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
Peter is going under, and he has time for three words. Day 4 is about the shortest prayer in this story, the name Jesus gives to Peter’s faith, and how quickly the hand came.
Matthew 14:30-31; Psalm 69:1-3; Psalm 144:7; Ecclesiastes 5:2; Hebrews 2:14-16; Matthew 28:16-17
Opening
But when he saw the strength of the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!” Immediately Jesus reached out His hand and took hold of Peter. “You of little faith,” He said, “why did you doubt?”
Matthew 14:30-31 (BSB)
Peter has walked on the water toward Jesus. Then he has looked at the wind.
Peter is going under. A moment ago he was walking toward Jesus on the surface of the lake, and now the water is closing around his legs. He has time for one breath. He spends it on a prayer. Lord, save me!
In Greek that prayer is three words long, with no opening and no ending, no account of how he got here and no promise to do better. It names the one he is speaking to, and it says what he needs.
Matthew's next word is immediately. Immediately Jesus reached out His hand and took hold of Peter. Matthew leaves no pause in the sentence for Peter to sink a little further and learn his lesson. The hand reached him as fast as the prayer left him.
Only then does Jesus speak. What He says is often heard as a scolding. You of little faith, He says, why did you doubt?
Look at where both of them are when He says it. By then Peter is being held, and the question comes from someone who is already holding him.
Jesus calls it little faith, which is still faith. A man with none would not have called out to Him. Peter had a little, and a little was enough to be caught by.
REFLECT
Do this today: pray Peter’s three words at the moment you notice you are going under, before you explain anything. Lord, save me. Say it out loud if you can. Then tell one person today that you are going under. If you have thought about ending your life, tell them that now, or call or text 988 in the United States. Outside the United States, findahelpline.com lists a line for your country.
A Two-Minute Prayer
Lord, save me. I have a little faith and a great deal of water. I am not going to explain myself first. Take hold of me. Amen.
IN YOUR OWN WORDS
Save me, O God, for the waters are up to my neck. I have sunk into the miry depths, where there is no footing; I have drifted into deep waters, where the flood engulfs me. I am weary from my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes fail, looking for my God.
Psalm 69:1-3 (BSB)
הוֹשִׁיעֵנִי אֱלֹהִים כִּי בָאוּ מַיִם עַד־נָפֶשׁ
A psalm that carries David’s name. Israel had been praying it for centuries before Peter was born.
Matthew chooses an unusual word for what is happening to Peter. It is katapontizesthai (καταποντίζεσθαι). The middle of that word is pontos, the open sea. It means to be plunged down into deep water, far from any shore.
He uses it in only one other place, where Jesus warns about anyone who causes a little one to stumble and says it would be better for that person to be drowned in the depths of the sea. So this is the word for being swallowed by the sea. Matthew puts a small word in front of it: Peter was beginning to sink, and he has not gone under yet. The scene stops at the exact second between walking and drowning, which is where the prayer is prayed.
Think about what Peter leaves undone. He is a fisherman, and later in the Gospels he will jump out of a boat and make for the shore without a second thought. Tonight he neither turns back toward the boat nor tries to save himself and report in afterward. He calls to the one in front of him.
Most of us do it the other way round. We try everything we know first. Prayer is what we come to when the list has run out. Peter's order is better, because the moment his feet go through the surface, the first thing out of his mouth is a name.
A little was enough to be caught by.
Lord, save me. The three Greek words are the one being asked, the thing being asked for, and the person who needs it.
The Teacher of Ecclesiastes once gave advice about prayer. It is not the advice we expect. He was warning people who make quick, grand promises in God's house. God is in heaven and you are on earth, he wrote, so let your words be few. A cry for help is no rash promise, yet the Teacher's rule about length still fits it. Peter promises nothing and asks for one thing, because a drowning man cannot pad his prayer.
The disciples have said nearly these words before. In an earlier storm, with Jesus asleep in the boat, they woke Him together with the cry, Lord, save us! We are perishing! That prayer was plural. This time there is nobody to pray it with him. He is the only one in the water, and the prayer has shrunk to fit: save me.
Underneath both prayers lies a much older one. Psalm 69 begins, Save me, O God, for the waters are up to my neck. In Hebrew the first word is hoshi'eni (הוֹשִׁיעֵנִי), save me, and it comes from the same root as the name Joshua, and so as the name Jesus.
The psalm then describes the water. It has come up to the singer's nephesh (נֶפֶשׁ), a word that usually means soul or life, which is how the King James translates it: the waters are come in unto my soul. Many translators now think that here it has its physical sense of the throat or neck. Either way the water has reached the place where a person breathes.
