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verses 1 through 4. His brother
Vern comes to give a public reading of the Word of God. Matthew chapter
10 verses 1 through 4. Thank God for His Word. Jesus
summoned his 12 disciples and gave them authority over unclean
spirits to cast them out and to heal every kind of disease
and every kind of sickness. Now the names of the 12 apostles
are these, the first Simon, who was called Peter, and Andrew
his brother, and James the son of Zebedee and John his brother,
Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector,
James the son of Alphaeus and Thaddeus, Simon the zealot, and
Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him. Father, it is breathtaking
to read and studied the biographies of these apostles. It is amazing
to see how very normal and common they were as human beings, how
sinful they were, how ungodly they were. And then God, you
chose them, and you washed them, and you saved them, and you changed
them, and you taught them. And Lord, you used them mightily,
and they changed the world. And we are the recipients of
their ministry even this morning. And so God, I pray that I do
justice to these men's lives by revealing as much as I know
to do about who they were and what they struggled with and
how you used them and even how they died in the hope that it
will cause us to have the courage that if God can use these very
common men, God can use us. If God can forgive them, God
can forgive us. And Lord, I pray God that you
will give me unction and anointing this morning that I will preach
this rightly and fully. And I pray God that those that
you have gathered here this morning, those that are watching by means
of the internet, and those who will be watching this at some
later time, that you will give them eyes to see, ears to hear,
and a heart to believe. And we'll give you the praise
and the glory for we ask these things in Jesus's most precious,
wonderful name. Amen. You may be seated. To the
glory of God, the Father, God, the Son, and God, the Holy Spirit,
amen. That's very fitting that we take
time to examine the biographies of these 12 men that Jesus chose
to be his own personal Shalia, that are called apostles. Because even though these men
were very ordinary and common men, they were used by God to
truly change the world. For example, through God's sovereign
predestination, by God's grace and to God's glory, you and I
have been chosen in these days to make up part of the worldwide
body of Jesus Christ, the church in the 21st century. But there
wouldn't be a church for us to be a part of had it not been
for these men. Because of who they were, what
they did, what they taught, what they either wrote down personally
or had written down by scribes, these men, along with the Old
Testament prophets, became part of the very foundation of the
Church of the Lord Christ. Ephesians 2, 19 through 22 says,
so then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow
citizens with the saints and are of God's household. having
been built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets,
Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole
body being fitted together is growing into a holy temple in
the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling
of God in the Spirit. So the office of apostle, the
age of the apostles, was a one-time, non-repeatable movement in history
when a few chosen men were used by God to radically and eternally
transform not only individual people's lives, but also the
way in which every human being on Earth could have a relationship
with the one true and living God. Now it is commonly taught
that the word apostle means a sent one, but that's like saying that
the word space means up, It may be true in some sense, but it
is woefully lacking in both the meaning and purpose of why Jesus
chose those men. And because of such shallow and
incomplete definitions, there are many, far too many, within
the modern church today who genuinely think that this office and ministry
of the apostles is ongoing. So please allow me to give you
a short rundown of what the ministry of the apostles was. And hopefully,
as you begin to understand this, you will agree that the office
and ministry of apostles has ceased. Jesus chose the apostles
to accomplish several very important things, like bring the old covenant
to a decisive end, like bring the new covenant into full existence,
receive the final full and completed revelation of God to man directly,
explain it, and then write it down. bring divine credibility
to this new revelation through breathtaking signs and wonders
and miracles and various gifts of the Holy Spirit, and then
to correctly interpret the Old Testament. And no other church
leader from the resurrection of Jesus to this very day has
been called to do these things except the apostles. The apostles
were the only ones chosen to accomplish these things. But
what is often overlooked in this discussion is the seal of apostleship
that these men brought forth that no one before or since accomplished. And that is the amazing level
of suffering that these men went through. And of course, this
issue, the issue of intense and ongoing suffering that none of
the so-called apostles of our day want to touch with a 50-foot
pole. Let me just give you a brief
summary of how great these men suffered for the cause of Jesus
Christ. From 2 Corinthians 11, 22 through 28, it says, are they
Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants
of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants of
Christ? I speak as if insane. I'm more
so. In far more labors, in far more
imprisonments, beaten times without number, often in danger of death. Five times I received from the
Jew 39 lashes. Three times I was beaten with
rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked.
