Well, maybe not actual water, but in Christ we can do the seemingly impossible in not giving way to fear and doubt because circumstances are greater than our Savior God. The gospel story of Peter walking on water has been significant for my life in many ways. There are several theological and practical takeaways, and I’ve never written anything extensively about it, so here are some thoughts on the gold to be mined from this amazing story.

I want to start with the most important question about this event: Did it really happen? If it didn’t actually happen, who cares what kind of spiritual or practical lessons we might learn from it. If it didn’t happen, it’s a lie, and I’m not interested. As I say, if the Bible isn’t true, throw it in the trash. I have more important things to do than waste my time on invented stories claiming they are true. Yet, all the world’s religions want a piece of Jesus even while they reject the supernatural Creator God Jesus of the Bible. For them it’s a pick and choose Jesus. They want nothing to do with actual Jesus of the Bible, Israel’s Messiah and the Savior of the World, and the one who not only can walk on water, but created it! So, first let’s establish the historical nature of the event portrayed in the gospels. To do that, I will use an argument I develop in my book, Uninvented: You just can’t make this stuff up!

Jesus’ Special Relationship to Water and Nature
Nothing is more absurd to the skeptic than Jesus walking on water or stilling a storm just by his command. Impossible, so they tell us. However, the way in which these stories are told is powerful evidence for their veracity. Before we get to Peter, we’ll look at the power of Jesus’ word over creation, told in Matthew (8), Mark (4), and Luke (8). The details are similar in each telling. Jesus gets into a boat with his disciples and says they are going to the other side of the lake (of Galilee). Obviously exhausted, Jesus falls asleep while a furious storm comes up. Terrified, the disciples wake him and plead with him to save them. Jesus’ reply as Matthew reports it is priceless:

26 He replied, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm.

Are you kidding me? What kind of question is that! How could they not be afraid? A raging storm on a dark night in the middle of a large body of water on a small boat is the perfect recipe for terror. But Jesus is as cool as a cucumber. Mark reports another question they ask in the midst of the squall: “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” That’s almost funny. Didn’t Jesus say before they even got into the boat, “Let’s go over to the other side of the lake”? Yes, in fact he did. He didn’t say, we’re going to the middle of the lake to drown. I guess when Jesus says something, he means it, storm or no storm. After the storm is calmed, the disciples’ response is even more priceless than before:

They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

So let me get this right. They are terrified during the storm when they think they’re going to die, and now they’re terrified of the guy who saved their lives? The answer to their question, and its implications, must have been troubling to say the least. The portrayal of the story has verisimilitude in spades, it reads real, not at all like mere human fiction.

As I said, if this is a made up story, it’s a lie, and in this case we would have roughly a dozen liars. Then, are we to believe they all made it up, and continued to stick to the story even when they all knew it wasn’t true? We only have two choices, either it happened, or it didn’t. And it’s an awfully odd story to make up if it didn’t really happen. Imagine them getting to the other side of the lake and telling people what happened. They probably didn’t, at least initially. It’s too preposterous! They hardly believed it themselves. There is also nothing comparable in Israel’s history. Even when Elijah called down fire from heaven in his encounter with the prophets of Baal (I Kings 18), he prayed to the Lord, and it was the Lord who did it, not Elijah. Here, Jesus himself is exerting power over nature by his mere word. God does such things, not man, yet here was a man doing it. No wonder they were freaking out. It made no sense! And to top it off, there was no expectation of the long-awaited Messiah having such power, none.

If this isn’t crazy enough, imagine making up the story about Jesus and Peter walking on water (Matt. 14, Mark 6, and John 6). There is nothing remotely like this in biblical history. Instead of Jesus getting in the boat with the disciples this time, he has them get in, and says he’ll meet them on the other side. This has the same problem as the previous episode on the lake for those who deny it happened; it’s a very strange thing to make up. Sometime after three in the morning on a wave-tossed and windy lake, the disciples see what they take as a ghost walking on the water, and it terrifies them. Who wouldn’t be? They respond like real people encountering something unimaginable. Jesus tells them not to be afraid, it is him. In Matthew’s account, impetuous Peter wants a little proof that it is in fact Jesus, so he asks Jesus to tell him to walk out to him on the water. Bad idea. As soon as he sees the wind and waves, he starts to sink. Terrified, Peter shouts, “Lord, save me!” Jesus’ response fits a realistic narrative perfectly:

