God Chooses the Ordinary to Accomplish the Extraordinary
Truth Taught- God chose twelve regular men to be His apostles and after they were equipped with the Holy Spirit, the world was forever changed.
Mark 3:13–21 (ESV)
13 And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him. 14 And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach 15 and have authority to cast out demons. 16 He appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter); 17 James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder); 18 Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Zealot, 19 and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.
20 Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat. 21 And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, “He is out of his mind.”
1. Jesus Chose Twelve Apostles (3:13-15)
13 And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him. 14 And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach 15 and have authority to cast out demons.
Here we see that Jesus already knew who He was calling to be His special ambassadors of the Gospel. These men were going to be given very specific tasks. They were the first wave of Christ’s Kingdom Army to go into hostile territory and redeem those under Satan’s control. So, it makes good sense that their task was two-fold…preach the Kingdom of God and cast out demons.
Luke tells us in his Gospel, that Jesus was up all night praying the prayer of God. He, the Father and the Holy Spirit have set down in eternity past who the twelve apostles would be. Eleven are going to follow Christ and one is going to betray Him. However, all twelve will do what God has decreed to be done, even Judas. Judas in his own power will betray Christ and Jesus will be crucified exactly according to plan. God does not make Judas sin, Judas does that all by himself. However, Judas’ sin will serve perfectly the purposes of God.
Why did Jesus choose twelve?
Twelve is a symbolic number. There were twelve tribes of Israel. However, during the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry, Israel was corrupt. The religion of Judaism had given up divine grace for human works. The calling of the twelve Apostles was an indictment against the religious system of Judaism. Jesus didn’t choose twelve Rabbis or twelve Pharisees. The men He chose were not a part of this religious system at all. So the twelve Apostles would be the new Israel. They would be the ones that Jesus the New Moses would lead into the Promised Land.
Luke 22:28-30 (ESV)
“You are those who have stayed with me in my trials, [29] and I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom, [30] that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
It was probably very clear to everyone what Jesus was doing. He was the Messiah. He has called twelve Apostles. He is preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God.
With this new Israel Jesus brings in the New Covenant. This coming Kingdom is very different than what the traditional religion anticipated.
We must turn to the Scriptures to see that the twelve did not chose Jesus, He chose them. That’s the typical order of things in the spiritual realm. God chooses and we follow.
John 15:16 (ESV)
You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.
They were called apostles. Now the word apostle really is a simple word in the original language that means, one who is sent out. In the New Testament, there are two primary usages of the word apostle. The first is in specifically referring to the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ. The second is in generically referring to other individuals who are sent out to be messengers/ambassadors of Jesus Christ.
There are no more Apostles like the original twelve. That specific office closed with them.
Jesus selected them, they were called or literally elected for the specific task of being an Apostle.
What we should understand here is that none of these men were scholars, theologians, educated, or in any way even qualified for this role. It wasn’t that God saw great potential in them. He chose them and He would equip them and when the day came that they received the Holy Spirit, they would become an unstoppable force.
They were absolutely average. For the most part they were fishermen and farmers. One was a political zealot another a tax collector…
They’re not the highest, the noblest, and the best; they’re not the most educated, the most highly skilled, the most gifted humanly speaking. The truth is they basically are distinguished by one thing and that is they are ordinary. They have that in common. And they are – they are a motley, motley group. They are a very, very strange group. You couldn’t pull them together any other way than God doing it for His own purposes.
None of them had a track record as an orator or some kind of theologian. They were outsiders – total outsiders from the religious establishment of Jesus’ day. They didn’t have any particular natural talents. They don’t appear to have any particular intellectual talents. They weren’t highly educated.
They were, on the other hand, prone to mistakes, and misjudgments, and misunderstandings, and bad attitudes, and lapses of faith, and bitter failure, and argumentativeness, and no more so than their leader Peter. And Jesus remarked that they were slow learners; they were spiritually dense at times.
What is encouraging is that the Bible shows us that these were simply men who God had called to be His messengers. God would empower them as He saw fit to perform their ministry. The reality is that the world has never been the same since. Their teaching is still a massive influence today. We know them through the pages of our Bibles. While King’s names are unknown these regular men called by God are known even today.
Their task was to go out and preach the Gospel and to cast out demons.
The focus of Jesus’ selection had to do with the Glory of the Father and the advance of His Kingdom. So, Jesus chooses twelve ordinary men, Fishermen, Tax Collectors, simple ordinary men.
Acts 4:13 (ESV)
Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus.
2. The Twelve Jesus Chose (3:16-19)
16 He appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter); 17 James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder); 18 Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Zealot, 19 and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.
Jesus takes undone lumps of clay and as the Divine Potter molds these ordinary men into extraordinary Apostles. Before it’s all over these men would be writers of Scripture, workers of miracles in the name of Jesus, and they would take the message of the Gospel to the ends of the known world. In the end most would even give their lives for the sake of their Master.
