The awe and fear of God dispels all anxious fear.
35 On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” 36 And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him. 37 And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. 38 But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” 39 And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. 40 He said to them, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” 41 And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
The deeper we move into this Gospel, the more that Mark shows us of Jesus Christ — His identity, His authority, His power, and His purpose as the Son of God, in Galilee, calling people to repent and believe.
Everything that Mark says is true — after all, he was in all likelihood the chief assistant and transcriber of the Apostle Peter. There is hardly a passage is Mark’s Gospel that does not bear the mark of Peter, someone who had been there, and who had seen it for himself.
And yet, for all that, Mark’s approach (which is to say, God the Holy Spirit’s approach in Mark) shows a masterful ability to cut to the chase while simultaneously sustaining the narrative tension. Not bad for a guy with the nickname “Stump-Fingers.” Je may have had stubby digits, but he writing style has a certain elegance that’s hard to beat.
As one example, we’ve already talked about intercalation — Mark Sandwiches — where Mark sets a story in the middle a larger story. It’s fitting, then, that Mark concludes the sequence of parables in ch. 4 — which are themselves well-crafted stories — by returning to the place where started at the beginning of ch. 4: the boat beside the sea.
vv. 35–36 | On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him.
Remember, the crowds had been pressing in around Jesus. He needed a pulpit, and so He hopped into a nearby boat as the crowd stood there on the seashore. And He preached parables — soil, seed, lamps, a kingdom. At some point, Mark notes, Jesus will explain these parables to His disciples, but Mark now draws us back to that seaside setting, except now it’s getting late. It’s evening. And Jesus says, “Let’s go across to the other side of the sea.”
On the surface, it’s not an unreasonable suggestion. It’s been a long day, Jesus and His Twelve disciples could use a little getaway from the pressing crowds. To be sure, Jesus Himself is no sailor — He’s a carpenter, and we have no reason to believe He had any great sailing experience. His band of disciples, on the other hand, include experienced fishermen like John, James, Andrew, and Simon Peter. They knew the Sea well enough, and so to them a trip across would seem easy enough to accomplish.
“The Sea” in truth might not seam like much of a sea to us. The Sea of Galilee, also know as the Sea of Tiberius, is shaped a little bit like Lake Tahoe, except only a third of the size. But even a third of Lake Tahoe is pretty impressive. Jesus’ starting point as the NW shore, near His home base of Capernaum, and He’s going to end up near the sea town of Gerasa on the south-eastern shore, possibly 7 miles away.
7 miles is a long way to go across any body of water, especially in a boat not much bigger than a 15 passenger van.1 But the disciples are experts, and so they take Him away from the crowd, Mark says, “just as He was,” in His makeshift pulpit, sailing across the sea.
“And,” Mark adds, “other boats were with him.”
So we’re left with a detailed picture of Jesus’ closest followers — the twelve, and maybe some others in various boats, making their way at Jesus’ request across the Sea of Galilee — straight into the greatest storm of their lives.
What is your deepest fear? What is the thing that you dread more than anything in the world? For some of us, our deepest fear was, at one point in our lives, that we’d have to give a presentation in front of the class at school. Or than mom would make us eat broiled fish for dinner. Or that some monster we saw in a movie would come up from under our bed and grab us.
But then as we grow, those fears fade. Public speaking wasn’t so bad, or if it was at least we got it over with. Same goes for mom’s broiled fish. As for the monsters, we know they aren’t real, and even if they scare us for a moment during the movie, they seem powerless, even humorous, once the lights come back on.
But there are other fears we know that won’t go away, even after the lights come on. This is not a fantastical fear; this is something that you dread might truly happen. Or maybe it did happened already, and you’re terrified to think that it might happen again. And you’re scared, because your sense of security and happiness may be shattered in an instant, and there’s not a thing you will be able to do to stop it.
I don’t know what your greatest fear is. But I think we meet Peter and company’s greatest fear in v. 37:
v. 37 | And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling.
