Chapter 9 - The Power of Faith (17:14-21)

9 The Power of Faith (17:14-21)

And when they came to the multitude, a man came up to Him, falling on his knees before Him, and saying, “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatic, and is very ill; for he often falls into the fire, and often into the water. And I brought him to Your disciples, and they could not cure him.” And Jesus answered and said, “O unbelieving and perverted generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring him here to Me.” And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon came out of him, and the boy was cured at once.

Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?” And He said to them, “Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it shall move; and nothing shall be impossible to you. [But this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.]” (17:14-21)

Matthew 17:14 marks the beginning of a special period of instruction by Jesus to the Twelve that continues through chapter 20. Having given them a revelation of His person as King and of His program for the kingdom, He now gives them further principles for living in the kingdom. The first is the foundational principle of faith. Just as spiritual life must be received by faith, so also it is to be lived by faith.

Scripture gives continual testimony to the power of faith in God in the lives of believers. It was faith in God’s power that caused young Caleb to look at the land of Canaan with its giants and report to Moses, “We should by all means go up and take possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it” (Num. 13:30). It was faith in God’s care that enabled Job to say of Him in the midst of personal disaster, “Though He slay me, I will hope in Him” (Job 13:15). It was faith in God’s protection that enabled Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to stand at the edge of the fiery furnace and declare to King Nebuchadnezzar, “Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire; and He will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up” (Dan. 3:17-18). It was faith in God’s protection that enabled Daniel to continue faithfully worshiping God, even though it meant being thrown into the lion’s den (Dan. 6:10). It was faith in Jesus to forgive her sins that brought spiritual deliverance to the woman who entered the Pharisee’s house and washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair (Luke 7:37-50).

From Hebrews 11 we learn that “by faith Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain” (v. 4), that “by faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death” (v. 5), that “by faith Noah . . . prepared an ark . . . and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith” (v. 7), and that “by faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed, . . . went out, . . . [and] lived as an alien in the land of promise, . . . for he was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (vv. 8-10). The rest of that chapter names a host of other Old Testament saints who “gained approval through their faith” (v. 39). In view of “so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us,” the writer continues, “let us also lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith” (12:1-2).

It is not surprising, therefore, that the first lesson Jesus taught the disciples after He returned from the mount of transfiguration was a lesson about faith. Peter, James, and John had just had a glimpse of the power and majesty of the Lord Jesus Christ (Matt. 17:2), which Paul may have been referring to when he spoke of “the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). But now the disciples were brought face to face with their own lack of power, which was due directly, Jesus told them, to their lack of faith.

For this lesson, the scene shifts dramatically from the mountain of glory to the valley of despair. From the dazzling majesty of the unveiled Christ in the presence of Moses, Elijah, and God the Father, in a glorious preview of the Lord’s second coming, Jesus and the three disciples descended into the reality of the sin-cursed world at its worst.

The Lord used the first tragic situation He encountered after the transfiguration as a living illustration of a principle He wanted to teach. Within this story can be seen four key elements: the pleading of the father (Matt. 17:14-15), the powerlessness of the followers (v. 16), the perversion of the faithless (vv. 17-18), and the power of faith (vv. 19-21).

THE PLEADING OF THE FATHER

From the second gospel we learn that the multitude included some scribes, the Jewish legal experts, who were arguing with the nine disciples who had remained below, and that as soon as the crowd saw Jesus coming, “they were amazed, and began running up to greet Him” (Mark 9:14-15).

From somewhere within the multitude, a man came up to Jesus, and fell on his knees before Him. From that posture of humility and reverence, the man said, “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatic, and is very ill; for he often falls into the fire, and often into the water.” We do not know how much the father meant by calling Jesus Lord, but at the least he recognized Him as a man of God who was endowed with divine power to heal. He fully believed that Jesus could bring sanity and wholeness to his son, his “only boy” (Luke 9:38), who had had this terrible affliction since childhood (Mark 9:21). Though the father may not have realized it at the time, he was about to bring his only beloved son into the presence of God’s only beloved Son.

Have mercy translates the aorist imperative of elee, which means to demonstrate sympathy and compassion. In his deep anguish, the father pleaded with Jesus to have compassion on his son and restore him to health.

Like the Greek term it translates, lunatic literally refers to something related to the moon (lunar). It is the idea seen in the word moonstruck, an expression based on the ancient belief that mental illness or madness was caused by the influence of the moon. The Greek word was used to describe what we now understand to be various nervous disorders, including epilepsy, that cause convulsions.

