You will find many zealots not religious in any sense of the word.
Zeal frequently expends itself on other things than religion. We shall occupy your time, this morning, first of all, by some little description of the unconverted Zealot and then, secondly, by some few remarks upon the Christian Zealot. May we so act and live that we might truthfully wear the title of Christian Zealots. I should be glad if many among us would earn the same title by so living that men would call them zealots, or even “fanatics,” for this is so sleepy an age concerning religious things, that to be called fanatic, now-a-days, is one of the highest honours a man can have conferred upon him. He was Simon the Zealot while in the darkness and blindness of his mind he knew not the Messiah he surely could not have been less Simon the Zealot when, gifted with the Holy Spirit, he went forth to cast out devils, and to heal the sick, and to proclaim that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. But it strikes me that he must have been a zealot after conversion too, for within that sacred circle which surrounded our Lord, every word was truth, and the Master would not have allowed any of his disciples to have worn a surname which was not expressive or truthful.
#SIMON THE ZEALOT FULL#
It is thought by some that he was a member of that very fierce and fanatical political sect of the Jews, called the Zealots, by whose means the siege of Jerusalem was rendered so much more bloody than it would have been but this does not seem very probable, for the sect of the Zealots had scarcely arisen in the time of the Saviour, and therefore we are inclined to think with Hackett in his exposition of the Acts, that he was so called because of his zealous attachment to his religion as a Jew, for there were some in the different classes of Jewish society who were so excessively full of zeal as to gain the name of Zealot. I suppose that he had this name before his conversion. He is called Simon the Canaanite in Hebrew - not because he was an inhabitant of Cana or a Canaanite, but that word, when interpreted, means precisely the same as the Greek word Zelotes. SIMON called Zelotes has apparently two surnames in scripture, but they mean the same thing.
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