The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 9 – 4
There are a lot of jobs in the world that need done, but aren’t worth paying someone to do. And there are a lot of people who don’t have a decent livelihood because they simply aren’t qualified to do anything – or at least, the job they could do is not worth what you’d have to pay them to survive.
I’ve never met any employer who wasn’t complaining about finding reliable labor whose work is worth their wages. I’ve also rarely talked to anyone who wasn’t complaining about finding a better job. And these problems have a mutual solution, but it’s one our society refuses to think about – apprenticeship.
For thousands of years, when someone needed a helping hand around the blacksmith’s shop, he didn’t hire an employee; he sought an apprentice. The difference is that an employee brings skills to the job, is paid enough money to house himself, feed himself, and clothe himself.
The apprentice, which we would call an intern today, was unpaid. But interns are usually expected to work for free, and house and feed themselves besides. On the other hand, an apprentice would live, eat, and work with his master, as one of his family.
The apprentice was usually a young man, typically early teens, who had no skills, no prospects, and was generally as worthless as most teenagers are today. Often from a family with more children than they could support, so they would pack him off to another town to learn a trade for himself, wherever there was a master willing to take him on.
Generally the apprenticeship would involve a contract lasting 4-7 years – this way, he is guaranteed a stable environment, and the master is guaranteed that the work he invests in the first few years of teaching would bring him benefits in the last few years.
He would receive no pay, but have no worries about the necessities of life; and at the end of his tenure, he would be paid in a lump sum, with perhaps some tools so he would be fully prepared to practice his trade.
A young man who has finished his apprenticeship, but who is not yet competent or confident enough to start his own business enters the job pool as a journeyman, either as an employee of his erstwhile master (for pay, this time), or in some new town where his services are needed.
A journeyman is someone who has not yet mastered his craft enough to take on apprentices of his own; who has not yet built a name for himself, yet who is competent enough to be a responsible employee in someone else’s business, and perhaps even to do a large part of the training of their apprentices.
This system, in some form, has existed since the dawn of time. Today it survives only in an abbreviated form in certain fields like electricians and plumbers, doctors and lawyers. And a large number of the social problems of our day are because of its decline.
In the last 75 years, going to college has gone from something that only a few people in highly specialized professions like medicine and law did, to practically mandatory for everyone who wants a career. And yet the overall skill level at most jobs has dropped dramatically at the same time, because colleges only prepare you for certain types of jobs, and usually not very well at that.
Colleges don’t teach you how to fix cars, build houses, run heavy equipment. Colleges don’t even teach you medicine or law. They teach you some things about those careers, but you can’t become a doctor without an extensive amount of time as an intern.
Likewise lawyers, electricians, plumbers and even programmers nearly always intern, often without pay, before they are hired. Because “nature itself teaches you” that you can’t teach someone how to do ANYTHING from a book! You have to learn by doing.
Don’t get me wrong, book study has its place in every field. But it doesn’t need to be done in a classroom, it needs to be done at night, after working in your field all day as an apprentice. That’s when you should study WHY you did what you did today.
THE COSTS AND REWARDS
Politicians today are trying to raise the minimum wage, so that people at low-class jobs can “earn a living wage”. Unlike the right, I support this. Unlike the left, I know this isn’t possible. Remember Psalms 37:25. I have never met a poor person who wasn’t staying poor because they are still making poor choices.
The leftists float ideas like universal basic income – society guaranteeing, through taxes on the wealthier citizens, that every citizen has sufficient money to live on. Unlike the right, I support this. Unlike the left, I know this isn’t possible.
Most poor people are very bad at managing their resources (Luke 19:15-26). Note that the guy with one pound could, legitimately, claim that he had less of an opportunity; and yet, with what he did have, he did absolutely nothing (Luke 16:10).
Remember the solar panel principle; it is not possible to guarantee a fool sufficient money to live on. If he has excess, he’ll waste it – gambling, dogs, tattoos, drinking, cars, entertainment. If he has sufficient, he’ll complain he can’t buy the things above – or worse, he’ll buy them instead of the things he needs for his family. So the solution must be to lower his need for money, not increase his supply of money.
The poor people I know generally are very bad at motivating their beast (Proverbs 26:13-16), and yet as that verse says, they never acknowledge that their situation is their own fault. So as you learned in the previous lessons, they’re poor for a reason; poor because one or another – or all – of their fractions are rebellious, foolish, or simply uneducated.
