THE CALL (1:1-15)

The Prophecies (1:2 & 3)

When Paul preached to the Pisidian Antiochians, he summed up his message by announcing the gospel and then quoting prophecies of the gospel.

And we preach to you the good news [gospel] of the promise made to the fathers, that God has fulfilled this promise to our children in that He raised up Jesus, as it is also written in the second Psalm, “You are My Son; today I have begotten you (Acts 13:32 & 33).

Likewise, the beginning of Paul’s letter to the Romans follows that same form, first mentioning the gospel and then the prophecies:  “Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures.”  The author of Hebrews, also, first announces the identity of Jesus as God’s Son and promised one (vv. 1-4) and then begins quoting Scriptural prophecies (vv. 5ff.).

By announcing a gospel and then backing it up with Hebrew prophecies, Mark seems to be following the Apostolic presentation quite closely.

The beginning of the joyful proclamation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
As it is written in Isaiah the prophet:

Behold, I send My proclaimer before Your face,
Who will prepare Your way;
The voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Make ready the way of the Lord,
Make His paths straight.”

[I diverged from the NASB by translating “angel” or “messenger” (the same word) as “proclaimer.”  I also translated “gospel” as “joyful proclamation.”  I am trying to show the close relationship between verses 1 and 2 anchored in the similarity between evangelion (“good news” or “gospel”) and angellon (“angel” or “messenger”).]

This may seem like a rather straightforward prophecy, but it is actually not.  What Mark has done is quote a verse from Isaiah with an introductory verse from Malachi.  The angel or messenger sent to prepare the way comes from Malachi 3:1.  The voice in the wilderness is found in Isaiah 40:3.

But things are even more complicated.  Mark does not quote Malachi 3:1 verbatim, but subtly alters it.  Consider them together:

Malachi 3:1 Behold, I am going to send My angel, and he will clear the way before My face.

Mark 1:2 Behold, I send My angel before Your face, who will prepare Your way

Now some of the differences could simply be the result of translating from Hebrew to Greek.  However, the Malachi prophecy has God saying that his angel will prepare the way for himself.  Mark has God sending an angel to prepare the way for someone else.  Why is Mark changing the passage?

I would suggest [following Austin Farrar, A Study in Saint Mark (New York, Oxford U Press, 1952), 55] that Mark is intentionally combining a passage from Exodus with the passage from Malachi in order to introduce the prophecy from Isaiah.

Exodus 23:20 Behold, I am going to send an angel before you to guard you along the way, and to bring you into the place which I have prepared.

Malachi 3:1 Behold, I am going to send My angel, and he will clear the way before My face.

Mark 1:2 Behold, I send My angel before Your face, who will prepare Your way.

What do these two Old Testament passages mean, taken together as an interpretation of Isaiah’s prophecy?  The passage from Exodus is God’s promise to Moses to lead the Israelites by his angel through the wilderness away from Egypt to the Promised Land.  The prophesy of Malachi is God’s promise to once again to visit His people in a visible way for salvation and judgment.

God did not give a prophecy to Malachi which only happened to accidentally sound like his words to Moses.  God’s Word is not prone to accidents.  There are similarities between what the people desired at the time of Malachi, and what they were hoping for in the wilderness.  The people of Israel in the wilderness were not simply moving to a better place; they were moving to a place where God promised to dwell with them.

Behold, I am going to send an angel before you to guard you along the way, and to bring you into the place which I have prepared.  Be on your guard before him and obey his voice; do not be rebellious toward him, for he will not pardon your transgression, since My name is in him.  But if you will truly obey his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.  For My angel will go before you and bring you in to the land of the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites; and I will completely destroy them (Exodus 23:20-23).

Notice that God’s presence, mediated by His angel bearing His name, is the key to their victory and acquisition of a new land.  That angel was the Lord Himself who had led them out of Egypt as a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night (Exodus 13:21), the same angel who, in a flaring cloud, protected the Israelites from the Egyptian army (Exodus 14:19), and the same angel who descended on that dark cloud upon Mount Sinai(Exodus 19:16).  Indeed, Moses sums up their entire journey through the wilderness by saying, “when we cried out to the Lord, He heard our voice and sent an angel and brought us out from Egypt” (Numbers 20:16).  That angel, of course, is the Lord Jesus himself, the one whom Mark’s gospel is written about.

It is important to remember that the Angel of the Lord dwelt within the Tabernacle Moses built.  God’s presence with His people was the whole point of the structure.  As he told Moses, “Let them construct a sanctuary for Me, that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8).  After the Tabernacle was built, the cloud on Mount Sinai moved into it (Exodus 40:34-38).  When God threatened to only lead them out of the wilderness at a distance, Moses was not happy.

