EU•AN•GE•LION (YOO-AN-GEL-EE-ON) · εὐαγγέλιον — Good News
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EU•AN•GE•LION (YOO-AN-GEL-EE-ON) · εὐαγγέλιον — Good News
In the last hours of the night Jesus comes to the boat, walking on the sea, and twelve men in a boat take Him for a ghost. Day 2 is about what fear does to our eyes, and about the three short sentences He says before He does anything about the wind.
Matthew 14:25-27; Mark 6:48-50; Job 9:8-11; Isaiah 51:10-12; Exodus 34:6; 1 Kings 19:11-12
Opening
During the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went out to them, walking on the sea. When the disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost!” they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus spoke up at once: “Take courage! It is I. Do not be afraid.”
Matthew 14:25-27 (BSB)
The fourth watch was the last of the night, the hours just before dawn. The men have been rowing against the wind since evening.
For most of the night nothing has happened except rowing. Then, in the last watch before dawn, someone is out on the water.
Matthew reports it as plainly as he reports everything else: Jesus went out to them, walking on the sea.
The disciples feel no relief at all, only terror. It's a ghost, they say, crying out in fear. Several of these men are fishermen who know this lake, Peter among them, and fear has made them afraid of the one person on it who means them no harm. They have looked straight at their rescue and given it the wrong name.
Jesus could have calmed the lake first and introduced Himself afterward. He begins with them, and Matthew says He spoke up at once: Take courage! It is I. Do not be afraid.
There are three short sentences here. The middle one carries the other two. A command stands on either side. Between them stands a person. He tells them who is in the storm with them.
The wind goes on blowing, and they have heard His voice.
REFLECT
Do this today: when the thing you dread comes to mind, say the three sentences aloud in order. Take courage. It is I. Do not be afraid. Say them slowly enough to hear who is speaking.
A Two-Minute Prayer
Lord Jesus, I have been afraid of the wrong things, and sometimes I have been afraid of You. Speak to me before the wind stops. Let me know Your voice in the dark. Amen.
IN YOUR OWN WORDS
About the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went out to them, walking on the sea. He intended to pass by them, but when they saw Him walking on the sea, they cried out, thinking He was a ghost— for they all saw Him and were terrified. But Jesus spoke up at once: “Take courage! It is I. Do not be afraid.”
Mark 6:48-50 (BSB)
Mark tells the same moment and adds a line that has puzzled readers ever since: He intended to pass by them.
The night was divided into watches, the shifts that guards kept. Older Israel counted three, which is why the Old Testament speaks of a middle watch and a morning watch. Rome counted four, and Jesus names all of them elsewhere in Mark: evening, midnight, when the rooster crows, and morning.
The fourth watch was the last one, from about three in the morning until six. So when Matthew says Jesus came in the fourth watch, he is telling us how long the night has been. The disciples left the shore in the evening. It is now nearly dawn.
John tells us how far they have come in all that time, which is about three or four miles. Tonight that distance has taken most of the night, leaving them still in the middle of the lake.
John also keeps one small phrase that is easy to miss. It was already dark, he writes, and Jesus had not yet gone out to them. Not yet is the phrase of someone who knows that He will come. The men in the boat did not have it. They had only the dark and the oars.
So He comes late, by any human reckoning, when their strength is nearly gone. The Gospels give the hour and no reason for it: the last watch, the worst hours, across the water.
He tells them who is in the storm with them.
He alone stretches out the heavens and treads on the waves of the sea. He is the Maker of the Bear and Orion, of the Pleiades and the constellations of the south. He does great things beyond searching out, and wonders without number. Were He to pass by me, I would not see Him; were He to move, I would not recognize Him.
Job 9:8-11 (BSB)
וְדוֹרֵךְ עַל־בָּמֳתֵי יָם
Job is describing God, whom he cannot find and cannot argue with.
Long before this night, a suffering man named Job tried to say how far God is above us. He reached for the biggest things he knew. He alone stretches out the heavens, Job says, and treads on the waves of the sea.
Job says alone. In his mind one walks on the sea. There is no second.
The Hebrew is vivid. It says God treads on the bamot (בָּמוֹת) of the sea, its heights, and the same word is used elsewhere for the high places on hills. Job pictures the swells of the open sea as a range of hills, with God striding along the ridges.
Treads is dorekh (דּוֹרֵךְ), from the same root as derekh, the road we met yesterday in Psalm 77. That psalm said God's road ran through the sea. Job says God treads on top of it. In the Bible's poetry the sea is the one place no human being can make a road. God walks there as He pleases.
