Making Wise Decisions

Bible Text: Acts 1:15-26 | Speaker: Logan Mauldin | Series: Acts: Jesus Builds His Church | Today, we will be wrapping up Chapter 1 of Acts, which means we are a 28th of the way through the book. If that is any indication of how long we are going to be in Acts then we should finish Acts around Zoe’s 16th birthday. Not to worry though, there is plenty of gold to be mined from this mountain. 

Today we’ll be looking at an interesting event in the life of the early church; the choosing of a replacement for Judas Iscariot. This is not without controversy, and we’ll discuss that, but I want to pull out 4 principles used by the disciples to help them in the decision-making process.

Before we get too far, let’s ask God to help us as we study his word. Let’s pray.

Decisions Introduction

Decisions, we make them all the time, every day, and you can tell a lot about a person from the decisions that he makes and especially how he makes them. 

Absurdist philosopher Albert Camus would go so far as to say that “Life is a sum of all our choices.” I wouldn’t quite go that far, but I think C.S. Lewis was right when he said, “Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all of your innumerable decisions, you are turning the central thing either into a heavenly creature, or into a hellish creature by simply making the decisions that you make.”

When we wake up, what we will wear, the first thing we will do with our time, what to eat, what to drive, where to work, how we work, where we live, what stuff we buy, how we entertain ourselves, who we associate with, and on and on it goes. Life is a continual series of forks in the road and each decision whether small or large at the moment can have a big impact down the line. Therefore, it is very important that the framework we use to make decisions glorifies God and enables us to make wise decisions. 

Let’s read our passage together and see what we can glean from these early followers of Jesus about making decisions. Acts 1:15, “In those days Peter stood up among the brothers (the company of persons was in all about 120)”

Peter Takes the Lead

As the disciples were waiting in Jerusalem for the Holy Spirit, on one occasion a large group of them were together. The text mentions that in those days the company was about 120 people in total. There’s nothing in the text that suggests that all 120 were present here for these events. They could have been, but at the beginning of chapter two it explicitly states that they were all together in one place on the day of Pentecost. It serves to reason that if they were all together at this time then it wouldn’t have said that he stood up among “the brothers.” 

Regardless of how many were there, Peter took a stand. This is not an uncommon position for him. In lists of the disciples or Apostles, he is always listed first without exception. The risen Lord Jesus himself spoke to Peter and gave him the express instructions to tend to his flock of followers. However, there are those who would claim that he went to Rome and established a church there and that leadership of that church has been handed down in an unbroken succession for nearly 2000 years. 

Peter is not the Pope, the vicar of Christ. He is not the rock upon which Christ will build his church. Peter himself tells us who he is in his letters. He is an apostle, a “fellow elder,” and a “bondservant of Christ.” I could say more about the papacy but now is not the time. Let me just say that I believe many Catholics love Jesus and worship him as true believers, but they are having man-made barriers placed in their way.

The Judas Issue

Peter stood up here as a leader among equals and he makes the argument that a decision must be made. Let me lay out his reasoning for you. Jesus chose 12 disciples during his earthly ministry. There were others that followed him and were present for the ministry, but these 12 were handpicked by Jesus himself. The number 12 corresponds to the 12 tribes of Israel. In Matthew 19:27, Peter asked Jesus what they would receive since they had left everything to follow Jesus. He said, “See, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?” Jesus said to them, “Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” One of those thrones was vacated by the apostasy of Judas. 

We get a reminder in Acts 1:18-19 of what Judas did. “Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness, and falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out. And it became known to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so that the field was called in their own language Akeldama, that is, Field of Blood.”

He betrayed Jesus to the Pharisees and religious leaders. He could have had lots of different motives for this, but the most likely is that he was trying to force Jesus hand in much the same way that Satan tried during his 40 days of temptation by telling him to jump off the top of the temple. If Judas could force Jesus into a corner with the religious leaders maybe he would reveal who he really was and would take his rightful place on David’s throne and cast out the Roman oppressors.

All of this was foretold by the Prophets. Specifically, Zechariah 11:12-13, “Then I said to them, “If it seems good to you, give me my wages; but if not, keep them.” And they weighed out as my wages thirty pieces of silver. Then the Lord said to me, “Throw it to the potter”—the lordly price at which I was priced by them. So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of the Lord, to the potter.”

