For the next four weeks, we will be going back to the theme of the Yahweh Warrior of the prophets. These next four miracles are called “self-manifesting” as they represent Yeshua’s true identity–even if everyone is still too blinded to see it now. These four signposts will make His identity obvious only after His resurrection, but that’s how acts of predictive prophecy are supposed to function. They aren’t obvious until all of a sudden, in retrospect, they are!
So what does the calming of the storm at sea reveal to us about who Yeshua is? Tune in and find out.
Transcript below, the editing on this one is not going to be extensive. I have been with my son in the hospital since Thursday for the emergency replacement of his cranial shunt. I am very exhausted still but hopefully, I can record a program about it and all the miracles that happened tomorrow to air this week.
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Mark 22—Cosmic Encounters—The Warrior and the Sea
35 On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” 36 And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him. 37 And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. 38 But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” 39 And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. 40 He said to them, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” 41 And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
Okay, so first we had Yeshua/Jesus start out His ministry by binding Satan, the strong man, in the wilderness and then going around looting his house by delivering people of demons, healing the sick, and that sort of thing. Then came the five controversies with human beings. Our last series covered who the insiders and outsiders in the Kingdom are through a series of confrontations and through the teaching of parables. We learned that insiders can become outsiders and outsiders can become insiders. Most notably His family, who all flat out rejected Him and labeled Him as being out of His mind, but three of whom later became heavy hitters in the early congregations of believers, and Judas, who started out as an insider but made a decision to become an outsider. Now we are back to the beginning with cosmic battles, which is how scholars label any battle that is not against flesh and blood. Messiah never acts forcefully against people, He just conquers them in word battles, but with the forces of the enemy, He is violent and relentless. A good lesson for us all. Over the next five weeks, He will show us His mastery over the forces of nature, with the stilling of the storm, the demonic, with the deliverance of the possessed Gerasene man, and two different kinds of death—social due to bleeding impurity, and actual physical death. At the end of his proving Himself to the amazed crowds, we will see the shocking conclusion to this section of Scripture when He is rejected in His own hometown. This will take us through the remainder of chapter four up to chapter 6:6. It would be more convenient if thematic grouping obeyed chapter divisions, but they don’t.
Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com
All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. A list of my resources can be found attached to the transcript for Part two of this series at theancientbridge.com.
Let’s review the Biblical theme of the Yahweh Warrior which we see all over the place in the prophets but most notably in Isaiah. Yahweh is portrayed time and again as responding to the lack of leadership and the corruption of his “shepherds” with the promise/threat that He will come and deal with the intolerable situation personally. Isaiah speaks on a number of occasions about the “arm of the Lord” whom the Qumran covenanters, the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in 1QIsa (the Great Isaiah Scroll) called the Messiah. Throughout the prophets and the Psalms, Yahweh is portrayed as personally taking revenge on the enemies of His people and so all this seemed to point to the Messiah, at least in some traditions, as a warrior who would defeat the Gentiles and restore the kingdom to the restored twelve tribes. But there were also a lot of verses, and especially in Isaiah, which clearly said that the Gentiles would be coming into the fold. Most notably in the Second Servant Song of Isaiah 49:
He says: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” (Is 49:6)
How could Yahweh destroy the nations and at the same time save them and include them in the worship at His Temple?
“…these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer;
their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” (Is 56:7)
It was anything but a cut and dried picture but then the fulfillment of Scripture can never be figured out ahead of time. If you remember the series I did on Isaiah and the Messiah you might remember that predictive prophecy isn’t to give us knowledge of the future before things happen, but instead to give us proofs that Yahweh is the only true God in that He is the only God in all of the world’s religions and myths who makes predictions that later come true. None of the other gods can do this and repeatedly in Isaiah 40-55, Yahweh issues challenges for them to predict something, anything! But there is nothing but silence. Yahweh only calls events before they happen and then when they come to pass, we are to witness His greatness to the world to the shame of all the powerless gods who were only considered to be at the mercy of fate and not the masters of the Universe. Yahweh alone is outside our reality, all other gods were at the mercy of it.