Galilee may not have been the largest sea, but due to a unique combination of topographical and meteorological factors, it was known for its sudden, unpredictable, and unforgiving storm patterns.2
Storms are a part of life when you live off the sea, and the disciples knew that better than anyone. But a storm of this magnitude was beyond anything they had ever seen. And “magnitude” is the right term for it, because Matthew (who, like Jesus, was another non-mariner caught up in this storm) describes this as a σεισμὸς μέγας… ἐν τῇ θαλάσσῃ — “a great earthquake in the sea.”3
Psalm 107, though written well before this event, gives us a good window into how the disciples would have felt at this moment:
Ps. 107 | 23 [they] went to sea in ships, conducting trade on the vast water. 24 They saw the LORD’s works, his wondrous works in the deep. 25 He spoke and raised a stormy wind that stirred up the waves of the sea. 26 Rising up to the sky, sinking down to the depths, their courage melting away in anguish, 27 they reeled and staggered like a drunkard, and all their skill was useless (CSB).
It’s not an accident that, when we’re trying to give words to the greatest struggles in our lives, we often reach for the language of a sea storms.
Overwhelming.
Unrelenting.
Lost at sea.
Swamped.
Drowning.
All our skill fails us here, and we’re powerless. There’s nowhere to hide when you’re in a boat, with storms up above, and sea all around, with waves breaking in, and water rising up above your head.4
It’s the deepest dread of any sailor and his family. This week, I came across an old poem illustrates this titled “The Three Fishers” by Charles Kingsley. The poem speaks of three fishermen “sailing away as the sun went down” while their wives and children look on in anxiety. In the second stanza, Kingsley writes,
Three wives sat up in the lighthouse tower,
And they trimmed the lamps as the sun went down;
They looked at the squall, and they looked at the shower,
And the night-rack came rolling up ragged and brown.
But men must work, and women must weep,
Though storms be sudden, and waters deep,
And the harbour bar be moaning.
You can see this isn’t going anywhere good. The poem ends in the next stanza:
Three corpses lay out on the shining sands
In the morning gleam as the tide went down,
And the women are weeping and wringing their hands
For those who will never come home to the town;
For men must work, and women must weep,
And the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep;
And good-bye to the bar and its moaning.
Peter had a wife, and a family. Andrew may have as well. James and John we know were the sons of their father Zebedee, and were devoted to their mother Salome (who was herself a devoted follower of Jesus). To say nothing of the other disciples in the boat with Jesus, and in those boats that followed him.
How many women would be weeping and wringing their hands the next day, to hear news that their husbands, sons, and brothers never made it to the other side of the sea? It’s not hard to imagine why the disciples, who again were many of them expert, experienced fishermen, were in a state of sheer panic, as their deepest fear was right there, breaking into the boat and threatening to drag them down to the depths.
And then Mark shares a detail that is almost beyond belief:
v. 38a | But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion.
There in the back of the boat, while all the sailors are losing their minds, the carpenter is fast asleep. It’s pretty impressive. Maybe you’ve been told before that you’re a deep sleeper— “You wouldn’t wake for another world war!” But what Jesus is doing here really is pretty remarkable (and a little funny).
What’s up with the man in the back of the boat? I think there are at least four things we should take away from this sentence:
First, we should appreciate how this shows us the true humanity of Jesus. Jesus isn’t pretending to take a nap here; He really is asleep, because He really is tired, because He really is human, and spent a whole day (plus) hard at work. As we confess in the Nicene Creed:
“I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God… Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man;
Or, as our church’s Confession puts it, Jesus has, a “true body and reasonable soul.” We need to banish the idea from our minds that Jesus is some kind of demigod, or superhuman. That’s not at all how the Bible explains Him. A superhuman is neither truly God nor truly human, but a tertium quid, some “third thing.”
Jesus is not some “third thing.” He’s not Superman; He’s the God-man. And that means He knows what it’s like to have a hard day, and enjoy a good night’s rest.
Second, v. 38 shows us, once again, a level of vivid detail that could only come from an eyewitness. There are those who have a hard time believing the Gospel accounts — the miracles, angels and demons, virgin conception, crucifixion, resurrection — these things seem beyond credibility. Maybe that describes you this morning — someone who really doesn’t see how the Gospels are any different than legends from the ancient past.
If that’s your understanding, I think this verse raises some questions: Why mention the cushion? Why mention the other boats? Why mention the fact that they took Jesus “just as He was”? Why mention any of these seemingly-useless details… unless they describe something that really took place?
Today, if I want to make up a story and pass it off as real,I might add all kinds of details to make it look plausible. But that’s just not how they thought back in Mark’s time. Legends were larger than life, and details like the cushion, if they were mentioned at all, would have to be like the proverbial Chekhov’s Gun — they wouldn’t be mentioned at all unless they had a role to play in the story.
