John the Baptist was a fearless preacher indeed! He rebuked King Herod because he had taken his brother’s wife, and for this Herod shut him up in prison; but John’s work was done, and neither Herod nor Satan himself could undo it. And though John was shut up, the call to repentance still rang out, for when Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, He came into Galilee. “From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
“And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brethren” — the very same two brothers we read about before — “Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.”
Jesus said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
Simon and Andrew had often read and spoken of David, the shepherd boy who was called by God to leave the care of his father’s sheep and become the shepherd of God’s people; but they never thought that when Messiah came He would call them, simple fishermen as they were, to leave their nets and become fishers of men. Perhaps they did not know what “fishers of men” meant, but they understood “Follow me,” and at once they left their nets and followed Jesus. They did not turn back, not even when later on He said to them, “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.”
Did Jesus make Simon Peter and Andrew, his brother, fishers of men? Indeed He did! Peter caught no fewer than three thousand men and women at once for Jesus. When fish are caught and drawn out of the water they die; but those who heard Peter preach that day did not die. They repented, that is, they were sorry for their sins and confessed them to God; they believed on Jesus as the Messiah, and they were baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, which means the same as Jesus Messiah, Jesus the anointed One; their sins were forgiven, and they received the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Peter was the chief speaker on that occasion, but Andrew was there too, with others who had followed Jesus, and they all stood up with Peter while he was speaking.
But before Simon Peter could become a fisher of men he had lessons to learn, and one of them was that Jesus knew where the fish were and could bring them to his net, and in learning this lesson he made a great discovery, which you will hear about later on.