And so, Mark presents Yeshua as the Yahweh-Warrior, the arm of the Lord, the Son of Man, the Son of God, and the Messiah. He binds Satan. He tosses out demons. He frees people from sickness and physical bondage right and left, and He can calm violent storms. BUT they ain’t seen nothing yet. Every single one of these stories will be different tales of going from death to life. You see, every miracle up to this point has only made Yeshua’s true identity more confusing to the crowd (as we will see later after the death of John the Baptist), but He is beginning to get bolder and His works will be more and more self-manifesting, in other words, revealing that He is more than just another prophet or teacher.
35 On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.”
On what day and where were they? Well, this is the day He taught the gathered crowd about the Parable of the Sower and then retreated privately with the Twelve and probably the seventy-two mentioned in Luke 10. Once alone with his serious disciples, He carefully explained the Parable of the Sower and then taught them a few more parables—the Hidden Lamp, the Growing Seed, and the Mustard Seed. Presumably, this is Capernaum as we have not had any mention of travel since the rejection of Yeshua by His family and the Beelzebul accusations by the Scribes from Jerusalem.
Notice this, “Let us go across to the other side.” The retreat to the sea in light of the rejection He experienced is being portrayed, once more, in Exodus terms as Yeshua and His disciples, like Moses and the Israelites, retreat to the Sea. At this point, whenever there is a problem, Yeshua retreats. Why? Because it is not yet His time to die. He doesn’t pick fights but His works provoke them. He addressed issues only as necessary. He is there to preach the message of the Kingdom to all of Israel and if He gets Himself killed prematurely He will have failed in His mission. Yeshua isn’t rash or a firebrand or zealous in the foolish type of way we like to be zealous. He is everything that He tells us we need to be in the Beatitudes. He is bold in a very dangerous and unworldly way—violent not toward people but toward the evil that has the people in bondage.
We can also see, in this verse, two other Exodus references. Crossing over is also what happened with Joshua as they entered into the promised land and on the way back from Babylon after the decree of Cyrus. But Yeshua isn’t heading into the Promised Land, but out of it. He is heading to the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee where Gentiles live, where the cities of the Decapolis were located. Dorothy, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.
36 And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him.
So they left the big crowds behind, and they took Him where He wanted to go. “Just as He was.” This means they didn’t stop to get supplies or extra clothing or money or anything like that. He said go and they just went. Other boats came along too but we don’t know who was in them, if it was the seventy-two or just fisherman (as it was evening and it was time to start fishing), or some of the crowd who was looking for goodies. Just don’t know. But this means we have a lot of witnesses which is important because scholars have pointed out that there are a lot more personal details in this account than in most of what Mark writes. This reads like it came from someone who was there and telling a very vivid story of their firsthand experience.
37 And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling.
The Sea of Galilee is prone to violent storms rising up almost out of nowhere at night because it effectively lies down in the bottom of a basin, so winds sweep down and the Sea can become very dangerous very quickly. Waves can get up to seven feet in height. More than tall enough to swamp a fishing boat full of men. But remember that these were not scientific people and they saw the Sea as a chaotic place with water spirits and demons and the disembodied souls of those who had drowned. This was a scary place at night, and it was at night. The boat would fill up fairly quickly.
38 But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
Three guesses what this is supposed to remind us of? Okay, you only needed one—Jonah! Jonah was a prophet escaping God’s will and he fled to Tarshish, which was just about as far as a man could get from Israel back in the day. The Mediterranean Sea rose up in violent protest at the command of God and the sailors were sure they were going to drown. They go down into the hull and there’s the guilty party sleeping like a baby. It had to have been a supernatural sleep because no one and I mean no one can sleep like that unless they are a teenager. The pagans sailing the ship, of course, end up having to chuck Jonah overboard to get the storm to stop although they were some awesomely decent guys and resisted doing it for as long as possible. Okay, so we think about it but the similarities are pretty barren. There is a boat and a prophet and a storm and that’s about it. Yeshua came to save, Jonah fled in the other direction because He didn’t want God to save Ninevah from the destruction He was threatening. Yeshua is going to the other side to have a very serious encounter with Satan and his legions, showing them that there is nowhere to hide.