The singer goes on, I have sunk into the miry depths, where there is no footing. Later he asks, do not let me sink.
We cannot say that Peter was quoting the psalm, since he had no time to quote anything. We can say that Israel had been praying these words for centuries, and that when a son of Israel felt the water at his throat, they were the nearest words he had.
Send thine hand from above; rid me, and deliver me out of great waters, from the hand of strange children;
Psalm 144:7 (KJV)
שְׁלַח יָדֶיךָ מִמָּרוֹם
Another prayer under David’s name, read here from the King James Version, which keeps the hand that some newer translations fold into reach down. Strange children is its word-for-word English for a Hebrew phrase that means foreigners.
The answer to Peter's prayer begins with an adverb. Immediately.
Matthew has leaned on that word all night. Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat. When they cried out in fear He spoke up at once, which is the same Greek word in a shorter form. Now, immediately, the hand. The Lord who was quick to send them and quick to speak is quick to save.
Then come two actions. He reached out His hand, and He took hold. The second verb is epelabeto (ἐπελάβετο), which means to grip. It is a strong word, used elsewhere for seizing a person and even for making an arrest. Peter is not offered a hand to reach for. He is taken hold of.
The letter to the Hebrews uses this verb in two places that throw light on the lake.
The first is about why the Son of God became a man. For surely it is not the angels He helps, the writer says, but the descendants of Abraham. The word translated helps is this one: He takes hold of them. One old dictionary of New Testament Greek explains it as laying hold of another person to rescue him from peril.
The second is about the Exodus. There God speaks of the day when He took His people by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, and the verb is the same one again. In the Bible's own telling, the rescue from Egypt was a grip on the hand.
It is a common word. Matthew does not point us to Egypt. The likeness is there all the same. What God did for a whole nation, Jesus does on the lake for one fisherman.
Now hear Psalm 144 once more. Send thine hand from above, David prays, and deliver me out of great waters. He prayed that as a picture of his troubles, asking for a hand to come down from the heights and pull him out of deep water.
On the lake that prayer is answered to the letter. There is deep water and a man in it, and the hand that reaches him does not have to come down from the sky, because the one it belongs to is standing on the water next to him.
Not everyone in deep water is pulled out, and Matthew knows it. This same chapter opens with John the Baptist beheaded in prison. His disciples buried the body and went and told Jesus. John was not pulled out.
Hebrews says more, just before its line about taking hold. He too shared in their humanity, the writer says, so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death, that is, the devil. He died, the writer goes on, to free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. The one who takes hold went under Himself. He was killed, and on the third day He was raised to life. His grip pulled one man out of a lake, and it holds through death.
Jesus has a name for Peter in this moment. It is one word. Oligopiste (ὀλιγόπιστε). Little-faith.
Matthew is almost the only writer who uses it. Every other time, Jesus says it to a group that is worrying about clothes, or panicking in the earlier storm, or fretting that they have brought no bread. Here alone it is singular, said to one man whom He is holding.
The rabbis had the same turn of phrase. In the Talmud, Rabbi Eliezer the Great says that anyone who has bread in his basket and asks, What shall I eat tomorrow, belongs to those who are small of faith. His saying was written down after the Gospels, but it shows how the phrase worked among Jewish teachers. It was said of people who believed, and who did not yet believe very far.
The second word is in the question, why did you doubt? The verb is distazo (διστάζω), built on the Greek word for twice, and it means to waver, to be of two minds. That is different from disbelief. Peter still knows who is in front of him, but he has two things in view, his Lord and the wind, and he has been going back and forth between them. That is what Matthew Henry saw yesterday when he said that Peter took notice of the danger as well.
Matthew uses this verb only one other time, at the very end of his Gospel. The eleven are on a mountain in Galilee with the risen Jesus, and Matthew writes, when they saw Him, they worshiped Him, but some doubted. Even there, in front of the risen Lord, worship and wavering stand in one sentence. And Jesus comes to the waverers along with the rest, and gives all of them their work.
John Bunyan understood this well enough to put a man called Little-Faith into The Pilgrim's Progress. Little-Faith is robbed on the road, and when one pilgrim asks whether the thieves took everything he had, another answers.
"No; the place where his jewels were they never ransacked, so those he kept still. But, as I was told, the good man was much afflicted for his loss, for the thieves got most of his spending-money."
A little faith can be robbed of its comfort without losing the thing it holds most dear.
So if little-faith is the right name for you this week, hear it the way Peter heard it, with a hand around his wrist.
