apostles of Jesus

• beliefs of apostles › Jesus was Eternal Son

33:1.2Our Cre­ator Son is not the Eter­nal Son, the ex­is­ten­tial Par­a­dise as­so­ciate of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther and the In­fi­nite Spirit. Mi­chael of Neb­a­don is not a mem­ber of the Par­a­dise Trin­ity. Nev­er­the­less our Mas­ter Son pos­sesses in his realm all of the di­vine at­tri­butes and pow­ers that the Eter­nal Son him­self would man­i­fest were he ac­tu­ally to be pres­ent on Sal­ving­ton and func­tion­ing in Neb­a­don. Mi­chael pos­sesses even ad­di­tional power and au­thor­ity, for he not only per­son­i­fies the Eter­nal Son but also fully rep­re­sents and ac­tu­ally em­bod­ies the per­son­al­ity pres­ence of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther to and in this lo­cal uni­verse. He even rep­re­sents the Fa­ther-Son. These re­la­tion­ships con­sti­tute a Cre­ator Son the most pow­er­ful, ver­sa­tile, and in­flu­en­tial of all di­vine be­ings who are ca­pa­ble of di­rect ad­min­is­tra­tion of evo­lu­tion­ary uni­verses and of per­son­al­ity con­tact with im­ma­ture crea­ture be­ings.

• Jesus › kept a. in service-contact with multitudes

91:7.2The great re­li­gious teach­ers and the proph­ets of past ages were not ex­treme mys­tics. They were God-know­ing men and women who best served their God by un­selfish min­istry to their fel­low mor­tals. Je­sus of­ten took his apos­tles away by them­selves for short pe­ri­ods to en­gage in med­i­ta­tion and prayer, but for the most part he kept them in ser­vice-con­tact with the mul­ti­tudes. The soul of man re­quires spir­i­tual ex­er­cise as well as spir­i­tual nour­ish­ment.

• called Jesus “Master”

100:7.17Je­sus was great be­cause he was good, and yet he frat­er­nized with the lit­tle chil­dren. He was gen­tle and unas­sum­ing in his per­sonal life, and yet he was the per­fected man of a uni­verse. His as­so­ciates called him Mas­ter un­bid­den.

• forbidden to become embroiled in politics

120:3.4“3. In your re­la­tions to the so­cial or­der we ad­vise that you con­fine your ef­forts largely to spir­i­tual re­gen­er­a­tion and in­tel­lec­tual eman­ci­pa­tion. Avoid all en­tan­gle­ments with the eco­nomic struc­ture and the po­lit­i­cal com­mit­ments of your day. More es­pe­cially de­vote your­self to liv­ing the ideal re­li­gious life on Uran­tia.

• chosen family of Jesus’ advisers

137:1.7James and John re­ceived the re­buke in good grace; never more were they en­vi­ous of An­drew and Si­mon. And they made ready, with their two as­so­ciate apos­tles, to de­part for Gal­i­lee the next morn­ing. From this day on the term apos­tle was em­ployed to dis­tin­guish the cho­sen fam­ily of Je­sus’ ad­vis­ers from the vast mul­ti­tude of be­liev­ing dis­ci­ples who sub­se­quently fol­lowed him.

• Jesus › trusted and loved
• studied 3 hours each evening

137:6.5Je­sus in­structed them to take up their reg­u­lar du­ties un­til “the hour of the king­dom comes.” And to en­cour­age them, he set an ex­am­ple by go­ing back reg­u­larly to work in the boat­shop. In ex­plain­ing that they should spend three hours ev­ery evening in study and prepa­ra­tion for their fu­ture work, Je­sus fur­ther said: “We will all re­main here­about un­til the Fa­ther bids me call you. Each of you must now re­turn to his ac­cus­tomed work just as if noth­ing had hap­pened. Tell no man about me and re­mem­ber that my king­dom is not to come with noise and glamor, but rather must it come through the great change which my Fa­ther will have wrought in your hearts and in the hearts of those who shall be called to join you in the coun­cils of the king­dom. You are now my friends; I trust you and I love you; you are soon to be­come my per­sonal as­so­ciates. Be pa­tient, be gen­tle. Be ever obe­di­ent to the Fa­ther’s will. Make your­selves ready for the call of the king­dom. While you will ex­pe­ri­ence great joy in the ser­vice of my Fa­ther, you should also be pre­pared for trou­ble, for I warn you that it will be only through much tribu­la­tion that many will en­ter the king­dom. But those who have found the king­dom, their joy will be full, and they shall be called the blest of all the earth. But do not en­ter­tain false hope; the world will stum­ble at my words. Even you, my friends, do not fully per­ceive what I am un­fold­ing to your con­fused minds. Make no mis­take; we go forth to la­bor for a gen­er­a­tion of sign seek­ers. They will de­mand won­der-work­ing as the proof that I am sent by my Fa­ther, and they will be slow to rec­og­nize in the rev­e­la­tion of my Fa­ther’s love the cre­den­tials of my mis­sion.”

• Jesus › wished for unity among

137:6.6That evening, when they had re­turned to the land, be­fore they went their way, Je­sus, stand­ing by the wa­ter’s edge, prayed: “My Fa­ther, I thank you for these lit­tle ones who, in spite of their doubts, even now be­lieve. And for their sakes have I set my­self apart to do your will. And now may they learn to be one, even as we are one.”

• called Jesus “Rabbi”
• personal loyalty to Jesus transcended faith in teachings

137:7.2Through­out these four months these seven be­liev­ers, one his own brother in the flesh, were get­ting ac­quainted with Je­sus; they were get­ting used to the idea of liv­ing with this God-man. Though they called him Rabbi, they were learn­ing not to be afraid of him. Je­sus pos­sessed that match­less grace of per­son­al­ity which en­abled him so to live among them that they were not dis­mayed by his di­vin­ity. They found it re­ally easy to be “friends with God,” God in­car­nate in the like­ness of mor­tal flesh. This time of wait­ing severely tested the en­tire group of be­liev­ers. Noth­ing, ab­so­lutely noth­ing, mirac­u­lous hap­pened. Day by day they went about their or­di­nary work, while night af­ter night they sat at Je­sus’ feet. And they were held to­gether by his match­less per­son­al­ity and by the gra­cious words which he spoke to them evening upon evening.

• forbidden to become embroiled in politics

137:7.5In this time of wait­ing Je­sus en­deav­ored to teach his as­so­ciates what their at­ti­tude should be to­ward the var­i­ous re­li­gious groups and the po­lit­i­cal par­ties of Pales­tine. Je­sus’ words al­ways were, “We are seek­ing to win all of them, but we are not of any of them.”

• forbidden to become embroiled in politics

137:7.12All of these par­ties and sects, in­clud­ing the smaller Nazarite broth­er­hood, be­lieved in the some­time com­ing of the Mes­siah. They all looked for a na­tional de­liv­erer. But Je­sus was very pos­i­tive in mak­ing it clear that he and his dis­ci­ples would not be­come al­lied to any of these schools of thought or prac­tice. The Son of Man was to be nei­ther a Nazarite nor an Es­sene.

• studied 3 hours each evening

137:7.14As they thus tar­ried be­fore em­bark­ing on their ac­tive pub­lic preach­ing, Je­sus and the seven spent two evenings each week at the syn­a­gogue in the study of the He­brew scrip­tures. In later years af­ter sea­sons of in­tense pub­lic work, the apos­tles looked back upon these four months as the most pre­cious and prof­itable of all their as­so­ci­a­tion with the Mas­ter. Je­sus taught these men all they could as­sim­i­late. He did not make the mis­take of overteach­ing them. He did not pre­cip­i­tate con­fu­sion by the pre­sen­ta­tion of truth too far be­yond their ca­pac­ity to com­pre­hend.

• Jesus › sent forth by twos

138:1.1The next day, Sun­day, June 23, A.D. 26, Je­sus im­parted his fi­nal in­struc­tions to the six. He di­rected them to go forth, two and two, to teach the glad tid­ings of the king­dom. He for­bade them to bap­tize and ad­vised against pub­lic preach­ing. He went on to ex­plain that later he would per­mit them to preach in pub­lic, but that for a sea­son, and for many rea­sons, he de­sired them to ac­quire prac­ti­cal ex­pe­ri­ence in deal­ing per­son­ally with their fel­low men. Je­sus pur­posed to make their first tour en­tirely one of per­sonal work. Al­though this an­nounce­ment was some­thing of a dis­ap­point­ment to the apos­tles, still they saw, at least in part, Je­sus’ rea­son for thus be­gin­ning the procla­ma­tion of the king­dom, and they started out in good heart and with con­fi­dent en­thu­si­asm. He sent them forth by twos, James and John go­ing to Kheresa, An­drew and Pe­ter to Ca­per­naum, while Philip and Na­than­iel went to Ta­ri­chea.

• all of one flesh

138:5.1Thomas the fish­er­man and Ju­das the wan­derer met Je­sus and the apos­tles at the fisher-boat land­ing at Ta­ri­chea, and Thomas led the party to his near-by home. Philip now pre­sented Thomas as his nom­i­nee for apos­tle­ship and Na­than­iel pre­sented Ju­das Is­car­iot, the Judean, for sim­i­lar hon­ors. Je­sus looked upon Thomas and said: “Thomas, you lack faith; nev­er­the­less, I re­ceive you. Fol­low me.” To Ju­das Is­car­iot the Mas­ter said: “Ju­das, we are all of one flesh, and as I re­ceive you into our midst, I pray that you will al­ways be loyal to your Galilean breth­ren. Fol­low me.”

• Wednesdays were rest days for

138:6.2It was at this time that Je­sus es­tab­lished the mid-week hol­i­day for rest and recre­ation. And they pur­sued this plan of re­lax­ation for one day each week through­out the re­main­der of his ma­te­rial life. As a gen­eral rule, they never pros­e­cuted their reg­u­lar ac­tiv­i­ties on Wednes­day. On this weekly hol­i­day Je­sus would usu­ally take him­self away from them, say­ing: “My chil­dren, go for a day of play. Rest your­selves from the ar­du­ous labors of the king­dom and en­joy the re­fresh­ment that comes from re­vert­ing to your for­mer vo­ca­tions or from dis­cov­er­ing new sorts of recre­ational ac­tiv­ity.” While Je­sus, at this pe­riod of his earth life, did not ac­tu­ally re­quire this day of rest, he con­formed to this plan be­cause he knew it was best for his hu­man as­so­ciates. Je­sus was the teacher—the Mas­ter; his as­so­ciates were his pupils—dis­ci­ples.

• desired preference
• did not grasp Jesus’ teaching

138:7.1Je­sus had planned for a quiet mis­sion­ary cam­paign of five months’ per­sonal work. He did not tell the apos­tles how long this was to last; they worked from week to week. And early on this first day of the week, just as he was about to an­nounce this to his twelve apos­tles, Si­mon Pe­ter, James Zeb­e­dee, and Ju­das Is­car­iot came to have pri­vate con­verse with him. Tak­ing Je­sus aside, Pe­ter made bold to say: “Mas­ter, we come at the be­hest of our as­so­ciates to in­quire whether the time is not now ripe to en­ter into the king­dom. And will you pro­claim the king­dom at Ca­per­naum, or are we to move on to Je­ru­sa­lem? And when shall we learn, each of us, the po­si­tions we are to oc­cupy with you in the es­tab­lish­ment of the king­dom—” and Pe­ter would have gone on ask­ing fur­ther ques­tions, but Je­sus raised an ad­mon­i­tory hand and stopped him. And beck­on­ing the other apos­tles stand­ing near by to join them, Je­sus said: “My lit­tle chil­dren, how long shall I bear with you! Have I not made it plain to you that my king­dom is not of this world? I have told you many times that I have not come to sit on David’s throne, and now how is it that you are in­quir­ing which place each of you will oc­cupy in the Fa­ther’s king­dom? Can you not per­ceive that I have called you as am­bas­sadors of a spir­i­tual king­dom? Do you not un­der­stand that soon, very soon, you are to rep­re­sent me in the world and in the procla­ma­tion of the king­dom, even as I now rep­re­sent my Fa­ther who is in heaven? Can it be that I have cho­sen you and in­structed you as mes­sen­gers of the king­dom, and yet you do not com­pre­hend the na­ture and sig­nif­i­cance of this com­ing king­dom of di­vine pre-em­i­nence in the hearts of men? My friends, hear me once more. Ban­ish from your minds this idea that my king­dom is a rule of power or a reign of glory. In­deed, all power in heaven and on earth will pres­ently be given into my hands, but it is not the Fa­ther’s will that we use this di­vine en­dow­ment to glo­rify our­selves dur­ing this age. In an­other age you shall in­deed sit with me in power and glory, but it be­hooves us now to sub­mit to the will of the Fa­ther and to go forth in hum­ble obe­di­ence to ex­e­cute his bid­ding on earth.”

• Jesus › sent forth by twos

138:7.2Once more were his as­so­ciates shocked, stunned. Je­sus sent them away two and two to pray, ask­ing them to re­turn to him at noon­time. On this cru­cial forenoon they each sought to find God, and each en­deav­ored to cheer and strengthen the other, and they re­turned to Je­sus as he had bid­den them.

• enemy would seek to draw away
• personal loyalty to Jesus transcended faith in teachings

138:7.3Je­sus now re­counted for them the com­ing of John, the bap­tism in the Jor­dan, the mar­riage feast at Cana, the re­cent choos­ing of the six, and the with­drawal from them of his own broth­ers in the flesh, and warned them that the en­emy of the king­dom would seek also to draw them away. Af­ter this short but earnest talk the apos­tles all arose, un­der Pe­ter’s lead­er­ship, to de­clare their undy­ing de­vo­tion to their Mas­ter and to pledge their unswerv­ing loy­alty to the king­dom, as Thomas ex­pressed it, “To this com­ing king­dom, no mat­ter what it is and even if I do not fully un­der­stand it.” They all truly be­lieved in Je­sus, even though they did not fully com­pre­hend his teach­ing.

• dependent families cared for

138:7.4Je­sus now asked them how much money they had among them; he also in­quired as to what pro­vi­sion had been made for their fam­i­lies. When it de­vel­oped that they had hardly suf­fi­cient funds to main­tain them­selves for two weeks, he said: “It is not the will of my Fa­ther that we be­gin our work in this way. We will re­main here by the sea two weeks and fish or do what­ever our hands find to do; and in the mean­time, un­der the guid­ance of An­drew, the first cho­sen apos­tle, you shall so or­ga­nize your­selves as to pro­vide for ev­ery­thing need­ful in your fu­ture work, both for the pres­ent per­sonal min­istry and also when I shall sub­se­quently or­dain you to preach the gospel and in­struct be­liev­ers.” They were all greatly cheered by these words; this was their first clear-cut and pos­i­tive in­ti­ma­tion that Je­sus de­signed later on to en­ter upon more ag­gres­sive and pre­ten­tious pub­lic ef­forts.

• dependent families cared for

138:8.1Af­ter dis­pos­ing of the fish catches of two weeks, Ju­das Is­car­iot, the one cho­sen to act as trea­surer of the twelve, di­vided the apos­tolic funds into six equal por­tions, funds for the care of de­pen­dent fam­i­lies hav­ing been al­ready pro­vided. And then near the mid­dle of Au­gust, in the year A.D. 26, they went forth two and two to the fields of work as­signed by An­drew. The first two weeks Je­sus went out with An­drew and Pe­ter, the sec­ond two weeks with James and John, and so on with the other cou­ples in the or­der of their choos­ing. In this way he was able to go out at least once with each cou­ple be­fore he called them to­gether for the be­gin­ning of their pub­lic min­istry.

• cheerfully ignorant of rabbinical learning

138:8.7The com­mon peo­ple mar­veled at the teach­ing and min­istry of Je­sus and his apos­tles. The rab­bis had long taught the Jews that the ig­no­rant could not be pi­ous or righ­teous. But Je­sus’ apos­tles were both pi­ous and righ­teous; yet they were cheer­fully ig­no­rant of much of the learn­ing of the rab­bis and the wis­dom of the world.

• personal loyalty to Jesus transcended faith in teachings
• regarded Jesus as best friend

138:9.1This some­what monotonous pe­riod of al­ter­nate fish­ing and per­sonal work proved to be a gru­el­ing ex­pe­ri­ence for the twelve apos­tles, but they en­dured the test. With all of their grum­blings, doubts, and tran­sient dis­sat­is­fac­tions they re­mained true to their vows of de­vo­tion and loy­alty to the Mas­ter. It was their per­sonal as­so­ci­a­tion with Je­sus dur­ing these months of test­ing that so en­deared him to them that they all (save Ju­das Is­car­iot) re­mained loyal and true to him even in the dark hours of the trial and cru­ci­fix­ion. Real men sim­ply could not ac­tu­ally desert a revered teacher who had lived so close to them and had been so de­voted to them as had Je­sus. Through the dark hours of the Mas­ter’s death, in the hearts of these apos­tles all rea­son, judg­ment, and logic were set aside in def­er­ence to just one ex­traor­di­nary hu­man emo­tion—the su­preme sen­ti­ment of friend­ship-loy­alty. These five months of work with Je­sus led these apos­tles, each one of them, to re­gard him as the best friend he had in all the world. And it was this hu­man sen­ti­ment, and not his su­perb teach­ings or mar­velous do­ings, that held them to­gether un­til af­ter the res­ur­rec­tion and the re­newal of the procla­ma­tion of the gospel of the king­dom.

• most married, some had several children

138:9.3The apos­tles car­ried on their per­sonal work in Ca­per­naum, Beth­saida-Ju­lias, Cho­ra­zin, Gerasa, Hip­pos, Mag­dala, Cana, Beth­le­hem of Gal­i­lee, Jo­ta­p­ata, Ramah, Safed, Gis­chala, Gadara, and Abila. Be­sides these towns they la­bored in many vil­lages as well as in the coun­try­side. By the end of this pe­riod the twelve had worked out fairly sat­is­fac­tory plans for the care of their re­spec­tive fam­i­lies. Most of the apos­tles were mar­ried, some had sev­eral chil­dren, but they had made such ar­range­ments for the sup­port of their home folks that, with some lit­tle as­sis­tance from the apos­tolic funds, they could de­vote their en­tire en­er­gies to the Mas­ter’s work with­out hav­ing to worry about the fi­nan­cial wel­fare of their fam­i­lies.

138:10.1The apos­tles early or­ga­nized them­selves in the fol­low­ing man­ner:

138:10.21. An­drew, the first cho­sen apos­tle, was des­ig­nated chair­man and di­rec­tor gen­eral of the twelve.

• Peter, James, and John were personal aids to Jesus

138:10.32. Pe­ter, James, and John were ap­pointed per­sonal com­pan­ions of Je­sus. They were to at­tend him day and night, to min­is­ter to his phys­i­cal and sundry needs, and to ac­com­pany him on those night vig­ils of prayer and mys­te­ri­ous com­mu­nion with the Fa­ther in heaven.

138:10.43. Philip was made stew­ard of the group. It was his duty to pro­vide food and to see that vis­i­tors, and even the mul­ti­tude of lis­ten­ers at times, had some­thing to eat.

138:10.54. Na­than­iel watched over the needs of the fam­i­lies of the twelve. He re­ceived reg­u­lar re­ports as to the re­quire­ments of each apos­tle’s fam­ily and, mak­ing req­ui­si­tion on Ju­das, the trea­surer, would send funds each week to those in need.

138:10.65. Mat­thew was the fis­cal agent of the apos­tolic corps. It was his duty to see that the bud­get was bal­anced, the trea­sury re­plen­ished. If the funds for mu­tual sup­port were not forth­com­ing, if do­na­tions suf­fi­cient to main­tain the party were not re­ceived, Mat­thew was em­pow­ered to or­der the twelve back to their nets for a sea­son. But this was never nec­es­sary af­ter they be­gan their pub­lic work; he al­ways had suf­fi­cient funds in the trea­surer’s hands to fi­nance their ac­tiv­i­ties.

138:10.76. Thomas was man­ager of the itin­er­ary. It de­volved upon him to ar­range lodg­ings and in a gen­eral way se­lect places for teach­ing and preach­ing, thereby in­sur­ing a smooth and ex­pe­di­tious travel sched­ule.

138:10.87. James and Ju­das the twin sons of Al­pheus were as­signed to the man­age­ment of the mul­ti­tudes. It was their task to dep­u­tize a suf­fi­cient num­ber of as­sis­tant ush­ers to en­able them to main­tain or­der among the crowds dur­ing the preach­ing.

138:10.98. Si­mon Ze­lo­tes was given charge of recre­ation and play. He man­aged the Wednes­day pro­grams and also sought to pro­vide for a few hours of re­lax­ation and di­ver­sion each day.

138:10.109. Ju­das Is­car­iot was ap­pointed trea­surer. He car­ried the bag. He paid all ex­penses and kept the books. He made bud­get es­ti­mates for Mat­thew from week to week and also made weekly re­ports to An­drew. Ju­das paid out funds on An­drew’s au­tho­riza­tion.

138:10.11In this way the twelve func­tioned from their early or­ga­ni­za­tion up to the time of the re­or­ga­ni­za­tion made nec­es­sary by the de­ser­tion of Ju­das, the be­trayer. The Mas­ter and his dis­ci­ple-apos­tles went on in this sim­ple man­ner un­til Sun­day, Jan­uary 12, A.D. 27, when he called them to­gether and for­mally or­dained them as am­bas­sadors of the king­dom and preach­ers of its glad tid­ings. And soon there­after they pre­pared to start for Je­ru­sa­lem and Judea on their first pub­lic preach­ing tour.

• Jesus › subjected to repeated disappointment, testing

139:0.1It is an elo­quent tes­ti­mony to the charm and righ­teous­ness of Je­sus’ earth life that, al­though he re­peat­edly dashed to pieces the hopes of his apos­tles and tore to shreds their ev­ery am­bi­tion for per­sonal ex­al­ta­tion, only one de­serted him.

• all except Alpheus twins graduates of synagogue schools
• not made alike by schooling

139:0.3Do not make the mis­take of re­gard­ing the apos­tles as be­ing al­to­gether ig­no­rant and un­learned. All of them, ex­cept the Al­pheus twins, were grad­u­ates of the syn­a­gogue schools, hav­ing been thor­oughly trained in the He­brew scrip­tures and in much of the cur­rent knowl­edge of that day. Seven were grad­u­ates of the Ca­per­naum syn­a­gogue schools, and there were no bet­ter Jew­ish schools in all Gal­i­lee.

• cheerfully ignorant of rabbinical learning

139:0.4When your rec­ords re­fer to these mes­sen­gers of the king­dom as be­ing “ig­no­rant and un­learned,” it was in­tended to con­vey the idea that they were lay­men, un­learned in the lore of the rab­bis and un­trained in the meth­ods of rab­bini­cal in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the Scrip­tures. They were lack­ing in so-called higher ed­u­ca­tion. In mod­ern times they would cer­tainly be con­sid­ered un­e­d­u­cated, and in some cir­cles of so­ci­ety even un­cul­tured. One thing is cer­tain: They had not all been put through the same rigid and stereo­typed ed­u­ca­tional cur­ricu­lum. From ado­les­cence on they had en­joyed sep­a­rate ex­pe­ri­ences of learn­ing how to live.

