The Power of Faith
Matthew 17:14‑21
I want us to take our Bibles now and look at Matthew chapter 17...Matthew chapter 17. I want us to look at a lesson taught by the Lord Jesus Christ on the power of faith. In this text, I want you to look at verse 14 and I want to read, for a setting for our message tonight, verses 14 through 21.
And when they were come to the multitude, there came to Him a certain man kneeling down to Him and saying, Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is epileptic and greatly vexed, for often he falleth into the fire and often into the water. And I brought him to Thy disciples and they couldn't cure him. Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you? Bring him here to Me. And Jesus rebuked the demon and he departed out of him and the child was cured from that very hour. Then came the disciples to Jesus privately and said, Why could not we cast him out? And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief, for verily I say unto you if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Move from here to yonder place, and it shall move and nothing shall be impossible unto you.
And then the Authorized version adds, "Howbeit this kind goeth not out except by prayer and fasting?"
Now this is an exceedingly interesting passage and I think before you're done you'll see the clarity of the Lord's message in it to His disciples and to us. Faith can move mountains, that's the essence of it in verse 20. If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you shall say unto this mountain, Move from here to yonder place and it shall move and nothing shall be impossible unto you.
Now faith moves mountains. Faith accomplishes great things. That's obvious. I think we've heard that many, many times. But I wonder if we really understand what it means. Let me give you just a little background. It was faith in God's power that caused Caleb the Jewish spy to look at the land of Canaan with its giants and say this in Numbers 13:30, "Let us go up at once and possess it for we are well able to overcome it." That was faith in God's power.
It was faith in God's care that enabled Job to say in the midst of personal disaster, "Thou He slay me, yet will I trust Him," Job 13:15. It was faith in God's protection that enabled Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to stand on the edge of the fiery furnace and say, "Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace and He will deliver us out of thine hand, O king," Daniel 3:17.
It was also faith in God's Word that enabled Daniel to survive the lion's den, as it says in the sixth chapter, "So Daniel was taken up out of the den and no manner of hurt was found upon him because he believed in his God." It was faith that saved the sinful woman who washed Jesus feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head, as it tells us in Luke chapter 7 verse 50.
And as you look at the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, that great chapter of faith, the Bible tells us it was faith that enabled Abel to offer a better sacrifice. It was faith that caused Enoch to be translated to heaven without death. It was faith that allowed Noah to build a great ark and preach righteousness. It was faith that caused Abraham to follow the call of God. It was faith that caused Sarah to have a child. It was faith that caused Isaac to bless his sons, that caused Jacob to bless his sons, that caused Joseph to hope in the future. It was faith that called Moses to reject the pleasures of sin for the reproach of Christ. It was faith that caused Rahab to receive the spies. And it was faith that came in the time of crisis to Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jetha and David and Samuel and the prophets and many, many others. The power of faith.
And the writer of Hebrews leads into the great opening of the twelfth chapter and says, "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses..." and what are they witnessing? "to a life of...what?...of faith as we stand surrounded by so many who say that we are to live by faith, let us lay aside every weight in the sin that thus so easily has beset us and let us run with patience the rest...the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith."
And so you have throughout holy Scripture, the testimony to the life of faith, to the power of faith. Now in our text, and we can look at our text more closely now, Jesus makes one of the great statements in all of the Bible relative to faith when He says that faith moves mountains and that it makes nothing impossible. The point of the whole passage in many ways is a summary of the whole testimony of the people of God through all of history that God moves powerfully when we believe the power of faith.
Now let me set you in the context of Matthew. We start in chapter 17 and verse 14, really kind of a special section because here the Lord begins an instructional period with His disciples. And running through the end of chapter 20, that is chapter 17, 18, 19 and 20, we find the Lord's special instruction to the Twelve. He is giving them sort of their final preparation for the ministry that lays ahead of them. He has given them a revelation of His person as King. He's given them a revelation of His program for the Kingdom. And now He gives them a revelation of the principles for living in that Kingdom. And there are so many lessons and each is rich and essential and practical and they will be great lessons not only for them but for us.
For example, He teaches them in chapter 17 about faith. And then He teaches them about citizenship, how to live in this world. And then in chapter 18, He teaches them about humility and then He teaches them about offending. And then He teaches them about discipline. And then He teaches them about forgiveness. And then as He comes into chapter 19, He teaches them about marriage and about divorce and about children and about wealth and about rewards. And then into chapter 20 about position and compassion. All of these are profound lessons for living the Kingdom principles. And by the way, stuck in between those lessons periodically is a word about His coming death so that He continues to remind them that He's moving to the cross.
