What Sort of Man Is This? | Jesus Calms the Storm | Matthew 8:23-27

Through the years, my work has taken me on extensive travels, allowing me to see the beauty and diversity of geography, people, and food. It sounds glamorous, but travel, especially air and boat travel, can be marked with the unexpected, what I will call thrills. Coming home one evening, we noticed the plane begin making multiple circles over the region without ever fully getting on approach to land. The pilot came on the overhead and gave us a calm explanation that he was working around the weather and wanted to make a smooth landing. The lady next to me was not buying it. Nervous passengers are the norm, and she was likely on her first flight ever, unfortunately, this one.

After several passes, the pilot told us we would need to land quickly and abruptly to avoid an impending storm. The anxiety on the plane was thick as we watched the sheets of rain and the lightning around us and felt the plane tossed by the wind. Then the pilot took us into a steep decline, cutting through the clouds and toward our destination. The terrified woman next to me sank her long nails into my left knee and began screaming. I was mildly nervous at first, but the combination of the pain, the situation, and her bellowing made the event memorable.

As we dove, the pilot pulled up at the last moment and prepared to touch ground. It felt like we landed sideways, bounced three times, and finally began to slowly roll. The cargo holds had opened and luggage had fallen out, and just as everyone began to realize we had reached safety, the pilot came on the overhead speaker once more and simply said, “Shewww!” Laughter ensued, and the fear began to lift, and so did those nails in my knee.

Our passage today takes us through a similar situation, but on the Sea of Galilee.

Matthew 8:23-27 “And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.” And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?”¹

Many of the disciples were skilled fishermen, and when Jesus asked them to climb into a boat and cross the sea to the other side, they would have felt right at home. The Sea of Galilee is fascinating. Sitting nearly 700 feet below sea level, it is not actually a sea but the lowest freshwater lake on earth. It lies at the bottom of the Jordan Rift Valley, the long tear in the Earth’s crust where the African and Arabian tectonic plates have pulled apart, opening the valley. That same fault system left the valley laced with basalt and prone to earthquakes to this day. The lake averages a depth of 84 feet, and in the northeast it reaches up to 157 feet. At 13 miles long, 7 to 8 miles wide, with a surface area of 64 square miles, it sits like a bowl surrounded by the Golan Heights rising 2,000 feet to the east and Mount Hermon standing over 9,000 feet to the north. It is small enough to walk end to end in a day and large enough to swallow all of Disney World, nearly the size of Washington, D.C. This is no small pond.

Compared to the ocean, this lake is shallow, and shallow water can make waves dangerous. In the deep ocean, the wind builds long rolling swells that a vessel can ride. In a shallow basin, the wind builds short, steep, breaking chop that slams rather than lifts, and that kind of wave is far harder on a small open boat. Researchers have long compared the Sea of Galilee to Lake Erie, the shallowest of the North American Great Lakes, famous for being whipped into violent water faster than its deeper neighbors. The Galilee is far smaller than Erie but shares similar terrifying stories.

Because the lake sits at the bottom of that bowl, surrounded by her towering neighbors, the clash of climates is frequent and fierce. Cool, dry, dense air flows downward, squeezing through narrow valleys and ravines, accelerating like a nozzle pressurizing the air before shooting it out across the warm lake. As that cold, dense air sinks onto the warm air sitting over the lake, the warm air is pushed upward, and the two masses collide. The collision is turbulent and sudden, and because the lake is only seven or eight miles across, the descending wind can reach the open center of the water directly, with nothing to slow it down. A surface that was glass can surge into a raging storm with little notice, and by the time the chill wind hits the back of your neck, you are already in danger.

Observers of the lake report that in the space of about thirty minutes, a calm surface can give way to wind-driven waves six to ten feet high, and a documented storm on the eleventh and twelfth of March in 1992 drove winds near thirty miles an hour, sending heavy waves crashing ashore at Tiberias on the western side. These are not ocean-liner conditions, and for a wooden fishing boat of twenty-five to thirty-five feet, they would have spelled disaster.

The crew was not made up of nervous travelers. At least four of the men in that boat had fished this lake for a living, and they had certainly weathered storms before. Their terror is one historical detail that helps us measure the storm. When men who have spent their lives reading this water become convinced that this time the boat is going down, the danger is genuine and extreme. It also sets up the irony Jesus exposes. The men with the most experience of the sea had the least faith in the moment, because their expertise told them exactly how bad this was, and their expertise had no category for the One sleeping in the stern.

That is a long way to get into the lesson, but it gives us a valuable perspective on the real and felt threat. There are three main lessons for us today.

First is their tested faith. In our last devotional, Jesus had warned Mr. Hasty that trials would be a normal way of life, and now, only moments later, the disciples and the other boats following them were caught up in a life-and-death situation, the kind many of these seasoned sailors would have recognized and feared. As in this story, so in our lives, commitment to the Savior will be followed by testing, by trials, and sometimes by anguish. Matthew, Mark 4:35-41, and Luke 8:22-25 all agree on the severity of this storm. Matthew calls it seismos megas, an earthquake of a storm, Mark says lailaps megas, a great windstorm, and Luke uses the word katebe, a windstorm that came down on them until they were in danger. They were being tested within their own skillset.

Second is the rebuke. Luke records the doubled cry, “Master, Master,”² epistata repeated to seize His attention and to press the plea with earnest intent. Mark records the sharper retort, “Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?”³ and Matthew the reverent plea, “Save us, Lord,”⁴ and all of it points to an immense urgency that told them they were about to die. Both Mark and Luke record the storm being rebuked first and Matthew the disciples first, but the order matters far less than the result. The disciples had just watched Jesus exercise supernatural power over sickness, death, disease, and spirits. Could He not do the same over a storm? Could this man, who had so clearly displayed a power they had only ever read about in the Old Testament, the God who stills the storm and hushes the waves in Psalm 107⁵ and who sets the boundaries of the sea in Job 38,⁶ carry that same authority over nature itself? That is precisely the point He proved. He rebuked both at once, the warring of air and water, and the human tendency to forget and to lose foundational faith, or at best to carry along only the shallow kind.

Last is the result. As New Testament believers living in an era when we read these stories without living them ourselves, we can read right past the emotional and physical impact this would have had on those following Him that day. The disciples’ response was telling of their weak faith, as Matthew records them asking, “What sort of man is this?” an easy indictment of the very weakness they had just spoken with their own mouths. Yet the result of the storm was a calm laid over both the sea and the soul. The word Matthew uses depicts a glassy stillness on the water, so calm that not a ripple appeared.

So what is the application? Know this, believer. Storms are coming in your life that will shake every foundation and every belief you hold within you. The storm is never meant to drown you or to pull you down into the depths of despair or depression. It is there to reveal where your foundation is cracking and where it needs strength. The Lord to whom you cry is Lord over all. He can give you strength in the middle of the storm, perseverance through it, and a restful calm when you need it most.

What are you resting on during the storms of life?

What do the storms reveal?

Stay on Mission

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Footnotes

1. Matthew 8:23-27. All Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version unless otherwise noted.
2. Luke 8:24.
3. Mark 4:38, New King James Version.
4. Matthew 8:25.
5. Psalm 107:23-30, especially verse 29: “He made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed.”
6. Job 38:8-11.