The story about Jesus calling Peter out to walk with Him on the water is commonly used to tell people to trust God. That’s kind of the point, right? But how quickly do we gloss over what’s really going on there?

What Peter experienced made absolutely no sense by human standards. We are heavier than water, so we sink. Storms are huge, so how could we be expected to hold our ground within them?

The problem is not that walking on water makes no sense. Jesus is the Lord, right? All things are possible through Him! The problem is that it makes perfect sense, but we believed something else. What doesn’t make sense is sin. It doesn’t matter if it’s the perceivably “little” white lies or the thefts or the abuses or the addictions or the perversions or the violence or the murders or the genocides. It’s not just what we do, and it’s not just others have done to us and each other.

The adversity for we who now live is that society tells us to question everything, and the fact is that, yes, there really is merit to skepticism, but the amount of that merit is much smaller than we think. Bear this in mind as I speak to you, though: I’m not condoning naively putting oneself in absurdly dangerous situations without a worthy cause.

As followers of Jesus, we believe that everything that we were meant to be in this world is now working in reverse, meaning that we do not live by reason or sanity but rather by lust and psychosis. Our worldview flipped nearly instantaneously in Eden from being sustained by an omnibenevolent God to questioning whether or not His word was true and what He was holding back from us. (Now, whether or not our initial motives were pure cannot be determined, but it can be reasonably assumed that we were as guilty as Lucifer of arrogance and lust for power upon temptation.) Now, we live in a world inhabited by three kinds of people: those who prey on others, those who merely try to survive, and those who think that there must be a better option than either.

Jesus is the better option. His death in our place for our sins and His resurrection overcoming the punishment for the same sin is the single most revolutionary act anyone has ever done. Had we never exposed ourselves to sin, this fact would make sense to us all. We wouldn’t view the world through the murky lens of fear. The idea that there is a perfect Lord of all would not seem so idiotic, because it isn’t! In fact, it makes more sense than anything in this world! Our problem is that we base our perceptions on what we’ve seen and heard, and what we’ve seen and heard is nothing but the evil proceedings from man’s heart!

So when Peter was called to walk with Jesus on the water, his lens was already murky. He already had doubts, but they didn’t surface until he refocused on how many ways walking on water could possibly go wrong. In a world where man had not chosen corruption, he would have understood and not doubted that this call from Christ was absolutely possible and that it was going to happen.

The real kicker here is that Jesus didn’t just call Peter out on the water; Peter asked Jesus to call him! He already doubted that it was Jesus on the water, but he had learned so far that Jesus had a habit of doing things that were, by human judgments, completely insane! So if Jesus called him out with Him, shouldn’t he have understood that it was going to be a little crazy? Yet he doubted Him anyway! I’d bet he didn’t mean to do it, but he did. How could you not when there’s a hurricane raging around you, right? But Jesus is Lord of the hurricane and the water!

I dare you, reader, to ask God to do something absolutely insane with you, and even more, I dare you to trust Him to lead you in the correct way. It’s our disbelief that is insane, not His sovereignty over all things, because the reality is that He is the sanest thing you will ever encounter.