Who Is This?
Day 4 — Headwind: Mark 4:40-41
Introduction
Yesterday you named the fear underneath the fear.
Maybe you wrote it down — the deeper layer, the thing the storm has been saying to you about God, about yourself, about whether any of this is going to be okay. Maybe you spoke Isaiah 41:10 out loud with your own name in it and felt something shift, even slightly. Maybe you identified the place you’ve been pulling back from and showed up there, even briefly.
Or maybe you did none of it, and the fear is still sitting exactly where it was.
Either way, today we go back to the boat — not to the storm, but to what happened after it stopped. Because the disciples’ response to the calm is, in some ways, more important than their response to the storm. And it has something specific to say to the fear you’ve been carrying.
Scripture
He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”
They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”
— Mark 4:40-41 (NIV)
Reflection
What’s Happening in the Text
The storm is over. The sea is completely calm. Jesus has spoken and the weather obeyed — and now the disciples are more afraid than they were during the squall.
This is worth sitting with. The wind and waves terrified them. The man who silenced the wind and waves terrified them more. They had a category for violent weather. They did not have a category for this.
Their question — who is this? — is not a question about His identity in the way we might ask it. They know His name. They’ve been traveling with Him. What they are asking is something closer to: what kind of being are we in a boat with? The storm revealed something about Jesus they hadn’t fully reckoned with. And the reckoning produced a fear that was entirely different in kind from what the waves had produced.
This is what theologians call the fear of the Lord. Not terror in the ordinary sense — but the particular awe that comes from encountering Someone who exists at a level of reality that dwarfs everything you thought was large.
What This Means for the Reader
There are two kinds of fear in this story, and they are not the same thing.
The first is the fear of the storm — the fear that something bad is going to happen, that the situation is beyond control, that the outcome is not going to be good. This is the fear most of us are most familiar with. It is the fear of circumstance, of outcome, of what might be lost.
The second is the fear that comes after the storm stops — the fear of encountering Someone whose authority over your circumstances is so complete and so effortless that it rearranges your entire understanding of what you’re dealing with. Who is this? Not anxiety. Awe.
Here is what the disciples discovered in that moment, and what the headwind is trying to teach you now: the God who is with you in the storm is larger than the storm. Not slightly larger. Not comparably powerful. The storm obeyed Him the way creation obeys its Creator — immediately, completely, without negotiation.
The fear you named yesterday is real. The storm you are in is real. But the One in the boat with you does not look at your circumstances and wonder how this is going to turn out. He is not anxiously monitoring the situation. He was asleep in the stern — not because He was unaware, but because nothing about the storm required His urgent attention.
That is not indifference. That is authority.
The invitation today is not to stop feeling afraid of your circumstances. It is to let that fear be gradually displaced by something larger — the awe of who is actually in the boat. Fear of the storm shrinks in proportion to your understanding of who the Captain is. You don’t manufacture that understanding. You encounter it — in Scripture, in prayer, in moments like this one where the text pulls back the curtain and you see, even briefly, what the disciples saw.
Who is this? Ask the question. Let it do its work.
Grace Note
The Lord is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life — of whom shall I be afraid? — Psalm 27:1 (NIV)
David doesn’t argue himself out of fear. He redirects it — toward Someone whose presence makes every other threat recalculate. The question whom shall I fear? is not rhetorical optimism. It is a declaration made by a man who had been in real danger and had learned, repeatedly, who was with him in it.
Prayer Prompt
Jesus, I want to know You the way the disciples knew You after the storm — not just as someone I follow, but as Someone whose authority over my life and my circumstances is so complete that it changes the size of everything else.
I’ll be honest: most of the time I think about You in proportion to my problems. I bring You what I’m facing and I wonder if it’s too much, if this is the one that won’t resolve, if this time the outcome is going to be different. I measure You against the storm instead of measuring the storm against You.
Shift that in me. Let the fear of what I’m facing be slowly replaced by the awe of who You are. Not because the hard thing isn’t hard — it is. But because You spoke and the wind stopped, and that means something about what You are capable of doing in my situation that I haven’t fully let myself believe yet.
Who is this? You are my Captain. And I am choosing, today, to be more awed by You than afraid of what’s around me.
Amen.
Response
1. Sit With the Question (Contemplative): Spend five minutes with just this question: Who is this? Not as a theological exercise — as a personal one. What do you actually believe about who Jesus is and what He is capable of? Where has your picture of Him shrunk to fit the size of your problem or experience? Sit in that question without rushing to answer it.
2. Carry the Fear Forward (Connective): Pull out what you wrote yesterday — the fear underneath the fear. Read it again. Then write one sentence underneath it: “But the One in the boat with me is larger than this.” You don’t have to feel it fully yet. Write it anyway. You are building something on the page that your faith will catch up to.
3. Tell Someone What You Saw (Relational): The disciples asked each other — who is this? The question was communal. Find one person today and tell them one thing you’ve seen God do — in your life or in Scripture — that reminds you He is larger than what you’re facing. Speaking it to another person does something that thinking it alone cannot.
To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: https://www.thisistheway.live/t/headwind
© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way