This then is lesson number one in this series of lessons. And it is a lesson on the power of faith. And I believe it could change your life and mine if we learn it well.
Now the whole scene takes place as the disciples‑‑Peter, James and John‑‑with the Lord Jesus are coming down from the Mount of Transfiguration. They have just seen the glory of God revealed in Jesus Christ. They have just seen what Paul calls the glory that is in Christ in the face of Christ. And they've seen it in its fullness, at least fuller than they've ever dreamed it could be seen. And as they descend from the Mount of Transfiguration, having just had that marvelous incomprehensible experience of seeing the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, they are met by a large crowd. And in verse 14 we read, "And when they were come to the multitude, there came to Him a certain man." And we'll stop there.
Here is the setting for the story. They come down the mountain. They meet a crowd. The other gospel writers tell us more about this crowd. Mark tells us it included scribes, Jewish legal experts, just the normal run‑of‑the‑mill gang of people that populated the northern Galilee area. And also the nine other disciples who weren't there at the Mount of Transfiguration. So you have the disciples, the scribes and the multitude of people. And they're there to wait and to meet Jesus and the three who come down from the mountain.
Now this sets up the scene. And in almost every one of these teaching incidents that run through chapter 20, the Lord uses a living situation as the illustration for the principle He wants to communicate. He was the master of taking life situations and from them teaching and burying indellibly in the minds spiritual truth. So it is not just spiritual truth given verbally, but coming out of a living dramatic illustration.
Now as we look at the narrative, I want you to follow four key elements in this narrative text. First is the pleading of the father...the pleading of the father. Now the center of attraction, obviously, in this crowd, as the text tells us, is a man, a certain man it says in verse 14. And it says about him he was kneeling down to Him, that is to Jesus Christ, and saying... Now here is a man in a posture of reverence. Here is a man in a posture of humility. You see him worshiping, kneeling. And then you add the title of verse 15, he says to him, "Lord..." And you can see that he really held Jesus in high esteem. Just what he fully meant by the title "Lord" we can't really know but it certainly was the deepest respect for Jesus Christ whose reputation as a healer and as one sent from God, a miracle worker and a teacher without equal, had run its course throughout all of Galilee and surely the man knew all about Jesus. So, though we may know now the full quality of his reverence in the usage of the title "Lord", we know the man believed that Jesus could heal. He believed He had divine power.
And so he has a request, in verse 15. "Have mercy on my son." A simple request. It's an aorist imperative in the Greek. He begs for an act of mercy. He begs for an instantaneous healing. He wants Jesus to heal his son. By the way, the word "mercy" eleeo, basically means to show or demonstrate compassion. Show compassion on my son. The father is in deep agony. He is pleading for his son. And the further you read in the story and when you add the narrative of Matthew...of Mark that parallels it and the narrative of Luke that parallels it, it becomes obvious why the father was so wrought in his heart with the matter of his son.
Look at verse 15 again. It says he is epileptic. Now that's a very interesting word. And in the Greek language, it basically means to be moonstruck...to be moonstruck. Because they believed in that period of time that certain strange behavior was caused by the moon. And we're not too far from that, by the way, we have a word that we use rather frequently for people who act strangely, we call them "lunatic." That also means moonstruck, or related to the moon. So that the term "moonstruck" simply demonstrates a rather pagan approach to defining this kind of behavior as something related to the moon like the tides, perhaps. The term is used only one other place and that's in Matthew 4:24. But it is used to described behavior that includes epilepsy which is nervous disorder, convulsions, seizure. And in ancient times people believed this was caused by some movement of the moon.
Now this is not a very pathological use of the term, but nonetheless we understand they're talking about a person acting crazily and out of control. Further it says he is greatly vexed. And that's Old English for saying "he is tremendously afflicted." It is not a mild case of epilepsy, it is a major case, it is perhaps grand mal at its most serious level.
Now Mark adds at this point, most interestingly in Mark 9:17, that the man was also dumb, that is he couldn't speak, or rather the child couldn't speak. And Mark also adds in chapter 9 verse 25 that he couldn't hear either. He was deaf and dumb. So he was epileptic at a severe level. He was deaf and dumb. And then we go back to Matthew and we pick this up, "He falls into the fire often and often into the water."
