Today’s passage is a picture of how Jesus rescues us as God rescued the Israelites from Pharaoh when they crossed the Red Sea. We all need to be rescued. He reaches out to us; all we need to do is respond to Him by taking His hand (Psalm 69).
This is also about the tests of faith and thinking that the Disciples faced. First, they were given a problem that humanly could not be solved — how to feed a multitude of people with no resources or means. Here, they were going from being overly busy and popular to alone and in dire danger.
Next, we will see a call to either commit to Him or to follow the noise of the crowd. Skeptics quickly point to the fact that many pagan gurus and pagan priests claimed they could walk on water. They did it by submerging a plank and standing on it or on a sandbar, but here, the storm made that humanly impossible. Many magicians today can walk on water, but it is not a miracle—just a trick. Magicians today use blocks of ice under the water or plexiglass scaffolds to perform their trick, items not available in Jesus’ time.
The people who claimed to do this in Jesus time did not go into a lake. They and magicians today are close to shore and in shallow water or in a pool; Jesus was in the middle of a very deep lake, and in a fierce storm, a feat that has never been duplicated.