Mark 6:45-52

"Obtuse", you know, slow to get it, slow for-- to make all the connections, slow to understand. And we can be that way in life and relationships. We can be hardheaded spiritually. In fact, that's kind of what's behind the quote that I got just from an anonymous post on the internet this week. Somebody wrote, "I'm a huge believer that God sends signs, but I'm too hardhearted, or hardheaded, to listen to them." And doesn't that describe many of us? We see God move in a significant way in our life.

We see him answer prayer. We see him, we hear him speak through other people, and somehow it doesn't sink in. It doesn't make any change in our life. We can be hardheaded spiritually, obtuse, not get it, slow to understand.

Well, that really, I think, is the idea that Mark is trying to convey of Jesus' disciples when he says at the end of our text today-- we're in chapter 6, and we're going to look at verses 45 through 52, but I'll jump to the end here just a minute, because in verse 52, he says this about the disciples: "They did not understand about the loaves, because their hearts were hardened."

So rather than hardheaded, he talks about hardhearted, and again, this is referring back to what we spoke about last week. If you were here-- it's online if you weren't here, when Jesus, to a crowd of probably well more than 10,000 people, miraculously took five loaves of bread and two fish and multiplied them so that everybody was fed adequately to their fill. And the disciples saw this. They had these elements passed by Jesus to them.

They saw this miracle occurring, and yet, even though they understood this miracle, they did not understand the significance of it. They did not understand about what it was supposed to communicate. Now, that same phrase Mark has used before. We saw this back in chapter 3, when he spoke this about the Pharisees and the scribes. Mark records in 3:5: "Jesus was grieved at the Pharisees and scribes, their hardness of heart." Now that's a little different.

The scribes and the Pharisees were callous, were impervious, to who Jesus is and what Jesus was doing. Their hardness was the result of unbelief. Their hardness was the result of hatred. That's the hardness of the unbelieving world toward Jesus. That should not be confused with what he's talking about here, when he speaks of the hardness of heart of the disciples. The disciples are not callous or impervious to the truth of who Jesus is, but they are failing to get it.

They are failing to grasp it. They have just witnessed this miracle, and by the way, this is a pattern. This is not the first miracle that this has occurred on. They have witnessed miracle after miracle, and this miracle of the loaves and fishes, like we saw last week, was packed with Old Testament Messianic symbolism, and it just goes right by them. They're hardheaded and hardhearted to what it really pointed to and to the implications for their life, just like you and me. Just like you and me.

And here's my premise today: you and I are default, and I'm even assuming after we come to Christ, we have varying degrees of spiritual hardheadedness or hardheartedness. We have instance after instance in our life where God shows up in a significant way, where God speaks through somebody else to us, where we witness God moving in an incredible way, and a day later, it's like we never heard it, never saw it, never experienced it. We are slow to understand.

We are slow to get what God is doing in our lives through Jesus Christ and the implications about what it means to follow him in light of those ways that God reveals himself. And so that really leads to my first point here, which I really think is something Mark is showing us over and over again through his Gospel, and here it is: Faith is not an inevitable result of knowing about Jesus.

A faith that is real, a faith that truly saves us, a faith that is alive, a faith that can move mountains...that is not simply the result of, at some point in your past, praying a prayer accepting Jesus into your life. That kind of faith is not simply the result of being in church. That kind of faith is not simply the result of knowing the right church answers, the right, what we call in my family, the Sunday school answers.

That kind of faith is not simply the result even of feeling something, of having some objective emotional experience in church or in some other spiritual setting. And case in point is these disciples: they were with Jesus. They were physically present with him. They were eyewitnesses to his miracle. You cannot get any more immediate than that. And yet, Mark tells us, again and again, they still did not understand the significance of his miracles.

They failed to grasp that the miracles were more than just him providing food or healing people, that the miracles pointed to who Jesus is. They have a limitation that to some degree we don't have. They grew up in a monotheistic culture: there is only one God, the Lord God. And so to get their minds around the concept that that God has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ, that Jesus is really God in the flesh, yeah, that's a leap for them. That's a whole shift in their thinking.

