Wednesday Night, July15, 2020 PM

He leadeth me, O blessed thought, O words with heavenly comfort fraught. Water I need still, tis God's hand that leadeth me. He leadeth me, He leadeth me by His own hand. He leadeth me, His faithful follower by His hand.

He leadeth me. Lasp thy hand in mine o 'er all sins. Whatever my lot I seek, since tis thy hand by His own hand. He leadeth me, His faithful follower I would be for by His hand. He leadeth me. My task on earth is done when by thy grace the victory's won.

This cold wave I will not flee since God through Georgia leadeth me. He leadeth me by His own hand. His faithful follower I would be for by His hand. He leadeth me.

Luke 6:12–19 and Rejoicing in the Son of Man

I invite you to open your Bibles and turn with me to Luke chapter 6. Luke chapter 6, we'll be reading verses 12 through 19. So we can continue looking at this passage in which I believe it is our goal to rejoice in the Son of Man.

To rejoice in the Son of Man. Luke 6 beginning in verse 12. It was at this time that he went off to the mountain to pray. And he spent the whole night in prayer to God. And when day came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also named as apostles.

Simon, whom he also named Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James and John, and Philip and Bartholomew, and Matthew and Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon, who was called the Zealot. Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

Jesus came down with them and stood on a level place. And there was a large crowd of his disciples and a great throng of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon, who had come to hear him and be healed of their diseases.

And those who were troubled with unclean spirits were being cured. And all the people were trying to touch him, for power was coming from him and healing them all. Let's pray. Father, I thank you for gathering us together tonight.

I thank you for those you have brought. And I pray that you would bless our time of fellowship around your word. And we thank you for the song that we sang. Thank you that you do lead us and that we have such a wonderful shepherd and king, a savior and bridegroom, Jesus Christ.

Help us to follow and help us to look at this text with an attitude of submission. And that we would rejoice as Jesus Christ is revealed to us as the Son of Man, worthy, worthy of glory, worthy of our praise.

We pray these things for his sake. Amen. What we talked about last week, it's good to remember the context for Luke writing this gospel. Certainly, he's inspired by the Holy Spirit. He is not one of the apostles, and yet here he is writing a gospel account.

Obviously, he is closely associated with Paul. But as Paul was often in prison and no place to go, Luke often made himself busy and industrious. He wrote with Luke and Acts. He wrote more material than all of Paul's letters combined.

He is the most prolific writer in the New Testament. And he is a careful historian. In both of his works, the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles were written and addressed to his patron, Theophilus, whose name, the title, means lover of God.

Apparently, Theophilus had commissioned this work to be done and probably was the one paying for all of the papyrus and ink to do this. That was not cheap. To write something this long and this thorough, Luke certainly needed a steady income to be able to accomplish that.

And as he writes to Theophilus, he wants to write in such a way so that Theophilus, who is a believer, who knows the gospel, will have an exact account of the things which he believes. And that's what we're given here in the Gospel of Luke, an exact accounting of all that occurred.

It was relevant to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. So, as we come to chapter 6, we are reminded that Jesus Christ is the Son of Man. Chapter 5, He's the Son of Man who forgives sins. Chapter 6, He's the Son of Man who is the Lord of the Sabbath.

And so we see His authority. We see that He is making all things new with His ministry. And here in verses 12 through 19, we have a bit of a transition text from the conflicts He was having with the Pharisees and moving into a significant portion of His teaching in verses 20 through 49.

We have the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. And some of that material is repeated here in verses 20 through 49. Before we get to that, we have this transition where we're considering Christ, His communion with the Father, how He was praying as this was custom.

Often He would be praying all night long alone with His Father. And we are to consider His community as well and rejoice in how He calls these disciples to be His apostles. And we see that in verses 13 through 16.

And so tonight, we're going to think about their number and their names. Their number and their names. So verse 13 says, When day came, He called His disciples to Him and chose twelve of them whom He also named as apostles.

So we see later on in verse 17 that there are many disciples. There are many followers of Christ who are called disciples. What does it mean to be a disciple? A learner. That's right. It means to be a learner.

So there are many people who had focused their attention upon Christ, to learn from Him, to learn His ways. The ones He called to be His apostles, obviously, were very committed to Him. It was a traditional matter for there to be a teacher with some degree of authority.

And He may be a wandering rabbi. He may be more localized in a particular area or even a town. But He would have disciples. And these disciples would follow their rabbi around. And they would listen to everything that He had to say.

