How many times in the past few days have you read something
like, “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and
there is no other.” He has made the case
again and again that as creator there is nowhere to turn in the universe except
to Him, everything else is created. Why
would the Lord of all creation, of water earth and sky, appeal to His own
creation to love Him? On what basis does
He care? The basis is that we are
created in the image of God and for that reason He does not despise us but,
inexplicably, loves us as a parent loves a wayward child. We abuse and reject His love, turn away and
seek after other gods and yet He is always seeking us. We are not seekers of
truth, we are seekers of fulfillment.
This little episode in the life of Jesus and the disciples
probably had an enormous impact on the men who had only recently joined
themselves to Him as disciples. They are
fighting against a storm on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus is sound asleep, a la
Jonah, and they wake Him with the question, “Teacher, do you not care that we
are perishing?” Jesus’ response is to
speak to the wind and waves, ““Peace! Be still!” with the result that the wind
ceased and there was a great calm. The
disciples wanted Jesus’ help but they got far more than they bargained
for. Their own peace and calm lasted
only briefly because now they knew Jesus was more than a teacher but how much
more? Their question is right, “Who then
is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”, and has only one real
answer, the one the wind and sea have always obeyed.
Paul’s admonition to servants is simple, “obey your earthly
masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ…” Have we made Jesus so accessible that we no
longer even think of Him with fear and trembling? That day on the water He had to ask why they
still had fear. They, too, lost that
sense of fear from time to time, Peter undertook to correct Jesus on theology
when He told them He would soon suffer and die.
Fear and trembling isn’t something we ever think about when we think of
Jesus yet when John saw Him in the revelation he says he fell at His feet as
though dead. He is one with the One who
created heaven and earth as the disciples discovered that day. He became like us in every respect as touches
our humanity but now He rules at the Father’s side and He will come again in
judgment. Perhaps we need to have a more
balanced view of Jesus.
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