As a Nestling
John Chrysostom preached through Matthew’s Gospel about sixteen hundred years ago. When he reached this verse he gave his hearers a picture from a nest. “And as when a nestling has come out of the nest before the time, and is on the point of falling, its mother bears it on her wings, and brings it back to the nest;” He ends the sentence in four words. “even so did Christ.” In his picture Peter is a young bird who left the nest too soon. Chrysostom keeps his eye on the mother, who is under the fledgling before it reaches the ground and carries it home.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Chrysostom was a preacher of the early church whose name means golden mouth. The picture comes from his fiftieth homily on the Gospel of Matthew.
On the Sinking Ship It Was Different
Dwight Moody was an American evangelist. In November of 1892 he sailed for home from Southampton on a steamer called the Spree, with his son beside him.
About three days out he felt a terrible crash. The shaft that drove the ship had broken, water filled the two rear compartments, and the pumps could do nothing with it. The ship lay drifting in a heavy sea.
On the second evening Moody led a service for the passengers. He held onto a pillar with one arm to keep his feet, and he read Psalm 91 and then part of Psalm 107.
Afterward he told the truth about himself. He had preached that a Christian can be free of the fear of death.
“But on the sinking ship it was different.”
The thought of his wife and children almost broke him.
“I could not endure it. I must have relief, and relief came in prayer. God heard my cry, and enabled me to say, from the depth of my soul, ‘Thy will be done!’ Sweet peace came to my heart.”
He went to his bed and slept soundly. About three in the morning his son woke him. Far off on the dark water a light was rising and sinking with the swell. It was another steamer, the Lake Huron, which towed them to Queenstown.
Moody’s prayer on the Spree was not Peter’s. He prayed, Thy will be done. But his honesty is Peter’s. A well-known preacher admits that his own courage did not hold when the water came in, and that prayer was where he found relief. Peace reached him hours before the light on the water did.
Where This Sits in the Story
ANCIENT TRUTH
The Psalms are the prayer book of the KINGDOM, written and sung by people in real trouble. Again and again they picture that trouble as deep water and God’s help as a hand. Behind them stands the EXODUS, when, as Scripture puts it, God took Israel by the hand.
Ecclesiastes gives the rule that Peter kept without meaning to: let your words be few (Ecclesiastes 5:2). A short prayer is not a poor one, and the Teacher thinks it is often the honest one.
MODERN APPLICATION
Many people stop praying exactly when they most need to, because they think they must first get themselves into a fit state to be heard. Peter prayed while he was sinking, with his faith at its smallest.
NEW TESTAMENT ECHO
Years later Peter wrote to Christians who were going through hard times of their own. Cast all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you (1 Peter 5:7). The verse just before it speaks of God’s mighty hand. Peter knew what that hand felt like.
REFLECT
What do you usually try before you pray?
Scripture Memory
Today’s verse is short enough to keep for life. Learn it with your hands as well as your head. It takes five minutes.
Read it aloud three times
Lord, save me! Immediately Jesus reached out His hand and took hold of Peter.
Add the motion
On Lord, save me, lift one hand above your head. On reached out His hand and took hold, grip that wrist with your other hand.
Write the first letters
On a card, write only the first letter of each word. Then say the verse from the letters.
Cover the card
Say it once more from memory, with the motion.
Use it
The next time you feel yourself going under, do the motion. Your hands will remember the verse.
Matthew's next sentence opens with the words, when they had climbed back into the boat. It is easy to pass over that he says they. Peter and Jesus return to the boat together, across the same water Peter was sinking in a moment before.
Matthew says nothing more about that walk, but notice what his sentence assumes. The wind has not stopped yet. It does not stop until they are in the boat. So Peter crosses that stretch of lake in the same weather that frightened him, and this time he does not sink. The last thing Matthew says about the hand is that it took hold.
Take that into today. You may not get a calm sea, or a larger faith by tonight. What this passage offers is a hand that came immediately to a man with little faith and two minds, and that Matthew never shows letting go.
Tomorrow they reach the boat, and the wind grows tired.
Prayer
Lord, save me. I am not going to dress it up. I am going under, and I have nothing to offer You except that I am calling Your name. You know how small my faith is. You named it before I did. Thank You that You did not wait for Peter’s faith to grow before You reached for him. Take hold of me the way You took hold of him, and the way You took Your people by the hand out of Egypt. Hold me on the way back to the boat, while the wind is still blowing. And when You ask me why I doubted, let me hear the question from inside Your grip. Amen.
