The Gospel of Mark opens with these words: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” What is the gospel? Perhaps you would say the gospel is the glad tidings, the good news. This, of course, is correct. But what is the good news? When I was young, I was taught that the good news is what is spoken of in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that every one who believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.” There can be no doubt that this certainly is good news. However, in the Gospel of Mark we do not read anything about God loving the world. Instead, 1:1 speaks of the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Then we are told in 1:14 that the Lord Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of God. In His preaching He declared, “Repent and believe in the gospel!” There is not a word here that the Lord Jesus preached about God’s love or that He said the time had come to believe in Him that we might have eternal life. In 1:15 the Lord Jesus said that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has drawn near. Therefore, we need to repent and believe in the gospel.
If we read 1:14 and 15 carefully, we shall realize that the gospel is actually the kingdom of God. Verse 14 says that the Lord Jesus preached the gospel of God, and verse 15 says that the Lord declared that the kingdom of God had drawn near. Because the kingdom of God had drawn near, people should repent and believe in the gospel. Here we see that the gospel and the kingdom of God are synonymous. The kingdom is the gospel, and the gospel is the kingdom.
If the kingdom of God were only a sphere for God to exercise His authority or a dispensation for Him to administer His government, it is not likely that such a kingdom could be a gospel to us. But in Mark it is revealed that the kingdom of God is the gospel. When the Lord Jesus preached the gospel of God, He preached the kingdom of God.
What is the kingdom of God? Strictly speaking, the kingdom of God is a Person, and this Person is the Son of God incarnated to be the Son of Man with the name Jesus Christ. First this wonderful Person came as the Sower. Second, He is the seed sown by Himself as the Sower. When the Sower sows the seed into us, this is the kingdom. We may say that, according to 1 Corinthians 3:9, the kingdom is God’s farm. Therefore, the kingdom is the Sower sowing the seed into human beings. Today this kingdom is the farm of God, and this farm is the proper church life.
What is growing on God’s farm? God’s farm grows Christ. This is the concept not only of the Gospel of Mark, but also of other books in the New Testament. For example, in his first Epistle Peter says, “Having been regenerated, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Pet. 1:23). Here we see that we have been born of God because we have the seed of God within us.
In the last book of the New Testament, Revelation, we have the harvest of the seed sown in the Gospels. In the Gospels the Lord Jesus was the Sower. But in Revelation 14 He will come as the Reaper. What was sown by the Lord in the Gospels grows in the Epistles. Eventually, it will ripen in Revelation 14, and there will be the harvest. Consider Revelation 14:14 and 15: “And I saw, and behold, a white cloud, and on the cloud One sitting like the Son of Man, having a golden crown on His head and a sharp sickle in His hand. And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice to Him who sat on the cloud, Send forth Your sickle and reap, for the hour to reap has come, because the harvest of the earth is ripe.” This harvest will be the aggregate of the mature believers. Eventually, these believers will be kings with the Lord Jesus.
We have been emphasizing the fact that in the Gospel of Mark we see a life that lives according to God’s New Testament economy. Whatever the Lord Jesus did in preaching, teaching, casting out demons, healing the sick, and cleansing the leper was according to the New Testament economy of God. Now in chapter four of Mark we see that this life is a sowing life. The life that is according to and for God’s New Testament economy is a life of sowing.