While writing a sermon on the story of Jesus calming the storm, related in Mark 4, some time ago, I was struck by a lovely play on words in verse 36. Jesus was dog-tired, just as you and I often are after a long day's work and He said to the disciples, "Let us go over to the other side. Leaving the crowd behind, they (the disciples) took Him along, just as He was, in the boat. There were also other boats with Him." Did you notice the change in emphasis between the two sentences? "(T)hey took him along" with them. But in the next sentence, "There were also other boats with Him."

It was really Jesus in control, however it looked and whatever part the disciples played, or thought they played, in "tak­ing" Jesus to the other side of the lake. They took Him along, but the other boats were with Him, not them.

It reminds one of the story of Uzzah in 2 Samuel 6 when David had ordered the Ark of God to be carried up to Jerusalem and it began to topple as the cart ran over some rough ground, so Uzzah, not a priest and therefore forbidden to touch it, reached out to steady it and stop it falling. God struck him dead on the spot. Psalm 37 tells us we are not to fret for it only leads to sin. Uzzah feared for God's Ark and sinned. Gideon's father had a better attitude when he taunted the Baal-worshippers who were very upset about Gideon destroying Baal's altar and there­fore wanted to kill him. "If Baal's worth his salt," he said, "surely he'll take care of Gideon without your help: let him strike him dead."

We certainly live under the Lord's commands to proclaim the Gospel in all the earth, to guard the faith once deliv­ered to the saints, and so forth. But the guarding of the faith doesn't depend on us as if we must do anything and every­thing to defend it. We'll only end up sinning if we fret about it like that. God's Ark, the cause of God's kingdom in the world, doesn't depend upon us. It might appear so and we might think that we are taking Jesus along with us in our (even reformed) boat, but the reality is rather, I trust at any rate, that we are with Him.

And for a moment the disciples forgot that – and they sinned. "Don't You care if we drown Lord?! For crying out loud, Lord, it was Your idea to take this trip and now, while we're drowning for Your benefit, You just sleep!" And so we too are sometimes inclined to think, like Ham­let,

The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right.

God must split his sides laughing at His own children as much as at the wicked (Psalm 2) sometimes, I think. We are so enamoured of our own impor­tance. We were not born to set anything right. I read a story once about the ambassador to The Hague in the days of the Puritan Commonwealth, Bulstrode Whitelock. (Don 't you just love that name? Who else but a seventeenth-century Englishman could have a name like that!) But once, when he was tossing about through the night in anxiety about the condition of his country, an old servant, lying in the same room said to him, "Sir, may I ask you a question?" "Certainly," replied the ambassador. "Sir, did God govern the world well before you came into it?" "Undoubtedly," came the reply. "And will He rule the world well when you have gone out of it?" "Undoubtedly," came the reply again. "Then, Sir, can you not trust Him to rule the world well while you are in it?" Whereupon the tired am­bassador turned over and fell asleep.

Storms come upon the world and upon our nations and upon the Church and into our families and even our own hearts, even we who belong to the Lord. And it seems we often think that what we read in the old story about Elijah is true at all times and in all places; God was not in the storm nor in the earthquake, but only in the still, small voice. But that would be to make an illegitimate deduction.

For God Himself says, I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.Isaiah 45:7

Indeed, "shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?" That raises a lot of questions, of course. But it also gives us one big answer.

So we need to look again even at the first clause we quoted from Hamlet; "The time is out of joint." Who said so? So there are storms in the realm of nature and in the affairs of men. But who says that something is out of joint by that? That is not the Bible's idea. Even as it was not Jesus' idea that the disciples were drowning. That was only their idea. That storm, that furious squall, was not flung up by some blind, mindless force nor was Ruapehu, nor Pinatubo. The world is under authority. It was the Lord who stirred up the tempest in Psalm 107 that lifted high the waves on which the sailors mounted up to the heavens one moment and the next were thrown into the depths.

There is nothing out of joint at all in all this disruption and turmoil and things going "wrong", as it appears to us in the world at present. It is all God's work – albeit His strange work (Isaiah 28:21). In all this, the world only does His bidding; it is not out of control. It has been subjected to this frustration, not by its own choice, or by any other forces, but by the will of the One who subjected it (Romans 8). And it was subjected in hope, let us never forget, that the crea­tion itself – and that includes politics and business and what we call the ebb and flow of history and the ambitions of wicked or "good" men – it was subjected to this frustration by its sovereign Lord that men's courage (read bravado) might melt away, that they might reel and stagger and, at their wits end, they might cry out to the Lord in their trouble, which cry the Lord will hear and, hearing, he will deliver them out of their distress (Psalm 107).