Christ, The Son of David (Mark #43)

Back in 2010, a well-known atheist author published an infographic that supposedly displayed all the contradictions in the Bible.

Here’s how you read it. Along the bottom, a row of thin white and gray bars represents the 1,189 chapters of the Protestant Bible, running left to right from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22. Arcing above them are hundreds of red lines connecting one chapter to another — each one supposedly a contradiction. I believe they claimed 439 of them.

It made an enormous splash on social media and even reached news outlets.

Many skeptics were elated. Here at last was a visual representation of how fictitious the Bible is — clearly a human construction rather than the word of God. What more damning evidence could you want?

And many Christians saw it and thought, I had no idea there were that many contradictions. For some, their faith started to crumble.

Then the Feedback Started

Within days — probably within hours — responses began coming in.

The first was that this graphic looked remarkably like an existing one, produced by a group of Christians, mapping all the cross-references between chapters of the Bible. There are roughly sixty-two thousand places where one biblical author refers to another. The author eventually acknowledged that yes, that chart was the inspiration.

The second piece of feedback concerned the source text. The entire chart was built on the King James Version, chosen because it’s the best-known English Bible. But the last revision of the King James came out in 1769, and an enormous amount of biblical scholarship has happened since. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thousands of manuscripts recovered. Some of archaeology’s greatest finds. Scholarship has advanced continuously — and a number of the listed “contradictions” have straightforward explanations rooted in that basic scholarship.

Third — and this one is interesting — some of his fellow skeptics were genuinely irritated. As they dug in, they found items on the list that even they couldn’t call contradictions. And that bothered them, because they felt it weakened the case. Their view was: we have far stronger arguments than this, and padding the list with weak examples makes us look bad.

And unsurprisingly, the largest volume of response came from Christian pastors, theologians, and apologists, who looked at many of the entries and concluded that the compiler wasn’t applying even basic principles of literacy — let alone biblical interpretation. A great many of the alleged contradictions dissolved on examination.

Did That Settle It? Of Course Not

You might expect that would be the end of it — that everyone would conclude the Bible holds up.

The original PDF is no longer available for download on that organization’s website. But is that because scholarship definitively refuted it and everyone now believes the Bible? No.

I found a site that took the same graphic and expanded it. You can now hover your cursor over each red arc and see the specific references. Scroll down and the list of alleged problems grows longer. People are absolutely convinced.

You can buy a shirt with contradictions printed on the back — and those are just the ones drawn from the Gospels. Just about Jesus. Go on social media and you’ll find endless arguments that the Bible is fabricated, and popular books arguing it’s purely a human work rather than anything inspired.

So even though much of that original graphic was debunked, the idea that Scripture is riddled with contradictions is alive and well.

Today We Look at a Real One

Why am I telling you this? Because today we’re going to encounter a genuine biblical contradiction — a real quandary, a discrepancy that on its face simply doesn’t work.

But this one isn’t being pushed by a skeptic. It isn’t printed on a shirt or catalogued on a website.

This contradiction is put forward by Jesus.

And rather than causing your faith to crumble, I believe working through it may leave you trusting God and his Scriptures more than before.

The Passage

We’re in Mark 12:35–37. Only three verses — but this week they’ve been like a very rich dessert. Have you ever taken a bite of something so rich that one bite satisfies you completely, and yet it’s so good you immediately want to go back for more? That’s been my week.

As Jesus taught in the temple, he asked how the scribes can say that the Christ is the son of David — since David himself, in the Holy Spirit, declared that the Lord said to his Lord, “Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.” David himself calls him Lord. So how is he his son? And the great crowd heard him gladly.

There it is, in verse 37. David has a descendant — and yet David calls that descendant his Lord.

Setting the Scene

Before we untangle it, we need the setting, which actually begins back in Mark 11:27.

Jesus and his disciples walk into the temple — presumably to worship, perhaps for Jesus to teach. But before he can do anything, he’s verbally accosted by chief priests, Pharisees, and scribes demanding to know by what authority he does these things. Jesus responds by offering to answer their question if they’ll first answer one of his. They refuse, so he declines as well.

That leads into chapter 12, where Jesus tells a parable that exposes the leaders and their plan to have him arrested and killed. This enrages them, so they set out to discredit him publicly.

Three weeks ago we watched the Pharisees and Herodians — two groups who agreed on almost nothing except their dislike of Jesus — approach him with what they considered a perfect trap: should we pay taxes to Rome? If he says yes, the Pharisees can tell the Jewish population and turn the crowds against him. If he says no, the Herodians report him to Rome and he’s arrested and eliminated.

And Jesus slips right out of it. Show me the coin. Whose image is on it? Caesar’s. Then give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God. And what bears the image of God? Humans. So humans are to give themselves to God.