Now, you might be wondering where the heck Yeshua is sleeping as the boat is filling with water. In these types of boats, (and you can find one if you google “Sea of Galilee Boat” or I will have a link on the transcript which will go up on Friday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Galilee_Boat and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1chZL3Ll-Lw) there was an area tucked under the stern deck where someone could easily take a nap using a ballast bag, which would be between 50 and 100 lbs, as a pillow. And by someone, I mean not me because I would be freaking out. I would be like telling those guys to stay perfectly still and don’t rock the boat under any circumstances. I would be white as a sheet. Oh wait, I just caught a look at my legs in shorts, evidently I already am.
But the verse says they woke Him. Yes, Yeshua was woke, but He was actually woke, not like us when we arrogantly pretend to be woke when we are really just napping and thinking that our opinions on our pet issues make us informed and intelligent. Moving on…the word for woke here is, anyone? Egiero—the resurrection word. Remember how I told you this would be a story about going from death to life? Here’s our first thematic hint in that direction.
Back to our links to Jonah, when the captain of the ship woke him, he demanded that Jonah cry out to his God so that they might be saved. But Jonah never even tries this because he still isn’t repentant and isn’t willing to call on God. He is willing to be a martyr, however—and not for the last time in this narrative either! So, what will their sleeping teacher do? “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” It reminds me of Exodus 14:11, “They said to Moses, “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?” No surprise, that complaint was delivered on the shore of the Sea of Reeds with Pharaoh’s army breathing down their necks. You can just hear the disbelief and they still don’t understand anything about Him. And remember that these guys are fishermen, hardened, experienced sailors and the storm is so bad that they are freaking out. He wakes up (this is the only mention of Yeshua sleeping in the entire NT) and I am sure they are counting on Him to call on God who seems to always be close by to answer His prayers. And this is a big difference between Yahweh and pagan gods as well. Like, you look at the Greek gods and they were very aloof and distant and even for their favorites their favor was pretty hit and miss. They had complicated lives to live and couldn’t be counted on to intervene. What will Yeshua do?
39 And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.
Well, I will tell you what He didn’t do. He didn’t call on Yahweh so save them. He “woke” which again has its root in that resurrection word egeiro, and then he rebuked (Mark uses the same Greek word as is used to rebuke demons), and said, “Peace!” But this isn’t shalom or the Greek word that is used for shalom. This is very forceful, siopao, which means “be muzzled!” It’s not, “okay storm, gosh golly you just calm down there why doncha and take a chill pill, mister.” This is actively taking authority as one who has absolute authority to control the wind and the waves. And evidently, it didn’t take a long time for the waves to die down as it would under natural circumstances. BOOM, the water is like glass and it is literally smooth sailing. We’re going to see this same picture next week with the Gerasene demoniac. Violent and uncontrollable one moment and then the next absolutely calm, respectable, and sane. This reads exactly like a deliverance story, as though the sea is possessed and then delivered through the authority of Yeshua.
But this isn’t even the cool stuff and for the cool stuff we are going to read some verses. I hope you like verses. It would be awkward, I suppose, if you were listening to this and didn’t like verses.
Psalm 107 28 Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. 29 He made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed. 30 Then they were glad that the waters were quiet, and he brought them to their desired haven. 31 Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man! 32 Let them extol him in the congregation of the people, and praise him in the assembly of the elders.
Jonah 1: 15 So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. 16 Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.
Job 98who alone stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea;
Throughout Scripture, Yahweh alone is portrayed as having total dominance over the seas. The seas are portrayed as being submissive to His will. When Moses is commanded to raise His staff at the shore of the Sea of Reeds, the waters pile up and they create a path for Israel to pass through in safety. When Joshua obeys Yahweh’s command to have the Levites carry the Ark into the Jordan River, the same thing happens. Elijah’s (then Elisha’s) cloak could perform the same miracle. But they needed props and it was understood that they were merely prophets operating under authority. What Yeshua did was different. He did not invoke the Name of Yahweh. He didn’t raise a staff or do anything except speak words of authority. As when He taught and dazzled the synagogue attendees in chapter one, He taught not like the Scribes but under His own authority. Yeshua is starting to give blatant hints about who and what He is and still it will not be clear until after the resurrection. But these proofs aren’t so they will know right now. Granted, they should be enough to cause the disciples to trust Him, but not enough to show them what still has to be veiled. It’s like predictive prophecy. No one can figure it out ahead of time (and yet people make a lot of money claiming otherwise) but later on, after the fact, people say, “Oh…I totally get it now! How could we be so blind?” Well, that’s the thing, we are blind by device. Those who know the future have no need to trust God because they can instead trust in their own cleverness. No, these works are there to look back on after the fact as proofs of His authority, power, and identity. Pretty cool.