And then you think about the fact that they spanned the political spectrum. One of them was a Zealot, a radical, a political radical determined to overthrow the Romans, and some of those radicals were called Sicarii. They carried around little daggers in their cloaks, and then when they found a Roman soldier unsuspecting, they murdered him.
Another one was a tax collector. He would have been on the opposite spectrum. You’ve got some who were killing the Romans; you’ve got some who take a tax franchise, buy it from the Romans and ten collect taxes from the Jewish people to give to the oppressing, occupying Romans. So, those two would have absolutely nothing in common. And if they had met each other somewhere along the way, one might have killed the other one.
As I said, four to seven of them were fishermen. If the three final that I include in the seven weren’t fishermen, they worked in an agrarian environment. Galilee was pretty much farming country. They may have been tradesmen, craftsmen, or farmers of some kind. They were virtually all from Galilee, with the exception of Judas, who was the only outsider and total stranger.
They’re going to be the foundation of the Church, Ephesians 2:20, “The apostle are the foundation of the Church.” And it all depends on 12 men whose most notable characteristic is that they were just plain, ordinary men.
Ephesians 2:18–22 (ESV)
18 For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
I’d like to rely a little on Luke’s account for a moment.
Luke 6:12 (ESV)
12 In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God.
This was a rare occasion in which Jesus prayed all night. Like most, when night time came, He was tired and slept. This was a special night, the eve before the selection of the twelve apostles.
Not only was this a special night, it was a special prayer as well. Luke uses a phrase here to describe Jesus’ prayer that unfortunately is somewhat lost in translation. The ESV translates it “praying to God”, as does the NIV but it is literally ‘prayer of God’, a phrase used only by Luke, and just on this occasion in the entire Bible. It was in this ‘prayer of God’ that Christ spent the night.
What is Luke getting at here? The prayer of God is a deep communion that Christ has with the Father and the Holy Spirit. So, it wasn’t that Jesus was up all night praying, but He was up all night in deep fellowship and communion with the Father, reviewing the disciples one by one. The Trinity was deliberating. This isn’t an indicator as some might think that Jesus was simply a man in need of God’s guidance, but for 33 years God the Son did take on man’s flesh and much of our weakness. He was tired, and needed the Father’s aid. He needed the Father’s guidance as He selected the twelve.
We must also realize that the choosing of the twelve is a Divine event. Christianity is built on these men whom God ordained to be Apostles. The Christian faith is not man’s idea or invention it is solely a work of our Sovereign God. Christianity is the new patch that cannot be sewn into an old garment. It’s the new wine that cannot be poured into old wineskins.
3. Jesus’ Family Misunderstand His Intensity to Obey His Heavenly Father (3:20-21)
20 Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat. 21 And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, “He is out of his mind.”
Here is the response of another crowd which included some of Jesus’ extended family. Our Lord’s zeal and commitment to His Father’s glory was so intense that many mistook it as being insane.
Acts 26:24–25 (ESV)
24 And as he was saying these things in his defense, Festus said with a loud voice, “Paul, you are out of your mind; your great learning is driving you out of your mind.” 25 But Paul said, “I am not out of my mind, most excellent Festus, but I am speaking true and rational words.
There is a corruption within human nature that is repulsed by truths concerning Jesus. A person can be zealous for their favorite sports team and it be seen as fun and exciting. A person can be zealous for making money, purchasing a home, car, whatever and be viewed as normal ambition. However, when someone is committed to Christ and zealous for Him, then things usually don’t go well with lost friends and family. You are viewed as odd, crazy, or even not very smart.
Another thing that might have made Jesus seem crazy was the twelve He chose to be His Apostles; those on whom He would begin to build His Church. These twelve would not have been the people we would have picked.
Jesus said, “You lack understanding; you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed. You lack humility; you’re proud. You lack faith.” “How is it you have no faith?” he said in Mark 4:40. “You lack power.” They came back in Matthew 17, and they couldn’t do any miracles. How do you deal with people who lack understanding, lack humility, lack faith, and lack power? They were uneducated and untrained.
But before the story was finally over, they had turned the world upside down, Acts 17:6. Ordinary in every way. They were laymen; they were laborers; they worked with their hands. They were prone to all the sins, all the errors in judgment, all the bad attitudes, all the lapses of faith, and all the failures. As ordinary as they were, they were given the highest calling, the highest commission ever held by any human being. And, folks, I tell you this, as a believer today, you stand in their heritage, for the Great Commission is yours today, isn’t it?
When Jesus choses these 12 regular ordinary men, He opens the door for us to serve Him as well. You see, if Jesus chose royalty, or PhDs, or the wealthy, or great speech makers then we would not be of much use. However, when God can take ordinary people and work them then we see that while I can’t be an apostle but God can use me for His purposes whatever they might be, we see that God takes the ordinary and receives more glory than He could from the very rich and talented.
Thank the Lord that He chooses the simple, ordinary, and regular to bring Himself glory.
That’s us…
Resources Used:
Mark by J C Ryle
Mark by William Lane
Words of Blessing
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