But here, we get details that do little more than, well, give us detail. indicating that they are coming not out of a creative writing class, but out of someone’s memory. Like any of us might do if we were recounting a significant event in our lives, Peter recalls (and Mark records) even some of the minor details of that day. And I find that very interesting.
Third — and this is really just a brief aside— but you notice something of a pattern in Jesus ministry here: He’s the kind of man who is up early praying when everyone else is asleep, and yet He’s calmly asleep when everyone is up panicking.5 I don’t say that to condemn; I merely point it out for my own sake, as someone who could certain do with more time in early prayer, and less time in evening anxiety.
Fourth, and perhaps most troublingly of all, it begins to dawn on us that none of this has happened by accident. The disciples are in the middle of this death-dealing storm because—and only because—Jesus is the one who brought them there. Jesus is the one who said “Let’s go to the other side,” and Jesus is the only one who’s not taken by surprise—who, indeed, has the nerve to take a nap while the wind and the waves threaten to break up the boat.
I say this is most troubling, because it runs counter to how we may think of the Christian life, or how we think of this incident in the boat. Sometimes this story is told in a disconnected way — Disciples go out, storms rise up, and (spoiler alert) Jesus calms the storm. And so we may be tempted to think of storms in our own lives as realities we faced “BC” — before Christ. Then, when Christ comes in to our lives, He stills the storms, so we should expect an easy path once we surrender all to Christ.
But friends, that is the complete and total opposite of what is going on here. The storm that threatens the disciples — the greatest struggle they ever faced, when they were at their wits-end, literally sinking down to the depths — that was all because they were following Jesus. It was following Jesus that brought them into the greatest struggle of their lives. And so, you almost don’t want to blame the disciples as they come to Jesus in the second half of v. 38:
v. 38b | And they woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
This is the first in a rapid sequence of four questions in our passage. Matthew and Luke record other statements, which no doubt were also said at the time, “Master, Master! Save us Lord! We are perishing!” But Mark doesn’t shy away from the raw question that everyone on this boat seems to be thinking: “Jesus, don’t you care?”
Here are these experienced fishermen — accomplished men, more than we often give them credit for. And now they’re completely powerless, they’re in a panic, and they’re asking a question any one of us might ask — and, probably have asked (if you’ve been a Christian for any length of time), when face with an agonizing storm in your life.
“To their credit,” says R.C. Sproul, “they turned to Jesus in their time of need.” To their discredit, they do so in order to accuse Him.6 Sinclair Ferguson, meanwhile, puts the matter rather plainly:
Ferguson | I think that's probably the harshest question in the whole of the New Testament to Jesus, who is in this world, and in this boat, and is destined to be on that cross for one reason and one reason only, because He cares.
Of course Jesus cares! And to demonstrate it, He gets up from His sleep, and without a word to the disciples, He proceeds to do something about the squall.
Up to this point, if we know our OT well enough, we may have noticed that there are many parallels here between this account and the account of the prophet Jonah, son of Amittai, in Jonah chapter 1:
Going out to sea.
Going to sleep down in the boat.
An act of Almighty God that sends a raging storm into the sea.
The panicking, experienced mariners who are totally powerless to stop the storm.
But now we see a great departure from the story of Jonah.
v. 39 | And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.
Imagine how strange it would be if you went camping as a child with your parents and, as you're driving up to the campsite, your father looks out and sees the rain coming down and says, “Rain, rain, go away” — and the rain just goes away. You'd be, I think, maybe think that was pretty cool, maybe a little concerned, not realizing your father had some power, some kind of wind and weather wizardry. But that's the image that we're given here in this passage. Jesus simply says, “Peace, be still.”
That's not a peace. Peace be with you and also with you. No, the word used to describe that peace is, it's akin to saying, pipe down, sit down. You would say it to a dog. In fact, Jesus will say it to the demons. “Sit down, be quiet.” He commands the wind and the waves, the whole storm and the sea of Galilee. And in an instant, the wind ceases and there's a great calm.
There's an image that I was pointed to this week. Imagine you're out there in the parking lot and your car alarm is going off and it's going beep, beep, beep. And you're really self-conscious. It's going off during the service. You really don't want that to, you know, people to realize it's your car. So you run out there and you go to silence your car and you go *click*. And the siren ceases instantly at a push of a button.
That's how dramatic this storm ceases on the Galilean sea. The storm of a century, the storm of a lifetime. And in an instant, it is quelled.