So rather than taxing everyone to guarantee such a beast sufficient money to house, clothe, and feed himself, the solution is to make him an apprentice; one who will be housed, fed, and clothed by the master. Because the master could do it much cheaper than he could do it for himself… while teaching him why he was poor in the first place!
And of course, as you read this, remember, these things are true on every level; the spiritually poor are also spiritually poor for the exact same reason; and the solution, likewise, is not to give them more truth, but for them to properly use the truth they have.
To reduce their need for divine guidance, not increase their supply of divine guidance. And the same solution applies… but we’ll get to that.
A LIVING WAGE
A successful adult can feed, house, and clothe a person for 1/10 of what it would cost a foolish teen to do it himself. So why pay him $1,500 month just so he can buy what the master can provide for $150? It’s far less wasteful to guarantee his living in this way – which he earns by his labor – than it is to pay him the unnecessarily-high wage required for a fool to live.
Likewise, why work to pay for school when work can be school for free? This way, rather than be in debt for decades after graduation, the apprentice would end his tenure with clothes, tools, and a pre-agreed lump sum.
And more importantly, he will “graduate” with the real-world skills he needed to make a success of himself. Not only in his trade, but in shopping, dressing, cleaning, traveling, interacting with adults. This means that when he does go off on his own, it will be as an adult, not as a kid who has to suddenly transition from a lifetime of schooling into the very different world of adulting.
But though unpaid, this apprentice isn’t as cheap for the master as it might sound. Obviously, the master provides food and a bed, necessary clothes and shoes and so on, of generally the same quality as he would provide his own children.
Still, the larger cost is all the stuff the apprentice will screw up, especially the first year. Broken and lost tools and wasted or ruined materials will probably be worth about the same as hiring a qualified employee would cost. The master will probably lose money on the deal the first year.
The even larger cost is the valuable time the master will have to spend teaching the skills – and then correction for not paying attention, and then explaining it again – which is time that the master could have spent just doing it right by himself.
Which means when you consider the actual costs of boarding him, the costs of the tools he ruined, the time lost teaching him and fixing his screwups, and the very low quality of work and the very low value of the work he is capable of doing at first, it will be years before having an apprentice turns a “profit” for the master.
But after that point, the benefit to the master is potentially enormous. There are always jobs around that need done, but that aren’t worth your time. Jobs that aren’t even worth minimum wage, but which need done to keep the shop running at peak efficiency.
Things like taking apart old pipe fittings for reuse; you cannot afford to pay an employee $20 an hour to recycle $5 worth of fittings. It’s far better just to buy new fittings. This is one of the causes of such waste in the world today – it is cheaper to buy a new drill than to pay someone to fix it, even when it’s a simple fix.
But with an apprentice, whose time is worth almost nothing and who would profit by the experience of fixing the broken drill, it becomes possible to reduce waste! Which, at the same time, teaches him how to glean… something you no longer have time for, but which you can have him, your low-value apprentice, do for you.
So having an apprentice means things which would be thrown away are able to be reused. Things which would be dirty are kept clean. Things which would go without maintenance are oiled. And, as always, it teaches the apprentice how to do these things when he’s charting his own way later in life.
Meanwhile, it allows the master to keep costs down for the customer; the environment benefits by tools and parts that are reused and not filling up a landfill; and the apprentice learns how things go together and come apart. Everybody wins.
THE REAL BENEFIT – TO THE APPRENTICE
First and foremost, the apprentice learned a trade. A valuable, real-world, useful skill he can use to make a living and help others. And he knows it, from doing it. He hasn’t merely read about it, or practiced it in a controlled environment! He IS a welder, or a plumber, or a farmer! After seven years, there will be no tasks in his field he won’t have done at least a time or two.
He would be at least competent in whatever trade the master wrought, and would be sent away out of debt, a free man with money in his pocket, capable of starting his own business, ready to start a life for himself.
For seven years, the apprentice didn’t have a single worry about food, shelter, or the necessities of life. This solves the problem of poverty in the world. No matter what the work, no matter what the ups and downs of his master’s business, the apprentice will leave this job with more than he had when he arrived!
Physically, his muscles would be toned from doing the manual labor the lowest man on the job always does. He would be taught to value hard work, to take orders and – in time, as new apprentices are added – to give orders to those under him, within the limits of his own authority.
And unlike today’s schools and universities, where you learn a few facts and knowledge about your trade, an apprentice learns everything. Not just how to do the trade, but how to get customers, and how to keep them; how to deal with mistakes on the job, how to negotiate to get the best prices on materials, and which ones to choose; how to maintain a shop and manage employees.