But we struggle similarly. We struggle similarly, even if you have grown up in church, to really grasp the fullness of who Jesus is and what that means for our lives. That's certainly been my experience. There've been many seasons in my life where I've gone through the motions of church, and because I've gone through the motions, I know all the right church, Sunday school answers to the right churchy questions. And yet I don't grasp-- I haven't grasped the significance.

I've missed the real, the full picture that God wants to give me of himself in Jesus. I've failed to grasp the implications of, "Then how am I to live in the light of who Jesus really is?" And honestly, that's my concern for you.

I think that's Mark's concern for all of us is that you're not just in church hearing about Jesus; that you are encountering him in a real way that helps you process through "What are the implications for how I live in light of who Jesus really is?" And over and over again in Mark, we see that faith is a choice. Faith is a decision that must be made.

There's the initial choice, the initial decision, but I believe those choices and those decisions are posed to us over and over again throughout our life of faith, and often, if not most of the time, I believe the critical choices, the critical decisions of faith come in the face of struggle and trial. That's what I think Mark shows us in the Gospel.

Over and over again, Jesus exposes his disciples to experiences that are intended to reveal to them the reality of who he is, God in the flesh, and the implications of that for their lives. And yet over and over again, they are too hardheaded, hardhearted, to grasp it. But here's the good news: Jesus never gives up on them, and that news extends to us. Jesus never gives up on us. Aren't you glad that God does not expect you to get everything at once?

That God does not expect you to somehow grasp all of of the truth immediately of who he is and what it means to follow him? Aren't you glad that he is gracious and patient with us? And maybe this is a step too far for you, but are you even glad that he uses the difficult situations in your life, the struggles that you're in, the trials that he allows you to go through, to bring you to those decision points, those points of choice in your life where he will expand?

He wants to expand your view of him and what it means to live in light of him. That's what he was doing in our account today, starting in verse 45. This account immediately follows the feeding of the 5,000. And we pick it up in verse 45: "Immediately, Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd." And just to give you a little background here, I mean, it almost seems as a surprise.

Why does he seem to be rushing them off? But that is exactly what Jesus is doing. He is moving his disciples away from the crowd, away from the situation of the miracle. And John tells us why. John records the same incident in his gospel, but from a slightly different perspective. And John tells us in chapter 6, verse 15: "Jesus perceived that the crowd intended to come and make him king by force."

You see, in that time in Israel, and particularly there in Galilee, the Jews being under the oppressive Roman rule that they were under, they were looking for a Messiah, but not the Messiah that the Old Testament envisioned. They were looking for a freedom fighter Messiah. They were looking for a figure who would rise up and lead a revolution against Rome. And whenever you had a large group like that, mass, like was at the feeding of the 5,000, there was that fervor in the crowd.

And Jesus-- I'm speculating here, but I think that there's good reason to believe he knew his disciples had witnessed him actually miraculously multiply that food. The crowd may have not been aware of that, like we looked at that last week. They just knew they were being fed. And Jesus knew that if he left the disciples there, and they're talking about what they've witnessed this man do, it's like adding fuel to that fire, stirring up their Messianic hopes.

And so he sends them off ahead, and he remains behind to pacify and dismiss the unruly crowd. And then we pick it up in verse 46: "And after Jesus had taken leave of the crowd, he went up to the mountain to pray." Why? Well, here again, we see Jesus in the pattern that we see throughout his earthly ministry: whenever he is under significant stress, whenever he is really at a place of a critical decision, think of the garden of Gethsemane.

He withdraws to a place of solitude to pray, to center himself upon what his father's will is. A wonderful model for you and for me. Verse 47: "And when evening came, the boat was out on the sea, and he was alone on the land." Now the timing's going to become important here in just another minute or two, but let me set up the timing here. So the feeding of the 5,000 was said to occur late in the day. Let's assume that's late afternoon here in verse 47.

