What do Christians mean by faith?
In the simplest sense, faith is trust or allegiance to a person. That definition is too flat for my taste, so I think it is better to explore the concept with a more specific and common question. If the Lord is good, why do bad things happen? You see, it is easier to demonstrate trust when nothing is at stake. Declaring Christian faith - “I believe that Jesus is Lord” - costs you nothing when you feel like your life is in control. Calm winds make for certain faith.
But what about when the storms are raging? Storms are a simple and powerful example (and metaphor) for life being out of our control. Ancient people felt powerless before the fearsome might of nature. And while we understand more about nature and are better predictors of storms, modern people feel just as powerless in the grip of the storm and the unruly behavior of the earth.
In the same way, it is common to hear imagery around storms and nature when praising the Lord and describing his power. Psalm 29 is a great example of this. It begins, “Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.” What sort of power? “The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the Lord, over many waters. The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.” God’s voice rules over and through nature. The thunder that shakes the house is both issued by his voice and subject to it. His voice is lighting that “flashes forth flames of fire” and thunder “shakes the wilderness.” When waters pour through the rivers and fill the valleys, “The Lord sits enthroned over the flood; the Lord sits enthroned as king forever.” At all times and in all circumstances, he is Lord.
Scholars have pointed out that this language sounds eerily similar to the hymns pagans sang to Baal. Baal was indeed a god of storms, and the songs found in the Ugaritic texts discovered by archaeologists in the late 1920s contain some common language. I’m not sure that we can know for certain that Psalm 29 draws from that stock of hymns, but it would not surprise me. It sounds very much like the Israelites to say, “That’s a very nice hymn. I think we will take it.” It was a true hymn after all, just with the wrong subject. Israel claimed that their Lord and no other controlled the storms.
In fact, the significance of their claim for the question of faith is actually greater than any Baal worshipper could muster. In a pagan religion, you had a variety of gods to appeal to for aid. If storms were out of hand, you prayed to the storm god. If crops were insufficient, you appealed to the harvest god. If good things happened, you said “thanks”. If bad things happened, you blamed them on the whim of these gods. You did not need to sort out the “why” of the actions of the gods. You just had to manage your expectations a bit.
For Israel, that was not an option. They professed just one god, a true Creator God. All of nature, history, and circumstance was under his sole control. Thus, things that appeared to be good and things that appeared to be bad had to be attributed to the same Being. “The voice of the Lord makes the deer give birth and strips the forests bare” (Psalm 29:9). Similarly, Isaiah hears God say, “I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the Lord, who does all these things” (Isaiah 45:7). The simplicity of that faith attributed all things to the Lord. The challenge of that faith was learning to hear “the voice of the Lord” in both seemingly good and seemingly bad circumstances.
In Mark’s Gospel, we see all these ideas put to the test when faith - personal trust - runs headlong into a very real storm. “On that day, when evening had come, Jesus said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was” (Mark 4:35–36). These two verses give us a picture of a stormless moment when professing faith in Jesus as Lord was as simple as could be. Jesus had asked fishermen to convey him in a boat. They had quite literally lived their entire lives preparing for a job like this. The water was calm, the sky was clear, and the task at hand was well understood. As it turns out, treating Jesus as Lord is easier when we feel in control of our lives.
But the feeling of control is a lie.
“And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling” (Mark 4:37). We are always one storm away from capsizing. We are also one gust removed from the stark realization that we are small vessels on an untamed sea. The same instinct that believed our control amounted to God’s control will then reverse the equation. We think the Lord is not in control when we feel like we are not in control. Obviously - we suppose - if the Lord was in control he would be doing exactly what we would do if we ran the show. Since things are not going as we planned, God must be asleep at the wheel.
As it happens, Jesus is sleeping, but not at the wheel. In this instance, he is sleeping on a cushion in the stern of the ship (Mark 4:38). His disciples accost him with an accusing question, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” His sleep looked to them like indifference. Stated another way, when we think the Lord is not in control, we also think he does not care. We assume a lordly God who loves us would act in just the same way we would act in every situation. No matter how often he reminds us that his thoughts and his ways differ from ours “as the heavens are higher than the earth” (Isaiah 55:8), we fail to understand.
The simplicity of Mark 4:39 is a verdict against us all: “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.” Jesus had never been in any danger. The sailors who suddenly felt out of control during the storm had never actually been in control when the sea had been calm. The master of the waves, the sea, the storm, the boat, and the sailors had never taken his hand away from the rudder of the universe.
If you read this story and conclude, “Wow, Jesus is Lord because he can stop a storm,” then you are missing a big part of what the story has to show us all. The message of the scene is not merely that Jesus can calm a storm. The message is that Jesus had still been in control when the storm was raging. The Lord is in control, and the Lord does care. At all times. In all circumstances. “The voice of the Lord makes the deer give birth and strips the forests bare.” Both are true, and both are within his hand.
“He said to them, ‘Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” (Mark 4:40) When Jesus - and therefore Christians - use the word faith, we do not mean that we believe Jesus may scratch out a victory against the perils of nature. We do not mean that we are optimistic about God’s ability to overcome our addictions, our shortcomings, our circumstances, and our enemies. We mean our allegiance to God remains during those very trials.
Faith is trust in the Lord during the storm.
We do not see God as he is despite the storm. We see him through it. It is in the thunder that God’s voice is heard. Only because of the storm, the disciples could ask, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:41) The storm shows us more about the Lord than we ever knew. It shows us that he is lord, and we are not. It demands dependence on him.
If during your storm of life, you are not crying out in worship to God, it is a waste of a storm. Those are the moments when faith means more than trust in a God who bends to our will. Those are the moments when faith means hearing his voice in circumstances we do not control. Those are the moments when faith truly means professing that Jesus is Lord and that he does whatever he pleases.
Dr. Benjamin Williams is the Senior Minister at the Central Church of Christ in Ada, Oklahoma and a regular writer at So We Speak. Check out his books The Faith of John’s Gospel and Why We Stayed or follow him on Twitter, @Benpreachin.
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