The Call to Follow Him

KV 17: Come and Be Fishers of Men

And Jesus said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men.”

Welcome to another BereanNation.com weekly podcast! We're glad you could join us for our line-by-line Bible study, where together we explore God's Word in depth and seek to apply its teachings to our everyday lives. Whether you're tuning in from across Canada or around the world, we encourage you to have your Bible ready as we journey through scripture, one verse at a time.

This week, we'll be focusing on Mark 1:16-20, examining each line closely and considering its context, meaning, and relevance for us today. As always, feel free to share your insights and questions in the comments or live chat—your participation helps us grow together as a community of Bereans, searching the scriptures daily.

Before we begin, let's take a moment to invite God to guide our study, granting us wisdom and understanding. [pray here] If you're new to our session, welcome! We ask three questions of the text we are studying:  What does it say, what did God Himself mean when He inspired the writer to choose the vocabulary to say what was said, and what am I going to do about that? 

Let's get started!

16-18: The Calling of Simon-Peter and Andrew 19-20: The Calling of James and John

For our context, according to Peter’s narrative to Mark, this is shortly after the imprisonment of John the Baptist and after Jesus put Satan to flight in the wilderness , not only by resisting Him, but by being better than Satan could ever be. He not only knew how to avoid temptation, but knew how to use Scripture and everything it means in context because He is it’s author. The Apostle John, named in our text in this study, in fact, called Him the Word of God in John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” After His truimph over the evil one, he went about choosing the people He would transform to help Him establish and strengthen His coming kingdom.

We should take a moment to remeber the context of our passage here, because it adds some significance. We’ve heard in the news recently about “kingdom building,” and this is the divine version of it, not the stuff the alphabet-soup agencies around the world do during military operations. The principle is exactly backwards to the way humanity seems to do it. We first impose an external control by using a political regime and hopefully that works into the hearts and minds of the people. Here, Christ is starting with the hearts and minds of the people and ultimately working it out to be His heavenly regime that will come to the Earth and lay down that rule for a millennium. I personally find that 100-year period to be very specific and oddly repeated. That kingdom will be what enters the eternal state, even though the territory is destroyed in the process. Why? Because that kingdom began in the hearts and minds of His followers, who will be the only beings to go through to that eternal state of the new heavens and the new Earth.

I could say more, but I think it will be more helpful just to dig into the text. Let’s do that.

KV 17: Come and Be Fishers of Men

And Jesus said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men.”

As I said before, this is about choosing the individuals that Jesus will personally change to to build His kingdom, which will have no end. This text is particularly meaningful to me, because I have family back in my hometown that does exactly what the men who were named did - they were commercial fishermen. Although I never did any of that on Lake of the Woods, I understand the work. As a biology summer student for Fish and Wildlife, I helped monitor gill nets set as a part of the population survey of walleye in Shoal Lake, a connected lake. That isn’t all I did, but I mention it here because I think it is relevant. I was taken from that by God and sent to university to earn a biology degree so that I could become the same as they did - and so can you - a fisher of men. Let’s get into the text.

16-18: The Calling of Simon-Peter and Andrew

As a prelude to the calling of His disciples, it is worth noting that this is where we begin to see how this adherent of John the Baptist stepped up and took his place as the next One to carry forward God’s message to the world through His activities. At this point, only John and those to whom he pointed it out, which may have included Andrew and John, knew that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. Now, they doubtless had shared this with their brothers, who had either been there (as Peter from the earlier description of the descending dove (the Holy Spirit) landing on Jesus and hearing the voice of the Father identify Him so clearly as everyone present did) or had heard about it. These men knew John the Baptist’s message and were trying to walk in that light. It doesn’t say it, but maybe their whole families were also. Many were, but that is just speculation on my part.

John’s message, as a reminder, was simple repentance. One was to make an internal personal commitment to forsake their sins and walk according to the will of God for their lives and wait for the Messiah, who, it was common knowledge, was the Son of God. Jesus had spent the forty days after His own internal personal commitment to walk according to the will of God for His life, having no sin to forsake after His encounter with Satan. According to more than one commentary, the next year was spent in prayer about some things, not the least of which was choosing the men who would follow Him, because it was the Messiah’s job. He was not to just fix the world, or prophesy, or heal others, or perform notable miracles with His divine power. It was to assemble a group of followers and lead them by teaching them how to grow His kingdom from scratch. His choice had to be specific, and it had to include all the men He would need to do their specific things He had gathered them to do, by, in part, preaching a similar message to John the Baptist.

