The Calling of the Twelve | Part 1 of 5
Author: Rod Reasen II
Jesus handpicked an ordinary team and commissioned them to an extraordinary mission. This four-part series for leaders breaks down how we can view our stewardship responsibility in team building.
Leaders are called to cast vision, execute on goals, and drive metrics. If you sit in one of those seats, you already feel the weight of it. You’ve also likely come to realize that your personal and professional success often comes down to who you have with you on the journey.
Scripture offers multiple glimpses into leadership principles; one great example of team building appears in today’s passage. We will see Christ’s manhood, His team-building leadership method, and what came after. What can we learn as leaders from the way Jesus did it, and what does the choosing of the twelve signify for us today? Let’s dig in.
Matthew 10:1-4
“And he called to him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every affliction. The names of the twelve apostles are these: first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.”[^1]
The Roster on Paper
Coaching young children or middle-school-age children is absolutely an exercise in patience. As an adult, you are almost always given a team with little to no selection criteria and a wide range of experience levels across your crew. Each practice, you are evaluating who you spend time with, which drills will be most effective for the broadest group, and where you can stretch these young people so they hopefully don’t get embarrassed in their first game. You take tremendous strides to prepare them, but eventually the day comes when they are on the field without you.
Jesus’ ministry began without a specific group of followers, but as He began, He also watched and called specific men. Probably the most surprising thing about them was their lack of experience.
There is a fisherman with a mouth he could not control, a skeptic who would not claim to believe a thing until he actually believed it, and one man about whom scripture records practically nothing. There are two brothers; Jesus will nickname them “sons of thunder,” which is not a compliment to their listening skills.
Matthew collected taxes for Rome, which made him a traitor and a thief in the eyes of every observant Jew, and Simon carried the name Zealot.[^2] Their résumés did not rise to the top. Their reputations did not elevate their status. Yet, these are the men who were called. Practically speaking, there is no org chart that turns a tax collector and a zealot into partners, and no off-site ropes course or team-building exercise that gets you there either. What held those men together was never compatibility or complementary skill sets. It was one mission and the Man who called them to it.
Notice, too, that the Holy Spirit could have written that Jesus chose twelve men and then moved on to the mission, which is where this chapter is actually headed. Instead, we get every name. Spurgeon caught the significance of this and said:
“The Holy Spirit does not object to truthful statistics: there were twelve apostles. This was a complete number, neither too many nor too few… The Holy Spirit has no love to the anonymous, or to the use of initials, as some have in these days. He gives the names, and why not? Order is observed in this muster-roll.”[^3]
The Word That Changes Here
Matthew has spent nine chapters calling these men disciples. The Greek word is mathetes, and it simply means “learner,” a student attached to a teacher.[^4]
In verse 2, he calls them apostles, and that is the only time the word appears in his entire gospel.[^5] Apostolos comes from apostello, to send off, and it means sent one. It was not a religious word first. In ordinary usage, an apostolos was an official emissary, a delegate who carried the full authority of the man who dispatched him, which is why dealing with the emissary was the same as dealing with his sender. MacArthur noted that the term conveyed the idea of “an ambassador, a delegate, an official representative.”[^6]
Matthew Henry, writing three hundred years ago, landed in the same place and gave it his own phrasing.
“All faithful ministers are sent of Christ, but they that were first, and immediately, sent by him, are eminently called apostles, the prime ministers of state in his kingdom.”[^7]
Notice this about these men. They were learners at first. Then He sent them. That is the hinge of this whole chapter, and it is one reason we will break this up into a series.
Matthew Is Not the Only Witness
If you read this chapter alone, you will miss most of what happened, because Matthew gives us only the moment of the calling. The other three gospels give us the run-up to it.
John shows the first meeting. Andrew was standing with John the Baptist when John pointed at Jesus and called Him the Lamb of God, and Andrew went and found his brother Simon and brought him.[^8] Philip is called the next day and immediately goes to find Nathanael, who wants to know whether anything good can come out of Nazareth.[^9] That is the introduction, and it happens long before Matthew 10.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke show the call to follow. Later, at the shoreline, Jesus tells Peter, Andrew, and then James and John to follow Him, and they leave the nets, the boat, and their father sitting there.[^10] Leaving both career and family to follow.
