25 November 2025
Picking up where the previous week left off, this session returns to the apostles' prayerful gathering in the upper room before turning to the heart of the passage: the nomination of two men to replace Judas Iscariot, and the casting of lots that settled on Matthias. Harry uses this moment to raise an uncomfortable question — were the apostles right to make this choice at all, and right in how they went about it? Tracing the Old Testament roots of casting lots, the silence that follows Matthias for the rest of Acts, and the very different way the Lord chooses His own instrument a few chapters later in Saul of Tarsus, Harry builds a case that good intentions and right instincts do not always add up to the right decision.
Editor's note: This article is a written summary based on the substance of Harry's Bible study on this passage. It is not a verbatim transcript, and while it aims to reflect the heart of the teaching faithfully, it cannot fully convey the warmth, care, and encouragement of the class itself.
Opening Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of your word and for the privilege of gathering together in the Name of your Son, Jesus Christ. As we open the Scriptures today, we ask that your Holy Spirit would illuminate our minds and soften our hearts, that we might hear your voice, grow in the knowledge of you, and be equipped to live and speak for Christ. We commit this time of study into your hands, in Jesus' Name, Amen.
The session opened by returning to Acts 1:12, "Then the apostles returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day's walk from the city," and to the point made the previous week: this was a vulnerable moment for the apostles, caught between Jesus' ascension and the coming of the Spirit. Harry stressed that their return to Jerusalem was itself an act of obedience — Jesus had told them not to leave the city but to wait there for the gift His Father had promised, the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and they did as they were told. He illustrated the principle with a domestic story of his own: when a gas engineer was due to make a final legal inspection before he and his wife could leave their previous home, he turned down a request to give someone a lift to work rather than risk being out when the gasman called. If missing a routine inspection mattered that much, Harry asked, how much more did it matter for the apostles not to miss the gift of the Father that was about to be delivered? He reinforced the point with the story of Evan Roberts, the Welsh evangelist who resolved "Don't miss the prayer meeting" and kept that resolve for thirteen years — until, at the age of twenty-six, the Spirit came upon him mightily and sparked the Welsh Revival of 1904.
Harry then returned to the detail of "a Sabbath day's walk," the farthest distance Jews were permitted to travel on the Sabbath without breaking the Fourth Commandment: "The seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns" (Exodus 20:10). He traced the tradition's roots to the instruction not to leave camp to gather manna on the Sabbath (Exodus 16:29), and to the measurement of pasture-land extending two thousand cubits from a town's walls in Numbers 35:5 — a distance Jewish tradition fixed at roughly five-eighths of a mile, or about a kilometre. Harry noted that what began as a sensible attempt to keep the Sabbath restful and to keep worshippers near the centre of their worship hardened into barren legalism. Rabbis found ways around their own rule: some would place food at the boundary and declare it their "residence," while others carried a bag of worthless possessions a thousand yards ahead and declared that their new "Sabbath home," allowing them to go wherever they wished. It was this kind of manoeuvring Jesus had in view when He said, "You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the tradition of men" (Mark 7:8).
Moving to verse 14, Harry highlighted how important it was to Luke that the believers were "of one accord" — a phrase almost exclusive to Acts, occurring some ten times through the book. He pointed out that prayer is a recurring emphasis for Luke across both his Gospel and Acts, citing it as a thread running from Jesus' own baptism and desert withdrawals through to the apostles' devotion to prayer in the early chapters of Acts. Alongside this, Harry drew attention to Luke's consistent highlighting of women in both volumes of his work. He noted something striking about Mary and Jesus' brothers in particular: earlier in the Gospels they had been hostile to His ministry, at one point thinking He was out of His mind (Mark 3:21), yet here, after the resurrection, they are found praying together with the apostles as prominent members of the community. Something had clearly changed.
Harry then reread the fuller passage, Acts 1:15–26, in which Peter stands up among the roughly one hundred and twenty believers and explains that Scripture had to be fulfilled concerning Judas, quoting the Psalms: "May his place be deserted; let there be no one to dwell in it" (Psalm 69:25) and "May another take his place of leadership" (Psalm 109:8). Peter argues that someone must be chosen to take Judas's place as a witness to the resurrection, two candidates are put forward — Joseph called Barsabbas, also known as Justus, and Matthias — and after prayer, the lot falls to Matthias.
