The Lord of All Creation
Pastor Marty Tuesday, October 22, 2019 at 12:29PM Mark 6:45-52. This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on Sunday, October 20, 2019.
In our story today, we have a miraculous event that makes it easy for some to scoff and discount it as a myth, at best. There are even some Christians who will say that this didn’t actually happen, but that the story is designed to teach what the writer believes is the truth about Jesus. To them, these mythical and miraculous stories are merely vehicles to take us to the truth. They are not the truth themselves.
All of this may seem good in some halls of academia (note: not all schools of higher learning teach this), but these men were not university professors with the desire to make up and use myths in order to teach truth. They were humble fishermen, hated tax collectors, and men who did not think in such ways. Their world had been turned upside down by an almost incredible man named Jesus.
Something else we should keep in mind is this. God does not present himself as an “ends justifies the means” being. His Holy Spirit was not encouraging these disciples to spin mythic yarns in order to get some people to believe the truth. This is important in our day and age because it is becoming an increasingly common method of “persuasion.” In truth, such methods are actually manipulation. No, God really is as great as He is presented in the Scriptures, even the miracles of Jesus.
In this life, we will face much difficulty. Some of it is simply life; some of it is the effects of our choices; and some of it is spiritual opposition. Regardless of what we are facing today, may God help us to trust His power over the natural and the supernatural creation that He has made by His power.
Jesus walks on the water
Last week we stopped with Jesus and his disciples picking up 12 baskets of leftovers from a miraculous provision of food for over 5,000 people. We are then told that evening was upon them and dark was approaching.
There are two other narratives of this event in the other Gospels in Matthew 14, and John 6. In John 6, we are told that Jesus recognized that the crowd wanted to take him by force in order to make him king. This leads to Jesus doing two things.
First, Jesus makes his disciples leave in a boat without him. Most likely, he doesn’t want them to get caught up in the fervor of the crowd, and he has other plans for why they will be on the water in a boat without him.
Second, Matthew records that Jesus sent the multitude away and went up on a nearby mountain alone in order to pray. It was not the time for Jesus to present himself as king, and he was destined to be rejected by the nation. Jesus was not looking to crowds as an opportunity for self-advancement. He was looking to His Father for the proper advancement that comes from Him alone. This is why it is a common theme throughout the Gospels that Jesus would get alone to pray. Believe me, he had even less time to pray than you do. Yet, he took time to commune with Father God late at night and early in the morning.
In light of the rest of this story, we must also recognize that Jesus knew that his disciples had not completely understood the magnitude of the miracle that had just happened with the feeding of the multitude. He is setting them up to see just who he really is in an unmistakable way.
It appears from the different accounts that the disciples took off in their boat across the Sea of Galilee as it grew dark, and began rowing across the large lake. It is around 6 to 7 miles across. At some point, the winds begin to pick up and they are not tail winds. Now, oaring is difficult enough without the resistance of the wind. However, this wind becomes very hard and the waves very large.
This account is very similar to the storm we saw earlier in Mark 4. There the storm was swamping the boat and the disciples feared that they would perish. However here, the storm seems different. It is impeding their progress and exhausting their efforts more than it is jeopardizing their lives. This is important because, when you think about it, we face exhaustion and giving up far more often than we face physical threats against our lives. When we become physically exhausted, it commonly leads to emotional and mental exhaustion. This can then lead to spiritual exhaustion wherein we simply give up and quit. It is a good thing to guard against spiritual exhaustion by taking care of ourselves physically, and making sure we are not physically exhausted. We can be our own worst boss, driving ourselves harder than is good for us, and harder than God desires for us. Yet, sometimes life does not give us a choice in this matter. We can be assailed by ill winds that just won’t quit, and by things that sap our strength in every way. The good news is that Jesus knows this.
Jesus wasn’t only praying on the mountain. Verse 48 tells us that he was also watching the progress of the disciples across the lake. Of course, he wanted to spend time with the Father and would not forgo that. However, he also allows them to oar, and oar…, and oar, for hours against the wind. Yet, he eventually does come to them in the last watch of the night. The last night would be anywhere from 3 AM to 6 AM. Clearly, these guys had been oaring for a long time and were not getting very far.