"When evening came", that refers to nightfall. That is, the sun has gone down. It's just beginning to be dark. It's what you and I would think of as the beginning of the evening. It's not well into the night. It's, depending on the time the sun sets, around here right now it would be 6:00, 7:00 PM. Jesus looks up from his prayer at that point, and what does he see? Verse 48: "He saw the disciples straining at the oars because the wind was against them." We've seen this before.

We've seen the disciples out on a boat on the lake, the Sea of Galilee, and the wind whip up and the realities of that word, that the Sea of Galilee is about 700 feet below sea level. So what that does in terms of the weather, what that does because of the geography, is that makes the winds tend to rush down in there. You can get violent downdrafts and sudden windstorms, and that's what happened. They set out in the boat while everything was calm. They really didn't even have that far to go.

They were just crossing the northern tip to the northwestern shore. But some time after they left the shore for what should have been a short trip, a windstorm whipped up, and it persisted. And over time, it was blowing their boat further and further out into the middle of the lake, and they were, now as Jesus looks up at the beginning of the evening (that's important), straining at the oars. They're trying unsuccessfully to row against the wind toward the northwestern shore.

Now let me pause here. This storm was no surprise to Jesus. In fact, I'd go so far as to say Jesus intentionally sent them out in the storm. And if you think with me of a storm, really, as a metaphor for the struggles that you are in or you are facing or you have just come out of, or the trials that you are in the midst of: none of those storms, none of those trials, none of those struggles have come up unexpectedly.

None of those trials or struggles that you are in, those storms, are somehow-- have caught Jesus, have caught God, by surprise. Just as he sent his disciples into that storm, he sends you and me into the storm. He doesn't do it as punishment. He doesn't do it as judgment. He doesn't do it because he is a callous God. He actually does it in love. He sends us into the storm because he knows it is where we each have to make a decision about faith.

He knows that storms are the primary faith-forming, faith-establishing times in our lives. I don't like to be in the storms any more than you do. The storms I've been through, I don't want to go back and repeat, but if you're like me and you've walked with Jesus for awhile, you look back at the results of some of the storms and you say, "I wouldn't trade that away for anything." It is his loving care that he intentionally sends us into the storms.

Then, in verse 48, in the middle of the verse 48: "And about the fourth watch of the night--" 3:00 AM to 6:00 AM, somewhere in that time period. It wasn't until about the fourth watch of the night that Jesus came to them walking on the sea. Now think about the timeline of this. Jesus sends them off, and at the beginning of the evening, at nightfall, he begins to pray. He looks up at that time. He sees them already, at that time, straining against the wind. Now it's 3:00 AM or maybe later.

It's at least six hours later, and he looks up again, and they are still straining. Why did he wait so long? Why did he not come when he first saw them at nightfall straining against the wind? I like what David McKenna says, and this is speculation, but I would tend to agree, because this resonates with what he does in my life and probably your life. David McKenna says, "Perhaps when Jesus first sees them at nightfall, he sees they're frustrated, but they're not desperate yet."

He sees they're men, experienced fishermen, for whom this is hard, but "we just need to muscle through this. We can get there. We just need to work harder. We can get there by our own efforts." They still think they can make it on their own at nightfall, but now, during the third watch, or 3:00 AM, the fourth watch, 3:00 AM or later, six hours or more later, their strength is gone, and their nerves are shot, and their minds are filled with fear. Now they're ready to see him.

Now they're ready for him to come to them. Is that your experience? That's my experience. I go into a storm, I go into a trial or struggle, and I look to my resources that I can bring to getting through that storm. I look to, maybe in some cases, physical strength, maybe mental, intellectual strength, emotional strength. Maybe it's financial resources. Maybe it's my circle of family that supports me or friends.

And you know, I have a place for Jesus in that, but it's kind of on the outer periphery of what I think I need to get through that storm. And then well into the storm. Some of you, maybe it's days into the storm. Some of you, maybe it's weeks. Maybe some of you, it is months into the storm. You exhaust all that, like these men had become exhausted, and your physical strength is shot, and your emotional strength is drained. You are near despair.

