turning your Bibles to Matthew chapter 10. We're going to look again at verses 1 through 4. Matthew chapter 10 verses 1 through 4 as Brother Verne comes to give a public reading of the Word of God. Matthew chapter 10 verses 1 through 4. As Brother Blair said, this is the very Word of God. Amen. 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 twelve apostles are these, the first Simon, who is 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 Thaddaeus, Simon the zealot, and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for these 40 writers who were moved upon by the Holy Spirit to pin down 66 infallible and inerrant and inspired books that are trustworthy, And Lord God, we thank you for those who labored unendingly to give us these original autographs in our own English language. We praise you for that gift, and we make use of it by reading our Bibles constantly, by studying our Bibles, by not allowing our Bibles just to collect dust. But Father, we thank you for them laboring diligently to get it right. We thank you, God, for the acts of providence and the miracles that you performed through the centuries as men hid the scriptures and recopied them. and collected them and tried to escape from war and famine and pestilence and persecution. And Lord, through all those many, many centuries of confusion and death and struggle and turmoil, Lord, you have for us now in this country very reliable copies of the original autographs of the word of the living God. And we bless you and we praise you for that. And Lord, we ask God that we could look over Matthew's shoulder, as it were, and we could understand this section as we visit with each of these men that Jesus called to his side to be his apostles. And we ask God that you help us do this now to your own glory and to the good of your people. In Jesus' name, amen. You may be seated. To the glory of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, amen. Now this morning we're continuing our examination of the list of men whom Jesus called apostles. The ancient Jews were familiar with teachers gathering what they called the Shalia, and they were men who were sent out in the name of the teacher with the same message of the teacher, and there were many of those in the first century. So this was not an uncommon thing. You've got to remember there's a sea of humanity that's following Jesus everywhere he goes. 10, 20, 30,000 people all calling his name, crying out, holding dying babies up to him, demon-possessed people, sick people, blind people, all pushing their way in, calling out to Jesus to heal them and to save them and to rescue them. And out of that group, there was a group called, in the Greek, it's methetes. It's a group of probably no more than a couple of hundred people out of that 30,000 C that were called disciples. And these were people that comprised four, four stages. There were those disciples who were genuinely saved, those disciples who were on their way to be saved, there were those who had at one time expressed an interest in Jesus who were on their way out, and they were getting offended. The more Jesus taught, the more offended they were getting, because he was not meeting up with their expectation of the Messiah that they had waited so long for. And then there were those who couldn't care less about being there. They were just there, probably the friends or the children or the wives or the husbands of the people who were interested in following this itinerant preacher who didn't have any pedigree, who was not acknowledged by the religious elite, who was not, he didn't own anything, he didn't have a house or a bed to lay his head on, he was given everything that he had, didn't look like a man that was worthy of following at first. The historian Josephus actually saw Jesus standing with some people talking, and he said he was of average height, and of average build, and there was nothing about him that made him look like he was some big deal. That's a paraphrase. And Isaiah the prophet in Isaiah 53 said there was no comeliness to him, that there was nothing about him that we would be attracted to him. He looked like he was smitten of God. He looked as though he would be rejected by God. And so this is the king of the universe. And so Jesus is choosing out of that couple of hundred disciples, his shahaliya, his apostles. And he's going to give these men his message. He's multiplying himself now. He has about two more years of ministry before he will set his face to go to Jerusalem and he will make his way down through every village on the way down to Jerusalem so he may die at the time of the Passover. Jesus was born to die. He was not born the And he didn't come into the world the first time to be crowned king of the universe. He came to die. He came to suffer. He came to be rejected. He came to bring judgment to faithless Israel. He came to denounce the religious elites. He came to usher in the new covenant. And it was a hard row to hoe. and it was not readily accepted by anybody. And so he has these 12 men that he went up in the mountain and he prayed all night long that he could pick these 12 men. And that's true even with Judas Iscariot. And Judas Iscariot had the power to heal. He had the power to cast out demons. He had the power to open blind eyes. He had the message of Jesus. And Jesus picked Judas Iscariot on purpose to pick a man who could be around the incarnate God for three and a half years and resist the grace of God. And that's why Judas has his own place in hell. And so we're taking the time to learn about these men because these men literally changed the world. And these men, after these men did what they did and taught what they taught and wrote down what they wrote down, the world was never the same. And so we should all have enormous respect and admiration for these men because the 12 apostles of Jesus are some of the most important people the world has ever known. But as important as they were, as powerful as their ministry was, these men were very common and very ordinary men. The only one who had any education, there were two of the apostles that had a pedigree, had had a better life than most people, that were raised in riches and were raised in education. One was Paul and the other one was Judas Iscariot. And we're going to learn about them as we go along. They were all terrible sinners before God, but they had all been touched by the Almighty and singled out for one of the most important and serious tasks that God ever gave to anyone. These men did not simply preach the gospel. They actually defined the gospel. They didn't simply build a church building. They established the Christian church on the earth. They didn't simply take notes about what Jesus taught them. They wrote or had written 27 books that are equally as inspired and errant and infallible as the 39 Old Testament books. These men did not simply believe the Old Testament was true, but God used these men to write