This encourages everyone in the world to be competent in their field. It encourages small business, because every individual knows how to do a useful trade in society by themselves, for themselves, without a corporate structure. It encourages innovation, as each new generation has a chance to learn from their masters, and then improve on their ideas and adapt solutions to the present state of technology.
But beyond the skills acquired in learning a trade, hard work, and running a business, are the skills the apprentice learns by living with the master. How to buy food, and what food is the best value. How to run a house, a family, how to manage bills and plan for the future.
He will see every facet of the master’s life, and so if he failed to learn any of these things from his parents – whether because they didn’t know them, or because he didn’t pay attention when they taught him – he has another chance to learn them now, a double chance to be prepared for adulthood and independence.
He was poor and unemployable from not ruling his own heart and spirit, from his own soul preferring sleep to labor (Proverbs 6:9-15). The master will not tolerate this, and will force him to overcome these faults by ruling his beast and breaking his spirit for him; creating an environment, if it’s willing, for his soul to awaken and take charge.
AS COMPARED TO…
Let’s look at a person who started an apprenticeship at fifteen, a common age, historically; as compared to a typical college graduate today. At 22, they are both finished with their respective learning.
The college graduate has no real-world experience, and only knows things as they were described in books – but, having been told that education is all that matters, he will be insufferably arrogant, and unteachable (Proverbs 26:12).
The apprentice, now officially a journeyman, has every facet of hands-on knowledge about his field. If you were an employer, which would you rather hire? He needn’t have a piece of paper to prove he passed a test; give him a job to do, and that can be his diploma (John 10:37-38).
The college graduate might have $50,000, maybe up to $500,000 in student loan debt. Most people pay on their student loans for decades after they graduate. Even the politicians realize it’s one of the biggest problems in the world today.
The apprentice has no debt, perhaps $10,000 in cash in his pocket which he knows how to save and invest, and maybe an old set of tools for his field that his master no longer needs. He has contacts through his master’s business he can use to seek employment and a network of relationships in his field.
Which would you rather be?
Would you rather sign your life away, with almost no risk, for a few years, with the prospect of a future as a free man?
Or would you rather borrow against decades of your future in college, pretending you are a free man, but in reality, being a servant to the banks for decades? (Proverbs 22:7).
Or, would you rather do neither, keep your pride of being a “self-made man”, but take a chance on being worth minimum wage for decades, if not the rest of your life, and have no education at all? You would have to learn the hard way the skills you need to manage your money, run your house, or start a business… to say nothing of the skills to rule your fractions.
Would you rather do it the hard way? The way of lifelong slavery? Or the way of temporary servitude?
Of these choices, who wouldn’t prefer to be an apprentice?
A RESTRUCTURED SOCIETY
Now let’s imagine a society where this was the norm; everyone, in every profession, would know what they were doing. Colleges would be, if not extinct, at least restricted to the most in-depth scientific professions, and even those would be much improved by apprenticing, say, second-year astronomy students with astronomers.
Student debt would cease to exist, as education would be paid for by their own low-quality, inept work; at the same time, removing the need for a huge section of low-paying jobs, replaced by apprentices who never go hungry, never go homeless, never lack the basic necessities of life.
Prices for skilled professions such as plumbers could fall because instead of having to pay an incompetent apprentice or helpers enough money to live foolishly and wastefully on their own… the helper would be working for room, board, and trade education.
The plumbers would still “make” the same amount of money, but could charge less to earn it, since he wastes less paying morons enough money for them to survive on while buying tattoos, drugs, entertainment, booze, and so on.
This eases a burden across society, where EVERY skilled profession is overpriced, largely because of overpriced labor costs. And they’re overpriced largely because you HAVE to overpay unskilled young adults… because if you don’t overpay them, they’ll starve because they can’t manage their money!
And if you overpay them, obviously you have to pay competent people even more to match. Which makes all labor cost too much. Which is why it’s cheaper to mine resources and throw them away than it is to have people fix them… which is destroying the Earth (Revelation 11:18).
But in a society where apprenticing was practiced, if you were a poor family and couldn’t feed your teenager (much less send him to college), there would always be someone out there who needs another hand.
Someone who could be persuaded to take him under his wing, if all he had to pay was the cost of room, board, the time of educating him. And, at the end of his term, a lump sum to get him started in a new life (Deuteronomy 15:13).