A night and a day I have spent in the deep. I have been on frequent
journeys in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers
from my countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the
city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers on the sea, dangers among
false brethren. I have been in labor and hardship
through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without
food, in cold and exposure. Apart from such external things,
there is the daily pressure on me of concern for all the churches. Now, for the sake of explanation,
let me just zero in on verse 24 that says five times, I received
from the Jews 39 lashes. Physical beatings were common
back in the first century. Most all people arrested were
beaten, even those who were later found to be innocent. But why
was Paul specific about how many times he received the lash from
the Jews? To find out, we need to go back
to the Law of Moses that taught this from Deuteronomy 25, one
through three. If there is a dispute between
men and they go to court and the judges decide their case
and they justify the righteous and condemn the wicked, then
it shall be if the wicked man deserves to be beaten, the judge
shall then make him lie down and be beaten in the presence
with a number of stripes according to his guilt. He may beat him
40 times, but no more. so that he does not beat him
with many more stripes than these, and your brother is not degraded
in your eyes." Wow. Now it seems like 40 lashes is
pretty extreme to me, but back then a man being beaten with
40 lashes was considered both humane and dignified. And this
had to do with the fact that all men are made in the image
of God, and so they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,
even criminals. So it was established by God
that a man, even a guilty criminal, could never be beaten more than
40 times. To beat a man more than 40 times
was a sin before God. So what happened if the man doing
the beating lost count? If he beat the criminal more
than 40 times, he was sinning. So this caused those doing the
beating to develop a custom to never beat a man more than 39
times, just in case he lost count. The original biblical goal in
beating the criminal in the first place was to humiliate him, to
facilitate his repentance, not to kill him. And so beating a
man 39 times became common over time with the Jews. When the
Romans took over from the Greeks in dominating Israel, they picked
up on this strange way to hand out justice. So the Romans began
beating Jewish criminals 39 times, but they had an alternative reason
for doing so. The Roman lash, the flagrum,
had been developed and evolved over time to be an amazing tool
of both torture and death. It was a long strand of leather
with bits of bone, lead balls, as well as sharp rocks tied to
the end that was designed to inflict the most damage as well
as the most bleeding. Contrary to several legends,
Roman law did not limit the number of lashes that could be meted
out to the criminal. And as a result, many, if not
most, who were beaten died. It is also commonly thought that
Jesus received 39 stripes before his crucifixion. That is not
true. The Roman authorities felt no
compulsion to adhere to Jewish law about this. So the Roman
soldiers beat Jesus until they got tired. And it is nothing
short of a miracle that he lived through it, because it was God's
will that he die by crucifixion rather than a beating. The reason
Paul received 39 lashes is because the Jewish authorities were in
charge of his beating, and he was accused of preaching blasphemies
because of the gospel. But Paul was beaten by the Jews
on five separate occasions. So he would have been arrested
first, tried, found guilty, and then sentenced to be beaten. So the apostle would have been
tied to a short post that forced him to bend over, and then the
beatings would commence. There would actually be a member
of the Sanhedrin court or one of the ranking high priests in
attendance at his beating, similar to the way that Paul was in attendance
at the stoning of Stephen. And that religious leader would
read the charges against Paul and then give the okay signal,
which was either a nod of the head or a thumbs down sign for
the beating to begin. The sharp rocks as well as the
bits of bone tied to the phlegm would have torn the skin on his
back open very quickly, causing massive bleeding. But the lead
balls would deliver deep-seated bruises down to actually bruising
and even breaking the bones in Paul's body. As each lash was
delivered, someone would count so as to not go past 40, because
they wouldn't want to do anything to displease the Lord. Paul may
have well passed out or been close to being unconscious once
the count of 39 came, but that wasn't the end of his sufferings,
not by a long shot. Because of the seriousness of
the charges against him, even after he was beaten, the Jews
would not have let Paul go free, at least not immediately. Instead,
he would have been drugged to the jail, which back in the first
century was in worse shape than what animals had to endure. Normally,
the city sewage ran right through the jail, and criminals had little
more than a single bucket to use both the bathroom in as well
as receive their food. Disease was rampant, and as many
criminals died from disease as from the punishments. Normally,
the criminal would be forced to sit down on the dirt floor,
usually in his own waist. His arms would be chained above
him on the wall, while his feet would be chained to the ground.
This caused him to be helpless to defend himself from the legion
of rats, some as large as cats, that would come out at night
and literally eat the face, fingers, and toes of the criminals. But
in Paul's case, his back was in shreds from the beatings,
his own blood and body serum running down his back against
the filthy wall. And this would have been a delicacy
for the rats at night. And as he lay in his own filth,
the wounds would become infected and his fever would rise, probably
causing him to become delirious. Until many days or weeks later,
they would scab over if he could live that long. Broken bones
were never set, and so they would heal wrongly or not at all. And the scars left from the beating
would last him the rest of his life. But once Paul survived
and regained his health from that beating, They took him out
and beat him again, and again, and again, and again the fifth
time. Five separate times this apostle
endured this barbaric and inhuman treatment, all because he had
the audacity to herald the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ. Now more than any of the other
apostles, now I have no idea if they beat him five times,
I mean, yeah, beat him five times in a row or if they beat him
and later on he got free and then they caught him again and
they got him in prison, beat him again and then they let him
go. It could have been that. I don't have any way of knowing.
I don't know anybody who does know. I tried to find out. I
don't know. Now more than any of the other
apostles, Paul used the Old Testament to prove that Christianity was
the fulfillment of the old covenant and was the promised new covenant.