The Sadducees were standing there watching. Different sect, and they figured the Pharisees had bungled it. So they brought their own logic puzzle: you claim there’s a resurrection — well, here’s a woman who was married to seven brothers in succession. Whose wife is she in the resurrection? Unsolvable. Got him.

And Jesus essentially tells them they don’t even know the Scriptures, then delivers a theology lesson demonstrating better command of the text than the religious leaders themselves.

A scribe listening to both exchanges blurts out a third question: what is the greatest commandment? That was a live debate. Jesus answers, and the man is so struck by the answer that he responds — and Jesus tells him he is not far from the kingdom of God.

And then verse 34: after that no one dared ask him any more questions.

They had tried everything. He knew the Scriptures better than they did and he knew the hearts of men, and he emerged from every exchange looking better than before. They finally realize they cannot trap him. They go silent.

And in that silence, Jesus can finally do what he came into the temple to do: teach.

Jesus Decides to Have a Little Fun

He’s just been peppered with questions — by what authority, should we pay taxes, what’s the greatest commandment. And I suspect he thinks: my turn.

His question is verse 35: how can the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David?

When we say “son,” we usually mean a direct male child. In that culture, “son” meant any male descendant. David had several sons — Solomon and Absalom among the more famous. But Solomon’s sons would also be called sons of David, and so would descendants fourteen generations down, which by Matthew’s genealogy runs all the way to Jesus. So Jesus could legitimately be called a son of David.

But Jesus isn’t here to discuss family trees. The key word in his question is Christ — which can also be translated Messiah, and simply means anointed one.

What They Expected the Messiah to Be

The Jewish people believed God would send this Anointed One to rule and to re-establish Israel as a sovereign nation. They needed a king like David.

And as they studied the Scriptures, a composite portrait emerged. He would be a prophet like Moses (Deuteronomy 18:15). He would be a priest in the order of Melchizedek (Psalm 110:4). And he would be a king in the line of David, as God promised in 2 Samuel 7.

So the people were watching for a great leader of extraordinary wisdom who would throw off Rome and restore the nation. The priests and rabbis taught this constantly. And everyone understood that such a figure had to come from David’s line — he had to be the son of David to have any claim to the throne.

The Psalm Jesus Quotes

So Jesus lays out their assumption, and then quotes David from Psalm 110:1 — the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.

I learned this week that Psalm 110 is the most-referenced psalm in the entire New Testament — thirty-three times the New Testament authors quote or allude to it. A good deal of that is Hebrews, because of verse 4.

The psalm is short, only seven verses, and it describes a king who will bring peace and defeat his enemies so thoroughly that they become a footstool — the picture is of a conquering ruler settling back on his throne, feet up, over subdued opposition.

And then, right in the middle of that portrait of a powerful king, verse 4 declares that he will be a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. So this king is also a priest. That combination confounded the Jewish people for a very long time.

But Jesus doesn’t go to verse 4. He stops at verse 1 — actually at the very first phrase.

Two Different Words for “Lord”

The LORD said to my Lord.

In Hebrew, the first “Lord” is Yahweh. (I’m no Hebrew scholar — I can’t read the language at all and I rely entirely on study tools, so none of this is beyond your reach either.) Yahweh is the unspoken name of God. The Jewish people considered God so holy that they would not dare pronounce his name, so they substituted a different pronunciation rather than risk profaning it.

So David writes that Yahweh said to — and here’s the second word — my adon.

Adon is a general word for “lord.” It could describe a father as lord of his household, a king or prince as lord over a kingdom, a captain as lord over an army. It was sometimes used of God himself.

Now, David is the king. You’d expect the only one above him to be Yahweh. But he says Yahweh spoke to my lord — someone David himself is under.

Who is this adon?

Some suggest David is simply being poetic and referring to himself as king. I disagree — because David never regarded himself as a priest, and verse 4 says this figure will be one. He’s talking about someone else.

Why This Broke Their Minds

Here’s the problem. In Matthew’s version of this same episode, Jesus simply asks the crowd who they say the Christ is. Answer: the son of David.

And Jesus says: then why does David call him my Lord?

Because in Jewish thought — an honor culture — honor always flowed up the family tree, never down. You gave honor to your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather. Never the reverse.

So this was the quandary. If there had been skeptics in Jesus’s day compiling contradictions, this is the verse that goes on the back of the shirt. This is one of the red arcs on the chart. Look — it doesn’t work. The son cannot be the lord. This proves the Hebrew Scriptures are unreliable.

And yet as Jesus raises it, he seems entirely at ease. I almost picture a slight smirk on his face.

Why Jesus Is So Comfortable: He Wrote It

I think there are two reasons.

