20. Wondering at Christ
20
Wondering at Christ1
And they being afraid wondered, saying one to another, What manner of man is this! for he commandeth even the winds and water, and they obey him.
—Luke 8:25
We read that this is the only fruit this miracle produced in the seamen: They begin wondering because they are astonished to see a man command the sea and the winds.
1. The miracles of Christ and all the works of God are so far inferior to His Word that they can teach us nothing of the Trinity or of two natures in the one person and of our mediator, Jesus Christ.
2. Oh how little of God do we see, especially being void of His own light! Job says that even though God is at our elbow, we do not know it is Him: “Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him” (Job 23:8). But is this because God was neither behind Job nor before him? No, God goes round about us. Every man may, as it were, put forth his hand, and touch the Almighty (Acts 17:27). Therefore, Job adds, He is “on the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him” (Job 23:9). We cannot trace the footsteps of His unsearchable ways. Alas, we only amuse ourselves to see superficially the outside, as it were, the brim of divine providence. Men or angels cannot dive to the bottom of the ways of our Lord. He says Himself, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:9).
3. We come only as near to Christ as to go at most three or four steps towards Him.
(a) Some are convinced and wonder. They say, “This must be God,” as in Luke 4:22, when Christ preaches as Christ, and like Himself, they all bear Him witness and wonder at the gracious words that proceed out of His mouth. Yet they are not a step nearer to Him. They despise Him and say, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” Some know that “there hath been a prophet among them,” but they are scorpions and briars and thorns and will not hear (Ezek. 2:5–6).
(b) Some are enlightened and believe for an hour (Matt. 13:20–21). Faith that lives for only an hour is a sickly, dying faith.
(c) Some are a step nearer. They have joy in Christ (Matt. 13:20), and the word of a prophet is to them “as…very lovely” (Ezek. 33:32). The gospel is sweet to many, but if they do not come nearer, they will not hear or obey.
(d) Some taste of “the good word of God” and “the powers (Gk. ‘manifold powers’) of the world to come” (Heb. 6:5), yet come never nearer to Christ but fall off, as if they were afraid to be converted. They do not go a fifth step further to give themselves up wholly to Jesus Christ.
If natural men wonder at the power and excellency of Christ, in that He, with a word, commands both sea and winds and they obey Him, should not Christ be to us a world’s wonder? Should He not be to us altogether lovely? If it were possible to lay in the opposite scale of the balance from Christ, a world of angels, put in yet millions of worlds of angels, add to them a world of Solomons with tripled wisdom, put in all the delights of the sons of men, put in yet the flower and rose of ten thousand possible worlds’ perfections, they should weigh less than He, and the balance would never [come] down.
1. Sermon Preached…Lords, 63–64.