down what the Old Testament actually meant by what it said. When David said, the Lord said unto my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make all your enemies a footstool for your feet, David had no idea what he was talking about. And the rabbis that came after David for 1,000 years, and you can read what they wrote about it, nobody understood what David was writing. A bunch of people said David must have been hallucinating when he wrote that. He was crazy, out of his mind. What is he talking about? That the Lord said unto my Lord. What is he talking about? And it wasn't until the advent of the New Covenant, and we understand the Trinity, and we understand that Jesus is God Almighty in human flesh, that God the Father said to God the Son, sit on my throne until I make all of your enemies a footstool for your feet. And that's our job right now, beloved. We are the church militant. And we are to go into all the world and we are to conquer the world by preaching the gospel. Not with arms, not with guns, not by force. We are to conquer by persuasion. And we are to preach the gospel to every creature so that more people are saved than will be lost. Hallelujah. Because we have the ultimate theses. The world has an antithesis. And so I tell people all the time on the radio, I couldn't care less. Let witches get on the radio. Let warlocks print books. Let homosexuals spread their views far and wide. Just give me that same freedom and let me preach the gospel without being hindered because I know the gospel wins every single time. Hallelujah. And in addition to being given the privilege and anointing to herald the very same message that Jesus preached, these men were also given the same power to heal sicknesses, perform astounding miracles, cast out demons that Jesus himself had. And these men were gifted with the ability to give divine credibility to what they taught and what they wrote down through signs and wonders, miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit. These men actually did what so many shysters in our day claim. They received divine revelation directly from God. They wrote that revelation down in 27 books that were then added to the 39 Old Testament books to form what is now called the Canon of Sacred Scripture. Look, I respect the honesty of the Jehovah's Witness. Because they don't make any bones about it. They say, we add 127 pages a week to the canon of Scripture. But if you believe that people are getting divine revelation directly from God, then you've got to be consistent about that. What do you do with what God Almighty has spoken? It's Scripture. So you need to put it down in the 67th book, and the 68th book, and the 69th book. Because it either is inspired or it's not. There's no degrees of inspiration. Hallelujah. So the 66 books form the rule or the standard. of what it means to be saved and a Christian and how the Church of Jesus is to function to the glory of God. As we have discovered, these 27 books of the New Covenant not only lay out for us the details of who Jesus is and what Jesus did, but they also gave us the information that we need on how sinful people may become fully justified before a holy God. instruction on how we are to live our daily lives after we are saved in a way that is pleasing to honoring God, how to organize and run the church in accord with God's will and what the Old Testament meant by what it said. So today when someone asks us how we may please the Lord, we do not tell them to obey the first five books of Moses. Instead, we point them to the 21 New Testament epistles that replaced Moses' books as the didactic books from God. Didactic means the teaching books. Before the New Testament epistles were written, the first five books of Moses were the didactic books from God. They told you how you can please God, what you have to do to be in right standing with God. Once Jesus lived and died and rose again and the epistles were written, those five books became obsolete in the sense that the New Testament epistles are superior to the first five books of Moses. Now, you see how I got one or two amens to that? See, it's not a popular thing to say in a nation that has been indoctrinated about, been indoctrinated wrongly about how we are to look at these things. If you don't believe that the first five books of Moses are inferior, why don't you obey them? Well, I mean, why don't you sacrifice animals? Why don't you obey the Levitical priesthood? Why don't you go by what the Sanhedrin court tells you? Why don't you go to the temple in Jerusalem once a year? That's what the first five books told you to do to be in right standing. So you do believe that they're inferior. Amen. Don't be afraid to say that it's a good thing to say. We've got something better. Hallelujah. Who wants to sacrifice an animal when we've got the Living God that's been sacrificed? Who wants to listen to a prophet who is a sinner when we can listen to perfect teaching from a perfect high priest Jesus Christ? Hallelujah. So today when somebody asks us how we may please the Lord, we do not tell them to obey the first five books of Moses, instead we point them to the 21 New Testament epistles that replaced Moses' books as the didactic books from God. Today when someone tells us that we are sinning because we don't sacrifice animals in accord with what God infallibly told Moses, we can respond with divine authority from the 27 New Testament books that Jesus' sinless life, His vicarious death on the cross, and His bodily resurrection made what God told Moses to be obsolete, because now we have an infinitely greater sacrifice. Hallelujah. When someone tells us that we are sinning by not submitting ourselves to the authority of the Levitical priests in accord with what God infallibly gave to Moses we can respond without any hesitation that according to the 27 New Testament books all genuine believers are priests unto God and to the Lamb. and that we have an infinitely greater high priest who reigns from his throne in heaven. When someone might castigate us because we do not travel once a year to worship God in the temple in Jerusalem, as Moses infallibly wrote down, we can respond with great authority that according to the 27 books of the New Covenant, we have an infinitely greater temple in heaven that has forever replaced the earthly one. That is a sampling of the power and the authority of the 27 books that God the Holy Spirit moved on these 12 men to write. And in those 27 books, the apostles made amazing statements, astounding statements, earth-shaking statements. And they made those statements in a very matter-of-fact way. There wasn't any trumpets behind them blaring. There wasn't any advanced advertising done. John just matter of factly said, if you people want to be in right standing with God, you have to be in right standing with us apostles. There's not a human on earth that can make that statement today. And so we have learned that as members