Harry was careful to affirm what the apostles got right before questioning what they got wrong. They joined together constantly in prayer; they included the women; their assessment of Judas was correct; it was right that someone should take his place of leadership; and it was right that whoever was chosen should be a witness to Jesus' resurrection. All of that, Harry said, was sound. His question was narrower and sharper: was it right for the apostles to make this choice at all, and was it right for them to make it the way they did?
Harry raised two immediate concerns about the process itself. First, the apostles narrowed the field to only two candidates — did that give God any real opportunity to indicate that neither man was His choice? Second, having narrowed it to two, they settled the matter by casting lots, which Harry identified as an Old Covenant method of decision-making. He traced the practice through Scripture: Aaron was commanded to cast lots over two goats on the Day of Atonement, one for the Lord and one for the scapegoat (Leviticus 16:3–10); Joshua cast lots to distribute the land among the tribes at Shiloh (Joshua 18:6, 9); Proverbs affirms that "the lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord" (Proverbs 16:33), meaning that even when people threw the dice, the Lord determined the outcome; and the pagan sailors on Jonah's ship cast lots to discover who was responsible for the storm that threatened them, with the lot falling on Jonah (Jonah 1:7). For Harry, the presence of lot-casting among sailors who did not know the Lord at all was itself telling — this was a mechanism belonging to an older, and even a pagan, way of seeking answers, not obviously the pattern for the New Covenant community waiting on the Spirit.
Harry built his case further with a series of observations. Matthias, he pointed out, is never heard of again anywhere else in the book of Acts. He then asked who had chosen the original twelve apostles in the first place — not the disciples themselves, but Jesus, after a night spent in prayer on the mountainside: "When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles" (Luke 6:12–16). Jesus Himself had made the point elsewhere that it was not the disciples who chose Him but He who chose them: "You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit — fruit that will last" (John 15:16). Harry reminded the class of the point made the previous week, that this was a ten-day window between Jesus' ascension and the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, a period when neither Jesus nor the Spirit was present with them — and, he suggested, perhaps not the wisest moment for the apostles to be making a major, permanent appointment on their own initiative.
To show what the Lord does when He chooses His own instrument, Harry turned to Acts 9:1–22 and the calling of Saul of Tarsus — struck down on the road to Damascus, addressed directly by the risen Jesus, and sent to Ananias, who is told in a vision, "Go! This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel" (Acts 9:15). Harry also pointed to the vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation, where the city's wall has twelve foundations bearing "the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb" (Revelation 21:9–14), and confessed that he could not imagine Paul's name being absent from that list. His broader point was about the danger of clinging to old, familiar patterns simply because "we have always done it this way," rather than watching for what God might be doing instead — echoing Isaiah's word, "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?" (Isaiah 43:18–19). It is easy, Harry said, to rely on ourselves rather than remembering, as Jesus did, that we are here to do the will of our Father in heaven — and we need the expectancy that He is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine, according to His power at work within the church (Ephesians 3:20–21). Saul of Tarsus, transformed into perhaps the greatest apostle of all — the writer of thirteen of the New Testament's twenty-seven books — is exhibit one of what that expectancy looks like in practice.
Underneath the historical puzzle of Matthias and the lot, Harry was pressing a much more personal point: how dependent we are meant to be on the Lord, especially at the very moments we are tempted to act on our own initiative. His warning was direct — if there is ever a bad time to make major decisions, it is when Jesus feels absent and the Spirit has not yet made His guidance clear, because, as Jesus said, apart from Him we can do nothing. The apostles' instincts were good and their motives were sincere, but Harry wanted the class to see that sincerity is not the same as waiting on God. His counsel for anyone seeking guidance today was to come to God with a completely open and honest heart, ready to hear whatever He says, rather than reaching for shortcuts — and he was candid that his own attempts to use a "fleece" for guidance had only ever left him more confused, since he could never cover every possibility. The real lesson of Matthias, for Harry, was not a verdict on one obscure figure in Acts 1, but an invitation to examine how readily we fill gaps and make calls ourselves rather than waiting, prayerfully and expectantly, for God to do the new thing He is already doing.
Closing Prayer
Heavenly Father, thank you that we are gathered here in the Name of your Son, Jesus Christ. Father, by the power of your Holy Spirit, open up our hearts and our minds that we might understand your words in the Scriptures and get to know you more, that we might live holy lives, and that we might share the Good News about Jesus in the power of your Spirit, for the building of your Church and the extending of your Kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven, in and through Jesus Christ, Amen.
