Calming the Storm B

The supernatural power of Jesus is such that with a word, millions of horsepower of windforce is halted.

Millions of gallons of water are stopped and made placid. And what is Mark telling us by this? That we're looking at the Creator here.

Today, television producers roll out new shows like that every so often. Well, the truth is, programs like those typically assume that the Bible can't really be trusted. The so-called experts who are interviewed make that point clear. Thankfully, you don't have to rely on the opinions of skeptics to learn about Jesus. Scripture reveals everything you need for an accurate, personal, life-changing knowledge of Christ.

John MacArthur takes you to God's Word as he continues his study titled, Jesus Over All. But before the lesson, John, talk for a minute about what it takes for grace to you to reach men and women and families with biblical truth. The staff here at our headquarters and the people at this radio station are essential, of course. But our listeners may not fully realize how important their role is. Well, their role is absolutely vital.

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But first, here's John to continue his study, Jesus Over All. Well the calm before the storm leads to the calm during the storm because the storm breaks out, according to verse 37, and there arose a fierce gale of wind and the waves were breaking over the boat so much that the boat was already filling up, a fierce gale of wind. Fierce gale is the term for a hurricane. We're talking about...we're talking about a huge wind. We could be talking about a 70 mile an hour wind. The word for wind is just that. What kind of wind was it?

A fierce gale kind of wind, a wind that could be classified as a hurricane, very descriptive language, very strong language. And Luke says, it descended on the lake, katabaino, it came down on the lake. It just came racing down the slopes.

The language is very, very strong. The best calculations would put this likely in the winter of the year 29 A.D. This would be the time of the worst winds, cold air furiously funneling down the ravines and the slopes, gaining speed as it descended, colliding with the warm air in the low basin of the lake, creating violent turbulence to begin to whip and swirl the water, turning it into foam and very, very high waves. And because the lake is so small, 13 by 8, once those waves hit the shore, they just explode back and collide again and again and again and again, wreaking havoc. They all were familiar with storms on the lake. They lived around the lake and they were in one now that was over the top. Here was a God-ordained storm.

We could assume that these were specially chosen winds to accomplish this miracle, to put our Lord in the position to demonstrate that He is, in fact, the one who controls His creation. This is to be a lesson. What's it supposed to teach? Look at verse 40.

Why are you afraid? How is it you have no faith? This is a faith lesson. This is a faith lesson. The point here is that our Lord wants to teach His disciples that He can be trusted in the most threatening of circumstances.

Now Matthew in his account in Matthew 8, this account repeats in Matthew 8 and Luke 8, as well as here in Mark 4. In Matthew 8, 24, what happens is described as seismos megas, seismos we understand, a seismic event of mega proportions. That's really basically the word for earthquake, seismos. So this is like...this is of massive proportions, like a violent shaking of the earth, this violent shaking of the water generated by hurricane force winds. And it's so severe, verse 37 says, that the waves were breaking over the boat so much that the boat was already filling up. Luke 8, 23 puts it this way, they began to be swamped and to be in danger. They can't get the water thrown out, bailed as fast as it's pouring in. Matthew 8, 16 says it's now night, so they're in the dark just to add to the terror. Matthew says the boat was covered with the waves. They're just literally swamping this little boat.

They're breaking so fast that they can't deal with them. Matthew says that in spite of the storm, Jesus remains asleep. Now does that give you some idea of His true humanness? He sleeps through the storm. That's how weary He was.

Verse 38, Jesus Himself was in the stern asleep on the cushion. You ever been that tired? Man, that is really tired. I can think back to a few times in my life. I can think back to one trip I took to Russia and they had me speaking, I don't know, eight hours a day for two weeks, I think. And it was exhausting and I remember getting on a plane in Moscow and having someone wake me up to get off the thing when it landed in New York and not remembering anything between.

And I remember then getting on the next plane in New York and not waking up till the wheels hit in L.A. I think some of us have experienced that in ways that we would identify as a very human response to being exhausted, worn out. And that's exactly what our Lord experienced. Again we see the truth of His humanity, don't we?

He's a real man, a real human being. He understands weariness and He's so tired that He sleeps with water smashing over the boat, sound asleep, peacefully asleep. I call that the calm during the storm, fatigued, totally calm, in the stern with His head on the pillow. He is the calm one in the midst of the storm, like the eye of the hurricane. Well nobody else was calm. Verse 38 says, "'They woke Him aware of the danger and said to Him, Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?'"

How can you just sleep when we're going through this? Don't you care that we're perishing the Word to be destroyed? They understood this was inevitable death. They would not survive this.

There would be on that boat, perhaps His Apostles were together on that boat, perhaps there were men and women in the little flotilla and they were all in the same situation. They were very clear as to the severity of the danger. They knew the situation they were in. They panicked.

Panic was a normal human response to that kind of circumstance. They knew Jesus had power over demons. They knew He had power over disease.

They knew that He had power over the natural world as well as the supernatural world. Could He save them in this circumstance? Could He deliver them from a storm? I don't think it entered their mind that He could stop the storm.

