Faith and Reverence: Jesus Calms the Storm

And he said to them where is your faith and they were afraid and marveled saying one to another who can this be for he commands even the winds and the water and they obey him again we have been treated to the hearing of the very word of god in the record of this extraordinary experience in the life and ministry of our lord. [00:55:40]

And what these atheists believed was this that the new discoveries of modern science had made the god hypothesis as an unnecessary, outdated opinion that science had now repudiated. They came to this conclusion by saying the god hypothesis is no longer necessary because now we know that the origin of life and indeed the origin of the whole universe has come to pass through the power of spontaneous generation. [04:12:56]

And they got this idea initially from observing mud puddles that were far removed from streams and rivers and oceans, lakes, and they looked at these mud puddles and found that in a few days after their formation they could see the squiggling in these mud puddles of tiny little tadpoles that obviously had come into existence spontaneously. [04:54:48]

And so the question is this, how do you negotiate with cancer? What good is it to plead with a fire? How do you bribe a flood? All these inanimate forces that threaten to destroy us are immune to all of the devices we use to ameliorate hostile people so according to freud he says we use our imagination and the first thing we do is we personalize these impersonal forces. [11:22:64]

And they looked at jesus in a way they hadn't seen him before and they said among themselves what manner of man is this, who is this man, what kind of man is this, we don't have a category for him he's suey generous he's in a class by himself no human being who's ever walked the face of the earth can walk and speak to the wind and make it behave and calm a troubled sea with the mere force of his voice. [18:05:88]

And they realized that they were in the presence of something more terrifying than the violent forces of nature this is what freud didn't expect and you see they were in the presence of the holy they were in the presence of one who had no category because he was transcendent he was other he was different he was higher he was holy. [18:44:24]

And ladies and gentlemen there is nothing on this planet scarier than to be in the presence of the holy i mentioned before when we looked at this passage how when i was a boy before the advent of television yes there was a time when there was no television that we found our entertainment by listening to the radio. [19:20:24]

And so i have to ask after looking at all this the simple question, well so what, what's the significance of this for us, is there any particular application that it has for us, i don't think it's much of a stretch to go back into the old testament for a moment and think of the most important event in the old testament that precedes the new testament work of redemption that is accomplished for us by jesus. [21:52:64]

And you know the story how the jewish people had been enslaved under the tyranny of pharaoh and forced to make bricks even without straw and they were miserable and they cried and they wept and they groaned until finally we read in the scriptures that god said i have heard the groaning of my people and god then appeared in the midianite wilderness to moses. [22:40:24]

And god gave the command to moses to go to the court of pharaoh the most powerful leader on the face of the globe and he went as a midianite shepherd with the message from god and he as you know the story moses goes to pharaoh with this message from god that says simply let my people go now for the rest of the story why did god command that pharaoh let these slaves go. [23:17:04]

And if we fast forward to the new testament and we see the elaborate work of redemption that christ the new moses had accomplished for us saving his people we know what he saved them from he saved them from the wrath of god but the question is what did he save him for and the ultimate answer to that question beloved is for worship. [25:00:24]

And sometimes we reveal how casually we take the whole experience of worship but beloved when we come to worship this is holy ground and we come not with a serval fear but with a godly fear a sense of reverence before him a sense of fear and trembling that was experienced by the disciples in that boat on the sea of galilee yes they were frightened and they should have been frightened because they were in the presence of the holy one of israel. [26:16:24]