Again, as I mentioned, this is the same kind of language Jesus will use to bark orders at the demons. He will tell them to be silent, to keep quiet. Now he tells even the sea and the waves that disciples have not seen anything like this before.
You know, we're going to see, Lord willing, next week as we look at chapter 5, as Jesus lands there in Gerasa, among the Gerasenes, he sees a man who is filled with demons. He's going to say the same word to that man that he says here to the storm. And I wonder if one of the reasons Jesus brings these men into the storm at this moment is so that they would be ready to meet the demon-possessed man there.
He rebukes whatever powers try to undermine his mission. That's the point. He is the only one in all the world who has the power to say, stop it, to the storm, and it ceases.
And that's because he's Almighty God. He's not a great teacher. He's not an interesting philosopher. He's not a man who you can take and leave, the bits you like you can keep, the rest you can discard. No, he is the Almighty one, the one who spoke in Genesis 1:9
Genesis 1 | 9 And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.
God is the kind of God who says to the ocean, “You shall come this far and no further.” No sea, no squall, no storm, no matter how fatal, is outside of the sovereign scope and power of the Almighty God. And Jesus proves it here.
Psalm 33 tells us,
Psalm 33 | 6 By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host. 7 He gathers the waters of the sea as a heap; he puts the deeps in storehouses. 8 Let all the earth fear the LORD; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him! 9 For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood [still].
Jesus rebukes those puny powers that try to undermine His purposes. That’s the point. With a word He rebukes the sea… and with another word, He rebukes His disciples.
v. 40 | He said to them, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?”
These are questions 2 & 3, and much like the disciples’ question 1, these questions are actually a rebuke.
Interestingly, Jesus does not use the verb φοβέομαι, the more common/general verb “to fear.” Instead, he uses the adjective δειλός — which is only used three times in the NT: 1) here, 2) in Matthew’s parallel account, & 3) in Revelation 21:8.
In Revelation 21, the Apostle John sees a grand vision of the end of all things.
“I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” he writes, “for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away…” He sees the Father on the throne, who says,
Revelation 21 | “Behold, I am making all things new… I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment.
But that’s not all that He says:
Verse 8 …as for the δειλός [the cowardly], the faithless, the detestable… their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”
There is a fear that opposes faith. Not the natural fear that we all feel in a sudden moment of danger, neither the heaviness of soul we feel in difficult circumstances. But the fear that opposes faith, to put it simply, is cowardice. Anxious, intentional, faithless cowardice. This is the kind of anxious fear that simply refuses to take God at His word, that shrinks back because it doesn’t believe that God really knows and will accomplish what is good and right and best for His people and His purposes.
This is a fear that banishes any thought of a great and almighty God, and simply stews in the fear and shrinks back because it does not believe that God truly knows, or that God truly cares, or that God can truly do anything about it.
I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but you need to know that there are some who make their money teaching people that God truly does care, God truly is sorry for suffering, yet God can do nothing about it. This is the view of “process theology,” an “open” theism (sometimes called “open and relational” theism). This kind of idea that God just is sitting there wringing his hands like the women on the seashore in Kingsley’s poem. He’s so sorry that you're suffering, but he doesn't do anything about it because he can't. Literally, one of these theologians wrote a book called “God Can’t.”
What kind of a gospel is that? A cowardly one. Not matter how sophisticated and romantic such a theology may seem, it is at root founded on anxious fear that shrinks back because it doesn't take God at His word, and trust God to do, in His own perfect timing, what is right, just, perfect, and good.
The disciples should have known better. They were walking with Jesus, there in all along. In Verse 27 of chapter one, remember everyone's amazed because he can cast out the demons. Who has authority to do that? Chapter two, verse seven, why does this man speak like that, say the Pharisees? Who could forgive sins but God alone? He's a blasphemer, unless he's God. Chapter three, verse 11, whenever an unclean spirit saw him, it falls down and cries out, you are the son of God.
So what if Jesus was sleeping in the boat? Didn’t they realize who this was? Don’t they know that, as they no doubt would have memorized from childhood in Psalm 121, “He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.”
According to His humanity, Jesus must sleep.
According to His divinity, Jesus will never, ever sleep.
Peter, you think you’re perishing? Don’t you realize that you’re in same boat as the man who is right now holding the very cosmos together?