Then the Lord spoke to Moses, . . . “Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey; for I will not go up in your midst, because you are an obstinate people, lest I destroy you on the way.” . . .  Then Moses said to the Lord, “See, You say to me, ‘Bring up this people!’ But You Yourself have not let me know whom You will send with me.  Moreover, You have said, ‘I have known you by name, and you have also found favor in My sight.’  Now therefore, I pray You, if I have found favor in Your sight, let me know Your ways, that I may know You, so that I may find favor in Your sight. Consider too, that this nation is Your people.”  And He said, “My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest.”  Then he said to Him, “If Your presence does not go with us, do not lead us up from here.  For how then can it be known that I have found favor in Your sight, I and Your people? Is it not by Your going with us, so that we, I and Your people, may be distinguished from all the other people who are upon the face of the earth?” (Exodus 33:1a, 3, 12-16)

The reason Moses was not happy was that acquisition of the Land, as important as that was, was not of much value to him if God was not with them.  Essential to the program of entering the Promised Land, was doing so with God’s visible presence in their midst.  Without God’s presence in the Tabernacle in the middle of the twelve tribes of Israel, the trip was simply not worth making.

This helps us understand why God gave Malachi a prophecy which reminded the hearers and readers of Exodus 23:20.  In Malachi’s day the Israelites were back in the Land after the return from exile.  They had rebuilt the Temple—even though it was relatively dinky (Ezra 3:12 & 13).  There priests were serving God in His house.

And yet something was wrong.  The Land was in jeopardy due to Israel’s new sins (Malachi 4:6b).  The Temple was not being treated as it should have been treated (Malachi 3:10).  The priests were corrupt (Malachi 2:1-9).  Despite dwelling in a special land, where God’s servants served Him in His dwelling palace, there was a real sense in which God was absent rather than present.  Geographically, the situation for Malachi was completely unlike the situation for Moses.  He was in the Promised Land whereas Moses was in the wilderness.  Yet covenantally, the nation of Israel was just as much in the wilderness as the generation of Moses had been.  They needed God’s presence.  Only when He visibly visited his Temple, would they truly possess the blessings that God had promised them.  As long as God was outside of the Land, in a sense, then so were they, no matter where they were geographically located.

When God promised Moses he would send an angel before them, He was promising to be present with them and lead them out of the wilderness into a place of communion with himself.  In a sense, Malachi is prophesying the same thing.  God will end the time of wilderness wandering by entering the Land, coming to His Temple, saving those who trust in Him, and destroying those who do not.  For Malachi, as is the case for the gospel writers, Jerusalem and the Land now count as Egypt and the wilderness.  God must re-enter the land for it to truly be the Promised Land.  Even though Malachi’s people are already settled geographically, the still need to be saved by God’s presence and put in the real Land.  God’s coming to His Temple is, in a real sense, their exodus out of Egypt and entry into the Land.  By coming into the Land Himself, God is bringing His people into the Promised Land.

All of this is necessary, if Mark’s readers are going to understand his invocation of Isaiah 40, verse 3.

The voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Make ready the way of the Lord,
Make His paths straight.”

Mark has already alluded to this passage by speaking of his document as a “gospel.”  By quoting this passage Mark is not simply extracting an ad hoc prooftext but offering a comprehensive explanation for who Jesus is and why John the Baptist preceded him.  He is also giving his readers a hint of what is going to happen in the rest of his story.  The only way to grasp this is to have this portion of Scripture firmly in mind.  Let us read it together:

Comfort, O comfort My people,” says your God.
“Speak kindly to Jerusalem;
And call out to her, that her warfare has ended,
That her iniquity has been removed,
That she has received of the Lord’s  hand
Double for all her sins.”

A voice is calling, “Clear the way for the Lord in the wilderness;
Make smooth in the desert a highway for our God.
Let every valley be lifted up,
And every mountain and hill be made low;
And let the rough ground become a plain,
And the rugged terrain a broad valley;
Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
And all flesh will see it together;

For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
A voice says, “Call out.”
Then he answered, “What shall I call out?”
All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
When the breath of the Lord blows upon it;
Surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
But the word of our God stands forever.

Get yourself up on a high mountain,
O Zion, bearer of the gospel.
Lift up your voice mightily,
O Jerusalem, bearer of the gospel;
Lift it up, do not fear.
Say to the cities of Judah,
“Here is your God!” (emphasis added)

The odds are that, if you are a Christian reader, you have been taught—correctly—that his is a prophecy of Jesus Christ and his ministry.  But we need to do some study to understand how it works as a prophecy.  Isaiah’s original readers would have—again correctly—read this passage in the context of Isaiah’s own life and it’s place in the his book.  The last thing mentioned just before this prophecy is Isaiah’s confrontation with Hezekiah:

Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the Lord of hosts, ‘Behold, the days are coming when all that is in your house, and all that your fathers have laid up in store to this day shall be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be left,’ says the Lord. And some of your sons who shall issue from you, whom you shall beget, shall be taken away; and they shall become officials in the palace of the king of Babylon.’”  Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, “The word of the Lord which you have spoken is good.” For he thought, “For there will be peace and truth in my days.”