And they would be kind of an oral repository of all of His teachings. They would hear His teachings and the things that He said. They would hear His stories more than once, as you may imagine. And they would hear His turn of phrase and so on and so forth.

And they would just remember that. They would memorize it. They would talk to one another about the things that their rabbi was saying. They would even do some comparison with what other rabbis were saying.

They might get themselves into a nice little debate with the other disciples of other rabbis about the differences between what their masters were teaching them. But in any case, the disciples, as they followed their rabbi, they were expected not only to learn the things that He said and then to practice the kinds of piety that He displayed.

But really, it was understood that they must mimic everything about their rabbi. It was a way of life when their rabbi would be heading down to the river in the morning to get a drink of water. And he was walking along the path, and there was an overgrown tree.

And if he were to take the branch with his left hand and lift it up and go underneath like that, that's exactly how they would do it. They wouldn't use their right hand. They wouldn't just dock and go under.

They wouldn't go around. They had to do everything exactly the way their rabbi did it. And that's what it meant for these disciples to be following after Jesus. If they were very committed, that's the kind of following that they would be doing.

Well, in this case, these disciples, 12 out of the group, there was a large group, but 12 of them, Jesus selects as His apostles. So what's the difference between a disciple and an apostle? Any ideas?

So an apostle is being trained to carry on the message. But, of course, disciples would certainly be reciting the message. But there's something more to an apostle carrying on the message, isn't there?

What's that extra something? Yeah, there's authority given to them. And that's really what that word apostle means. It's a compound term, and it means to be a delegate, not simply a messenger, but really an ambassador.

It has a very high, kingly, royal kind of official tone to it. If we had a good synonym in the English language for apostle, it would probably be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. If you were ever named that, it means that you are a diplomatic minister of the highest rank, that you are accredited as a permanent resident to another country or to another sovereign, but you represent somebody else's authority and somebody else's interests.

And Ambassador Extraordinary or Plenipotentiary, got it out. The idea is that they had a very, very high rank, and that they were sent out for a very specific mission. So let's say that there was some sort of tension between two countries over in Asia, let's say.

And another country says, we don't like the fact that there's so much tension between these countries that affects us in these various ways. We're going to send our Ambassador Extraordinary over there, and you're going to root in there, and you are going to do your best to see for the interest of our nation with how things are going over here.

Well, the term for apostle means to be made an official commissioner, to be sent out properly, to be sent out on a mission. So what he's doing is he's calling these disciples out of the pool of disciples, and he's saying, you are going to be my apostles.

He's going to be training them to carry out his message, to carry it forward, but with authority to establish matters on earth in his name. So they're going to be going forth with power. If you read the account in Matthew 10, where we have a list of names of 12 apostles, it says that Jesus empowered them to do all the very same miracles that he was doing.

Jesus was casting out demons, and then they went out, and they did the same as they went out two by two. Jesus was healing people, and they did the very same thing as they went out two by two. Jesus was preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and that's exactly what they did, is they went out two by two from town to town.

They were his ambassador extraordinaries. That's what they were. So they carried forward all of his authority. Now, we are to rejoice in that. We are to rejoice in that because he called out the apostles and appointed these apostles for the good of his church.

Now, not all are apostles. First Corinthians 12 reminds us not everybody is an apostle, though if you really want to be an apostle, you can spend about $1 ,000 online and get yourself a little credential, and you can be apostolized.

There's also ways to become an apostle today, but they're all meaningless. Not all are apostles. They are given for the church. Ephesians 4, verses 10 through 13, reminds us of how God equips the church.

So verse 10 says, He who has descended, meaning Christ who took on flesh and came to live among us, he who descended is himself who also ascended far above all the heavens so that he might fill all things.

And he gave some as apostles and some as prophets and some as evangelists and some as pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of service to the building up of the body of Christ until we all attained to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to a mature man to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.

So in order to build up his church, in order to bless his people, he called out these disciples and he made them apostles. And what were these apostles going to do? Well, we see from Ephesians 2 that the apostles and the prophets were the foundation of the church.

They laid the foundation, Christ being the cornerstone. They came and they preached. And as you read the book of Acts, and as you read the epistles that they wrote, as you read the New Testament and kind of see the impact of the apostles on early church history, you can see how Christ used them to lay the foundation for his church.

And it was laid all over the known world by the time Revelation was written. The gospel had hit every sector of the Roman Empire and even beyond. The gospel spread very quickly, and the apostles were preaching and planting churches.