Matthew and Luke show the commissioning. What happens in Matthew 10 is the third move. Luke supplies additional detail.
“In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God. And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles.”[^11]
The whole night. Mark adds the posture behind it, telling us Jesus went up on the mountain and called to Him those whom He desired, and they came to Him.[^12] Those whom He desired. Not those who applied.
MacArthur reads these as three distinct phases of one calling, running from introduction to discipleship to apostleship, and once you see the sequence you cannot unsee it.[^13] These men were not recruited in an afternoon. They were introduced, then called, then commissioned, and each stage cost them more than the one before.
Four Lists, One Roster
There are four rosters of the twelve in the New Testament. Stacking them side by side turns up something most readers may never notice.
| Matthew 10:2-4 | Mark 3:16-19 | Luke 6:14-16 | Acts 1:13 | |
| 1 | Peter | Peter | Peter | Peter |
| 2 | Andrew | James | Andrew | John |
| 3 | James | John | James | James |
| 4 | John | Andrew | John | Andrew |
| 5 | Philip | Philip | Philip | Philip |
| 6 | Bartholomew | Bartholomew | Bartholomew | Thomas |
| 7 | Thomas | Matthew | Matthew | Bartholomew |
| 8 | Matthew | Thomas | Thomas | Matthew |
| 9 | James son of Alphaeus | James son of Alphaeus | James son of Alphaeus | James son of Alphaeus |
| 10 | Thaddaeus | Thaddaeus | Simon the Zealot | Simon the Zealot |
| 11 | Simon the Zealot | Simon the Zealot | Judas son of James | Judas son of James |
| 12 | Judas Iscariot | Judas Iscariot | Judas Iscariot | not listed |
The names inside each block of four shuffle freely. The blocks themselves never move, and the man at the head of each block is the same in all four lists. Peter always leads the first four. Philip always leads the second four. James, the son of Alphaeus, always leads the last four. Judas Iscariot is last on every list that includes him, and Acts drops him because the seat is now open, and the eleven are waiting for a replacement.
Four writers, four occasions, one structure. Think about how you would lay out your own team. That’s what we are seeing recorded.
One more thing about that table. In Mark and Luke, Matthew is listed seventh. In his own gospel, he puts himself eighth, behind Thomas, and he is the only writer who attaches the words tax collector to his name. In “He Saw A Man,” we cover this more deeply.
Why Twelve?
This was not a random number based on availability or a slot He had to fill on His roster. To the Jewish ear in Galilee, the number twelve carried immense significance.
Twelve is the number of the sons of Jacob and, therefore, the number of the tribes of Israel. When this man Jesus assembles twelve and commissions them to the house of Israel, He is making a claim about who He is. Jesus makes that claim plain later on, when He tells these same men they will sit on twelve thrones judging those very tribes.[^14] John shows us where it finally lands, in a New Jerusalem whose wall stands on twelve foundations carrying the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.[^15] A new order was being created in front of them.
That is the scale of the mission these men had just been handed. Not a regional uprising against Rome, as most of them had hoped. The restoration of a covenant people and a city that has not yet been built.
For the Seat You Are In
Whatever the title on your door happens to read, Founder, CEO, President, Executive Vice President, Emperor, or King, you did not arrive in that chair by accident, and you do not own it. Standing before Pilate as God in the flesh, Jesus said, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above.”[^16]
The team you have been given is not an accident either. Some of them you picked. Some of them came with the building. At least one of them, if the pattern holds, is going to disappoint you in a way you did not see coming.
Look at that roster again this week, the way Matthew wrote his, with every name spelled out. Then start asking the question that the next three entries answer. Not who is on the list, but how a group like this one and perhaps your own ever came to be.
Three questions to sit with.
First, if somebody wrote out your team by name today, with no titles and no résumés attached, what would that list say about how you actually choose people?
Second, which name on your roster have you already written off, and what would change if you handled that person the way Jesus handled Matthew?
Lastly, where would you appear on your boss’s list and why?
Stay on Mission
FAQ’s
Twelve was the number of the sons of Jacob and therefore the number of the tribes of Israel. By assembling twelve men and commissioning them to the house of Israel, Jesus was making a claim about His own identity and about the scale of what He was starting. He confirms it later when He tells these same men they will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes, and John sees the New Jerusalem built on twelve foundations carrying their names.
