If you have your Bible, you can turn to the Gospel of Mark, chapter 9. Last week, John Song preached from chapter 8, verses 27 through chapter 9, verse 1, during the evening service. And this morning, we'll continue looking at the gospel of Mark as we look at the gospel of the kingdom. And we'll be looking at particularly verses 2 through 13, even though I'm going to kind of give some prior context, starting in chapter 8, verse 34. Before I read, let's pray. Holy Father, would you meet us in this place with the reading of your word that we would, by the very nature of your word being living and active, You are making yourself known. You are manifesting yourself in real ways. The way you extend your grace, you show your mercy as you make yourself known through your son, Jesus. May we see him and see your kingdom. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. I don't know about you, but I like stories that go from humble beginnings to grand endings. We're captivated by those stories of ordinary people rising to extraordinary positions. Today's passage comes close to that, but with a very unexpected twist. And it's not our normal custom, though we do it from time to time, I invite you to stand to hear God's Word read as we read from the Gospel of Mark. Starting at 8, chapter 8, verse 34. And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospels will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. And he said to them, truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power. And after six days, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them. And his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus. And Peter said to Jesus, Rabbi, it is good that we are here. Let us make tents, three tents, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah. For he did not know what to say, for they were terrified. and a cloud overshadowed them and a voice came out of the cloud. This is my beloved son. Listen to him. And suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only. And as they were coming down the mountain, he charged them to tell no one what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead might mean. And they asked him, why do the scribes say that first Elijah must come? And he said to them, Elijah does come first to restore all things. And how is it written of the son of man that he should suffer many things and be treated with contempt? But I tell you that Elijah has come and they did to him whatever they pleased as it is written of him. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Ryan Silva is a thru-hiker who prefers obscurity but experiences fame, albeit a very small pocket of fame, amongst other long-distance hikers. He has walked some of the more common long-distance hikes, such as the Continental Divide Trail and the Pacific Crest Trails, which go from Mexico to Canada and different points in the country. He also likes to blaze trails in the vast untouched wilderness, usually where no humans, if not few humans, go. In one of his essays that he titled, The State of Wilderness and the Impact of Through Hiking, Ryan Silva says this, I left Los Angeles many years ago because I saw the severe encroachment of the urban sprawl envelop the once beautiful surrounding hillsides. There became no place to truly roam free. You had to go elsewhere. We live in an age where we suffer no lack of information or entertainment. Time seems to be our only enemy that prevents us from experiencing all that we can possibly imagine, all that we can easily access by just the flick of a finger or the click of a button. We ask our devices about the weather. We watch episodes of Reading Rainbow on YouTube. We ask Google things like directions to a nearby Italian restaurant, how to lose weight, how to accept myself for who I am. The last two being real questions that were popular questions asked of Google because they track everything. Do no harm. We often want our lives to be different than we experience them. We seek an experience in the next moment different from the moment right now. But do you feel that gap in your own life? I do. We don't experience transformation because we have, not because we have a knowledge problem. No, we don't usually experience the transformation that we seek because we have a glory problem. And today's passage addresses that glory problem by revealing the kingdom of God and power. And seeing the kingdom is knowing that Jesus is the Christ. seeing the kingdom is knowing that Jesus is the Christ. And because Jesus is the Christ, we must follow him. That's the context of this passage. It's discipleship, it's following Jesus and what that entails. And so we're gonna look at this passage, we're gonna break it up into three sections. Verses two through eight, we're gonna look at how we are to worship Jesus. Verses 9-10, we're going to look at how we are to look to His resurrection. And verses 11-13, we're going to look at how we are to anticipate the restoration of all things. So first, let's look at verses 2-8. That seeing the kingdom is knowing that Jesus is the Christ. And because He's the Christ, we are to worship Him. Up to this point, Jesus has been calling people to follow him. As we look back from the beginning of Mark to where we are in chapter 9, Jesus goes about his teaching and healing ministry And people are amazed, crowds are gathering, people are deciding to follow