This particular boy was very ill, indicating that his condition was unusually serious. It was so severe, the father explained, that he often falls into the fire, and often into the water. Open fires were common, as were many open bodies of water, such as pools or wells. Because the boy had actually fallen into the fire many times, he must have carried burn scars that added to his unattractiveness and probable ostracism. He was also in constant danger of drowning by falling into the water. The father or some other member of the family probably had to stay near the boy at all times, never knowing when a seizure might occur.

The father sensed what Jesus verified, that the boy’s affliction was not simply physiological or mental but demonic. When he brought him to Jesus, he described his son as being “possessed with a spirit which makes him mute” (Mark 9:17). In addition to having seizures, the boy was unable to speak and was apparently deaf as well (see v. 25). The demon was exceptionally violent. Whenever the “spirit seizes him,” the father said, “he suddenly screams, and it throws him into a convulsion with foaming at the mouth, and as it mauls him, it scarcely leaves him” (Luke 9:39).

Every unsaved person is subject to the control of Satan, “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2), and the more a person willfully sins and rejects God, the more he leaves himself open to Satan’s influence. But there is no indication that this boy’s demonic affliction was due to any unusual moral or spiritual wrongdoing on his part or on the part of his parents. For his own reasons, Satan caused the demon to torment this particular child.

THE POWERLESSNESS OF THE FOLLOWERS

And I brought him to Your disciples, and they could not cure him.” (17:16)

While Jesus had been on the mountain with Peter, James, and John, the man had brought his demon-possessed boy to the other disciples for healing, but they could not cure him.

In light of their previous commissioning, empowering, and experience, it seems strange that the disciples now failed where once they had succeeded. About a year earlier, Jesus had sent the Twelve out to minister “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And as you go,” He said, “preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons” (Matt. 10:6-8; cf. Mark 3:15). Perhaps to their own surprise, the disciples were highly successful “in casting out many demons and were anointing with oil many sick people and healing them” (Mark 6:13).

What had gone wrong or changed? Their failure now was not due to the fact that Jesus was not with them, because He was not with them on those earlier occasions, either. They still had Jesus’ promise and His power, yet they could not cure the boy. The explanation for their failure is therefore obvious. They failed to appropriate the power available to them.

With increasing frustration and anguish, the father understandably despaired of help from the disciples and turned to Jesus Himself.

Throughout the history of the church, the faithlessness, weakness, and indifference of Christians has caused many seeking unbelievers to despair of help from God’s people. Sometimes, like the father in this story, they turn to the Lord Himself.

THE PERVERSION OF THE FAITHLESS

And Jesus answered and said, “O unbelieving and perverted generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring him here to Me.” And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon came out of him, and the boy was cured at once. (17:17-18)

The disciples’ faithless impotence not only grieved the boy’s father but Jesus as well. Speaking to the disciples and to the multitude rather than to the man who had just confronted Him, Jesus answered and said, “O unbelieving and perverted generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you?”

Here Jesus gives a rare glimpse into the depths of His divine heart and soul. Having been accustomed from eternity past to having the angels instantly do His bidding, He was grieved at the blindness and faithlessness of God’s people Israel, especially His disciples, whom He had personally chosen, taught, and endowed with unique power and authority.

The entire generation of Jews was faithless, represented on this occasion by the multitude, the disciples, and the self-righteous scribes who were there to entrap and discredit the Lord if they could. Even the father’s faith was not complete, as he himself confessed: “I do believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24).

The people not only were unbelieving but perverted. Perverted is from diastreph, which has the basic idea of twisting or bending out of shape. The term was frequently used to describe a piece of pottery that a careless craftsman had misshaped or that had somehow become distorted before being fired in the oven.

Although many of His listeners doubtlessly were also morally perverted, Jesus was here speaking primarily of the spiritual perversion that is inevitable in those who are unbelieving. Any person who does not genuinely trust God cannot escape having a distorted view of Him and His will.

“How long shall I be with You? How long shall I put up with you?” the Lord said, perhaps as much to Himself as to them. No doubt He was becoming increasingly anxious to return to His heavenly Father, with whom He had just experienced a unique time of fellowship on the mountain. In His humanness, He must have been tempted to doubt whether His soon-coming suffering and death would be worthwhile. “If they do not trust You while You are with them,” Satan may have whispered in Jesus’ ear, “how do You expect them to trust You after You have returned to heaven?”

The thrill-seeking crowds followed Jesus for the personal benefit of His healing and out of curiosity. The gloating Jewish leaders followed Him in order to convict Him of a capital crime. And although the disciples knew He was the promised Christ (Matt. 16:16), they were frequently confused about the meaning of His teaching and work.

But Jesus would not vary from His divine mission nor succumb to Satan’s temptation to despair. He was on earth to do His Father’s business, from which nothing would deter Him. He therefore said to the father, “Bring him here to Me.”