in particular of the body of Jesus Christ in the 21st century, our job, our duty, our joy, our privilege as the modern church is not to receive new revelation from God. It is not to reinvent the wheel or to give a new spin on the word of God. It is not to try to develop new angles or new ways and methods of serving Christ. No, our primary job, responsibility and privilege, is to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints, that faith. And then as we obey this command and we contend earnestly for that once for all handed down to the saints, Christian faith, we must then first know and then believe and admire and love and obey this faith, and then teach the very same apostles' teaching that those 12 men wrote down. That is what the apostles did for us. And so we are not an apostolic church because we make the ridiculous claim that those who leave the church back to the Apostle Peter. No, we are an apostolic church as the Nicene Creed says we must be because we teach and believe the very same things that the apostles received directly from God. And so while some people today make the claim that they are apostles of the Lord and that they hear directly from God and that God speaks individually to them we can easily see that those people hold that office and that title illegitimately. And while some of those people may well be saved, and whereas some of them may be very sincere, and whereas they may mean well, and whereas they should be called missionaries, or evangelists, or even pastors, or teachers, they are certainly not apostles. Because all that Jesus desired for the 12 apostles to do was done. It was completed, it was finished, and there simply wasn't anything left out, and there wasn't anything left undone. And so we labor on, so that on that day, we may hear the most blessed words that any man could ever hear, when the Lord himself would descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and when he takes account of all that we have done in this life, and says to us, well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Enter into the joy of your master. Hallelujah. That is my motivation. That is why I labor on, because I really do believe that this will happen. And I'm looking forward to it. And I'm staking my life on it. Someone asked me recently, your problem, Brother Blair, is that you believe that every problem can be solved in Jesus Christ. And I replied, you betcha. That's exactly what I believe. I'm so glad you know that's what I believe. I really do believe that Jesus Christ is the answer to every question and the solution to every problem, I sure do. So this is not a job to me. This is not a weekend hobby that I get up here and talk a little bit. This is not an occupation. I'm not a hireling. This is not a pipe dream or simply blind faith or a strongly held opinion. Serving Jesus Christ is reality. This is truth and it works. I've told you many times that I am personally in awe of the apostles because they should have failed in their mission. They should have collapsed under the weight and the enormity of their calling. I read about preachers today getting what they call burned out. And then they leave and abandon what they say God called them to do. They say that being called into the ministry is just too hard, and it costs too much. And then I look at all those 12 men 2,000 years ago who should have collapsed under the weight of their calling, and yet they didn't quit. They didn't fall apart. They didn't walk away from what God called them to do. Those men, absent Judas Iscariot, remained faithful to the call, and even though they should have failed, they did not fail. They didn't collapse and they did not falter. They succeeded in accomplishing everything that Jesus commissioned them to do. Who can say that today? I mean, really, I'm trying. I don't think I've accomplished everything God wants me to do. I look at the fact that those men were very ordinary men, and every one of them was sinful, weak, frail, and tempted. Every one of them had sinful tendencies, just like we do. And yet, with all of these weaknesses, and with all of these temptations, and with all of this sinfulness inherent in their flesh, they succeeded. And that is testimony to the power and the omnipotence and the glory of the risen Christ. Now, the effort by these men acting as the apostles of Jesus Christ had never been done before, and it will never be done again. So from that standpoint, those men were very unique. They were special. They were one of a kind. And with the death of John sometime near the end of the first century, the office and the title and the position and the authority and the unction and the supernatural gifting of the apostles came to an end. And it came to that end for one very important reason. Those men did what God called them to do. They completed their task. So what we are doing on Sunday mornings for a while is to look as close as we can on each one of these men. As we've already looked at both Peter and Andrew, who were natural brothers, and so today, Lord willing, I'm going to try to begin to teach you about another set of brothers, the sons of Zebedee, two men called James and John, and we're certainly not going to get through with this today. So let's look first at the apostle named James. Now, as you read through the New Testament books, two of the apostles, Peter and John, get the lion's share of the highlights. And so we have a well-colored portrait of both of those guys. But we only have silhouettes of both Andrew and James. There's a lot of confusion about James in the Bible, and part of that confusion lies in the fact that there are at least four different men in the New Testament who were called James. Now, James is the Anglicanized version of his Hebrew name. His mom and daddy didn't name him James. They called him a Hebrew, and I can't pronounce it right now. Number one is James the father of Judas. First of all, there's James, who was the father of Judas, who was chosen to be an apostle. This particular Judas was not Judas Iscariot, who betrayed the Lord. That it is very possible that this Judas went by another name of Thaddeus. As soon as Judas Iscariot did what he did, nobody names their babies Judas anymore. or Judah is the Hebrew name. Judas was the Greek name. Jude was the Anglicanized version of the Greek Judas, which was the Greek rendition of the Hebrew Judah. It's like nobody in Germany names their little boy Adolf anymore. Number two is James the Less. This James was the son of a man named Altheus. And this James was chosen by Jesus to be an apostle as recorded for us in Matthew 10, 3, Mark 3, 18, Luke 6, 15, and again in the book of Acts, chapter 1, verse 13. Number three is James the greater, James the just. This man was the son of Mary and Joseph, which made him to be the half-brother of the Lord Christ. This James initially rejected Jesus as being the Messiah, as recorded for us in John 7, verse 5, but according to 