him. But in chapter 8, verse 27, we see a hinge. The gospel of Mark pivots from looking at who is Jesus as the Messiah to what is he going to do because he is the Messiah. And Jesus is focusing here, especially in these middle sections, where we are now through the end of chapter 10, but certainly through the end of the book, he is focusing now on the implications of what it means to follow me. What is discipleship? And he's trying to help his disciples understand those implications. So, as we look at verses two through eight, this section is commonly known as Jesus' transfiguration. It comes from that, from the word, verse two, and he was transfigured before them. Transfiguration is when Jesus visibly showed his heavenly glory to Peter, James, and John. Why these men, you might ask. Well, along with Andrew, These three men were the first disciples that Jesus called. On other occasions, Jesus is with these three men in particular that are in situations that are apart from the other disciples. This being one of them, there'll be another one in another couple chapters. There's been one at the healing of Jairus' daughter. So we see this pattern of Jesus spending time with his disciples, spending time with the crowds, but then also pulling aside and spending time with these three specific men. And we can also glean from this that Jesus seems to be interested that these particular men become witnesses of the transfiguration to explain its meaning to the others at the appropriate time. And in a very clear way it is a fulfilling of the law that by two or three witnesses you have sound testimony. So what is the nature of this transformation, this transfiguration? Other than what is written, I can't tell you. I wasn't there. Some have argued that Peter, James, and John merely experienced a vision, maybe like a hologram or even potentially a hallucination, something that they kind of experienced in their mind. But I think the opposite is true. I think the description in the text and the illusions that are embedded in this whole passage of just so many references in the Old Testament with how God interacts with people points to the reality of this event. And so let me just mention some of these allusions, because they really are all over the place. Just to mention several of them in just passing. So looking at verse 4, it says, And there appeared to them Elijah and Moses. That's important. It's very important. And this is in the context of something that's also interesting for Mark. In verse 2, it begins by giving a specific time chronology. It says in after six days. This is unusual for Mark. If you've read it in one sitting before, which I would recommend, or if you've been tracking with us through this series, you'll notice that events just go from one to the next, often using words like immediately or and they went here and they did that. And it's not even necessarily chronological. So Mark is a very rapid, fast-paced telling of Jesus's life, but here it says, and after six days. That's a clue. What is Mark communicating? He's linking what happened in the prior passage, the prior paragraph, to what's happening in our passage. There's a time lapse, and this is a reference to Exodus 24, where Moses himself spent six days on Mount Sinai, waiting for the experience, the vision, the communication from God himself, where he was waiting to hear from the Lord. Likewise, in Exodus 24, we see Moses also took three people with him to the mountain. God appeared to Moses in the form of an overshadowing cloud, and a voice spoke from that cloud. That voice said, this is my beloved son, listen to him. That hearkens back to even Jesus's baptism, as well as merging Deuteronomy chapter 18, verse 15, where the Lord says that he would raise up a prophet for the people of Israel, like Moses, from among them, and the people of Israel shall listen to him. This episode, this transfiguration is screaming at you to think about the mountain where God's people, after their redemption from Egypt, they experienced what it meant to be in relationship to their Redeemer and was given the law on the mountain of Mount Sinai. Likewise, Elijah experienced an appearance of the Lord on a mountain in 1 Kings 19. And we'll speak more to Elijah in a moment. But this passage is just chock full of imagery that we should be picking up of what's going on and how God has worked in redemptive history and what is he doing now in the redemptive history in the moment of Jesus' being the Messiah. The comparison of it with regard to his clothing being intensely white suggests it is not just bright clothing but actually emanating from Jesus. So whereas Moses was face-to-face with God and had to veil his face because he shone with the glory of God as he radiated in reflection of God's brilliance, we see Jesus emanating His own brilliance, His own radiance. So Peter's response is actually quite honest. even though it's misguided. He suggests that they build three tents. Let's go camping. The word here for tent is tabernacle, the place where the Lord dwelled. Other places, it was the tent of meeting where Moses spent time face to face with the Lord. His presence, the Lord's presence was veiled. It was mediated, it was buffered, except through that mediator, which was Moses. And so the terror that the disciples are feeling and experiencing in this moment is justified because they know of people who