• Andrew was chief

139:1.2In A.D. 26, the year he was cho­sen as an apos­tle, An­drew was 33, a full year older than Je­sus and the old­est of the apos­tles. He sprang from an ex­cel­lent line of an­ces­tors and was the ablest man of the twelve. Ex­cept­ing or­a­tory, he was the peer of his as­so­ciates in al­most ev­ery imag­in­able abil­ity. Je­sus never gave An­drew a nick­name, a fra­ter­nal des­ig­na­tion. But even as the apos­tles soon be­gan to call Je­sus Mas­ter, so they also des­ig­nated An­drew by a term the equiv­a­lent of Chief.

• Philip was apostolic steward

139:5.3When the apos­tles were or­ga­nized for ser­vice, Philip was made stew­ard; it was his duty to see that they were at all times sup­plied with pro­vi­sions. And he was a good stew­ard. His strong­est char­ac­ter­is­tic was his me­thod­i­cal thor­ough­ness; he was both math­e­mat­i­cal and sys­tem­atic.

• dependent families cared for
• Nathaniel watched over a.’s families

139:6.7Na­than­iel’s duty was to look af­ter the fam­i­lies of the twelve. He was of­ten ab­sent from the apos­tolic coun­cils, for when he heard that sick­ness or any­thing out of the or­di­nary had hap­pened to one of his charges, he lost no time in get­ting to that home. The twelve rested se­curely in the knowl­edge that their fam­i­lies’ wel­fare was safe in the hands of Na­than­iel.

• Matthew was fund-raiser

139:7.2An­drew ap­pointed Mat­thew the fi­nan­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the apos­tles. In a way he was the fis­cal agent and pub­lic­ity spokesman for the apos­tolic or­ga­ni­za­tion. He was a keen judge of hu­man na­ture and a very ef­fi­cient pro­pa­gan­dist. His is a per­son­al­ity dif­fi­cult to vi­su­al­ize, but he was a very earnest dis­ci­ple and an in­creas­ing be­liever in the mis­sion of Je­sus and in the cer­tainty of the king­dom. Je­sus never gave Levi a nick­name, but his fel­low apos­tles com­monly re­ferred to him as the “money-get­ter.”

• never openly solicited funds from the multitude

139:7.8Mat­thew re­ceived freely ten­dered of­fer­ings from be­liev­ing dis­ci­ples and the im­me­di­ate au­di­tors of the Mas­ter’s teach­ings, but he never openly so­licited funds from the mul­ti­tudes. He did all his fi­nan­cial work in a quiet and per­sonal way and raised most of the money among the more sub­stan­tial class of in­ter­ested be­liev­ers. He gave prac­ti­cally the whole of his mod­est for­tune to the work of the Mas­ter and his apos­tles, but they never knew of this gen­eros­ity, save Je­sus, who knew all about it. Mat­thew hes­i­tated openly to con­tribute to the apos­tolic funds for fear that Je­sus and his as­so­ciates might re­gard his money as be­ing tainted; so he gave much in the names of other be­liev­ers. Dur­ing the ear­lier months, when Mat­thew knew his pres­ence among them was more or less of a trial, he was strongly tempted to let them know that his funds of­ten sup­plied them with their daily bread, but he did not yield. When ev­i­dence of the dis­dain of the pub­li­can would be­come man­i­fest, Levi would burn to re­veal to them his gen­eros­ity, but al­ways he man­aged to keep still.

• Thomas managed itinerary

139:8.5In the or­ga­ni­za­tion of the twelve Thomas was as­signed to ar­range and man­age the itin­er­ary, and he was an able di­rec­tor of the work and move­ments of the apos­tolic corps. He was a good ex­ec­u­tive, an ex­cel­lent busi­ness­man, but he was hand­i­capped by his many moods; he was one man one day and an­other man the next. He was in­clined to­ward melan­cholic brood­ing when he joined the apos­tles, but con­tact with Je­sus and the apos­tles largely cured him of this mor­bid in­tro­spec­tion.

• Alpheus twins were errand-boys; managed multitudes

139:9.3An­drew as­signed them to the work of polic­ing the mul­ti­tudes. They were the chief ush­ers of the preach­ing hours and, in fact, the gen­eral ser­vants and er­rand boys of the twelve. They helped Philip with the sup­plies, they car­ried money to the fam­i­lies for Na­than­iel, and al­ways were they ready to lend a help­ing hand to any one of the apos­tles.

• Simon in charge of diversion and relaxation

139:11.2Si­mon Ze­lo­tes was given charge of the di­ver­sions and re­lax­ation of the apos­tolic group, and he was a very ef­fi­cient or­ga­nizer of the play life and recre­ational ac­tiv­i­ties of the twelve.

• forbidden to become embroiled in politics

139:11.9The Mas­ter had many talks with Si­mon, but he never fully suc­ceeded in mak­ing an in­ter­na­tion­al­ist out of this ar­dent Jew­ish na­tion­al­ist. Je­sus of­ten told Si­mon that it was proper to want to see the so­cial, eco­nomic, and po­lit­i­cal or­ders im­proved, but he would al­ways add: “That is not the busi­ness of the king­dom of heaven. We must be ded­i­cated to the do­ing of the Fa­ther’s will. Our busi­ness is to be am­bas­sadors of a spir­i­tual gov­ern­ment on high, and we must not im­me­di­ately con­cern our­selves with aught but the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the will and char­ac­ter of the di­vine Fa­ther who stands at the head of the gov­ern­ment whose cre­den­tials we bear.” It was all dif­fi­cult for Si­mon to com­pre­hend, but grad­u­ally he be­gan to grasp some­thing of the mean­ing of the Mas­ter’s teach­ing.

• Judas Iscariot was treasurer

139:12.3An­drew ap­pointed Ju­das trea­surer of the twelve, a po­si­tion which he was em­i­nently fit­ted to hold, and up to the time of the be­trayal of his Mas­ter he dis­charged the re­spon­si­bil­i­ties of his of­fice hon­estly, faith­fully, and most ef­fi­ciently.

• chosen family of Jesus’ advisers
• Jesus › gave a. authority over all things temporal regarding the kingdom

140:2.2“My Fa­ther, I now bring to you these men, my mes­sen­gers. From among our chil­dren on earth I have cho­sen these twelve to go forth to rep­re­sent me as I came forth to rep­re­sent you. Love them and be with them as you have loved and been with me. And now, my Fa­ther, give these men wis­dom as I place all the af­fairs of the com­ing king­dom in their hands. And I would, if it is your will, tarry on earth a time to help them in their labors for the king­dom. And again, my Fa­ther, I thank you for these men, and I com­mit them to your keep­ing while I go on to fin­ish the work you have given me to do.”

140:2.3When Je­sus had fin­ished pray­ing, the apos­tles re­mained each man bowed in his place. And it was many min­utes be­fore even Pe­ter dared lift up his eyes to look upon the Mas­ter. One by one they em­braced Je­sus, but no man said aught. A great si­lence per­vaded the place while a host of ce­les­tial be­ings looked down upon this solemn and sa­cred scene—the Cre­ator of a uni­verse plac­ing the af­fairs of the di­vine broth­er­hood of man un­der the di­rec­tion of hu­man minds.

• Jesus › obligated a. to abide by practices reflective of Jesus’ ideals
• separate from all other men on earth

140:3.1Then Je­sus spoke, say­ing: “Now that you are am­bas­sadors of my Fa­ther’s king­dom, you have thereby be­come a class of men sep­a­rate and dis­tinct from all other men on earth. You are not now as men among men but as the en­light­ened cit­i­zens of an­other and heav­enly coun­try among the ig­no­rant crea­tures of this dark world. It is not enough that you live as you were be­fore this hour, but hence­forth must you live as those who have tasted the glo­ries of a bet­ter life and have been sent back to earth as am­bas­sadors of the Sov­er­eign of that new and bet­ter world. Of the teacher more is ex­pected than of the pupil; of the mas­ter more is ex­acted than of the ser­vant. Of the cit­i­zens of the heav­enly king­dom more is re­quired than of the cit­i­zens of the earthly rule. Some of the things which I am about to say to you may seem hard, but you have elected to rep­re­sent me in the world even as I now rep­re­sent the Fa­ther; and as my agents on earth you will be ob­li­gated to abide by those teach­ings and prac­tices which are re­flec­tive of my ide­als of mor­tal liv­ing on the worlds of space, and which I ex­em­plify in my earth life of re­veal­ing the Fa­ther who is in heaven.

• Jesus › obligated a. to abide by practices reflective of Jesus’ ideals

140:6.8And then said Je­sus: “But you will stum­ble over my teach­ing be­cause you are wont to in­ter­pret my mes­sage lit­er­ally; you are slow to dis­cern the spirit of my teach­ing. Again must you re­mem­ber that you are my mes­sen­gers; you are be­holden to live your lives as I have in spirit lived mine. You are my per­sonal rep­re­sen­ta­tives; but do not err in ex­pect­ing all men to live as you do in ev­ery par­tic­u­lar. Also must you re­mem­ber that I have sheep not of this flock, and that I am be­holden to them also, to the end that I must pro­vide for them the pat­tern of do­ing the will of God while liv­ing the life of the mor­tal na­ture.”

• Jesus › required a. to dedicate all their possessions to the common cause

140:6.11When Je­sus heard this, he said: “Be will­ing, then, to take up your re­spon­si­bil­i­ties and fol­low me. Do your good deeds in se­cret; when you give alms, let not the left hand know what the right hand does. And when you pray, go apart by your­selves and use not vain rep­e­ti­tions and mean­ing­less phrases. Al­ways re­mem­ber that the Fa­ther knows what you need even be­fore you ask him. And be not given to fast­ing with a sad coun­te­nance to be seen by men. As my cho­sen apos­tles, now set apart for the ser­vice of the king­dom, lay not up for your­selves trea­sures on earth, but by your un­selfish ser­vice lay up for your­selves trea­sures in heaven, for where your trea­sures are, there will your hearts be also.

• Father supplies needs of
• Jesus › required a. to dedicate all their possessions to the common cause
• should not be anxious for their lives

140:6.13And then Thomas asked Je­sus if they should “con­tinue hav­ing ev­ery­thing in com­mon.” Said the Mas­ter: “Yes, my breth­ren, I would that we should live to­gether as one un­der­stand­ing fam­ily. You are in­trusted with a great work, and I crave your un­di­vided ser­vice. You know that it has been well said: ‘No man can serve two mas­ters.’ You can­not sin­cerely wor­ship God and at the same time whole­heart­edly serve mam­mon. Hav­ing now en­listed un­re­servedly in the work of the king­dom, be not anx­ious for your lives; much less be con­cerned with what you shall eat or what you shall drink; nor yet for your bod­ies, what cloth­ing you shall wear. Al­ready have you learned that will­ing hands and earnest hearts shall not go hun­gry. And now, when you pre­pare to de­vote all of your en­er­gies to the work of the king­dom, be as­sured that the Fa­ther will not be un­mind­ful of your needs. Seek first the king­dom of God, and when you have found en­trance thereto, all things need­ful shall be added to you. Be not, there­fore, un­duly anx­ious for the mor­row. Suf­fi­cient for the day is the trou­ble thereof.”

• personal loyalty to Jesus transcended faith in teachings

140:7.8Though the apos­tles failed to com­pre­hend much of his teach­ing, they did not fail to grasp the sig­nif­i­cance of the charm­ingly beau­ti­ful life he lived with them.

• forbidden to become embroiled in politics

140:8.92. Po­lit­i­cal at­ti­tude. He cau­tioned his apos­tles to be dis­creet in their re­marks con­cern­ing the strained re­la­tions then ex­ist­ing be­tween the Jew­ish peo­ple and the Ro­man gov­ern­ment; he for­bade them to be­come in any way em­broiled in these dif­fi­cul­ties. He was al­ways care­ful to avoid the po­lit­i­cal snares of his en­e­mies, ever mak­ing re­ply, “Ren­der to Cae­sar the things which are Cae­sar’s and to God the things which are God’s.” He re­fused to have his at­ten­tion di­verted from his mis­sion of es­tab­lish­ing a new way of sal­va­tion; he would not per­mit him­self to be con­cerned about any­thing else. In his per­sonal life he was al­ways duly ob­ser­vant of all civil laws and reg­u­la­tions; in all his pub­lic teach­ings he ig­nored the civic, so­cial, and eco­nomic realms. He told the three apos­tles that he was con­cerned only with the prin­ci­ples of man’s in­ner and per­sonal spir­i­tual life.

• not to be imposed on by professional alms-seekers

140:8.12The Mas­ter did not say that men should never en­ter­tain their friends at meat, but he did say that his fol­low­ers should make feasts for the poor and the un­for­tu­nate. Je­sus had a firm sense of jus­tice, but it was al­ways tem­pered with mercy. He did not teach his apos­tles that they were to be im­posed upon by so­cial par­a­sites or pro­fes­sional alms-seek­ers. The near­est he came to mak­ing so­ci­o­log­i­cal pro­nounce­ments was to say, “Judge not, that you be not judged.”

• Jesus › required a. to dedicate all their possessions to the common cause

140:8.16He never taught his fol­low­ers to avoid earthly pos­ses­sions, only his twelve apos­tles. Luke, the physi­cian, was a strong be­liever in so­cial equal­ity, and he did much to in­ter­pret Je­sus’ say­ings in har­mony with his per­sonal be­liefs. Je­sus never per­son­ally di­rected his fol­low­ers to adopt a com­mu­nal mode of life; he made no pro­nounce­ment of any sort re­gard­ing such mat­ters.

• majority were rugged fishermen

140:8.20Je­sus did not at­tack the teach­ings of the He­brew proph­ets or the Greek moral­ists. The Mas­ter rec­og­nized the many good things which these great teach­ers stood for, but he had come down to earth to teach some­thing ad­di­tional, “the vol­un­tary con­for­mity of man’s will to God’s will.” Je­sus did not want sim­ply to pro­duce a re­li­gious man, a mor­tal wholly oc­cu­pied with re­li­gious feel­ings and ac­tu­ated only by spir­i­tual im­pulses. Could you have had but one look at him, you would have known that Je­sus was a real man of great ex­pe­ri­ence in the things of this world. The teach­ings of Je­sus in this re­spect have been grossly per­verted and much mis­rep­re­sented all down through the cen­turies of the Chris­tian era; you have also held per­verted ideas about the Mas­ter’s meek­ness and hu­mil­ity. What he aimed at in his life ap­pears to have been a su­perb self-re­spect. He only ad­vised man to hum­ble him­self that he might be­come truly ex­alted; what he re­ally aimed at was true hu­mil­ity to­ward God. He placed great value upon sin­cer­ity—a pure heart. Fi­delity was a car­di­nal virtue in his es­ti­mate of char­ac­ter, while cour­age was the very heart of his teach­ings. “Fear not” was his watch­word, and pa­tient en­durance his ideal of strength of char­ac­ter. The teach­ings of Je­sus con­sti­tute a re­li­gion of valor, cour­age, and hero­ism. And this is just why he chose as his per­sonal rep­re­sen­ta­tives twelve com­mon­place men, the ma­jor­ity of whom were rugged, vir­ile, and manly fish­er­men.

• religion to be exclusive business of

140:8.30Je­sus did not teach his apos­tles that re­li­gion is man’s only earthly pur­suit; that was the Jew­ish idea of serv­ing God. But he did in­sist that re­li­gion was the ex­clu­sive busi­ness of the twelve. Je­sus taught noth­ing to de­ter his be­liev­ers from the pur­suit of gen­uine cul­ture; he only de­tracted from the tra­di­tion-bound re­li­gious schools of Je­ru­sa­lem. He was lib­eral, big-hearted, learned, and tol­er­ant. Self-con­scious piety had no place in his phi­los­o­phy of righ­teous liv­ing.

• consecration charge

140:9.2Je­sus re­viewed many fea­tures of the or­di­na­tion ser­mon, de­liv­ered on this same spot, and then, call­ing them be­fore him one by one, he com­mis­sioned them to go forth in the world as his rep­re­sen­ta­tives. The Mas­ter’s con­se­cra­tion charge was: “Go into all the world and preach the glad tid­ings of the king­dom. Lib­er­ate spir­i­tual cap­tives, com­fort the op­pressed, and min­is­ter to the af­flicted. Freely you have re­ceived, freely give.”

• Jesus › did not reveal plans to a.

141:0.1On the first day of the week, Jan­uary 19, A.D. 27, Je­sus and the twelve apos­tles made ready to de­part from their head­quar­ters in Beth­saida. The twelve knew noth­ing of their Mas­ter’s plans ex­cept that they were go­ing up to Je­ru­sa­lem to at­tend the Pass­over feast in April, and that it was the in­ten­tion to jour­ney by way of the Jor­dan val­ley. They did not get away from Zeb­e­dee’s house un­til near noon be­cause the fam­i­lies of the apos­tles and oth­ers of the dis­ci­ples had come to say good-bye and wish them well in the new work they were about to be­gin.

• relations with John’s apostles

141:1.4Many of those who came from Perea and Judea had been bap­tized by John and were in­ter­ested in find­ing out more about Je­sus’ teach­ings. The apos­tles made much prog­ress in teach­ing the dis­ci­ples of John inas­much as they did not in any way de­tract from John’s preach­ing, and since they did not at this time even bap­tize their new dis­ci­ples. But it was al­ways a stum­bling stone to John’s fol­low­ers that Je­sus, if he were all that John had an­nounced, did noth­ing to get him out of prison. John’s dis­ci­ples never could un­der­stand why Je­sus did not pre­vent the cruel death of their beloved leader.

141:1.5From night to night An­drew care­fully in­structed his fel­low apos­tles in the del­i­cate and dif­fi­cult task of get­ting along smoothly with the fol­low­ers of John the Bap­tist. Dur­ing this first year of Je­sus’ pub­lic min­istry more than three fourths of his fol­low­ers had pre­vi­ously fol­lowed John and had re­ceived his bap­tism. This en­tire year of A.D. 27 was spent in qui­etly tak­ing over John’s work in Perea and Judea.

• beliefs of apostles › Messiah would sit on throne of David

141:2.1The night be­fore they left Pella, Je­sus gave the apos­tles some fur­ther in­struc­tion with re­gard to the new king­dom. Said the Mas­ter: “You have been taught to look for the com­ing of the king­dom of God, and now I come an­nounc­ing that this long-looked-for king­dom is near at hand, even that it is al­ready here and in our midst. In ev­ery king­dom there must be a king seated upon his throne and de­cree­ing the laws of the realm. And so have you de­vel­oped a con­cept of the king­dom of heaven as a glo­ri­fied rule of the Jew­ish peo­ple over all the peo­ples of the earth with Mes­siah sit­ting on David’s throne and from this place of mirac­u­lous power pro­mul­gat­ing the laws of all the world. But, my chil­dren, you see not with the eye of faith, and you hear not with the un­der­stand­ing of the spirit. I de­clare that the king­dom of heaven is the re­al­iza­tion and ac­knowl­edg­ment of God’s rule within the hearts of men. True, there is a King in this king­dom, and that King is my Fa­ther and your Fa­ther. We are in­deed his loyal sub­jects, but far tran­scend­ing that fact is the trans­form­ing truth that we are his sons. In my life this truth is to be­come man­i­fest to all. Our Fa­ther also sits upon a throne, but not one made with hands. The throne of the In­fi­nite is the eter­nal dwell­ing place of the Fa­ther in the heaven of heav­ens; he fills all things and pro­claims his laws to uni­verses upon uni­verses. And the Fa­ther also rules within the hearts of his chil­dren on earth by the spirit which he has sent to live within the souls of mor­tal men.

• Wednesdays were rest days for

141:3.1The Mas­ter and his apos­tles re­mained near Am­athus for al­most three weeks. The apos­tles con­tin­ued to preach twice daily to the mul­ti­tude, and Je­sus preached each Sab­bath af­ter­noon. It be­came im­pos­si­ble to con­tinue the Wednes­day play­time; so An­drew ar­ranged that two apos­tles should rest each day of the six days in the week, while all were on duty dur­ing the Sab­bath ser­vices.

• relations with John’s apostles

141:3.3An­drew was much oc­cu­pied with the task of ad­just­ing the con­stantly re­cur­ring mis­un­der­stand­ings and dis­agree­ments be­tween the dis­ci­ples of John and the newer dis­ci­ples of Je­sus. Se­ri­ous sit­u­a­tions would arise ev­ery few days, but An­drew, with the as­sis­tance of his apos­tolic as­so­ciates, man­aged to in­duce the con­tend­ing par­ties to come to some sort of agree­ment, at least tem­porar­ily. Je­sus re­fused to par­tic­i­pate in any of these con­fer­ences; nei­ther would he give any ad­vice about the proper ad­just­ment of these dif­fi­cul­ties. He never once of­fered a sug­ges­tion as to how the apos­tles should solve these per­plex­ing prob­lems. When An­drew came to Je­sus with these ques­tions, he would al­ways say: “It is not wise for the host to par­tic­i­pate in the fam­ily trou­bles of his guests; a wise par­ent never takes sides in the petty quar­rels of his own chil­dren.”

• called Jesus “Master”

141:3.5Je­sus of Naz­a­reth was in­deed a strong and force­ful per­son­al­ity; he was an in­tel­lec­tual power and a spir­i­tual stronghold. His per­son­al­ity not only ap­pealed to the spir­i­tu­ally minded women among his fol­low­ers, but also to the ed­u­cated and in­tel­lec­tual Nicode­mus and to the hardy Ro­man sol­dier, the cap­tain sta­tioned on guard at the cross, who, when he had fin­ished watch­ing the Mas­ter die, said, “Truly, this was a Son of God.” And red-blooded, rugged Galilean fish­er­men called him Mas­ter.

• ministry to the sick

141:4.4At this same time Je­sus be­gan to teach the twelve more fully con­cern­ing their mis­sion “to com­fort the af­flicted and min­is­ter to the sick.” The Mas­ter taught them much about the whole man—the union of body, mind, and spirit to form the in­di­vid­ual man or woman. Je­sus told his as­so­ciates about the three forms of af­flic­tion they would meet and went on to ex­plain how they should min­is­ter to all who suf­fer the sor­rows of hu­man sick­ness. He taught them to rec­og­nize:

• relations with John’s apostles

141:6.5The apos­tles made great prog­ress dur­ing the so­journ at Am­athus. But they were very much dis­ap­pointed that Je­sus would give them no sug­ges­tions about deal­ing with John’s dis­ci­ples. Even in the im­por­tant mat­ter of bap­tism, all that Je­sus said was: “John did in­deed bap­tize with wa­ter, but when you en­ter the king­dom of heaven, you shall be bap­tized with the Spirit.”

