Discipleship in Jesus' time

The earth has had the greatest privilege to have the greatest man ever come and teach us the greatest message ever. The disciple's of Jesus never realized the impact that he would have on the world, but they knew that they wanted to follow him with their whole hearts. I always ask myself why the disciple's wanted to follow him so badly when they did not understand who he truly was yet. When we read Matthew 4:21 tells us that Jesus came to James and John, both sons of Zebedee, and called them to be disciples. The interesting thing is that the "immediately" left their boats to follow him (Jn. 4:22). My question here is why? Why would these men get up from their jobs and run right to Jesus? When kids reached the age between 7 and 12 they learned the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch is often known as the Torah, or the first 5 books of the Bible. They did not just read the Pentateuch, but they learned everything about the first 5 books and even took the time to memorize them! We think of that as something so insane. Can you imagine waking up and quoting the book of Leviticus? Not many of us want to even read that book let alone memorize it. When student's reached the age of 12 they would learn the family trade. But, if they were good at learning the Torah, they would move on to study and memorize the rest of the Old Testament. If you were surprised when I told you that 7 and 8 year old's were memorizing the first 5 books of the Bible, then memorizing the rest of the Old Testament will blow your mind! This is so much more rigorous of a process that took so much effort as well as a true calling from God. Some of us will make an effort to read the Old Testament, but we could not even dream of putting the amount of effort into memorizing it all. When these students would reach the age of 15, they would work on becoming a Rabbi. This means that after all the teachings that they have received from the teacher's of the law, they would then follow any Rabbi that thought them as teachable. For example, a student would come up to a Rabbi and would ask to follow him. The Rabbi then would ask three questions. One, may be about quoting a passage of the Torah. The second, the Rabbi would maybe ask for the student to explain a certain passage of Scripture. The final question would be to ask the student to explain a more specific part of the law and how it applies to another part of the Old Testament. Following a Rabbi was a very difficult process and blew my mind the first time I ever heard about it. If you have read my last blog on discipleship (http://smith6261.blogspot.com/2012/07/discipleship.html) I mentioned that you need to look for someone who is a strong spiritual leader. Someone who is faithful to God and has good morals. When you find this person, ask them to teach you things about the Scriptures, ask them questions that you have, and tell them the struggles you are having in living what you have learned out. This is what these early disciples learned from when they were children, and we can follow God just as faithfully today even though we cannot quote all the Old Testament. Find someone in your church you can really trust and ask them to teach you. If you would like to do a deeper study on this, I encourage you to check out Ray Vander Laan. He does an amazing look at the history of the early teachings and even walks you through the land of Israel to show you what it may have looked like in the time of the disciples in his series titled "The Footsteps of the Disciples" (http://www.followtherabbi.com/).