Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And as you well know, if you hang out with me much, I really like fly fishing. But fly fishing back east is very different than fly fishing out west where I live. Back east, a lot of the places where the water is cold enough for trout is at the bottom of dams. You get that reservoir, the water's hot on top, too hot for trout, but down at the bottom, it's cold for trout. And then that water comes out of the dam and it's real cold. And so for a few hundred yards or a few miles, you get trout water in places where otherwise that might not happen. Which is awesome. As a fly fisherman, I can go below a dam and I can fish and I can get rainbow trout and it's really fun, but it's also kind of dangerous because eventually those dams are gonna open up at some point during the day. And the low flow water level, which is nice for wading around, it's serene and tranquil, will turn into mean high flow water really quickly. And they got stuff on the websites, and you can check when they're gonna open up the dams, and there's usually a horn that sounds to say, hey, you might want to get out of there. And so I had it all scheduled out one time when I was in Tennessee fishing with a buddy, but after we waded out several hundred yards into the middle of this very wide river, and it was kind of tricky to get there, I start pulling out the fish, and then I look at a rock that I could see a minute ago, and now I can't see the rock. And then I look at the rate of flow of the water, I'm like, oh no, I need to get out of here. I just had the time wrong or something, but the water is coming. And so I signaled my buddy, and we start trying to get out, and we just can't. It's too deep. We're wearing waders. You really don't want your waders to fill up with water, and we did end up having to swim out with full waders. You can speculate as to what the waders were full of, but we were a little bit panicked, and as that water came up, that sense of control that we like to have about our natural environment started to go away, and you gotta play it real cool. But inside, you're like, this could be it right here, right now. Likewise, in Matthew chapter 8, we've got a situation where things are cool and under control in a natural environment and things get out of control really quickly. And that thing in your brain that says, This is freaky because no one can do anything about nature is the same thing that kicks in for the disciples in their situation on the Sea of Galilee. We'll talk about details here in a minute, but let me just read it to you, starting in verse 23 of Matthew 8. Then he got into the boat and his disciples followed him. Suddenly a furious storm came up on the lake, so that the waves swept over the boat, but Jesus was sleeping. The disciples went and woke him, saying, Lord, save us, we're gonna drown. And he replied, You have little faith, why are you so afraid? Then he got up and rebuked the wind and the waves, and it was completely calm. The men were amazed and asked, What kind of man is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him. So let's just do this one old school and break it down bit by bit. At the beginning, we got then he got into the boat and his disciples followed him. Remember what we were doing last time? There was all this big hubbub, people are following him to get him to do miracles. You got other people who are like, I'm gonna follow you wherever you go, or I'm gonna follow you to somebody go bury my dad first. And Jesus gives both of those people a bit of a disclaimer to use the term we've been throwing out, and just moves on. He's not waiting around for people, he's doing stuff. It was time to go, and so he went. He didn't beg, he didn't wait, he didn't pander. He said how the things were. Some people followed him, some people didn't, and he was cool with that. Also, Jesus just got done saying, hey, look out, if you follow me, it's probably gonna get tough at times. And then, like two verses later, things get tough because this giant storm comes up and the waves are sweeping over the boat. And so this is in keeping with what we know about the Sea of Galilee to this very day. You know, let's just talk about the Sea of Galilee a little bit. I'm not an expert on this, I've only been there once. I stayed for a week in the city of Tiberias, which is kind of on the south end of the Sea of Galilee, also known as the Sea of Tiberias. And we got an Airbnb, so we stayed way up high in this lady's kind of rundown old apartment. And the place wasn't great, but the view was amazing. And that sea, which sits like at sea level, maybe just a little bit below, it looks like a volcanic basin. It's not, I don't think, but it looks like it. That sea will just be still as can be. I mean, it looks like glass, you can see all the way across it. And then two minutes later, it'll look like this churned up bowl of death that you would never want to go out on. So I myself have witnessed something that the original audience would have been very familiar with about how tumultuous and mercurial the Sea of Galilee could be. So this nasty storm kicks up. We have recorded waves of over seven feet in our lifetime, so we know it still gets crazy, and we can picture exactly what kind of boat these guys would have been in. There's a fishing boat that dates to the first half of the first century AD that's been dug up out of the shores of the Sea of Galilee. I mean, it was a very shallow shipwreck, and it is on the west side of the Sea of Galilee at like nine o'clock, at Magdala, maybe something like that. Whatever the case, you can go and see it. It's like called the Jesus boat or something like that. And you can see about how long it was. You can see that there might be room for one person to possibly sleep below deck, and apparently that's what Jesus is doing. He's sleeping below deck. So Jesus is all calm while everybody else's metaphorical waiters are filling up. They're in panic mode, but also think about this. If you go out fly fishing with me in water that I know really, really well, and things are a little weird, and maybe it's running a little bit higher than normal, but I'm calm and I'm like, nah, it's okay. I've been here a billion