• religion to be exclusive business of

141:7.4The Mas­ter sought to im­press upon all teach­ers of the gospel of the king­dom that their only busi­ness was to re­veal God to the in­di­vid­ual man as his Fa­ther—to lead this in­di­vid­ual man to be­come son-con­scious; then to pre­sent this same man to God as his faith son. Both of these es­sen­tial rev­e­la­tions are ac­com­plished in Je­sus. He be­came, in­deed, “the way, the truth, and the life.” The re­li­gion of Je­sus was wholly based on the liv­ing of his be­stowal life on earth. When Je­sus de­parted from this world, he left be­hind no books, laws, or other forms of hu­man or­ga­ni­za­tion af­fect­ing the re­li­gious life of the in­di­vid­ual.

• Jesus › obligated a. to abide by practices reflective of Jesus’ ideals

142:7.2Je­sus sought first to make plain to his apos­tles that he him­self was on earth liv­ing a unique life in the flesh, and that they, the twelve, had been called to par­tic­i­pate in this be­stowal ex­pe­ri­ence of the Son of Man; and as such cowork­ers, they, too, must share in many of the spe­cial re­stric­tions and obli­ga­tions of the en­tire be­stowal ex­pe­ri­ence. There was a veiled in­ti­ma­tion that the Son of Man was the only per­son who had ever lived on earth who could si­mul­ta­ne­ously see into the very heart of God and into the very depths of man’s soul.

• relations with John’s apostles

143:3.1About this time a state of great ner­vous and emo­tional ten­sion de­vel­oped among the apos­tles and their im­me­di­ate dis­ci­ple as­so­ciates. They had hardly be­come ac­cus­tomed to liv­ing and work­ing to­gether. They were ex­pe­ri­enc­ing in­creas­ing dif­fi­cul­ties in main­tain­ing har­mo­nious re­la­tions with John’s dis­ci­ples. The con­tact with the gen­tiles and the Samar­i­tans was a great trial to these Jews. And be­sides all this, the re­cent ut­ter­ances of Je­sus had aug­mented their dis­turbed state of mind. An­drew was al­most be­side him­self; he did not know what next to do, and so he went to the Mas­ter with his prob­lems and per­plex­i­ties. When Je­sus had lis­tened to the apos­tolic chief re­late his trou­bles, he said: “An­drew, you can­not talk men out of their per­plex­i­ties when they reach such a stage of in­volve­ment, and when so many per­sons with strong feel­ings are con­cerned. I can­not do what you ask of me—I will not par­tic­i­pate in these per­sonal so­cial dif­fi­cul­ties—but I will join you in the en­joy­ment of a three-day pe­riod of rest and re­lax­ation. Go to your breth­ren and an­nounce that all of you are to go with me up on Mount Sartaba, where I de­sire to rest for a day or two.

• relations with John’s apostles

143:3.5When they went up the moun­tain, An­drew’s head was full of prob­lems. John was in­or­di­nately per­plexed in his heart. James was griev­ously trou­bled in his soul. Mat­thew was hard pressed for funds inas­much as they had been so­journ­ing among the gen­tiles. Pe­ter was over­wrought and had re­cently been more tem­per­a­men­tal than usual. Ju­das was suf­fer­ing from a pe­ri­odic at­tack of sen­si­tive­ness and self­ish­ness. Si­mon was un­usu­ally up­set in his ef­forts to rec­on­cile his pa­tri­o­tism with the love of the broth­er­hood of man. Philip was more and more non­plused by the way things were go­ing. Na­than­iel had been less hu­mor­ous since they had come in con­tact with the gen­tile pop­u­la­tions, and Thomas was in the midst of a se­vere sea­son of de­pres­sion. Only the twins were nor­mal and un­per­turbed. All of them were ex­ceed­ingly per­plexed about how to get along peace­ably with John’s dis­ci­ples.

• relations with John’s apostles

143:3.7Their re­turn from this hol­i­day marked the be­gin­ning of a pe­riod of greatly im­proved re­la­tions with the fol­low­ers of John. Many of the twelve re­ally gave way to mirth when they noted the changed state of ev­ery­body’s mind and ob­served the free­dom from ner­vous ir­ri­tabil­ity which had come to them as a re­sult of their three days’ va­ca­tion from the rou­tine du­ties of life. There is al­ways dan­ger that mo­not­ony of hu­man con­tact will greatly mul­ti­ply per­plex­i­ties and mag­nify dif­fi­cul­ties.

• personal loyalty to Jesus transcended faith in teachings

143:4.3The an­tag­o­nisms be­tween the Jews and the Samar­i­tans were time-hon­ored and his­toric; in­creas­ingly since the days of Alexan­der they had had no deal­ings with each other. The twelve apos­tles were not averse to preach­ing in the Greek and other gen­tile cities of the De­capo­lis and Syria, but it was a se­vere test of their loy­alty to the Mas­ter when he said, “Let us go into Samaria.” But in the year and more they had been with Je­sus, they had de­vel­oped a form of per­sonal loy­alty which tran­scended even their faith in his teach­ings and their prej­u­dices against the Samar­i­tans.

• beliefs of apostles › women not equal to men

143:5.11The apos­tles never ceased to be shocked by Je­sus’ will­ing­ness to talk with women, women of ques­tion­able char­ac­ter, even im­moral women. It was very dif­fi­cult for Je­sus to teach his apos­tles that women, even so-called im­moral women, have souls which can choose God as their Fa­ther, thereby be­com­ing daugh­ters of God and can­di­dates for life ev­er­last­ing. Even nine­teen cen­turies later many show the same un­will­ing­ness to grasp the Mas­ter’s teach­ings. Even the Chris­tian re­li­gion has been per­sis­tently built up around the fact of the death of Christ in­stead of around the truth of his life. The world should be more con­cerned with his happy and God-re­veal­ing life than with his tragic and sor­row­ful death.

• relations with John’s apostles

144:0.2There were a num­ber of rea­sons why Je­sus and his apos­tles were in re­tire­ment at this time on the bor­ders of Samaria and the De­capo­lis. The Je­ru­sa­lem re­li­gious rulers were very an­tag­o­nis­tic; Herod An­tipas still held John in prison, fear­ing ei­ther to re­lease or ex­e­cute him, while he con­tin­ued to en­ter­tain sus­pi­cions that John and Je­sus were in some way as­so­ci­ated. These con­di­tions made it un­wise to plan for ag­gres­sive work in ei­ther Judea or Gal­i­lee. There was a third rea­son: the slowly aug­ment­ing ten­sion be­tween the lead­ers of John’s dis­ci­ples and the apos­tles of Je­sus, which grew worse with the in­creas­ing num­ber of be­liev­ers.

• did not grasp Jesus’ teaching
• personal loyalty to Jesus transcended faith in teachings

144:1.1As time passed, the twelve be­came more de­voted to Je­sus and in­creas­ingly com­mit­ted to the work of the king­dom. Their de­vo­tion was in large part a mat­ter of per­sonal loy­alty. They did not grasp his many-sided teach­ing; they did not fully com­pre­hend the na­ture of Je­sus or the sig­nif­i­cance of his be­stowal on earth.

• did not grasp Jesus’ teaching

144:1.7Dur­ing these Sep­tem­ber weeks they rested, vis­ited, re­counted their ex­pe­ri­ences since Je­sus first called them to ser­vice, and en­gaged in an earnest ef­fort to co-or­di­nate what the Mas­ter had so far taught them. In a mea­sure they all sensed that this would be their last op­por­tu­nity for pro­longed rest. They re­al­ized that their next pub­lic ef­fort in ei­ther Judea or Gal­i­lee would mark the be­gin­ning of the fi­nal procla­ma­tion of the com­ing king­dom, but they had lit­tle or no set­tled idea as to what the king­dom would be when it came. John and An­drew thought the king­dom had al­ready come; Pe­ter and James be­lieved that it was yet to come; Na­than­iel and Thomas frankly con­fessed they were puz­zled; Mat­thew, Philip, and Si­mon Ze­lo­tes were un­cer­tain and con­fused; the twins were bliss­fully ig­no­rant of the con­tro­versy; and Ju­das Is­car­iot was silent, non­com­mit­tal.

144:6.1Around the first of Oc­to­ber, Philip and some of his fel­low apos­tles were in a near-by vil­lage buy­ing food when they met some of the apos­tles of John the Bap­tist. As a re­sult of this chance meet­ing in the mar­ket place there came about a three weeks’ con­fer­ence at the Gil­boa camp be­tween the apos­tles of Je­sus and the apos­tles of John, for John had re­cently ap­pointed twelve of his lead­ers to be apos­tles, fol­low­ing the prece­dent of Je­sus. John had done this in re­sponse to the urg­ing of Ab­ner, the chief of his loyal sup­port­ers. Je­sus was pres­ent at the Gil­boa camp through­out the first week of this joint con­fer­ence but ab­sented him­self the last two weeks.

144:6.2By the be­gin­ning of the sec­ond week of this month, Ab­ner had as­sem­bled all of his as­so­ciates at the Gil­boa camp and was pre­pared to go into coun­cil with the apos­tles of Je­sus. For three weeks these twenty-four men were in ses­sion three times a day and for six days each week. The first week Je­sus min­gled with them be­tween their forenoon, af­ter­noon, and evening ses­sions. They wanted the Mas­ter to meet with them and pre­side over their joint de­lib­er­a­tions, but he stead­fastly re­fused to par­tic­i­pate in their dis­cus­sions, though he did con­sent to speak to them on three oc­ca­sions. These talks by Je­sus to the twenty-four were on sym­pa­thy, co-op­er­a­tion, and tol­er­ance.

144:6.3An­drew and Ab­ner al­ter­nated in pre­sid­ing over these joint meet­ings of the two apos­tolic groups. These men had many dif­fi­cul­ties to dis­cuss and nu­mer­ous prob­lems to solve. Again and again would they take their trou­bles to Je­sus, only to hear him say: “I am con­cerned only with your per­sonal and purely re­li­gious prob­lems. I am the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Fa­ther to the in­di­vid­ual, not to the group. If you are in per­sonal dif­fi­culty in your re­la­tions with God, come to me, and I will hear you and coun­sel you in the so­lu­tion of your prob­lem. But when you en­ter upon the co-or­di­na­tion of di­ver­gent hu­man in­ter­pre­ta­tions of re­li­gious ques­tions and upon the so­cial­iza­tion of re­li­gion, you are des­tined to solve all such prob­lems by your own de­ci­sions. Al­beit, I am ever sym­pa­thetic and al­ways in­ter­ested, and when you ar­rive at your con­clu­sions touch­ing these mat­ters of non­spir­i­tual im­port, pro­vided you are all agreed, then I pledge in ad­vance my full ap­proval and hearty co-op­er­a­tion. And now, in or­der to leave you un­ham­pered in your de­lib­er­a­tions, I am leav­ing you for two weeks. Be not anx­ious about me, for I will re­turn to you. I will be about my Fa­ther’s busi­ness, for we have other realms be­sides this one.”

144:6.4Af­ter thus speak­ing, Je­sus went down the moun­tain­side, and they saw him no more for two full weeks. And they never knew where he went or what he did dur­ing these days. It was some time be­fore the twenty-four could set­tle down to the se­ri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion of their prob­lems, they were so dis­con­certed by the ab­sence of the Mas­ter. How­ever, within a week they were again in the heart of their dis­cus­sions, and they could not go to Je­sus for help.

144:6.5The first item the group agreed upon was the adop­tion of the prayer which Je­sus had so re­cently taught them. It was unan­i­mously voted to ac­cept this prayer as the one to be taught be­liev­ers by both groups of apos­tles.

144:6.6They next de­cided that, as long as John lived, whether in prison or out, both groups of twelve apos­tles would go on with their work, and that joint meet­ings for one week would be held ev­ery three months at places to be agreed upon from time to time.

144:6.7But the most se­ri­ous of all their prob­lems was the ques­tion of bap­tism. Their dif­fi­cul­ties were all the more ag­gra­vated be­cause Je­sus had re­fused to make any pro­nounce­ment upon the sub­ject. They fi­nally agreed: As long as John lived, or un­til they might jointly mod­ify this de­ci­sion, only the apos­tles of John would bap­tize be­liev­ers, and only the apos­tles of Je­sus would fi­nally in­struct the new dis­ci­ples. Ac­cord­ingly, from that time un­til af­ter the death of John, two of the apos­tles of John ac­com­pa­nied Je­sus and his apos­tles to bap­tize be­liev­ers, for the joint coun­cil had unan­i­mously voted that bap­tism was to be­come the ini­tial step in the out­ward al­liance with the af­fairs of the king­dom.

144:6.8It was next agreed, in case of the death of John, that the apos­tles of John would pre­sent them­selves to Je­sus and be­come sub­ject to his di­rec­tion, and that they would bap­tize no more un­less au­tho­rized by Je­sus or his apos­tles.

144:6.9And then was it voted that, in case of John’s death, the apos­tles of Je­sus would be­gin to bap­tize with wa­ter as the em­blem of the bap­tism of the di­vine Spirit. As to whether or not re­pen­tance should be at­tached to the preach­ing of bap­tism was left op­tional; no de­ci­sion was made bind­ing upon the group. John’s apos­tles preached, “Re­pent and be bap­tized.” Je­sus’ apos­tles pro­claimed, “Be­lieve and be bap­tized.”

144:6.10And this is the story of the first at­tempt of Je­sus’ fol­low­ers to co-or­di­nate di­ver­gent ef­forts, com­pose dif­fer­ences of opin­ion, or­ga­nize group un­der­tak­ings, leg­is­late on out­ward ob­ser­vances, and so­cial­ize per­sonal re­li­gious prac­tices.

144:6.11Many other mi­nor mat­ters were con­sid­ered and their so­lu­tions unan­i­mously agreed upon. These twenty-four men had a truly re­mark­able ex­pe­ri­ence these two weeks when they were com­pelled to face prob­lems and com­pose dif­fi­cul­ties with­out Je­sus. They learned to dif­fer, to de­bate, to con­tend, to pray, and to com­pro­mise, and through­out it all to re­main sym­pa­thetic with the other per­son’s view­point and to main­tain at least some de­gree of tol­er­ance for his hon­est opin­ions.

144:6.12On the af­ter­noon of their fi­nal dis­cus­sion of fi­nan­cial ques­tions, Je­sus re­turned, heard of their de­lib­er­a­tions, lis­tened to their de­ci­sions, and said: “These, then, are your con­clu­sions, and I shall help you each to carry out the spirit of your united de­ci­sions.”

144:6.13Two months and a half from this time John was ex­e­cuted, and through­out this pe­riod the apos­tles of John re­mained with Je­sus and the twelve. They all worked to­gether and bap­tized be­liev­ers dur­ing this sea­son of la­bor in the cities of the De­capo­lis. The Gil­boa camp was bro­ken up on Novem­ber 2, A.D. 27.

144:7.1Through­out the months of Novem­ber and De­cem­ber, Je­sus and the twenty-four worked qui­etly in the Greek cities of the De­capo­lis, chiefly in Scythopo­lis, Gerasa, Abila, and Gadara. This was re­ally the end of that pre­lim­i­nary pe­riod of tak­ing over John’s work and or­ga­ni­za­tion. Al­ways does the so­cial­ized re­li­gion of a new rev­e­la­tion pay the price of com­pro­mise with the es­tab­lished forms and us­ages of the pre­ced­ing re­li­gion which it seeks to sal­vage. Bap­tism was the price which the fol­low­ers of Je­sus paid in or­der to carry with them, as a so­cial­ized re­li­gious group, the fol­low­ers of John the Bap­tist. John’s fol­low­ers, in join­ing Je­sus’ fol­low­ers, gave up just about ev­ery­thing ex­cept wa­ter bap­tism.

144:7.2Je­sus did lit­tle pub­lic teach­ing on this mis­sion to the cities of the De­capo­lis. He spent con­sid­er­able time teach­ing the twenty-four and had many spe­cial ses­sions with John’s twelve apos­tles. In time they be­came more un­der­stand­ing as to why Je­sus did not go to visit John in prison, and why he made no ef­fort to se­cure his re­lease. But they never could un­der­stand why Je­sus did no mar­velous works, why he re­fused to pro­duce out­ward signs of his di­vine au­thor­ity. Be­fore com­ing to the Gil­boa camp, they had be­lieved in Je­sus mostly be­cause of John’s tes­ti­mony, but soon they were be­gin­ning to be­lieve as a re­sult of their own con­tact with the Mas­ter and his teach­ings.

144:7.3For these two months the group worked most of the time in pairs, one of Je­sus’ apos­tles go­ing out with one of John’s. The apos­tle of John bap­tized, the apos­tle of Je­sus in­structed, while they both preached the gospel of the king­dom as they un­der­stood it. And they won many souls among these gen­tiles and apos­tate Jews.

144:7.4Ab­ner, the chief of John’s apos­tles, be­came a de­vout be­liever in Je­sus and was later on made the head of a group of sev­enty teach­ers whom the Mas­ter com­mis­sioned to preach the gospel.

• apostles of Jesus
• intoxicated by healing of 683 at sundown

145:4.1Through­out the evening fol­low­ing this great out­burst of heal­ing, the re­joic­ing and happy throng over­ran Zeb­e­dee’s home, and the apos­tles of Je­sus were keyed up to the high­est pitch of emo­tional en­thu­si­asm. From a hu­man stand­point, this was prob­a­bly the great­est day of all the great days of their as­so­ci­a­tion with Je­sus. At no time be­fore or af­ter did their hopes surge to such heights of con­fi­dent ex­pec­ta­tion. Je­sus had told them only a few days be­fore, and when they were yet within the bor­ders of Samaria, that the hour had come when the king­dom was to be pro­claimed in power, and now their eyes had seen what they sup­posed was the ful­fill­ment of that prom­ise. They were thrilled by the vi­sion of what was to come if this amaz­ing man­i­fes­ta­tion of heal­ing power was just the be­gin­ning. Their lin­ger­ing doubts of Je­sus’ di­vin­ity were ban­ished. They were lit­er­ally in­tox­i­cated with the ec­stasy of their be­wil­dered en­chant­ment.

• Jesus › subjected to repeated disappointment, testing

145:4.3And again did twelve dis­ap­pointed, per­plexed, and heart-sor­row­ing men go to their rest; few of them, ex­cept the twins, slept much that night. No sooner would the Mas­ter do some­thing to cheer the souls and glad­den the hearts of his apos­tles, than he seemed im­me­di­ately to dash their hopes in pieces and ut­terly to de­mol­ish the foun­da­tions of their cour­age and en­thu­si­asm. As these be­wil­dered fish­er­men looked into each other’s eyes, there was but one thought: “We can­not un­der­stand him. What does all this mean?”

• urged Jesus to perform healings

145:5.5Mean­while, early Sun­day morn­ing, other crowds of af­flicted souls and many cu­rios­ity seek­ers be­gan to gather about the house of Zeb­e­dee. They clam­ored to see Je­sus. An­drew and the apos­tles were so per­plexed that, while Si­mon Ze­lo­tes talked to the as­sem­bly, An­drew, with sev­eral of his as­so­ciates, went to find Je­sus. When An­drew had lo­cated Je­sus in com­pany with the three, he said: “Mas­ter, why do you leave us alone with the mul­ti­tude? Be­hold, all men seek you; never be­fore have so many sought af­ter your teach­ing. Even now the house is sur­rounded by those who have come from near and far be­cause of your mighty works. Will you not re­turn with us to min­is­ter to them?”

• apostles of John the Baptist accompanied

146:0.1The first pub­lic preach­ing tour of Gal­i­lee be­gan on Sun­day, Jan­uary 18, A.D. 28, and con­tin­ued for about two months, end­ing with the re­turn to Ca­per­naum on March 17. On this tour Je­sus and the twelve apos­tles, as­sisted by the for­mer apos­tles of John, preached the gospel and bap­tized be­liev­ers in Rim­mon, Jo­ta­p­ata, Ramah, Ze­bu­lun, Iron, Gis­chala, Cho­ra­zin, Madon, Cana, Nain, and En­dor. In these cities they tar­ried and taught, while in many other smaller towns they pro­claimed the gospel of the king­dom as they passed through.

• apostles of John the Baptist accompanied

146:3.9The apos­tles con­tin­ued to preach and bap­tize be­liev­ers, while they kept up the prac­tice of vis­it­ing from house to house, com­fort­ing the down­cast and min­is­ter­ing to the sick and af­flicted. The apos­tolic or­ga­ni­za­tion was ex­panded in that each of Je­sus’ apos­tles now had one of John’s as an as­so­ciate; Ab­ner was the as­so­ciate of An­drew; and this plan pre­vailed un­til they went down to Je­ru­sa­lem for the next Pass­over.

• urged Jesus to perform healings

146:4.6From Iron they went to Gis­chala, spend­ing two days pro­claim­ing the gospel, and then de­parted for Cho­ra­zin, where they spent al­most a week preach­ing the good news; but they were un­able to win many be­liev­ers for the king­dom in Cho­ra­zin. In no place where Je­sus had taught had he met with such a gen­eral re­jec­tion of his mes­sage. The so­journ at Cho­ra­zin was very de­press­ing to most of the apos­tles, and An­drew and Ab­ner had much dif­fi­culty in up­hold­ing the cour­age of their as­so­ciates. And so, pass­ing qui­etly through Ca­per­naum, they went on to the vil­lage of Madon, where they fared lit­tle bet­ter. There pre­vailed in the minds of most of the apos­tles the idea that their fail­ure to meet with suc­cess in these towns so re­cently vis­ited was due to Je­sus’ in­sis­tence that they re­frain, in their teach­ing and preach­ing, from re­fer­ring to him as a healer. How they wished he would cleanse an­other leper or in some other man­ner so man­i­fest his power as to at­tract the at­ten­tion of the peo­ple! But the Mas­ter was un­moved by their earnest urg­ing.

• relations with John’s apostles

147:2.4When Je­sus and the twelve de­parted for Ca­per­naum, the apos­tles of John did not re­turn with them. Un­der the di­rec­tion of Ab­ner they re­mained in Je­ru­sa­lem and the sur­round­ing coun­try, qui­etly la­bor­ing for the ex­ten­sion of the king­dom, while Je­sus and the twelve re­turned to work in Gal­i­lee. Never again were the twenty-four all to­gether un­til a short time be­fore the com­mis­sion­ing and send­ing forth of the sev­enty evan­ge­lists. But the two groups were co-op­er­a­tive, and not­with­stand­ing their dif­fer­ences of opin­ion, the best of feel­ings pre­vailed.

