After a full day of preaching and ministering to lost souls, Jesus and his disciples boarded a boat at Capernaum to make a night crossing of the Sea of Tiberias. In the midst of the passage, a tempest arose, with peels of thunder and bolts of lightning. Threatening a watery grave, the turbulent wind pushed the sea into the small vessel. Panic stricken, the disciples searched the boat for Jesus. They found him asleep, weary from his work, gathering strength for the day ahead, unmindful of the howling wind and perilous surge. The disciples awakened him with shouts, pleading for him to act, to save them. Hearing their yells above the din and seeing the horror-stricken faces, he stood up, rebuked the wind and waves, saying, “Peace, be still.” Calm. Silence. The sudden and gentle lapping of the tide against the boat. The sheer terror on their faces gave way to utter bewilderment. Who is this? He looked at them and asked: “Why are you so fearful, O you of little faith?”
The disciples feared the storm outside the boat. They should have feared the One with them in the boat. In their time with Jesus, they had seen miracles and heard marvelous words. At some level, a saving level, they believed Jesus to be the promised Messiah. Still, however, they did not really know him, in his glory and power. They did not realize that he who made the seas could calm them with a word. He sat above the floods, above the chaos of life, entering into it, yes, for our sakes, yet never in danger of being capsized by it. The wind and the seas obey him. The forces of nature obey him. He is Lord, not simply in an esoteric, abstract sense of a religious figure to whom we must give allegiance as our ancient, venerated Master or as unto a power beyond our understanding. He is Lord personally, absolutely, and historically. Everything obeys him, even things far beyond the control or understanding of men. Whatever is happening around us, however horrible those events may be, he sits as King above the flood, accomplishing his holy and wise purposes, using the chaos of life to reveal the utter calm and repose before his throne, the peace that is ours in him.
The child of God has only one legitimate fear. The Bible says that the Lord is our fear, our dread. Interestingly, the commands to “fear God” and “fear the Lord” outnumber those to love him. This fear is not the superstitious anxiety of the heathen, whether backward tribesmen or ancient Greek bards. We are not to fear God because he might suddenly send a lightning bolt upon us if we do evil or arouse the forces of nature against us if we displease him in some way. No, we fear him because we stand in holy awe of him, of his majesty and greatness, of his holiness and penetrating gaze, of his power and strength, of his love and grace. We fear him because he is not capricious, but just, not arbitrary, but ever consistent with himself. We fear him because our hearts are drawn by his Spirit to love him for who he is. It is a curious combination, admittedly, that the Lord and God whom we love so ardently, we also fear so deeply. True love for him, though, is built upon a heartfelt sense of awe and wonder. Unless we know something of his greatness, in fact, we cannot truly love him and will never give ourselves completely to him.
If we fear God, we need fear nothing else. Take, for example, the Proverb: “Do not be afraid of sudden terror, neither of the desolation of the wicked when it comes. For the Lord will be your confidence and keep your foot from being taken” (3:25-26). Believers often find themselves living through very turbulent times and feel their pinch personally. Through them, the Lord shows us that all our safe ships are not quite so safe after all. The Lord confronts us with storm, with peril. And when the storm is more widespread, as when unbelieving men and nations are judged for their rebellion through events that only a blind man would not attribute to the hand of God, we are caught up in them. Finding ourselves surrounded by fearful men proclaiming the end of the world, we feel like the waves of life threaten our destruction. We run around like half-crazed men, unhinged by fear, sensing disaster but feeling powerless to do anything about it. One says, “Do this.” Another says, “You must do this to survive the coming storm.” All the while, the Lord of glory is with us. Even if he seems to be sleeping, a word from him is sufficient. A question from him exposes our idolatry, that we fear the wrong things: loss of health, prosperity, position, or even life.
We should expect guilty men to proclaim the end of the world whenever their world begins to collapse. Whatever unbelieving man says about himself, God says that he is “like the waves of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind.” He may be quite sophisticated, well-educated, and incredibly wealthy. Nevertheless, he has no rest. He is cut off from his God, alienated in his mind through wicked works. Since the Lord made us for himself, there can be no inner peace, no lasting security for the man that seeks life apart from God. His guilt is constant. He may not be able to define his haunting fear; he may even deny its existence. Yet, man is who God says he is, not who man says he is. A sense of alienation from God is always joined by an “end of the world” mentality, a paralyzing spiral of unbelief that we see everywhere operative in the West, from climate to currency. The decisions made to avoid the feared peril actually intensify it, for all these efforts are against God, man’s foolish attempt to protect himself from the God of the universe. Thus, when his world of institutions, education, manipulation, and control begins to collapse, when his hubris is confronted by the reality of God’s providence and justice, of course it will seem to him that the whole world is ending with him. He wants others to be fearful, for this justifies his own fears. It also gives him the opportunity to control others through fear, for fear is the greatest control mechanism Satan ever invented.
