| Living Waters Message Board to refresh the saints... |
| These search engines are in no way affiliated with Living Waters. | |
|---|---|
|
|
Re: I?ve got a question Posted by caf - January 15, 2003 at 2:25:14am 1280x1024x32 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:0.9.4.1) Gecko/20020314 Netscape6/6.2.2 In Reply to: I?ve got a question Posted by Craig - January 13, 2003 at 9:57:06pm:
|
|
: Mark 1:13 reads "and he was in the desert forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him." : Matt. 4:11 reads "Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him." Before I offer my 2 cents, let's go a little farther with the quotes: Matthew 4:1-3, 11 Luke 4:1-3, 13 Mark 1:12-13 : The question is: Does Mark give different detail than Matthew. Did angels attend to Jesus (I don't mean feed him) during the 40 days? This portion of Mark is clearly a summary, so it may have been Mark's way of writing the same information, but it also may be different information. There many times when the detail from gospel to gospel is different. I just wonder if this is one of them. The three accounts each give some different details, although I had not thought the attendance of the angels was one of them. Mark's particular details that are not really stated by the other two writers include the idea of immediacy, plus the strength of the Spirit's urge to go into the wilderness, and the bit about the wild animals. Matthew puts an emphasis on the purpose, that he went into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan, that this was a purposeful testing, and not just a happenstance. Luke puts a heavy emphasis on the guidance of the Holy Spirit, before, during and after the wilderness experience (including the following verse in Luke, not quoted above). : Is it possible that Marks is telling us that the angeles protected Jesus from harm during his time in the wilderness? And also attended him after the devil had tempted him. Even Satan notes the potential for the angel's assistance in the second temptation. Mark's mention of the wild beasts is intriguing. Perhaps it is intended to be related to the attendance of angels, as in the story of Daniel in the lions' den (Daniel 6), or then again perhaps it was connected to the prophetic idea of the lion and the lamb and the bear and the ox together (Isaiah 11:6-7). I would be inclined to think that Mark's mention of the ministration of the angels parallels Matthew's, that he is just briefly mentioning or summarizing important factors, and that the angelic attendance was apparent in the aftermath rather than during the ordeal. The word for "attended" or "ministered" is the same one we have in reference to service in Mark 1:31 and 15:41 (and several other New Testament passages). Having said that, however, and looking over your question and various alternatives, I must note that the Psalm quoted by Satan in Matthew 4:6 specifically mentions safety from wild animals... and that is Mark's most likely reference point, and might suggest the angelic guardianship was ongoing during the 40 days, whether visible or not, though they did not keep Satan from him, and probably were more palpably present at the end. Ps 91:11-13 One curiousity is that most people don't really think in terms of the 40 days of temptation, which all three writers mention, but just focus on the three tests highlighted by Matthew and Luke as though that was the whole story. The three are chosen for a reason, but clearly not the entire scope of the testing. : The one conclusion that I have reached is that we too often jump to conclusions by reading the "preferred" gospel account and too often don't consider that the detail might get in the way of the real point of why God inspired the writer to write a certain way. Seems like I've been recommending a lot of books lately, but here I go again. Men With A Message by John Stott is a pretty good treatment of the different perspectives the New Testament writers bring to their topics, and some of the apparent reasons for the information they include. It's the kind of analysis I enjoy. There's a bit of a review elsewhere on Living Waters
|
| Follow Ups |
| - |
| Post A Followup | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| E-Mail: | ||||||||
| Subject: | ||||||||
| ||||||||
|