But it probably entered their mind that if they were going to be spared death, He was going to have to be the one that would come through to make some kind of miraculous exit possible. They had nowhere else to turn. It's pandemonium, by the way. It's panic. They're yelling over the loud wind and the crashing water.

Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing? Luke says they said, Master, Master. Matthew says, and that's a word, epistata, which means commander. Then Matthew says, Lord. So He's master in one thing, Lord in another, and teacher in another. Somebody says, well that's scriptural inconsistency.

No, it's not. Look, this was not a...this was not a one-time statement. This is panic and pandemonium. They used all the words they could come up with. They were firing at Him from every angle.

Teacher, Master, Lord. This is not an organized speech. This is the cries of terrified people. And Matthew 8 26 says they were terrified. Of course they were going to die.

That was inevitable if something didn't happen. It's a dark day, you know, when the sailors call on the carpenter to get them out of the storm. Nazareth is a long way from the sea.

Jesus wasn't raised on the sea. So they're not looking for a carpenter's solution to a sailor's dilemma. They're looking for a divine solution. By now they know He has connections with God and they know that they're going to have to have some divine intervention.

That's their only hope. They know that. Maybe the one who has divine power over illness, the one who has divine power over demons, maybe God will dispense to him something that will get them out of this. And, you know, they were, after all, raised on the Old Testament, very familiar with the Psalms. So they would have known things like this, Psalm 65 verses 5 to 7, O God of our salvation, You who are the trust of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest sea, who establishes the mountains by His strength, being girded with might, who stills the roaring of the seas, the roaring of the waves. The psalmist had said God has power to still the roaring sea and the roaring waves. Or they might have remembered Psalm 89, 9, You rule the swelling of the sea.

When its waves rise, You still them. Or perhaps they remembered that very familiar and beloved 107th Psalm, that in verse 23 says this, those who go down to the sea in ships who do business on great waters, they've seen the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep. For He spoke and raised up a stormy wind which lifted up the waves of the sea. They rose up to the heavens. They went down to the depths. Their soul melted away in their misery. They reeled and staggered like a drunken man and were at their wits and then they cried to the Lord in their trouble and He brought them out of their distress as He caused the storm to be still so that the waves of the sea were hushed. Maybe they remembered Psalm 107, that God is the one who has the power to still the storm and hush the waves. We don't know what they were thinking about, but they knew that there was no human solution. They knew that Jesus had access to God. They knew that He had access to divine power. They had never seen anything like this.

They had never seen Him act in any situation like this. Of all the miracles that He had done, none of them was to deliver them from danger. There had not yet been any miracle in which Jesus had delivered His own from danger and death.

But where else are they going to turn? So they go to the one that they know has connections with God and some of them even knew that He was God and so they apply their simple, humble, weak little faith, as it's called also, to this plea which then leads to the calm after the storm. Verse 39, and He got up, got up off His bench in the stern, up off the pillow that was under His head and rebuked the wind. He rebuked the wind and said to the sea, "'Hush, be still.'"

Wow! They broke in on Jesus' sleep, typical of people in distress, in desperation. Maybe they were thinking of Psalm 10, 1, why do you stand afar off, O Lord, why do you hide yourself in the midst of trouble? Or Psalm 44, arouse yourself, why do you sleep, O Lord, why do you hide your face? And the Lord heard their desperate cries and He got up and He rebuked the wind and then He said to the sea, "'Hush, be still.'"

No theatrics, no effort. He spoke to the wind and the wind stopped instantaneously. He spoke to the water and the water stopped instantaneously. The water and the wind recognized the voice of their Creator just as He would tell death to release Lazarus. He tells the wind and the waves to obey His will.

Both stopped and Mark says it became perfectly come. Perfectly is really probably not an accurate translation, although I understand what the translators meant. It's megalae, mega, something mega is great. Megalae is the greatest calm. The whole lake was as placid as a pond. The wind stopped immediately and the waves flattened out.

That wouldn't happen. If the wind stopped, the waves would still go, hit the shore, bounce back, collide, that would go on for quite a long time after the winds had stopped. But He stopped the winds and at the same time stopped the water simply by speaking. These men had seen the winds come up and they had seen the water whipped up and they had seen the winds die down and the water continue to boil.

But here the wind and the water stops and there is a perfect supreme calm. The supernatural power of Jesus is such that with a word, millions of horsepower of wind force is halted, millions of gallons of water are stopped and made placid. And what is Mark telling us by this? That we're looking at the Creator here. This is the Son of God.

He is the Son of God proven by His birth, proven by His victory over Satan, proven by His teaching, proven by His miracle power and proven by His tremendous control of creation. Yes He can bring the new creation. Yes He can restore the earth to Eden-like characteristics.

Yes He can make the desert blossom like a rose. Yes He can open a river in Jerusalem that flows out into the desert, turns it into a garden. Yes He can change nature so the lion lies down with the lamb and the child can play in a snake pit. Yes He has the power over His creation to change lifespan so that in the Kingdom somebody who dies at a hundred dies like an infant.

Yes He has that power. He has complete power over nature and He controls it. He created it, He sustains it and He'll bring it to its recreation in the Millennial Kingdom in the future and He will one day eliminate it in an uncreation where it will melt with a fervent heat.