As a hilarious aside, 2 Maccabees records an incident where evidently Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid king who persecuted and slaughtered the Jews and defiled the Temple, decided he was divine and was going to show everyone by commanding the water–
9:8 Thus he who only a little while before had thought in his superhuman arrogance that he could command the waves of the sea, and had imagined that he could weigh the high mountains in a balance, was brought down to earth and carried in a litter, making the power of God manifest to all.
This is in context to the details of his death. Talk about adding insult to injury. But back to the Bible:
40 He said to them, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?”
This is the first faith rebuke toward the disciples in the Gospel of Mark. He has marveled in the past at their lack of understanding but has not called their faith into question before now. This was a huge act of salvation. Their lives were literally in danger. This wasn’t just their overreacting as the Sea of Galilee is very deep and if they went under fully clothed they were going to drown. They wouldn’t have been able to stay above the waves. They had just been transported from the realm of the dead to the realm of the living. Let’s go deeper and unpack Yeshua’s statement here, “Why are you so afraid?” What did we see over and over again in Isaiah?
Isaiah 7:4 And say to him, ‘Be careful, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint
8:11-12 Fear God, Wait for the Lord. “Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread.
35:4 Say to those who have an anxious heart, “Be strong; fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you.”
40:9 Go on up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good news; lift it up, fear not; say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!”
41:1 Fear Not, for I Am with You
41:10 Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. 11 Behold, all who are incensed against you shall be put to shame and confounded; those who strive against you shall be as nothing and shall perish. 12 You shall seek those who contend with you, but you shall not find them; those who war against you shall be as nothing at all. 13 For I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, “Fear not, I am the one who helps you.” 14 Fear not, you worm Jacob, you men of Israel! I am the one who helps you, declares the Lord; your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel.
43:1 But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.
43:5 Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.
In addition, Yahweh speaks the words, “fear not” to Abraham, to Hagar, and many others, and His representatives often speak it to remind people to only fear Yahweh and not their circumstances. Here. After commanding the wind and waves with a word, Yeshua utters marvel about their fearfulness—the word, in fact, is calling them cowards. Ouch. He asks, “Have you still no faith?” The word for faith, of course, is pistis and it means to trust. It is actually a military word that describes the level of trust that an army has to have for one another from top to bottom and from bottom to top. Unflinching confidence that your orders will be followed if you are above and that your orders can be trusted, if you are below in the pecking order. But they didn’t have this kind of trust in their leader—they still didn’t have the courage to trust Yeshua implicitly, although that would change after the resurrection so let’s give credit where credit is due. Evidently, the disciples didn’t respond to the calming of the waters with cheering and gratitude—as we see from the next verse:
41 And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
In Jonah 1:10, we see that the sailors in the storm, in the literal Hebrew, “feared with a great fear” and we are seeing the same thing here. The disciples were filled with great fear, megan phobon, and obviously, phobos is where we get our word phobia and megas sounds like our slang term “mega” for a reason. So, in modern slang English, they were mega scared. Or maybe that was slang thirty years ago, I have no idea. The answer to their question of “Who is this then?” is absolutely unthinkable to a first-century Jew and so their minds won’t even allow them to go there. If Yeshua had said, “In the name of Adonai I command you to be muzzled!” and it had happened, they would have been hooting and hollering and rejoicing. But Yeshua didn’t do that. He didn’t call upon the authority of anyone higher than Himself. That’s scary if you don’t know the end of the story—if you don’t have a narrator as we have. The sea was the livelihood of four of these guys but they also knew it could be a deathtrap and uncontrollable. It was believed to be inhabited by demons and ghosts and such and they had a healthy respect for it. They would be idiots to be casual about the power of storms to kill. But this guy, their teacher, the guy they traveled with—he calmed the storm with a few words and none of them were the correct words. Personally, I am not judging them as I could have wet myself almost immediately. No, I would have wet myself immediately. I would be too panicked even after the storm died down to think rationally.
