Luke 8:23 “But as they sailed He fell asleep. And a windstorm came down on the lake, and they were filling with water, and were in jeopardy.”
So if Jesus is God then He should have just kept anything bad from happening, right? I mean if Jesus could calm the storm then surely He could have prevented it altogether. So why didn’t He? What was the purpose of intentionally allowing this windstorm to overtake them?
Jesus is infinitely more powerful than we can imagine. What He can do and what He does do are often different things. This is an important thing to understand about God. He could do a lot of things with our world that He just doesn’t do. And why? It is because of His nature.
God is totally different from the imagined gods of mankind. He isn’t fickle, limited, lazy, petty, or capricious. He is good, tremendously good, and extremely holy. He does only the most perfect things all of the time. He never does anything evil, but He also never does anything incorrectly. He doesn’t make mistakes.
Jesus didn’t need to make the disciples lives a veritable smorgasbord of supernatural blessings in order to teach them what they needed to know. On the contrary, it seems He chose to do things the way He did in order to teach them better. He didn’t keep them from hardship or fear, but delivered them and told them not to be afraid right in the middle of all of it. And this is because their lives would be the same once He had returned to heaven.
God doesn’t put an invisible bubble of complete protection around His children. At least, not the way we see it. He does indeed protect us, but again not as we might think. He will allow hardship, hurt, and pain to be a part of our daily lives. He wants us to love Him in the middle of all that. And why is that?
The devil once said that Job, a great servant of God, served the Lord only because God had blessed Him. This was not the case, but God worked out the proving of this fact. And He does similar things in our lives today to show us how to have a relationship with Him in spite of anything that might come into our lives in the meantime.
Heavenly Father, though we often have a hard time understanding, we know Your way is perfect. You know exactly what You are doing. If we can trust You today, we can trust You tomorrow. Thank You for approaching us the way You do. You are gracious, kind, and loving. In the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ I pray and praise You, Amen.