When the Old Testament was translated into Greek, the translators made Job's line even plainer. In their version God is walking on the sea as on firm ground. Their word for walking is the very word Matthew now uses for Jesus.
So think about a Jewish reader who knew the Scriptures in Greek. In those Scriptures the one who walks on the sea is God, and Job says that He does it alone. Then Matthew writes, with the same word, that Jesus went out to them walking on the sea.
Matthew does not stop to explain what he has done. He puts a man on the one road that Scripture reserves for God and lets the reader work out who must be walking on it.
Was it not You who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep, who made a road in the depths of the sea for the redeemed to cross over? So the redeemed of the LORD will return and enter Zion with singing, crowned with everlasting joy. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee. I, even I, am He who comforts you. Why should you be afraid of mortal man, of a son of man who withers like grass?
Isaiah 51:10-12 (BSB)
The prophet calls on the LORD, who once made a road through the sea for His people. Then the LORD answers, and names Himself.
Mark's account holds the strangest sentence of the night. Jesus went out to them, walking on the sea, and Mark adds, He intended to pass by them.
He has seen them struggle and has walked out across the water toward them, so why would He mean to go past? Mark gives no explanation, so careful readers differ. Some take it simply: He meant to walk on ahead and meet them further along. That may be all there is to it.
The word itself points somewhere, though. Mark's verb for pass by is parelthein (παρελθεῖν), and the Greek Old Testament uses that same verb at two of the holiest moments in Israel's story.
The first is on Mount Sinai. When Moses asks to see God's glory, God answers that no one can see His face and live. So He hides Moses in a cleft of the rock and covers him, and says, I will cause all My goodness to pass before you. Then the LORD passed in front of Moses and called out His own name: the LORD, the LORD God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger. In Hebrew that last phrase is long of nostrils, an anger that is a long time coming.
The second is centuries later with Elijah on Horeb, the mountain of God. Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, he is told. Behold, the LORD is about to pass by. A great and mighty wind tears into the mountains, and the writer adds, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind come an earthquake and a fire, and after the fire a still, small voice.
In both scenes passing by is how God lets a person see as much of Him as that person can bear. At Sinai it comes with His name spoken aloud. On Horeb it comes with a wind He is not in, and then a voice.
Now go back to Job. A few lines after he says that God alone treads the sea, he adds, were He to pass by me, I would not see Him. For Job these are two separate thoughts: God walks on the sea, and if He passed by, I would never know it.
On the lake both happen in one verse. Someone walks on the sea and means to pass by, and the men who see Him do not know who He is.
Mark leaves it there, and a reader raised on these Scriptures would feel the echo.
Then comes the voice, and its middle sentence: It is I.
In Greek that is ego eimi (ἐγώ εἰμι), the everyday way of saying it's me. A blind man whom Jesus healed uses the same two words when his neighbours argue about whether he is really the same person.
It is also how the Greek Old Testament voices God when He names Himself in Isaiah. Hear those verses from Isaiah once more. The prophet remembers the road God made through the depths of the sea, and then God answers: I, even I, am He who comforts you. Why should you be afraid? In Hebrew the word I comes twice, anokhi anokhi hu (אָנֹכִי אָנֹכִי הוּא), and in the Greek version ego eimi is said twice.
So Isaiah has a sea, a road through it, a frightened people, and a God who says I am He and asks why they are afraid. The lake has a sea, someone walking on it, twelve frightened men, and a voice that says, It is I, do not be afraid.
Two words cannot prove who Jesus is. In plain Greek they mean it's me. On that sea, with those echoes behind them, Matthew lets a reader hear the larger thing as well.
Mark says something small and important about the disciples' fear: they all saw Him. Nobody in the boat was imagining things. Twelve men saw the same figure on the water. All twelve came to the same wrong conclusion about it.
Their eyes were working. What failed was the name they gave to what they saw. It had been a long night, and when something appeared that they could not explain, fear supplied the explanation. Matthew's word means an apparition. The King James says a spirit.
We do the same thing, and not only at sea. A hard turn in life arrives and we call it God's anger. A door closes and we call it rejection. A conviction that something needs to change comes to us, and we call it condemnation. In each case something real is in front of us. The mistake is in what we decide it is.
Jesus does not argue with them about ghosts or wait for them to calm down by themselves. He speaks, and He speaks at once, because the cure for the wrong name is His voice saying the right one.
Alexander Maclaren, preaching on this passage, saw why the order matters.
