Personally, it is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. Jesus is sleeping and was awoken by His disciples in an absolute panic. A storm had arisen on the Sea of Galilee, and its magnitude was so incredible that the experienced fishermen thought this would be the end of them. Then, the just awakened Jesus performs a miracle in Mark 4:39: “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.”
Psalm 107:26-30 says, “They mounted up to heaven; they went down to the depths; their courage melted away in their evil plight, they reeled and staggered like drunken men and were at their wits’ end. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble. and He delivered them from their distress. He made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed. Then they were glad that the waters were quiet, and He brought them to their desired haven.” Although not a prophecy, the literary parallel in Psalm 107 reveals something about the relationship between God and man which spans the testaments and is summarized in the first part of Psalm 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God.”
Our current society and daily lives can get frantic. There are troubles about money, a job, school, social activities, politics, family, and a million other little things that cause anxiety. This is not a new phenomenon, but one that even Jesus Himself addressed in Matthew 6:25-34 in His Sermon on the Mount. He said not to worry so much about food and clothing: “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” This is not to say that food and clothing are not important. They are! The body needs food to survive. The soul needs clothing on the body to remain clean and protected. Jesus is not telling to cast these things off, but to have faith and trust in the Lord to provide: “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow not reap not gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? … Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
In the church, Christians do not suffer want in any real sense. One does not go hungry, unclothed, unhoused, or without the needs of this life. That does not mean they go away completely, but the one who has faith in the Lord as they should does not let their soul be troubled with it because the Christian knows that, despite all the troubles of this life, they belong to the Lord.
We look to Solomon and his God-given wisdom and see the same conclusions which he came to from the opposite direction: “Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. … Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. … So, I hated life because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind” (Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:11, 17).
Solomon concluded, after having explored the desires of life, that he was anxious for no purpose. All the things of this life didn’t matter in the end. Sure, they matter at the time, and for the continuation of life, but when this life is over, we are only at the beginning of what really matters.
On the Sea of Galilee, the disciples were too focused on the immediate situation that life had them in to realize that Jesus was with them. He would keep His disciples, except the son of destruction (John 17:12) and nothing was going to happen to Jesus until His mission could be fulfilled. (Psalm 91:11-12) Jesus asks them, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?”
Our lives get so busy that sometimes we forget that the Lord is with us. Sometimes we just need to stop a moment and be still and remind ourselves who is slumbering in our presence, not because He does not care or is not interested in intervening, but as an example of how little these temporary troubles should be even if they feel like the end of the world to us. “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” Let us “Be still and know that [He] is God.”
Lance Byers