Thank you. When the religious leaders attempted to fabricate a charge that would lead to a death sentence for Jesus, he stood in purposeful silence.

Today on Truth for Life, we'll look at the moment he broke that

silence and the impact of his declaration, both then and now. Alistair Begg is teaching from

Mark Chapter 14. We begin today at verse 53.

Artie friends who died this last year, was an excellent New Testament commentator,

and in his lengthy tome on the Gospel of Mark, he refers to this as the Christological climax of the gospel.

And all that has been anticipated, all that has been veiled, shadowy, pointing forward, leading on, now is declared unequivocally by Jesus in answer

to the question of the high priest. What makes this quite so striking is the fact that Mark's gospel in a peculiar way

has in it what theologians refer to as the messianic secret. What they are saying in that is

that it is not difficult for even a fairly cursory reading of the gospel to make it obvious to

the reader that Jesus is at pains throughout this gospel to make sure that people do not tell

other people who he is.

Now, we could go through and rehearse the whole thing,

and we're not going to do that.

You may be relieved to know,

but you can search it out for yourself if you choose.

Let me just give you a couple of illustrations.

For example, in the third chapter of Mark,

where Jesus has dealt with the demonic activity, and the

evil spirits have been cast out. The heading is a great crowd follows Jesus, verse 7 of Mark

3, and this great crowd has followed Jesus Jesus because they've heard all that he was

doing. And because of the buzz that has been created, they're all coming to him. Then he had the

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