And if finances are an issue, they're are drained, or they're running out, and your friendship circle and your family circle, they're exhausted, too. Think about what happens when you go through a medical trial that is long and persistent and draining, the effect that that has not only on you, but on your loved ones around you. And you get to the place where finally, you reach your limits, and you say, "I've got no more that I can bring to this. I can't get myself through the storm."

And that's when we're ready. That's when we're ready to finally see Jesus show up. That's really the point here. Often, we are not ready to see Christ in the midst of our storms until we've reached our limits, until we've come to an end of ourselves. So a little bit of speculation involved here, but this is not Jesus callously waiting, wanting more time by himself; this is Jesus waiting until he knew they were finally ready to perceive him.

Now here's the strange thing: when he does come physically walking over the waves, notice what the end of verse 48 tells us: "he walked across the lake toward the boat, and as he did so, he meant to pass by them." "Pass by." I think of the word "bypass". You know, I go through Atlanta if I'm driving between here and Jacksonville, my home, and Atlanta used to be the kind of city with the congestion that you didn't want to go through it on the interstate, but there were bypasses around it.

They're as congested these days as that going straight through Atlanta, but you know what a bypass is. You're coming up on a major metropolitan area. You don't want to deal with the congestion. And so, you find that the map says, "Oh, there's a bypass. I can go around it. I don't have to go through it. I don't have to deal with it." Is that what Jesus was doing? Was Jesus wanting to bypass them? "I don't want to come to you directly. I want to maintain a distance from you."

Is that what he is doing? No, that is not the meaning of the word, and yet this word that he meant to pass by them was very intentionally chosen by Mark. Mark wants-- actually the Holy Spirit working through Mark-- wants to communicate to you and to me as well as to the disciples something significant about Jesus, and that term "to pass by" is carefully chosen because it is an Old Testament term that, in the Old Testament, when this term is used of God, it refers to what we call an epiphany.

What is an epiphany? It is God who is not seen, Almighty God who is not seen, making himself temporarily able to be seen by a person or by a group of people, and in many of the epiphanies, the instances of epiphany in the Old Testament, this term is used: "God passing by them". Let me give you some examples. Exodus 33 and 34: what's going on, this is the Israelites going through the wilderness. By Exodus 33, Moses is exhausted. He is at an end of himself.

The people, the Israelites, they have rebelled against God. They have rebelled against him. Moses doesn't know if he can go forward any longer. And what he asks to get him through is, "God, show me your glory." We sang that earlier. "Show me your glory, God. I need to see your glory. I need that to give me strength if you want me to keep leading your people." And so, I'm summarizing Exodus 33 here, but God says, "Okay, but you know what? No one can see my face and live.

So here's how I'm going to reveal my glory to you. You're going to go up on Mount Sinai, and there is a place where there's a cleft in the rock--" maybe it was a cave or a partial cave-- "and you're going to hide in the cleft of the rock. I'm going to come by you. I'm going to pass by you, but I'm going to do so in a way where my back is turned to you. So all as you see is my back." And we read of that in Exodus 34, verse 6: "Then the Lord passed by Moses, in front of Moses."

And in doing so, he reveals himself. He proclaims, "The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness and faithfulness." What is God doing? God is revealing himself. God is revealing what he is like to Moses in an epiphany of passing by him. Okay, that's not just a chance coincidence. Let me give you another one.

Now on Mount Horeb, a little later in the history of Israel, we see this when the Prophet Elijah is at a similar low place, and he is exhausted, and he is spent, and he doesn't know if he can go on, and he needs to see the glory of God in some way. And so the Lord says to Elijah and 1 Kings 19:11: "Go out and stand on the mountain, Mount Horeb, in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by." And you continue to read that story, and that same term is used.