By the power of the Holy Spirit, the gospel spread very rapidly. Well, when we think of the apostles, we should rejoice in the Son of Man for building his church. What do we have here but the treasury of the New Testament because of the apostles?

Everyone who wrote a letter or a book of the New Testament is either an apostle or closely connected to an apostle, and therefore there's apostolic authority for all of the New Testament. And when we read through the New Testament, what do we discover?

We discover what is the meaning of all of the shadows and types and promises of the Old Testament. We see how it all fits together. It's like the Old Testament, which is the majority of the Bible, is the majority of the puzzle pieces.

You know how you build a puzzle, don't you? You find the corners. You find the corners, and then you find all the straight edges, and you connect all the straight edges, and you finally have your frame, and you start building in from the outside.

Now, you can be about two-thirds or close to three-fourths of the way done, but that middle part is not there, the really, really significant part to really bring that picture together. That's not there yet.

That's the New Testament. That's the New Testament. That's the apostles preaching Christ as the fulfillment of the promises, the fulfillment of the shadows. He's the substance to the shadows. He's the fulfillment of the types.

And then all that gets all filled in. And so we can rejoice in Christ giving us these apostles. Now, what about their number? What's the point of the 12 apostles? We talked about this a little bit last time, how it was that Jesus was off to the mountain to pray.

He spent the whole night in prayer to God, the whole night in prayer to God. And we were reminded about Jacob wrestling all night with God. All night he was wrestling with God. And in the morning, he was given a new name.

His name, Israel, Israel. And for the very first time, there were then the sons of Israel who would become the tribes of Israel. Before that, they were the sons of Jacob and the tribes of Jacob. And they were only Jacobites.

That's all they were, just Jacobites. But after that whole night long of Jacob wrestling with God, after that, they were Israelites. After that, they were the 12 tribes of Israel from that point on. Well, in similar fashion, what we have here is that all night long, Jesus is praying.

He's not wrestling with God. He's praying with his Father. And then in the morning, he calls forth 12 apostles. And so, as we're reading this, for being consistent, the new Israel calls forth 12 apostles.

He doesn't sire 12 sons. All of the new covenant people of God, everyone, every last one of us, can trace, if God would give us the roadmap, we can all trace our origins back to the apostles themselves.

They're the foundation of the church. They went out preaching. They went out planting churches. And those churches trained up missionaries and pastors who planted other churches, who trained up missionaries and pastors who planted other churches, and so on and so forth.

We can trace our spiritual lineage straight back to the 12 apostles that Jesus called out. And even as the old covenant people of God trace their origins back to Jacob's 12 sons, which tribe are you? And they would know.

We trace our origins back to the 12 apostles. So that's really the point that Jesus is making, a new people of God defined by Jesus Christ with these 12 who would preach the kingdom of God. And Matthew 10 is a wonderful chapter to read through and see what it was that Jesus was up to in sending these apostles out two by two.

Now, what about the names? Well, Peter, James, and John, that's pretty familiar to us. Peter, James, and John seem to show up more often than the rest of the disciples, but we remember the stories of Andrew and Philip, and we think of Nathaniel under the tree, and we think of doubting Thomas, and we can think of all those different stories connected to the apostles.

When you read the various lists from Matthew to Mark to Luke, Bartholomew is the same person as Nathaniel. Their names just get switched out. The reasons for this are myriad and boring. Thaddeus is Judas, the brother of James, the same reason why their names might be different, but just tracking that in the list.

So Bartholomew or Nathaniel, we can go either way with that name, and Thaddeus or Judas, the brother of James. And Simon is known as Simon Zelotes, or the Canaanian, which means zealous, which is a Hebrew word.

So the idea here is that's just his surname, so you sometimes find him listed a little bit differently as well. Same 12 guys, it's just that their names are a little bit different. Remember that Simon Peter was also called Cephas.

So lots of names floating about and just trying to keep track of who's who. Now the question really always is in the list of the names, why is Judas Iscariot even on the list? He should have been kicked off the list, right?

Isn't it true that when someone does something bad and evil, they should be erased from history?

Right? No?

When someone does something bad in history, they're recorded forever as doing something bad in history, right? I remember that Judas Iscariot, he managed the money purse. That doesn't mean that he stole from it all the time.