The desolation of the wicked will come. His entire worldview, to borrow from a popular phrase, is a huge ponzi scheme to escape the claims of the living God, enslave others while amassing personal wealth, and insulate himself from the general havoc his various worldviews always create. Solomon assumes, as all the Bible does, that the desolation of the wicked will come. It does not always come when we think it will, for our Father is merciful and longsuffering. He gives men time to repent. He gives his church time to proclaim the gospel to his elect in the four corners of the land. For the sake of his Church, for whose sake he has given his Son dominion over all things, he might even forestall the judgment, giving us time to repent, see his hand working, and prepare ourselves to take securer refuge in him. But it will come. Over six thousand years of world history is strewn with the rotting corpses and decaying civilizations that sought to build their own towers of Babel, large and small, arrogant empire and separatist enclave, all gone.
We are not to fear this desolation. We are to expect it and the furious storms it creates. Remember, these are the Lord’s storms, outbreaks of his displeasure against the world of ungodly men, historical reminders that there is another King, anticipations of the final judgment. God’s desolating work against the city of man is never completed in this life, but it can be quite devastating. Since we live in God’s world, even as his precious sheep, we will see and feel the tremors of his wrath. They are to awaken us from our stupor and stir us up to seek the Lord. Like the disciples in the boat, we must run to Jesus when the storms of life mount, when the wicked, like the waves of the sea, stir up mire and dirt, the filth of their own rebellion, crash upon the immovable crags of God’s providence and purposes.
Whenever these storms arise, we immediately begin rowing harder in the boat, doing all within our limited means and ability to preserve ourselves. Since fearing God means recognizing these storms as his work, we should make adequate preparation. Whatever providential manifestation of God’s displeasure a particular age of man experiences, those with eyes to see should wake up, take notice, and adjust their lives accordingly. If God is judging materialism, we should repent of our covetousness. If he is judging immorality, we must seek purity of heart and life in him. If the Lord is toppling financial markets, we should put our own financial houses in order and live within our means. There is only so much we can do, especially when God’s judgments are widespread. In seasons of general upheaval, I often think of pious Israelite families like Daniel’s, who watched their son being carted away as a captive to serve a foreign court. They were undoubtedly leading generally godly lives, for Daniel’s convictions did not arise out of thin air once he arrived in Babylon. Though Daniel’s parents could not have known it at the time, their gut-wrenching loss was the very means God used to diffuse his glory in a larger sphere, through the piety and faithfulness of one committed man. Daniel’s life reminds us that even something as horrible as the radical displacement and separation of families is always purposeful. When we are tempted to fight back, to go out shooting, so to speak, we would do well to remember this. Thankfully, Daniel’s parents were not of this mentality, choosing to die together in some sort of Alamo last stand rather than submit to the Lord’s greater providences, which they could neither see nor understand, but in which they believed. All our storm preparations, then, which are good and necessary, must never ignore the fact that our human means are always secondary to God’s larger purposes. Use them, but do not trust them. God may use them; then again, he may simply bypass them to accomplish his larger purposes for us. The very reason the Lord brings the storms is to draw us away from every other confidence and to teach us to run to him.
Yet, let us not run around as the disciples did, as fear-crazed men, knowing but not knowing who it was with them in the boat. We know who he is. He is the Lord of glory. All things have been given into his hand. His sole purpose in bringing the desolation of the wicked is to revive, reform, and restore his Church. We need him to topple our idols; he will. We need him to test and purify our faith; he will. We need him to work so gloriously as to set our affections more firmly on his eternal kingdom; he will. We need him to draw a clearer line of demarcation between his church and the world; he will. We need him to make us more mindful of our citizenship in heaven; he will. We need him to make us holy; he will. He does all these things as the crucified and risen Lord of heaven and earth, the Savior and Shepherd of his people and the Judge of the nations. We need him to teach us to lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven, not upon the earth; he will. Finding us asleep, he stirs up the storms of life to lead us to seek refuge, comfort, and life in him. Amid his furious din, his howling providences, wake up, believer, and hear his call to you: “Why are you so fearful? It is I, be not afraid.”