BREATH PRAYER
Inhale: Lord — Exhale: save me
IN YOUR OWN WORDS
Today's Commitment
I will pray first today. When I feel myself going under, I will say Lord, save me before I try anything else, and I will not tidy up the prayer.
LEAVING AT THE CROSS
RECEIVING FROM THE CROSS
Check Yourself
In Matthew 14:31, which comes first: the hand or the question?
The King Who Prayed From Deep Water
shepherd, fugitive and king of Israel, about a thousand years before Christ
Psalms 69 and 144 both carry David’s name in their headings. He spent years running for his life before he ever sat on a throne, and his prayers are full of floods, deep water and enemies too strong for him.
Save me, O God, for the waters are up to my neck.
LESSON FOR US
David gave Israel words to pray when the water was already rising. Peter, a thousand years later, prayed in the same shape, and found the hand David had asked for.
Sources & Further Study
RELATED SCRIPTURES
Matthew 14:1-12
The death of John the Baptist, earlier in the same chapter.
Matthew 14:28-33
The walking, the sinking, the hand and the boat.
Matthew 8:23-27
The earlier storm, and the first time they prayed, Lord, save us.
Psalm 69:1-18
The prayer from deep water.
Psalm 144:1-8
Send thine hand from above.
Ecclesiastes 5:1-7
Let your words be few.
Hebrews 2:14-18 and 8:8-9
The one who takes hold, and the hand at the Exodus.
Matthew 28:16-20
Worship and doubt on the mountain.
1 Peter 5:6-7
The mighty hand, and the anxiety cast on Him.
FOR DEEPER STUDY
Greek: Matthew 14:30 sink is katapontizesthai, from katapontizo, Strong’s G2670, found in the New Testament only here and at Matthew 18:6. The Greek version of Psalm 69 has the same verb in verses 2 and 15 (verses 3 and 16 in its own numbering), where it translates a Hebrew verb meaning to flood over; it does not translate the Hebrew verb for sinking in that psalm, so the link is one of vocabulary and should not be pressed into a quotation. Lord, save me is Kyrie, soson me; compare Matthew 8:25, where the disciples say it together. Immediately in Matthew 14:22 and 14:31 is eutheos, G2112, and at once in 14:27 is the shorter form euthys. Took hold is epelabeto, from epilambanomai, G1949, nineteen times in the New Testament, including Hebrews 2:16 (twice) and Hebrews 8:9; Thayer explains Hebrews 2:16 as “laying hold of another to rescue him from peril.” The word is also used of seizing and arrest (Acts 21:30), so the likeness to the Exodus is one of shared vocabulary. Little-faith is oligopistos, G3640: Matthew 6:30, 8:26, 14:31, 16:8 and Luke 12:28, with the related noun at Matthew 17:20 in the critical text. Thayer notes that the word is not found in secular authors. The saying of Rabbi Eliezer the Great is in the Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 48b; it is later than the Gospels, and its phrase is miqqetannei amanah, of those small of faith. Doubt is distazo, G1365, from dis, twice; only here and at Matthew 28:17. The popular picture of “standing in two places” is not in the standard lexicons and is not used here. Hebrew: Psalm 69:1 hoshi’eni Elohim, save me, O God, from yasha, H3467. Nephesh, H5315, is soul or life; the reading “neck” or “throat” is followed by several modern translations. Psalm 144:7 shelach yadekha mi-marom, with “hands” in the plural; strange children renders benei nekhar, sons of foreignness, which the Berean Standard Bible gives as foreigners. Ecclesiastes 5:2 (5:1 in the Hebrew numbering) yihyu devarekha me’attim, let your words be few. Notes on the story and the quotations. Moody’s account is in his own words, as his son, who was on board, printed them in 1900. Chrysostom in the same homily puts Peter’s sinking down to his want of faith; the picture of the nestling is his account of the rescue. Matthew 14:10-12 tells the death of John the Baptist; Matthew 16:21 is the first of Jesus’s own announcements of His death and rising. Sources 1. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part 1 (1678), the conversation of Christian and Hopeful about Little-Faith. Project Gutenberg #131. 2. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, Homily 50, section 2, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 10. newadvent.org/fathers/200150.htm. 3. W. R. Moody, The Life of Dwight L. Moody (Fleming H. Revell, 1900), chapter 35, “In Peril on the Deep,” pages 400 to 404. 4. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol. 5, on Matthew 14:30, quoted on Day 3. Further: BibleProject, “The Reason You Can Trust God (Even When It Seems Risky),” on what the Bible means by faith.
Finished reading? Mark this day read.
BEFORE YOU GO
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