Sorry for the gap in posting. I have been traveling to several places, which makes it harder to post. One of those places was a geology conference in Banff, Alberta. I will be reporting on that shortly. In the meantime. . .

In my book Meet God Again for the First Time I describe how Jesus provides the meaning of Old Testament Israel’s whole life and history. He is the second Adam, the new Moses, and the son of David, among many others. Whenever you read a story or a letter in the New Testament, you want to be constantly aware of references to the characters, stories and experiences of the apostles’ past. This was the way New Testament writers related to the their Bible, what we often call the Old Testament. God meets people where they are. And he embedded His message for us in the language and style of real people in the first century.

So I was not surprised when Timothy Keller (see previous blog), in his description of the Mark’s version of Jesus’ stilling the storm, noticed multiple references to the Jonah story in the Old Testament. What did Jesus have in common with the world’s first recorded submarine ride?

For starters, both Jesus and Jonah were in a boat, both boats were overtaken by a storm and the description of the storm was quite similar in both cases. But the similarities do not end there.

When the storm begins, both Jesus and Jonah are asleep (Jonah 1:5; Mark 4:38). In both stories sailors wake up the sleeping passenger and assert, "We are going to die!" Jonah 1:6; 4:38. And in both cases there is a miraculous divine intervention which stills the storm. But instead of calming the sailors down, the stilling of the storm makes them even more terrified (Jonah 1:15-16; Mark 4:40-41)!

The two stories are almost identical except for one thing. In the Jonah story, he tells the sailors to throw him into the sea and it will become calm (Jonah 1:11-12). That doesn’t happen in the Jesus story. Or does it? People have noticed that there is very little overt "theology" in the Gospel of Mark. Whatever messages one gets from that gospel are embedded in the stories and the way they are ordered and tied together. The same is true of this story. In another place Jesus said, "One greater than Jonah is here" (Matt 12:43). And he explains that just as Jonah spent three days and nights in the belly of a fish, He would spend a similar amount of time in the tomb (Matt 12:40). He is the new Jonah. And just as Jonah stilled a storm by the sacrifice of himself, so Jesus would still the ultimate storm of sin and death by the sacrifice of Himself on the cross.

When we go through the storms of our lives, it is easy to wonder, as the disciples of Jesus did in Mark 4: 38-41, whether God even cares about what we have to experience. But when you come to know the meaning of the cross, when you come to understand that He threw Himself into the ultimate storm, the one the threatens everything we are (sin and death), it puts our smaller storms into a bit of perspective. If He did not abandon us in the ultimate storm, why would He do so in the relatively minor trials of our lives?

From the cross we get a sense of the kind of God who rules our lives as well as the universe. A God who is caring, gracious and merciful. In His wisdom he does not calm every one of our storms, but as we walk with Him we learn to trust Him even in the midst of the storm. And we learn to trust that one day He will still all storms for eternity. And that is what we call hope.