And Jesus knew all of it was happening while it was going on. This was the plan of God to have one of Jesus’ close friends betray him for 30 pieces of silver. So since God planned it that way does that mean that Judas was innocent? Wasn’t he just doing God’s will? 

This is one of those foundational paradoxes of understanding God. He knows and plans everything. Nothing is a surprise to him and nothing can thwart his will. But this foreknowledge and predestination does not let man off the hook. God’s sovereignty and man’s freedom sit side by side. 

Judas’ decisions were not made apart from his own will. Even though God ordained that Judas would be the one of the Twelve who would betray Christ, it was not separated from the desire of Judas. Judas was no robot. Our Lord did not simply allocate to an unwilling Judas the part of the villain in the crucifixion. Quite the opposite, throughout the gospels we see Jesus extending grace and calling Judas to repentance, time and time again, with His love, His pleas, and His rebukes, yet at every point he turned it down until the point at the last supper when Satan entered him and Jesus told him that it was time to do what he had determined to do. 

So although Judas’s treachery fit into the plan of God, God did not design him as a treacherous man. He became a traitor to Christ by his own choice. God merely designed his treachery into the divine plan. He took Judas, wretched as he was, and fit him into His plan. Judas meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. Judas is a good example of what C.S. Lewis was talking about when he said that our choices are fitting us to become either heavenly or hellish creatures. Judas made some bad decisions and it ended up hellish for him.

4 Steps to Wise Decision Making

It was at this point that the decision was before the church and they had to weigh the information before them to decide whether Judas’ place should be given to another and if so, to whom. From here, we see them take 4 steps, and I think this is a good model for us to use even to this day. 

Seek Biblical Counsel (16-17, 20)

First, looking at the situation through the lens of the word of God, Peter saw that the events of Judas’ departure (to put it nicely) was more than simple happenstance. Peter had been processing the events of the past couple of months with Jesus personally. He got to ask him questions about why things had happened the way they did. And Jesus taught the disciples how the Hebrew Scriptures pointed to Him as their ultimate fulfillment. Armed with this knowledge and understanding, Peter recognized that Judas did what he did (as despicable as it was) to fulfill Scripture. 

Acts 1:16-17; 20, “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 he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry.” 20 “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.’”

First, note the level of honor that he gives to the divine inspiration of Scripture. He doesn’t simply ascribe its writing to the human author David, but to the Holy Spirit. 

Second, look at the two prophecies that he quotes.  The first one, Psalm 69:25, predicts that Judas’ place would be vacated; “may his camp” – his place – “become desolate.” And then the second prophecy, Psalm 109:8, “Let another take his office.” Let another take his episkopon in Greek. If you listen carefully to it you might hear the same root that we get Episcopal from. It means the office of judgement or oversight. It is a leadership position. 

Now, you might think, this is unfair. Peter and the disciples have a decision to make that is in the most important time in history, of course the Bible is going to have something to say. They have prophecy to help interpret what is going on. But I don’t think there is any prophecy concerning whether I should take one job or another or whether I should play sports or do drama or both or neither. So, what help can the Bible provide with my everyday decisions?  

While the Scripture does not specifically answer every conceivable question we might have, it does provide help to us in finding the right, and even best, answers. Romans 12:2 calls this being, “transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The point of such renewal being that you can “discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” 

It is very easy to let reason take the driver’s seat in our decision-making, but a mind saturated with the Word of God is going to see different principles to follow when making decisions. Reason alone might tell us to take that new job because it means a pay increase and benefits. Those are nice things, but the principles that we gain from remaining close to God in his word might tell us that the additional workload and travel that comes with that job will create strain on your marriage and family. 

The beautiful thing is that now, unlike Peter and the disciples at this point, we do have the Holy Spirit and although I don’t fully understand how he does it, as we weigh our decisions before him and stay close to the word of God, things become clearer and there is peace where there otherwise shouldn’t be. 

When we give the word of God the degree of importance that it deserves in our lives, then all of our thoughts, decisions and activities will be influenced by the desire to please the Lord first. This is what *Augustine called rightly ordered loves. Citing Psalm 73:28, he writes:

“[The Psalmist] did not say, ‘for me the good is the possession of abundant wealth,’ or, ‘to enjoy the distinction of the purple robe and the glory of the sceptre or crown; nor (as some philosophers have not blushed to say) ‘my good is bodily pleasure’; nor…’my good is the virtue of my soul.’ What he said was ‘As for me, my true good is to cling to God.’”