The fact is, there are lot of jobs that give little value back but which must be done. Low paying, low return jobs like feeding chickens or clearing a field of rocks, picking up trash or cutting things to length in a shop need to be done in every society.
Most societies in history solved this problem with slavery, at least in part, to do the jobs no one wants to do. Today, those jobs are mostly done by minorities, often illegal immigrants at starvation wages. The rest are done by the lowest class of society at minimum wage, which barely gives them enough to live on, and is scarcely better than slavery.
Governments propose paying them more, but the jobs they’re doing – taking an order for a Big Mac, or stocking store shelves – simply aren’t worth any more than minimum wage. Most can be replaced by a machine or a computer, and soon will be. And you could never pay them enough as long as they waste what they have! (Haggai 1:5-9).
The Biblical solution would mean that everyone would be a servant at least for a few years of their life (Lamentations 3:27), even if it’s only a servant of their professional parents (Luke 15:29). No one, in any profession, will have grown up without learning what it was to be a “hewer of wood and a bearer of water” (Deuteronomy 29:11).
Which means everyone will have firsthand knowledge of what it was like to “bear the yoke”, and therefore everyone will have empathy with their own apprentices (Colossians 4:1), even the strangers (Deuteronomy 24:14).
GLEANING, STRANGERS, AND THE POOR
Obviously, this lesson is tying together the idea of gleaning which you learned in the last lesson, and the solution to immigration from the lesson before that, and Biblical bondservants from the lesson before that. To be clear, lifelong generational slavery, particularly based on skin color, is wrong.
And yet being bound by contract to obey a master is something we all must learn to do (Philippians 2:10-12). And not just to God, in the future; but here, now, on the Earth, all of us must learn how to do this: Colossians 3:18-25.
For if we cannot obey our master on Earth whom we have seen, (1 John 4:20, 1 Peter 2:18-21), how will we obey an invisible Master whose will is a whisper, not a whip? (Isaiah 30:21). That is why it is good to learn the habits of obedience and respect to a human master, so we can learn how authority works, and transfer the principles to our heavenly Master (Luke 7:9).
At many times in history, when God’s children were rebellious, He sold them into bondage (Judges 3:8 for instance). Because if you cannot rule your heart and break your spirit and obey the Invisible Master internally, God will sell your contract to someone else who can break your spirit for you… and then give your soul another chance to stay on top of it for yourself (Judges 2:11-21).
Remember, bondage is not necessarily slavery; but particularly in a woke world, it conjures up ideas of great boats of Africans being shipped off to generations of hard labor for cruel masters; which was, indeed, sinful. But the Bible has strict limits in place to prevent exactly that from happening.
This is why God made the term of servitude no longer than 7 years unless explicitly, publicly requested by the bondservant (Exodus 21:2-6, Genesis 29:18). In addition, even for those 7 years, the Bible described specific protections for abuses to limit the power of the masters (Exodus 21:20, 26-27, etc.).
As with any system, this one can be abused and become abject slavery. But society can correct problems like that, even when run by selfish people, by putting the promised money in escrow; by punishing abusers; by ensuring the living conditions are adequate.
For this to work properly, the master has to treat the apprentice as his own child; he has to desire his good, not merely seek to exploit him (Job 31:13-15). But that’s the whole point of the Bible anyway, to encourage that kind of relationship! (1 Timothy 5:1). And even among the Gentiles, it often was the case (Luke 7:2-10).
And in a proper world, “love thy neighbor as thyself” will be the law; it’s very unlikely someone would keep that perfectly in every way except with his apprentice, which means he would be condemned for some more egregious sin long before he would be in a position to hire and abuse an apprentice.
And for the poor, or the refugee, or the criminal, a term of seven years labor for a master who is required by law to treat you decently and send you out with money and skills is a tremendous deal compared to the alternatives of poverty, refugee camps, and prisons. One which is such a good arrangement, I myself would have been glad to sell my bond when I was a teenager.
THE APPRENTICE-SON
Obviously, the apprentice has to actually care about what he does. He has to honor his contract, and if he refuses to work, or is lazy, the OC master is given broad powers to motivate him (Malachi 1:6). Because as you learned in the lessons on government, all authority figures are disguised patriarchs.
There is no real difference in principle between master and king and judge and father, between God and Moses and Paul and Gamaliel; thus he who buys a servant’s contract must circumcise him, because he has become a part of his household (Genesis 17:12). Because he has become a type of son to him; and if the following verses apply to sons, they also apply to apprentices (Proverbs 22:15, 23:13-14, etc.).