"It is of no use to preach courage unless we preach Christ first. If we have not Him with us, we do well to fear: His presence is the only rational foundation for calm fearlessness."
That is a sober thing to say. Maclaren grants that without Christ their fear would be reasonable, and what makes take courage an honest command is the sentence that follows it.
For us His voice is in Scripture. These three sentences are written down, and they can be learned on an ordinary afternoon, long before the fourth watch comes. People who know a voice well can pick it out in the dark.
He Plants His Footsteps in the Sea
William Cowper was an English poet who knew long seasons of darkness. He wrote one of the best-known hymns in the language. Its first verse sets yesterday’s psalm beside today’s line from Job. “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform; He plants his footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm.” The footsteps recall Psalm 77, where they could not be found. The sea recalls Job, where God alone treads it. In the last line God does more than cross the storm. He rides it.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
This is the first verse of his hymn Light Shining out of Darkness, printed in the Olney Hymns more than two hundred years ago.
The Word of a Gentleman
In January of 1856 David Livingstone was crossing Africa toward the east coast. He came to the place where the Loangwa River joins the Zambezi. There the journey stalled. The people there did not trust this stranger and would lend no more than two canoes, and he expected that he might be killed the next day.
His journal for that day opens with a prayer.
“On Thy Word alone I lean.”
He made a plan to slip across the river secretly in the night, and by evening he was writing that he felt much turmoil of spirit. Then he read the promise Jesus made at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, lo, I am with you alway, and he wrote down what he thought of it.
“It is the word of a gentleman of the most sacred and strictest honor, and there is an end on’t. I will not cross furtively by night as I intended.”
So he stayed. He would take his readings of latitude and longitude that night, he wrote, though they may be the last. Then he closed the entry with one line.
“I feel quite calm now, thank God.”
The river had not narrowed, and the people were no friendlier. In the morning armed men gathered around the party. Livingstone sent his own men and goods over first and stepped into the canoe last, and he thanked the people and wished them peace.
Livingstone grew calm on the evening of the fourteenth of January, hours before he knew how the crossing would go. A sentence from Jesus had reached him before anything about the river changed, which is the order of Matthew 14:27. The fear in this story was his own, and it was answered by a voice before it was answered by events.
Where This Sits in the Story
ANCIENT TRUTH
At Sinai, in the EXODUS, God passed by Moses and spoke His own name: compassionate and gracious, slow to anger. In Isaiah, speaking to exiles, He names Himself again beside the sea He once opened. On the lake a reader may hear the same notes: one who means to pass by, the words It is I, and a word against fear.
The Teacher of Ecclesiastes says there is a limit to what we can read from what we see. As you do not know the path of the wind, he writes, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things (Ecclesiastes 11:5). Twelve men looked straight at the work of God that night and called it a ghost. Better eyes would not have helped them. They needed Him to speak.
MODERN APPLICATION
Most of what frightens us at four in the morning has been given a name by fear and by nobody else. Before deciding what a thing is, ask who has told you so. Some fears already have the right name. If what you fear is a person who hurts you, tell someone. If it is a symptom in your body, see a doctor.
NEW TESTAMENT ECHO
Matthew ends his Gospel with the same assurance in a longer form. And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). It is the sentence David Livingstone read by the Zambezi.
REFLECT
What in your life right now have you been calling a ghost?
A Journaling Prompt
Fear gives things the wrong name. Writing slows it down enough to check. Give this ten minutes with a pen.
Name it
Write the thing you are most afraid of this week in one plain sentence.
Write what fear calls it
Under it, write what you have been telling yourself it means.
Copy the three sentences
Write out Matthew 14:27 by hand: Take courage! It is I. Do not be afraid.
Ask one question
Write: Lord, is it possible that You are in this? Then write whatever comes, without tidying it.
Keep the page
Fold it into your Bible at Matthew 14. We will take it out again on the sixth day.
Today's verses stop with the wind still up and the boat still in the middle of the dark lake. Into that comes a voice. For now it has to be enough. Twelve men who were screaming a moment ago have gone quiet enough to listen, because they know who is out there.
It can feel like a small thing. Often we ask God to stop the wind, and what He gives first is His voice. He comes close and speaks, while the circumstances stay as they were for a while longer.
One man in the boat is not content to stay where he is. Having heard the voice, he wants to be nearer to it than a boat will let him.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, You came to them in the last watch of the night, across the one road nobody else could take, and they did not know You. I have done the same. I have looked at the hard thing in front of me and called it Your absence, or Your anger, when You were nearer than I knew. Have mercy on my fear and on the names it has given You. Speak now, before anything changes. Say Your three sentences over the thing I dread. Let me hear who is speaking, and let that be enough for today. Amen.
