Acts 12:2

‘And he killed James the brother of John with the sword.'

To the horror of all Christians James, the brother of John, one of the select three of Peter, James and John, was put to death by being beheaded with a sword. In Jewish law death by the sword was the penalty for murder or apostasy (m. Sanhedrin Acts 9:1; compare Deuteronomy 13:2). The Apostles were therefore being treated as apostates from Judaism. It was the first death of an Apostle that we know of and must have baffled the church. Why had God allowed this to happen to an Apostle? Previously the Apostles had been sacrosanct.

But as with Stephen, James was allowed to be martyred, as Jesus had strongly hinted might be the case (see Mark 10:39; compare John 16:2, literally fulfilled here). God did not intervene. He was ‘making up that which was behind of the sufferings of Christ', for the principle of Scripture and the purpose of God is that righteousness advances through suffering (Colossians 1:24). The Servant is the suffering Servant. It is through much tribulation that we will enter under the Kingly Rule of God (Acts 14:22). And the Apostles could not be excluded, now that the church was no longer so dependent on them. Note that James died at the same feast as his Lord. He followed in His steps.

It is not for us to ask why James was taken and Peter was spared. Some perish by the sword, others are saved from the sword (Hebrews 11:34; Hebrews 11:37). That is God's pattern and it is He Who holds the reins. But it is interesting in the light of the great commission of Acts 1:8 that both James and Peter were still in Jerusalem. Perhaps this was to be a strong hint to the Apostles that it was now time that they were moving on, in the same way as the martyrdom of Stephen had been a means of despatching the witnessing church out among the nations.