Restoring the Twelve

Acts 1:15-16 & 20-22

In those days Peter stood up among the brothers (the company of persons was in all about 120) and said, “Brothers, the Scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David concerning Judas, who became a guide to those who arrested Jesus. For it is written in the Book of Psalms, ‘May his camp become desolate, and let there be no one to dwell in it’; and ‘Let another take his office.’ So one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us—one of these men must become with us a witness to his resurrection.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

There they were, the spearhead of Jesus’ plan to renew and restore God’s people—and there were supposed to be twelve of them. Only eleven were left. How could they model, and symbolize, God’s plan for Israel (and therefore the world) if there were, so to speak, one patriarch short of a true Israel?

As with everything else that happened in the early church . . . they went to two sources for instructions: to the word of God, and to prayer. . . . For them, the Jewish Bible (what we call the Old Testament) was not just a record of what God had said to his people of old. It was a huge and vital story, the story of the earliest part of God’s purposes, full of signposts pointing forward to the time when, further forward within the same story, the plans God was nurturing would come to fruition. . . . Here they found, not indeed a road map for exactly where they were—scripture seldom supplies exactly that—but the hints and clues to enable them to see how to feel their way forward in this new and unprecedented dilemma (17-8).

Aaron Orendorff

Scripture and prayer. What an arrestingly simple approach. I appreciate that, as Wright points out, “here they found, not indeed a road map for exactly where they were—scripture seldom supplies exactly that—but the hints and clues.” It’s true; seldom does the Bible provide a one for one answer to life’s dilemmas. What we find instead are patterns and principles, all of which are built upon one form or another of cross and resurrection, failure and restoration, death and new life. God is in the business of bringing back—here, bringing back both the symbolic as well as the relational community of the twelve. And yet, while scripture attests univocally to the reality restoration, it never downplays the pain of betrayal and failure.