"Behold, the Lord passed by Elijah in the form of a terrible wind, and then an earthquake, and then a fire, and finally, in the sound of a low whisper." One more. There's many I could share with you, but one more this morning: we see it in Job 9:11, and we see it kind of almost in its negative. Here, Job, in the midst of his suffering, is longing to experience the glory of God, but God, for reasons that Job doesn't understand, at that point is withholding his immediate awareness of his presence.

But Job says, "Behold, the Lord passes by me, and I see him not. He moves on, but I do not perceive him." Mark is deliberately reaching back and borrowing that language of epiphany of God making himself real to us.

And Mark probably, I think, was even thinking in that passage in Job, as he records in verse 48 how Jesus came to them walking on the sea, because just a couple of verses earlier, in Job 9, Job 9:8, that's almost exactly the same wording that Job uses to describe God as "the one who alone stretches out the heavens and treads on the waves of the sea". Again, no accident here.

Jesus meant to pass by them, not because he was trying to avoid them, not because he was trying to stay out of their clear vision, but so that they would see him pass by, giving them an Old Testament picture of his true identity, an epiphany of God in the flesh, in his form, giving him that epiphany as he walked on the sea. Now, did the disciples understand this Old Testament symbolism? They were closer to the Old Testament than we are, you know. They should have gotten it. Did they get it?

Did this epiphany comfort them? Well, we read in verse 49 about their hardheadedness, hardheartedness: "When they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost--" the Greek word "phantasm" there-- "and they cried out, for they all saw him and were terrified." Not only were they not assured of God's presence; they didn't even recognize it. They reverted, really, to their popular superstitions. Very honestly, again, that's you and me. That's you and me.

We have so much in common with these disciples. You know, we may be fine when we sense God's presence and comfortable, familiar settings: worshiping him in church, experiencing him in the fellowship of a small group or our connect group.

But how different it is, in the middle of the night of our storms, of trials and struggles, when we are lonely, when we are at an end of ourselves, when we are hurting, when we are near despair, where we don't sense Christ's presence in familiar and comfortable ways.

But it is exactly these kinds of experiences that God uses, that he intends to take us beyond our anxiety, beyond our fear, and give us an even more real glimpse of Christ than we would have taken, than we would have gotten, if we'd never gone into the storm. That's what he's doing here with the disciples. That's what he does in my life and your life. Verse 50, middle of verse 50: "But immediately Jesus spoke to them, and he said, 'Take heart.

It is I. Do not be afraid.'" And even in what Jesus says to them, he gives them another clue about his divine identity. "It is I." Again, Mark reaches back into the Old Testament, as the Holy Spirit has inspired all of this, and that is essentially God's language of self-revelation that we see. Well, we see it back at the burning bush in Exodus 3, verse 14, when from the burning bush, God says to Moses, "I am who I am." "It is I." "I am who I am."

This is what you are to say to the Israelites: "I am." "It is I who has sent you." It is that same language of self-identification. So do you see what is happening here? Jesus walks on the waves like the God who treads on the waves of the sea. Jesus meant to pass by them in an epiphany of God, like the epiphanies of the Old Testament. Jesus speaks like the one true God. "It is I." "I am who I am."

And all of this gives them clues to his true identity, helps them connect their view of "there is one Lord and one God with the one who is standing before them in the flesh", and we need this as much as they do. You and I, we need this glimpse of the Lord Jesus Christ as fully God, as much as they knew. We need to see that in the midst of our storms, Christ is passing by, not in avoidance, not at a distance, not uncaring, but revealing himself, revealing, showing us God's power and God's love.

Here's the thing about why we have an even advantage over those in the Old Testament who saw these direct epiphanies: Moses saw only God's back as God passed by. Elijah only saw the whirlwind and the earthquake and the fire as God passed by. But in the midst of our storms, in the midst of our trials and our struggles, we see God pass by in the face of his son, Jesus Christ. We have the fullest picture. We have the fullest revelation, the fullest epiphany.

