Third Focus

We concluded yesterday’s offering on a grand note of unconquerable encouragement and peace in this singular unalterable fact. It is that when we honestly and unquestionably know, Home, with Jesus, when times come to us and we are, Home Alone, His Superior and Unsurpassed powers are most sufficient and efficient to safeguard us from all surrounding and encircling darkness.

We continue on with an even grander note, bringing more and more faith-building and trust-engendering truth, as we receive the third fact. And when He came to the disciples, He saw a great multitude around them, and scribes disputing with them.

Our third specific focus - And scribes disputing with them.

The text lets us know that Jesus did not just see a multitude around His nine disciples, but we are given some important details. The text tells us, not just of what Jesus saw as He descended the Mount of His Transfiguration, but we are told of what He heard. He saw and heard scribes, disputing with His Nine. Two living images instantly take hold of us. Jesus saw and heard scribes disputing with His students. Up front, we must have a good picture of the multitude. It was made up of ordinary citizens and among them were scribes.

Who were scribes? First of all, they were not the ordinary citizens, the common folk in the community. They were highly trained in law, scholars, and the teachers of law. How did Jesus view them? Listen to what He told His followers, His disciples, as He taught them. Then He said to them in His teaching, Beware of the scribes, who desire to go around in long robes, love greetings in the marketplaces, the best seats in the synagogues, and the best places at feasts, who devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. These will receive greater condemnation. Mark 12: 38 – 40. This helps us to have a glimpse of the kind of people scribes were, full of themselves and their scholarship. These were the legal minds, the experts in Jewish law.

This leads us into the second living image, where legal, lawful minds are disputing with the Nine.

These nine disciples of Jesus are not learned men as the scribes are. These disciples of Jesus are trained in the understanding of their Master, fulfilling the law, not as the scribes and other high-profile Jews, who simply fulfilled the law according to them.

A dispute is a disagreement, an argument or a debate about some controversial matter. The NIV translation speaks of an argument taking place. When they came to the other disciples, they saw a large crowd around them and the teachers of the law arguing with them. Mark 9: 14. What the argument or dispute was about is not mentioned in the specific verse that is our text. However, its details are not really relevant to incite us, to have them presented to us.

Let faith be free, as we are being steered into this vein of thinking. Does this not again, bring you to even deeper insights about Jesus and His disciples? Don’t you remember Jesus once telling His disciples that they were not above Him, their Master and Lord and if people treated Him in a certain way, they would also treat them, His disciples, in the same way? If people hated Him, they would hate them also. If people disputed and disagreed with Him, His teachings and His ways, they would do the same with His own.

Is this not additional living testimony here? Do you really believe that had those men not been Jesus’ disciples, those scribes would waste time to dispute with them? The disciples were regarded as unlearned and uneducated men who, without Jesus, would be to scholars of the law, of no kind of significant worth. Have you thought of that?  

We conclude tomorrow, by drawing this in tighter to us, personally.