As I have studied the references to this man in the New Testament, I have divided the story told of his life into seven chapters.  I have entitled them, The Remarkable Career of John Mark.  But before I come to that, there are a couple of things to be said by way of introduction:

The first thing is that there are actually four different Johns in the New Testament. 

  • The first and least known John is the father of Simon Peter. He is only mentioned in the Gospel of John. Cf. John 1:42; 21:15-17.
  • The second is well-known. It is John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus.  He is the son of Zacharias and Elizabeth, the relative of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
  • There is John the Apostle, the brother of James.  James and John were “the Sons of Thunder” and the sons of Zebedee.
  • There is also John Mark. As we will discover, he was the cousin of Barnabas.

We will discover a great deal about John Mark from the several mentions of him in the New Testament.  But there is something else you need to know.

John Mark is not always identified in the same way.  There are passages that refer to him as John Mark (Acts 12:12, 25; 15:37). There are passages that refer to him as John (Acts 13:5; 13). And there are passages that refer to him simply as Mark (Acts 15:39; Col. 4:10; Phm. 1:24; 2 Tim. 4:11; 1 Pet. 5:13). There is even a passage which I think speaks of him without giving us his name (Mark 14:51-52).

Parity in the Eldership and the Need for Balance (part 1 of 5)

Parity in the Eldership and the Need for Balance (part 1 of 5)

by | Nov 13, 2018 | Ecclesiology

We distribute a book as a Seminary that I helped to write and edit many years ago.  It is entitled, In Defense of Parity. In that short volume, I with a few other men defend the notion (which many of us hold as Reformed Baptists) that there is no official distinction to be made between the different elders of the church.  In other words, such a view of parity says that biblically all elders are pastors and all pastors are elders.  This view is based on what seems to me to be an indisputable exegetical reality.  That reality is that in the Bible the three words presbuteros, episkopos, and poimein refer to the same office in the church.  This is a little confusing because each of these three Greek words has both an older and a newer.  Presbuteros is translated presbyter in older English and elder in newer English.  Episkopos is translated in older English as bishop and as overseer in newer English.  Poimein is translated pastor in older English but shepherd in newer English.  Parity simply asserts that all these words refer to the identical office in the church.

But to repeat myself, I am not going to spend a lot of time defending that conclusion or implication of the parity of the eldership and the equivalence of the terms shepherd, elder, and overseer with regard to referencing the same office in the church. The reason is that this conclusion is the assumption or presupposition of these blog posts rather than their thrust or focus.  Here I want to speak of my growing conviction over the years that the parity of the eldership needs to be balanced by the biblical teaching regarding the diversity of the eldership.

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