1 Corinthians 15 and 7, he later believed. This James became a key leader in the church at Jerusalem and served as its first pastor. It is this James that was probably the writer of the Epistle of James, which some scholars consider to be the first New Testament book ever written. James was written sometime around 40 AD, just 11 or so years after the resurrection of Jesus took place. According to the, if you're wondering how I did my math, Jesus was born when Herod was still alive. And because we know that, we know when Herod died. So Jesus had to be born in what we call the B.C. era toward the zero point. So I think he was born around 4 B.C., between 6 and 4 B.C. He was about 30 years old when he started his ministry. If you calculate the months, three and a half years of his ministry, and he was crucified in Jerusalem. So he was crucified around 29 to 32 A.D., somewhere around in there. That's how I got my numbers. All right. According to the Acts 15, this James was used by God to moderate the first church council, the Jerusalem Council, which successfully resisted the heresy of the Judaizers and reaffirmed that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in the finished work of Christ alone and is not brought about by adherence to church sacraments or Jewish circumcision. The issue the Judaizers were bringing up to the Gentile believers was, you guys have to first become good Jews before you can become good Christians. And the Jerusalem Council was assembled to deal with that issue. Is that true? And they determined, no, it's not true. And so that's what churches are supposed to do today. We did that when President Obama, when the Supreme Court under President Obama ruled that homosexuals could marry in the United States. And there's never been a law passed that says this is good. Congress is cowards. They won't pass a law like that. For all the money in the world, they wouldn't touch that with a 50-foot pole. So Supreme Court ruled that you can't pass a law prohibiting homosexuals to get married. That's what the law said. And I didn't get into the legal ramifications. I got into one issue, and that is they were saying that, well, the Bible is unclear about whether homosexuality is a sin. I heard that. And so we met together as elders, we had a council, the Covenant of Peace Church met in a council, we called it the Council of Homosexual Marriage, and we determined that the Bible was true and that every man else that disagrees with it is a liar, including the black-robed Supreme Court judges. And so I immediately preached a series of messages on human sexuality and the supremacy of Jesus Christ in this church, and then I put it on the radio in both 30-minute and 15-minute format. So we are not in any way ashamed of where we stand up, because we want homosexuals to be saved, and we want all men to come to the knowledge of the truth. And you have to tell them they're lost in order for them to be saved. So that's what you're supposed to do. And I know nobody hardly does that anymore, but we did. He said, well, who do you think you are? I think we're part of the church of Jesus Christ. That's who I think we are. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think that. Number four, James, the brother of John. This James was the son of a man named Zebedee, who along with his brother, John, was called to be an apostle. And that's the James we're looking at. Now notice that I said that James number one was the father of Judas as recorded in Luke 6.16. But if you're reading from the King James Version, the translator said this James was the brother of Judas. But if you're reading from the NIV or the NASB or the ESV, Luke 6.16 says that Judas was the son of James, making James to be Judas's father. So which one is it? Was this James Judas's father or his brother? This is an example of where the modern translations have gotten, is this an example of where the modern translations have gotten it all wrong? Or is this an example where the King James Version is an error? Nope to all of that. None of that's true. You can trust your English translation. But then how in the world could the people who translated the Bible into English get something so simple mixed up like this? And the answer is it's not simple. If you have followed me on this verse-by-verse journey through Matthew, you remember that we talked about this very issue back when we were going over the genealogy of Jesus. And I told you that where you see a phrase that says, this man was the son of this other man, the word son of is in italics. And that means it was not in the original autograph. And this is why you can't simply add up the men who are listed in a genealogy and come up with the date of creation, or the date of anything, really. The original simply says this man is of this other man. And we don't know if that means he is the son of that other person, or his grandson, or his nephew, his great-grandson, or even his adopted son. You simply can't tell. But please read Luke 3.23 with me. In the original Greek, this verse says, when he began his ministry, Jesus himself was about 30 years of age, being as was supposed of Joseph, who was of Eli. The phrase the son of, which is written twice in this verse, was not in the original Greek documents, but was added later by the English translators. Now there isn't anything sinister about this. Jesus was supposedly the son of Joseph, and Joseph was the son of Eli, but that's not the way people say that in Greek. This is not my opinion, beloved. This is a fact of the Greek language. The way that they say this in Greek is that Jesus was supposedly of Joseph. Now pick that verse because you know that Jesus was supposedly the son of Joseph, and that Joseph was the son of or of Heli, meaning they came out of the other man's loins, or in other words, the one man was the other man's son. This is the way that the King James translators translated every single one of these men in the genealogies found in the New Testament. They almost always translated the man as being the son of the other man and never the brother of that other man. But for some reason, and nobody knows why, these very same translators chose to translate the very same words in Luke 6.16 and the King James differently, the way the original Greek reads in Luke 6.16 is, and Judas of James and Judas Iscariot, which also was the traitor. All that the Greek says is that Judas was of James, just like the Greek does back in Luke 3. And all I'm telling you now is that the wonderful and godly men who translated the King James were simply inconsistent about the method they used to translate this verse, as opposed to the way they translated Luke 3, 23 through 38. If there was any additional information that may have caused the translators to change son into brother, that information has been lost to us because nobody's got it. So no one knows why the translators did this, but it certainly appears that they were simply