saw God face-to-face in His raw presence and they died. James, John, and Peter did not want to die. So it makes sense that Peter said, hey, Hey, before this goes any further, can we just build some tents so we don't die, so we can stay here longer, so we can be in this glorious cloud, this voice, this moment that we are raptured up into on this mountain? Can we just stay here? I want to worship here. I want to build here. I want to stay here. So. Again, it's an honest response, though misguided. It really could be because Peter was in awe and wanted to feel safe in that awe, in that being just struck with the splendor that he was experiencing. He also might have suggested the tents to mirror the natural sense of building a house for God's splendor and holiness as a way to capture, to bottle the transfiguration on top of the mountain. I remember a particular morning last year walking in Georgia on the Appalachian Trail. And I do different things, different times. Sometimes I do night hikes. Sometimes I wake up really early and do morning hikes. This particular morning I woke up really early before the sun rose and was walking. And I came up on this clearing. There were no trees and it was just this beautiful window of the dark black sky. And with no light pollution, you could just see the stars. It was amazing. And if you go a long time without seeing the stars, you forget how amazing that is. What was particularly fascinating about that window, I just laid down on my back for 10 minutes or so. I actually watched the stars move as we are rotating around the universe and spinning. The actual sky could see it over that ten minute period of time and those stars changed. I was mesmerized. I got up and hiked some more and I decided to have breakfast right before the sun rose. I was on the trail on one side, on one ridgeline and there was a valley in front of me and then another ridgeline and the sun was coming up on the other side of the ridgeline. And I'm eating my oatmeal and my coffee and I'm just basking in this moment. And it was quite moving. See, I enjoy the mountains to see that expanse, to witness glory, to get a glimpse of that. I'm so small in those moments that it's being kind of caught up in that transcendence. But that's not true worship. This text shows us that the worship of true glory is in the person of Jesus. The things that I painted are pointers, their outcomes, their effects of God's creative design and purposes. But I'm not worshipping the outcomes, I'm worshipping the mover of those outcomes. And this text tells us that that comes from the person of Jesus. But there's a reason that we call them mountaintop experiences. If you've ever been to the Grand Canyon or seen a sunrise similar to the one I described, or maybe even going to the beach and seeing the ocean, in those moments we can fall on two extremes. We can define the glory of that moment by experiencing the transcendent by abstracting our realities from it. by cutting off real life, the humdrum of our lives, and we want to get lost in the transcendence. The other extreme is that we define glory by ignoring or denying the transcendent in our lives and only say we only have the humdrum of our lives. There is no transcendent. It's just what's before us. Both extremes, well I'm sorry, the first extreme fails to see God's presence in the most mundane experiences of life. The second extreme fails to see that there is always more than just this life. But both separate what God is showing in this passage. Both separate, whereas the passage is where the divine actually meets the human in the person of Jesus. And that's the point, that's the point of this passage, the point of Jesus' transfiguration, of Him giving a glimpse, a foretaste of His glory is to showcase His divinity. to show that He is the Son of God, that He has surpassed Moses, that He has outshined Elijah, that He has come to fulfill both the law and the prophets. And so what you see here on the mountain where Peter wants to build tents to capture this transfiguration, we see only Jesus remaining. And it's interesting that the voice says, listen to Him, but Jesus doesn't say anything. but it's a pointer to what He's about to do. See, we don't need to build a temple to house Jesus. We don't. There's nothing necessarily sacred about this space. Jesus is Himself the tabernacle of God that has made His dwelling place with His people. It is not necessary to seek God's presence on the mountain because His glory has been revealed and His Son, who is Emmanuel, who is God with us. Second, moving on to verses 9 through 10. Again, we're looking at the very foundation of Jesus being the Christ. We then look at His resurrection. So verse 9, and as they were coming down the mountain, He charged them to tell no one that they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead Jesus has done this similarly elsewhere, ask someone not to say who he is. The text tells us that In those other cases where people went and spread and told anyway the disciples Listened there was a time kind of a time expiration date on this command Don't tell anyone until the Son of Man is risen from the dead And so that's what's perplexing the disciples Verse 10 so they kept the matter to themselves questioning what what this rising from the dead might mean you see to To the Jewish people it was very common to have an understanding of resurrection. What was unique about this was just the regular Jewish person of the day would not have associated resurrection with an individual. Certainly not an individual before the end of time. You see that's caught up in this imagery of Elijah. With Elijah coming, to be the restorer of all things. He's referencing Malachi chapter 4. Malachi chapter 4 verses 4 and following. It says, Malachi says, I'm sorry, the Lord is saying this. Remember the law of my servant Moses. again Moses and Elijah together, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel. Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes and he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction. Malachi is bringing a message of hope and restoration of the people of God experiencing the peace of that covenant relationship with their God. That is through repentance. That is the message of Elijah then, and it's the message of John the Baptist, who is the Elijah who is calm, that Jesus references in verses 11 through 13, which we'll get to in a minute. The disciples are perplexed because if Elijah has come, well, then the day of the Lord should be at hand. So why are you again, Jesus, talking about suffering? Why are you talking about from the dead? The beauty of Mark's gospel here is actually it parallels Peter's confession. You are the Christ. And then let me pull you aside, Jesus, and say, no, no, don't go to Jerusalem and die. You're the Christ. You're victorious. This is gonna end well. Why are you talking about something that's not gonna go well for you or the way it sounds for us? And so here again, maybe they learned a little bit, because it's not as, it's more diplomatic, if you will, to say, oh, and they asked him, why did the scribes say that the first Elijah must come? It's a way of actually wondering, putting these categories together, because they're actually also resistant in their heart. Why are you speaking of suffering if Elijah's come and the day of the Lord is at hand? We should be celebrating. We should be triumphant. You talk as if you're about to be defeated. So as we look to the resurrection, we see it on this side of the resurrection from this passage as Christians. The disciples in that moment were seeing it before it happened, of course. And so as we look to Jesus' resurrection, it anchors our hope when we are in the valley, the valley of death. We know how the story ends. We can be in the valley because one, we know that the Lord is with us and also we know that as we share in His sufferings, we also are going to share in His resurrection. It anchors our hope when we look to His resurrection. Likewise, it impacts our evangelism. Notice here He doesn't say never tell people that I'm the Son of Man, that I've raised from the dead. Never tell people about the transfiguration. He says wait until the appropriate time when all things will be better understood, when you can instruct the other disciples. These things will make sense in the context of my death and resurrection and then my ascension. Then tell everybody, tell anybody and everybody that Jesus is the Christ. Tell anybody and everybody that He is the King, who is God incarnate, who has come to dwell with man and to make all things right. And He did that by taking on flesh, by taking on our fallenness, though He was not fallen Himself. and He willingly laid down His life so that we might share in His. We must proclaim the beautiful mystery of Him being both divine and human, for it is truly a mystery. Jesus is the beginning, the middle, and the end of human history. Everything we are made for is fulfilled in Him. Everything in us that prevents us from that intimacy that we were created to have with our God is redeemed by Him. Everyone that laments the wrong that is in us, the wrong that is in the world, we can rejoice because it will be restored. So I ask you, Christian, I ask you guests who may not be a Christian, Have you given much thought to who Jesus is? These are the wonderful moments where we take what we do here on a Sunday service and we live this out in our lives. This isn't about you taking this and living kind of this isolated Christian life and trying to figure out these things. These things have to be lived in community. Because we have different degrees of maturity. There are people who have, they've been walking with the Lord longer, and they maybe understand this stuff better, or they say. And maybe you're a new believer, and you're hearing this for the first time. As we follow Jesus, we have to be walking together in these things. These are the opportunities when we're in the word together. It's having the opportunity to ask someone, would you be interested in reading the gospel of Mark to explore who Jesus is? I'd love to tell you about how I know him to be my savior, to be the Messiah. I'd love to share with you why he died on the cross. I'd love to share with you my hope that He's been raised from the grave. The Son of Man has risen, so now we are to tell anyone and everyone that He is the Christ, that He was rejected, that He was held in contempt, that He suffered on the cross to bring about the glory of God and the revelation of His kingdom. Do you see it? Do you see His kingdom and power? Finally, this last section, verses 11 through 13, we are to anticipate the restoration of all things. He attributes that to the Elijah to come, verses 11, or in answer to the