JESUS WALKS ON WATER (PART I)

“Scripture Is Not Subject to Private Interpretation”

By Akin Ojumu

Righteousness, like a tender flower, flourishes when the soul is planted by the streams of the water of God’s Word. Fidelity to the purity of the truth of the Gospel is the manure that fertilizes the soil of spiritual maturity. A daily diet fortified with essential minerals of sound doctrine makes the mind whole and the body healthy. 

Theological error corrupts and absolute doctrinal error corrupts absolutely. Profane babbles, vain blathers, and godless chatters will only lead people into more and more ungodliness. The soul of those who feed on erroneous teachings will progressively wither.

“But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation.” (2 Peter 1:20).

For us to accurately and correctly interpret Scripture, we must DRAW OUT from the Bible texts and not READ INTO them. Drawing out from Bible texts is what’s called exegesis. This means the interpreter is guided to his conclusions by carefully and judiciously following the text.

Reading into Bible texts, on the other hand, is known as eisegesis. This is when the reader injects his own thoughts and ideas into the text, making it mean whatever he wants. With eisegesis, we approach the Bible as if we were a hammer, which means that we inevitably treat every text as if it were a nail (Ligonier Ministries).

Closely related to eisegesis is narcigesis, a compound word coined from narcissism (i.e., a personality disorder in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance) and eisegesis. Narcigesis describes the situation where people make the Bible all about themselves by reading themselves into Bible texts.

Unfortunately, the sermons emanating from Church pulpits everywhere are godless chattering, vain blathering, and profane babbling of men unschooled in how to carefully handle God’s Word and women unskilled in sound exegesis.

In the typical eisegetical fashion, the Church is full of folks, preachers and lay people alike, who read their icky opinions and wacky ideas into Bible texts in order to make them mean whatever it is they want the texts to mean. The false gospel these people preach is nothing but a self-centered glory story.

Rather than getting themselves out of the way and allowing the Bible text to speak for itself, Church folks insert themselves into the text and they make it say whatever it is they want it to say. And that which they want it to say is always something about their issues; their health, wealth, success, etc.

Consider the story of Jesus walking on water which is recorded in three of the Gospels (Matthew 14:22–36; Mark 6:45–56; John 6:16–21). This is one of those Bible passages that have suffered in the hands of all manners of Bible-twisting eisegetes and narcigetes who have turned this amazing story into some ear-scratching glory story gobbledygook.

Before we get to the real lesson of this story, an examination of the setting would be helpful.

The Sea of Galilee, aka Lake of Gennesaret, was the backdrop against which this amazing event took place. Shortly after miraculously feeding five thousand men with five small barley loaves and two small fish, the awestruck crowd, having had more than enough to eat, plotted to make Jesus king of Israel by force. Knowing their thought, the Lord dismissed the crowd, told His disciples to go ahead of him to the other side of the lake, while He went up on a mountainside by Himself to pray.

As His disciples got into a boat and set sail across the lake for Capernaum, a great storm threatened to imperil their lives. After spending much of the night battling strong winds and choppy waters, they had made little progress. A journey that should ordinarily have taken them as little as 2 hours, they were still in the middle of the lake far from the shore hours into the journey. 

Shortly before dawn, Jesus appeared, He was walking on the stormy water.  When they saw Him coming towards them, the disciples thought it must be a disembodied spirit, i.e., a ghost. If you’ve ever wondered why the thought of a ghost came to their mind, well, here is a little bit of a historical anecdote that probably explains why.

Around the time of this event, the people that lived in this region believed that spirits, including wind spirits, could influence human life. In particular, they believed that the Sea of Galilee was haunted and was home to evil forces. 

Because of the tempestuous nature of the Lake of Gennesaret, many fishermen that plied their trade on this lake had lost their lives when their fishing boats capsized. A popular folklore among the fishermen in those days was that the first person to see the ghost of the last fisherman to die in the lake would be the next person to die. 

You can imagine the cold terror that ran down the spines of Jesus’ disciples at the sight of the apparition coming towards them. Because they were mostly fishermen themselves and were familiar with the legend of the Sea of Galilee, they freaked out. They thought it was the ghost of the last fisherman who died in the lake, which now meant it was their turn to die.

There’s still a lot to unpack. But we’ll pause now and take it from here next time.