By J. Vernon McGee
In the Fullness of Time
The question has been asked from the very beginning, "Why four Gospels? Why not five? Why not three?" Well, the wag has given an answer: "Three is not adequate, and five is superfluous, so we have four." But there must be a better reason than that.
Some scholars have attempted to resolve the problem by making a harmony of the Gospels. When I was in seminary, I studied the harmony in both English and Greek. They attempt (and these are sincere men) to come up with one account. It is amazing how outstanding men will trim the corners in an attempt to reconcile any disparity they think they've found in the Gospel records. Reading many of these harmonies is like trying to fit a size 4 shoe on a lady with a size 7 foot - it's just difficult to do! You've probably heard the story about the lady who went into the shoe store. The clerk, in a gracious way, asked, "What size do you wear?" She said, "Well, I can get on a 4, but 5 is my size, and since 6 feels so good, I always buy a size 7." Let me tell you, that's the way they harmonize the Gospels. We do not need a harmony today. We need a disharmony.
There is a vast difference and wide divergence among the Gospel records. Each was written for a particular purpose to meet the need of a separate segment of the world population. We need to recognize this and let the Gospels conform to this very natural pattern. If the Holy Spirit had wanted one Gospel, He would have given us one Gospel. But He gave us four in order that they might meet the needs of mankind.
When Christ came, there were four major divisions in the human family. These divisions were not strictly racial or national, although they basically followed that pattern. Rather, they were cultural divisions based on thought patterns. There are four sepa-rate ways of looking at life; likewise, there are four levels of civili-zation. I believe that to this day you can put all of mankind (as you could in Christ's day) under one of these major divisions. Each pre-sents certain specific human needs, each has certain expectations, and there is a Gospel to meet the need of each segment. And I hope we shall see that each performed a tremendous mission, and that God used these divisions of the human family to get over to man His message, which is for all mankind.
The Religious Man
The first division, and I'm sure it is the one that would come to your mind first, would be the nation Israel, representing the religious man. As we shall see, God segregated and separated these people from the rest of mankind in order to do a work in the nation, and then He scattered them throughout the world. My friend, He did that for a very definite purpose. They represented a God-given religion. Actually, God has never given but one religion. That was Judaism, the Mosaic system. Somebody may ask, "But what about Christianity?" Christianity, in my book, is not a religion - it's a Person. You either have Christ or you don't have Him; you either trust Him or you don't trust Him. It's not a religion; it's a Person. But God did give a religion, the Mosaic system, and He gave it to the nation Israel.
In Christ's day, religion had gone to seed; it was as dead as a dodo bird. It was reduced to a ritual and a law. It was a legalistic system--and that was all. I am afraid there are those today, even in fundamental circles, who try to make Christianity just that. They follow a little rule and a little regulation, learn a little vocabulary - all of which makes them Christian, so they say. May I say to you that Christianity is a Person, and that Person is Christ. It is not a religion at all. It does not even conform to the meaning of the word "religion."
In Christ's day, religion had become so dead that though in the beginning of His earthly ministry He said, "Make not my Father's house an house of merchandise" (John 2:16), He concluded His ministry by saying, "Your house is left unto you desolate" (Matthew 23:38), and He walked out. He turned His back on religion.
Let me remind you that religion had not satisfied the heart of man. One dark night, a Pharisee named Nicodemus came to Jesus with a question. (The religious man always thinks he has the answers until a few questions are asked and he comes into contact with Jesus Christ.) That night Nicodemus asked, "How can a man be born [again]?" (John 3:4). Yet Nicodemus represented religion at its best.
On another occasion, a scribe (Scripture calls him a lawyer) came to Jesus. The scribes, by the way, knew the Old Testament. They played a little game in the temple when business was light in which they would take a thorn, push it into an Old Testament scroll (the Old Testament was not, of course, in book form at that time), and guess where it had stopped. They wouldn't try to guess just the chapter, or the verse, or the word, but the letter where the thorn stopped! They knew the Old Testament. So the scribe who came to Christ knew the Old Testament or he wouldn't have been a scribe. Yet he came with this question: "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" (Luke 10:25). He knew he did not have it. And Nicodemus knew he was not born again. Even Zacchaeus, the publican who was an Israelite outcast, climbed up in a sycamore tree because he wanted to see Christ. He wanted something that religion could never give him. And after our Lord had visited with him in his house, He came out and said, "This day is salvation come to this house" (Luke 19:9).
When religion rejected our Lord (religion has always been against Jesus Christ - the greatest enemy of the person of Jesus Christ in this country right now is liberalism), He turned to individuals. He said to them, as He says to you and me today:
Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls. (Matthew 11:28, 29)
He denounced religion. We always hear about the "gentle Jesus," how gracious He was. It is true that He was gentle, and He still is today. When a sinner came to Him, He was always gracious. But, my friend, He hated religion when it was phony. The harshest words in the Bible came from His lips, and He uttered them, not against Rome, not against harlots, not against the bootleggers, but against religion. Let me lift out just one verse as an example:
But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for ye neither go in yourselves, neither permit them that are entering to go in. (Matthew 23:13)
My! Religion will shut men out from God. So our Lord came to meet the need of the religious man.
The Strong Man
The second division is the Roman Empire, representing the strong man. I have always admired the Romans. I can't help but admire them. For one millennium they ruled the world! And, my friend, they brought law and justice to the world. Our laws are partially based on theirs. I have a quotation I'd like to share with you from Dr. Gregory concerning the Romans:
The Romans, on the contrary, gave the world law in its dynamic, governmental, and temporal aspects. With him it was not a precept waiting for man to fall in with it, but the expression of a present force, the organized and martial might of Rome, demanding submission and remorselessly crushing men and nations into its iron moulds. It said to men: "Rome is all-powerful and does not choose to wait; therefore yield on the instant or die."