• urged Jesus to perform healings

147:3.2The apos­tles were some­what rest­less un­der the re­stric­tions im­posed by Je­sus, and John, the young­est of the twelve, was es­pe­cially restive un­der this re­straint. He had brought Je­sus to the pool think­ing that the sight of the as­sem­bled suf­fer­ers would make such an ap­peal to the Mas­ter’s com­pas­sion that he would be moved to per­form a mir­a­cle of heal­ing, and thereby would all Je­ru­sa­lem be as­tounded and pres­ently be won to be­lieve in the gospel of the king­dom. Said John to Je­sus: “Mas­ter, see all of these suf­fer­ing ones; is there noth­ing we can do for them?” And Je­sus replied: “John, why would you tempt me to turn aside from the way I have cho­sen? Why do you go on de­sir­ing to sub­sti­tute the work­ing of won­ders and the heal­ing of the sick for the procla­ma­tion of the gospel of eter­nal truth? My son, I may not do that which you de­sire, but gather to­gether these sick and af­flicted that I may speak words of good cheer and eter­nal com­fort to them.”

• each taught own view of gospel

148:1.2Each of the apos­tolic teach­ers taught his own view of the gospel of the king­dom. They made no ef­fort to teach just alike; there was no stan­dard­ized or dog­matic for­mu­la­tion of the­o­logic doc­trines. Though they all taught the same truth, each apos­tle pre­sented his own per­sonal in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the Mas­ter’s teach­ing. And Je­sus up­held this pre­sen­ta­tion of the di­ver­sity of per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence in the things of the king­dom, un­fail­ingly har­mo­niz­ing and co-or­di­nat­ing these many and di­ver­gent views of the gospel at his weekly ques­tion hours. Not­with­stand­ing this great de­gree of per­sonal lib­erty in mat­ters of teach­ing, Si­mon Pe­ter tended to dom­i­nate the the­ol­ogy of the school of evan­ge­lists. Next to Pe­ter, James Zeb­e­dee ex­erted the great­est per­sonal in­flu­ence.

• called Jesus “Master”

149:2.12Je­sus re­ceived the obe­di­ence of his fol­low­ers with­out ex­act­ing it. Only three men who re­ceived his per­sonal call re­fused to ac­cept the in­vi­ta­tion to dis­ci­ple­ship. He ex­er­cised a pe­cu­liar draw­ing power over men, but he was not dic­ta­to­rial. He com­manded con­fi­dence, and no man ever re­sented his giv­ing a com­mand. He as­sumed ab­so­lute au­thor­ity over his dis­ci­ples, but no one ever ob­jected. He per­mit­ted his fol­low­ers to call him Mas­ter.

• strict rules on working with women

150:2.2It was at Mag­dala that the women first demon­strated their use­ful­ness and vin­di­cated the wis­dom of their choos­ing. An­drew had im­posed rather strict rules upon his as­so­ciates about do­ing per­sonal work with women, es­pe­cially with those of ques­tion­able char­ac­ter. When the party en­tered Mag­dala, these ten women evan­ge­lists were free to en­ter the evil re­sorts and preach the glad tid­ings di­rectly to all their in­mates. And when vis­it­ing the sick, these women were able to draw very close in their min­istry to their af­flicted sis­ters. As the re­sult of the min­istry of these ten women (af­ter­ward known as the twelve women) at this place, Mary Mag­da­lene was won for the king­dom. Through a suc­ces­sion of mis­for­tunes and in con­se­quence of the at­ti­tude of rep­u­ta­ble so­ci­ety to­ward women who com­mit such er­rors of judg­ment, this woman had found her­self in one of the ne­far­i­ous re­sorts of Mag­dala. It was Martha and Rachel who made plain to Mary that the doors of the king­dom were open to even such as she. Mary be­lieved the good news and was bap­tized by Pe­ter the next day.

150:4.1The next evening, hav­ing gath­ered to­gether the twelve apos­tles, the apos­tles of John, and the newly com­mis­sioned women’s group, Je­sus said: “You see for your­selves that the har­vest is plen­teous, but the la­bor­ers are few. Let us all, there­fore, pray the Lord of the har­vest that he send forth still more la­bor­ers into his fields. While I re­main to com­fort and in­struct the younger teach­ers, I would send out the older ones two and two that they may pass quickly over all Gal­i­lee preach­ing the gospel of the king­dom while it is yet con­ve­nient and peace­ful.” Then he des­ig­nated the pairs of apos­tles as he de­sired them to go forth, and they were: An­drew and Pe­ter, James and John Zeb­e­dee, Philip and Na­than­iel, Thomas and Mat­thew, James and Ju­das Al­pheus, Si­mon Ze­lo­tes and Ju­das Is­car­iot.

150:4.2Je­sus ar­ranged the date for meet­ing the twelve at Naz­a­reth, and in part­ing, he said: “On this mis­sion go not to any city of the gen­tiles, nei­ther go into Samaria, but go in­stead to the lost sheep of the house of Is­rael. Preach the gospel of the king­dom and pro­claim the sav­ing truth that man is a son of God. Re­mem­ber that the dis­ci­ple is hardly above his mas­ter nor a ser­vant greater than his lord. It is enough for the dis­ci­ple to be equal with his mas­ter and the ser­vant to be­come like his lord. If some peo­ple have dared to call the mas­ter of the house an as­so­ciate of Beelze­bub, how much more shall they so re­gard those of his house­hold! But you should not fear these un­be­liev­ing en­e­mies. I de­clare to you that there is noth­ing cov­ered up that is not go­ing to be re­vealed; there is noth­ing hid­den that shall not be known. What I have taught you pri­vately, that preach with wis­dom in the open. What I have re­vealed to you in the in­ner cham­ber, that you are to pro­claim in due sea­son from the house­tops. And I say to you, my friends and dis­ci­ples, be not afraid of those who can kill the body, but who are not able to de­stroy the soul; rather put your trust in Him who is able to sus­tain the body and save the soul.

150:4.3“Are not two spar­rows sold for a penny? And yet I de­clare that not one of them is for­got­ten in God’s sight. Know you not that the very hairs of your head are all num­bered? Fear not, there­fore; you are of more value than a great many spar­rows. Be not ashamed of my teach­ing; go forth pro­claim­ing peace and good will, but be not de­ceived—peace will not al­ways at­tend your preach­ing. I came to bring peace on earth, but when men re­ject my gift, di­vi­sion and tur­moil re­sult. When all of a fam­ily re­ceive the gospel of the king­dom, truly peace abides in that house; but when some of the fam­ily en­ter the king­dom and oth­ers re­ject the gospel, such di­vi­sion can pro­duce only sor­row and sad­ness. La­bor earnestly to save the whole fam­ily lest a man’s foes be­come those of his own house­hold. But, when you have done your ut­most for all of ev­ery fam­ily, I de­clare to you that he who loves fa­ther or mother more than this gospel is not wor­thy of the king­dom.”

150:4.4When the twelve had heard these words, they made ready to de­part. And they did not again come to­gether un­til the time of their as­sem­bling at Naz­a­reth to meet with Je­sus and the other dis­ci­ples as the Mas­ter had ar­ranged.

• miracle-minded

152:1.2Since there was much ag­i­ta­tion in Ca­per­naum against Je­sus, he called the fam­ily to­gether and ex­plained that the maiden had been in a state of coma fol­low­ing a long fever, and that he had merely aroused her, that he had not raised her from the dead. He like­wise ex­plained all this to his apos­tles, but it was fu­tile; they all be­lieved he had raised the lit­tle girl from the dead. What Je­sus said in ex­pla­na­tion of many of these ap­par­ent mir­a­cles had lit­tle ef­fect on his fol­low­ers. They were mir­a­cle-minded and lost no op­por­tu­nity to as­cribe an­other won­der to Je­sus. Je­sus and the apos­tles re­turned to Beth­saida af­ter he had specif­i­cally charged all of them that they should tell no man.

• beliefs of apostles › blinded by belief in temporal kingdom, materialistic Messiah
• serious, sober, chastened group of disillusioned men

152:6.1While rest­ing at the home of a wealthy be­liever in the Gen­nesaret re­gion, Je­sus held in­for­mal con­fer­ences with the twelve ev­ery af­ter­noon. The am­bas­sadors of the king­dom were a se­ri­ous, sober, and chas­tened group of dis­il­lu­sioned men. But even af­ter all that had hap­pened, and as sub­se­quent events dis­closed, these twelve men were not yet fully de­liv­ered from their in­bred and long-cher­ished no­tions about the com­ing of the Jew­ish Mes­siah. Events of the pre­ced­ing few weeks had moved too swiftly for these as­ton­ished fish­er­men to grasp their full sig­nif­i­cance. It re­quires time for men and women to ef­fect rad­i­cal and ex­ten­sive changes in their ba­sic and fun­da­men­tal con­cepts of so­cial con­duct, philo­sophic at­ti­tudes, and re­li­gious con­vic­tions.

• Jesus › subjected to repeated disappointment, testing

153:1.3The Mas­ter well knew that many of his fol­low­ers were slowly but surely prepar­ing their minds fi­nally to re­ject him. He like­wise knew that many of his dis­ci­ples were slowly but cer­tainly pass­ing through that train­ing of mind and that dis­ci­pline of soul which would en­able them to tri­umph over doubt and coura­geously to as­sert their full-fledged faith in the gospel of the king­dom. Je­sus fully un­der­stood how men pre­pare them­selves for the de­ci­sions of a cri­sis and the per­for­mance of sud­den deeds of coura­geous choos­ing by the slow pro­cess of the re­it­er­ated choos­ing be­tween the re­cur­ring sit­u­a­tions of good and evil. He sub­jected his cho­sen mes­sen­gers to re­peated re­hearsals in dis­ap­point­ment and pro­vided them with fre­quent and test­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties for choos­ing be­tween the right and the wrong way of meet­ing spir­i­tual tri­als. He knew he could de­pend on his fol­low­ers, when they met the fi­nal test, to make their vi­tal de­ci­sions in ac­cor­dance with prior and ha­bit­ual men­tal at­ti­tudes and spirit re­ac­tions.

• feared for their safety
• Jesus › subjected to repeated disappointment, testing

153:5.1Time and again had Je­sus dashed to pieces the hopes of his apos­tles, re­peat­edly had he crushed their fond­est ex­pec­ta­tions, but no time of dis­ap­point­ment or sea­son of sor­row had ever equaled that which now over­took them. And, too, there was now ad­mixed with their de­pres­sion a real fear for their safety. They were all sur­pris­ingly star­tled by the sud­den­ness and com­plete­ness of the de­ser­tion of the pop­u­lace. They were also some­what fright­ened and dis­con­certed by the un­ex­pected bold­ness and as­sertive de­ter­mi­na­tion ex­hib­ited by the Phar­isees who had come down from Je­ru­sa­lem. But most of all they were be­wil­dered by Je­sus’ sud­den change of tac­tics. Un­der or­di­nary cir­cum­stances they would have wel­comed the ap­pear­ance of this more mil­i­tant at­ti­tude, but com­ing as it did, along with so much that was un­ex­pected, it star­tled them.

• Jesus › forewarned a. of Judas’s betrayal

153:5.4“My beloved, you must re­mem­ber that it is the spirit that quick­ens; the flesh and all that per­tains thereto is of lit­tle profit. The words which I have spo­ken to you are spirit and life. Be of good cheer! I have not de­serted you. Many shall be of­fended by the plain speak­ing of these days. Al­ready you have heard that many of my dis­ci­ples have turned back; they walk no more with me. From the be­gin­ning I knew that these half­hearted be­liev­ers would fall out by the way. Did I not choose you twelve men and set you apart as am­bas­sadors of the king­dom? And now at such a time as this would you also desert? Let each of you look to his own faith, for one of you stands in grave dan­ger.” And when Je­sus had fin­ished speak­ing, Si­mon Pe­ter said: “Yes, Lord, we are sad and per­plexed, but we will never for­sake you. You have taught us the words of eter­nal life. We have be­lieved in you and fol­lowed with you all this time. We will not turn back, for we know that you are sent by God.” And as Pe­ter ceased speak­ing, they all with one ac­cord nod­ded their ap­proval of his pledge of loy­alty.

• Jesus › sent apart to pray

155:5.14All twenty-four of his hear­ers rose to their feet, in­tend­ing to sig­nify their united and loyal re­sponse to this, one of the few emo­tional ap­peals which Je­sus ever made to them, but he raised his hand and stopped them, say­ing: “Go now apart by your­selves, each man alone with the Fa­ther, and there find the un­emo­tional an­swer to my ques­tion, and hav­ing found such a true and sin­cere at­ti­tude of soul, speak that an­swer freely and boldly to my Fa­ther and your Fa­ther, whose in­fi­nite life of love is the very spirit of the re­li­gion we pro­claim.”

• beliefs of apostles › blinded by belief in temporal kingdom, materialistic Messiah
• beliefs of apostles › Jesus was Messiah
• Jesus › subjected to repeated disappointment, testing

157:4.1Since the oc­ca­sions of Je­sus’ bap­tism by John and the turn­ing of the wa­ter into wine at Cana, the apos­tles had, at var­i­ous times, vir­tu­ally ac­cepted him as the Mes­siah. For short pe­ri­ods some of them had truly be­lieved that he was the ex­pected De­liv­erer. But hardly would such hopes spring up in their hearts than the Mas­ter would dash them to pieces by some crush­ing word or dis­ap­point­ing deed. They had long been in a state of tur­moil due to con­flict be­tween the con­cepts of the ex­pected Mes­siah which they held in their minds and the ex­pe­ri­ence of their ex­traor­di­nary as­so­ci­a­tion with this ex­traor­di­nary man which they held in their hearts.

• Jesus › gave a. authority over all things temporal regarding the kingdom

157:4.5Je­sus, still stand­ing, then said to the twelve: “You are my cho­sen am­bas­sadors, but I know that, in the cir­cum­stances, you could not en­ter­tain this be­lief as a re­sult of mere hu­man knowl­edge. This is a rev­e­la­tion of the spirit of my Fa­ther to your in­most souls. And when, there­fore, you make this con­fes­sion by the in­sight of the spirit of my Fa­ther which dwells within you, I am led to de­clare that upon this foun­da­tion will I build the broth­er­hood of the king­dom of heaven. Upon this rock of spir­i­tual re­al­ity will I build the liv­ing tem­ple of spir­i­tual fel­low­ship in the eter­nal re­al­i­ties of my Fa­ther’s king­dom. All the forces of evil and the hosts of sin shall not pre­vail against this hu­man fra­ter­nity of the di­vine spirit. And while my Fa­ther’s spirit shall ever be the di­vine guide and men­tor of all who en­ter the bonds of this spirit fel­low­ship, to you and your suc­ces­sors I now de­liver the keys of the out­ward king­dom—the au­thor­ity over things tem­po­ral—the so­cial and eco­nomic fea­tures of this as­so­ci­a­tion of men and women as fel­lows of the king­dom.” And again he charged them, for the time be­ing, that they should tell no man that he was the Son of God.

• Jesus › believed in faith of a.

157:4.6Je­sus was be­gin­ning to have faith in the loy­alty and in­tegrity of his apos­tles. The Mas­ter con­ceived that a faith which could stand what his cho­sen rep­re­sen­ta­tives had re­cently passed through would un­doubt­edly en­dure the fiery tri­als which were just ahead and emerge from the ap­par­ent wreck­age of all their hopes into the new light of a new dis­pen­sa­tion and thereby be able to go forth to en­lighten a world sit­ting in dark­ness. On this day the Mas­ter be­gan to be­lieve in the faith of his apos­tles, save one.

• Jesus › sent apart to pray

157:4.8And when Je­sus had thus spo­ken, he di­rected the twelve to go apart by them­selves in the hills to seek wis­dom, strength, and spir­i­tual guid­ance un­til the time of the evening meal. And they did as the Mas­ter ad­mon­ished them.

• beliefs of apostles › Jesus was Eternal Son

157:5.1The new and vi­tal fea­ture of Pe­ter’s con­fes­sion was the clear-cut rec­og­ni­tion that Je­sus was the Son of God, of his un­ques­tioned di­vin­ity. Ever since his bap­tism and the wed­ding at Cana these apos­tles had var­i­ously re­garded him as the Mes­siah, but it was not a part of the Jew­ish con­cept of the na­tional de­liv­erer that he should be di­vine. The Jews had not taught that the Mes­siah would spring from di­vin­ity; he was to be the “anointed one,” but hardly had they con­tem­plated him as be­ing “the Son of God.” In the sec­ond con­fes­sion more em­pha­sis was placed upon the com­bined na­ture, the su­per­nal fact that he was the Son of Man and the Son of God, and it was upon this great truth of the union of the hu­man na­ture with the di­vine na­ture that Je­sus de­clared he would build the king­dom of heaven.

• beliefs of apostles › Jesus was Messiah

157:6.2Nei­ther Pe­ter nor the other apos­tles had a very ad­e­quate con­cep­tion of Je­sus’ di­vin­ity. They lit­tle re­al­ized that this was the be­gin­ning of a new epoch in their Mas­ter’s ca­reer on earth, the time when the teacher-healer was be­com­ing the newly con­ceived Mes­siah—the Son of God. From this time on a new note ap­peared in the Mas­ter’s mes­sage. Hence­forth his one ideal of liv­ing was the rev­e­la­tion of the Fa­ther, while his one idea in teach­ing was to pre­sent to his uni­verse the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of that su­preme wis­dom which can only be com­pre­hended by liv­ing it. He came that we all might have life and have it more abun­dantly.

• Jesus › sent apart to pray

157:7.2And that was all An­drew could elicit from Je­sus. Al­ways had there been some strangeness be­tween this Judean and his Galilean breth­ren. Ju­das had been shocked by the death of John the Bap­tist, severely hurt by the Mas­ter’s re­bukes on sev­eral oc­ca­sions, dis­ap­pointed when Je­sus re­fused to be made king, hu­mil­i­ated when he fled from the Phar­isees, cha­grined when he re­fused to ac­cept the chal­lenge of the Phar­isees for a sign, be­wil­dered by the re­fusal of his Mas­ter to re­sort to man­i­fes­ta­tions of power, and now, more re­cently, de­pressed and some­times de­jected by an empty trea­sury. And Ju­das missed the stim­u­lus of the mul­ti­tudes.

• apostles of Jesus

158:0.2In a gen­eral way, Je­sus knew be­fore­hand what was to tran­spire on the moun­tain, and he much de­sired that all his apos­tles might share this ex­pe­ri­ence. It was to fit them for this rev­e­la­tion of him­self that he tar­ried with them at the foot of the moun­tain. But they could not at­tain those spir­i­tual lev­els which would jus­tify their ex­po­sure to the full ex­pe­ri­ence of the vis­i­ta­tion of the ce­les­tial be­ings so soon to ap­pear on earth. And since he could not take all of his as­so­ciates with him, he de­cided to take only the three who were in the habit of ac­com­pa­ny­ing him on such spe­cial vig­ils. Ac­cord­ingly, only Pe­ter, James, and John shared even a part of this unique ex­pe­ri­ence with the Mas­ter.

• rise and fall of faith of

158:1.5The faith of the apos­tles was at a high point at the time of the feed­ing of the five thou­sand, and then it rapidly fell al­most to zero. Now, as a re­sult of the Mas­ter’s ad­mis­sion of his di­vin­ity, the lag­ging faith of the twelve arose in the next few weeks to its high­est pitch, only to un­dergo a pro­gres­sive de­cline. The third re­vival of their faith did not oc­cur un­til af­ter the Mas­ter’s res­ur­rec­tion.

• apostles of Jesus

158:2.5Je­sus did not take Pe­ter, James, and John with him up to the mount of the trans­fig­u­ra­tion be­cause they were in any sense bet­ter pre­pared than the other apos­tles to wit­ness what hap­pened, or be­cause they were spir­i­tu­ally more fit to en­joy such a rare priv­i­lege. Not at all. He well knew that none of the twelve were spir­i­tu­ally qual­i­fied for this ex­pe­ri­ence; there­fore did he take with him only the three apos­tles who were as­signed to ac­com­pany him at those times when he de­sired to be alone to en­joy soli­tary com­mu­nion.

• beliefs of apostles › blinded by belief in temporal kingdom, materialistic Messiah
• desired preference

158:4.4The nine apos­tles were much sur­prised and con­sid­er­ably per­turbed when this man, ac­com­pa­nied by al­most forty other per­sons who were look­ing for Je­sus, sud­denly came upon them. At the time of the ar­rival of this group the nine apos­tles, at least the ma­jor­ity of them, had suc­cumbed to their old temp­ta­tion—that of dis­cussing who should be great­est in the com­ing king­dom; they were busily ar­gu­ing about the prob­a­ble po­si­tions which would be as­signed the in­di­vid­ual apos­tles. They sim­ply could not free them­selves en­tirely from the long-cher­ished idea of the ma­te­rial mis­sion of the Mes­siah. And now that Je­sus him­self had ac­cepted their con­fes­sion that he was in­deed the De­liv­erer—at least he had ad­mit­ted the fact of his di­vin­ity—what was more nat­u­ral than that, dur­ing this pe­riod of sep­a­ra­tion from the Mas­ter, they should fall to talk­ing about those hopes and am­bi­tions which were up­per­most in their hearts. And they were en­gaged in these dis­cus­sions when James of Safed and his fel­low seek­ers af­ter Je­sus came upon them.

• Jesus › subjected to repeated disappointment, testing

158:5.4It was in­deed a dis­il­lu­sion­ment for the three apos­tles who had so re­cently en­joyed the spir­i­tual ec­stasy of the scenes and ex­pe­ri­ences of the trans­fig­u­ra­tion, so soon to re­turn to this scene of the de­feat and dis­com­fi­ture of their fel­low apos­tles. But it was ever so with these twelve am­bas­sadors of the king­dom. They never failed to al­ter­nate be­tween ex­al­ta­tion and hu­mil­i­a­tion in their life ex­pe­ri­ences.

• desired preference

158:6.2And Je­sus an­swered Thomas, say­ing: “Ev­ery­thing which your breth­ren heard on the moun­tain shall be re­vealed to you in due sea­son. But I will now show you the cause of your de­feat in that which you so un­wisely at­tempted. While your Mas­ter and his com­pan­ions, your breth­ren, as­cended yon­der moun­tain yes­ter­day to seek for a larger knowl­edge of the Fa­ther’s will and to ask for a richer en­dow­ment of wis­dom ef­fec­tively to do that di­vine will, you who re­mained on watch here with in­struc­tions to strive to ac­quire the mind of spir­i­tual in­sight and to pray with us for a fuller rev­e­la­tion of the Fa­ther’s will, failed to ex­er­cise the faith at your com­mand but, in­stead, yielded to the temp­ta­tion and fell into your old evil ten­den­cies to seek for your­selves pre­ferred places in the king­dom of heaven—the ma­te­rial and tem­po­ral king­dom which you per­sist in con­tem­plat­ing. And you cling to these er­ro­neous con­cepts in spite of the re­it­er­ated dec­la­ra­tion that my king­dom is not of this world.