There are some differences in the messages, however. John spoke of the general repentance required to travel the straight path to the kingdom of God. Jesus brought the news that said kingdom had drawn near and that the day of its fulfilment (the time of its formation, or at least the start of it) had in fact come upon them. Both wre urgent calls, John’s because of the urgency of his call to prepare for the day of God’s salvation, and Jesus’s because of that time being upon them; it was closer than even John thought. Jesus’s message was called the good news of God, while this is not said of John’s message. It is the first appearance in history of the actual gospel, not just promises leading up to it. With that said as a prologue, let’s look at what the text has for us.

16: As He was going along by the Sea of Galilee, He saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting a net in the sea; for they were fishermen.

When we rejoin our Lord Jesus, we find Him walking along the sea of Galilee. This is a place that has been mentioned before in Scripture. It isn’t a sea in the normal sense, it is really a large freshwater lake. In the Old Testament, we encounter it in Numbers 34:11 as the Sea of Chinnerith“and the border shall go down from Shepham to Riblah on the east side of Ain; and the border shall go down and reach to the slope on the east side of the Sea of Chinnereth.” We see it in Josh. 13:27 under the same name. The name comes from a form of the Hebrew word kinnor, meaning harp or lyre, which is probably because the lake itself is in the rough shape of a harp. (See photo.) In New Testament times, it was known as either the Sea of Galilee or the Sea of Tiberias (John 6:1 “After these things Jesus went away to the other side of the Sea of Galilee (or Tiberias).” ) It gained that noteriety when the city of Tiberias was located on its Western shore by Herod Antipas. It was the preferred name of all those who were...influenced...by loyalty to the Roman Emperor of the day, Tiberias. That’s the historical setting.

It should not come as a shock that such a large lake would have a kind of fishing industry around it. My hometown is on the north shore of a place called Lake of the Woods, and by comparison, it is about 27 times larger than the Sea of Galilee at 1727 square miles compared to 64 for the Sea of Galilee. I mention this because of my family relatives who ARE commercial fishermen, like these men were. The equipment and tactics are different as well, but that is less relevant. What I’m trying to do here for people like me, who will never be able to travel to that place for financial reasons, it to try to give something of an idea of the scale of the events with something from my real world experience. It was as He walked along its shore that Jesus chose four men who would become a third of the group.

We encounter two of the men in this verse: Simon and Andrew. Simon we know as Cephas or Peter also. Simon became the spokeman for the group after Jesus’s ascension, but we are a long way from that here. Because Simon is named first, it could be that Andrew was the younger of the two (this is the ancient understandig of the church at any rate). The two of them were casting a net out. Fishing then was something different. The net would be thrown out and expand in the air to a circular shape that was weighted to sink to the bottom and trap fis hunder it. The fisherman would then swim down and close the net with a drawstring and then attach the net to the boat with a rope they had brought with them. I think this would restrict them to the shallows, and I don’t really know the bottom topography of the Sea of Galilee, so I think this would keep the boats closer to the shore, that is, swimming distance. I hear it, the question from the back row of the internet. “So what?”

What I am trying to describe is how these two brothers were involved in their own life, in their own area of skill, not looking for anything to happen. It is important to remember that this is actually Simon form the text’s description of events. The way Peter is describing this is that it kind of happened “out of the blue.” I’m not sure that is entirely true. These men were not unknown at this point in time to Jesus nor He to them. I, as well as many commentators think that Simon, Andrew, and John, were all there when Jesus was baptized. They were also baptized, and possibly James soon after (info from a note in my electronic Harmony of the Gospels). Think about this for a moment. Jesus is God. NONE of us are unknown to Him. He came along and called them each individually. It doesn’t say He called each by name, so I won’t say that, but each man heard the call of Jesus himself.

Now think about your own situation. You are just going along in your life, doing whatever it is you do to fill your days. I make no judgments nor did Jesus. He simpley gave a command; “Follow Me.” I heard that command in 1985, when the Lord called me to Himself. Can you remember when the Lord called you? It isn’t essential that you do. Some of us do. We also realized that the call was not a request or even an invitation. It was an ORDER. “Follow me!” Praise the Lord that He so inclined our hearts to follow it. I was still a rebellious teenager. I call it the mercy of God. I was a security guard, and I still kind of am, but of a different sort. What do I mean by that? Next verse.

17: And Jesus said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men.”

There is that command I was talking about. “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” What is Jesus actually calling these believing men to? Discipleship. He is calling them to be learners of the things He would teach them, in this case it was something they were at least familiar with, although it has its differences. One could say He was making them to be evangelists, although I bet they didn’t even recognize that term until later. Let’s think about that idea of “fishers of men” for a moment.

