Mark writes in a rather concise style and he moves quickly through events without spending as much time detailing them as do the other gospel writers.  It’s almost disconcerting to notice how often he uses the word “immediately.”  But I guess it’s emblematic of his style to keep moving and give highlights, rather than a lot of biographical details. I think the thread that ties this next passage together is found in another word used twice in this passage, but implied more often than that,  which is the word “authority.”  In  verse 22, “And they were astonished at His .

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We are continuing in our study of Mark and we left off last time in vs 13 with the temptation of Christ in the wilderness.  That temptation happened directly after he was baptized by John the Baptist.  Today we pick up in Mark’s account with vs 14, which begins with the phrase “Now after John had been taken into custody…”  What that indicates is that there is an interval of about one year in between vs 13 and vs 14. So Jesus’s ministry began with His baptism, and He has been preaching and teaching for about a year in both

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Galatians is Paul’s dissertation, from a judicial standpoint, on the doctrine of salvation. And he has spent the brunt of his argument delineating the merits of grace versus law. He has shown in detail the difference between salvation by grace alone, as opposed to salvation by faith plus works. In particular, he was answering the Judaiser’s teaching that you needed to be circumcised and follow the dietary and ceremonial laws of the Jews in order to really be saved. Paul called such legalism “slavery.” And he described salvation by grace through faith as “freedom.” But some of the difficulty comes

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Paul has reached the last stage of his legal argument for the doctrine of justification by faith.  During his missionary journey’s to the region of Galatia he had preached the gospel, and the Galatians were converted and he had established churches there for them.  But then not too long afterwards certain men from Jerusalem had come to those churches and began to teach these new converts that they were not fully saved until they had become circumcised and adhered to certain ceremonial and legal requirements of Judaism. So Paul wrote the letter to the Galatians refuting that false teaching and

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Paul has reached in this passage the final part of his argument for the Galatians to turn away from the legalistic teaching of the Judaisers. Paul has appealed to them on so many levels, using various scriptures and illustrations to show that our salvation is by grace through faith, not faith plus the law. Paul had even appealed on the basis of his relationship with the Galatians as the founding father of their churches in order to encourage them to abandon the Judaizers teaching. But the final argument has the authority of scripture as Paul goes to the very law

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