So the fact that the Jewish authorities continued to arrest, try, condemn,
and punish Paul proved that their treatment of this man had infinitely
more to do with the fact that through his preaching and teaching,
he exposed their lost condition and their religious hypocrisy
more than that they were simply punishing a man who had supposedly
committed blasphemy. But as we have gone through the
biographies of the apostles, I have been faithful to show
you one common thread with them all. Not only was God using them
greatly, but God also allowed these men to suffer above and
beyond the normal suffering that was common with all the first
century believers. And they all suffered for the
same reason. They heralded the gospel. Now contrast that level
of unspeakable suffering with the cushioned lives of the pillow
prophets of our day who call themselves apostles. From flying
on their own private jets, to eating in the finest restaurants,
to wearing the best clothing, to living in the most luxurious
condominiums on earth, these modern-day Pied Pipers demonstrate
the greatest contrast between themselves and the true apostles. as they set in chains after being
beaten within an inch of their lives, with rats eating their
eyes. No, not only are those men of
our day not apostles of Jesus Christ, many of them, probably
the vast majority of them, are not even Christians. I told you
last week that Nathanael Bartholomew's name was actually Mataniel Bar-Tolmai,
or Mataniel the son of Tolmai. which has been transliterated
over the centuries to be Nathanael Bartholomew, or simply Bartholomew,
or simply Nathanael. So let's meet Metanael Bartholomew
by looking at John 1, verse 43. And this is the only place where
he's identified in the entire New Testament. Verse 43 picks
up the story of Jesus in the time in which he was calling
his disciples. John the Baptist had pointed
to Christ as being the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of
the world, and the ministry of Jesus then officially began.
And so Jesus called Simon and Andrew in the prior passage to
be his disciples. And later on, those two men would
become apostles. But at this point, Jesus just
called them to be his disciples. Methodes is the Greek word. They're
students. They're learners. There's a vast
number of these people. There's a huge crowd of 10,000
or more people that follow Jesus everywhere he goes. Out of that
larger crowd was a smaller crowd of disciples, or students, who
some were saved, some were lost. And then out of that smaller
group came an even smaller group of Jesus's own personal Shalia,
or what is called as apostles. And so it's a group out of a
group out of a group. But at this point, Jesus just
called them to be disciples. And then on the very next day
after he had done that, Jesus purposed to go into Galilee and
he found Philip. And he said to Philip, follow
me. Now Philip was identified as being from Bethsaida, the
city of Andrew and Peter, and he probably knew them very well
and probably attended the same synagogue with them and knew
them to be followers of the one true living God and lovers of
God with a messianic hope they all had very much in common.
So all of these guys were genuine believers of the one true God,
and they were all looking for the coming Messiah. Now I just
want to say this. because they were looking for the Messiah
showed what kind of work God had already done in their lives.
So these were men who loved God and men who would be truly saved. But just let me say this to you.
Almost everything they believed about the Messiah did not come
to pass. Almost everything they expected
the Messiah to do when he got here was not done by Jesus. because they were wrong about
what they believed. Their eschatology was wrong.
And they were completely bewildered half the time that Jesus was
doing what he was doing. I don't know that I'd have been
any better. I don't know you would have been any better. They
despised the Romans. They looked at the Romans as
being Gentile pagan dogs who were putting their boot on the
neck of the Jews, and they despised them. They prayed that God would
kill them, and they hated them. You read some of the old priestly
prayers against the Roman soldiers. It's awful. No mercy at all. They never prayed for mercy for
the Roman soldiers. And Jesus never said a single
bad word about the Roman soldiers the whole time he was in ministry
that I can find. Not one. And he routinely condemned what
appeared to be the most religious, godly men on earth at the time,
which was the Pharisees. And Jesus never said anything
good about them. So it's understandable that people didn't know this
was God in human flesh. Now the thing that would have
won the day, you think, is every time Jesus turned around, boom,
boom, bang, bang, bang, bang, he was doing stuff only God can
do. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons, open blind
eyes, forgive sin. And he did it openly and publicly
in front of everybody. So you got that. And then they'd
look over here and there's Joseph and Mary and his other brothers
and sisters who didn't believe in him. And they're going, there's
his mom and daddy right over there. What are you talking about?
He's God. It had been a hard sell. Now truly he's of God,
truly he's from God, that's obvious, Nicodemus was willing to say
that, but God, that's just, that's a stretch. And I try to put myself
in these guys shoes And the whole time they were with Jesus until
the resurrection, they didn't have a clue what he was talking
about. They didn't have a clue what he was doing. They didn't
understand it. They were constantly just fumbling
around. And again, I don't think I'd
have done as good as they did. So I'm not condemning them. I'm
just saying for them to become the mighty men of God that they
became is a work of the spirit that's just astounding. because
these were the most motley group of people, the most unqualified
group of men that's ever been assembled. I mean, these men
were as embarrassing to Jesus as Jesus riding down Main Street
on the back of a baby donkey with his feet dragging the ground
in the most ridiculous sight instead of triumphant with a
white stallion in perfect order, like everybody thought was gonna
happen. And here he comes walking with his donkey, and people are
taking their clothes off and throwing them, and the Pharisees
are over there going, bless their hearts? I mean, it's amazing
when you stop and think about it. So truly, the Holy Spirit
was at work where Jesus walked up to these guys and said, follow
me, and immediately they followed him. It is amazing when you stop
and think about it. You talk to people today. Well,
let me think about it. Well, I'll pray about it. They
didn't pray about whether they need to get saved or not. Maybe God didn't want you to
get saved, so you need to pray and God will tell you, no, don't
go through this. Don't repent. Don't get saved.