All of us are called to give an answer for the hope that is in us at times, and we should know how to do that and the proper words to say in such a way as to get the metaphorical fish onto the metaphorical hook and land them. We are commanded through these disciple and later the Apostles including Paul to share the good news that Jesus died in our place. As those who want to obey Him, we should learn to do it, rtight? Personally, I think about what it looks like to the one with whom you are sharing, the proverbial fish. There is always a fatal aspect of this for the fish, just as there was for us. We will say more about this later. Jesus has given a command to follow Him. What will happen next?

18: Immediately they left their nets and followed Him.

For Simon and Andrew, it was persuasive. They dropped their nets, and the text gives me the impression that they just left it where it fell. The Greek word ἀφέντες is the aorist tense of the active verb, which is plural (meaning it was both of them) in the nominativemasculint participle. What that means is that they abandoned their stuff on the spot. Then they followed Jesus. They obeyed the call, just as anyone He calls will. I know not everyone believes that, but I do, and is a concept known as irresistable grace, and at the time God calls you with this kind of grace, you will not want to say no. There is a bit in John 6:44 that says, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.” that word “draws” is the Greek word ἑλκύσῃ, and it is usually translated as something like “dragged,” as in “kicking and screaming.” But if you think about that, it isn’t how it really happens. No one is ever “saved against their will.” When God saves you, the first thing that happens is that He regenerates your heart so you will not want to disobey that command to come to Him. This appears to me what happened here.

When you became a Christian, the same thing happened to you. If it did not, then I daresay you may not be one. God will spend a great deal of His time preparing your heart for this event. When you hear it and want it, obey it. As Peter will later say in Scripture in 2 Peter 1:10, “Therefore, brethren, be all the more diligent to make certain about His calling and choosing you; for as long as you practice these things, you will never stumble...” That phrase “calling and choosing you” is translated in the King James as “make your calling and election sure.”

Although I am uncertain that this is the point that these men became believers, it is a good example of how it can happen. These things are never random encounters, and if you think they are, you should carefully consider this: The God who created the universe is the one doing the calling every single time, no matter who is doing the evangelizing. Although it does not mean your will is not involved,, God’s choosing of you happened before the foundation of the world, as it says in Romans 8:29, “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren;” and Ephesians 1:5, which says, “He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will...” I know this about that God, who is the God I worship: He wrote the names of the people He chose in a book before the foundation of the world (that προώρισεν word in the text, meaning predestined or foreordained). That God is also all-knowing, and there has never been a time in the universe that He has had to learn anything, so He did not simply peek down the corridors of time to learn how you would respond to His call. To that God, there is not one stray atom in the universe, and He knows where they all are, and if they have names, He knows them and can remember them all. In fact, He put them where they are now. This is the God that is calling you, and if you feel that tug in your heart and mind (it can be either or both), then my advice is to yield to that call. Email me at [e-mail] if you need help or want to talk about that further. We will move on.

19-20: The Calling of James and John

We have already covered a lot of what I had intended to cover in the first pair of men the Lord called to Himself. Let’s see what we can learn about the next two, James and John, in the text.

19: Going on a little farther, He saw James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, who were also in the boat mending the nets.

Now there are three men walking down the shoreline. I don’t think it took very long before they were near where Zebedee kept his boat, where he was working with his two sons James and John on mending the nets. Because of my family connections, I can tell you this is a “neverending Story.” No boy named Etrayu, no Luck Dragon, just lots of torn nets, the adult version of the story. They were mending the equipment so they could go catch more fish.

This to me is a picture of family. Brothers working together for a common goal. Dad was there to supervise, the boys there to work, and everybody was there to earn a living for the family. I was never a commercial fisherman. I grew up on a beef and dairy farm. Thinking back to verse 17, that call was to men who were familiar with fishing to become fishers of men. That should be true for all of us, but I had a different thought here, and I share it for what it may be worth.