158:6.3“No sooner does your faith grasp the iden­tity of the Son of Man than your self­ish de­sire for worldly prefer­ment creeps back upon you, and you fall to dis­cussing among your­selves as to who should be great­est in the king­dom of heaven, a king­dom which, as you per­sist in con­ceiv­ing it, does not ex­ist, nor ever shall. Have not I told you that he who would be great­est in the king­dom of my Fa­ther’s spir­i­tual broth­er­hood must be­come lit­tle in his own eyes and thus be­come the server of his breth­ren? Spir­i­tual great­ness con­sists in an un­der­stand­ing love that is God­like and not in an en­joy­ment of the ex­er­cise of ma­te­rial power for the ex­al­ta­tion of self. In what you at­tempted, in which you so com­pletely failed, your pur­pose was not pure. Your mo­tive was not di­vine. Your ideal was not spir­i­tual. Your am­bi­tion was not al­tru­is­tic. Your pro­ce­dure was not based on love, and your goal of at­tain­ment was not the will of the Fa­ther in heaven.

• should disregard selves, take up responsibilities daily

158:7.5Af­ter they had re­cov­ered from the first shock of Je­sus’ sting­ing re­buke, and be­fore they re­sumed their jour­ney, the Mas­ter spoke fur­ther: “If any man would come af­ter me, let him dis­re­gard him­self, take up his re­spon­si­bil­i­ties daily, and fol­low me. For whoso­ever would save his life self­ishly, shall lose it, but whoso­ever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s, shall save it. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul? What would a man give in ex­change for eter­nal life? Be not ashamed of me and my words in this sin­ful and hyp­o­crit­i­cal gen­er­a­tion, even as I will not be ashamed to ac­knowl­edge you when in glory I ap­pear be­fore my Fa­ther in the pres­ence of all the ce­les­tial hosts. Nev­er­the­less, many of you now stand­ing be­fore me shall not taste death till you see this king­dom of God come with power.”

• desired preference

158:8.1En­ter­ing Ca­per­naum at twi­light, they went by un­fre­quented thor­ough­fares di­rectly to the home of Si­mon Pe­ter for their evening meal. While David Zeb­e­dee made ready to take them across the lake, they lin­gered at Si­mon’s house, and Je­sus, look­ing up at Pe­ter and the other apos­tles, asked: “As you walked along to­gether this af­ter­noon, what was it that you talked about so earnestly among your­selves?” The apos­tles held their peace be­cause many of them had con­tin­ued the dis­cus­sion be­gun at Mount Her­mon as to what po­si­tions they were to have in the com­ing king­dom; who should be the great­est, and so on. Je­sus, know­ing what it was that oc­cu­pied their thoughts that day, beck­oned to one of Pe­ter’s lit­tle ones and, set­ting the child down among them, said: “Ver­ily, ver­ily, I say to you, ex­cept you turn about and be­come more like this child, you will make lit­tle prog­ress in the king­dom of heaven. Whoso­ever shall hum­ble him­self and be­come as this lit­tle one, the same shall be­come great­est in the king­dom of heaven. And whoso re­ceives such a lit­tle one re­ceives me. And they who re­ceive me re­ceive also Him who sent me. If you would be first in the king­dom, seek to min­is­ter these good truths to your breth­ren in the flesh. But whoso­ever causes one of these lit­tle ones to stum­ble, it would be bet­ter for him if a mill­stone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into the sea. If the things you do with your hands, or the things you see with your eyes give of­fense in the prog­ress of the king­dom, sac­ri­fice these cher­ished idols, for it is bet­ter to en­ter the king­dom mi­nus many of the beloved things of life rather than to cling to these idols and find your­self shut out of the king­dom. But most of all, see that you de­spise not one of these lit­tle ones, for their an­gels do al­ways be­hold the faces of the heav­enly hosts.”

• took offense at others teaching in Jesus’ name

159:2.3But John of­ten­times re­counted this ex­pe­ri­ence in con­nec­tion with his sub­se­quent labors in be­half of the king­dom. Nev­er­the­less, many times did the apos­tles take of­fense at those who made bold to teach in the Mas­ter’s name. To them it al­ways seemed in­ap­pro­pri­ate that those who had never sat at Je­sus’ feet should dare to teach in his name.

• beliefs of apostles › Jesus was Eternal Son

161:1.61. The Fa­ther in Par­a­dise does en­joy equal­ity of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with at least two other be­ings who are fully equal to him­self and wholly like him­self—the Eter­nal Son and the In­fi­nite Spirit. In view of the doc­trine of the Trin­ity, the Greek was com­pelled to con­cede the per­son­al­ity pos­si­bil­ity of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther. (It was the later con­sid­er­a­tion of these dis­cus­sions which led to the en­larged con­cep­tion of the Trin­ity in the minds of the twelve apos­tles. Of course, it was the gen­eral be­lief that Je­sus was the Eter­nal Son.)

161:1.72. Since Je­sus was equal with the Fa­ther, and since this Son had achieved the man­i­fes­ta­tion of per­son­al­ity to his earth chil­dren, such a phe­nom­e­non con­sti­tuted proof of the fact, and dem­on­stra­tion of the pos­si­bil­ity, of the pos­ses­sion of per­son­al­ity by all three of the God­heads and for­ever set­tled the ques­tion re­gard­ing the abil­ity of God to com­mu­ni­cate with man and the pos­si­bil­ity of man’s com­mu­ni­cat­ing with God.

161:1.83. That Je­sus was on terms of mu­tual as­so­ci­a­tion and per­fect com­mu­ni­ca­tion with man; that Je­sus was the Son of God. That the re­la­tion of Son and Fa­ther pre­sup­poses equal­ity of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and mu­tu­al­ity of sym­pa­thetic un­der­stand­ing; that Je­sus and the Fa­ther were one. That Je­sus main­tained at one and the same time un­der­stand­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion with both God and man, and that, since both God and man com­pre­hended the mean­ing of the sym­bols of Je­sus’ com­mu­ni­ca­tion, both God and man pos­sessed the at­tri­butes of per­son­al­ity in so far as the re­quire­ments of the abil­ity of in­ter­com­mu­ni­ca­tion were con­cerned. That the per­son­al­ity of Je­sus demon­strated the per­son­al­ity of God, while it proved con­clu­sively the pres­ence of God in man. That two things which are re­lated to the same thing are re­lated to each other.

• Jesus › required a. to dedicate all their possessions to the common cause
• regarded Jesus as best friend

161:2.32. His life as­so­ci­a­tion with us ex­em­pli­fies the ideal of hu­man friend­ship; only a di­vine be­ing could pos­si­bly be such a hu­man friend. He is the most truly un­selfish per­son we have ever known. He is the friend even of sin­ners; he dares to love his en­e­mies. He is very loyal to us. While he does not hes­i­tate to re­prove us, it is plain to all that he truly loves us. The bet­ter you know him, the more you will love him. You will be charmed by his unswerv­ing de­vo­tion. Through all these years of our fail­ure to com­pre­hend his mis­sion, he has been a faith­ful friend. While he makes no use of flat­tery, he does treat us all with equal kind­ness; he is in­vari­ably ten­der and com­pas­sion­ate. He has shared his life and ev­ery­thing else with us. We are a happy com­mu­nity; we share all things in com­mon. We do not be­lieve that a mere hu­man could live such a blame­less life un­der such try­ing cir­cum­stances.

• boldness of Jesus terrified a.

162:1.1Long be­fore they fled from Gal­i­lee, the fol­low­ers of Je­sus had im­plored him to go to Je­ru­sa­lem to pro­claim the gospel of the king­dom in or­der that his mes­sage might have the pres­tige of hav­ing been preached at the cen­ter of Jew­ish cul­ture and learn­ing; but now that he had ac­tu­ally come to Je­ru­sa­lem to teach, they were afraid for his life. Know­ing that the San­hedrin had sought to bring Je­sus to Je­ru­sa­lem for trial and re­call­ing the Mas­ter’s re­cently re­it­er­ated dec­la­ra­tions that he must be sub­ject to death, the apos­tles had been lit­er­ally stunned by his sud­den de­ci­sion to at­tend the feast of taber­na­cles. To all their pre­vi­ous en­treaties that he go to Je­ru­sa­lem he had replied, “The hour has not yet come.” Now, to their protests of fear he an­swered only, “But the hour has come.”

• boldness of Jesus terrified a.

162:1.2Dur­ing the feast of taber­na­cles Je­sus went boldly into Je­ru­sa­lem on sev­eral oc­ca­sions and pub­licly taught in the tem­ple. This he did in spite of the ef­forts of his apos­tles to dis­suade him. Though they had long urged him to pro­claim his mes­sage in Je­ru­sa­lem, they now feared to see him en­ter the city at this time, know­ing full well that the scribes and Phar­isees were bent on bring­ing about his death.

• boldness of Jesus terrified a.

162:1.11Ev­ery time Je­sus went to Je­ru­sa­lem, his apos­tles were filled with ter­ror. They were the more afraid as, from day to day, they lis­tened to his in­creas­ingly bold pro­nounce­ments re­gard­ing the na­ture of his mis­sion on earth. They were un­ac­cus­tomed to hear­ing Je­sus make such pos­i­tive claims and such amaz­ing as­ser­tions even when preach­ing among his friends.

162:9.1Through­out the week that fol­lowed the feast of taber­na­cles, scores of be­liev­ers for­gath­ered at Beth­any and re­ceived in­struc­tion from the twelve apos­tles. The San­hedrin made no ef­fort to mo­lest these gath­er­ings since Je­sus was not pres­ent; he was through­out this time work­ing with Ab­ner and his as­so­ciates in Beth­le­hem. The day fol­low­ing the close of the feast, Je­sus had de­parted for Beth­any, and he did not again teach in the tem­ple dur­ing this visit to Je­ru­sa­lem.

162:9.2At this time, Ab­ner was mak­ing his head­quar­ters at Beth­le­hem, and from that cen­ter many work­ers had been sent to the cities of Judea and south­ern Samaria and even to Alexan­dria. Within a few days of his ar­rival, Je­sus and Ab­ner com­pleted the ar­range­ments for the con­sol­i­da­tion of the work of the two groups of apos­tles.

162:9.3Through­out his visit to the feast of taber­na­cles, Je­sus had di­vided his time about equally be­tween Beth­any and Beth­le­hem. At Beth­any he spent con­sid­er­able time with his apos­tles; at Beth­le­hem he gave much in­struc­tion to Ab­ner and the other for­mer apos­tles of John. And it was this in­ti­mate con­tact that fi­nally led them to be­lieve in him. These for­mer apos­tles of John the Bap­tist were in­flu­enced by the cour­age he dis­played in his pub­lic teach­ing in Je­ru­sa­lem as well as by the sym­pa­thetic un­der­stand­ing they ex­pe­ri­enced in his pri­vate teach­ing at Beth­le­hem. These in­flu­ences fi­nally and fully won over each of Ab­ner’s as­so­ciates to a whole­hearted ac­cep­tance of the king­dom and all that such a step im­plied.

162:9.4Be­fore leav­ing Beth­le­hem for the last time, the Mas­ter made ar­range­ments for them all to join him in the united ef­fort which was to pre­cede the end­ing of his earth ca­reer in the flesh. It was agreed that Ab­ner and his as­so­ciates were to join Je­sus and the twelve in the near fu­ture at Ma­g­a­dan Park.

162:9.5In ac­cor­dance with this un­der­stand­ing, early in Novem­ber Ab­ner and his eleven fel­lows cast their lot with Je­sus and the twelve and la­bored with them as one or­ga­ni­za­tion right on down to the cru­ci­fix­ion.

162:9.6In the lat­ter part of Oc­to­ber Je­sus and the twelve with­drew from the im­me­di­ate vicin­ity of Je­ru­sa­lem. On Sun­day, Oc­to­ber 30, Je­sus and his as­so­ciates left the city of Ephraim, where he had been rest­ing in seclu­sion for a few days, and, go­ing by the west Jor­dan high­way di­rectly to Ma­g­a­dan Park, ar­rived late on the af­ter­noon of Wednes­day, Novem­ber 2.

162:9.7The apos­tles were greatly re­lieved to have the Mas­ter back on friendly soil; no more did they urge him to go up to Je­ru­sa­lem to pro­claim the gospel of the king­dom.

• Jesus › required a. to dedicate all their possessions to the common cause

163:2.2One earnest dis­ci­ple came to Je­sus, say­ing: “Mas­ter, I would be one of your new apos­tles, but my fa­ther is very old and near death; could I be per­mit­ted to re­turn home to bury him?” To this man Je­sus said: “My son, the foxes have holes, and the birds of heaven have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. You are a faith­ful dis­ci­ple, and you can re­main such while you re­turn home to min­is­ter to your loved ones, but not so with my gospel mes­sen­gers. They have for­saken all to fol­low me and pro­claim the king­dom. If you would be an or­dained teacher, you must let oth­ers bury the dead while you go forth to pub­lish the good news.” And this man went away in great dis­ap­point­ment.

163:2.3An­other dis­ci­ple came to the Mas­ter and said: “I would be­come an or­dained mes­sen­ger, but I would like to go to my home for a short while to com­fort my fam­ily.” And Je­sus replied: “If you would be or­dained, you must be will­ing to for­sake all. The gospel mes­sen­gers can­not have di­vided af­fec­tions. No man, hav­ing put his hand to the plough, if he turns back, is wor­thy to be­come a mes­sen­ger of the king­dom.”

163:2.4Then An­drew brought to Je­sus a cer­tain rich young man who was a de­vout be­liever, and who de­sired to re­ceive or­di­na­tion. This young man, Mata­dor­mus, was a mem­ber of the Je­ru­sa­lem San­hedrin; he had heard Je­sus teach and had been sub­se­quently in­structed in the gospel of the king­dom by Pe­ter and the other apos­tles. Je­sus talked with Mata­dor­mus con­cern­ing the re­quire­ments of or­di­na­tion and re­quested that he de­fer de­ci­sion un­til af­ter he had thought more fully about the mat­ter. Early the next morn­ing, as Je­sus was go­ing for a walk, this young man ac­costed him and said: “Mas­ter, I would know from you the as­sur­ances of eter­nal life. See­ing that I have ob­served all the com­mand­ments from my youth, I would like to know what more I must do to gain eter­nal life?” In an­swer to this ques­tion Je­sus said: “If you keep all the com­mand­ments—do not com­mit adul­tery, do not kill, do not steal, do not bear false wit­ness, do not de­fraud, honor your par­ents—you do well, but sal­va­tion is the re­ward of faith, not merely of works. Do you be­lieve this gospel of the king­dom?” And Mata­dor­mus an­swered: “Yes, Mas­ter, I do be­lieve ev­ery­thing you and your apos­tles have taught me.” And Je­sus said, “Then are you in­deed my dis­ci­ple and a child of the king­dom.”

163:2.5Then said the young man: “But, Mas­ter, I am not con­tent to be your dis­ci­ple; I would be one of your new mes­sen­gers.” When Je­sus heard this, he looked down upon him with a great love and said: “I will have you to be one of my mes­sen­gers if you are will­ing to pay the price, if you will sup­ply the one thing which you lack.” Mata­dor­mus replied: “Mas­ter, I will do any­thing if I may be al­lowed to fol­low you.” Je­sus, kiss­ing the kneel­ing young man on the fore­head, said: “If you would be my mes­sen­ger, go and sell all that you have and, when you have be­stowed the pro­ceeds upon the poor or upon your breth­ren, come and fol­low me, and you shall have trea­sure in the king­dom of heaven.”

163:2.6When Mata­dor­mus heard this, his coun­te­nance fell. He arose and went away sor­row­ful, for he had great pos­ses­sions. This wealthy young Phar­isee had been raised to be­lieve that wealth was the to­ken of God’s fa­vor. Je­sus knew that he was not free from the love of him­self and his riches. The Mas­ter wanted to de­liver him from the love of wealth, not nec­es­sar­ily from the wealth. While the dis­ci­ples of Je­sus did not part with all their worldly goods, the apos­tles and the sev­enty did. Mata­dor­mus de­sired to be one of the sev­enty new mes­sen­gers, and that was the rea­son for Je­sus’ re­quir­ing him to part with all of his tem­po­ral pos­ses­sions.

163:2.7Al­most ev­ery hu­man be­ing has some one thing which is held on to as a pet evil, and which the en­trance into the king­dom of heaven re­quires as a part of the price of ad­mis­sion. If Mata­dor­mus had parted with his wealth, it prob­a­bly would have been put right back into his hands for ad­min­is­tra­tion as trea­surer of the sev­enty. For later on, af­ter the es­tab­lish­ment of the church at Je­ru­sa­lem, he did obey the Mas­ter’s in­junc­tion, al­though it was then too late to en­joy mem­ber­ship in the sev­enty, and he be­came the trea­surer of the Je­ru­sa­lem church, of which James the Lord’s brother in the flesh was the head.

163:2.8Thus al­ways it was and for­ever will be: Men must ar­rive at their own de­ci­sions. There is a cer­tain range of the free­dom of choice which mor­tals may ex­er­cise. The forces of the spir­i­tual world will not co­erce man; they al­low him to go the way of his own choos­ing.

163:2.9Je­sus fore­saw that Mata­dor­mus, with his riches, could not pos­si­bly be­come an or­dained as­so­ciate of men who had for­saken all for the gospel; at the same time, he saw that, with­out his riches, he would be­come the ul­ti­mate leader of all of them. But, like Je­sus’ own breth­ren, he never be­came great in the king­dom be­cause he de­prived him­self of that in­ti­mate and per­sonal as­so­ci­a­tion with the Mas­ter which might have been his ex­pe­ri­ence had he been will­ing to do at this time the very thing which Je­sus asked, and which, sev­eral years sub­se­quently, he ac­tu­ally did.

163:2.10Riches have noth­ing di­rectly to do with en­trance into the king­dom of heaven, but the love of wealth does. The spir­i­tual loy­al­ties of the king­dom are in­com­pat­i­ble with ser­vil­ity to ma­te­ri­al­is­tic mam­mon. Man may not share his su­preme loy­alty to a spir­i­tual ideal with a ma­te­rial de­vo­tion.

163:2.11Je­sus never taught that it was wrong to have wealth. He re­quired only the twelve and the sev­enty to ded­i­cate all of their worldly pos­ses­sions to the com­mon cause. Even then, he pro­vided for the prof­itable liq­ui­da­tion of their prop­erty, as in the case of the Apos­tle Mat­thew. Je­sus many times ad­vised his well-to-do dis­ci­ples as he taught the rich man of Rome. The Mas­ter re­garded the wise in­vest­ment of ex­cess earn­ings as a le­git­i­mate form of in­sur­ance against fu­ture and un­avoid­able ad­ver­sity. When the apos­tolic trea­sury was over­flow­ing, Ju­das put funds on de­posit to be used sub­se­quently when they might suf­fer greatly from a diminu­tion of in­come. This Ju­das did af­ter con­sul­ta­tion with An­drew. Je­sus never per­son­ally had any­thing to do with the apos­tolic fi­nances ex­cept in the dis­burse­ment of alms. But there was one eco­nomic abuse which he many times con­demned, and that was the un­fair ex­ploita­tion of the weak, un­learned, and less for­tu­nate of men by their strong, keen, and more in­tel­li­gent fel­lows. Je­sus de­clared that such in­hu­man treat­ment of men, women, and chil­dren was in­com­pat­i­ble with the ide­als of the broth­er­hood of the king­dom of heaven.

• Jesus › required a. to dedicate all their possessions to the common cause

163:3.3As they went off by them­selves, Je­sus was grieved that Mata­dor­mus did not re­main with them, for he greatly loved him. And when they had walked down by the lake, they sat there be­side the wa­ter, and Pe­ter, speak­ing for the twelve (who were all pres­ent by this time), said: “We are trou­bled by your words to the rich young man. Shall we re­quire those who would fol­low you to give up all their worldly goods?” And Je­sus said: “No, Pe­ter, only those who would be­come apos­tles, and who de­sire to live with me as you do and as one fam­ily. But the Fa­ther re­quires that the af­fec­tions of his chil­dren be pure and un­di­vided. What­ever thing or per­son comes be­tween you and the love of the truths of the king­dom, must be sur­ren­dered. If one’s wealth does not in­vade the precincts of the soul, it is of no con­se­quence in the spir­i­tual life of those who would en­ter the king­dom.”

• Jesus › required a. to dedicate all their possessions to the common cause

165:4.5When Je­sus had fin­ished his story, an­other man rose up and asked him: “Mas­ter, I know that your apos­tles have sold all their earthly pos­ses­sions to fol­low you, and that they have all things in com­mon as do the Es­senes, but would you have all of us who are your dis­ci­ples do like­wise? Is it a sin to pos­sess hon­est wealth?” And Je­sus replied to this ques­tion: “My friend, it is not a sin to have hon­or­able wealth; but it is a sin if you con­vert the wealth of ma­te­rial pos­ses­sions into trea­sures which may ab­sorb your in­ter­ests and di­vert your af­fec­tions from de­vo­tion to the spir­i­tual pur­suits of the king­dom. There is no sin in hav­ing hon­est pos­ses­sions on earth pro­vided your trea­sure is in heaven, for where your trea­sure is there will your heart be also. There is a great dif­fer­ence be­tween wealth which leads to cov­etous­ness and self­ish­ness and that which is held and dis­pensed in the spirit of stew­ard­ship by those who have an abun­dance of this world’s goods, and who so boun­ti­fully con­tribute to the sup­port of those who de­vote all their en­er­gies to the work of the king­dom. Many of you who are here and with­out money are fed and lodged in yon­der tented city be­cause lib­eral men and women of means have given funds to your host, David Zeb­e­dee, for such pur­poses.

• Father supplies needs of
• Jesus › required a. to dedicate all their possessions to the common cause

165:5.2“Yes, An­drew, I will speak to you about these mat­ters of wealth and self-sup­port, but my words to you, the apos­tles, must be some­what dif­fer­ent from those spo­ken to the dis­ci­ples and the mul­ti­tude since you have for­saken ev­ery­thing, not only to fol­low me, but to be or­dained as am­bas­sadors of the king­dom. Al­ready have you had sev­eral years’ ex­pe­ri­ence, and you know that the Fa­ther whose king­dom you pro­claim will not for­sake you. You have ded­i­cated your lives to the min­istry of the king­dom; there­fore be not anx­ious or wor­ried about the things of the tem­po­ral life, what you shall eat, nor yet for your body, what you shall wear. The wel­fare of the soul is more than food and drink; the prog­ress in the spirit is far above the need of rai­ment. When you are tempted to doubt the sure­ness of your bread, con­sider the ravens; they sow not nei­ther reap, they have no store­houses or barns, and yet the Fa­ther pro­vides food for ev­ery one of them that seeks it. And of how much more value are you than many birds! Be­sides, all of your anx­i­ety or fret­ting doubts can do noth­ing to sup­ply your ma­te­rial needs. Which of you by anx­i­ety can add a hand­breadth to your stature or a day to your life? Since such mat­ters are not in your hands, why do you give anx­ious thought to any of these prob­lems?