That is the plain mystery of the incarnation, that the God-man at once is both God and man, and that we can at once trust Him not only to sympathize with us in our weaknesses, but protect us through His omnipotent and sovereign power. To save us from the Lake of Galilee, and to save us from an eternal Lake of Fire.
And that’s where we find the solution to cowardly, anxious fear: We need a Greater Fear.
v. 41 | And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
We need someone who is greater and more terrifying than a sea storm. Someone who leaves us shaking with terror, awe, and joy all at the same time.
It's a funny thing being a Christian. At one and the same time, you are commanded to live in a state of constant fear and constant non-fear.
The Bible is filled, Old and New Testament, with commands to not fear. The Lord is near, to not fear. God will strengthen you.
He says, Though you pass through the waters, I will be with you in Isaiah. The flames will not consume you. Do not fear.
I the Lord, your God, will with you. I will strengthen you, he says. And yet we also find that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the beginning of knowledge.
Psalm 19 says the fear of the Lord is clean. It's righteous. It's good.
It's what every Christian should long for, to have a fear of the Lord. Because it's only when you have a fear of God, when you fear the Lord God, when you stand in awe of him, in reverence of him, amazed by him, obedient to him, yes, understanding that you could be consumed in an instant by him, but knowing that he is a kind and gracious God. It's only if you have that fear that the storms of the life will seem like simple little squalls.
I'm not promising that there's not going to be things in your life that try you deeply, that bring great sorrow upon our heart. Jesus himself experienced such sorrow. But when we know the fear of the Lord, in the end, nothing else can touch us.
No sandbar, no storm can overwhelm us. Because we know that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ. And so the disciples asked that question.
It's a question every one of us must have a ready answer for. Who then is this? Who then is this? Who is he? How would you answer that question? Do you consider the boat that Jesus was in? Consider the flood that was raging around them.
My mind this week went to another storm that God once sent. That the storm that nearly drowned Jonah, but the storm that nearly drowned the entire world. The Flood, in the days of Noah, spoken of in Genesis 7.
I say “nearly,” because there was one place where you could go and be safe, and that was inside the boat. That’s where God is, after all; with His people, and all the remnant of His creation.
It may smell a bit inside the ark, and the same is true in the church. It may be uncomfortable, even offensive at times.
But far better to be safe within than perishing without; far better to be inside with Jesus sleeping than outside there in the storm weathering it yourself.
The Lake of Galilee is but a tiny drop compared to terrors of the Lake of Fire, but both have one thing in common: The only way you’re making it out of this lake alive is with the man in the boat. And so, as the hymn writer Francis Havergal once put:
Francis Havergal | We are either inside or outside the Ark. There is no half-way in this. Outside is death, inside is life. Outside is certain, inevitable, utter destruction. Inside is certain and complete safety. Where are you at this moment?
“Where are you” is a good question, but you can only give a good answer if you can first answer the disciples’ question: “Who then is this?”
If He’s a teacher, a philosopher, and interesting figure among many figures in history, He’s of no use to you. But if He’s the one who can command storm and sea, the Almighty God who rules all things with the power of His word, then He is everything to you, if you have anything at all. He is your hope, your salvation, the shade from your every sunstroke, the shield from your every assault.
If you're willing to sit in the boat with Jesus, you will not be put to shame. Because Revelation 21 has a part that I didn't mention.
That vision that John had. New heavens, new earth, first heaven, first earth passes away. But there’s another, tiny little detail. John says, “And the sea was no more.”
Remember, John was there in the boat that night, on the Galilean Sea. How terrifying it all was The sea was for him and to many the best illustration of total, unrelenting, unstoppable destruction. Of total loss.
As an old man, John would be exiled to an island. There he is again, surrounded by sea. But in the vision he received, Jesus shows him, at the end of it all, there is no more sea. There is no squall. There is no storm. There is only Christ.
Psalm 107 gives us a good picture of the terror a storm may strike into the heart of a sailor. But the psalm goes on, showing us how God saves the imperiled sailors, and how they respond in grateful praise and worship:
26 They mounted up to heaven; they went down to the depths; their courage melted away in their [disastrous] plight; 27 they reeled and staggered like drunken men and were at their wits’ end. 28 Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. 29 He made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed. 30 Then they were glad that the waters were quiet, and he brought them to their desired haven. 31 Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man! 32 Let them extol him in the congregation of the people, and praise him in the assembly of the elders.
Amen.