He must have been good at it at one point in time, but began to help himself later on. He was able to do some good, probably some practical good. He was also part of a team that went out preaching the kingdom of God, and I don't know exactly how it all worked, but he was there when miracles were being done, and he preached the kingdom, and he was part of the life of the disciples for quite some time before he betrayed Christ.

Now we often think about Judas Iscariot, and it's, I think, interesting that Judas Iscariot was replaced with Matthias early on in the book of Acts. And I think that's an important distinction that we need to make between the old covenant and the new covenant.

In the old covenant, the people of the old covenant, the twelve sons of Jacob, the twelve tribes of Jacob, they were maintained that none of the tribes were allowed to go out of existence. Reuben was pretty bad, Simeon and Levi were pretty bad, Judah was pretty bad.

We read that in Genesis. I mean, they were not upstanding, wonderful folks. But yet they were retained, and they had tribes named after them and so on. And then some of the tribes got pretty bad. The tribe of Dan was an awful tribe, and the tribe of Benjamin was an awful tribe.

But, no offense, but it's just the facts. But the point was that they were preserved and kept no matter how bad things got. But in the new covenant, in the new covenant, only those who are truly born again can be understood as God's people, whether they are Jew or Gentile.

That's one of the big differences about the new covenant. And so Judas, having proved his reprobation, having proved that he was a traitor to Christ, he is replaced with Matthias. Because there cannot be an apostate reprobate apostle.

There can be an apostate reprobate tribe. Yeah, that was old covenant. But there can't be a reprobate apostate apostle. And so they replaced Judas Iscariot with Matthias. Now, when James was beheaded, when he was killed with the sword by Herod, they didn't replace him, did they?

No, because he died in faith. There was no reason to replace that apostle. He was saved, but they replaced Judas Iscariot. That's one of the big differences from old covenant to new covenant. And I remember one time someone asked me, he said, yeah, well, you're numbered 12, but what about Paul?

Some people say, well, Matthias was a mistake. They shouldn't have cast lots for Matthias or whatever, because Paul was the true 12th apostle. And then I have this little fun moment where I remind people, well, actually, there were 13 tribes of Israel.

So I don't know if there's anything to that or not, but there were 12 sons, but there were 13 tribes. So sometimes, you know, every man can ask a candid devil for Joseph. So I don't know if there's anything significant to that at all.

I just thought it was interesting, 13 apostles, 13 tribes. So when we think of the names on the list, and what we know about them is somewhat limited, but we find that Jesus called normal people. There were a lot of very smart people in Jesus' day, very smart about the things of scripture and religious tradition.

A lot of other rabbis, a lot of other teachers who he could have called to be a part of his team. There were a lot of people who were very politically connected. The Herodians, for example, and the Sadducees, for example, had power, they had wealth, and they had influence.

And not one of them ended up on Jesus' team. The fishermen were part of that 15 of the artisan class. They weren't part of the 70 subsistence, hand-to-mouth, farmer poverty that was going on. The fishermen actually were a little bit better off because they owned their own business.

He called them. He called Matthew, who was a tax collector, had a lot of money, but he was hated. Judas Iscariot is probably the only one he called from Judea. All the rest of them are Galileans. Simon the Zealot was probably on the verge of being an insurgent or a terrorist.

He may have already been and got forgiven. We don't know his background, but he probably would have been one of the poor folks in the group. But in any case, there was a nice mix of different people there.

Some of them were wealthy. Some of them were poor. Some of them were influential. Some of them were not. Some of them became famous. And then some of the apostles just remained in obscurity, even in church history.

We don't really know much about them at all. Some lived long and fruitful lives. Some of them died early as martyrs. So when we think about those whom Jesus called to follow him as his apostles, what do we have to rejoice in that?

Well, that Christ established his kingdom with 12. And now, whether we're counting those already at rest in heaven or those still on the ground, there's billions in Christ's kingdom. It started with 12.

Now there are billions. That's kind of hard to wrap your mind around on the numbers. But look what Jesus did. Look what the Son of Man did with these 12 men. I think John MacArthur has a book, 12 Ordinary Men.

Just ordinary men that Jesus called, and he accomplished glorious matters. And we see that God delights in doing the impossible through the unlikely. Why? Because it glorifies our Savior and Master Jesus Christ.

We can say, what a great Savior. We can say, what a great Sovereign. And we can rejoice in the Son of Man. Any questions or thoughts about the 12 disciples or apostles? All right, well, let's take some prayer requests tonight.

Who can we pray for tonight?