Now when he would go into one of these fits and one of the seizures of massive proportions, he would be exposed to great danger because all around that part of the world, of course, there were open fires. And as he would thrash about he would have the obvious potential of falling in to either a pool of water of which there were many around the cities for the drawing of water, or falling into a fire. And so he was always in danger of being severely burned, and‑‑no doubt‑‑had been severely burned and always in danger of being drowned. Perhaps there was in that demon that possessed this young boy a violent desire for murder.
So you have a child with epilepsy, seizures, deaf and dumb, compounded by burnings and near drownings. And this is his life. Mark and Luke add other symptoms. Mark says that there was a demon in him and the demon in him, he says, taketh him and teareth him. Literally thrashes him. You could translate tear to strike, to dash or to smash down. And so in the fit that would go on, the demon would smash him to the ground and thrash his body. Luke says the demon threw him down, or slammed him down. Mark says that he foams at the mouth, he convulses, he wallows and rolls in the dirt and he withers away.
You can imagine, can't you? It was so severe that he couldn't eat, that his body was dissipating rapidly. And then to make it worse, if it could be, Mark adds that the demon in him was a foul unclean demon...which may mean that he uttered profanities, that he acted in a licentiousness lewd immoral way out of control. And in Mark 9:21, the question is asked of the father, "When did he get like this?" And the father says, "He was like this since he was a child." Now you understand why the father is pleading? He's got a real heartache on his hands. Something that would be very, very difficult for a father to bear. And this is his only son.
What a picture. Here is the only beloved son of his father and he's about to face the only beloved Son of God. Jesus can identify with him. Jesus can understand the heart of this father. And so the father comes and he pleads.
And I can't help but think at this moment that there is such a stark contrast, isn't there, between the mount of splendor and the valley of despair? I mean, all of the glory up there and the unveiled Christ and Moses and Elijah and the transparent beautiful light, the glow of the Shekinah coming from Christ, the conversation of Moses and Elijah, the glory of that Second Coming preview and now just a few hours after that they descend into the reality of the sin‑cursed world at its worse.
You say, "How do people get demons in them like this?" Let me tell you something. If you're not a Christian, you don't have to do anything to get like this because you're ruled by the prince of the power of the air who can dispatch or permit or allow or not prevent his demons to do anything to you that they want to do. You have no way to resist that. And it's not to say that this child was evil, this child was possessed from his childhood, from his young childhood. It was the choice of the demon, perhaps not even the choice of the child in terms of any moral choice. And so we are reminded again that we come from the mountain top of the Second Coming right back down to reality. Let's face it, we've had a few great weeks on the mountain top, haven't we? And we've been singing and praising God for the Second Coming as we've been anticipating it but before it comes we've got to get back to reality and here's reality, here's a pleading father with a son that is‑‑humanly speaking‑‑an utter disaster, has no resource.
Kebble(?) has written, "If ever on the mount with Thee I seem to soar in vision bright, with thoughts of coming agony, stay Thou the two presumptuous flight, gently along the veil of tears, lead me from Herman's sunbright steep, let me not grudge a few short years with Thee toward heaven to work and weep." Don't let me get so caught up in the Second Coming and so caught up in the glory that is to come that I forget the pain that must be dealt with here.
That leads us to a second point in the narrative. The pleading of the father brings us to the powerlessness of the followers. Verse 16, "I brought him to Thy disciples and they could not heal him," therapeuo, same word used throughout the New Testament for healing. "I brought him to the disciples and they couldn't do it."
Does that seem strange to you? Well, let me show you something. Go back to chapter 10 verse 1. When Jesus called His disciples, He called unto Him the Twelve, verse 1 says, Matthew 10, "He gave them power against unclean spirits to cast them out and to heal all types of sickness and all types of disease."
Look at verse 7, "As you go, preach saying the Kingdom of heaven is at hand, heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons." Hey, they had been given the commission to do this. They had been given the power to do this and now they can't do it. And what is even more amazing is they'd already been doing it. That's right, this isn't the first time that they had tried to cast demons out. In Mark chapter 6 it tells us that He sent the twelve forth to preach and to heal. And it says in verse 13 they cast out many demons and anointed with oil many that were sick and healed them. They had done it before. They knew Jesus gave them the power. They knew they had accomplished it in times past. And now all of a sudden they can't do it. What's gone wrong? Have they lost this power?
Luke adds, by the way, that the father pled with them, the nine who were down below...pled with them to do this. And they couldn't do it. Now listen, did Jesus give...did Jesus promise them they could do it? Did He? Yes, chapter 10. Did He prove to them they could do it by allowing them to do it? Yes. So they had the promise and they had the power, what was missing?
