When you start marketing a product, you're looking for the early adopters. They want to try out new things, get ahead of the game, are willing to pay that little bit higher price, before it might fall as sales increase, in order to be the ones who have what others don't. For the manufacturer, it's the early adopters who give the product credibility in the market by boosting early sales figures, writing the first reviews, and telling their friends and colleagues about it.
When I was a student, I decided to use a computer to control my main experiment. After a while, I upgraded to a mark I BBC microcomputer, which was amazing. However, to get it to control the apparatus, take measurements and do some preliminary analysis, it was still necessary to write in assembly language (the next level up from 1's and 0's), because the memory was so small. And, yes, I had to install and replace several chips myself. It did seem like a better option than moving the equiment by hand all the time and then writing down the results using pen and paper, but it turned out to be a project in itself. However, computerization has turned out to be the way to go!
John the Baptist had his own ministry, which was doing well. However, he was aways pointing to Jesus as the one to come. After Jesus had been proclaimed publicly as the Son of God by a voice from Heaven, just after his baptism, John started to tell other people that it was Jesus who was the Messiah. This was by the River Jordan. The first people that he told were two of his own disciples, one of whom was a man called Andrew, from Bethsaida on the coast of the Sea of Galillee. These two decided to check out Jesus for themselves and spent a day with him. Andrew, though, first went off to fetch his brother Simon, who was probably somewhere nearby, because they arrived back in time to spend the rest of the day with Jesus.
The next day, Jesus set out for Galilee, presumably with Andrew and Simon. We don't hear again of the other disciple of John who had spent that first day with Jesus; perhaps he went back to John. When Jesus and his two companions arrived in Galilee, they came across a man called Philip, also from Bethsaida. It doesn't seem that he had been at Jesus' baptism or that he had been a disciple of John. So we don't kow much about him, except that he might have known Andrew and Simon, at least by sight. Jesus, though, must have seen faith in him and recognized that this was someone who was going to be one of his apostles. "Follow me," Jesus said to him (John's Gospel, chapter 1, verse 43).
Philip might not have had the benefit of John's teaching about the one to come after him, although he might have been to the Jordan to be baptized earlier. He certainly had not had John specifically tell him who Jesus was, although Andrew might have got involved in the discussion with Jesus. However, something must have made him know inside that this was someone worth being with. So Philip followed him - just like that.
Philip saw something good that seemed to be of God and threw himself behind it with little but faith to justify the decision.
Some of the 12 apostles joined Jesus after he had become quite famous as an outstanding teacher and miracle worker; Philip was an early adopter who took a chance on limited evidence, a man of faith. He, like Andrew, decided to go and fetch someone as well, in his case a friend called Nathanael Bartholomew, and told him that he might have found the Messiah. Nathanael was skeptical, but Philip wasn't put off and persuaded his friend to come along (John 1:44-46). So once they had all returned, these seem to have formed the core of four men who were Jesus' first committed disciples.
We don't know vast amounts about Philip beyond that. He is the one whom Jesus asked where they could buy food for the thousands of people that Jesus had been preaching to one day, flummoxing him rather. In the end Jesus fed them with five loaves of bread and two fish (John 6:1-14). When some Greeks came to see Jesus, they approached Philip for an introduction, which he provided (John12:20-26). At one point when Jesus had been talking about his Father, Philip asked him to show them the Father, only to be told that that wasn't necessary, because if he'd seen Jesus he had seen the Father (John 14:7-11). As you can see, life with Jesus wasn't always easy: he was very unusual and expected an awful lot of his friends.
Of course, Philip was involved in everything that all the other apostles did, apart from the few occasions where Jesus took just Peter together with the brothers James and John, but we don't read anything else about him as an individual. After Jesus had gone back to Heaven and the Holy Spirit had arrived in power, it's possible that we see Philip preaching and teaching on a couple of occasions, but it's not clear if that's him or Philip the deacon. The Bible doesn't tell us what he did later, although the most likely account seems to be that he died in Hierapolis (in what is now western Turkey) around 80 AD. In that case, his apostolic duties had led him to preach the gospel far from home, like many other leaders in the early Church.
Although we don't know much about Philip, he had an important role to play. He was a man who, right at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, was willing to step out in faith, take Jesus at face value with little logical reason for doing so, and be faithful to him to the end, despite not having an easy ride and being embarrassed by Jesus from time to time by getting the wrong end of the stick. He also took the opportunity to introduce others to Jesus when presented to him.
How willing are we to step out in faith when we don't understand what's going on? Do we want to know all the answers and have the logic in place before following up on what we think that Jesus might be telling us? Do we miss, or even ignore, the promptings of the Holy Spirit because we are more attuned to the promptings of the rational world? Do we sometimes look back and see that someone stepped in when we didn't and now has a successful ministry or has received blessing from God in some other way? We mustn't be stupid or presumptuous, but we need to tune our spiritual ears to be able hear God in the midst of the cross-talk from everyone else. Philip took the plunge purely on faith and led one of the most exciting lives that anyone has ever lived.
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