We don't have a category for somebody who can speak to the waves, and they listen to him. This one is in a class by himself.
This one is so alien, so other, that there is no compartment for us to include him. As soon as he manifests His transcendent majesty, they are reduced to terror. What does Jesus' calming of the sea teach us about the holiness of God, the otherness, the majesty of God? Stay tuned for this Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. Coming out of a season reflecting on the final week before the death and resurrection of Jesus, we're taking a break to go back to earlier in His ministry for a sermon series from Mark's Gospel that shows the power of Jesus on full display. We'll only spend four weeks in Mark's Gospel, so if you want to dig deeper, be sure to request the hardcover volume of R.C.
Sproul's commentary on Mark by giving a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org before midnight tonight. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on the calming of the sea. If you've ever been to Israel and had the opportunity to take a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee, I'm sure you experience the warnings of those who took you on such a voyage that even with the modern equipment that sailors use today to navigate the Sea of Galilee, that there is always a profound and imminent danger of sudden storms that arise without warning. There are reasons for that climatically and geographically, and we realize that the topography of that region in the Sea of Galilee has not changed very much in the last two thousand years. Mountains that were present then remain present now, and the sea level of the Sea of Galilee is basically the same today as it was in Jesus' day.
And the structure of the ground there creates opportunities for wind tunnels, winds that come either from the east off the desert or winds that come from the west off the Mediterranean Sea. We notice that in this passage the event takes place in the evening, and we know that in ancient times though the Sea of Galilee was so rich for the fishing industry, most of the fishing was done at night to avoid the worst winds that occurred usually during the day. And so the storm, this perfect storm that Mark describes to us in this text, takes place at night, which was somewhat unusual and gives us some insight into the exceedingly great fear that these seasoned veteran fishermen experienced on that occasion. One other detail before we look at the text itself, and that is this, that in recent years an interesting discovery was made by archeologists along the shores of the Sea of Galilee when in one of their digs they found a fishing boat intact. And their dating indicated that the ship dated back to the end of the first century B.C., or right around the beginning of the first century A.D., so that it comes right from the time of the narrative that we've just heard. And the boat was twenty-seven feet long, and they were normally four feet high. So they weren't little rowboats, but they weren't, you know, exactly the Titanic either. They were propelled by four sets of oars and sails when it was possible to use them. But always in the back of these boats there was a seat or a bench for the coxswain, and it had a comfortable pillow there for him to sit. Now that's enough of the background.
Let's go to the text itself. Jesus said to them in the evening, let's go over to the other side. And so they left the multitude, and they took Him along in the boat as He was. And there were other boats, little boats that were also with them. And then suddenly a great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat so that it was already filling. But He, that is Jesus, was in the stern, and for you landlubbers, that's the back of the boat. Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a pillow.
Sound asleep, sound asleep, oblivious to the peril that is immediate, utterly unconcerned for His own or anyone else's safety. And we see Mark's description here that the disciples are both afraid and they're angry, and they not only awaken Jesus, but they rebuke Him. That's the first rebuke that takes place in this text. They said to Him, teacher, don't you care that we are perishing?
Let me just pause here for a second. How like the creature to rebuke the Creator. How like the Servant to sass the Master. And there they are rebuking their Lord. But He tends to ignore them except to ask them about the reasons for their fear. But first He rose up, and He gives a rebuke. But at first He doesn't rebuke them. Instead He rebukes the wind, and He says to the sea, peace, be still.
And you know what happened. As soon as the Lord of glory who created heaven and earth, who was Master over nature, who could curse a fig tree and make it wither on the spot, gives His command just as the Father had commanded the light to come on in creation, now the Son says to the elements, peace, be still. And as soon as the command comes out of the lips of Christ, the sea is like glass, and there's not the slightest zephyr to be felt in the air. Everything is calm except the disciples. They remain agitated, which I find quite fascinating. Jesus then rebuked His disciples, saying, Why are you so fearful?
Don't you have any faith? And what follows? Does Mark tell us, well then they finally calmed down?
No. It's said that they feared exceedingly and said to one another, Who can this be that even the wind and the sea obey Him? Now I want us to notice that in this passage three times Mark uses the descriptive term great, or enormous. The Latin translation uses the word magna. The Greek here speaks of mega. You know what a megaton bomb is like.