A disciple is a learner. The Greek is mathetes, a student attached to a teacher. An apostle is a sent one, from the Greek apostolos, an official emissary carrying the full authority of the person who dispatched him. Matthew calls these men disciples for nine chapters and calls them apostles exactly once, in Matthew 10:2, at the moment they are commissioned. They were learners right up until He sent them.
Simon Peter, Andrew, James the son of Zebedee, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew the tax collector, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot. They were fishermen, a tax collector who worked for Rome, a man whose name marked him as a religious hardliner, and several about whom scripture records almost nothing. None of them held religious credentials.
The New Testament lists the twelve four times, in Matthew 10, Mark 3, Luke 6, and Acts 1, and the same men appear in all four. The order shifts inside three blocks of four, but the blocks never move, and the same man heads each one, with Peter first, Philip fifth, and James the son of Alphaeus ninth. Some men carry more than one name, so Bartholomew is likely the Nathanael of John’s gospel, Thaddaeus is called Judas the son of James by Luke, and Simon is called Cananaean in some translations and Zealot in others from the same underlying word. Acts lists eleven because Judas is dead and a replacement has not yet been chosen.
Yes. Matthew does not mention it, but Luke does. Jesus went out to the mountain and continued all night in prayer to God, and when day came, He called His disciples and chose twelve from among them. Mark adds that He called to Him those whom He desired, which means the initiative was entirely His rather than theirs.
Matthew is the only one of the four writers who attaches that description to his own name, and he also places himself eighth on the list while Mark and Luke place him seventh. A tax collector worked for Rome against his own people, so the title carried real shame. Spurgeon read the self-naming as deliberate gratitude, saying Matthew recorded his former condition so that the grace which called him would stand out more clearly.
Three things surface immediately. He took the initiative rather than waiting for applicants, and He prayed all night before naming anyone. He chose character over credentials, since not one of the twelve would have passed a review in Jerusalem. And He built a team out of men whose backgrounds should have made them enemies, including a tax collector and a zealot, which shows that a shared mission holds a team together where compatibility never could.
Footnotes
[^1]: Matthew 10:1-4 (ESV). All Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version unless otherwise noted.
[^2]: Matthew 10:4 and Mark 3:18 use the Greek Kananaios, Strong’s G2581, a transliteration of the Aramaic word for zealous one. The ESV renders it Zealot in both places, while older translations transliterate it as Canaanite or Cananaean. Luke 6:15 and Acts 1:13 use the Greek Zelotes. Whether the title marks membership in an organized revolutionary party or simply a man of fierce religious intensity is debated, since Josephus does not describe the Zealots as a formally named faction until decades later.
[^3]: Charles H. Spurgeon, The Gospel of the Kingdom: A Popular Exposition of the Gospel According to Matthew (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1893), comment on Matthew 10:2. Published posthumously. Public domain.
[^4]: Greek mathetes, Strong’s G3101, from manthano, to learn.
[^5]: Greek apostolos, Strong’s G652, from apostello, to send off. Matthew 10:2 is the only occurrence of the word in Matthew’s gospel. See Thomas L. Constable, Notes on Matthew, comment on Matthew 10:2.
[^6]: John MacArthur, Twelve Ordinary Men: How the Master Shaped His Disciples for Greatness, and What He Wants to Do with You (Nashville: W Publishing Group, 2002), chapter 1.
[^7]: Matthew Henry, An Exposition of the Old and New Testaments, comment on Matthew 10:2. Public domain.
[^8]: John 1:35-42.
[^9]: John 1:43-51.
[^10]: Matthew 4:18-22, Mark 1:16-20 and Luke 5:1-11.
[^11]: Luke 6:12-13 (ESV).
[^12]: Mark 3:13.
[^13]: MacArthur, Twelve Ordinary Men, chapter 1, where Matthew 10:1-4 and Luke 6:12-16 are identified as the third phase of the calling, the calling to apostleship.
[^14]: Matthew 19:28.
[^15]: Revelation 21:14.
[^16]: John 19:11 (ESV).
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