The world got tired of that. Mark wrote to meet the need of the strong man. Mark is the Gospel of miracles; it is the Gospel of action. The word that occurs more than any other word is the little conjunction "and." A teacher I had in rhetoric would have failed me if I'd turned in a paper that had as many "ands" in it as does Mark's Gospel. But Mark didn't fail. He wrote what the Romans wanted to hear - "Jesus did this...and He did that...and He did the other thing." The Roman wanted to know that. He believed that law, as was represented by him, got action throughout the world - and it did. It was death for anybody that resisted. No one could flee away because Rome had a secret service that reached out everywhere - over three continents and the islands of the sea round about. The Gospel of Mark was written to meet the need of that man. It was the Gospel of miracles. And it is in this Gospel that our Lord said, "The Son of man came, not to be ministered unto, but to minister" - to do something - "and to give his life a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45). One day a little Jew, crippled, ill, and heart-sick, stumbled down the Apian Way into Rome. He had already written, "For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; for it is the power [not exousian, delegated power, but dunamis, dynamite power] of God unto salvation" (Romans 1:16). Do you want to know if it was dynamite or not? Read Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He says that the gospel Paul brought in was one of the factors that shook Rome to its foundations. It couldn't stand up against it. My friend, the Gospel of Mark is a brief Gospel, and it is the Gospel written for the man of action.
The Thinking Man
Then there is the third Gospel, the Gospel of Luke. It was written for the Greek, the thinking man. For one hundred years, termed the Golden Paraclean Age, four centuries before Christ came, Greece erected upon the horizon of history a culture that has dazzled the world from that day to this. One of the tenets of Greek culture was their search for the perfect man. Look at their art, look at their statuary - they were seeking the perfect man, physically. Read their literature - they were looking for the perfect man, mentally. And as you look at their gods, you realize they were nothing more than projections of humanity. They did not find what they sought. They never found the perfect man.
Dr. Luke - a medical doctor, himself a Greek, the one Gentile who wrote in the Scriptures, and a brilliant man - wrote for the Greek. He wrote with the thinking man in mind, and he presented to him the perfect man. Greek philosophy had not produced him, but Dr. Luke said in effect, "I poured Him into the test tube in my clinic, and I put the acids of Greek philosophy down upon Him, I placed the stethoscope upon His heart. He is perfect."
Our Lord came to save - save the thinking man. After our Lord's resurrection when He met with His disciples, Luke said, "Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures" (Luke 24:45). Jesus was a great teacher. Aristotle was a great teacher, Socrates was a great teacher, Plato was a great teacher, but not like Jesus. Our Lord could open men's under-standing to comprehend spiritual truth, and He still does this today. You and I give out the Word of God, but understanding comes from Him. He is still the Great Teacher.
The Wretched Man
The last major division of the human family was the Oriental races. Out yonder is the mysterious East. An Englishman who went out there, spent years as a soldier, and wrote a great deal of poetry, said, "East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet." Although it is strange to us, there is one thing we know about it: It is a place of squalor, misery, and poverty. While you and I try one reducing diet after another, thousands of people in the Orient die from starvation. But the strange thing is that right beside that poverty is untold wealth. There is a man out there who gets on one side of the scale, and they put diamonds and gold on the other side - that's his income. Believe me, that's a nice way to draw a salary! There is wealth untold and poverty unspeakable, yet both the rich man and the poor man are wretched. And out of that mysterious East, for some strange reason, there came wise men saying, "Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have...come to worship him" (Matthew 2:2). They had a need; they were looking for someone to meet that need. John wrote a Gospel for this particular mind:
And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the
Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name. (John 20:30, 31)
They don't need poverty out there, and they don't need wealth. Somehow neither has solved any problems. What they need is life. Jesus said, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10).
These four groups, represented by the Hebrew, the Roman, the Greek, and the Oriental, were well separated in that day. However, the world today is a melting pot. Technological advancements have made it so that when a man puts his first step on the moon, the world sees it. Races today mingle and mix in thousands of places. I saw it in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in the West Indies, in the
Hawaiian Islands, and I am seeing it in this country today. You and I live in a melting pot. That's what our world has become.
Now all you have to do is to walk down the streets of a great, throbbing city and you will find all four groups:
The religious man is here. If all you have is religion, not Christ, you are lost. You know down in your heart that religion has never satisfied you.
There is the strong man. When I go out to lunch, the clerks from banks and young executives are there. You ought to listen to their conversations. You would think the president of the Federal Reserve Bank was speaking to the head of the New York Stock Exchange to hear some of those young fellows talk! They are sure of themselves. They are on their way up. They do not think they need a Savior. They are the strong men. You may be that strong man, and you are saying, "Preacher, you're not talking to me. I have what I want. I have a bank account. I have a fine family. I don't need Christ." Yes, you do. You don't rule the world; the Roman did, and he needed Christ.
Then there is the thinking man. You may be that man. You have a high IQ and are under the impression you are going to think your way through life. No, you're not. The Greek for one hundred years put up a civilization that was intellectual. It came tumbling down. And the gospel went out in the Greek language.
Then there is the wretched man. He is in our midst today. Oh, he may have a few dollars in his pocket, but he is miserable. Several outstanding men have committed suicide recently. There are a lot of wretched people in this world - in all walks of life. Christ "the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:28). I hope you see your need of Him today. If you do, I'm here to tell you that He can meet your need, whatever it is. And most of all, He can save your soul. God had you in mind when He gave mankind a written record. He prepared one of the four Gospels specifically for you.
