Saturday, 4th of February 2012 was the day Florence Green died. Florence was a British citizen

who served in the Royal Air Force during the First World War. She died at the age of 110,

only two weeks shy of her 111th birthday. When she was asked what it felt like being 110, she said with

typical British understatement, not much different to being 109. I mentioned Florence because

as the last known surviving veteran of World War I, she was unique and irreplaceable.

She had been there, been a witness to it, and now, following her death, there are no longer

any first-hand witnesses that we can speak to about the Great War. We will have to rely on

recorded conversations,

written memoirs, the work of historians. Apostles occupy a similar role as first-hand witnesses.

In Acts chapter 1, verse 21 and 22, we learned that an apostle had to be a first-hand witness to the resurrected

Jesus. Initially, Jesus commissioned 12 apostles and then later commissioned Paul and Jesus' own brother, James.

Paul became an apostle because he too had encountered the

resurrected Christ on the road to Damascus and had been commissioned by him, quote, to carry my name

before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. There's scriptural evidence that at first the other disciples were

wary of Paul's claim to be an apostle. After all, everybody knew that Paul had an unenviable track

record of persecuting believers. But nevertheless, once the disciples had spent time with Paul, his story

about encountering the resurrected Christ checked out. He was given the official stamp of approval

from all the other apostles and was visibly endorsed by them as an apostle. In Ephesians

chapter 2, Paul writes that the church is built

on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.

That view of the apostles as being included in the foundation of the Christian faith is crucial to understand

because a foundation is laid only once. So after those apostles laid the foundation in the first

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