I mentioned I grew up on a farm. We had both beef and dairy herds, chickens sometimes, like that. I learned from about age 8 to feed the cows, and we had a special area for that, how to keep the bark clean (we had a machine kind of like a conveyor belt to do help, I did less than it sounds like, how to harvest our own hay and store it, how to call the dairy cows at milking time, and they learned to hear my voice. I learned how to care for them, in other words. In other words, I had an affinity for herding. We never had sheep, but many of the concepts were similar. When God called me at 18, I was a security guard, and I was learning to stand guard over property. Now think about what I’m doing to fill my time. Metaphorically, I can see the similarities. My education at university taught me how to research, read quickly, and think clearly to put papers on assigned topics together (among other things). I remember on a third year paper, I ended up in a class with a very good friend. We did a lot of assignments together with another friend from my hometown (our families were very good frinds), but we had a final paper to write. I don’t remember the exact topic, but somehow it involved the book Thucidides’ History of the Peloponesian War. My hometown friend had hers in before the two of us, but I was a busy boy in a biology program, and my other friend worked to support herself. We turned our papers in on the same day. I remember she worked on it for about 2 or 3 weeks. I did mine the weekend before it was due. I got the higher mark. She got mad at me because I did it the weekend before, but I calmed her down by telling her that I was used to doing a paper a week like that, and I had been doing that times three at least for three years. I just learned how to put one together at the last minute. Now think about what I do again. Do you see the connection I’m making?

To be clear, this is not me bragging. I’m using an example with which I am familiar. I have been given, over the years, the tools that I would need that make me a half-decent pastor. It is not the path I would recommend, but I gained the knowledge all the same. I have never been to seminary, and that’s harder, because I don’t have the paperwork that most churches look for when seeking a pastor. And yet, God called me to it just the same. And now, I have to maintain the tools I use just as faithfully as these fellow did, and that can be difficult. The Lord is good, though. John may have found that out the hard way, if you know anything about what His life was like after Jesus called hium.

20: Immediately He called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, and went away to follow Him.

As soon as they were in view and in earshot, Jesus called the pair. I can picture it in my mind’s eye: Their heads snapped up, they saw who called them, they looked at each other, nodded and dropped the nets wehre they were and followed Jesus. I wonder what Zebedee thought. I can remember how my parents reacted to my answering Jesus’s call to me. My mother told me not to preach to her, and my father forbid me from sharing this with my sisters. Neither ban really affected me, and I’ve done plenty of both of those things. I hope it was different for the sons of Zebedee.

They left it all behind them and followed the man who promised to turn them into a different kind of fisherman than they had known. They went away to follow Jesus. This brings me to a point. Bible Commentator and Puritan Matthew Henry says this: “Those whom Christ calls, must leave all to follow Him; and by His grace He makes them willing to do so.” Think about what that means. We must forsake every thing that is against our duty to Christ and do what He tells us, even if that means we will be persecuted, starved, beaten, or even killed. I have a pastor friend who has paid this price, where a bunch of men put him into the hospital for preaching the gospel to them, and from what I understand, they had given previous invitation for him to do so!

In our Friday book club, which is an adaptation of the small group the guys on the call were in with me, we read a book by Dr. Steven J. Lawson named, It Will Cost You Every Thing. In the book, he says that after our unconditional surrender to the King, our Lord Jesus Christ, we are under new management. So were these men. They had become disciples, those who would learn the lessons that the Lord would teach them, regardless of the cost it will take. He ends his book with a poem, titled, “I Am a Disciple.” (pp. 125-127) I will read that poemn now. [read poem]

What we see in this text is men becoming followers of God, with the intention to learn whatever the Master, our Lord Jesus, would teach them. This should also be our goal. Conversion without discipleship in this sense is false conversion. We must strive to learn the lessons, do the works, hear the words, and follow our king. Praise the Lord.

Let’s pray:

Heavenly father, as we have seen what it takes to be a disciple of Your glorious Son, our Lord Jesus, strengthen our hearts and minds to the task. Create in us the attitude that will make us walk that narrow road that Christ walked. We ask for it to be created because we do not naturally have it, but are mere men, lost in sin before we met You. Guide us to Your ways with Your lessons, bot easy and difficult. Get us ready, no matter what it takes so that on the day of Your choosing, we may arrive on Your beautiful shore. We ask in His precious, strong, and holy hand, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen and Amen.

That’s what I saw in the text this time! Next time, we will be looking at Mark 1:21-34. I know it’s a bigger chunk, but what I think befits the concept of broad brushstrokes. I will be at All Saints Lutheran Church preaching this Sunday, so come out and say hi! They have a very wonderful congregation.

[Announcements]

[Alex]

Live Outro: Thanks so much for joining us this week for the BereanNation.com line-by-line bible study. From our text tonight, we saw that following Christ is something for which it is worth giving all you have for as long as you have to gain Heaven’s reward. Martyred missionary Jim Elliot said, “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” That’s what he was talking about. If you found today’s session helpful or encouraging, please consider letting us know by liking this video and sharing your thoughts in the comments below—it really helps us reach more people and fosters a great community.

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