165:5.3“Con­sider the lilies, how they grow; they toil not, nei­ther do they spin; yet I say to you, even Sol­o­mon in all his glory was not ar­rayed like one of these. If God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive to­day and to­mor­row is cut down and cast into the fire, how much more shall he clothe you, the am­bas­sadors of the heav­enly king­dom. O you of lit­tle faith! When you whole­heart­edly de­vote your­selves to the procla­ma­tion of the gospel of the king­dom, you should not be of doubt­ful minds con­cern­ing the sup­port of your­selves or the fam­i­lies you have for­saken. If you give your lives truly to the gospel, you shall live by the gospel. If you are only be­liev­ing dis­ci­ples, you must earn your own bread and con­tribute to the sus­te­nance of all who teach and preach and heal. If you are anx­ious about your bread and wa­ter, wherein are you dif­fer­ent from the na­tions of the world who so dili­gently seek such ne­ces­si­ties? De­vote your­selves to your work, be­liev­ing that both the Fa­ther and I know that you have need of all these things. Let me as­sure you, once and for all, that, if you ded­i­cate your lives to the work of the king­dom, all your real needs shall be sup­plied. Seek the greater thing, and the lesser will be found therein; ask for the heav­enly, and the earthly shall be in­cluded. The shadow is cer­tain to fol­low the sub­stance.

• attempted to dissuade Jesus from entering Judea

167:4.4Ac­cord­ingly, early on Wednes­day morn­ing he said to his apos­tles: “Let us pre­pare at once to go into Judea again.” And when the apos­tles heard their Mas­ter say this, they drew off by them­selves for a time to take coun­sel of one an­other. James as­sumed the di­rec­tion of the con­fer­ence, and they all agreed that it was only folly to al­low Je­sus to go again into Judea, and they came back as one man and so in­formed him. Said James: “Mas­ter, you were in Je­ru­sa­lem a few weeks back, and the lead­ers sought your death, while the peo­ple were minded to stone you. At that time you gave these men their chance to re­ceive the truth, and we will not per­mit you to go again into Judea.”

• attempted to dissuade Jesus from entering Judea

167:4.7When they could not per­suade him to re­frain from go­ing into Judea, and when some of the apos­tles were loath even to ac­com­pany him, Thomas ad­dressed his fel­lows, say­ing: “We have told the Mas­ter our fears, but he is de­ter­mined to go to Beth­any. I am sat­is­fied it means the end; they will surely kill him, but if that is the Mas­ter’s choice, then let us ac­quit our­selves like men of cour­age; let us go also that we may die with him.” And it was ever so; in mat­ters re­quir­ing de­lib­er­ate and sus­tained cour­age, Thomas was al­ways the main­stay of the twelve apos­tles.

• forbidden to become embroiled in politics

167:5.6It was very dif­fi­cult for the apos­tles to un­der­stand the Mas­ter’s re­luc­tance to make pos­i­tive pro­nounce­ments rel­a­tive to sci­en­tific, so­cial, eco­nomic, and po­lit­i­cal prob­lems. They did not fully re­al­ize that his earth mis­sion was ex­clu­sively con­cerned with rev­e­la­tions of spir­i­tual and re­li­gious truths.

• did not grasp Jesus’ teaching

170:2.10The apos­tles were un­able to grasp the real mean­ing of the Mas­ter’s ut­ter­ances re­gard­ing the king­dom. The sub­se­quent dis­tor­tion of Je­sus’ teach­ings, as they are re­corded in the New Tes­ta­ment, is be­cause the con­cept of the gospel writ­ers was col­ored by the be­lief that Je­sus was then ab­sent from the world for only a short time; that he would soon re­turn to es­tab­lish the king­dom in power and glory—just such an idea as they held while he was with them in the flesh. But Je­sus did not con­nect the es­tab­lish­ment of the king­dom with the idea of his re­turn to this world. That cen­turies have passed with no signs of the ap­pear­ance of the “New Age” is in no way out of har­mony with Je­sus’ teach­ing.

• beliefs of apostles › concept of kingdom of heaven

170:2.13Up to this time the apos­tles had ac­quired a dou­ble view­point of the king­dom; they re­garded it as:

170:2.141. A mat­ter of per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence then pres­ent in the hearts of true be­liev­ers, and

170:2.152. A ques­tion of racial or world phe­nom­ena; that the king­dom was in the fu­ture, some­thing to look for­ward to.

170:2.16They looked upon the com­ing of the king­dom in the hearts of men as a grad­ual de­vel­op­ment, like the leaven in the dough or like the grow­ing of the mus­tard seed. They be­lieved that the com­ing of the king­dom in the racial or world sense would be both sud­den and spec­tac­u­lar. Je­sus never tired of telling them that the king­dom of heaven was their per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence of re­al­iz­ing the higher qual­i­ties of spir­i­tual liv­ing; that these re­al­i­ties of the spirit ex­pe­ri­ence are pro­gres­sively trans­lated to new and higher lev­els of di­vine cer­tainty and eter­nal grandeur.

• beliefs of apostles › Jesus’ immediate second coming

170:4.16His apos­tles and dis­ci­ples most cer­tainly linked these two teach­ings to­gether. When the king­dom failed to ma­te­ri­al­ize as they had ex­pected, re­call­ing the Mas­ter’s teach­ing con­cern­ing a fu­ture king­dom and re­mem­ber­ing his prom­ise to come again, they jumped to the con­clu­sion that these promises re­ferred to an iden­ti­cal event; and there­fore they lived in hope of his im­me­di­ate sec­ond com­ing to es­tab­lish the king­dom in its full­ness and with power and glory. And so have suc­ces­sive be­liev­ing gen­er­a­tions lived on earth en­ter­tain­ing the same in­spir­ing but dis­ap­point­ing hope.

• beliefs of apostles › blinded by belief in temporal kingdom, materialistic Messiah
• did not grasp Jesus’ teaching

171:0.2The ad­dress on the king­dom and the an­nounce­ment that he was go­ing to the Pass­over set all his fol­low­ers to think­ing that he was go­ing up to Je­ru­sa­lem to in­au­gu­rate the tem­po­ral king­dom of Jew­ish su­prem­acy. No mat­ter what Je­sus said about the non­ma­te­rial char­ac­ter of the king­dom, he could not wholly re­move from the minds of his Jew­ish hear­ers the idea that the Mes­siah was to es­tab­lish some kind of na­tion­al­is­tic gov­ern­ment with head­quar­ters at Je­ru­sa­lem.

171:0.3What Je­sus said in his Sab­bath ser­mon only tended to con­fuse the ma­jor­ity of his fol­low­ers; very few were en­light­ened by the Mas­ter’s dis­course. The lead­ers un­der­stood some­thing of his teach­ings re­gard­ing the in­ner king­dom, “the king­dom of heaven within you,” but they also knew that he had spo­ken about an­other and fu­ture king­dom, and it was this king­dom they be­lieved he was now go­ing up to Je­ru­sa­lem to es­tab­lish. When they were dis­ap­pointed in this ex­pec­ta­tion, when he was re­jected by the Jews, and later on, when Je­ru­sa­lem was lit­er­ally de­stroyed, they still clung to this hope, sin­cerely be­liev­ing that the Mas­ter would soon re­turn to the world in great power and ma­jes­tic glory to es­tab­lish the prom­ised king­dom.

171:0.4It was on this Sun­day af­ter­noon that Sa­lome the mother of James and John Zeb­e­dee came to Je­sus with her two apos­tle sons and, in the man­ner of ap­proach­ing an Ori­en­tal po­ten­tate, sought to have Je­sus prom­ise in ad­vance to grant what­ever re­quest she might make. But the Mas­ter would not prom­ise; in­stead, he asked her, “What do you want me to do for you?” Then an­swered Sa­lome: “Mas­ter, now that you are go­ing up to Je­ru­sa­lem to es­tab­lish the king­dom, I would ask you in ad­vance to prom­ise me that these my sons shall have honor with you, the one to sit on your right hand and the other to sit on your left hand in your king­dom.”

• desired preference

171:0.6By this time some­one had car­ried word of this con­fer­ence to Pe­ter and the other apos­tles, and they were highly in­dig­nant that James and John would seek to be pre­ferred be­fore them, and that they would se­cretly go with their mother to make such a re­quest. When they fell to ar­gu­ing among them­selves, Je­sus called them all to­gether and said: “You well un­der­stand how the rulers of the gen­tiles lord it over their sub­jects, and how those who are great ex­er­cise au­thor­ity. But it shall not be so in the king­dom of heaven. Whoso­ever would be great among you, let him first be­come your ser­vant. He who would be first in the king­dom, let him be­come your min­is­ter. I de­clare to you that the Son of Man came not to be min­is­tered to but to min­is­ter; and I now go up to Je­ru­sa­lem to lay down my life in the do­ing of the Fa­ther’s will and in the ser­vice of my breth­ren.” When the apos­tles heard these words, they with­drew by them­selves to pray. That evening, in re­sponse to the labors of Pe­ter, James and John made suit­able apolo­gies to the ten and were re­stored to the good graces of their breth­ren.

• beliefs of apostles › blinded by belief in temporal kingdom, materialistic Messiah

171:1.3In a gen­eral way, most of Je­sus’ im­me­di­ate fol­low­ers un­der­stood that the camp at Pella had been aban­doned, but they re­ally thought this in­di­cated that their Mas­ter at last in­tended to go to Je­ru­sa­lem and lay claim to David’s throne. A large ma­jor­ity of his fol­low­ers never were able to grasp any other con­cept of the king­dom of heaven; no mat­ter what he taught them, they would not give up this Jew­ish idea of the king­dom.

• beliefs of apostles › blinded by belief in temporal kingdom, materialistic Messiah

171:2.6Im­me­di­ately af­ter speak­ing these words, Je­sus, lead­ing the twelve, started off on the way to Hes­h­bon, fol­lowed by about five hun­dred. Af­ter a brief de­lay the other half of the mul­ti­tude went on up to Je­ru­sa­lem. His apos­tles, to­gether with the lead­ing dis­ci­ples, thought much about these words, but still they clung to the be­lief that, af­ter this brief pe­riod of ad­ver­sity and trial, the king­dom would cer­tainly be set up some­what in ac­cor­dance with their long-cher­ished hopes.

• beliefs of apostles › Jesus was immortal

171:3.5The ma­jor­ity of the apos­tles and many of his in­ner dis­ci­ples did not be­lieve it pos­si­ble for Je­sus to die; they, be­liev­ing that he was “the res­ur­rec­tion and the life,” re­garded him as im­mor­tal and al­ready tri­umphant over death.

• many carried swords

171:4.1On Wednes­day evening, March 29, Je­sus and his fol­low­ers en­camped at Livias on their way to Je­ru­sa­lem, af­ter hav­ing com­pleted their tour of the cities of south­ern Perea. It was dur­ing this night at Livias that Si­mon Ze­lo­tes and Si­mon Pe­ter, hav­ing con­spired to have de­liv­ered into their hands at this place more than one hun­dred swords, re­ceived and dis­tributed these arms to all who would ac­cept them and wear them con­cealed be­neath their cloaks. Si­mon Pe­ter was still wear­ing his sword on the night of the Mas­ter’s be­trayal in the gar­den.

• many carried swords

172:0.3The chief priests were in­formed that Je­sus lodged at Beth­any, but they thought best not to at­tempt to seize him among his friends; they de­cided to await his com­ing on into Je­ru­sa­lem. Je­sus knew about all this, but he was ma­jes­ti­cally calm; his friends had never seen him more com­posed and con­ge­nial; even the apos­tles were as­tounded that he should be so un­con­cerned when the San­hedrin had called upon all Jewry to de­liver him into their hands. While the Mas­ter slept that night, the apos­tles watched over him by twos, and many of them were girded with swords. Early the next morn­ing they were awak­ened by hun­dreds of pil­grims who came out from Je­ru­sa­lem, even on the Sab­bath day, to see Je­sus and Laz­a­rus, whom he had raised from the dead.

• many carried swords

172:2.1On this Sun­day morn­ing, in Si­mon’s beau­ti­ful gar­den, the Mas­ter called his twelve apos­tles around him and gave them their fi­nal in­struc­tions prepara­tory to en­ter­ing Je­ru­sa­lem. He told them that he would prob­a­bly de­liver many ad­dresses and teach many lessons be­fore re­turn­ing to the Fa­ther but ad­vised the apos­tles to re­frain from do­ing any pub­lic work dur­ing this Pass­over so­journ in Je­ru­sa­lem. He in­structed them to re­main near him and to “watch and pray.” Je­sus knew that many of his apos­tles and im­me­di­ate fol­low­ers even then car­ried swords con­cealed on their per­sons, but he made no ref­er­ence to this fact.

172:5.1This Sun­day evening as they re­turned to Beth­any, Je­sus walked in front of the apos­tles. Not a word was spo­ken un­til they sep­a­rated af­ter ar­riv­ing at Si­mon’s house. No twelve hu­man be­ings ever ex­pe­ri­enced such di­verse and in­ex­pli­ca­ble emo­tions as now surged through the minds and souls of these am­bas­sadors of the king­dom. These sturdy Galileans were con­fused and dis­con­certed; they did not know what to ex­pect next; they were too sur­prised to be much afraid. They knew noth­ing of the Mas­ter’s plans for the next day, and they asked no ques­tions. They went to their lodg­ings, though they did not sleep much, save the twins. But they did not keep armed watch over Je­sus at Si­mon’s house.

• many carried swords

172:5.2An­drew was thor­oughly be­wil­dered, well-nigh con­fused. He was the one apos­tle who did not se­ri­ously un­der­take to eval­u­ate the pop­u­lar out­burst of ac­claim. He was too pre­oc­cu­pied with the thought of his re­spon­si­bil­ity as chief of the apos­tolic corps to give se­ri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion to the mean­ing or sig­nif­i­cance of the loud hosan­nas of the mul­ti­tude. An­drew was busy watch­ing some of his as­so­ciates who he feared might be led away by their emo­tions dur­ing the ex­cite­ment, par­tic­u­larly Pe­ter, James, John, and Si­mon Ze­lo­tes. Through­out this day and those which im­me­di­ately fol­lowed, An­drew was trou­bled with se­ri­ous doubts, but he never ex­pressed any of these mis­giv­ings to his apos­tolic as­so­ciates. He was con­cerned about the at­ti­tude of some of the twelve who he knew were armed with swords; but he did not know that his own brother, Pe­ter, was car­ry­ing such a weapon. And so the pro­ces­sion into Je­ru­sa­lem made a com­par­a­tively su­per­fi­cial im­pres­sion upon An­drew; he was too busy with the re­spon­si­bil­i­ties of his of­fice to be oth­er­wise af­fected.

172:5.3Si­mon Pe­ter was at first al­most swept off his feet by this pop­u­lar man­i­fes­ta­tion of en­thu­si­asm; but he was con­sid­er­ably sobered by the time they re­turned to Beth­any that night. Pe­ter sim­ply could not fig­ure out what the Mas­ter was about. He was ter­ri­bly dis­ap­pointed that Je­sus did not fol­low up this wave of pop­u­lar fa­vor with some kind of a pro­nounce­ment. Pe­ter could not un­der­stand why Je­sus did not speak to the mul­ti­tude when they ar­rived at the tem­ple, or at least per­mit one of the apos­tles to ad­dress the crowd. Pe­ter was a great preacher, and he dis­liked to see such a large, re­cep­tive, and en­thu­si­as­tic au­di­ence go to waste. He would so much have liked to preach the gospel of the king­dom to that throng right there in the tem­ple; but the Mas­ter had specif­i­cally charged them that they were to do no teach­ing or preach­ing while in Je­ru­sa­lem this Pass­over week. The re­ac­tion from the spec­tac­u­lar pro­ces­sion into the city was dis­as­trous to Si­mon Pe­ter; by night he was sobered and in­ex­press­ibly sad­dened.

172:5.4To James Zeb­e­dee, this Sun­day was a day of per­plex­ity and pro­found con­fu­sion; he could not grasp the pur­port of what was go­ing on; he could not com­pre­hend the Mas­ter’s pur­pose in per­mit­ting this wild ac­claim and then in re­fus­ing to say a word to the peo­ple when they ar­rived at the tem­ple. As the pro­ces­sion moved down Oli­vet to­ward Je­ru­sa­lem, more es­pe­cially when they were met by the thou­sands of pil­grims who poured forth to wel­come the Mas­ter, James was cru­elly torn by his con­flict­ing emo­tions of ela­tion and grat­i­fi­ca­tion at what he saw and by his pro­found feel­ing of fear as to what would hap­pen when they reached the tem­ple. And then was he down­cast and over­come by dis­ap­point­ment when Je­sus climbed off the don­key and pro­ceeded to walk leisurely about the tem­ple courts. James could not un­der­stand the rea­son for throw­ing away such a mag­nif­i­cent op­por­tu­nity to pro­claim the king­dom. By night, his mind was held firmly in the grip of a dis­tress­ing and dread­ful un­cer­tainty.

172:5.5John Zeb­e­dee came some­where near un­der­stand­ing why Je­sus did this; at least he grasped in part the spir­i­tual sig­nif­i­cance of this so-called tri­umphal en­try into Je­ru­sa­lem. As the mul­ti­tude moved on to­ward the tem­ple, and as John be­held his Mas­ter sit­ting there astride the colt, he re­called hear­ing Je­sus one­time quote the pas­sage of Scrip­ture, the ut­ter­ance of Zechariah, which de­scribed the com­ing of the Mes­siah as a man of peace and rid­ing into Je­ru­sa­lem on an ass. As John turned this Scrip­ture over in his mind, he be­gan to com­pre­hend the sym­bolic sig­nif­i­cance of this Sun­day-af­ter­noon pageant. At least, he grasped enough of the mean­ing of this Scrip­ture to en­able him some­what to en­joy the episode and to pre­vent his be­com­ing over­much de­pressed by the ap­par­ent pur­pose­less end­ing of the tri­umphal pro­ces­sion. John had a type of mind which nat­u­rally tended to think and feel in sym­bols.

172:5.6Philip was en­tirely un­set­tled by the sud­den­ness and spon­tane­ity of the out­burst. He could not col­lect his thoughts suf­fi­ciently while on the way down Oli­vet to ar­rive at any set­tled no­tion as to what all the dem­on­stra­tion was about. In a way, he en­joyed the per­for­mance be­cause his Mas­ter was be­ing hon­ored. By the time they reached the tem­ple, he was per­turbed by the thought that Je­sus might pos­si­bly ask him to feed the mul­ti­tude, so that the con­duct of Je­sus in turn­ing leisurely away from the crowds, which so sorely dis­ap­pointed the ma­jor­ity of the apos­tles, was a great re­lief to Philip. Mul­ti­tudes had some­times been a great trial to the stew­ard of the twelve. Af­ter he was re­lieved of these per­sonal fears re­gard­ing the ma­te­rial needs of the crowds, Philip joined with Pe­ter in the ex­pres­sion of dis­ap­point­ment that noth­ing was done to teach the mul­ti­tude. That night Philip got to think­ing over these ex­pe­ri­ences and was tempted to doubt the whole idea of the king­dom; he hon­estly won­dered what all these things could mean, but he ex­pressed his doubts to no one; he loved Je­sus too much. He had great per­sonal faith in the Mas­ter.

172:5.7Na­than­iel, aside from the sym­bolic and pro­phetic as­pects, came the near­est to un­der­stand­ing the Mas­ter’s rea­son for en­list­ing the pop­u­lar sup­port of the Pass­over pil­grims. He rea­soned it out, be­fore they reached the tem­ple, that with­out such a demon­stra­tive en­try into Je­ru­sa­lem Je­sus would have been ar­rested by the San­hedrin of­fi­cials and cast into prison the mo­ment he pre­sumed to en­ter the city. He was not, there­fore, in the least sur­prised that the Mas­ter made no fur­ther use of the cheer­ing crowds when he had once got in­side the walls of the city and had thus so forcibly im­pressed the Jew­ish lead­ers that they would re­frain from plac­ing him un­der im­me­di­ate ar­rest. Un­der­stand­ing the real rea­son for the Mas­ter’s en­ter­ing the city in this man­ner, Na­than­iel nat­u­rally fol­lowed along with more poise and was less per­turbed and dis­ap­pointed by Je­sus’ sub­se­quent con­duct than were the other apos­tles. Na­than­iel had great con­fi­dence in Je­sus’ un­der­stand­ing of men as well as in his sagac­ity and clev­er­ness in han­dling dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions.

172:5.8Mat­thew was at first non­plused by this pageant per­for­mance. He did not grasp the mean­ing of what his eyes were see­ing un­til he also re­called the Scrip­ture in Zechariah where the prophet had al­luded to the re­joic­ing of Je­ru­sa­lem be­cause her king had come bring­ing sal­va­tion and rid­ing upon the colt of an ass. As the pro­ces­sion moved in the di­rec­tion of the city and then drew on to­ward the tem­ple, Mat­thew be­came ec­static; he was cer­tain that some­thing ex­traor­di­nary would hap­pen when the Mas­ter ar­rived at the tem­ple at the head of this shout­ing mul­ti­tude. When one of the Phar­isees mocked Je­sus, say­ing, “Look, ev­ery­body, see who comes here, the king of the Jews rid­ing on an ass!” Mat­thew kept his hands off of him only by ex­er­cis­ing great re­straint. None of the twelve was more de­pressed on the way back to Beth­any that evening. Next to Si­mon Pe­ter and Si­mon Ze­lo­tes, he ex­pe­ri­enced the high­est ner­vous ten­sion and was in a state of ex­haus­tion by night. But by morn­ing Mat­thew was much cheered; he was, af­ter all, a cheer­ful loser.

172:5.9Thomas was the most be­wil­dered and puz­zled man of all the twelve. Most of the time he just fol­lowed along, gaz­ing at the spec­ta­cle and hon­estly won­der­ing what could be the Mas­ter’s mo­tive for par­tic­i­pat­ing in such a pe­cu­liar dem­on­stra­tion. Down deep in his heart he re­garded the whole per­for­mance as a lit­tle child­ish, if not down­right fool­ish. He had never seen Je­sus do any­thing like this and was at a loss to ac­count for his strange con­duct on this Sun­day af­ter­noon. By the time they reached the tem­ple, Thomas had de­duced that the pur­pose of this pop­u­lar dem­on­stra­tion was so to frighten the San­hedrin that they would not dare im­me­di­ately to ar­rest the Mas­ter. On the way back to Beth­any Thomas thought much but said noth­ing. By bed­time the Mas­ter’s clev­er­ness in stag­ing the tu­mul­tuous en­try into Je­ru­sa­lem had be­gun to make a some­what hu­mor­ous ap­peal, and he was much cheered up by this re­ac­tion.

