by Jez Carr
In one of his happier moments, poet William Cowper wrote the poem from which we get the immortal line, “God moves in a mysterious way.” The poem continues:
. . . His wonders to perform; He plants his footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm.
When life seems like chaos and storm, we are to remember that God is bigger: He rides upon the storm. But Cowper didn’t always experience God this way. Not long after writing this poem, he became severely depressed. When he read Commodore Anson’s account of one of his sailors falling off the ship in the middle of a storm at sea, Cowper heard a profound resonance with his interior experience. The end of the account goes like this, “ . . . we lost sight of him struggling with the waves, and conceived from the manner in which he swam, that he might continue sensible for a considerable time longer, of the horror attending his irretrievable situation.” Cowper’s final poem, “The Castaway,” reflects on the account and his own experience:
No voice divine the storm allay’d, No light propitious shone; When snatched from all effectual aid, We perish’d, each alone: But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.
Cowper captures something of the power of the imagery around stormy seas. It is uniquely able to connect with the fears and anxieties with which we process our experience of this world, as well as with the feeling of the “voice divine” disappearing in the midst of the roar. Where is the God who rides upon the storm, who answers from “the secret place of thunder?” (Ps. 81:7 [English Standard Version])
Over three reflections, we’re going to explore this imagery as a way to engage faithfully with life’s struggles. This first reflection focuses on how these struggles fit within a healthy Christian worldview, even—or especially—when we ask the “where” question and can’t find tidy answers. In fact, you’ll get a little sick of me asking the question. The second reflection examines how we understand Jesus within this imagery, and how we see him as the primary answer to the “where” question. (Finally!) The final reflection explores what it means to live all this out within the life of faith.
Watery imagery flows through the whole Bible: creation out of water; the flood; the sea that parts in the exodus; Jonah and his huge fish; Jesus walking on water, stilling storms, and warning that storms will beat against your house; the dragon and the sea in Revelation, etc. I’ll leave you to expand the list. Oh yes, and the whole baptism thing. But the imagery finds its deepest emotional expression in the Psalms. Sometimes they celebrate the God who rides upon the storm:
Mightier than the thunder of the great waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea— the LORD on high is mighty. (Ps. 93:4 [ESV])
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging. (Ps. 46:2-3 [New International Version])
. . . And sometimes they ask in bemusement, “Where is the voice divine?”
Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in the miry depths, where there is no foothold. I have come into the deep waters; the floods engulf me. I am worn out calling for help; my throat is parched. My eyes fail, looking for my God. (Ps. 69:1-3 [NIV])
To understand passages like these, we need to understand how water functioned within the world of their authors. In fact, the Bible is drawing on a theme that was prevalent in worldviews across the ancient Near East. The deep waters were chaotic, and chaos was deadly. The deeper you went, the further you were from God’s presence.
And then there’s the petulant gods, ferocious dragons, and their violent battles. All the great ancient mythologies of this region describe storm gods battling sea gods (generally depicted as sea dragons). In Enuma Elish (Babylonian), Marduk (storm god) gathers his cronies and defeats Tiamat (sea god):
Then the lord raised up the flood-storm, his mighty weapon. He mounted the storm-chariot irresistible and terrifying. He harnessed and yoked to it a team-of-four, The Killer, the Relentless, the Trampler, the Swift. Sharp were their poison-bearing teeth. They were versed in ravage, skilled in destruction. On his right he posted the Smiter, fearsome in battle, On the left the Combat, which repels all the zealous. His cloak was an armor of terror, His head was turbaned with his fearsome halo. The lord went forth and followed his course, He set his face towards the raging Tiamat.
Marduk goes on to “split Tiamat like a shellfish” and is ultimately crowned king of the pantheon of gods. Baal is the Philistine (Assyrian) version of Marduk, and there is also significant overlap with the Greek god Zeus and Roman god Jupiter. War in the waters and beasts of the deep were central to how surrounding cultures understood, well, everything: the natural, political, and spiritual worlds, as well as the inner life of everyone who experiences them. And they were profoundly fearful images.
The Bible engages these stories to help us understand Yahweh, the God of Israel, and show how much comfort there is in him being the one who rides upon the storm. Like the “other” storm gods, Yahweh’s power over the storm is central to his nature. He is the one who will “slay the monster of the sea” (Isa. 27:1 [NIV]). But whereas it’s a close call for the “other” gods, there is no contest with him. And more than that: Whereas the others use their power for themselves, Yahweh uses it to rescue his beloved people. Listen to how Yahweh compares to Marduk (above) when King David cries out to him:
He parted the heavens and came down; dark clouds were under his feet. He mounted the cherubim and flew; he soared on the wings of the wind. He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him— the dark rain clouds of the sky. Out of the brightness of his presence clouds advanced, with hailstones and bolts of lightning. The Lord thundered from heaven; the voice of the Most High resounded. He shot his arrows and scattered the enemy, with great bolts of lightning he routed them. The valleys of the sea were exposed and the foundations of the earth laid bare at your rebuke, Lord, at the blast of breath from your nostrils. He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters. (Ps. 18:9-16 [NIV])
Or look at how, in the story of Noah in Genesis 6-9, Yahweh compares to the gods described in other versions.
