One day long ago, Jesus told His disciples to travel with Him to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. They did. They left the crowd and got into a boat with Jesus Christ.
Since the disciples were directly following the will of Jesus, one might anticipate “smooth sailing” on the sea. Instead, a fierce storm arose, and their boat began to fill with the water of the vicious waves. Christ slept while all this ruckus took place. Imagine, omniscient Jesus had told His followers to go out to sea, and then He snoozed as they began to fear for their lives in a terrible storm!
Our God was up to something; He had a purpose for the squall. Our God is up to something in our lives, too, when He sends us into tumultuous waters. As Jesus demonstrated while napping in the stern of a boat, God is never unnerved by trouble surrounding us. He is in control, ready to use what appears as chaos to accomplish a vital work of the soul.
What happened next for the disciples was a dramatic, necessary shift in their understanding of Jesus Christ. As those men began to fear their demise in the storm, they awoke Jesus and said, “Teacher do You not care that we are perishing? (Mark 4:38b, NASB). Notice how they addressed Christ; they called Him Teacher.
To be sure, Jesus is a Teacher; but He is infinitely more! If Jesus is only a religious instructor, we are hopeless. Following only a moral teacher means trying to be saved by doing all the things prescribed in the body of teaching. Our problem is that “doing good” does not help us because we are dead inside. Spiritual death requires the prescription of a miracle – new life. New life comes because Jesus is God. His death pays for the sin of all who believe in Him, and His resurrected life enables us to live. I count His death as the payment for my sin, and I count His life as my Way to live (Romans 6:10-11).
The disciples needed desperately to realize that Jesus was more than their Teacher. When they cried out to Him in that storm, He told the sea to be still, and the sea listened! A complete calm ensued. Staring into the face of the new situation Jesus had wrought by His own power; the disciples “became very much afraid and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?'” (Mark 4:41). His followers’ notion of Him as simply “Good Teacher” was blown out of the water, if you will.
A new-found, vital reverence swept over the men as they became awakened to the true nature of Jesus. They must have thought to themselves, “This Jesus tells creation what to do!” I wonder if any of the disciples ever looked back to the Psalms to find what is spoken in chapter 33, verses 8-9, “Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.”
Jesus is God. He is more than my Teacher. I have hope because He commands all of creation. I have hope because He gives me life when I can only offer death. I have hope because He can tell the swirling circumstances of my life to come to calm perfection when He sees fit.
Rather than appearing too dignified and declaring only, “Jesus is my Teacher,” I will stand with my mouth agape and proclaim, “This Jesus amazes me!”
