Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And I did the thing again where I just start talking and getting excited about a passage. And then later I look down like, oh wow, that's not gonna work for something called the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. So we're gonna cut it in two. So the first half of this conversation about Matthew 8, 23 through 27, that's the account of Jesus calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee. The first half of that is yesterday's or last episode, and I think that's 0170. I think that's probably right. So then this one would be 0171. You're definitely gonna need the last one in order to make sense of this one because we're gonna pick it up abruptly, right after the music that I'm gonna play in three, two, one, now. This is where it gets weird. So then he got up out of the boat and he rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm. There are two things that stand out for me about this one. One is what the original audience might have thought of. I think this incident would have conjured memories for them of King Xerxes, the one from Esther, the one from 300, the one who went to punish the Spartans and the Athenians for the defeat that his predecessor had suffered in trying to conquer or rather bring to heal the Greek city-states who had come into conflict with their Persian overlords. Xerxes, famously, when he was trying to cross the Hellespont, that's a little skinny chunk of river between what we would call Asia Minor or Turkey and the mainland of Europe, as he's trying to cross that, the Hellespont is being uncooperative. So famously, Xerxes, who is a god king himself, sends out some dudes with flogs and is like, whip that river. And they vigorously whipped the river. It doesn't seem like that was particularly effective, though eventually Xerxes and his men did get across the river. They got thumped really, really badly by the Spartans and the Athenians and all of the other Greeks a little bit later on. So for the original audience, the whole incident with Xerxes whipping the Hellespont would have been a metaphor for the impotence of blustering, overblown, self-important kings who don't really understand their own limitations. Whereas now that Jesus is doing it, the original audience is like, oh, what are we gonna do? Are you gonna whip the Hellespont again? We've seen this routine, except then it stops. And that's the second thing that stands out to me. Dang, this time it actually worked. And I'm not gonna go do the whole Greek breakdown just in the interest of time here, but the original language does indicate that it immediately was calm. Now think about how long it would take if you vigorously sloshed around a lake the size of a major city for that water to settle down once you stopped whatever was creating the commotion. It's gonna take a minute, but it says here that it was immediately calm. Am I maybe reading into the language too much? Ah yeah, maybe I can do that sometimes. But it certainly gives the impression that it wasn't just that the storm stopped, but that immediately it went from crazy to tranquil, and that very publicly, very visibly defies the laws of physics. I don't know what I would do at this point. If I'm in the boat, I'm going from total panic over my impending death to total panic over who I'm in a boat with. What in the world was that? You know how in superhero movies, you know, you like the main character, especially in origin stories, but they haven't revealed their power yet, and their friends don't know about it, and then a crisis comes up, and there's this moment where the hero has to do something, and so they use their newfound powers in front of their old acquaintances for the first time, and the old acquaintances are kind of freaked out a little bit. They're like, Whoa, what was that? And it's only in the dumb superhero movies where everybody's like, Awesome! Because the reality is you would be concerned. Who is this person who is my friend who can stand in front of trains and not die, or get shot by bullets and not die? This is a little bit freaky and other to me. And that is the response of the disciples. The men were amazed and asked, what kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him. The response of the disciples to me supports the idea that the Greek language holds out that this was an immediate stoppage of the churning and crazy stuff that was happening. If the wind just died down quickly and they're like, oh, things got better, they might be tempted to be like, that was a crazy coincidence. Like he got up and yelled at things and then it just settled down. But that isn't the impression we get. These guys are shocked by what happened, and they thought they understood who Jesus was, but now they're like, uh maybe we don't really know who Jesus is. Maybe we're underestimating him. Apparently we don't really know who Jesus is. We thought he was powerful, we thought he was a big deal, but this is next level. Remember all of those claimants to being Messiah that I talked about who had come and gone in this era? They didn't do anything like this. Like maybe little parlor tricks and gimmicks, sleight of hand stuff that could fool the gullible, but there's no way to fake something like this. But beyond that, think about what happens when they get to the shore and start comparing notes with other people in the same line of work. They're like, hey, do you remember like four nights ago would have been uh Thursday? Do you remember like 7 p.m. that gigantic storm rolled in and stuff got crazy and everybody was hustling off the lake and then it just quit? And the other people are like, Yes! Was that not the weirdest thing ever? It was just bizarre. I've never seen anything like that. Well, yeah, about that. We were actually out in the middle of the lake when that happened, and well, you know that guy we've been hanging around with? Yeah, yeah, I've seen the one that he's got the hair and the dreamy eyes. Yeah, that's the one. So he just got up and barked at the storm and it quit. Just like that. That's what you saw, Kyle. I just think about comparing notes over that. This seems like kind of a private miracle, but I think there would have been a lot of secondary witnesses who would have had their minds blown by the thing as well. And that collective mind blowing that would