First, Jesus does not attribute these words to David alone. Look at verse 36: David himself, in the Holy Spirit, declared…

Christians believe God wrote the Bible through human authors. He didn’t put them into a trance — it wasn’t possession, and they weren’t stripped of their faculties. God used their personalities, their quirks, their experiences, their backgrounds. And through all of it he said precisely what needed to be said.

This is why Paul writes to Timothy that all Scripture is God-breathed. Some translations say “inspired by God,” but in modern usage “inspired” has drifted — a sunset inspires a poem, someone’s beauty inspires a song. That’s not what this means. It isn’t that these men admired God so much they decided to write things down. It’s that God breathed it — the way he breathed life into Adam, he breathed life into these Scriptures, using flawed and particular human authors to say exactly what needed saying to the people of that moment, and to carry it down through the generations.

So Jesus, as God the Son, was there as these words came through David.

Way back in Mark 1 we saw that Jesus taught with authority. And notice the first part of that word: author. Jesus knows these Scriptures inside and out because he is their author. He is the authority over them. That’s why he can raise this contradiction and smile — he wrote it through David.

And He Sees the Whole Thing

Second, Jesus has a completely different perspective.

He’s speaking to a first-century Jewish audience thinking with first-century Jewish assumptions. Within that framework, David calling his descendant “my Lord” makes no sense. So they either avoided the verse or tried to work around it.

Jesus isn’t limited by that framework, because he is God the Son. He steps back and sees the whole.

He knew from the beginning that he — God the Son — would take on human flesh in the line of David, live a sinless life, die a sinner’s death, and rise from the dead, demonstrating authority over all things. Which makes him genuinely David’s Lord and David’s son.

For Jesus there is no contradiction at all.

His listeners couldn’t see it, and it was the kind of thing that could unravel their faith. Jesus is essentially saying: no — this shouldn’t crumble your faith. It should strengthen it. Because it’s been God’s plan all along that the great King David would have a descendant who is also his Lord.

Takeaway One: Trust the Scriptures

That’s fascinating for the mind. But how does it change your Monday? I think the two reasons Jesus is so comfortable become your two takeaways.

First: trust the Scriptures.

Just as the Jews of Jesus’s day couldn’t get their minds around this puzzle, we all encounter things in Scripture that make us uncomfortable or that we simply cannot resolve.

Right now in my personal reading I’m working through Revelation, and there are things I flatly don’t get. I can picture the imagery, but I know something is there that I can’t quite grasp. God gets it — he has already seen the end, which is how he could write these things through John’s hand. When everything is said and done, I suspect I’ll look back at Revelation and want to smack my forehead: it was right there, how did I miss it? But right now I can’t.

And there are times life pulls us one direction and then we read something in Scripture that makes us deeply uncomfortable. Jesus’s teaching on divorce, for instance, makes plenty of us uncomfortable — myself included. Our culture pushes one way and the text seems to run the other. Or the pressure to believe certain things, to do certain things, when Scripture pulls against it.

What do you do?

Trust the Scriptures. Because cultures have shifted continuously throughout history, and feelings are extraordinarily fickle — and through all of it, God’s word has remained.

There are things our culture currently regards as obviously fine that nobody would have said forty or fifty years ago. And there are things we currently believe that people thirty or forty years from now will find embarrassing and backward. That’s not unique to us — pick any culture in history and you’ll find things in it that align with Scripture and things that cut directly against it.

So you can’t simply follow the culture, because the culture will move on and leave you out of date. Stick with the thing that has stood solidly — the anchor that isn’t blown about by every wave.

What That Looks Like

When you feel like such a failure that God could never love you — trust the Scriptures, which say God loved you so much he sent his only Son to die for your sins. He loves you. Your sin does not repel him. He is drawn to you in your sin, because he doesn’t want you mired in it. Jesus came to die for it. So don’t believe your heart when it tells you no one could love you.

When you feel alone and misunderstood — the Scriptures teach that God is always with us. The very last words Jesus spoke on this earth were that he would be with us always, to the end of the age.

When Scripture says God will provide — trust him, even when the bank account says otherwise. When a relationship isn’t going the way you want — trust that God is enough even when circumstances aren’t.

Yes, there are moments when we feel like those scribes, unable to make sense of it. But the Scriptures have weathered every kind of storm, and they will still be there tomorrow.

Takeaway Two: Trust God

Which leads to the second: trust God. The reason we can trust the Scriptures is that God wrote them.

God isn’t limited by time, culture, experience, or temptation. He simply doesn’t see things the way we do. Yes, we’re made in his image and we reflect him — and we remain utterly different from him. Because his perspective is so much broader, we need to trust it. We get stuck seeing nothing but our own immediate circumstances while God is saying: look beyond right now. I have this figured out.