Really? I had a guy tell me, well, I'm going to come to prayer
meeting that the Lord tells me to. I said, he's already told you
to come to prayer meeting. He said, well, he needs to speak
to me personally. I said, he's not going to do that. I promise you he won't
do that. And he didn't. So all of these
guys were genuine believers of the true God. They were all looking
for the coming of the Messiah. They followed Jesus, trusting
him to be that Messiah for whom they had waited. Now, after all
of this, Philip says in verse 45 that he found Nathanael or
Bartholomew. So by this, we know that these
two men were acquaintances. And we don't know what that acquaintance
was all about. We don't even know whether it
was a professional one or a family one or whether it was just social
or maybe even spiritual. But whatever their association
was, Philip found Bartholomew. the implication here is that
Philip and Bartholomew knew each other because as soon as Philip
met Jesus he immediately went and pursued Bartholomew because
he wanted to tell him what he himself had discovered concerning
the Messiah. And Philip's conversation with
Nathanael Bartholomew gives us some indication as to what kind
of a guy he was. Look at the last part of verse
45. Here's what Philip tells Nathanael Bartholomew. We have
found him of whom Moses and the law and the prophets did write,
Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. He's right over there.
Come on. We found him. We've been looking for him for
hundreds and hundreds of years, the Jewish people have. Now he's
right over there. So this is the first bit of information
that we have about the Apostle Bartholomew. Philip knows that
what mattered to him the most is what the scripture said. And
this indicates to us that both Bartholomew and Philip were students
of the Old Testament. If it is true that Bartholomew
is Bartholomai, son of Ptolema. There was a group
called the Ptolemians in the first century who were like the
Bereans who were students of the Old Testament. And so it's
very possible that this guy was one of them or his daddy was
one of them or he was raised in it or something. So he was
familiar with the Old Testament. And so in that sense, they were
very different from the religious establishment, which was dominated
by the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. These two men were the real deal.
And so Philip finds his close friend, Bartholomew, and he tells
him, we have found the one about whom we have studied in the scriptures
for so long. And what we have to understand,
my friends, is that Bartholomew was able to recognize Jesus so
clearly and so quickly and so easily because he had such a
clear understanding of what the scripture said about him. He
knew what the promises about the Messiah were. And so he knew
what the fulfillment would look like. He knew him of whom Moses
and the prophets had written. And when he showed up, not immediately
upon the first introduction of Philip, but immediately upon
the first introduction of Jesus, Bartholomew recognized Jesus
as being the Messiah. And as I told you last week in
verse 46, we get some insight into Bartholomew's frail week
and sinful character, and even though Bartholomew was a great
student of scripture, he was just flat out biased and bigoted
against people who came from the wrong side of the tracks,
because he responds to Philip's excited statement by saying,
can there any good thing come out of Nazareth? And this is
just a general statement that manifests a deep-seated prejudice
inside this man. The statement is not rational,
it's just pure emotional. And what demonstrates Bartholomew's
hypocrisy is that he didn't live in such a hot town either. He
was from the city of Cana, and unless you were looking for the
house where Jesus turned water into wine, you'd never go there.
And so from the religious leaders on down to the hoi polloi, the
people sitting in the synagogue, it was their prideful and self-righteous
prejudice that caused them to reject Jesus, even in his own
town, as we learned back in Luke 4. You remember that in that
chapter, Jesus had gone into the synagogue, his own synagogue,
where he grew up in his own town of Nazareth. And he went there
and he preached one and a half verses out of the prophecy of
Isaiah and the extended family of Jesus. He read one and a half verses and then
sat down and said, this day, this has been fulfilled in your
ears. In other words, I'm the fulfillment of what Isaiah was
just talking about. And everybody ran to Jesus and
embraced him and bowed before him and became Christian. Wait
a minute. No, they didn't. They were so filled with prejudice
and hatred against the only perfect preacher who has ever lived that
after he preached that one sermon they tried to take him off to
a cliff at the edge of town and throw him off and kill him. That's
after one and a half verses. So it was really the same blind
and evil prejudice that skewed their ability to view the Messiah
correctly. It was their deep-seated prejudice
against Jesus as a Galilean, against him as an uneducated
person outside the religious elite, their prejudice against
his message that literally shut them off from the gospel. They
refused to hear Jesus because they were prejudiced against
him. And so rather than humble themselves to a man that they
knew at least was from God, Their deep-seated biases caused them
to be willing to burn in hell rather than believe. Wow. The great Puritan John Bunyan
understood this prejudice, and when he wrote his famous allegory,
The Holy War, which pictures God coming down to conquer a
soul, he tells about Emmanuel, that's God, and the forces of
Emmanuel coming to a town called Mansoul. And the forces of Emmanuel
coming to the town of Mansoul are coming to bring the gospel
to Mansoul. And they direct their assault
against Mansoul at the Ear Gate, because faith comes by hearing.