have been experienced all at once by all the people on the Sea of Galilee, I think helps to explain why there's this gigantic regional reaction, some freaked out, like the disciples were at first, some really enthusiastic in regard to Jesus, because I think people saw this thing happen, and as word spread as to what the epicenter of this crazy freak event was, a whole lot of people who know how that lake works and who know how that lake does not work and have been looking at that their whole lives would have reacted viscerally and heavily in response to what they just saw go down and the rumors that were floating around about what that all meant. Speaking of what that all meant, what does this all mean to us? On the one hand, this is where typically with this passage we got to do the thing where, like, we say Jesus can calm the storms in your life, and if you're sad or stressed out about things, Jesus is powerful enough to do something about it. And I think that's good and encouraging and therapeutic in a way, and I think Jesus is like that, but I'm not sure that's necessarily the point of the passage. I think the point of the passage is not so much to cozy up to Jesus and be like, wow, you really do help me feel better about my problems, which is great. But I think the point of this passage is to respond at this point in Matthew like the disciples did. What the heck is going on? Who the heck is this guy? What kind of authority are we actually talking about here? Like I thought I had a sense of how significant this character was, because you made somebody's leprosy go away like before people's eyes. He healed a guy from long distance, just with the phrase, he gently put a hand on some lady and she was instantly healed of whatever sickness she had. Like I thought he was a big deal, but this is insane. It's like when you watch the old Star Wars movies and you see Luke struggle to use the force to move a skinny little lightsaber like four feet from a snowbank into his hand, and you're like, oh, he did it. That's amazing. And then you go and watch some of the like the Clone Wars cartoons and the prequel stuff, and you got Jedi who are moving like planets with their hands and things like that. Whoa, that's a completely different scale. I guess I need to rethink the amount of power that these characters have. And that's fun in science fiction and everything, but this people were seeing it, and they had to completely recalibrate their sense of the power and authority of Jesus. And the response is to say, he is other from us. He looks like us and he eats like us, and he uses language like us and he takes naps and the boat like us, but that is not like us. That is just decidedly other and different and frankly better than us. So if at this point in the passage, the attentive reader is getting to a place of comfort and familiarity with Jesus, we're like, this guy's like my bro, he's like my partner and helping to solve the problems of me and the problems of the world. And if we partner together and work together with what I bring to the table and he brings to the table, we could do some really neat things that involve the kingdom, and that'll be awesome. Look, if that's the attitude that somebody's reading this and getting toward, this obliterates it. Also, he commands all of nature and is something to be feared. And I don't think that's such a bad thing. This is a demonstration of unbelievable power and authority. And those smaller demonstrations that we saw before demonstrate that he has authority over this limitation, this limitation, this limitation. But you remember one of the five big limitations we talked about was just the physical world and physics in general. And now we see that now, he's not like us. He's other. And if he were like us, he wouldn't deserve all the things that he says he deserves in the Sermon on the Mount. To be treated as a king and unquestioningly authoritative, the ultimate judge of all things. Like if he's just a good person, you cannot ascribe to him that stuff because even a good person will abuse that power, will get those judgments wrong. You just can't treat a good person like a god, but you can treat a god like a god, and now these guys have seen firsthand something that they apparently couldn't even suspect about who he is and what kind of power and authority he wields. And that I think is the kind of stuff that the text intends for you to take from this passage. Awe. We've done the intimacy thing, seeing Jesus as a little baby, seeing him up close, seeing him be interested in people, but this is almost a preview of the transfiguration where we see just this little glimmer of the amazing reservoir of unlimited power that he's actually drawing on. And I think the idea here as we make our way across the lake and into the next anecdotes is be impressed, be in awe. And if you were thinking that that right posture before the king, falling at his feet, your king of everything, your will be done, your kingdom come, was maybe too much. Maybe this passage is supposed to make it possible for you to say, ooh, maybe assuming the right posture is the only thing that makes any sense at all. Last thought, you know who's awesome? This is everybody who supports this program on Patreon at patreon.com slash the TMBH podcast. Was that stilted? I'm sorry if that was stilted. I really do appreciate you all. Thank you so much for doing that. It makes it so that this can happen, and I don't know how to put that any more simply. We get to do this, I get to do this thing that I love doing, even though I sometimes have to drag my computer and my microphone around with me to ridiculous places. I love doing it. I love doing this every day. And how do you say thank you to people enough for making it so that you get to do the stuff that you love? So thank you a ton. You know who else is awesome? All of you who do not support the program, because you don't have to. This is free and it's always gonna be free, and you don't have to kick in anything. I hope you enjoy it and have a blast. And anybody who makes the time to listen to this, to hang out with me and process this stuff together is a kindred spirit, and I appreciate you enormously. On that note, we're gonna cash it in on Jesus Calming the Storm and shift our attention toward the next passage tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.