Mark 6:15 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Mark 6:15

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In verse 15 you have just a little more information about how Herod came to hear. ‘Others said, That it is Elijah’, risen from the dead. ‘Others said, That is a prophet’, a great prophet who has come – for 400 years the Jews had not had a wonder working prophet – ‘or one of the [old] prophets.’ ‘And some said’, according to Luke, ‘it's John the Baptist who is risen’, and Herod Antipas chose the last explanation. Yes, it must be John the Baptist risen from the dead. That was the one that he selected out of the different explanations that were on offer. Explanations – how very interesting! The miracles of Christ were so numerous, and so mighty, and so suddenly performed, and so total in the recovery they gave to people; so total that a deeply handicapped person was not only healed, but limbs that had been withered dead for years – you might say – had life surge into them, and return to normality. These were the mightiest of miracles, performed at a word or at a touch, and there were so many of them that everybody knew someone who had been remarkably healed. People would take their family members who were sick, and he would heal hundreds and hundreds in villages and towns across Galilee, and then single out individual cases. There had to be an explanation. You couldn't just dismiss this. Even Christ's greatest enemies, the chief priests and the scribes and the Pharisees, who used their station and their dignity to push to the front of the crowd wherever he was, and who witnessed first-hand these miracles; they had to give an explanation.

Application

You notice that nobody ever denied the miracles of Christ. Even his greatest enemies had to say, it is demonic; it is by Beelzebub, the prince of the demons that he does these things. The explanation may have been insulting and outrageous and outlandish, but they couldn't just dismiss them. There is only one set of people in the history of the world that actually dismiss the miracles of Christ, and that is atheists. Atheists don't need an explanation. Of course we know that modern atheists weren't there, but nevertheless they don't need an explanation. The people at the time who didn't want to accept that Christ was Messiah, had to think of some good explanation for the miracles. No one denied them. Only atheists deny things, because atheism, though it likes to say, we are the people of reason, they are actually the people who put their head in the sand, in the earth. If they don't agree with something and they can't answer it – whether it something in biological science, which collapses the whole theory of evolution, or whatever it is – they simply ignore it, and bury their reason. Everybody here had to have an explanation, whether they were for Christ, or whether they were against him. The explanation that Herod Antipas selected was that John the Baptist was risen from the dead.

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Mark 6:15 Commentary and Bible Study