In Atrahasis, humans are multiplying too fast and their noisiness is disturbing the sleep of the gods, so they decide to cull humanity. In the story of Noah, God is grieved at humanity’s corrupt rejection of him and decides to put an end to it.
In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the flood is so terrible that the gods “cowered like dogs” at what they had created, while in the biblical account, God remains in complete control, the constant initiator of the story.
Finally, at the end of the Gilgamesh flood account, the gods are starving because there has been no one to offer sacrifices (their only source of food), so when “Noah” (here called “Utnapishtim” [here, have a tissue]) offers sacrifices, it says the gods “crowded like flies around the sacrificer,” while when Noah offers sacrifices, God renews his promises with Noah.
In contrast to the cavalier, needy, petulant selfishness of the gods of these other stories, the God of Israel is absolute in his power and unique in his love.
So again we ask, where is he? Repeat warning: No tidy answers lie ahead. But it may help to start at the beginning: As the Bible story opens, uninhabitable watery chaos is all there is. God spends three days creating order before the world can be filled with life, then he appoints his image bearers (us) to keep filling the order and subduing the chaos. But as soon as we meet a beast who has crawled out of the chaos (a serpent—related to sea dragons in ancient taxonomy), rather than subdue it, we embrace it (Gen. 3). The portal has been opened for watery chaos to creep back into God’s flourishing creation and into the hearts of his image bearers. The rest of the Bible is spent defeating it, both in our hearts and in the world around us.
But God promises that his power over the waters remains throughout. The defining story of God for the people of Israel was the exodus (with imagery of parting waters in the midst of chaos reminiscent of the creation story). As the escaped Hebrew slaves find themselves trapped between the watery chaos of the Red Sea and the dust storms of the avenging Egyptians, the chaos enters their very souls: We’re going to die!! (Exod. 14:11) Moses reassures them: “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still” (Exod. 14:14 [NIV]). Not “be still" as in “don’t move” (they still have to walk God’s path of deliverance), but as in “trust; be still in your spirit.” And sure enough, the waters separate, just like in creation, and the escapees walk through to freedom, reborn into new life as the people of God. Every time they hear God’s name, Yahweh, they are to remember his power over the waters, exerted to bring them new life, to rescue them from all that seeks to drown them. Fast-forward: As the Bible comes to a close, we hear that the dragon is dead, and his sea is gone forever (Rev. 21).
However, again, experience tells us we’re not there yet; the dragon still roams. Yet again we ask, where is the God who rides upon the storm? The Psalms survey the possibilities: Maybe he has fallen asleep, or worse, forgotten us? Or maybe he’s lost his power? Maybe what we’re experiencing is his anger? Something must have happened because we certainly don’t experience THAT Yahweh in the midst of OUR storms. The prophets chime in too:
Awake, awake, arm of the LORD, clothe yourself with strength! Awake, as in days gone by, as in generations of old. Was it not you who cut Rahab to pieces, who pierced that monster through? Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep, who made a road in the depths of the sea so that the redeemed might cross over? (Isa. 51:9-10)
Maybe the lack of tidy conclusions is because Jesus is the true answer, and he (from the perspective of the Old Testament) is yet to come, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The imagery of floods and storms allows our imaginations to run riot, to interpret what is happening to us in all sorts of ways: When we’re beyond our ability to cope, we feel “overwhelmed” like a boat sinking in a storm. We may wonder what fearful floods lie ahead. God asks us to choose carefully where we fix our eyes. Like the apostle Peter taking his precarious walk on the water, we’re prone to fix our eyes on the waves rather than on the One who quiets them. But he waits for us to invite his hope into our rioting imaginations, despite the questions. But again, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
For now, what we need to hear is this: Feeling overwhelmed and wondering where God is in the midst of it may not be as spiritually unhealthy as it feels. Whatever storms each of us may be facing, I hope it is a comfort to be reminded that you are not alone. What you are experiencing comes straight out of the Bible’s overarching story. You are not alone; the characters—and authors—of the Bible keep company with you in the midst of the storms.
Jez Carr divides his time between leading the Hutchmoot UK team and pastoring a small Anglican church in Seer Green (a village in Buckinghamshire, UK). He has held a variety of roles in music (mainly jazz) and mission, and has graduate degrees in theology from Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the University of Oxford.
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