But Diabolos, who was the enemy of Emmanuel and his forces, wants
to hold Mansoul captive to hell, decides to meet the attack by
stationing at the Ear Gate, which is the gate to which Emmanuel's
forces come. Now, this is just a, oh, by the
way, when you read Bunyan, you understand how Bunyan understood
Jesus's view of the church. He said, he said, upon this rock,
I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail
against it. That is a offensive maneuver,
not a defensive maneuver. That does not mean that the gates
around the church are going to be strong and that when Satan
attacks, the gates are going to hold and keep the devil out. That's not what Jesus said. That's
not what he meant. He means that the church is going
to attack the gates of Hades. and beat those gates down and
go right into the devil's territory and steal the souls of men away
from Satan, right in front of him, and bring them into God's
kingdom. That's what that means. Now,
you say, well, Brother Blair, you're just a moron. Okay, right.
John Bunyan wasn't, and that's what he said, not me. So Bunyan
wrote this, old Mr. Prejudice, an angry and ill-conditioned
fellow. And then Bunyan wrote, and Diabolos
put under his power 60 men called deaf men. And so the gospel was
stopped by this prejudice. So we need to know that men's
ears are often closed to the gospel by deep-seated prejudice,
racial prejudice, social prejudice, religious prejudice, whatever.
And this effectively caused the Jewish nation to remain deaf
to the Messiah. Diabolos, or Satan, is stationed
at the ear gate of Israel to keep them deaf. And that is why
when Jesus came into his own synagogue and spoke the truth,
they were deaf to it, and they tried to kill him by throwing
him off a cliff. And it's still that way today,
moving from deafness You could borrow the vivid imagery of Paul
in 2 Corinthians 4, verse 4, where he said, in whom the God
of this world has done what? Has blinded the minds of them
which believe not. Why so? Lest the light of the
glorious gospel, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.
So there's the battle right there. Satan has blinded the minds of
the lost so they won't see the light of the glory of the gospel
of God. So our job is to go to those blind people who have been
blinded by Satan and do what? Preach the gospel. Y'all didn't hear that, okay.
We're supposed to do for them what they don't want. And we're
to continue to do it until they get mad and kill us or until
they're saved. But we never stop. There's no
stopping of the preaching of the gospel ever. The day Jesus comes back, the
gospel will be preached. There will never be another day
till Jesus comes back that the gospel will not be preached,
ever. So, we need to get busy. And we need
to quit wringing our hands and talking about how terrible everything's
getting and how dark everything's getting. Like we don't have the
hope of the gospel in our hearts. We've got the greatest news in
all the world that transcends any country, or any government,
or any law, or any persecution, or any suffering that anybody
on earth could ever give us. And so we are to be absolutely
fearless in the face of ungodliness, and we are to herald the gospel
to our lives end. regardless of what that may cost
us. That's what Christianity's all
about. Deaf and blind by their own human
prejudice against the truth and against righteousness, they missed
the message and they remained lost. So was Bartholomew influenced
by all of this? Sure he was. He lived in a society
that was prejudicial by temperament and nature because all lost and
sinful people are blinded by Satan, every one of them. But
Philip didn't just let this statement be the last word and he said
to Bartholomew at the end of verse 46, come and see. I hear
you. Yack, yack, yack, yack, yack,
Bartholomew is talking off at the mouth. Quit talking and just
come on and let's look. Either he is or he isn't. He's
the Messiah or he's not. Come on. You don't have to argue
with me about it. And that's the best way you deal
with prejudice and ignorance because they are not objective.
They're always subjective. Ignorance and pride and prejudice
are not based on facts. They're based on feelings. They're
not based in reality. They're based on a sense of superiority. And Philip knew that the solution
to his friend's prejudice was simply come and see. Can any
good thing come out of Nazareth? Well, I don't know. I don't know,
Bart. Why don't you come and see for yourself? And so he went. an ignorant and prejudiced mind,
but a heart that had been prepared in advance by the sovereign regeneration
of the Holy Spirit to receive salvation. So Methanael, the
son of Ptolemy, walked up to Jesus with Philip, sort of doubting
and wondering, his mind on full alert, and yet his heart had
already been touched by God, the Holy Spirit. And now please
read verse 47 of John 1. Jesus saw Nathanael coming to
him and said of him, behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom
there is no deceit. He didn't even say hi. Now, I don't know if Jesus said
this to him, he didn't say this to Peter, he didn't say this
to Paul, he didn't say this, he called Paul, he said it's
hard for you to kick against the pricks, isn't it, Bubba?