inconsistent. Now, the King James only people that's listening to this right now are having a coronary because I just said that. Their pressure is 212 over 190 right now. Now in spite of what many in the King James only crowd say, the newer translations are actually more consistent in translating Judas as being the son of James in Luke 6, even as the men were all sons of the other men in Luke 3. That is why the newer versions read slightly different than the King James. The King James is simply inconsistent for no known reason, and the newer versions are more consistent in their approach. I call these things translation difficulties. And as I have told you before, there are about 12 of these problems in the King James, and we know about every one of them, and none of them involve any serious issue of doctrine or theology. So they are minor inconveniences and are not a serious problem, as long as people don't go about to prove how wrong the modern translations are by using the King James as the one true standard. Of course, the most notable of these translation difficulties in the King James occurs when the translators were divided into two groups. And one group translated the Greek word into Holy Spirit, while the other group translated the very same Greek word into Holy Ghost. And as long as you understand that this is simply a translation difficulty and is not a doctrinal issue, you're fine. Where people get off base is in assuming that since the King James says Holy Spirit in some places and Holy Ghost in another place, it is referring to two different beings because that's simply not true. So we have absolutely no reason to assume that Judas was anything other than the son of this particular man named James. Now along with his brother John, James was the son of a man named Zebedee, and Zebedee owned a fishing business, and James and his brother John worked with their father in that business. Now I personally think James is much more significant than it might initially appear. Many people have a very low opinion of this James, because we know so very little about him. But in two of the lists of the apostles, his name comes immediately after Peter. And in the ancient world, this would lead us to believe that he was a very, very strong leader. Also, when the two names of the brothers are seen together, James and John, James is always first. which again in the ancient world probably indicates that he was either older than John or that he was the more dominant of the two. I've got another reason why I believe that in just a second. This James never appears at any time in the Gospels apart from John. So, we don't have any information about James without John. It's always James and John. And this could indicate that these brothers were very close. They are completely inseparable throughout the Gospels. But James seems to be the dominant one. Now, the fishing business of Zebedee was apparently very successful because we learn in Mark 1 and 20 and Matthew 4, 21 that their father apparently had employees, which would indicate that the business must have been fairly large. Now James and John, like Peter and Andrew, were privileged to be called in that first group of apostles who were very close and intimate with Jesus. But unlike Andrew, James was in the most intimate group of the three men, Peter, James, and John, who seemed to have been the closest to Jesus. James was there on the Mount of Transfiguration. He was there in that special place in the Garden of Gethsemane with the Lord praying. You will remember that the rest of the apostles were all at the outer perimeter of the garden, while Jesus brought Peter, James, and John part of the way into the garden, while Jesus went into the very center of the garden alone to pray. Now, one very good way to get a look at James is probably to note that Jesus gave he and John a name. He called them, and I'll try to get this down pat. Anyway, he called them that. And that Aramaic name means Sons of Thunder. Well, see, I've been practicing about Bethlehem. Bethlehem is not Bethlehem. It's Bet-la-ham. La-ham. Bet, B-E-T, la ham. That's the name of the city and it means a basket of bread or something about bread. And I'll get into that in about three weeks from now, I guess. So Boanerges is not Boanerges. That's a Gulfport, Mississippi, 21st century John Clark Road pronunciation. publicly educated pastor, four-eyed, flat-footed, yeah, okay, you get the idea. Now when you call somebody a son of thunder, you're defining their personality in a very vivid term. So we must know that being a son of thunder fits James as well as John. Now I told you all this the other day, when fishermen are not fishing, they're fighting. That's almost universal. And I'm not trying to disparage anybody, but you know what Irish people are known for? And there's certain defining qualities about groups of people. And fishermen are known to be violent. They're rough, their hands are gnarled, and they're just rough people. And some of them are sweethearts. I'm not saying that, it's not universal. So we must know that being a son of thunder fits James as well as John and by that we know that James was very zealous and thunderous and no doubt brutal and violent as well as passionate and fervent. He may well have been the New Testament counterpart of Jehu who said in the Old Testament, come with me and see my zeal for the Lord. And they followed him and then he uprooted the house of Ahab and swept away Baal worshipers from the land. Yeah, watch me. That's what he was saying. So he kicked and took names. So James was a very fiery person, very passionate. He seems to have been able to make enemies very easily. I wonder why. So while Andrew was quietly bringing people to Jesus, James was busy driving them away. And we need to know that there's a place in spiritual leadership for these people who have thunderous personalities, thank God. And James apparently was that way by personality and by character. And that may have been aided and abetted by the fact that he centered on some of the things that Jesus did that seemed to justify that kind of fury. I'm sure that James remembered in great detail that Jesus had exercised holy and righteous indignation, had made a whip, had turned over the tables, and had cleansed the temple when the people in the temple were doing what dishonored God. My question, why did Jesus kick it over at that point? Because they'd been doing this the whole time. And the reason Jesus, you remember when they tried to grab him early in his ministry and he just walked right through them? It's not time. It was time now. So he's picking a fight. He's making sure they get him and they arrest him. It's fascinating when you think about this. Jesus timed how fast he could walk. And he knew exactly when to leave Galilee to make his way down those different villages so he could be at Jerusalem on the day of the Passover. He timed his footpaces so that he could be at the city