Well, it's very simple. They didn't appropriate the power. Not too hard to figure out, is it? They didn't appropriate it. It was available but they didn't appropriate it. They couldn't do in chapter 17 what they were promised to do in chapter 10. Now let's leave that for a moment, we'll come back to that.
So, the father presses past them to Jesus. And we can't help but be moved by the sense of urgency of this father. He doesn't now have a lot of faith in the disciples of Jesus but he still has some faith in Jesus. I think it kind of reminds me of how some people think about the church. They don't have a whole lot of faith in the agents of Jesus but they sure would like to get past the agents to Him. In fact, I remember reading in a New West magazine an article by a man who was cynical about Christianity. And he said at the close of his article, "Frankly, I think Jesus had a lot more class than most of His agents." And so, in a sense, they're not unlike...the father, rather, is not unlike the world in seeing the impotence of the church in wanting to press off and past that to get to the Savior Himself.
So, we see the pleading of the father and the powerlessness of the followers. That leads us to what we'll call the perversion of the faithless in verse 17. It's time for Jesus to give a lessons, folks. I mean, the disciples are in confusion. The father's in a state of tremendous grief. And now it's time for Jesus to speak. "Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you?" Stop right there.
You don't get very many glimpses into the heart of Jesus like that one. You know what we'd call that in our language? That's being totally...what?...frustrated. How long will I be with you? How long is this going to last when I'm so used to working through angels? How long will I bear with you?
You're really seeing into the heart of Christ, the pain of His heart, the disappointment that comes out of His lips. You say, "Well, who does He have in mind?" O faithless and perverse generation...well, I think...I think that's a general statement. The whole generation was faithless and perverse, but He generalizes off of the specific and who were the specific ones who weren't exercising faith? The disciples. It was the particular inability of the disciples from which He generalizes to the whole inability of the generation in which they lived, because the scribes standing there, they didn't believe either. And the other nine disciples, they couldn't pull it off. And the father himself was weak in faith. You remember he says, according to Mark's gospel, when in conversation with Jesus in this same incident, he said, "Lord, I believe, help Thou my unbelief." He believed a little bit but not much more than a little bit. And so the Lord is saying, "Oh, you disciples are symbolic of a whole generation of faithless people." And if you don't trust God and you don't believe in God, you get twisted, and that's what perverse means, to be crooked, or to be twisted. It's used of objects made by a craftsman that turn out lousy because he's a clumsy craftsman...twisted, distorted, out of shape. And He says, "You people who don't believe are distorted and twisted." And that's the generation He faced.
No wonder there was a sense of frustration. I love that statement in verse 17, "How long shall I be with you?" You can see Him starting to get anxious to go back to the Father, can't you? He sort of senses the end, how long do I have to endure this? You see, His contemporaries were disastrous failures and even His own disciples were continually having to learn the same lessons over and over and over and over. I mean, just look at the crowd. The crowd is thrill‑seeking, they don't really believe fully. The scribes, they're gloating. Oh, you can know it, they're gloating over the inability of the nine disciples to heal this young boy. I mean, they're really happy they can't do it. And the father is struggling with faith. And the disciples had failed to exercise the faith they needed to heal the young boy, even though they had the promise and the power. And so, to some degree, the whole bunch of them were faithless and twisted and diverted from trust in God. And Jesus says, thirty‑three years is about all of this I can take. And so, in the end of verse 17 He says, "Bring him here to Me...bring him here."
At this point Matthew doesn't tell us what happened, but Mark does. The father brought the boy. And as he brought the boy, Mark says, the demon in the boy saw Jesus and when he saw Jesus he threw the boy into convulsions. The boy smashed into the dirt and began to roll in the dirt, wallow in the dirt and foam at the mouth.
And to be deaf and dumb in addition to that, and all the horror of that scene... Well, you know the demon knew where he was. Demons know Christ. Remember Acts chapter 19 verse 15 when the demon said, "Jesus I know and Paul I know, but who are you?" They know Jesus. And this one knew Him, just like the demons in the maniac of Gadara knew Him. He knew Him. And he knew he was at his Waterloo, too. When he saw Jesus, this demon, fallen angel of the Satanic host who had what the New Testament called demonized, daimonizonminos(?), who had demonized this child. When he saw Jesus, threw him into convulsions.