times. You're going to be calm, even if it's your first time out. But if we get into some water and I start looking a little nervous and a little panicky, and the tone of my voice gets a little more barking, like, hey, we need to get out of here right now, your heart's gonna start beating. It's like if the stewardesses on the airplane are being chill, even as the plane's bumping and rocking around, and who cares, right? But if the stewardesses start acting nervous, uh, look out, things are about to get weird. But Jesus, who theoretically isn't even the expert in the boat, is completely fine. I mean, he's so fine that he's asleep. So then the disciples go down and wake him up and they're like, You gotta save us, we're gonna drown. Whoa, this is full-on panic mode. They're terrified because this thing is out of their control. And what's like the worst feeling in the world? I mean, it's that, right? A situation that feels perilous, that obliterates our illusion of control that we usually maintain with our technology and our decision making and having the government take care of us and make sure everybody thing's always gonna be fine and everybody's always gonna be safe. But the government can't always take care of us and our technology can't always save us. And in those moments where you have those brushes with your own mortality and your own weakness and impotence, it's really freaky. People get desperate, people get honest, they start sharing what they actually think about things, and these guys, though they are pretty early in the process of following Jesus, they know enough about this guy to be like, look, he fixed the centurion's servant, he fixed your mother-in-law, Pete, he fixed that leper guy. Like, who else are we gonna turn to? Now, you and me were like, oh well, I know the story. Jesus calms the storm, and that just gives me such comfort because it's kind of a metaphor for the storms in my own life. I mean, we've heard pop songs about this, we've heard sermons about this, we know that Jesus fixes it, but they didn't know that. They had no idea what the extent of his power was or the limit of his power was. I mean, when they woke him up, did they think it was maybe possible that he was gonna come up and be like, Don't fear my children. We oh crap! This one's really bad. I actually don't know if I've got it, guys. This is gonna take teamwork. Like, what did they expect him to do? Well, here's what he did. He just gets up and he's like, guys, relax. Like, who do you think I am? Or that's an awful paraphrase. You have little faith. Why are you so afraid? So in Jesus' mind, he's shown them enough that they should be able to deduce that he could handle a situation like this without any problems whatsoever. But uh, let me pump the brakes a little bit here. Why would it be fair for him to expect them to know that? See, I think that's kind of important for what we do with the passages we think about it now. As believers, as skeptics, as out and out rejectors, uh this seems like the key question of the text. Why did he think they should know? Why was he justified in saying, you guys don't have faith, and you should have been able to see what I could do here? Okay, well, one, he's broken the laws of time and space, so we at least know that he can sort of do that. But two, it's kind of like when you watch Game of Thrones or any other really great long form storytelling story. If the character's arc isn't done and what they need to accomplish in the story isn't done, they have plot armor. This can't be killed yet, because they still have things to do that nobody else can do. Well, maybe Jesus feels like he's done enough here that they should recognize that he has plot armor. He just can't be killed in a freak boating accident. He's the Messiah, he's the redeemer of all things. I mean, come on, you guys, you you twelve of all people have surely seen enough to have that figured out. And maybe further, Jesus is reasonable in expecting them to have enough faith to know that this is going to work out just on the grounds that, eh, what if you die? I mean, Jesus is right there. He's the one who transcends death. There's his kingdom, it's eternal, it's bigger than this. Whatever you choose to make of Jesus' statement about faith or why they should have seen enough to have enough faith to believe this would work out, it does tell us two things for sure. One, Jesus believes that he has already shown enough and said enough for people to get what he's about. Hmm, interesting. So I guess we still need the rest of the book of Matthew, but it seems like Jesus feels like he's already done enough. Two, it means that people who have seen as much as you and I at this point have seen of the book of Matthew are not necessarily gonna be sure or have a clear picture of it. So if we allow ourselves to come at this text as though it's our first time, it feels like the text even right here is saying, like, oh, well, even if you're like the disciples, you seem like they were pretty good at being Christians, yeah, it still takes a minute. And even though Jesus thinks they should have had this down by now, it's not like he kicks them out of the boat and lets them drown, and he rescues them and buys more time and they catch on as it goes along. You guys are probably caught on to the fact that this has sounded weird for the last week or so. We're doing work to fix the house that got broken over the winter, and so everything's taken down in my little space where I like to record. So I'm sorry, it's been echoey, it's been on the road, it's been goofy, but I don't know, I really like doing this, so I just take it with me wherever I go so that I can get it done, whether I'm traveling or sitting at home or whatever. So thank you so much for being patient with that. I realize it affects the audio situation a little bit from time to time, but uh, you're awesome. So, at any rate, uh, we're gonna pause there. It's gonna be one of those abrupt pauses because I look down at the timestamp here and we're getting really long on this one. So we're just gonna split it in two and I'll pick it up abruptly tomorrow and we'll keep going. Thanks for doing this with me. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do it again soon.