BREATH PRAYER
Inhale: It is You — Exhale: I will not be afraid
IN YOUR OWN WORDS
Today's Commitment
I will learn Matthew 14:27 by heart today. The next time fear names something for me, I will say those three sentences before I decide what it is.
LEAVING AT THE CROSS
RECEIVING FROM THE CROSS
Check Yourself
When the disciples cry out in fear, what does Jesus do first?
The Man Who Could Not Find God
a man whose story is set in the land of Uz, in a time the book does not date
Job lost his children, his wealth and his health, and spent most of his book demanding to speak with a God he could not find. He never doubts that God is great. What he cannot bear is how far away God seems.
He alone stretches out the heavens and treads on the waves of the sea.
LESSON FOR US
Job said that if God passed by him he would not know it. On the lake the one who treads the sea does what Job longed for. He stops and speaks.
Sources & Further Study
RELATED SCRIPTURES
Matthew 14:22-27
The night, the fourth watch and the voice.
Mark 6:45-50
The same hour, with the line about passing by.
John 6:16-20
The dark, the distance rowed and the same three words.
Job 9:1-12
The God who treads the sea and passes by unseen.
Exodus 33:18 to 34:8
The LORD passes by Moses and speaks His name.
1 Kings 19:9-13
The LORD passes by Elijah; He is not in the wind, and then comes a voice.
Isaiah 51:9-16
The road through the sea, and I, even I, am He.
FOR DEEPER STUDY
Greek: Matthew 14:27 take courage is tharseite, from tharseo, Strong’s G2293, seven times in the New Testament and always an imperative; the Greek Old Testament has the same form at Exodus 14:13. It is I is ego eimi, G1473 with G1510. The same two words are ordinary speech at John 9:9. In the Greek of Exodus 3:14 the name God sends is “the One who is,” which is a different phrase; so the words of Matthew 14:27 should not be called the name from the burning bush. The closer parallel is Isaiah, where ego eimi renders the Hebrew “I am He,” and in Isaiah 51:12 it is doubled. Mark 6:48 pass by is parelthein, from parerchomai, G3928; the Greek Old Testament uses this verb at Exodus 33:19, 33:22 and 34:6 and at First Kings 19:11. Thayer lists Mark 6:48 simply as “to go past,” so the link to Sinai and Horeb is a matter of shared vocabulary and setting, which Mark himself does not state. Apparition is phantasma, G5326. The fourth watch: phylake, G5438; the four Roman watches are named in Mark 13:35, and the older three-watch reckoning appears in Judges 7:19 and Exodus 14:24. Hebrew: Job 9:8 reads ve-dorekh al-bamotei yam; dorekh is from darakh, H1869, to tread, and bamot is from bamah, H1116, a height. The Greek version of Job 9:8 has “walking on the sea as on firm ground,” with the verb peripateo, G4043, the word Matthew uses in 14:25. Exodus 34:6 slow to anger is erekh appayim, literally long of nostrils, from aph, H639, which means both nostril and anger. Isaiah 51:12 in Hebrew is anokhi anokhi hu menachemkhem. In Isaiah 51 verses 9 and 10 call on the arm of the LORD, and from verse 12 the LORD replies. Notes on the story and the hymn. The Livingstone journal is quoted as William Blaikie printed it in his 1880 biography, with some lines left out; the journal says the people would furnish no more than two canoes. Livingstone used a harsh word of his day for the people at the river, which is not repeated here. A popular story says Cowper wrote his hymn after a cab driver lost his way in fog; Cowper’s own memoir places that coach ride years earlier, with no fog and no lost driver, and never mentions the hymn, so the story is not used. Sources 1. Alexander Maclaren, “The King’s Highway,” in Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. Matthew, chapters 9 to 28. Project Gutenberg #7351. 2. William Cowper, “Light shining out of darkness,” Olney Hymns (London, 1779), Book 3, Hymn 15. On the legend of its origin: Cowper’s Memoir of the Early Life (1816), and John Julian, A Dictionary of Hymnology. 3. David Livingstone, journal for 14 and 15 January 1856, as printed in W. G. Blaikie, The Personal Life of David Livingstone (1880), chapter 9. Project Gutenberg #13262. Further: BibleProject, “God’s Name Has Changed?! (Learn Its Interesting Biblical History),” on Exodus 3 and the name of God.
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BEFORE YOU GO
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