Staying in God’s word helps us to keep God first on the list, and to help sort out the good stuff that isn’t God himself. Augustine continues his thoughts not by creating a complete list ranking life’s objects and pursuits. He knew that those would change along with the seasons of life, but rather he suggests a correct way to think about them.

For instance, he says there is nothing inherently wrong with gold. But when a man loves gold so much that abandons justice then that has become greed. 

In essence, everything, he says, can either be loved rightly, or wrongly. Loving rightly keeps us free from idolatry helps us stay close to God through his revealed word and prayer. 

I think this is obvious, but you know that I don’t just mean randomly opening your Bible looking for nuggets of gold for the moment. This is where regular Bible reading plays such a great role. It is important to not just go to the Bible looking for answers to your problems. It certainly provides some good answers, but without an understanding of the overall story of scripture and the overarching message of God’s gracious love in sending Jesus to redeem fallen mankind to himself, it is very easy to take things out of context, or just to pick and choose what we want to hear. 

Set Boundaries (21-23)

At this point, they didn’t take nominations or start collecting resumes of people they thought would make good apostles. They didn’t form an apostle search committee. Those can all be good things, but what they did to start was simply to set some boundaries, some guidelines. Without some good common sense guidelines, making a decision becomes infinitely harder. 

We see this happen at the grocery store, every single product has dozens of variations. Take notice the next time you walk down the shampoo aisle. There are forty different brands with different purposes, branding, ingredients, and scents all there to clean your hair. With all these options, how do you know what the best choice is?

You might think that having 200 different shampoos to choose from might make you happier, but psychologists are finding that actually, the more options you have, the less happy you are in making a decision. There was a study done in 2000 where they saw the negative effects of having too many options.

They randomly assigned individuals to either a group in which they could choose from 30 types of chocolate or a group in which they could choose from six types of chocolate. Win win right? You get chocolate either way. As you might expect, subjects initially reported liking having the choice of 30 different chocolates, but in the end, they were more dissatisfied and regretful of the choices they made over those who only had six to choose from.

The more choices you have the more difficult it is to know you’re making the best choice. Am I missing out on something? Did I remember that rightly? Is that really the best option? You make a choice, but you’re dissatisfied and regretful. Too many options can also result in decision paralysis. 

I’ve had to learn this in marriage. If I ask Teresa what she wants to eat for dinner, the possibilities are endless in her mind. She’s got hundreds of recipes saved on her Pinterest which we could cook, but that takes time and ingredients that we may or may not have. We could hop in the car and go pick something up from any of the restaurants in town, or we could all go out to eat and any of the dozens of types of restaurants in either Gainesville, Ocala, Dunnellon, or beyond. It’s too much, and sometimes the answer when faced with so many choices would simply be “I don’t care. You pick.” 

So instead, I will look at the menu and say, we’ve got fish on the menu and I don’t really want to smell it tonight, let’s do something else. Do you want to cook breakfast here or do you want me to go get hamburgers from McDonalds? That can still be a hard decision at times, but it is definitely narrowed from the endless flood of possibilities. 

Let’s go back to the shampoo aisle. If you have determined some guidelines like knowing your hair-type (or lack of hair type in my case) If you have color-treated frizzy hair then you want a shampoo made for you. Maybe you set a price point in your head so you can be a good steward, and finally, you are hoping for a shampoo that is organic and hasn’t been tested on animals. With that framework, the aisle is significantly reduced and we are able to more effectively choose our shampoo. But then we have to talk about deodorant. Just kidding. 

So let’s look at the guidelines that they formed by looking at their existing group and see how it helped them determine the replacement. 

Acts 1:20-23, “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.” And they put forward two, Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also called Justus, and Matthias.”

Setting some boundaries reduced their options from 120 down to just two. Let’s see how they got there. First, it had to be one of the men. The women were present and were vitally important to the early church, but there would have been no thought of a female apostle in those days. Why, because they were sexist bigots? No. 

What was the purpose of this person that they were identifying? They needed to identify the person best qualified to be a witness to the resurrection. Unfortunately, a woman was not considered a reliable witness in a Jewish court in those days. So despite Jesus and the disciples having much respect for and fellowship with godly women, when it came time to choose a witness, they couldn’t do it because of effectiveness. 

Finally, they needed someone who had been with Jesus and the group of disciples for roughly the same amount of time as the other apostles. Specifically, it says “from the time of the baptism of John through the ascension.” 