question in verse 11, verse 12, Elijah does come first to restore all things. Jesus is actually agreeing with the scribes. That's what the disciples are hearing this. This is kind of in the ebb and flow of life with the people of Israel, wondering who the Messiah is and when will he come and when will the Romans get kicked out? When will things be restored? Well, we're waiting for Elijah. And Jesus says, yes, the scribes are right, but there's something more to that. Elijah has come already and he is John the Baptist. And so as Elijah who, when he was living, proclaimed a message of repentance, that that restoration would happen when we seek to humble ourselves and to return from father to sons and from children to fathers, that we would experience that peace together, that those things are being brought out now and Jesus is accomplishing it. He's accomplishing it on the cross. So when Peter says, hey, let's build some tents, he's basically kind of doing the Lowe's commercial. Hey, let's go build something together. Jesus says, actually, the stuff that we need isn't at Lowe's. We need to go to Jerusalem. We need to go to Jerusalem because I'm not going to go buy some stuff to build it. I'm going to actually watch the Romans build me a cross. That's what it took to accomplish salvation, to accomplish the foretaste of the restoration of all things. Because, beloved, we live in the already and not yet. What has been accomplished on the cross is finished. But we still live in the valleys. So, brothers and sisters, the temptation is to kind of clamor for those mountaintops. to say, I got to experience something of God. I've got to make my way to the mountain. I've got to just pull myself up and get up this incline and just make myself get up there because that's where God is. This passage says Jesus came down the mountain. You won't find him up there. You will actually find him where you already are. In your struggle, in your fear, in your sin, Jesus is with you and He's restoring all things. We all long for a kingdom where justice reigns and flourishing abounds. The difference becomes how we envision getting there. We all have different competing views of who will be responsible for making that happen, what's it going to cost to sustain it. As Christians, no matter how mature we are in the faith or how early we are in our journey, discipleship is understanding more and more of who Jesus is and his identity as the Christ and what it means to follow him in that same path of death and resurrection. And this is what we'll be unpacking for the rest of the gospel. This is Jesus' focus. This is His last message, His last lectures, if you will, to His disciples, unpacking death and resurrection and how we are to follow in His footsteps. And so as we anticipate restoration, church, what are your dreams? What does restoration look like for you? What do you want to see happen in your future? What does restoration look like at CPC? What does it look like in your family? What dreams do you have for your life, for the community that you live in, whether that's Columbia or the surrounding county? It's wonderful to have dreams, and the reality is we all have them, but the passage this morning encourages us to make sure our dreams for the future are in line with the pathway that God treads. I'll close with this. in a video describing the work that, there's an artist by the name of Mako Fujimara. He did a work a couple years ago where he illuminated, it's called the Four Holy Gospels Project. And in the video, he has this very profound statement. He says this, we today have a language to celebrate waywardness, but we do not have cultural language to bring people back home. We today have a language to celebrate waywardness, but we do not have a cultural language to bring people back home. The gospel of Jesus provides the vocabulary. It provides the grammar for that very thing. In our recognition of who Jesus is as the Messiah, the very Son of God, who set aside his glory to take on flesh and to live as one of us, More than that, he took on flesh and lived a sinless life. He lived in perfect obedience. He experienced perfect intimacy with God the Father, and he walked in perfect alignment with God the Spirit and reliance upon Him. More than that, he knowingly suffered contempt, betrayal, and execution to bring about God's righteous kingdom And more than that, though He died, He was raised from the dead. Because Jesus is the Christ, we may worship Him. Because Jesus is the Christ, we may remain focused upon His death and resurrection, looking to it as our hope. And because Jesus is the Christ, we may anticipate the final restoration of all things, where He will return again Have that shape your dreams. Have that shape your hopes, your affections, the way you see the world, the way you see people, the way you see yourself. See it all in the view of how God sees us, through his son and by his abundant grace. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we are in awe of your glory, and we long for it. We long to experience it, to know of your grace, to know of your mercy and your kindness. Help us to walk in that. Help us to experience it. Help us to then not hoard it and to hide it and to capture it as if we can Freeze dry it. May we give it away. May we extend it to others. Help us to be your disciples. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.