172:5.10This Sun­day started off as a great day for Si­mon Ze­lo­tes. He saw vi­sions of won­der­ful do­ings in Je­ru­sa­lem the next few days, and in that he was right, but Si­mon dreamed of the es­tab­lish­ment of the new na­tional rule of the Jews, with Je­sus on the throne of David. Si­mon saw the na­tion­al­ists spring­ing into ac­tion as soon as the king­dom was an­nounced, and him­self in su­preme com­mand of the as­sem­bling mil­i­tary forces of the new king­dom. On the way down Oli­vet he even en­vis­aged the San­hedrin and all of their sym­pa­thiz­ers dead be­fore sun­set of that day. He re­ally be­lieved some­thing great was go­ing to hap­pen. He was the nois­i­est man in the whole mul­ti­tude. By five o’clock that af­ter­noon he was a silent, crushed, and dis­il­lu­sioned apos­tle. He never fully re­cov­ered from the de­pres­sion which set­tled down on him as a re­sult of this day’s shock; at least not un­til long af­ter the Mas­ter’s res­ur­rec­tion.

172:5.11To the Al­pheus twins this was a per­fect day. They re­ally en­joyed it all the way through, and not be­ing pres­ent dur­ing the time of quiet vis­i­ta­tion about the tem­ple, they es­caped much of the an­ti­cli­max of the pop­u­lar up­heaval. They could not pos­si­bly un­der­stand the down­cast be­hav­ior of the apos­tles when they came back to Beth­any that evening. In the mem­ory of the twins this was al­ways their day of be­ing near­est heaven on earth. This day was the sat­is­fy­ing cli­max of their whole ca­reer as apos­tles. And the mem­ory of the ela­tion of this Sun­day af­ter­noon car­ried them on through all of the tragedy of this event­ful week, right up to the hour of the cru­ci­fix­ion. It was the most be­fit­ting en­try of the king the twins could con­ceive; they en­joyed ev­ery mo­ment of the whole pageant. They fully ap­proved of all they saw and long cher­ished the mem­ory.

172:5.12Of all the apos­tles, Ju­das Is­car­iot was the most ad­versely af­fected by this pro­ces­sional en­try into Je­ru­sa­lem. His mind was in a dis­agree­able fer­ment be­cause of the Mas­ter’s re­buke the pre­ced­ing day in con­nec­tion with Mary’s anoint­ing at the feast in Si­mon’s house. Ju­das was dis­gusted with the whole spec­ta­cle. To him it seemed child­ish, if not in­deed ridicu­lous. As this venge­ful apos­tle looked upon the pro­ceed­ings of this Sun­day af­ter­noon, Je­sus seemed to him more to re­sem­ble a clown than a king. He heart­ily re­sented the whole per­for­mance. He shared the views of the Greeks and Ro­mans, who looked down upon any­one who would con­sent to ride upon an ass or the colt of an ass. By the time the tri­umphal pro­ces­sion had en­tered the city, Ju­das had about made up his mind to aban­don the whole idea of such a king­dom; he was al­most re­solved to for­sake all such far­ci­cal at­tempts to es­tab­lish the king­dom of heaven. And then he thought of the res­ur­rec­tion of Laz­a­rus, and many other things, and de­cided to stay on with the twelve, at least for an­other day. Be­sides, he car­ried the bag, and he would not desert with the apos­tolic funds in his pos­ses­sion. On the way back to Beth­any that night his con­duct did not seem strange since all of the apos­tles were equally down­cast and silent.

172:5.13Ju­das was tremen­dously in­flu­enced by the ridicule of his Sad­ducean friends. No other sin­gle fac­tor ex­erted such a pow­er­ful in­flu­ence on him, in his fi­nal de­ter­mi­na­tion to for­sake Je­sus and his fel­low apos­tles, as a cer­tain episode which oc­curred just as Je­sus reached the gate of the city: A promi­nent Sad­ducee (a friend of Ju­das’s fam­ily) rushed up to him in a spirit of glee­ful ridicule and, slap­ping him on the back, said: “Why so trou­bled of coun­te­nance, my good friend; cheer up and join us all while we ac­claim this Je­sus of Naz­a­reth the king of the Jews as he rides through the gates of Je­ru­sa­lem seated on an ass.” Ju­das had never shrunk from per­se­cu­tion, but he could not stand this sort of ridicule. With the long-nour­ished emo­tion of re­venge there was now blended this fa­tal fear of ridicule, that ter­ri­ble and fear­ful feel­ing of be­ing ashamed of his Mas­ter and his fel­low apos­tles. At heart, this or­dained am­bas­sador of the king­dom was al­ready a de­serter; it only re­mained for him to find some plau­si­ble ex­cuse for an open break with the Mas­ter.

• did not assist cleansing of temple

173:1.10This sur­pris­ing act of Je­sus was be­yond the com­pre­hen­sion of his apos­tles. They were so taken aback by this sud­den and un­ex­pected move of their Mas­ter that they re­mained through­out the whole episode hud­dled to­gether near the speaker’s stand; they never lifted a hand to fur­ther this cleans­ing of the tem­ple. If this spec­tac­u­lar event had oc­curred the day be­fore, at the time of Je­sus’ tri­umphal ar­rival at the tem­ple at the ter­mi­na­tion of his tu­mul­tuous pro­ces­sion through the gates of the city, all the while loudly ac­claimed by the mul­ti­tude, they would have been ready for it, but com­ing as it did, they were wholly un­pre­pared to par­tic­i­pate.

• apostles of Jesus

173:5.6Again it was a silent group of Jews who made their way up the west­ern slope of Oli­vet on this Mon­day night. These twelve men, as never be­fore, were be­gin­ning to sense that some­thing tragic was about to hap­pen. While the dra­matic cleans­ing of the tem­ple dur­ing the early morn­ing had aroused their hopes of see­ing the Mas­ter as­sert him­self and man­i­fest his mighty pow­ers, the events of the en­tire af­ter­noon only op­er­ated as an an­ti­cli­max in that they all pointed to the cer­tain re­jec­tion of Je­sus’ teach­ing by the Jew­ish au­thor­i­ties. The apos­tles were gripped by sus­pense and were held in the firm grasp of a ter­ri­ble un­cer­tainty. They re­al­ized that only a few short days could in­ter­vene be­tween the events of the day just passed and the crash of an im­pend­ing doom. They all felt that some­thing tremen­dous was about to hap­pen, but they knew not what to ex­pect. They went to their var­i­ous places for rest, but they slept very lit­tle. Even the Al­pheus twins were at last aroused to the re­al­iza­tion that the events of the Mas­ter’s life were mov­ing swiftly to­ward their fi­nal cul­mi­na­tion.

• Jesus › warned not to endanger their lives

176:1.3Since Je­ru­sa­lem was to be­come the cra­dle of the early gospel move­ment, Je­sus did not want its teach­ers and preach­ers to per­ish in the ter­ri­ble over­throw of the Jew­ish peo­ple in con­nec­tion with the de­struc­tion of Je­ru­sa­lem; where­fore did he give these in­struc­tions to his fol­low­ers. Je­sus was much con­cerned lest some of his dis­ci­ples be­come in­volved in these soon-com­ing re­volts and so per­ish in the down­fall of Je­ru­sa­lem.

176:1.4Then An­drew in­quired: “But, Mas­ter, if the Holy City and the tem­ple are to be de­stroyed, and if you are not here to di­rect us, when should we for­sake Je­ru­sa­lem?” Said Je­sus: “You may re­main in the city af­ter I have gone, even through these times of tra­vail and bit­ter per­se­cu­tion, but when you fi­nally see Je­ru­sa­lem be­ing en­com­passed by the Ro­man armies af­ter the re­volt of the false proph­ets, then will you know that her des­o­la­tion is at hand; then must you flee to the moun­tains. Let none who are in the city and around about tarry to save aught, nei­ther let those who are out­side dare to en­ter therein. There will be great tribu­la­tion, for these will be the days of gen­tile vengeance. And af­ter you have de­serted the city, this dis­obe­di­ent peo­ple will fall by the edge of the sword and will be led cap­tive into all na­tions; and so shall Je­ru­sa­lem be trod­den down by the gen­tiles. In the mean­time, I warn you, be not de­ceived. If any man comes to you, say­ing, ‘Be­hold, here is the De­liv­erer,’ or ‘Be­hold, there is he,’ be­lieve it not, for many false teach­ers will arise and many will be led astray; but you should not be de­ceived, for I have told you all this be­fore­hand.”

• Jesus › subjected to repeated disappointment, testing

177:4.11Ju­das did not re­al­ize it at this time, but he had been a sub­con­scious critic of Je­sus ever since John the Bap­tist was be­headed by Herod. Deep down in his heart Ju­das al­ways re­sented the fact that Je­sus did not save John. You should not for­get that Ju­das had been a dis­ci­ple of John be­fore he be­came a fol­lower of Je­sus. And all these ac­cu­mu­la­tions of hu­man re­sent­ment and bit­ter dis­ap­point­ment which Ju­das had laid by in his soul in ha­bil­i­ments of hate were now well or­ga­nized in his sub­con­scious mind and ready to spring up to en­gulf him when he once dared to sep­a­rate him­self from the sup­port­ing in­flu­ence of his breth­ren while at the same time ex­pos­ing him­self to the clever in­sin­u­a­tions and sub­tle ridicule of the en­e­mies of Je­sus. Ev­ery time Ju­das al­lowed his hopes to soar high and Je­sus would do or say some­thing to dash them to pieces, there was al­ways left in Ju­das’s heart a scar of bit­ter re­sent­ment; and as these scars mul­ti­plied, pres­ently that heart, so of­ten wounded, lost all real af­fec­tion for the one who had in­flicted this dis­taste­ful ex­pe­ri­ence upon a well-in­ten­tioned but cow­ardly and self-cen­tered per­son­al­ity. Ju­das did not re­al­ize it, but he was a cow­ard. Ac­cord­ingly was he al­ways in­clined to as­sign to Je­sus cow­ardice as the mo­tive which led him so of­ten to refuse to grasp for power or glory when they were ap­par­ently within his easy reach. And ev­ery mor­tal man knows full well how love, even when once gen­uine, can, through dis­ap­point­ment, jeal­ousy, and long-con­tin­ued re­sent­ment, be even­tu­ally turned into ac­tual hate.

• Jesus › forewarned a. of Judas’s betrayal

177:5.2This was the oc­ca­sion of Je­sus’ warn­ing his fol­low­ers to be­ware of the sup­port of the mul­ti­tude. He re­counted their ex­pe­ri­ences in Gal­i­lee when time and again great throngs of peo­ple en­thu­si­as­ti­cally fol­lowed them around and then just as ar­dently turned against them and re­turned to their for­mer ways of be­liev­ing and liv­ing. And then he said: “And so you must not al­low your­selves to be de­ceived by the great crowds who heard us in the tem­ple, and who seemed to be­lieve our teach­ings. These mul­ti­tudes lis­ten to the truth and be­lieve it su­per­fi­cially with their minds, but few of them per­mit the word of truth to strike down into the heart with liv­ing roots. Those who know the gospel only in the mind, and who have not ex­pe­ri­enced it in the heart, can­not be de­pended upon for sup­port when real trou­ble comes. When the rulers of the Jews reach an agree­ment to de­stroy the Son of Man, and when they strike with one ac­cord, you will see the mul­ti­tude ei­ther flee in dis­may or else stand by in silent amaze­ment while these mad­dened and blinded rulers lead the teach­ers of the gospel truth to their death. And then, when ad­ver­sity and per­se­cu­tion de­scend upon you, still oth­ers who you think love the truth will be scat­tered, and some will re­nounce the gospel and desert you. Some who have been very close to us have al­ready made up their minds to desert. You have rested to­day in prepa­ra­tion for those times which are now upon us. Watch, there­fore, and pray that on the mor­row you may be strength­ened for the days that are just ahead.”

• desired preference

179:1.6They are gath­ered to­gether to cel­e­brate, at least in spirit, an in­sti­tu­tion which an­te­dated even Moses and re­ferred to the times when their fa­thers were slaves in Egypt. This sup­per is their last ren­dezvous with Je­sus, and even in such a solemn set­ting, un­der the lead­er­ship of Ju­das the apos­tles are led once more to give way to their old predilec­tion for honor, pref­er­ence, and per­sonal ex­al­ta­tion.

• Jesus › forewarned a. of Judas’s betrayal

179:3.6As the Mas­ter made ready to be­gin wash­ing Pe­ter’s feet, he said: “He who is al­ready clean needs only to have his feet washed. You who sit with me tonight are clean—but not all. But the dust of your feet should have been washed away be­fore you sat down at meat with me. And be­sides, I would per­form this ser­vice for you as a para­ble to il­lus­trate the mean­ing of a new com­mand­ment which I will pres­ently give you.”

• desired preference

179:3.9“When I came into this cham­ber tonight, you were not con­tent proudly to refuse to wash one an­other’s feet, but you must also fall to dis­put­ing among your­selves as to who should have the places of honor at my ta­ble. Such hon­ors the Phar­isees and the chil­dren of this world seek, but it should not be so among the am­bas­sadors of the heav­enly king­dom. Do you not know that there can be no place of prefer­ment at my ta­ble? Do you not un­der­stand that I love each of you as I do the oth­ers? Do you not know that the place near­est me, as men re­gard such hon­ors, can mean noth­ing con­cern­ing your stand­ing in the king­dom of heaven? You know that the kings of the gen­tiles have lord­ship over their sub­jects, while those who ex­er­cise this au­thor­ity are some­times called bene­fac­tors. But it shall not be so in the king­dom of heaven. He who would be great among you, let him be­come as the younger; while he who would be chief, let him be­come as one who serves. Who is the greater, he who sits at meat, or he who serves? Is it not com­monly re­garded that he who sits at meat is the greater? But you will ob­serve that I am among you as one who serves. If you are will­ing to be­come fel­low ser­vants with me in do­ing the Fa­ther’s will, in the king­dom to come you shall sit with me in power, still do­ing the Fa­ther’s will in fu­ture glory.”

179:4.1For some min­utes the apos­tles ate in si­lence, but un­der the in­flu­ence of the Mas­ter’s cheer­ful de­meanor they were soon drawn into con­ver­sa­tion, and ere long the meal was pro­ceed­ing as if noth­ing out of the or­di­nary had oc­curred to in­ter­fere with the good cheer and so­cial ac­cord of this ex­traor­di­nary oc­ca­sion. Af­ter some time had elapsed, in about the mid­dle of this sec­ond course of the meal, Je­sus, look­ing them over, said: “I have told you how much I de­sired to have this sup­per with you, and know­ing how the evil forces of dark­ness have con­spired to bring about the death of the Son of Man, I de­ter­mined to eat this sup­per with you in this se­cret cham­ber and a day in ad­vance of the Pass­over since I will not be with you by this time to­mor­row night. I have re­peat­edly told you that I must re­turn to the Fa­ther. Now has my hour come, but it was not re­quired that one of you should be­tray me into the hands of my en­e­mies.”

179:4.2When the twelve heard this, hav­ing al­ready been robbed of much of their self-as­sertive­ness and self-con­fi­dence by the para­ble of the feet wash­ing and the Mas­ter’s sub­se­quent dis­course, they be­gan to look at one an­other while in dis­con­certed tones they hes­i­tat­ingly in­quired, “Is it I?” And when they had all so in­quired, Je­sus said: “While it is nec­es­sary that I go to the Fa­ther, it was not re­quired that one of you should be­come a traitor to ful­fill the Fa­ther’s will. This is the com­ing to fruit of the con­cealed evil in the heart of one who failed to love the truth with his whole soul. How de­ceit­ful is the in­tel­lec­tual pride that pre­cedes the spir­i­tual down­fall! My friend of many years, who even now eats my bread, will be will­ing to be­tray me, even as he now dips his hand with me in the dish.”

179:4.3And when Je­sus had thus spo­ken, they all be­gan again to ask, “Is it I?” And as Ju­das, sit­ting on the left of his Mas­ter, again asked, “Is it I?” Je­sus, dip­ping the bread in the dish of herbs, handed it to Ju­das, say­ing, “You have said.” But the oth­ers did not hear Je­sus speak to Ju­das. John, who re­clined on Je­sus’ right hand, leaned over and asked the Mas­ter: “Who is it? We should know who it is that has proved un­true to his trust.” Je­sus an­swered: “Al­ready have I told you, even he to whom I gave the sop.” But it was so nat­u­ral for the host to give a sop to the one who sat next to him on the left that none of them took no­tice of this, even though the Mas­ter had so plainly spo­ken. But Ju­das was painfully con­scious of the mean­ing of the Mas­ter’s words as­so­ci­ated with his act, and he be­came fear­ful lest his breth­ren were like­wise now aware that he was the be­trayer.

179:4.4Pe­ter was highly ex­cited by what had been said, and lean­ing for­ward over the ta­ble, he ad­dressed John, “Ask him who it is, or if he has told you, tell me who is the be­trayer.”

179:4.5Je­sus brought their whis­per­ings to an end by say­ing: “I sor­row that this evil should have come to pass and hoped even up to this hour that the power of truth might tri­umph over the de­cep­tions of evil, but such vic­to­ries are not won with­out the faith of the sin­cere love of truth. I would not have told you these things at this, our last sup­per, but I de­sire to warn you of these sor­rows and so pre­pare you for what is now upon us. I have told you of this be­cause I de­sire that you should re­call, af­ter I have gone, that I knew about all these evil plot­tings, and that I fore­warned you of my be­trayal. And I do all this only that you may be strength­ened for the temp­ta­tions and tri­als which are just ahead.”

179:4.6When Je­sus had thus spo­ken, lean­ing over to­ward Ju­das, he said: “What you have de­cided to do, do quickly.” And when Ju­das heard these words, he arose from the ta­ble and hastily left the room, go­ing out into the night to do what he had set his mind to ac­com­plish. When the other apos­tles saw Ju­das has­ten off af­ter Je­sus had spo­ken to him, they thought he had gone to pro­cure some­thing ad­di­tional for the sup­per or to do some other er­rand for the Mas­ter since they sup­posed he still car­ried the bag.

179:4.7Je­sus now knew that noth­ing could be done to keep Ju­das from turn­ing traitor. He started with twelve—now he had eleven. He chose six of these apos­tles, and though Ju­das was among those nom­i­nated by his first-cho­sen apos­tles, still the Mas­ter ac­cepted him and had, up to this very hour, done ev­ery­thing pos­si­ble to sanc­tify and save him, even as he had wrought for the peace and sal­va­tion of the oth­ers.

179:4.8This sup­per, with its ten­der episodes and soft­en­ing touches, was Je­sus’ last ap­peal to the de­sert­ing Ju­das, but it was of no avail. Warn­ing, even when ad­min­is­tered in the most tact­ful man­ner and con­veyed in the most kindly spirit, as a rule, only in­ten­si­fies ha­tred and fires the evil de­ter­mi­na­tion to carry out to the full one’s own self­ish projects, when love is once re­ally dead.

• beliefs of apostles › blinded by belief in temporal kingdom, materialistic Messiah

180:6.9When the eleven had heard him speak, they said to each other: “Be­hold, he does speak plainly to us. Surely the Mas­ter did come forth from God. But why does he say he must re­turn to the Fa­ther?” And Je­sus saw that they did not even yet com­pre­hend him. These eleven men could not get away from their long-nour­ished ideas of the Jew­ish con­cept of the Mes­siah. The more fully they be­lieved in Je­sus as the Mes­siah, the more trou­ble­some be­came these deep-rooted no­tions re­gard­ing the glo­ri­ous ma­te­rial tri­umph of the king­dom on earth.

• chosen by Father

181:1.4“The Fa­ther sent me into this world, but only a few of you have cho­sen fully to re­ceive me. I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, but all men will not choose to re­ceive this new teacher as the guide and coun­selor of the soul. But as many as do re­ceive him shall be en­light­ened, cleansed, and com­forted. And this Spirit of Truth will be­come in them a well of liv­ing wa­ter spring­ing up into eter­nal life.

• beliefs of apostles › blinded by belief in temporal kingdom, materialistic Messiah

181:2.7Je­sus now went over to Si­mon Ze­lo­tes, who stood up and lis­tened to this ad­mo­ni­tion: “You are a true son of Abra­ham, but what a time I have had try­ing to make you a son of this heav­enly king­dom. I love you and so do all of your breth­ren. I know that you love me, Si­mon, and that you also love the king­dom, but you are still set on mak­ing this king­dom come ac­cord­ing to your lik­ing. I know full well that you will even­tu­ally grasp the spir­i­tual na­ture and mean­ing of my gospel, and that you will do valiant work in its procla­ma­tion, but I am dis­tressed about what may hap­pen to you when I de­part. I would re­joice to know that you would not fal­ter; I would be made happy if I could know that, af­ter I go to the Fa­ther, you would not cease to be my apos­tle, and that you would ac­cept­ably de­port your­self as an am­bas­sador of the heav­enly king­dom.”

• Jesus › warned not to endanger their lives

181:2.15Je­sus then stepped over to James Zeb­e­dee, who stood in si­lence as the Mas­ter ad­dressed him, say­ing: “James, when you and your younger brother once came to me seek­ing prefer­ment in the hon­ors of the king­dom, and I told you such hon­ors were for the Fa­ther to be­stow, I asked if you were able to drink my cup, and both of you an­swered that you were. Even if you were not then able, and if you are not now able, you will soon be pre­pared for such a ser­vice by the ex­pe­ri­ence you are about to pass through. By such be­hav­ior you an­gered your breth­ren at that time. If they have not al­ready fully for­given you, they will when they see you drink my cup. Whether your min­istry be long or short, pos­sess your soul in pa­tience. When the new teacher comes, let him teach you the poise of com­pas­sion and that sym­pa­thetic tol­er­ance which is born of sub­lime con­fi­dence in me and of per­fect sub­mis­sion to the Fa­ther’s will. Ded­i­cate your life to the dem­on­stra­tion of that com­bined hu­man af­fec­tion and di­vine dig­nity of the God-know­ing and Son-be­liev­ing dis­ci­ple. And all who thus live will re­veal the gospel even in the man­ner of their death. You and your brother John will go dif­fer­ent ways, and one of you may sit down with me in the eter­nal king­dom long be­fore the other. It would help you much if you would learn that true wis­dom em­braces dis­cre­tion as well as cour­age. You should learn sagac­ity to go along with your ag­gres­sive­ness. There will come those su­preme mo­ments wherein my dis­ci­ples will not hes­i­tate to lay down their lives for this gospel, but in all or­di­nary cir­cum­stances it would be far bet­ter to pla­cate the wrath of un­be­liev­ers that you might live and con­tinue to preach the glad tid­ings. As far as lies in your power, live long on the earth that your life of many years may be fruit­ful in souls won for the heav­enly king­dom.”

