The Wind Behind the Sail
2 Peter 1:20-21 "knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit."
September 6, 1620. The Mayflower set sail alone from Plymouth, England, with 102 passengers crammed into a 100-foot wine ship not built for transatlantic travel. Sixty-six days at sea. Storm after storm. Halfway across the Atlantic, somewhere in the dark middle of the ocean, a sickening crack ran through the ship: one of the main beams in the midship had bowed and split. Even the experienced sailors began arguing for turning back. The ship wouldn’t survive another bad storm with a broken back.
Then someone remembered something. A passenger named William Brewster had brought from Holland the great iron screw of his old printing press, the heavy mechanism that pressed inked type onto paper. They hauled it up out of the cargo hold. The carpenter braced the screw against the cracked beam, jacked it back into position, and propped it with a post. The Mayflower limped on. It later dropped anchor at Cape Cod, and a country was born.
The sailors steered the whole way. The wind decided where they landed.
That image has been waiting for us underneath 2 Peter 1:20-21. "For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." The Greek phrase translated "carried along" is phero. It’s a sailing word, and the same one Luke uses in Acts 27 when Paul's ship is caught in a Mediterranean nor'easter and the sailors stop fighting and just let the storm carry them where it wills (Acts 27:15, 17). The boat had a captain. The boat had crew. The boat had its own shape and creaks and character. None of that was deciding where the boat was going. The wind was.
This is what Peter is telling us about the Bible.
Moses was still Moses. David was still David. Paul was still Paul. Peter was still Peter. Their personalities, their vocabularies, their styles, their tears and their humor and their fingerprints are visible on every page they wrote. Luke writes like a careful Greek physician. Mark writes like a man in a hurry. Paul writes like a lawyer in love. John writes like a poet who has stopped trying to explain heaven and just describes it.
And underneath all of those steady hands on the tiller, the wind in the sails was the Holy Spirit.
Peter is making a claim that goes deeper than most of us realize. He’s saying that the Bible isn’t God dictating to passive secretaries. It’s not humans speculating about God and getting it mostly right. It’s something more wonderful than either. It’s the partnership of the indwelling Spirit with willing human voices, in such a way that the voices stay fully human and the words stay fully God's. Every syllable is Mark, and every syllable is the Spirit.
This is the same grammar that runs through your Christian life. Paul will say it bluntly in Galatians 2:20: "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." The exchanged life. You are still you. Your name, your laugh, your awkward small talk at the coffee shop, all yours. And in you the Spirit is doing what he did in Paul's pen and Mark's parchment: filling the sail. The wind that carried the apostles is the wind that carries you.
We forget this on our hardest days. We assume the spiritual life is a matter of trying harder, gritting our teeth, mustering up enough conviction to obey something the Bible said this morning. But the Word that was breathed out by the Spirit comes to us still riding on the breath of the same Spirit. He doesn’t just give us the instructions; He fills the sail of the obedience.
Bring out the great iron screw of grace, and let it lift the cracked beams. The Spirit who carried Peter to write this verse is the Spirit who can carry you through whatever is cracking in you today.
Today: Do the one thing the Word has been pressing on you that you’ve been waiting to feel ready for: the conversation, the confession, the phone call, the forgiveness, the first step back to the Lord. Stop waiting for the wind and simply set the sail. The Spirit who breathed out the Bible has been waiting for you to raise it.
Prayer: "Father, I worship You for a Book breathed out by Your Spirit and a life lived through that same Spirit. Thank You that You haven’t asked me to manufacture the wind; You’ve asked me to raise the sail. Carry me today the way You carried Peter, into the obedience I might be postponing. In Jesus' name, Amen."
-PK