Now verse 18, "And Jesus rebuked the demon and he departed out of him and the child was cured from that very hour." What a marvelous scene, isn't it? I mean, it all has been going on for years and it just ended that fast. Jesus rebuked the demon, he left. The child was cured from that very hour. He could speak, he could hear, he could think, no more convulsions, no more seizures, no more wallowing, no more foaming at the mouth, no more foul, evil, vile, wretched vocabulary...if there was anything to come gutterly out of his dumbness. Amazing, miraculous.
But Jesus always had that power...always. It was just part of His ministry to cast out demons. He did it over and over and over again. And we've been following through Matthew and we've seen it in chapter 4, we've seen it in chapter 8 twice, we've seen it in chapter 9, we've seen it in chapter 12, we see it here. Jesus had power over wretched fallen angels.
By the way, Luke adds a wonderful little footnote here. Luke says, "And all were astonished...I love this phrase...all were astonished at the majesty of God." Beautiful phrase. All were astonished at the majesty of God. You know why Luke uses that phrase? It lingers in his mind from the transfiguration. On the mountain, the majesty of God was seen in Christ and no less was it seen in His power over the demonic world. Majesty. And Luke uses that word, the majesty of God. And it...by the way...is the very same word that Peter uses in 2 Peter 1:16 when it says we were eyewitnesses of His majesty on the holy mount. This, too, revealed His majestic glory.
So, in response to the pleading of the father and the powerlessness of the followers, the Lord confronts the perversion of the faithless generation. And He heals the child Himself. Now that brings us to the main point, this is the fourth point, the power of faith. It's now teaching time, folks. And we're going to find out what all this is meant to teach. I mean, if we just stop here and go home we really wouldn't know. Which seems a nice story, glad for that child, it's wonderful. Nice to have that child whole for the father's sake. Nice for people to see the power of Christ, but it has nothing to do with me.
Oh, but it does...it does and let's see why. The whole incident is merely an illustration of a lesson, and here comes the lesson in verse 19. "Then came the disciples to Jesus privately and they said, Why could we not we cast him out?" I mean, You just came up and...(snap) he was gone. Why couldn't we do it? It doesn't square with what You told us in chapter 10. I mean, it doesn't make sense.
Mark says they went into a home, maybe a home where they were staying in that area. And they got Him alone and they said, "Why couldn't we do it?" They didn't ask, "How did You do that?" They knew how He did it, they wanted to know why they couldn't. So, Jesus teaches them a great lesson. Verse 20, "Because of your little faith..." That's the original text. Not unbelief, not no faith, "Because of your little faith, you had weak faith, you didn't believe enough."
Now at this point I know I run the risk of sounding like the average faith healer. So let me clarify this because most of us run so fast the opposite way that we've eliminated faith from our lives all together, and everything for us is just matter of fact, you know. But He says because of your little faith. You know, if they had one problem, what was it? Little faith. Have you heard that before? O ye of...what?...little faith. Remember I told you that was the subtitle for the disciples, the O ye of little faith association. They always were indicted for that. Four times Jesus says to them "O ye of little faith."
And what's He saying? It's not enough for me to say that, I've got to get a handle on that and I think you do, too. I want to know exactly what that means. Now follow my thinking very closely. What is our Lord saying, O ye of little faith? Does He mean, "Well, you don't believe down deep in some subjective way," what is He really saying?
Now let me give it to you as simply as I can. When the disciples first saw this child, the father brought him, and there's little doubt in my mind that they attempted to heal the boy. And maybe they said in the name of Jesus Christ, be gone. He didn't go. Nothing happened. And maybe they said it one more time, in the name of Jesus Christ be gone...and he didn't go. And so they said, "Well, it's too difficult for the Lord...it just, it can't be done...can't be done." So they gave up. I mean, they just bailed out. Their faith ran out at that point. And they quit. And in case you think that's unusual, let's take a little trip.
Go back to Matthew chapter 6, this was pretty routine behavior for them. He teaches them a rather important lesson. We believe the Sermon on the Mount was spoken to the multitudes but also to His disciples, as it's indicated in chapter 5. And when He speaks to them, and particularly in verse 30, "Wherefore if God so clothed the grass of the field which is today and tomorrow is cast in the oven, shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith." Now one thing they worried about was the matter of clothing and food and drink. Now they were okay with what they had, it was what they didn't have that worried them. They had a lack of faith in God to supply what they didn't see immediately in their hand. I mean, all of us can believe, and we say, "Oh yes, my God supplies all my need, all you need to do is go to the closet and take it out." Or the Lord provides all our food, all you have to do is go to the cupboard in your kitchen or go to the market and buy it. So you don't have any trouble believing God for what you have in hand. But what is accessible and available to you?