I mean, you knock yourself out, you're trying to defeat the church,
how's that working out for you? And here this guy walks up and
Jesus goes to town with this thing, right? That's the most
important thing we could ever hear. The most wonderful thing
that any of us could ever hear is Jesus telling us that we have
no deceit. What a statement. That would
be one thing that at the end of your life, somebody says something
like this at your funeral. But here Jesus is telling this
sinful, prejudiced man, this man who was full of rancor and
self-righteousness, that he had no deceit. So how could Jesus
say that? Was he lying? Bartholomew was
not pure. He was a wicked sinner. He had
just made one of the most prejudiced statements found anywhere in
the Bible, and yet Jesus said here he had no deceit. So what
is this all about? This shows you the sovereign
work of God in salvation. The statement by Jesus shows
you clearly that salvation is not about the elimination of
sin from our lives. That salvation is not about us
keeping the law of God, or about being baptized, or about speaking
in tongues, or about partaking of communion. Salvation is not
about praying certain prayers, or going down front, or raising
your hand. Because salvation is not based
on anything that we do for ourselves. It is clear to those of us who
know and understand the Bible that at this point, Bartholomew
had already experienced the miracle of the new birth, and had already
been given new spiritual life by sovereign work of God before
he ever physically came to Jesus. So like all of us, Bartholomew
was born again before he was forgiven and made righteous.
And this is one of the most important theological truths that anyone
could ever get from the Bible. It is a very simple statement,
but it has very powerful ramifications. Here it is. And you might want
to write it down because it's going to change your life. Regeneration,
being born again, precedes, comes before, justification, being
forgiven and made righteous. Regeneration, the sovereign miracle
of the new birth, precedes. It comes before being forgiven
and made righteous in justification. In other words, in order to be
forgiven and made righteous, you must repent and you must
believe. But because of the blindness
of your heart and because the fall of Adam was so radical and
so great, unless and until God the Holy Spirit comes inside
of us first and gives us eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart
to believe, nobody will ever repent and nobody will ever believe.
And they cannot, they will not believe because they cannot.
And they cannot believe because they don't want to. So when you
boil it all down, really and truly what's wrong with lost
people is their want to. They need a new want to. They
need a new nature, in other words, right? Now way back in 1971 when I was
first saved, I was taught that being born again was the same
thing as being forgiven. But the Bible teaches that these
are two completely separate events. I was also taught that I must
believe in order to be born again. But the Bible doesn't teach that
either. The truth is unless I am first
born again, I will have neither the desire nor the power to repent
and trust in Jesus. So the truth is that I must first
be born again in order to have the faith to believe, and I must
be born again in order to have the desire to repent. So even
though Bartholomew was not yet forgiven and made righteous,
he had been chosen by God for the foundation of the world for
salvation. And because of that, God had
already birthed him the second time. And Bartholomew had been
sovereignly and graciously given eyes to see. And he had been
sovereignly and mercifully given ears to hear. And he had been
sovereignly and miraculously transformed by the sovereign
work of the Holy Spirit down to the base element of his own
nature. And with that new nature, Bartholomew,
like all of us, would respond to what God had already done,
and he would repent and trust in Jesus Christ as Lord, and
he would be forgiven and made righteous. So it is in that sense
that he had no deceit. This does not mean that he was
sinless or that he never said anything wrong. We just heard
him exercise his ignorant prejudice just a minute ago. All of this
statement by Jesus means is that Bartholomew was chosen by God
for salvation. Now Jesus also said that Mataniel
Bartolomei was an Israelite indeed. So what does that mean? Here
Jesus uses the word alathos, which means genuine or truly. So Jesus was saying that Bartholomew
was genuinely and truly an Israelite. And this is an area of theology
that many find hard to accept. But what I'm about to say is
just as true and right and biblical as John 3.16. So just what was
Jesus talking about? Was Jesus referring to Bartholomew's
physical descent from Father Abraham? No, not in the physical
sense. He's not talking about Bartholomew's
bloodline or his ethnicity or his genetics. What did Jesus
mean by this statement? It means that Bartholomew was
a true spiritual Israelite and not merely an Israelite in the
flesh or in name only. You see, the reality is that
many who say they are or who lay claim to be Israelites or
Jews are not. Romans 9, 6b and 7a clearly says,
they are not all Israel who are descendant from Israel, nor are
they all children because they are Abraham's descendants. And
then in verse eight, it also gives us the answer to this mystery
when he said this, that is, it is not the children of the flesh
who are children of God, but the children of the promise are
regarded as descendants. In other words, human flesh and
everything associated with human flesh like ethnicity, nationality,
and bloodline means nothing to God as far as salvation is concerned,
and it never has. All that matters is whether a
person has been sovereignly chosen by God, and if he has, he will
be saved, and that alone makes him a child of God. But if an
individual, even a Jew, does not come to Jesus for salvation,
then that person is not chosen by God, he is not a son of Abraham,
nor is he a child of God, nor is he part of the people of God.
And that is why the apostle wrote this in Romans 2, 28 and 29. For he is not a Jew who is one
outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the
flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision
is that which is of the heart, by the spirit, not by the letter,
and his praise is not from men, but from God. And this is the
way it has always been. And this explains why God had
to personally kill so many Jews in the wilderness, and why so
many Jews refused to believe in Jesus. They were not chosen. Because all who have been chosen
will come. Please look at Romans 8, 29 and
30. For those whom he foreknew, he
also predestined to become conformed to the image of his son, so that
he would be the firstborn among many brethren. And these whom
he predestined, he also called, and these whom he called, he
also justified, and these whom he justified, he also glorified. So once again, Jesus was talking
about the fact that God the Father had already chosen Bartholomew
for salvation from before the foundation of the world. And
because he was chosen, and because he had already been born again,
Bartholomew was on his way to become a spiritual Jew, an inward
Jew, a true Jew. But Bartholomew was not yet justified. He was not yet forgiven. And
he had not yet become righteous before God by faith alone. Yet
he was a chosen vessel. He was a man who was on his way
to become a true Israelite. And a true Israelite is one who
is an Israelite or a believer on the inside. So this was a
born-again man. This was a man who had experienced
the new birth and was ready for both forgiveness and righteousness.