When you think about it, all the things you learn from a master are things you should have learned from your parents. The trades (1 Kings 7:13-14), the laws (Deuteronomy 4:9), the breaking of hearts and spirits; these are things we should learn at home.
And all forms of government, from God to the police who write parking tickets, are substitute fathers to enforce lessons we should have already learned (Romans 13:1-7). Things our parents failed to teach us; and this applies on every conceivable level – but we’ll get to that later (Proverbs 27:10).
So if, say, the Syrians had been righteous, as a nation, they would have had a noble leader and never had a civil war (1 Samuel 12:14). Giving them a new home, with no strings, invites them to recreate the same problems there as they had in their old home because they are still the same people who caused them in the first place!
But them entering a new country as contract servants bound for 7 years to serve in their new home, while learning the language, laws, and habits of a better people than they are would correct those flaws… and either prepare them for their new home, or arm them with the tools they need to return to their old one and fix it!
So if someone steals, rather than put them in prison, sell them as a bondservant for seven years to repay. While there, they will have their spirits broken and their hearts humbled, and by being surrounded with successful people (obviously successful, since they could afford to buy their contract), they will become more like them (Proverbs 13:20).
When surrounded by law-abiding people with authority over them, their own souls will be given the chance to grow and be rehabilitated; instead of being a burden to society in prison, where they almost invariably become even more hardened criminals (1 Corinthians 15:33).
And unlike released prisoners, these bondservants are released with money, food, clothes, and skills… and most importantly, a trained heart and spirit that their soul is more capable of ruling on their own to prevent this from happening again!
Which is the greatest part of all, for the only reason any of this happened in the first place is their fractions were out of control!
For if a thief had managed his fractions, he wouldn’t have stolen. If the culture of the homeland was so great, their society wouldn’t have fallen apart. And if a man had what it took to be a success, he would have done it on his own.
And being sold as a slave – whether willingly, to a master to learn a trade and escape poverty; or unwillingly, as a thief or prisoner of war; is the ultimate act of humiliation and embarrassment; it is saying, in effect, that he is a failure as a person, and needs someone to remake him in their image.
Which is to say, it is the best way to teach meekness and humility. Thus the apprentice/child/bondservant can’t help but acknowledge that he brought nothing to the relationship, and is just doing what was agreed, nothing more – if that (Luke 17:7-10). Thus anything more the master gives him is based on grace, not works (2 Timothy 1:9).
MINISTERS
This is all well and good, you may be thinking. You might even be thinking it’s amazing, and you wish the world was run that way. But surely you don’t think I said that for its own sake? Did I say it because I “cared for interns”? (1 Corinthians 9:9-10).
No, I said it “altogether for our sake”. Now that you know what to look for, the Bible is absolutely full of examples of this. This has always been the way things were done. Elijah trained Elisha to be his replacement; and yet, while being trained, he was his servant, performing such menial tasks as doing his laundry and washing his hands (1 Kings 19:16-21).
I could cite a lot of examples of this; take David and Saul; David had seven elder brothers, and would never have inherited his father’s house. So he was apprenticed to a different house – the house of Saul (1 Samuel 16).
But to become part of this house, he was first taken out of the house of his father, and made legally a part of the house of Saul (1 Samuel 17:56-18:5). Which God, in due time, made him heir of (2 Samuel 12:7-8). Note that Saul was his master, making him Saul’s apprentice!
Or consider Pharaoh and Joseph; Noah and Shem; Aaron and Eleazar and Phinehas; or, if we move into the NT, Paul and Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). Note that Paul was apprenticed to Gamaliel, which is how he learned the law!
Paul noted this in particular, proudly, because Gamaliel was a very prestigious and respected master (Acts 5:34-40). And based on that passage, far wiser than the arrogant young Paul, who did the opposite of what his master counseled here.
The Bible is full of references to this system, but they’re passed over because our society has forgotten how these things worked just a few hundred years ago. Consider the story of Eli and Samuel, who was raised in the temple by Eli as payment for God opening the womb of Hannah (1 Samuel 1-3, particularly 1 Samuel 3:1-7, 1:27-28, 2:20).
Note the terms there; this was a loan of their seed; and yet, it was for as long as he lived. What sort of loan is that? A lifelong apprenticeship! And as such, that’s why Eli – high priest of God, and His representative – called Samuel “my son”.