31 Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”

Again, what kind of question is that! Well, Jesus, because, you know, maybe people just don’t walk on water? That reads so real. Then, Matthew writes something utterly un-Jewish: “those who were in boat worshiped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’” Worshiping a man, any man, even if he walks on water, is blasphemy. Mark has a little different take, saying that even though they were amazed, they really hadn’t understood. Jesus had just previously fed more than five thousand people with a few loaves, but “they had not understood.” Both accounts reflect perfect human ambivalence to something so inconceivable. I’ll quote Jewish Christian biblical scholar Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889) as to why it takes more faith to believe this is made up, than it having actually happened:

Not only would the originations of this narrative . . . be utterly unaccountable—neither meeting Jewish expectancy, nor yet supposed Old Testament precedent—but, if legend it be, it seems purposeless and irrational. Moreover, there is this noticeable about it, as about so many of the records of the miraculous in the New Testament, that the writers by no means disguise from themselves or their readers the obvious difficulties involved.

In other words, it doesn’t read at all like legend or myth because there is no point to it or no precedent for it in Jewish history. The disciples are as shocked by it all as anyone would be encountering something so seemingly impossible. We must remember as we read the Bible, what we know as modern fiction didn’t exist in the ancient world. The gospel writers had no category in their minds of trying to write something that didn’t happen to try to make it look real.

As I also argue in my book, the burden of proof is on those who claim the story isn’t real and just made up. The only reason they can give for claiming this comes from an anti-supernatural bias they bring to the text. In logic it’s called begging the question, or assuming the premise before they get to the conclusion. In this case, miracles can’t happen, these are miracles, therefore, these events didn’t happen. Sorry, that won’t work because it’s pure bias. Having established the historicity of the events, let’s look at the theological implications.

Jesus is God: The Doctrine of Christology
Christology is simply the study of who Jesus as the Christ was, and is. We learn two things about Jesus in these stories. The first is his humanity. We see this in his falling asleep while they are in the boat on the lake; even while the storm is raging he’s still asleep and the disciples have to wake him up. Just prior to this Jesus had fed the five thousand with a few loaves and fishes, and had spent the entire day healing the sick. Most orthodox Christians probably tend to overemphasize the divine Jesus at the expense of the human Jesus, while liberal types do the opposite. The liberal Jesus is pretty much human. The testimony of Scripture and the entire history of the church, however, declares Jesus is both fully God and fully man, something, remember, utterly inconceivable to obsessively monotheistic Jews at the time, or any time.

Christology was a struggle for the church for several hundred years. All the first Christians were Jews, so a man who proclaims by his words and deeds he is God wouldn’t compute. In fact, as we see in the gospels, his claim to divinity was why he was put to death. When the high priest asked Jesus after he was arrested to tell them if he was “the Messiah, the Son of God,” his affirmation of equality with God leaves no doubt, and the high priests’ response confirms it:

65 Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, “He has spoken blasphemy! Why do we need any more witnesses? Look, now you have heard the blasphemy. 66 What do you think?”

And they all agreed, Jesus was worthy of death.

We see how difficult this was for Jews to accept in the story of doubting Thomas, who refused to believe Jesus had come back from the dead. As he said:

 “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

Did he think Mary and the others were lying or delusional? It’s more likely he didn’t know what to think. Not being a modern post-Enlightenment person who automatically disbelieves in miracles, it wasn’t that Thomas couldn’t believe Jesus came back from the dead. After all, he’d seen him bring Lazarus back to life after he’d been dead four days. I think, rather, it was Thomas as a Jew finding it impossible to believe the supposed Messiah would die on a Roman cross, hung on a tree enduring God’s curse. All Jews knew this passage in Deuteronomy 21:23:

his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance.