You understand what the force of this prefix is. And the three times that we read of it in the text is, first of all, to describe the tempest that comes up so suddenly on the sea. It's not just a storm. It's not just a tempest. It's a mega tempest according to the text. It is a great storm, an enormous storm, surpassing the usual types of maelstroms that will arise on the open water. This is a horrific tempest that threatens the lives of the disciples. We read, The great windstorm arose, and the waves beat, not against the boat simply, but into the boat.
That four-foot deep craft is about to capsize as the waves are beating into the boat and filling the boat with water. It's at that point that the sailors go to their leader, wake him up, and say, Do something, or we perish. Then when Jesus utters His command and rebukes the sea, saying, Peace, be still. Then the text says, a great calm, a mega calm, a magna calm comes upon the waters. From great distress, from great violence comes great and instant peace.
But the one great descriptive term that I'm most interested in in this passage is the third use of that term, mega, in the text. And that is when Mark uses the term magna in the Latin or mega in the Greek to describe the fear of the disciples. Now what I also want us to see is this, the progress of that fear. When the storm comes up, they're phobic. They're afraid. They're intimidated. But when the storm is calmed, their fear is intensified. Isn't that remarkable? The great fear doesn't come until after the threatening storm has been removed.
We dare not miss the significance of this in the lives of the disciples in their response to the person of Christ. Recently I saw in the paper a list of the top ten phobias that assault people's comfort zones, particularly in the United States of America. People are afraid of the marketplace, agoraphobia. They're afraid of water, aquaphobia. They're afraid of small cramped spaces.
We know that. But in the top ten phobias in our country is a phobia called xenophobia, spelled with an X, X-E-N-O, xenophobia. And xenophobia is the fear of strangers.
Their difference haunts us because we're not sure how to respond. And so we always have this fear of the stranger. Remember Mark Twain's little short story on the mysterious stranger and how people did not know how to respond to this stranger from out of town who came into their community.
They were frightened. I was teaching seminary in Philadelphia many years ago. I had a senior course that I was teaching in the history of atheism, and I required my students to read primary sources. I said, I don't want to just read about atheism. I want you to read the atheists. And so I made them read Kaufman. I made them read Nietzsche. I made them read Sartre and Camus.
And I made them read Marx and Feuerbach and Freud's Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents. And as they would read these works of the most brilliant atheists of the last couple of hundred years, then we would have discussions about their arguments against the existence of God. And there was a common thread that ran through particularly nineteenth-century atheists because after the Enlightenment, the thinkers of the Enlightenment said, well, we no longer now have to look to the idea of God to account for the beginning of the universe or the origin of human beings. Now we know that the universe has come to pass through spontaneous generation.
And so the question that was left for the followers of the Enlightenment was this. Since there is no God, how is it that everywhere we go on this planet we find people who are practicing religion? Mankind seems to be incurably homo religiosus. Where does that all come from since it doesn't come from God? Why so much religion?
And the same answer is given over and over and over again in the atheistic philosophers, namely that religion is invented as a crutch. It's a psychological bromide to help us cope with the scary things that surround us. And Freud had an interesting theory about this. He said, as human beings, we're frail. We're always in imminent danger of having our lives destroyed here today, gone tomorrow, and we look at those things around us in nature that can terminate our existence, and we see, for example, that we can succumb to fatal illnesses. We can be killed on the battlefield in war. We can be murdered by a robber. We can be killed in a hurricane, an earthquake, or a fire, or some other natural disaster. And so Freud said, basically, nature is hostile to us and is a threat to our survival. Nowhere is that more eloquently portrayed than in the text that we've read this morning. It was the force of nature, the great wind, the great turbulence, the great turbulence in the sea, the beating of the waves against this boat that threatened the very lives of these human beings.
Freud made this observation. We have learned how to cope to some degree with hostile people. If you are angry at me and are expressing that anger to me, and I want to get rid of that anger, I can do a few things. I can beg you for mercy. I can apologize to you, and maybe that'll turn away your anger. Or I can say, you don't want to be mad at me.