Because a servant only stays a servant if he lacks the desire in his soul to be more (Matthew 24:45). Really, the sky is the limit (Proverbs 29:21). Any servant who distinguishes himself can become “one of the family” in the end, even the heir of the house.
HIGHER EDUCATION
This is how information was passed on throughout history, from one generation to the next. If not from a parent to child, then from a master to an apprentice; whether it was carpentry, rulership, or philosophy. Because there was no other way!
They didn’t have classrooms in ancient Israel. Book learning, what there was of it, was generally done in the temple (Luke 2:46-49). Historically, it has always been the priesthood’s job to deal with knowledge, whether sacred or profane (Matthew 2:3-6, Malachi 2:7).
The arts and sciences and religion – which were pretty much the same thing for most of history – were always managed by the temples of the day. This is true whether it was a Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, or a Babylonian ziggurat, or a Jewish temple; the books were kept by priests.
But to use those books, you’d have to learn to read – which was not something your average person ever learned (John 7:14-15). And that required having a master to teach you how to read. And that was rarely free.
Sometimes the student paid the master; sometimes they became his servants to pay for their tuition. But no one did anything for nothing. Rich people could afford private tutors; but the best most could hope for was “group lessons”.
So when a young man heard of, say, the teachings of Plato and wanted to learn more, they would come from across the Mediterranean to Athens and look for a master willing to take them on; and from him they would learn philosophy, law, debating, and so on.
Their “education” generally involved walking around the city or countryside as the master riffed on various things that came to mind. This style of teaching is called “peripatetic” from the Greek for “given to walking about”. Sound familiar? Mark 2:23-28, Mark 10:32-34, Mark 11:13-14, etc.
This was how higher education was done in classical times. Because it was the way that made sense! Modern education is simply “patetic” in comparison. And this means that throughout history, every person who ever learned from another person, did so as some form of apprentice.
…Or, to use a word you’re much more familiar with but don’t understand at all… by becoming a disciple.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
In our blinkered religious world, no one but Jesus ever had disciples. But that’s just not true; not even in the Bible. Did anyone else have disciples? Matthew 9:14. Were the Pharisees themselves disciples? John 9:24-29. Did they have disciples of their own? Matthew 22:15-16.
Disciples weren’t some new thing that Jesus created (Matthew 12:2). Plato was the disciple of Socrates, and Aristotle in turn was Plato’s disciple. And everyone knew this; indeed, not knowing how it worked in Athens would have been the equivalent of you never having heard of Harvard or Oxford.
But of course, Athens didn’t invent it; as I’ve shown, this was how it had always been done, everywhere. Webster defines the word as “a person who is a pupil or an adherent of the doctrines of another”, after five other religious meanings which have eclipsed the simplicity of the word.
Like with most Biblical words, we’ve lost the meaning of the word behind the symbol of what they mean to churches today. But the original word translated as disciple was “mathetes”; in the Greek-speaking world, it meant “a follower and student of a mentor, teacher, or other figure” (Wikipedia).
So Jesus’ disciples were, quite simply put, His apprentices! How did He meet them? Mark 1:17. Right there, it was the offer of a profession in exchange for their service to Him. What relationship did they have? John 13:14. This is why they called Him Master. Because He was literally the Master to their Apprentice!
And Jesus’ disciples were used just like any other master would use them; they took care of menial preparation (Luke 22:8-9). They handled the accounting (John 12:4-6); they carried messages (Luke 7:19). All these tasks freed Him up for the job of teaching them, correcting them, and making decisions for them.
And that’s why before you can be an heir with Him, you must first be a bondservant with Him. He must correct and change you as your Master, before He can love you as a friend (John 14:1-16). Because we just aren’t capable of being good friends yet.
So as the disciples grew more competent, they were sent on missions to do small jobs for Him (Luke 9:1-6) – which gave them a chance to practice the trade they were learning from Him, even though they couldn’t do the job right all the time (Matthew 17:16-21).
But they had to learn a little at a time, while He ate from the almond tree so they wouldn’t have to… so that they would be able to eat from it safely without guidance after He released them from discipleship at His death… graduating them into apostles.
Because after an apprentice fulfills his contract, he becomes a journeyman; which Webster’s defines as a “trained worker employed by someone else”. And what is an apostle… but a disciple whom Jesus trained, then sent out into the world to do His will?
One who is still not yet worthy to be considered a master (Matthew 23:10), not yet worthy of training apprentices in his own name, but who can be trusted to do the bulk of the work training disciples in Jesus’s name!