• beliefs of apostles › blinded by belief in temporal kingdom, materialistic Messiah

181:2.23Then Na­than­iel spoke, ask­ing Je­sus this ques­tion: “I have lis­tened to your teach­ing ever since you first called me to the ser­vice of this king­dom, but I hon­estly can­not un­der­stand the full mean­ing of all you tell us. I do not know what to ex­pect next, and I think most of my breth­ren are like­wise per­plexed, but they hes­i­tate to con­fess their con­fu­sion. Can you help me?” Je­sus, putting his hand on Na­than­iel’s shoul­der, said: “My friend, it is not strange that you should en­counter per­plex­ity in your at­tempt to grasp the mean­ing of my spir­i­tual teach­ings since you are so hand­i­capped by your pre­con­cep­tions of Jew­ish tra­di­tion and so con­fused by your per­sis­tent ten­dency to in­ter­pret my gospel in ac­cor­dance with the teach­ings of the scribes and Phar­isees.

• Jesus › prayed to be honored in a.

182:1.4“I have man­i­fested you to the men whom you chose from the world and gave to me. They are yours—as all life is in your hands—you gave them to me, and I have lived among them, teach­ing them the way of life, and they have be­lieved. These men are learn­ing that all I have comes from you, and that the life I live in the flesh is to make known my Fa­ther to the worlds. The truth which you have given to me I have re­vealed to them. These, my friends and am­bas­sadors, have sin­cerely willed to re­ceive your word. I have told them that I came forth from you, that you sent me into this world, and that I am about to re­turn to you. Fa­ther, I do pray for these cho­sen men. And I pray for them not as I would pray for the world, but as for those whom I have cho­sen out of the world to rep­re­sent me to the world af­ter I have re­turned to your work, even as I have rep­re­sented you in this world dur­ing my so­journ in the flesh. These men are mine; you gave them to me; but all things which are mine are ever yours, and all that which was yours you have now caused to be mine. You have been ex­alted in me, and I now pray that I may be hon­ored in these men. I can no longer be in this world; I am about to re­turn to the work you have given me to do. I must leave these men be­hind to rep­re­sent us and our king­dom among men. Fa­ther, keep these men faith­ful as I pre­pare to yield up my life in the flesh. Help these, my friends, to be one in spirit, even as we are one. As long as I could be with them, I could watch over them and guide them, but now am I about to go away. Be near them, Fa­ther, un­til we can send the new teacher to com­fort and strengthen them.

• Jesus › prayed a. be kept from evil, sanctified in truth

182:1.5“You gave me twelve men, and I have kept them all save one, the son of re­venge, who would not have fur­ther fel­low­ship with us. These men are weak and frail, but I know we can trust them; I have proved them; they love me, even as they rev­er­ence you. While they must suf­fer much for my sake, I de­sire that they should also be filled with the joy of the as­sur­ance of son­ship in the heav­enly king­dom. I have given these men your word and have taught them the truth. The world may hate them, even as it has hated me, but I do not ask that you take them out of the world, only that you keep them from the evil in the world. Sanc­tify them in the truth; your word is truth. And as you sent me into this world, even so am I about to send these men into the world. For their sakes I have lived among men and have con­se­crated my life to your ser­vice that I might in­spire them to be pu­ri­fied through the truth I have taught them and the love I have re­vealed to them. I well know, my Fa­ther, that there is no need for me to ask you to watch over these breth­ren af­ter I have gone; I know you love them even as I, but I do this that they may the bet­ter re­al­ize the Fa­ther loves mor­tal men even as does the Son.

• resented Judas’s treachery

182:2.4Re­sent­ment of Ju­das’s be­ing a traitor for the mo­ment ec­lipsed ev­ery­thing else in the apos­tles’ minds. The Mas­ter’s com­ment in ref­er­ence to Ju­das, spo­ken in the course of the last prayer, opened their eyes to the fact that he had for­saken them.

• Jesus › realized a. to be weak and ignorant

182:3.9The ex­pe­ri­ence of part­ing with the apos­tles was a great strain on the hu­man heart of Je­sus; this sor­row of love bore down on him and made it more dif­fi­cult to face such a death as he well knew awaited him. He re­al­ized how weak and how ig­no­rant his apos­tles were, and he dreaded to leave them. He well knew that the time of his de­par­ture had come, but his hu­man heart longed to find out whether there might not pos­si­bly be some le­git­i­mate av­enue of es­cape from this ter­ri­ble plight of suf­fer­ing and sor­row. And when it had thus sought es­cape, and failed, it was will­ing to drink the cup. The di­vine mind of Mi­chael knew he had done his best for the twelve apos­tles; but the hu­man heart of Je­sus wished that more might have been done for them be­fore they should be left alone in the world. Je­sus’ heart was be­ing crushed; he truly loved his breth­ren. He was iso­lated from his fam­ily in the flesh; one of his cho­sen as­so­ciates was be­tray­ing him. His fa­ther Joseph’s peo­ple had re­jected him and thereby sealed their doom as a peo­ple with a spe­cial mis­sion on earth. His soul was tor­tured by baf­fled love and re­jected mercy. It was just one of those aw­ful hu­man mo­ments when ev­ery­thing seems to bear down with crush­ing cru­elty and ter­ri­ble agony.

• Jesus › did not wish a. present at his arrest

183:0.3Fail­ing to dis­perse his fol­low­ers, the Mas­ter left them and walked down to­ward the olive press near the en­trance to Geth­sem­ane Park. Al­though the three apos­tles, the Greeks, and the other mem­bers of the camp hes­i­tated im­me­di­ately to fol­low him, John Mark has­tened around through the olive trees and se­creted him­self in a small shed near the olive press. Je­sus with­drew from the camp and from his friends in or­der that his ap­pre­hend­ers, when they ar­rived, might ar­rest him with­out dis­turb­ing his apos­tles. The Mas­ter feared to have his apos­tles awake and pres­ent at the time of his ar­rest lest the spec­ta­cle of Ju­das’s be­tray­ing him should so arouse their an­i­mos­ity that they would of­fer re­sis­tance to the sol­diers and would be taken into cus­tody with him. He feared that, if they should be ar­rested with him, they might also per­ish with him.

• Jesus › warned not to endanger their lives

183:4.2An­drew had been re­leased from all re­spon­si­bil­ity in the group man­age­ment of his fel­low apos­tles; ac­cord­ingly, in this great­est of all crises in their lives, he was silent. Af­ter a short in­for­mal dis­cus­sion, Si­mon Ze­lo­tes stood up on the stone wall of the olive press and, mak­ing an im­pas­sioned plea for loy­alty to the Mas­ter and the cause of the king­dom, ex­horted his fel­low apos­tles and the other dis­ci­ples to has­ten on af­ter the mob and ef­fect the res­cue of Je­sus. The ma­jor­ity of the com­pany would have been dis­posed to fol­low his ag­gres­sive lead­er­ship had it not been for the ad­vice of Na­than­iel, who stood up the mo­ment Si­mon had fin­ished speak­ing and called their at­ten­tion to Je­sus’ oft-re­peated teach­ings re­gard­ing non­re­sis­tance. He fur­ther re­minded them that Je­sus had that very night in­structed them that they should pre­serve their lives for the time when they should go forth into the world pro­claim­ing the good news of the gospel of the heav­enly king­dom. And Na­than­iel was en­cour­aged in this stand by James Zeb­e­dee, who now told how Pe­ter and oth­ers drew their swords to de­fend the Mas­ter against ar­rest, and that Je­sus bade Si­mon Pe­ter and his fel­low swords­men sheathe their blades. Mat­thew and Philip also made speeches, but noth­ing def­i­nite came of this dis­cus­sion un­til Thomas, call­ing their at­ten­tion to the fact that Je­sus had coun­seled Laz­a­rus against ex­pos­ing him­self to death, pointed out that they could do noth­ing to save their Mas­ter inas­much as he re­fused to al­low his friends to de­fend him, and since he per­sisted in re­frain­ing from the use of his di­vine pow­ers to frus­trate his hu­man en­e­mies. Thomas per­suaded them to scat­ter, ev­ery man for him­self, with the un­der­stand­ing that David Zeb­e­dee would re­main at the camp to main­tain a clear­ing­house and mes­sen­ger head­quar­ters for the group. By half past two o’clock that morn­ing the camp was de­serted; only David re­mained on hand with three or four mes­sen­gers, the oth­ers hav­ing been dis­patched to se­cure in­for­ma­tion as to where Je­sus had been taken, and what was go­ing to be done with him.

• apostles of Jesus
• Jesus › warned not to endanger their lives

184:2.2Pe­ter, upon en­ter­ing the court­yard, went over to the char­coal fire and sought to warm him­self, for the night was chilly. He felt very much out of place here among the en­e­mies of Je­sus, and in­deed he was out of place. The Mas­ter had not in­structed him to keep near at hand as he had ad­mon­ished John. Pe­ter be­longed with the other apos­tles, who had been specif­i­cally warned not to en­dan­ger their lives dur­ing these times of the trial and cru­ci­fix­ion of their Mas­ter.

• refused to believe Jesus risen

189:5.3Pe­ter at first sug­gested that the grave had been ri­fled, that en­e­mies had stolen the body, per­haps bribed the guards. But John rea­soned that the grave would hardly have been left so or­derly if the body had been stolen, and he also raised the ques­tion as to how the ban­dages hap­pened to be left be­hind, and so ap­par­ently in­tact. And again they both went back into the tomb more closely to ex­am­ine the grave cloths. As they came out of the tomb the sec­ond time, they found Mary Mag­da­lene re­turned and weep­ing be­fore the en­trance. Mary had gone to the apos­tles be­liev­ing that Je­sus had risen from the grave, but when they all re­fused to be­lieve her re­port, she be­came down­cast and de­spair­ing. She longed to go back near the tomb, where she thought she had heard the fa­mil­iar voice of Je­sus.

• refused to believe Jesus risen

190:1.1The apos­tles did not want Je­sus to leave them; there­fore had they slighted all his state­ments about dy­ing, along with his promises to rise again. They were not ex­pect­ing the res­ur­rec­tion as it came, and they re­fused to be­lieve un­til they were con­fronted with the com­pul­sion of unim­peach­able ev­i­dence and the ab­so­lute proof of their own ex­pe­ri­ences.

• after resurrection, Jesus left a. alone for a few hours

190:2.7They all wanted to rush off to the city to tell the doubt­ing apos­tles about what had hap­pened, but James re­strained them. Mary Mag­da­lene, only, was per­mit­ted to re­turn to Joseph’s house. James for­bade their pub­lish­ing abroad the fact of this mor­ontia visit be­cause of cer­tain things which Je­sus had said to him as they con­versed in the gar­den. But James never re­vealed more of his visit with the risen Mas­ter on this day at the Laz­a­rus home in Beth­any.

• after resurrection, Jesus left a. alone for a few hours

190:3.1The fifth mor­ontia man­i­fes­ta­tion of Je­sus to the rec­og­ni­tion of mor­tal eyes oc­curred in the pres­ence of some twenty-five women be­liev­ers as­sem­bled at the home of Joseph of Ari­mathea, at about fif­teen min­utes past four o’clock on this same Sun­day af­ter­noon. Mary Mag­da­lene had re­turned to Joseph’s house just a few min­utes be­fore this ap­pear­ance. James, Je­sus’ brother, had re­quested that noth­ing be said to the apos­tles con­cern­ing the Mas­ter’s ap­pear­ance at Beth­any. He had not asked Mary to re­frain from re­port­ing the oc­cur­rence to her sis­ter be­liev­ers. Ac­cord­ingly, af­ter Mary had pledged all the women to se­crecy, she pro­ceeded to re­late what had so re­cently hap­pened while she was with Je­sus’ fam­ily at Beth­any. And she was in the very midst of this thrilling recital when a sud­den and solemn hush fell over them; they be­held in their very midst the fully vis­i­ble form of the risen Je­sus. He greeted them, say­ing: “Peace be upon you. In the fel­low­ship of the king­dom there shall be nei­ther Jew nor gen­tile, rich nor poor, free nor bond, man nor woman. You also are called to pub­lish the good news of the lib­erty of man­kind through the gospel of son­ship with God in the king­dom of heaven. Go to all the world pro­claim­ing this gospel and con­firm­ing be­liev­ers in the faith thereof. And while you do this, for­get not to min­is­ter to the sick and strengthen those who are faint­hearted and fear-rid­den. And I will be with you al­ways, even to the ends of the earth.” And when he had thus spo­ken, he van­ished from their sight, while the women fell on their faces and wor­shiped in si­lence.

• after resurrection, Jesus left a. alone for a few hours

190:4.2Ru­mors of Je­sus’ res­ur­rec­tion and re­ports con­cern­ing the many ap­pear­ances to his fol­low­ers are spread­ing rapidly, and the whole city is be­ing wrought up to a high pitch of ex­cite­ment. Al­ready the Mas­ter has ap­peared to his fam­ily, to the women, and to the Greeks, and pres­ently he man­i­fests him­self in the midst of the apos­tles. The San­hedrin is soon to be­gin the con­sid­er­a­tion of these new prob­lems which have been so sud­denly thrust upon the Jew­ish rulers. Je­sus thinks much about his apos­tles but de­sires that they be left alone for a few more hours of solemn re­flec­tion and thought­ful con­sid­er­a­tion be­fore he vis­its them.

• Jesus › warned not to endanger their lives

191:0.5James Zeb­e­dee at first ad­vo­cated that they all go to the tomb; he was strongly in fa­vor of do­ing some­thing to get to the bot­tom of the mys­tery. It was Na­than­iel who pre­vented them from go­ing out in pub­lic in re­sponse to James’s urg­ing, and he did this by re­mind­ing them of Je­sus’ warn­ing against un­duly jeop­ar­diz­ing their lives at this time. By noon­time James had set­tled down with the oth­ers to watch­ful wait­ing. He said lit­tle; he was tremen­dously dis­ap­pointed be­cause Je­sus did not ap­pear to them, and he did not know of the Mas­ter’s many ap­pear­ances to other groups and in­di­vid­u­als.

• after resurrection, Jesus left a. alone for a few hours

191:0.13The Mas­ter put off the first mor­ontia ap­pear­ance to the apos­tles for a num­ber of rea­sons. First, he wanted them to have time, af­ter they heard of his res­ur­rec­tion, to think well over what he had told them about his death and res­ur­rec­tion when he was still with them in the flesh. The Mas­ter wanted Pe­ter to wres­tle through with some of his pe­cu­liar dif­fi­cul­ties be­fore he man­i­fested him­self to them all. In the sec­ond place, he de­sired that Thomas should be with them at the time of his first ap­pear­ance. John Mark lo­cated Thomas at the home of Si­mon in Beth­page early this Sun­day morn­ing, bring­ing word to that ef­fect to the apos­tles about eleven o’clock. Any time dur­ing this day Thomas would have gone back to them if Na­than­iel or any two of the other apos­tles had gone for him. He re­ally wanted to re­turn, but hav­ing left as he did the evening be­fore, he was too proud to go back of his own ac­cord so soon. By the next day he was so de­pressed that it re­quired al­most a week for him to make up his mind to re­turn. The apos­tles waited for him, and he waited for his breth­ren to seek him out and ask him to come back to them. Thomas thus re­mained away from his as­so­ciates un­til the next Sat­ur­day evening, when, af­ter dark­ness had come on, Pe­ter and John went over to Beth­page and brought him back with them. And this is also the rea­son why they did not go at once to Gal­i­lee af­ter Je­sus first ap­peared to them; they would not go with­out Thomas.

• Matthias chosen to take place of Judas

192:0.2From this time on, un­til the apos­tles were dis­persed by the ris­ing tide of per­se­cu­tion, Pe­ter was the gen­er­ally rec­og­nized head of the apos­tolic corps. Je­sus never gave him any such au­thor­ity, and his fel­low apos­tles never for­mally elected him to such a po­si­tion of re­spon­si­bil­ity; he nat­u­rally as­sumed it and held it by com­mon con­sent and also be­cause he was their chief preacher. From now on pub­lic preach­ing be­came the main busi­ness of the apos­tles. Af­ter their re­turn from Gal­i­lee, Matthias, whom they chose to take the place of Ju­das, be­came their trea­surer.

192:3.1At noon on Sat­ur­day, April 22, the eleven apos­tles as­sem­bled by ap­point­ment on the hill near Ca­per­naum, and Je­sus ap­peared among them. This meet­ing oc­curred on the very mount where the Mas­ter had set them apart as his apos­tles and as am­bas­sadors of the Fa­ther’s king­dom on earth. And this was the Mas­ter’s four­teenth mor­ontia man­i­fes­ta­tion.

192:3.2At this time the eleven apos­tles knelt in a cir­cle about the Mas­ter and heard him re­peat the charges and saw him re-en­act the or­di­na­tion scene even as when they were first set apart for the spe­cial work of the king­dom. And all of this was to them as a mem­ory of their for­mer con­se­cra­tion to the Fa­ther’s ser­vice, ex­cept the Mas­ter’s prayer. When the Mas­ter—the mor­ontia Je­sus—now prayed, it was in tones of majesty and with words of power such as the apos­tles had never be­fore heard. Their Mas­ter now spoke with the rulers of the uni­verses as one who, in his own uni­verse, had had all power and au­thor­ity com­mit­ted to his hand. And these eleven men never for­got this ex­pe­ri­ence of the mor­ontia reded­i­ca­tion to the for­mer pledges of am­bas­sador­ship. The Mas­ter spent just one hour on this mount with his am­bas­sadors, and when he had taken an af­fec­tion­ate farewell of them, he van­ished from their sight.

192:3.3And no one saw Je­sus for a full week. The apos­tles re­ally had no idea what to do, not know­ing whether the Mas­ter had gone to the Fa­ther. In this state of un­cer­tainty they tar­ried at Beth­saida. They were afraid to go fish­ing lest he come to visit them and they miss see­ing him. Dur­ing this en­tire week Je­sus was oc­cu­pied with the mor­ontia crea­tures on earth and with the af­fairs of the mor­ontia tran­si­tion which he was ex­pe­ri­enc­ing on this world.

• apostles of Jesus
• Jesus › sent forth by twos

193:3.2“Peace be upon you. I have asked you to tarry here in Je­ru­sa­lem un­til I as­cend to the Fa­ther, even un­til I send you the Spirit of Truth, who shall soon be poured out upon all flesh, and who shall en­dow you with power from on high.” Si­mon Ze­lo­tes in­ter­rupted Je­sus, ask­ing, “Then, Mas­ter, will you re­store the king­dom, and will we see the glory of God man­i­fested on earth?” When Je­sus had lis­tened to Si­mon’s ques­tion, he an­swered: “Si­mon, you still cling to your old ideas about the Jew­ish Mes­siah and the ma­te­rial king­dom. But you will re­ceive spir­i­tual power af­ter the spirit has de­scended upon you, and you will pres­ently go into all the world preach­ing this gospel of the king­dom. As the Fa­ther sent me into the world, so do I send you. And I wish that you would love and trust one an­other. Ju­das is no more with you be­cause his love grew cold, and be­cause he re­fused to trust you, his loyal breth­ren. Have you not read in the Scrip­ture where it is writ­ten: ‘It is not good for man to be alone. No man lives to him­self’? And also where it says: ‘He who would have friends must show him­self friendly’? And did I not even send you out to teach, two and two, that you might not be­come lonely and fall into the mis­chief and mis­eries of iso­la­tion? You also well know that, when I was in the flesh, I did not per­mit my­self to be alone for long pe­ri­ods. From the very be­gin­ning of our as­so­ci­a­tions I al­ways had two or three of you con­stantly by my side or else very near at hand even when I com­muned with the Fa­ther. Trust, there­fore, and con­fide in one an­other. And this is all the more need­ful since I am this day go­ing to leave you alone in the world. The hour has come; I am about to go to the Fa­ther.”

• spiritual progress after Pentecost

194:2.9But these mis­takes of the in­tel­lect in no way in­ter­fered with the be­liever’s great prog­ress in growth in spirit. In less than a month af­ter the be­stowal of the Spirit of Truth, the apos­tles made more in­di­vid­ual spir­i­tual prog­ress than dur­ing their al­most four years of per­sonal and lov­ing as­so­ci­a­tion with the Mas­ter. Nei­ther did this sub­sti­tu­tion of the fact of the res­ur­rec­tion of Je­sus for the sav­ing gospel truth of son­ship with God in any way in­ter­fere with the rapid spread of their teach­ings; on the con­trary, this over­shad­ow­ing of Je­sus’ mes­sage by the new teach­ings about his per­son and res­ur­rec­tion seemed greatly to fa­cil­i­tate the preach­ing of the good news.

• Jesus › required a. to dedicate all their possessions to the common cause

194:3.16Be­fore Pen­te­cost the apos­tles had given up much for Je­sus. They had sac­ri­ficed their homes, fam­i­lies, friends, worldly goods, and po­si­tions. At Pen­te­cost they gave them­selves to God, and the Fa­ther and the Son re­sponded by giv­ing them­selves to man—send­ing their spir­its to live within men. This ex­pe­ri­ence of los­ing self and find­ing the spirit was not one of emo­tion; it was an act of in­tel­li­gent self-sur­ren­der and un­re­served con­se­cra­tion.

• beliefs of apostles › Messiah would sit on throne of David

194:4.1When Je­sus was so sud­denly seized by his en­e­mies and so quickly cru­ci­fied be­tween two thieves, his apos­tles and dis­ci­ples were com­pletely de­mor­al­ized. The thought of the Mas­ter, ar­rested, bound, scourged, and cru­ci­fied, was too much for even the apos­tles. They for­got his teach­ings and his warn­ings. He might, in­deed, have been “a prophet mighty in deed and word be­fore God and all the peo­ple,” but he could hardly be the Mes­siah they had hoped would re­store the king­dom of Is­rael.

• after Pentecost, a. were bold followers of living Lord

194:4.2Then comes the res­ur­rec­tion, with its de­liv­er­ance from de­spair and the re­turn of their faith in the Mas­ter’s di­vin­ity. Again and again they see him and talk with him, and he takes them out on Oli­vet, where he bids them farewell and tells them he is go­ing back to the Fa­ther. He has told them to tarry in Je­ru­sa­lem un­til they are en­dowed with power—un­til the Spirit of Truth shall come. And on the day of Pen­te­cost this new teacher comes, and they go out at once to preach their gospel with new power. They are the bold and coura­geous fol­low­ers of a liv­ing Lord, not a dead and de­feated leader. The Mas­ter lives in the hearts of these evan­ge­lists; God is not a doc­trine in their minds; he has be­come a liv­ing pres­ence in their souls.

• turned Roman Empire upside down

195:6.9The ma­te­ri­al­is­tic so­ci­ol­o­gist of to­day sur­veys a com­mu­nity, makes a re­port thereon, and leaves the peo­ple as he found them. Nine­teen hun­dred years ago, un­learned Galileans sur­veyed Je­sus giv­ing his life as a spir­i­tual con­tri­bu­tion to man’s in­ner ex­pe­ri­ence and then went out and turned the whole Ro­man Em­pire up­side down.