And Christ does far more than just rescuing us out of the storm as he passes by: he rescues us, and he saves us from our bondage to Satan and sin. It is the ultimate deliverance, the ultimate rescue. Well then in verse 51, Jesus got into the boat with them, and the wind ceased. Again, comparing it with the earlier account of them being on the Sea of Galilee in a storm in chapter 4. There, Jesus commands the wind and the waves to be still. But here it is his mere presence that stills the storm.

That is God showing who he is in a very real way. His very presence stills the storm. And that's what we discover. In the middle of our storms, this is what God wants us to see, that it is his mere presence in the midst of our storms, where we find the peace, we find the calm that we need. Even in the middle of the storm. Maybe you've been that one in a hospital room or in the middle of a very, very hard financial or relational situation.

Maybe you've been the one who you cannot see the end of the storm. Or maybe you've been the one sitting in that hospital while somebody suffers that you love, and that storm seems far from over. Jesus wants you to see. He wants me to see that even in the middle of the storm, he is there and that his presence and the reality of his presence is enough to sustain us. Now notice in verse 53, when they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret.

Jesus doesn't immediately rescue them out of that storm, does he? What he does is he enables them to finish the voyage, to continue the voyage to the other shore. His presence enables them to finish the voyage, and that applies to the storms that you're in and the storms that I am in. That even when he doesn't rescue us right away, out of the storm, he enables us to continue the voyage.

We tend to think of the voyage as getting out of the immediate circumstances, as being physically healed, as having our financial problem addressed, as having this relation healed, but he has a much bigger view. He can and he does do that at times. He still heals. He still provides. He still mends relationships. But ultimately the reason that Jesus died to save you from sin, the reason that Jesus rose again to give you new life, was for you to live forever with him in Heaven.

And this life, it's just a voyage. Whether you're in that hospital room, and that voyage is completed with your death because of those medical complications, or you are allowed to live a very long life, it's just the voyage. And Jesus' presence enables you, however little time or much time you have left, his presence is ultimately about enabling you to finish the voyage that he will carry you through.

So as we close this morning, I'm guessing it's probably pretty accurat to assess that you're here and you're in either one of two camps. You're here this morning, maybe, and you're in the middle of a storm, and the struggle, the trial, that you're in, you know, that's a good word for it: "storm". Or you're here this morning, and you're not immediately in the storm, but somebody you love, somebody you care for, is in the middle of a storm. We can pray for healing. We can pray for provision.

We can pray for mending, and we should, and God answers those prayers in accordance with his will. But let me offer you one additional way, maybe even more powerful way, that you can pray for yourself in the middle of the storm or somebody you love in the middle of the storm this morning. And it's this: ask God to use this storm to reveal his face to you or to the one you love, to reveal his face to you in the face of Jesus Christ, in a new and deeper way.

Ask God to use that storm to reveal Christ to you and to those that you love in a way that you would never experience if you did not go through that storm. I want to offer that to you this morning. Even as we close, there will be some people up front. There will be people in the back in a slightly more private area back there. They would love to pray with you about your storm. They don't need to know details. You can reveal as little or as much as you want.

They will pray with you confidentially. They will pray for healing. They will pray for provision. They will pray for mending of relationships. They will pray, probably even most importantly, that in the middle of your storm, that God's presence would become real to you in a way you would never have experienced had he not taken you into this storm. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, once again, we are amazed by who you are.

And Father God, even when we think about the way that your Holy Spirit has woven scripture together, that Jesus knew these Old Testament images, and by your will, he lived them out in the lives of the disciples. And that same Holy Spirit inspired Mark to record them in such a way that we can see this, and it speaks to us. I pray, Lord, that through these images we would see Jesus as a result of encountering your word here this morning in an even more real way.

I pray for my brothers and sisters here this morning who are in the midst of storms. I pray for those who are heavy with watching others that they love go through these storms. We pray for your work of healing. We pray for your work of provision. We pray for your work of mending. Ultimately, we pray that they would see you passing by, and they would see you as the God you are, bringing peace, bringing calm, enabling them to continue the voyage, to see you in the middle of the storm.