I won’t pretend trusting God is easy. It’s hard. And I’m not going to resolve all your questions in thirty-five minutes. God works on a very different timetable. If I were God I’d do things differently and ruin everything. He knows what he’s doing.

So when you don’t get the job — trust him. He may have a better one in mind. When you can’t find the right spouse, or you can’t have children — trust him. He may know exactly what he’s doing and exactly who he’s bringing into your life later. When everything around you is changing — trust him, because Psalm 139 says wherever we go, God is already there. You are not weathering this alone.

“Then Why Did He Let That Happen?”

But if I’m supposed to trust God — why did he let me go through abuse? Why was I abandoned? Why has he left so many questions unanswered?

I don’t know. I can’t answer that specifically. Maybe if we sat down and I heard more of your story I could say something. But right now I can’t tell you what’s happening in your heart.

What I can tell you is one thing that holds regardless of your circumstance, regardless of what’s happened in your past, regardless of the questions still inside you or the voices outside you. The one thing that can hold you steady is the gospel.

No matter what is happening around you, this remains true: God loves you so much that although your sins separated you from him, Jesus Christ — God the Son — took on human flesh in the line of David, lived a sinless life, and died in the sinner’s place, paying for your sin at the cross so you could return to relationship with your Creator.

That’s enough.

Even If He Gave You Nothing Else

Let’s run a thought experiment. Suppose God gives you nothing else for the rest of your life. You’re looking for a job and never get it. You’re deep in debt and you die in debt. You want children and never have them. Every single thing you’ve longed for — suppose none of it comes.

But he gives you Jesus.

That is enough. Because when you look at the cross you see God’s heart toward you. He saw you sick in your sin, spiritually dead, and he loved you enough to come for you — to resurrect you and bring you back into spiritual life and relationship with him.

You get God. That’s enough. That’s why “gospel” means good news.

And There’s More

But here’s better news: that isn’t all he gives.

When you put your faith in Christ, you don’t only receive forgiveness and a relationship with God. The Scriptures teach that you receive the Holy Spirit. Ephesians describes the Spirit as a seal on our hearts — God marking us and saying this one is mine. And the same power that raised Christ from the dead now dwells in us. God didn’t merely say, “Your sins are forgiven, we’re square.” He said, “I’m going to live with you. I’m going to live in you.”

He also gives you the church — a church family, brothers and sisters in Christ. Here in Iowa, when things get hard, we buckle down and handle it ourselves because we don’t want to be a burden. That may be Iowan, but it isn’t biblical. God gave us to each other. Life is hard, in case you hadn’t noticed, and we’re meant to help each other, love each other, and speak life to each other. We are not alone.

He gives you the Scriptures — which, as we’ve just discussed, have endured everything. So read them. God is still communicating. Study it. Get into it.

And Ephesians 1:3 says he has given us every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. When Jesus died on the cross, God didn’t hand out forgiveness and call it done. He has poured everything out on you.

Step Out of the Cloud

So when you get trapped inside your own small bubble of circumstances — and yes, they’re hard, they’re genuinely awful, and I don’t want to belittle any of it — step back and take the wider view.

God has given me so much. So it doesn’t finally matter what those people say about me. It doesn’t finally matter what’s happening right now. It doesn’t finally matter how empty the account is. Because my God is on high, he loves me, he is for me, he is with me, he is in me, and he surrounds me.

You can trust God through all of it, because he loves you and he is for you.

So when you come across a contradiction you can’t resolve — you may not be able to answer it. But you know the One who can. And that makes all the difference.

A Prayer

Father, make us people who trust. Trust your Scriptures. Trust your Holy Spirit. Trust your plan and your instructions — more than our feelings, more than the voices around us, more than what our culture insists on.

We confess that this kind of trust is easy to say and hard to do. So by your Spirit, minister to your people right now. Bolster their trust. Let them see that you have had a plan from long ago — that just as your plan was for Jesus to come through the line of David and yet also be David’s Lord, you have a plan for us. You know the days ahead.

Help us trust your perspective. Remind us of what you wrote in Romans 8 — that you are working all things together for the good of those who love you and are called according to your purpose. Help them trust you, because you are working all of it out: the good, the bad, even the evil. What the enemy intended for destruction, you can turn toward good.

And in the moments when we struggle to trust — when we don’t want to believe the Scriptures, or your presence, or your instructions — turn our eyes to the cross. Let us see your heart for us, what you did for us, how you redeemed us. And let us see that you are enough.

As we take the bread, we remember your body broken for us. As we take the cup, your blood shed for us. And as we take these into ourselves, we’re saying that your story is our story and our identity is found completely in you — and that because of that, we can trust you. In Jesus’s name, amen.