Welcome to the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast.

Right now we're going through the entire Bible to understand it is one big cohesive story,

recovering one book each day, and this one's about Mark.

The Book of Mark is so much like the Book of Matthew on its surface and that it is telling

the story of Jesus from a very sympathetic perspective.

Obviously, Mark thinks Jesus is the Son of God.

He thinks Jesus is the Savior of the world and he wants you to believe that.

So at the most basic level, he's trying to accomplish the same thing that Matthew before

him was trying to accomplish.

He wants to get to the end.

He's going to wrap the book up pretty abruptly just as Matthew did.

And the idea is, boom, balls in your court reader, what are you going to do with that?

But where Mark is very different is that he seems to be talking to a completely different

audience than Matthew is writing to.

And as a result, he's pacing his book very differently because the audience he's writing

to doesn't seem to be as interested in all the stuff from the Old Testament.

In fact, it looks kind of like Mark is assuming his audience isn't very familiar with much

of any of that at all.

And so the result is that we see a whole lot of stuff that Jesus did and a very fast-paced

telling of the story we just got done with in Matthew.

And we get it with a lot fewer words from Jesus.

In fact, Mark records fewer than half of the total words of Jesus that we get in the

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