But the evidence all around them is clashing with their paradigms and paradigms have to be removed by God. It wasn’t time yet. And so they are terrified, not of the storm anymore but of Yeshua. What had they gotten themselves into? But we must not mistake their confusion for rejection, they simply lack understanding. I want to read the Yahweh-Warrior verses from Isaiah 63:7-65:7 so we can look for clues as to how Yahweh foreshadowed His workings through Yeshua in the prophets. Much of this is in the prophetic perfect tense, speaking of the future as though it has already happened because, if God has ordained it, it might as well have already happened. It is history that simply has not occurred yet. This looks back and forward and will have a lot of bearing on the teachings over the next few months. We find a ton of foreshadowing here about what is going to happen in Yeshua’s ministry.
7 I will recount the steadfast love of the Lord, the praises of the Lord, according to all that the Lord has granted us, and the great goodness to the house of Israel that he has granted them according to his compassion, according to the abundance of his steadfast love.
8 For he said, “Surely they are my people, children who will not deal falsely.” And he became their Savior.
9 In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.
10 But they rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit; therefore he turned to be their enemy, and himself fought against them.
11 Then he remembered the days of old, of Moses and his people. Where is he who brought them up out of the sea with the shepherds of his flock? Where is he who put in the midst of them his Holy Spirit (via the Tabernacle),
12 who caused his glorious arm (remember 1QISa and the arm of the Lord being the Messiah?) to go at the right hand of Moses, who divided the waters before them to make for himself an everlasting name,
13 who led them through the depths? Like a horse in the desert, they did not stumble.
14 Like livestock that go down into the valley, the Spirit of the Lord gave them rest. So you led your people, to make for yourself a glorious name.
64 Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, (baptism of Yeshua) that the mountains might quake at your presence—
2 as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries, and that the nations might tremble at your presence! (Gerasene demoniac)
3 When you did awesome things that we did not look for, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.
4 From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides you, who acts for those who wait for him.
5 You meet him who joyfully works righteousness, those who remember you in your ways. Behold, you were angry, and we sinned; in our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved?
6 We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. (woman with the issue of blood) We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
7 There is no one who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to take hold of you; (woman with the issue of blood) for you have hidden your face from us, and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities.
8 But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.
9 Be not so terribly angry, O Lord, and remember not iniquity forever. Behold, please look, we are all your people.
10 Your holy cities have become a wilderness; Zion has become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation.
11 Our holy and beautiful house, where our fathers praised you, has been burned by fire, and all our pleasant places have become ruins.
12 Will you restrain yourself at these things, O Lord? Will you keep silent, and afflict us so terribly?
65 I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for me; I was ready to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, “Here I am, here I am,” to a nation that was not called by my name.
2 I spread out my hands all the day to a rebellious people, who walk in a way that is not good, following their own devices;
3 a people who provoke me to my face continually, sacrificing in gardens and making offerings on bricks;
4 who sit in tombs, and spend the night in secret places; (Gerasene demoniac) who eat pig’s flesh, and broth of tainted meat is in their vessels;
5 who say, “Keep to yourself, do not come near me, for I am too holy for you.” (Pharisee challenges based on their traditions) These are a smoke in my nostrils, a fire that burns all the day.
6 Behold, it is written before me: “I will not keep silent, but I will repay; I will indeed repay into their lap
7both your iniquities and your fathers’ iniquities together, says the Lord; because they made offerings on the mountains and insulted me on the hills, I will measure into their lap payment for their former deeds.”
Quite a bit of this is a blueprint for at least the next ten weeks if I am counting correctly. Yeshua is going to travel to Gentile areas and minister there, to a people who have not sought Him out. We have the Gerasene demoniac next week, followed by the woman with the issue of blood and the raising of Jairus’s daughter. He will then be rejected in Nazareth, His death at the hands of bureaucrats will be foreshadowed in the death of John the Baptist, He’ll feed the five thousand Jews and the four thousand Gentiles, will walk on water and do battle with the Pharisees over some of their traditions. A lot is coming up. Very exciting stuff. Yeshua is slowly laying the foundation work for Israel to understand who He is after He is raised. No one can see it now. Not even His family and not even His inner circle.
Every one of these is THE best! How is that even possible?!?