When Jesus rebuked him, . . . the demon had no choice but to come out of him. But before he departed, the evil spirit made a last attempt to destroy the boy, “crying out and throwing him into terrible convulsions; . . . and the boy became so much like a corpse that most of them said, ‘He is dead!’” (Mark 9:26; cf. Luke 9:42).

The demon knew his efforts were hopeless, because, like the demon who tormented the man of Gadara (Mark 5:7) and the one who attacked the seven sons of Sceva (Acts 19:15), he recognized the divine identity of Jesus. He was compelled to obey the Son of God.

As soon as the demon was gone, the boy was cured at once. While the child was still in the death-like stupor in which the demon left him, “Jesus took him by the hand and raised him; and he got up” (Mark 9:27). He could now play like other boys, with no fear of suddenly being thrown into a fire to be burned or into water to be drowned. He would have no more seizures, no more foaming at the mouth or grinding of his teeth.

Although Jesus already had successfully cast out countless demons (see Matt. 4:24; 8:16, 32; 9:33; 12:22), Luke reports that on this occasion, the crowds “were all amazed at the greatness of God” (Luke 9:43). “Greatness” is from megaleiots, which refers to great splendor or magnificence. It is the word used by Peter to describe the divine majesty of which he, James, and John were eyewitnesses at the transfiguration. It was perhaps with that glory in mind that Luke here used the term to describe the crowd’s amazement. Unknowingly, they, too, had had a small glimpse of the kind of majesty and splendor the Lord would reveal at His second coming.

THE POWER OF FAITH

Jesus’ purpose in the miracle went beyond the healing of the demonized boy, important as that was. The healing not only brought health to the boy and great joy to his father, but glory to God. But for the disciples the important lesson of that event was yet to be learned.

It is not surprising that they questioned Jesus privately—in a house, Mark tells us (9:28), perhaps the home of one of the disciples. They were embarrassed at their own failure and were perplexed as to why they themselves could . . . not cast it out. Why was He able to accomplish with a word what they had not been able to accomplish with great effort? “You commissioned and empowered us to heal and to cast out demons,” they said, in effect. “And we have been successful before. Why did we fail this time?” They probably went about the act of casting out the demon in the same way they had on earlier occasions. They probably invoked the Lord’s name, commanded the demon to leave, and awaited his departure. But this time nothing happened.

“The reason should be obvious,” Jesus implied. “You failed because of the littleness of your faith.” It was not because of total lack of faith but because of . . . littleness of . . . faith that they were powerless. They had saving faith, which they could not lose. And they had trusting faith to some degree, or they would not have attempted to heal the boy. But they lacked sufficient faith to employ the power Jesus had given to them.

Having littleness of . . . faith was a somewhat typical condition of the disciples. Soon after Jesus called them into His service, they sat among the crowd on the mountainside whom He charged with being anxious because of their little faith in God to provide for their physical needs (Matt. 6:25-34). When during the fierce storm on the Sea of Galilee they despaired of their lives, Jesus rebuked them before He rebuked the waves, saying “Why are you timid, you men of little faith?” (8:26). When Peter started to walk on the water but became afraid and began sinking, “Jesus stretched out His hand and took hold of him, and said to him, ‘O you of little faith, why did you doubt?’” (14:31). Shortly before healing the demonized boy, Jesus had again charged the disciples with having little faith in not expecting Him to be able to feed the multitude near Magadan (16:8).

Those incidents illustrate that little faith is the kind of faith that believes in God when you have something in your hand, when His provision is already made. When things were going well with the disciples and everything seemed under control, they found it easy to trust their Lord. But as soon as circumstances became uncertain or threatening, their faith withered. Their faith was like the faith of most believers in all ages. When they are healthy and have the necessities of life, their faith is great and strong, but when they are in need, their faith is small and gives way to doubt.

Great faith trusts God when there is nothing in the cupboard to eat and no money to buy food. Great faith trusts in God when health is gone, work is gone, reputation is gone, or family is gone. Great faith trusts God while the windstorm is still howling and persecution continues.

The Lord was giving the disciples a sample of what their lives would be like once He had returned to heaven, when they could no longer see Him or touch Him or talk with Him in the way they were used to doing. He was also teaching them persistence. We do not know how often they tried to cast the demon out of the boy, but at some point they gave up. When Jesus first sent the disciples out, their success at healing and casting out demons was immediate. But Jesus had not promised that that would always be the case. The Twelve had to learn that, unlike the Lord’s power, theirs was not inherent in themselves. It came only from Him, by His divine provision and will.