Do you ever wish that God would show up sooner than he does? Of course, we all do. Yet, the testimony of saints through the ages is that God’s timing was always for their good in retrospect. The problem with hindsight is that you don’t get it until you reach the other side of the story. Can we keep faith and trust in Christ in the midst of difficulty, or will we quit oaring the direction Jesus sent us and go back? These stories, the stories of other believers today, and our own past experiences, all teach us that God can be trusted to take care of us.
This time, Jesus is not going to dramatically tell the storm to stop. He is going to come to them in a way that will help them understand that the storm is not bigger than him. This may seem cliché, but God help us to hold on to the truth that He really is bigger than all of our problems. We don’t have to fear. He doesn’t always help us in the way that we want, or in the same way, but help He will and none too late!
The disciples are rowing as best they can, probably taking shifts, but they are making little progress if any. It is at this point that Jesus comes walking on the water looking as if he is going to pass on by them. This is an important point. Jesus is coming for them, yet they need to recognize his presence and call out to him. We can get so caught up in our difficulties, with our head down towards the ground, and not see him in our situation, and not cry out to him.
The comedy of this situation should not escape us as these grown men think they are seeing a ghost, and give a cry of fear. This is not anything they would expect to see. Someone is walking on the water, and, as if that wasn’t enough, it is in the middle of a storm. Another boat would have been surprising to see, but normal. However, this scared them.
When we come face to face with the mighty power and ability of God, it can be a hair-raising experience. He is more powerful than we can imagine, and we definitely do not want to be His enemy. Yet, even His children can be caught by surprise and have a sense of fear at how great His power really is. It is not God’s intention to cause us to fear, but it will happen nonetheless. Thus, Jesus states, “Be of good cheer! It is I; do not be afraid.” Ah yes, the classic statement of angels, and now Jesus, to those freaked out by their presence. “It is I” is the promise Christ makes to all who trust him. “I will never leave you nor forsake you…I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” These are the words he gives to us. God help us to hold on to them in our storms, and even when we are exhausted.
We should note that the episode of Peter, sort of walking on the sea, happens at this point, but only Matthew 14 records this event, and so we will not go into it now.
Essentially, the disciples go from fear that Jesus is a ghost (some kind of shade from the Hebrew equivalent of Davey Jones’ Locker) to amazement at what they had just witnessed. The waves, the wind, and the water that impeded them so greatly were no such impediment to Jesus. We can almost hear those words again, “What manner of man is this?” Mark uses three different ways of telling us their minds were blown: they were “greatly amazed,” “beyond measure,” and “marveled.” That is our God, and we must never forget it. When He needs to do so, He can blow our minds with His power and ability.
When Jesus gets into the boat, the winds cease. There was no command of Jesus. It just simply calms down. There is a good historical reason to believe that Peter was the main source for Mark in these stories. So, it is interesting that Mark’s account is the one that points out that their inability to grasp that Jesus was more than a man was due to their hearts being hard. After they saw Jesus speak to the storm, cast out the legion of demons, feed the multitude with a paltry amount of food, surely then they should have understood the power of Christ and what it says about him.
We are used to seeing the phrase “hard hearts” with unbelievers like Pharaoh, but not with believers. They were believers in Jesus, but they were also disciples, which implies that they had much to learn (that we have much to learn). Discipleship is not easy, and is filled with moments that challenge our faith to step up to the next level. May God help us to understand that no force of nature is greater than He is.
There is a final point to be made with this story. Jesus literally walked on water and that is a tribute to His power as the Son of God. Yet, there is some purposeful symbolism here that also gives tribute to His power over supernatural forces as well.
Revelation 17:15 clues us in to the fact that the waters of the sea are sometimes used as symbols of the peoples of the earth. The waves picture the forces from within humanity and beyond it that cause a turbulent movement of societies in every which way. Ill winds blowing upon the waters is often a picture of supernatural forces, whether good or evil, interacting and affecting the nations of the earth. Also, there is a theme of the Bible that is explicitly seen in Isaiah 27:1, where the devil is pictured as an aquatic reptile, or a water dragon. He is like a sea monster, slithering throughout the peoples of the earth, mastering the chaotic seas, and causing havoc wherever he wishes.
These are the kind of things that scare us and make us feel puny, but Jesus is the Lord of all creation, both its natural aspects and its supernatural ones. He will slay the fleeing serpent and we need not fear even when all the forces of hell are marshalled against us. How? We can know that Christ is always watching over us, and praying for us. He will come to us at just the right time, and we will grow to know His power and grace even more.