I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 10-11.

    Jesus’ teachings on marriage here tell us a lot about God’s intentions in creating human sexuality. A man leaves his father and mother and is joined, by God, to his wife. Husband and wife are not joined together by the government, nor are they joined together by the Church. They are joined together by God. I do not fully understand how that happens, but our sexuality plays a role in it. This is why sexual sins are such a problem, our sexuality is designed to bind us to one other person of the opposite sex. There is a connection between this and Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount about lusting after someone and adultery. I think this gets put into that bucket of subjects I should revisit and do an blog study on at some point in the future.

    I see a unified theme from the children who come to Jesus through the healing of blind Bartimaeus. Let’s see if I can find the words to explain that theme. In some ways I think that this passage is central to Mark’s understanding of Jesus’ teaching just as the Sermon on the Mount is central to Matthew’s. First Jesus tells us that we must receive the Kingdom of Heaven like a child. I have seen lots of debate about what that means and I am not going to go into that right now. This is followed by the story of the rich young man who is not willing to give up his material wealth to gain eternal life. He is willing to do just about anything else (to the point that we do not know anything else he is not willing to do), but not that.
    Then Jesus tells the Twelve the sort of death He is about to die. Which is immediately followed by James and John asking for special privileges in Jesus’ coming kingdom. Even after the exchange with the rich young man and Jesus describing the terrible sufferings He was about to experience, they were looking for the perks of being a follower of Jesus. So Jesus explains to them that the leaders in His Kingdom will spend their time meeting the needs and wants of others, not in having their needs and wants met by others. Finally we have blind Bartimaeus. When Jesus asks him what he wants, he responds, “I want to see.” While Bartimaeus was asking for physical sight, Mark is telling us that we need to want spiritual sight. When Jesus asks us what we want, do we answer “I want to see?” Or are we looking for what is in it for us?