of, the village of Nain at the very moment that the funeral procession of a widow woman's only son passed by at the gate of the city, which is a post. Everybody gathered at that post and made the city fathers gathered at that post. And so Jesus arrived at the same point that that funeral procession arrived. What a coincidence, right? Yeah. Okay. I'm sure that James was convinced that Jesus's fury was correct and that it was divine, and it was a very good display of the holiness of God. But sometimes James's zeal and indignation was less than righteous. We don't have any more many glimpses of James, but I want to show you the ones we have. Please turn to Luke 9 with me and we'll find out a very typical response of a son of thunder. Look at verse 51. Here Jesus is going to go into Jerusalem for the final Passover for his death, burial, and resurrection. In Luke 9, 51, Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem. And Jesus and that huge crowd of disciples, as well as the apostles, are all coming from the Galilee area, and so they are literally coming down towards Jerusalem. and they have to go through an area called Samaria. And instead of going around Samaria, they walk through a Samaritan village. Now, when Jews traveled from the north of Israel to the south of Israel, they walked all the way around Samaria, so their feet did not have to get a tainted dust on them. And if they ever did walk through Samaria, they had to shake the dust of their feet off as a testimony against the Samaritans, because the Samaritans were half-breeds. They had married, intermarried with the Babylonian captors that took away the 10 northern tribes, only they didn't take all of them away. There were some Jews that were still there. And they intermarried with the Babylonian pagans, and they became the enemies of the Jews. And yet they considered the history of the Jews as theirs. And that's why when Jesus saw the woman, and she said, are you greater than our father Jacob?" Even though she was a Samaritan, she said Jacob was her father. You see? So they latched on to the history of the Jews, but at the point of the Babylonian captivity, they diverted from the Jews. And they worshipped up in a mountain while the Jews worshipped in Jerusalem. And so this is all in the scriptures. Jesus and that huge crowd of disciples, as well as the apostles, were all coming, I already said that, Now back then there was no 1-800 number to call to make a reservation so they could get a room for the night. So you had to send a messenger ahead of you to find a place to stay. And this was a time when a lot of pilgrims were migrating throughout that region and so there was a lot of people there and Jesus sends messengers on ahead of them and they entered a village Samaritans. Now you don't, you don't need to know that back in the day the Samaritans and the Jews hated each other with a passion, because the Samaritans were people who had intermarried with the pagan Gentiles. They were Jews who had blatantly disregarded and disdained their heritage like Esau had, and they had intermarried with pagans. And in the mind of the Jews the Samaritans had polluted the supposed pure blood, bloodline of Israel. So the Jews considered the Samaritans to be half-breeds, as well as traders and turncoats. And this animosity was so great that Jews would not even go into Samaria. They would walk all the way around it. And Jesus walked right through it. Isn't that amazing? And I know that his followers were about to have a heart attack following him through Samaria. Hey, Jesus, we're not supposed to go in there. And Jesus just goes steady walking right through it. But the Samaritans, that's why I gave the parable of the good Samaritan. That's why he gave the Jews that parable. I mean, you can't insult a Jew any more than say that the hero of the parable was a despised Samaritan. But the Samaritans hated the Jews just as passionately. And they had not only hated the Jews, but they despised the worship that went on in Jerusalem. So the Samaritans had devised their own religion with their own worship on Mount Gerizim. And so by hating Jerusalem, they also therefore hated the messianic gospel. But just like the hard-hearted Jews, the Samaritans had absolutely no interest in being saved from the wrath of God against their sins. Because to a Samaritan, all that salvation stuff was nothing more than Jewish propaganda. So when the messengers of Jesus came ahead of the group into Samaria to prepare the way for Jesus, they probably told the people of Samaria to, look, the Messiah is coming. gave the Samaritans the whole story. And they wanted to make arrangements for Jesus. But in verse 53 we see that the Samaritans did not receive Jesus because He was journeying with His face toward Jerusalem which in their mind made Jesus to be part of their ongoing problem with the Jews. So the Samaritans wanted nothing to do with anyone who was going to Jerusalem to be part of the worship of the Jews. And so the Samaritans outright rejected Jesus and they refused to receive him. And their mistake was they rejected Jesus in front of two suns of thunder. And when James and John saw that the Samaritans rejected Jesus, they did not begin to pray that God would please open their eyes so that the Samaritans might see and be saved. They didn't do that. How did these two sons of thunder respond to the rejection of Jesus by the Samaritans? Look at verse 54. Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them? This is not an example of the seeker-friendly mentality that many in the modern church have. These two men wanted Jesus to give them power to burn these pagan Samaritans up. And so it is a glimpse into the personality of a son of thunder. Now, it very well may have been that there was some extracurricular activity going on here. For example, it is very possible that the messengers could have been driven out from that village with curses and with stones thrown at them. We don't know that, but the animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans was that bad. But just the fact that the Samaritans would not accept the Messiah infuriated James and John so much that they wanted God to incinerate these people. So we have a great contrast between Andrew and James. Andrew said, bring them to Jesus, while James said, burn them up. So James didn't actually have the missionary spirit of Andrew, and yet the Lord Jesus stayed up all night praying so that he could pick a hot-headed and violent, unmerciful man like James to be a part of this group. What do you do with a guy like James who wants to burn up people who reject Jesus? Well, let's look at what Jesus did do. Look at verses 55 and 56. But he turned and rebuked them and said, you do not know what kind of spirit you are of. For the Son of Man did not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them. And they went on to another village." Now, I don't know if you've ever been in a crowd of people where