I'm president of your fan club, and let me show you here's a gift, and I offer you a gift in hoping to assuage your anger and turn it aside. And he said, then religion rises up when we use the techniques that we find will work sometimes to remove the threat of humans against us. We will use the same tactics with non-human entities. We will personalize the impersonal forces of nature, because how do you negotiate with Katrina?
You can pray Katrina, go down the coast, hit someplace else, don't hit us, but she doesn't hear. So we personalize the storm. We personalize the earthquake.
And then the next step is we sacralize it. We begin to invent personal gods who live in the hurricane, who live in the earthquake, who live in the sea, so that you have sea gods and wind gods and all the rest, so that now we can talk to them, pray to them, offer sacrifices to them. And Freud said that's how religion started. And he got it really simplified when you boiled it all down to one god over all of the forces of nature so that if you're afraid of the hurricane, you can pray to the god who makes the hurricane.
Not so fast, Sigmund. Although I think it's true in the history of religion that people do tend to sacralize non-sacred objects and to personalize objects that have no personality. Nevertheless, in all of his creativity, the one thing human beings don't do when they invent gods to protect themselves is to invent a god who is more terrifying than the force we're trying to tame.
And that's the point that Freud overlooks because what human beings don't want is a personal is a personal God who's holy. Nothing threatens sinful humanity more than the presence of the holy. You see, it's the same reaction that takes place this night on the sea. When the disciples see that storm instantly calmed by the command of Jesus, we see the third use of mega. Now they're not just afraid. Their fear is a mega fear. It's exceedingly great, and they cry out, what kind of man is this?
But even the winds and the seas obey Him. What kind of person? They met all kinds of people, and you do it every single time you walk down the street in a city and you see hordes of people coming your way that you've never met in your life, and you pigeonhole every person that you see instantly. You may not consciously think about it, but you're watching all the time. Is that person smiling? That person is safe. Is this other person's eyes furious? You give them a little extra space because you know what unbridled anger can be like in human beings, and so you give room for people like that.
You separate and sort every person you meet into a category—safe, dangerous, nice, cantankerous, whatever. But we don't have a category for somebody who can speak to the waves, and they listen to Him. This one is sui generis. This one is in a class by Himself.
This one is so alien, so other, that there is no compartment for us to include Him. In a word, beloved, what the disciples experienced on the Sea of Galilee that night was the holiness of Christ. Oh, they liked His power when they were in trouble. Wake up, Jesus.
Help us. Show us Your power. Well, when He showed them the power He had.
So this is not common power. This is holy power. This man is different from any other person on the face of the earth. And when they were in the presence of the Holy One of Israel, they were consumed by fear. That's what Professor Freud never understood.
And the thing that Professor Freud was more afraid of than anything else in the world was the holiness of God. That's why people run from God. That's why people run from Christ. As soon as He manifests His transcendent majesty, they're reduced to terror. That's why, beloved, if Christ now in His majesty would come in this church this morning, nobody would go up to Him and shake His hand and say, hey pal, come on in.
No, no, no, no. You would be on your faces. Just as John is on his face when Christ appears on the Isle of Patmos, when the resurrected Christ and His glory and the manifestation of His holiness appears, all creatures hit the dirt because He's other. He's holy. So that not only do people tremble at His voice, but sees that have no ears listen to His command, and wins that have no knowledge, no enough to stop blowing when He says, be still. That's our Savior. And what a Savior He is. Throughout His ministry, R.C. Sproul often spoke about the eclipse of God in the church, pulpits failing to portray God as He has revealed to us in Scripture. But we must proclaim the God of the Bible, the one who is thrice holy, as we read in Isaiah chapter 6. This is the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham. Dr. Sproul was a gifted communicator, and he preached with passion.
His sermons from the Gospel of Mark formed the foundation of his expositional commentary. And to thank you for your support of the truth-proclaiming outreach of Renewing Your Mind, we'll send you a hardcover copy of it. Simply give your gift at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes. If you prefer the e-book edition instead of hardcover, or you live outside of the U.S. or Canada, you can request it at renewingyourmind.org slash global. Thank you for making Renewing Your Mind possible, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Jesus has power over creation, as we saw today, and He has power over the demonic realm. And that's what we'll see next Sunday, here on Renewing Your Mind.
