The question before us has in it a wild sublimity. The waves had just found their resting-place; the wind was gone back into its treasure-house; and our Saviour stood upon the calm, and seemed to say, "The fierce enemies have been and gone, but where is your faith?"
I. Everybody has faith. To have a trust in something is so natural, that I could almost say it is indispensable to human nature. There are faculties and principles of the human heart which must cling. Every man, however independent he thinks himself, is constituted to have some feeling in him which goes forth which is as the creeper that creeps over your door, or as the vine which is wedded to the air. Those feelings made to twine may trail in the dust; those affections made to mount may often trail down like withered, disappointed things; they may grasp that which will never bear, or drive to that which sends back poison and death where we had looked for sustenance. Is our faith in the First Great Source? or is it in second causes?
II. Trusting to second causes is sheer idolatry. It is the essential of God that He is final; what is final is made God. There is many an idolater in heathenism who never looks upon his wretched idol, but his thoughts are led to that invisible being that the idol represents. Those who look at second causes and do not look at the First Cause are greater idolaters than the heathen. Look at our marts of commerce, look at our great assemblies, look at our great entertainments, look at our churches, and say is it not so. Are not instruments being looked at as if they were all-effective causes? What remains for a jealous God but to scatter second causes which have been elevated into a supremacy which belongs only to Him? The winds that came down upon the Sea of Galilee were but as strings in the hands of God, causing the waves to become tempestuous; and you who go up and down trusting to that which is wise in man and beautiful in nature, beware! lest presently your bright prospect gets beclouded, and a more fearful storm than that which swept over the angry sea come into your heart, to teach you to have no confidence anywhere but in God, and to look up from the dangers of this disappointing world to Him who only sits at the helm of all, and cry to Him, "Master, Master, we perish!"
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,1874, p. 189.
References: Luke 8:25. F. W. Farrar, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxi., p. 253.Luke 8:28. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xiii., No. 778. Luke 8:34. R. Heber, Parish Sermons,vol. i., p. 160.