What did Peter mean by the Baptism of John? If you read it quickly and don’t think about it you may think that he is talking about the baptism of Jesus by John. But if we take that as a criteria then most of Jesus’ existing disciples wouldn’t have qualified. I think that Peter is saying that it should be someone who had been with them since before John the Baptist was arrested and killed. They joined the fellowship while John was still baptizing. 

This narrowed them down to two people who could be considered. We know nothing from scripture about these two candidates, Joseph “Justus” Barsabbas and Matthias. They were both equals and met the qualifications and were considered to be good candidates by the apostles. Interestingly enough, although they choose Matthias in the end, we never hear his name mentioned again in scripture, but we think that Barsabbas shows up later in Acts 15 when they were looking for people to join Paul on his 2nd missionary journey. 

Because of this silence, many people have said that the apostles jumped the gun here by choosing and they think that they should have waited for God to fill the final spot with Paul. However, I do not agree with them. We see no rebuke, no consequences, and no regrets about this decision. Also, most of the other disciples aren’t really featured in the rest of the Bible either. We only hear about Peter, John, James, and Phillip. 

If you are going to claim that Peter stepped out of bounds here in calling for this decision then I think you need some evidence and something more than human reasoning and “it just doesn’t feel right.” To back you up. I guess we will just have to wait and see in heaven. Revelation 21:14 says, “And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.” It will be interesting to see whose name is written there, Matthias, Paul, or even Judas. But even in all eternity, I don’t think I’ll remember to look. I’ll have more important things to do. 

Pray, Pray, Pray (24-25)

Once they had narrowed the field down to the qualified two candidates then notice what they did. The same thing they had been doing for the days leading up to this decision. Prayer. That is one of the main reasons that I feel like Peter even made this motion that Judas position needed to be filled. Jesus himself could have told him to do it, but even if he didn’t he’s bathed in prayer and he’s rooted in scripture. Let’s read what they prayed, Acts 1:24-25, “And they prayed and said, “You, Lord, who know the hearts of all, show which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place.” 

Pretty simple prayer right? Prayer doesn’t have to be long and drawn out. We don’t have to try to impress God with many words. Some of the greatest prayer warriors I have known have continuously lifted up simple prayers in faith. God cares about your heart and even if words are not spoken, the heart can be lifted up in submission. 

That is ultimately what these men are doing. They have done the work of staying close to Jesus in his word, they have used some sanctified common sense to narrow down the options, and now they pray that God would shine his light to make the final decision. They did not want to be like Judas who made his own decisions and had gone astray. They wanted to be faithful and obedient. We often treat prayer like it is a god-shaped pinata that we can hit to get stuff we want, but prayer is really an act of submission. Bringing ourselves under his authority. 

Trust God (26)

Finally, let’s look at the way they made their decision. I asked on the Facebook page for input asking which is more important, your decision-making process or your decisions themselves and I was happy to see that most people said the process. I would agree with that. We see it here as the disciples humbled themselves in this process, submitted to God who knows the hearts of men, and then left the results up to him. Acts 1:26 says, “And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias, and he was numbered with the eleven apostles.”

What does it mean to cast lots? In the Old Testament we get some glimpses of this practice. The priest would have two stones called the Urim and Thummim and he would assign one to each option then he would but the two stones in a pot and pour them out. The first stone out would be the Lord’s decision. 

This was essentially the same as drawing straws, pulling a name out of a hat, or flipping a coin. So the question I have is should we just flip a coin to make decisions? 

Well, this is the last time we see it in the New Testament. Many say that is because we now have the Holy Spirit. That may be the case, but the casting of lots is not forbidden anywhere. In fact, it is one of the ultimate steps of faith. I don’t see any issue with a prayer drenched and biblically informed coin flip. But you better trust that first flip and not go two for three. Proverbs 16:33 says, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.” 

I think what we see from the disciples is that they trusted God with the result. It could have been either man. I don’t think that the Holy Spirit would have changed this decision at all. The use of lots or a coin flip is not the most common method, but in this scenario dealing with an appointment this significant where the options were deadlocked, it was a good idea for them to give God the tie-breaking vote and to trust him for that outcome. 

So in conclusion, when faced with a decision, we should seek godly counsel from the word of God and other people, we should set some boundaries or guidelines that will guide our decision making, we should pray for God’s wisdom and guidance, then we should make the decision, even if it is with a coin toss and trust God to oversee the outcome.