Bad Company

Luke 6:13-16

And when day came, he called his disciples and chose twelve of them, whom he also named apostles: Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, and James, and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James son of Alphaeus, and Simon, who was called the Zealot, and Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

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Bad company
And I can't deny
Bad company
Till the day I die
Oh, till the day I die
Till the day I die

"Bad Company" recorded by Bad Company written by Paul Rodgers and Simon Kirke.

The song begins with a mellow riff and the lyrics "Company, always on the run, Destiny is the rising sun." Yeah, I can imagine this lyric applying to the first Apostles of Christ.

And what a group they are too! There's a zealot, who believed in the radical overthrow of Rome alongside Matthew,the former tax collector thus nominally a Roman collaborator. That couldn't have been comfortable. There were a bunch of fishermen. Until the advent of "The Deadliest Catch" on The Discovery Channel have you ever heard a positive thing said about commercial fishermen? Thomas would eventually be known as "Doubting Thomas" and there's nothing for me to add about Judas Iscariot that scripture doesn't already say.

Frankly, they were bad company! They were a semi-disreputable group behind a Rabbi who stood against what the good people thought the synagogue and temple should stand for.

Here's the tricky part, they were right. As diverse as they were, they followed the right leader. As much as they came from different parts of the nation, temple, and synagogue they came together in the name of Christ to serve the Lord and serve the Lord together.

They didn't always agree with each other, but with Christ at the center, nothing could come between them and the Lord, even betrayal.

We could all learn a lot from this.