somebody's mouthing off and somebody puts them in their place, and it's real quiet, and everybody just kind of disperses. Well, that's what was going on here. So this was James and John's approach. And there's a touch of nobility in it. There's something about it that I like, because it is better to get fired up with righteous wrath than allow insults to Christ. So I like the fact that they don't allow an insult to the Messiah to pass without a reaction, because Jesus himself got angry when God was dishonored. And Jesus was zealous and explosive and fervent. But of course, Jesus was perfect. And James was not. Now there's another insight about James in Matthew 20 and 20, so let's go there. This is one of the strangest incidences in all the Gospels about the apostles. Here we find that James was not only fervent, passionate, zealous, brutal, and violent, and insensitive. That was on his business card. But he was also a type A man, a very ambitious man. James was driven to achieve and he wanted to be the highest and be in the highest and best places. So please read with me Matthew 20, 20 through 28. Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came to Jesus with her sons, bowing down and making request of him. And he said to her, what do you wish? She said, command that in your kingdom, these two sons of mine may sit one on your right and one on your left. But Jesus answered, you do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink? They said to him, we're able. He said to them, my cup you shall drink. But to sit on my right and on my left, that is not mine to give, but it is for those whom it has been prepared by my father. And hearing this, the 10, the other guys, became indignant with the two brothers. They got mad at James and John, right? But Jesus called them to himself. Now you got a riot going on in the apostles. And hearing this, the 10, okay, and Jesus called them to himself and said, you know that the rulers of the Gentiles lorded over them and their great men exercise authority over them. Is it not this way among you? It is not this way among you. But whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant. And whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave. Just as the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many. I've got a sermon entitled, Do Not Serve Jesus. That's not what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches that Jesus is gonna serve you. And then I would also like you to define for me exactly what serving Jesus means. And I would suggest that the only reason you do anything like serve Jesus is you do it based upon his power and his grace and his strength and his wisdom that he loans to you. So you're really not doing much at all. Isn't that insulting? Now, I have no idea what Mr. Zebedee was like, but Mrs. Zebedee was really something. Here this mother is actually commanding the Messiah. And some of you ladies are saying, I cannot even identify with this because this is not a meek and a quiet spirit. I mean, perhaps one or two of you ladies might have said this. But this woman just walked up and told Jesus, I'm telling you, you command that my boys are on your right hand and your left hand in the kingdom. And all I can say to that is poor Mr. Zebedee. I'm sure he spent a lot of time out on the boat. Now what is interesting here is that James and John were both very close to Jesus, and they knew they were in that very close intimate circle. And they had been called as disciples for a long, long time by now, and they both knew Jesus very well. And so what is going on here is that these two sons of thunders are going to take advantage of their position with Jesus to their own advantage. They were on the inside track and they knew it, and so they got mom involved. Now obviously she thought that was a good idea and obviously she didn't have any reservation or hesitation here. That's how bold she was. So mama carried her son's sinful ambition right before Jesus. But Jesus said, you do not know what you are asking. In other words, dear lady, you don't have a clue what you're asking for. Being on my right hand and left hand, that's having the most prominent place in all the kingdom. So you need to back off because you don't know what you're asking for. Then Jesus turned to the two brothers and asked them a question. Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink? And in their self-righteous confidence and sinful arrogance, they said, sure, no problem. Drink your cup, no biggie. Yeah, of course we're able. So here are these two men, James and John, and all they're doing here is clamoring for honor and prestige and position. Now surely the Lord would have never purposely called somebody who is insensitive and harsh and zealous and brutal and violent and passionate and ambitious into ministry, would he? Surely God would only choose people who are holy and righteous and without sin, right? Well, the truth is that God does this all the time. In fact, if God didn't choose people with great flaws and great weaknesses and great iniquities, then He would have to simply use Himself because every human being on earth is just like this. So God did indeed choose James and John, and God turned their raw passion and their raw zeal and their raw fervency that God gave them when they were born, and Jesus personally molded these attributes and shaped them so he could use them for his own glory. And at the end of the day, these two brothers were used mightily by God. So the Lord said, okay, my cup you shall drink. You want to go there? You think you can handle it? You're going to drink it all right, but even at that I can't give you the right or the left hand. Only the Father will determine who deserves the seats of prominence. Now listen to me. There will absolutely be seats of prominence in the kingdom of God. Even among the apostles. Because I would suggest, and here's your homework assignment. Write it on a piece of paper, the 12 apostles, after Judas left. After Judas sinned and he killed himself. Name me the names of the 12 apostles. That's your homework. And the Bible says that the apostles will rule over the 12 tribes of Israel. But some will receive more prominence than others. And only God the Father knows how to adjudicate all that. But James and John's sinful ambition created all kinds of problems because verse 24 says, Now this sin has spread through the entire group and every one of these 12 men are all caught up with this spirit of rivalry. So this becomes the big debate the whole time they're together, clamoring for honor, recognition, prestige, and glory. So here are the would-be killers of the pagan Samaritans, forgetting all about how evil and wicked the Samaritans had been, as they are all consumed with their own wicked ambition. And their raw zeal has become a source of sinful pride to get them into the positions of power with Jesus. And so both James and John tried to play on their privilege by