It is encouraging to realize that even the apostles, with their unique calling and miraculous gifts, always had to rely on Jesus to minister effectively. To strengthen their faith and sense of dependence, the Lord sometimes made them wait—just as He often does with believers today. To help strengthen our faith, He may sometimes make us wait a long time for an answer to prayer. Just as an athlete grows stronger by gradually lifting heavier weights or by running longer distances, so a believer grows stronger in faith by facing ever-increasing challenges that expose his own weakness and drive him to the Lord.

Continuing the lesson on faith, Jesus said, “For truly I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it shall move; and nothing shall be impossible to you.”

Jesus seems to contradict Himself, first rebuking the disciples for having small faith and then telling them that even the smallest faith can move mountains. But as He made clear in the parable of the mustard seed, the seed does not represent littleness as such but rather littleness that grows into greatness. “When it is full grown,” He explained, “it is larger than the garden plants, and becomes a tree” (Matt. 13:32). Small faith can accomplish great things only if, like a mustard seed, it grows into something greater than it was. Only when small faith grows into great faith can it move a mountain.

Mustard seed faith is persistent faith. It continues to grow and become productive because it never gives up. It is the sort of faith exercised by the importunate man who kept knocking on his neighbor’s door late at night until he got a response. “I tell you,” Jesus said, that “even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence he will get up and give him as much as he needs” (Luke 11:8). Jesus also illustrated mustard seed faith in the parable of the oppressed widow, a parable He gave specifically “to show that at all times [the disciples] ought to pray and not to lose heart” (Luke 18:1). When the widow would not take no for an answer, the godless, indifferent judge finally gave her “legal protection, lest,” he said, “by continually coming she wear me out” (v. 5). “Hear what the unrighteous judge said,” Jesus went on to explain; “now shall not God bring about justice for His elect, who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them? I tell you that He will bring about justice for them speedily” (vv. 6-8).

It must also be clearly understood that Jesus was not talking about moving a literal mountain. Neither the apostles nor the Lord Himself ever performed such a feat—nor has anyone else in the nearly 2,000-year history of the church. That would have been the sort of grand but pointless miracle the scribes and Pharisees expected of the Messiah but which Jesus refused to perform (Matt. 12:38-39).

The expression “able to move mountains” was a common figure of speech in that day that represented the ability to surmount great obstacles. As William Barclay has observed,

A great teacher, who could really expound and interpret Scripture and who could explain and resolve difficulties, was regularly known as an uprooter or even a pulverizer of mountains. To tear up, to uproot, to pulverize mountains were all regular phrases for removing difficulties. Jesus never meant this to be taken physically and literally. After all, the ordinary man seldom finds any necessity to remove a mountain. What He meant was: “If you have faith enough, all difficulties can be solved, and even the hardest task can be accomplished. Faith in God is the instrument that allows men to remove the hills of difficulty which block their path. (The Gospel of Matthew [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1959], pp. 184-85)

Jesus was talking figuratively about mountain-size difficulties, such as the nine disciples had just experienced in not being able to cure the demonized boy.

The promise nothing shall be impossible to you is conditional, valid only within the framework of God’s will. Mountain-moving faith is not faith in oneself, much less faith in faith, but faith in God. It is not faith itself, no matter how great, that moves mountains, but the God in whom the faith is grounded. Faith has only as much power as its object. When Jesus said to the Samaritan leper and the blind man of Jericho, “your faith has made you well” (Luke 17:19; 18:42), He did not mean that their faith in itself healed them. That would mean they healed themselves, which, of course, they did not do.

Jesus’ point was that “nothing shall be impossible to you when you prayerfully and persistently trust in Me.” The disciples could not heal the demonized boy, even though they had Jesus’ commission and promised power, because they did not persist in dependent prayer.

Throughout the ages believers often have failed to receive God’s promised joy, freedom, forgiveness, guidance, fruitfulness, protection, wisdom, and countless other blessings simply because, like those disciples, they have not persisted in prayer.

“This kind of demon does not go out except by prayer,” Jesus declared. Although that phrase is not found in the best manuscripts of Matthew (indicated by brackets in some versions), it is a genuine saying of Jesus and is found in Mark’s account (9:29), from which an early scribe probably picked it up and added it to Matthew. However, the last two words of the verse, and fasting, are not found in the best manuscripts of any gospel.

Jesus’ emphasis was clearly on prayer. As James wrote some years later, “The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much” (James 5:16). Dedicated, fervent, passionate, persistent prayer gets results, because such prayer is honored by God.

During one point of his ministry, the nineteenth-century Christian leader George Mueller began to pray for five personal friends. It was not until five years later that the first one of them came to Christ. After five more years, two more of them became Christians, and after twenty-five years the fourth man was saved. He prayed for the fifth friend until the time of his death, a few months after which the last friend came to salvation. For that friend George Mueller had prayed more than fifty years!