Do you remember what he said to them? He asked them a question: "Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?" (Matthew 20:22, Mark 10:38). It was these two boys who came to Jesus with their mother and asked to be granted positions at the right and the left hand of the throne of glory when Jesus came into his kingdom. John he particularly loved and drew close to himself, but both were strong in his affections.
They were filled with zeal, and it is interesting to watch how the Lord worked with these two young men.
They wanted to call fire down upon the villages that would not listen to them. They were loudmouths, and were probably the youngest members of the apostolic band - in their late teens when Jesus called them. How often their names appear together in the Gospel accounts! These were the brothers whom Jesus very affectionately called "sons of thunder" (Mark 3:17) because of their swashbuckling dispositions. This obviously indicates that James was an important leader in the church, although his name has not been mentioned previously in the book of Acts. This is his brother, known as Herod Agrippa, the father of the Herod before whom Paul will later appear.) (This Herod is not the one before whom Jesus appeared. But now the enemy strikes hard, and moves Herod the king to take James the brother of John, and to behead him with the sword. The church has been growing and expanding during these twelve years, spreading out to Judea and Samaria, and then beginning to reach the Gentiles, as we saw in the last chapter. Therefore these events occurred about twelve years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, and the coming of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. We can date it very precisely because the date of Herod's death, also recorded here, is well known in ancient history. That means that it was during the Passover season, the same period of the year when Jesus himself was taken and crucified. This was during the days of Unleavened Bread. He killed James the brother of John with the sword and when he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also. We have, first, the murder of James:Ībout that time Herod the king laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church. The three events are the murder of James the Apostle, the deliverance of Peter from prison by the intervention of an angel, and the death of Herod the king. We will try to see why Luke, guided by the Holy Spirit, has chosen these for our instruction. We will go through this chapter rather rapidly, comment briefly on the events, and then think about the questions they raise in our minds. But no choice of events in the Word of God is ever without significance, and these are very significant for us. Now we shall examine three events which Luke, the writer of this book, puts together, yet which seem somewhat unrelated at first. Up to this chapter we have been seeing the body of Christ at work. He is the same in every age, working today just as he did here in the book of Acts. This is a very contemporary book because it is the account of the work of the timeless Spirit of God. We may be twenty centuries away from this first century, but we are not twenty centuries away from the book of Acts. Now we come back to Jerusalem and discover that the enemy strikes back with vicious, slashing power against the church there. We saw how that city, the third largest in the Roman empire, was being shaken by the presence of these Christians in its midst. In Chapter 11, you will recall, blessing was pouring out as God's Spirit was moving in the city of Antioch to enlarge the Christian enterprise and to thrust the gospel out to the Gentiles. That is confirmation of what the Bible tells us is the truth: We are not wrestling against flesh and blood, but we are engaged in a life-or-death struggle against principalities and powers and wicked spirits in high places, who are able to unleash a vicious, lashing attack against us - just when we think things are going well. Just when you think the path has smoothed out and that you are having a great time in the Lord, with nothing but blessing ahead - then everything seems to fall apart at once.
I am sure that you had not been a Christian for very long before you discovered that the enemy with whom we wrestle has a very disconcerting way of striking when everything seems to be going well. We will look at the twelfth chapter - a very exciting passage. I invite you to resume our studies together in the book of Acts.