doing this. They all demean and minimize and insult Christ and his kingdom. Jesus knows that he has a lot of work to do with these two guys. James wanted a glorious crown, so Jesus gave him a bitter cup. James wanted power, so Jesus gave him servanthood. James wanted to rule over sinners, so Jesus gave him martyrdom at the hands of sinners. James wanted to rule on a throne over the Gentile nations, So Jesus gave the Gentiles a sword that would cut him in half as he was executed. And it is his arrest and martyrdom that I see how strong and important James was to the church at that time, because just 14 years from this very moment, James was found beneath the shadow of the sword. As the book of Acts chapter 12, 1 and 2 says, Now to prove, look what chapter that is, 12. Now to prove to you that the issuance of mercy is solely in God's prerogative, and to prove to you that there are times when God absolutely does actively and sovereignly intervene on behalf of his children to perform miracles and acts of providence in healing and in rescuing and delivering them from danger and from persecution and from disease and from problems, as you read through the rest of the book of Acts, you will see how God chose to actively and sovereignly intervene on Peter's behalf through a series of divine miracles Peter was set free. And yet here in verses 1 and 2, we see that the very same God who rescued Peter chose not to rescue James. So God stepped aside and he passively allowed Herod to do what was in his evil heart to do to James and to kill him with the sword. Yet God chose not to intervene on James' behalf, although he certainly could. Many people in the modern church want to say that the reason why God rescued Peter and did not rescue James was simply because James was weak in his faith and Peter was strong, but the Bible does not teach that at all. We need to understand, beloved, that while it is true that it is sometimes God's will to perform powerful miracles or acts of providence to deliver and heal and rescue his people, God does not always choose to do that. But by this very same faith, God sometimes chooses to sustain his people in their sufferings rather than deliver them from it. And having strong faith or not having strong faith is not the ultimate determining factor in whether you suffer or whether you are delivered. God's sovereign will and wisdom and love always takes precedent over our faith. We need to know and believe, friends, that the common features of the faith that escape suffering and the faith that endures suffering is this. Both of them involve believing that God himself is infinitely better than anything that life can give to us now, and it is infinitely better than anything that death can take from us later. Because those who love God more than this life, and who suffer willingly, not accepting deliverance, are awaiting something infinitely better than what this life can offer. So the suffering saints are not failures who didn't have enough faith to be delivered, but in fact, they are God's great gifts to the world. So notice that Herod is very furious and angry against the church and the spread of the gospel, because the gospel is beginning to affect the pagan world mightily. And Herod laid hands on some who belonged to the church in order to mistreat them. So it begins a great persecution. Now here in verse two and through the rest of the chapter, we see that these same three men, Peter, James, and John, and so Herod takes James. and kills him with the sword. And when Herod saw that killing the great apostle James pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter so he could kill him too. Now notice, when Herod wanted to stop the growth of the church, when Herod wanted to stop the great spread and impact that the gospel is having on the people, who does he kill? Peter? Nope. John? Nope. He killed James. The first person that Herod killed right out of the gate was James, not Peter. Herod did not arrest Peter until after he killed James and saw that by killing James, the Jews were pleased. Then he took Peter. And from this, we can see that at that particular time, James is an even greater force for God and even greater proponent for the gospel than Peter was, because James was the greater threat to Herod. So at this time, James, not Peter, is being used more than Peter was. And that is why Herod killed James and not Peter, the greatest preacher of the first 12 chapters of the book of Acts. That is why Herod kills James and not John, who was the constant companion of Peter, who traveled with him. So instead of either Peter or John, Herod killed James. This son of thunder had been personally mentored by Jesus. He had been empowered by the Holy Spirit. He had been shaped by those spiritual means into a man whose zeal and ambition was for God and the kingdom of God, and whose strength and intolerance was for divine purposes and the protection of the truth, whose sympathies were reserved for those things that honored God. Somewhere along the line, God had taught James how to control his temper. God had taught James how to bridle his tongue, and God had taught James how to redirect his zeal, and how to eliminate revenge, and how to completely abandon his own personal ambition. This courageous, zealous, brutal, violent, sometimes loveless, insensitive, and ambitious man of passion who had wanted to brutally destroy an entire city, who wanted to selfishly sit on a throne next to Jesus, had been turned into an instrument of love and grace in the hand of God. And his strength was so great, and his influence in the community, was so powerful and his ability to proclaim the gospel was so strong that when it came time to stop the Christian church, James was the first apostle who had to die. So James really did drink from that bitter cup after all. And his life was very short. James's life blazed brightly, very brightly, and very quickly. But then it went dark, very swiftly, at the edge of a sword. And you know, one of the church historians wrote that when James was sentenced to death, He was taken to the place of execution by an officer, it says, who guarded him, who became so impressed by the courage James displayed that the guard repented of his sin, fell down at James's feet and begged pardon for the part he had played in the rough treatment James had received on the way to execution. And this great apostle James, according to this report, raised up the officer from the ground, embraced and kissed him, and said, peace, my son, peace to you as God has pardoned your sins. And being immediately transformed, This officer publicly confessed his surrender to Jesus Christ, and he too was beheaded alongside of James, and both of them entered into glory together. Amen. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for this amazing man, this apostle. Thank you, God, that we have an example to follow his faith, to emulate his faith. Help us to do that now in Jesus' name. Amen.