This was a man whose eyes and ears had been opened, whose heart
had been softened, ready to meet Jesus, and yet at the same time
he was sinful, he was as sinful and flawed as everybody is. Now
please look again at the first part of John 1.48. Nathanael
said to him, how do you know me? Mathanael the son of Ptolemy
said, how do you know me? I don't know you, so how do you
know me? In other words, Bartholomew was
asking Jesus, I don't know you, so what is the basis of your
knowledge about me? What a question to ask the omniscient
God of the universe. Now, remember the context of
this meeting. Bartholomew is doubting whether
this man could be the true Messiah that Philip said that he was.
Not that he questioned Philip, because Philip is his friend.
And it's not that Bartholomew questions or doubts the scriptures.
He doesn't. He believes the scriptures. It's just that this particular
man from Nazareth that he doubts doesn't seem to fit the image
of what the long-awaited Messiah ought to look like. This man
was the son of a carpenter, a no-name, nondescript guy named Joseph
who comes from a scraggly town that had no connection to prophecy
and that didn't even exist in the Old Testament scriptures
were being written. So how could this be connected to the Messiah?
It's just hard for this man to buy into all this. So he approached
Jesus and Jesus said to them, ah, an Israelite indeed in whom
there is no deceit. And I think Bartholomew understood
it this way. He said, how do you know me?
with this kind of incredulous thought, are you just flattering
me? How do you know me? Are you just trying to earn points
with me? Are you just trying to add me to your followers by
using this flattery on me? How can you possibly say that
about me? You don't even know me. That's
a pretty straightforward statement. So how in the world could you
say that about me? Now read the last part of verse
48. Jesus answered and said to him, before Philip called you,
when you were under the fig tree, I saw you. And by saying this, Jesus was
saying, no, Mataniel, the son of Ptolemy, as a matter of fact,
I'm not using human flattery on you at all. I'm not trying
to butter you up or deceive you into following me at all, I'm
God. And I am using my own unlimited
divine omniscience and I saw you when you were underneath
that fig tree. Now I think there may be a little more to this
than what most people think. Now it could have been that he
was committing adultery under a fig tree. It could have been
that he was cursing God under the fig tree. It could have been
that he was praying under the fig tree. It could have been
that he was crying out to God in the deepest part of his heart
that he wanted to love God and he wanted to, whatever it was,
sin or righteousness, whatever it was, good or bad, Jesus saw
him. Back then, the poor people, which
were the most people in Israel, lived in a one-room house. And
you did everything in the house, and the house could get full
of smoke, and it could get stuffy, and was also very hot. And one of the ways you cooled
off was to plant trees around the house, close to the house.
And one of the favorite trees to plant back then was a fig
tree, because it provided wonderful fruit. And over there, a fig
tree would grow to a height of about 15 feet. So you could get
under it because it would have a diameter of maybe 30 feet wide. And so this would make a wonderful
shade tree and a way to leave the house and the heat of the
house where they did all the cooking and everything. So getting
under the shade of a fig tree would be a wonderful place to
go. And they also had a little patio on the roofs of many houses
back then. But in the heat of the day, the
people would go up there. And so getting under the shade
of a fig tree was a typical place to go. And under the trees, became
a kind of a private room for poor people to go and sit and
meditate and pray and talk to God. And I think Jesus was not
just saying, I knew your geography or I knew your physical location.
Jesus was saying, I know the state of your heart because I
saw you under the fig tree and I know what you were doing there
and I saw you and I heard you in your private room. That's
where you would go and study the scriptures. That's where
you would go and pray. That's where you would go and meditate. Bartholomew, when I was first
saved, I roomed with two other Christians and our place was
this wall that we had built, this brick wall we had built
around the water pump. And we would spend hours sitting
on that wall, talking with each other about what it might be
like to marry a godly Christian woman and what it might be like
to have godly children and to raise them as Christians, and
what it might be like to have that kind of experience in life,
to have both a wife and children, to bring to the house of God
and to see them grow in the fear and the admonition of the Lord.
And we talk about it. We plan. Many of the things that
I did when I first got married and with both my wife and my
children were because I met with with Stanley and Eddie on that
brick wall. And that's how we would spend
Friday nights. When I was alone, I spent Friday
nights sitting on my front porch reading the Bible. And when those
guys came, we read the Bible too, but we talked about, you
know, golly, you reckon we could ever find a godly woman? You
reckon we could ever get married? And just talking like that, it
meant a lot to us. And that's kind of what I'm thinking
that Bartholomew was doing under the fig tree. So Jesus was telling
Bartholomew, I saw you in your secret place. I saw you in the
private place. I saw you in that place of meditation
and I heard your cry to me. So Jesus not only knew Bartholomew's
location, he knew the man's spiritual condition. And because God had
already prepared Bartholomew's mind and heart, that's all it
took. Look at verse 49. Nathanael answered and said to
him, Rabbi, you are the son of God. You are the king of Israel.