It will have an atomic implosion and be replaced by a new heaven and a new earth. I just wish the people in our world who think they can control the future of the planet understood what the Bible says. They're not in charge of the planet, none of them are and they aren't collectively and they're not going to make this planet last one split second longer than the Creator has designed for it to last.

They have nothing to do with it. All of that is nonsense, absolute nonsense. First of all, it's nonsense scientifically. But even more so, it's nonsense theologically.

The Creator is the sustainer and the consummator of His creation. This miraculous demonstration of His power would seem to be enough to convince me who I'm dealing with and it was a lesson in faith for them. So He said to them, why are you afraid? How is it that you have no faith?

I'm looking at your panic and your fear. How is it that you have no faith? Or in the words of Matthew, why are you afraid, you men of little faith? And again He stops the storm and points out the weakness of their faith. He didn't have enough faith to believe that I could care for you. You didn't need to be in a panic.

You didn't need to be terrified. So there they sit in the placid silence and the calm after the storm and Jesus says, why such fear? Why such lack of faith?

Haven't I proven that you can trust Me already? Well their faith must have received a big boost that day...must have. But their reaction really doesn't demonstrate that. We'd like to have them say, Lord, we'll never fear again as long as You're around. Hey, we're not going to worry about anything. We've seen enough.

We're convinced. But that's not their reaction. Their reaction is predictable. Verse 41, it's the last point. This is the storm after the calm. They became very much afraid. Please notice, verse 40, they were afraid during the storm, now they're very much afraid.

Why? Well what's worse than having a storm outside your boat is having God in your boat. That's enough to panic you. They knew what they were dealing with. The living God was in their boat, the Creator, the controller of His creation.

Terror set in, panic set in. You remember on another occasion on the sea when Peter couldn't catch any fish, Luke 5, and Jesus said, try this side of the boat. Peter threw his net over there and they had so many fish they couldn't bring them in. And what was Peter's response? Lord, depart from me for I am a sinful man.

What kind of a reaction is that? That's the reaction of somebody who knows that the Creator controls all of the living animals, all the fish in the sea and they go where He tells them to go. That's frightening because if you see God, then God sees you. You see His glory, He sees your sin. That's a very normal response through Scripture. Abraham, Genesis 18, 27 had the same reaction, a sort of immediate panic when he had an encounter with God and realized the kind of man he was. Manoah, the father of Samson, came home and said to his wife, we're going to die, write the will, we're done. And she said, Well why? I saw the Lord and if I saw Him, He saw me.

And if He saw me, we're dead. Job had the same experience. Isaiah, Isaiah 6, 5 pronounced a curse upon himself, I'm a man of unclean lips. He cursed himself. Ezekiel had the same experience in the vision of chapter 1. Daniel had the same experience in chapter 10. John the Apostle in Revelation 1 when he saw the first vision of Christ says he fell over like a dead person. It's a terrifying thing to realize that you are in the presence of God...the presence of God. They...there was no other explanation.

They knew this was supernatural and they said to one another, Who then is this that even the wind and the sea obey Him? That's a rhetorical question. It doesn't have to have an answer.

Mark doesn't even give an answer. Where is this person from? Not from around here. This is an alien person.

This is a foreign person from another place with that kind of power. And, of course, the implication is that they were talking about one who had come from heaven. Matthew 14 is another occasion of Jesus on the water and this time He walked on the water, remember that? And when He got in the boat, it says, after walking on the water, He says, Oh you of little faith, same thing, why do you doubt?

Here we go again. The wind stopped and those who were in the boat worshiped Him and said, You are certainly the Son of God. The second time that they saw an incident on the water in which He controlled the water, walked on the water, stopped the storm, they answered their rhetorical question. Here they say, He's not from here. Next time they say, He's the Son of God. I think that was what was in their minds here as well. There's no reason for Mark to answer that rhetorical question.

There's only one possibility. Only God controls the elements. He does it at His own discretion and in this case for the protection of His own disciples and Apostles. They needed to know that the Lord not only was God, but that the Lord was their protector. So the Lord is communicating two things here. He's communicating His deity in the expression of power and He's communicating His sympathy, His compassion and His care for His own in protecting them from premature death.

The Lord protects and cares for and preserves His own as He did here. This is a story that has no explanation apart from the deity of Jesus Christ. There is no explanation humanly for this. Even if you could suggest that the wind stopped on their own, there's no explanation for the water flattening out. And if they thought it was coincidental, they would never have responded in terror because they knew divine power was present, nor would have they suggested that this was a divine person, not someone from around their neighborhood. And they also said, the wind and the sea obey Him, which means that the stopping of the wind and the stopping of the water was directly connected to His words.

Well it was an interesting trip to get to the other side and it was equally interesting when they arrived, as we will see next time. We're listening to Grace To You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, as he continues his current study titled, Jesus Over All. A friend, as John mentioned before the lesson, we're able to broadcast lessons like the one you heard today because of friends like you who give and tell others about us and who pray for our ministry. If you're benefiting from Grace To You and you want to help others benefit, express your support today.

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