It is in the shadow of this prediction of the Babylonian exile that we are given a glorious prophecy that there will be “a highway for our God.”  This is a promise of a return from exile to the Promise Land.  Not only is this made clear by the immediate context of Isaiah 39, bur from the wider context as well.  Early on in Isaiah, the Lord laments that “My people go into exile for their lack of knowledge” (Isaiah 5:13). Later, Isaiah will explicitly promise the return for the exiles (49:21; 51:14).

Thus the “highway for our God” is the highway by which He promises to lead the captives away from Babylon back to the Promised Land. In fact, God through Isaiah explicitly compares the journey from Babylon to the exodus from Egypt.

Awake, awake,
Clothe yourself in your strength, O Zion;
Clothe yourself in your beautiful garments,
O Jerusalem, the holy city.
For the uncircumcised and the unclean
Will no more come into you.
Shake yourself from the dust, rise up,
O captive Jerusalem;
Loose yourself from the chains around your neck,
O captive daughter of Zion.

For thus says the Lord, “You were sold for nothing and you will be redeemed without money.”  For thus says the Lord God, “My people went down at the first into Egypt to reside there, then the Assyrian oppressed them without cause.  Now therefore, what do I have here,” declares the Lord, “seeing that My people have been taken away without cause?” Again the Lord declares, “Those who rule over them howl, and My name is continually blasphemed all day long.  “Therefore My people shall know My name; therefore in that day I am the one who is speaking, ‘Here I am.’”

How lovely on the mountains
Are the feet of him who brings the gospel,
Who announces peace
And brings the gospel of happiness,
Who announces deliverance,
And says to Zion, “Your God is King!”(52:1-7)

The exile among the nations is comparable to slavery in Egypt.  God’s deliverance then, will be a new exodus.  As Isaiah also writes:

Go forth from Babylon! Flee from the Chaldeans!
Declare with the sound of joyful shouting, proclaim this,
Send it out to the end of the earth;
Say, “The Lord has redeemed His servant Jacob.”
And they did not thirst when He led them through the deserts.
He made the water flow out of the rock for them;
He split the rock, and the water gushed forth (48:20 & 21).

The end of exile and return to Israel is explicitly compared to God’s deliverance of the Hebrews for Egypt and His care for them in the wilderness.  The return from exile is a new exodus.

It is that prophecy of a return from exile which Mark is saying ultimately points to the calling and work of Jesus.  He begins his writing by saying that his victory announcement is what was written by Isaiah the prophet, when Isaiah prophesied the restoration of Israel after their deportation from Babylon.

But what could a return from exile have to do with Jesus’ campaign in Palestine?  After all, the Hebrews were living in the Promised Land at the time of Jesus.  They had a Temple where they could hold their sacred feasts.  They had a priesthood.  What could a prophesy about the return from exile have to do with Jesus and the Israelites of his day?

In combining Exodus 23:20 with Malachi 3:1 to introduce the quote from Isaiah, Mark has explained the import of the return from exile.  Yes the Israelites are in the Promised Land, just as the were in Malachi’s day.  Nevertheless, they are covenantally in the wilderness and in exile—somehow back in Egypt and Babylon.  In a very real sense they need to be brought back to the Promised Land.  Mark has not yet told us why Israel is in such a bad situation, and he probably expects that his initial readers already have some idea.  We will have to figure it out as we go along.  Nevertheless, it is clear that Israel is in grave danger and needs to be rescued by God.  They need God to come to them so that He is once again present with them.  Only then will they truly possess God’s promise.

What does all this mean?

In the first place, we have a hint here of great humility on God’s part.  Instead of God’s people needing to be taken out of the Land and then come back to it out of the wilderness, God himself seems to be the one undergoing the exile and exodus and returning to the Promised Land.  It is not the people who must undergo a literal geographical exile.  God is in some sense taking it upon himself.  And Jesus will quite literally take all the weight of oppression by foreign powers upon himself.

In the second place, we see here a great advancement of the human race.  In Exodus 23:20 it is the angel of the Lord—God Himself—who prepares the way for his people to inherit the promises.  Yet in Malachi 3:1 the angel is no longer God, but a man as a messenger (again: remember that “angel” and “messenger” are the same word in both the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures).  As we will see, like the Angel of the Lord in the wilderness, John the Baptist remains at Israel’s eastern frontier in the desert preparing the people to inherit the Land.

More than that, we also see here as clear a statement as we could hope for that Jesus is God Himself.  Malachi 3:1 is unambiguous: the messenger will prepare the way for the arrival of Yahweh, “the Lord” as he is usually called in our English Bibles.  Yet Mark, like the other three gospel writers, claims that the messenger is John the Baptist.  And Mark is quite clear that it is Jesus for whom John has prepared the way.  Jesus is the presence of God coming to His people.

But who can endure the day of his coming?

Indeed, the prophecy from Isaiah which Mark quotes goes on to promise that every valley will be raised and every mountain will be made low.  Mark is warning us of what we will read.  We can safely guess that the mountains are not going to be too thrilled about being flattened, even if the valleys do rejoice in being raised.