Hallelujah. He's in. He's in. Nope, nope, nope. He did not see him raise the
dead. He did not see him cast out devils. It was enough. Now
keep in mind that back then the phrase son of God always is used
to refer to Jesus sharing the same nature of God the father. So Nathanael was saying here,
you're God. that Jesus is God, that Jesus
is Lord. And according to Romans 10 and
nine, that's one of the things it takes to be saved. You must
confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, that he is full
deity. So Bartholomew understood that
Jesus knew everything about him. He not only knew his physical
location, but he knew Bartholomew's spiritual condition. And so he
said, that's enough for me because only God knows that. Therefore,
you are the son of God. That is to say, you have the
same nature as God. You are one with God. Now look
at verses 50 and 51. Jesus answered and said to him,
because I said to you that I saw you under the fig tree, do you
believe? You will see greater things than these. And he said
to him, truly, truly, I say to you, you will see the heavens
opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the
son of man. So as Jesus was saying to him,
from here on out, everything you see is just going to enrich
and enlarge your faith. The other disciples, the things
that they see, they're gonna struggle with it. They're not
gonna understand it all. And even Philip, Lord, show us
the Father. They're all going to be struggling,
but not you. Everything you see is going to
enrich in what you already know to be true. And of all the apostles,
Bartholomew seems to me to be the one who gained the most from
his time with Jesus. Because at the outset, he knew
exactly who he was. And everything after that was
an enrichment. The first church historian, a
man named Eusebius of Caesarea, wrote an account called Ecclesiastical
History or the History of the Church. In that book, Eusebius
wrote that after Jesus ascended into heaven, Bartholomew went
into India and left behind a copy of the Gospel of Matthew. There's
supposedly a church in India that has that copy. Jerome of
Striden wrote that Bartholomew did most of his work in India
around Bombay region near the Konkan coast. The modern Christians
of Azerbaijan consider Bartholomew to be the one that God used to
bring the gospel to them. History also records that Bartholomew
knotted with the apostle Jude Thaddeus and went into what is
called today Armenia to begin a church there that has been
having uninterrupted worship services since Bartholomew first
preached there. The tradition is that after preaching
the gospel to the local king, the king was converted. But the
magistrates of the region feared both the Jews and the Romans,
and so they arrested Bartholomew and condemned him to die by the
slow and intentional flaying of his flesh, like they would
clean a fish are skin and animal. You know, I'm thankful as I read
a lot of material on the apostles, as I read about the people that
God has used. I've been reading a lot of Christian
biographies, and I'm constantly amazed at how God has always
used weak and sinful people, how he can go into the gutter
and into the horrible pits of the world and find the worst,
the lowest, the most degraded person and save them and then
make them the means of somebody else's salvation. The Savior
made an apostle out of an evil publican. He has made godless
godly women out of great virtue, out of a prostitute. All through
history, God has used flawed and sinful people, and we've
seen it in these men. But what about your own life?
I'm sure in this congregation this morning, there is some man
or some woman, some young person, who feels like their life is
broken and disreputable, maybe even scandalous. They think their
heart is dirty and their mind is full of corruption. Maybe
you feel a little bit intimidated being here if the truth were
known, but I want you to know you're just the kind of person
the Lord can use mightily because God is glorified the most when
he picks up the lowly, the base, the common, the humble, and he
transforms them. As long as you can cry, Lord,
have mercy on me. That's all he asks. like the
publican who beat on his chest, and of that man Jesus said he
went home justified. If you are available and willing,
the Lord can change you and use you to change the world. That's
what he's been doing, and he's still doing that. One of the
stories I heard many years ago was about one of the greatest
preachers in America after the turn of the 19th century. He
was a man who was a drunken alcoholic who spent all of his family's
money on just booze. He didn't feed his family. He
eventually had a little baby girl who died, and she died because
of malnutrition. He was drinking so much, he forgot
to feed his daughter. This man went in a drunken stupor
to the daughter's funeral, and after the service was over, he
stole the clothes off of her dead body to exchange for another
drink. But on his way to the bar, he
stumbled into a mission, heard the gospel, was converted, stopped
drinking, and was used to bring many others to Jesus Christ.
And that's just one among millions of other stories of what God
can do and will do for those who have been made humble by
the grace of God. Amen. Let's pray. Father, we
thank you for this. We thank you for Bartholomew.
We thank you for the call of God on his life, how you turned
his face around and how you used him. And Lord, as we go through
each of these men in this series, I pray, God, that you will stimulate
our faith or that you can and you will use us for your glory
if we'll just be willing to humble ourselves before you. Help us,
oh God, I pray in Jesus' holy name. Amen.
115 - Jesus Chooses His Apostles, Part 12
Series The Gospel of Matthew
| Sermon ID | 1014242027563565 |
| Duration | 57:02 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Bible Text | Matthew 10:1-4 |
| Language | English |
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