You can see why the disciples so quickly wanted to get Jesus off the cross before the Sabbath started. Knowing this is what makes Thomas’s declaration after he encountered the risen Jesus and saw Jesus’ wounds so Christologically powerful:

28 Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

Yet for hundreds of years heresies would arise denying exactly this, that Jesus wasn’t only just a god, but The God, Yahweh himself, Israel’s covenant making Creator God. This controversy was finally put to rest at the council of Nicaea in 325 from which we get the ringing declaration of the Triune God. Jesus was fully God and fully man, a theological fact upon which our salvation from sin depends.

What Peter Walking on Water Teaches Christians About Faith
Before I get to the lessons, one comment on the word faith. We tend to use it in a non-biblical way to mean intellectual assent. I believe in something, have faith, because I’ve been given logical reasons to do so. I intellectually assent to such and such because I believe it. However, faith in the biblical sense is a synonym for trust. This includes using our intellects, our minds, but so much more. The first dictionary definition I came across defines trust well:

assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something, one in which confidence is placed

We can immediately see the focus of trust isn’t me or so much what I believe, but the person or thing I’m believing in, the one or thing in which I place my trust. This is perfect for our story, but more importantly, trust not only includes our mental faculties, but our entire being, our emotions and will as well. My favorite verse about trust in the Bible is Isaiah 26:3, short and sweet:

You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast because he trusts in you.

We don’t have perfect peace, we don’t trust. This means no worry, fear, anxiety or doubt. I repent every morning for my worry, fear, anxiety, and doubt because I’m a sinner, and sinners sin. It’s a battle to attain perfect peace, and always just beyond our grasp. Think of it like Peter walking on the water. He’s actually pulling it off. Notice carefully what is making the impossible possible:

Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. 30 But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”

The contrast says it all. For those few seconds he was obviously looking at Jesus and almost didn’t notice the tempest raging about him. The moment he does, fear kicks in, and he starts sinking. Fear, of course, was a perfectly reasonable response, and once he took his eyes off Jesus fear, and thus sinking, is inevitable.

This is the perfect metaphor for the Christian life because of Jesus’s response. It takes us back to Christology, and our own ever present sinful inclinations to live by sight, and not by trust. When Jesus says to peter, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” you almost have to laugh? I can imagine Peter thinking in that moment if thought was even possible, “What, are you kidding me? How in the world could I not be afraid? Walking on water is impossible!” Well, if Jesus really was God, Creator of the universe, and all the physical laws of the universe are under his control, then fear was in fact not warranted at all. Jesus seems to be saying, if you would just trust me, you wouldn’t have even seen the wind and the waves, only me, and you would have been able to do the impossible without fear.

We know however, in real life in a fallen world in a fallen body among fallen people it doesn’t work that way. Lack of trust is built into the proverbial sinful human cake. The faith-trust dynamic, and thus struggle, is perfectly captured by Blaise Pascal in his description of human nature:

What kind of freak is man? What a novelty he is, how absurd he is, how chaotic and what a mass of contradictions, and yet what a prodigy! He is judge of all things, yet a feeble worm. He is repository of truth, and yet sinks into such doubt and error. He is the glory and the scum of the universe!

Therein lies the battle of trust. The question for us is, which of these will win in the battle of daily life. This reminds me of the story in Mark 9 when a man brings his son who is often violently possessed by demons, and the man pleads with Jesus to help them. Jesus replied, “all things are possible for those who believe.”   In what must have been a heart wrenching scene, the father responds:

24 Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

The word for belief in Greek is pisteuó-πιστεύω, or trust. This is my daily prayer because I fail continually, “Lord, help my lack of trust!”

Thankfully, sanctification is real because Jesus died, as the hymn rightly says, “to make men holy.” This isn’t only positionally before the Father, justification, but actually changes who we are, what we think and what we do. That’s why Paul in I Corinthians 1:30 shares with us these comforting truths:

And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

When we struggle to trust Him, so experience the seemingly ever elusive perfect peace, we must remember to keep our eyes stubbornly focused on Jesus and do our best to ignore the wind and the waves. We just might find ourselves walking on water, even if only for a fleeting moment, until the next time.

 

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