Matthew 17:20
“For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.” (sic)
I find it necessary to repeat here
your entire comment regarding this scripture, so that anyone reading this will
not mistakenly think I have altered your argument in any way. Your comment
reads:
“If ‘nothing will be impossible to you’, then if we ask to cure cancer tonight, cancer should disappear. Right? Yet nothing happens. Note that if we take the Bible less-than-literally here, the statement ‘nothing will be impossible to you’ becomes ‘lots of things will be impossible to you,’ and that would mean that Jesus is lying.”
I hardly know where to begin. Just for starters, you have left
out the first sentence of the verse in question without making any mention, or
giving any indication that you have done so (a simple ellipsis, “…”, prior to
the word you began with would have sufficed). The sense of the entire statement
is changed by your omission of this sentence, and in actuality, for the sake of
clarity, you should also have included the verse prior to this one, Matthew
17:19, and it would be better still if you had included everything back to
Matthew 17:14. I would really like to give you the benefit of the doubt, but I
have to, at the very least, point out that this certainly has the appearance of
deliberately trying to deceive your readers. Not to mention that you follow
this apparent deception up by calling Jesus a “liar”, when in fact, it is your argument that is quite obviously
designed to deceive. So let us now take a look at the context surrounding the
Lord’s comment which you have chosen to question.
The first eight verses of Matthew 17 deal with the event that
we have come to refer to as “The Transfiguration”. Immediately following this
occasion, Jesus and the three disciples who had accompanied Him up the
mountain, return to the crowd that they had earlier separated themselves from.
Jesus is asked by a man to heal the man’s son, who suffers from violent
“seizures”. The boy’s father also mentions that the disciples who had not gone
with Jesus and the others up the mountain, had, in Jesus’ absence, tried to
heal the boy themselves, but failed to do so. Verse 18 relates Jesus’ success
in healing the boy, and then we come to the verse immediately prior to your
reference, verse 19 (and I will also include with it your actual reference,
verse 20, but with the initial sentence re-inserted):
“Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked, ‘Why couldn’t we drive it (the demon that was causing the seizures) out?’“He (Jesus) replied, ‘because you have so little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.” (Emphasis and parenthetical statements mine for clarification.)
So clearly, Jesus was not telling
them that they could perform such a
feat at that time; He was, rather, explaining why they couldn’t. Because they still didn’t
have faith the size of a mustard seed. And here, it must be noted that
Jesus clearly had real purpose in His choice of comparison. This was not the
only time that our Lord used the tiny little mustard seed as the chosen vehicle
for relaying to His followers a very important lesson, or principle. Again,
I’ll ask you to consider that which follows.
“He (Jesus) told them (in this case, the crowd that followed Him) another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches’.Matthew 13:31-32 (Parenthetical statements mine. cf., Mk 4:30-32)
In the same manner that Jesus used to illustrate the potential
for growth, concerning “the kingdom
of God”, in the parable that we
have just read, so was He illustrating the potential
for growth, concerning “faith”, when He answered the question put to Him by His
disciples in our earlier reference from Matthew 17. The disciples, however,
would not receive this type of faith unto themselves, a faith of such magnitude
that it could be used to move mountains, until the events surrounding
Pentecost, at which time they would receive from God the gift of the Holy
Spirit, and the God-sanctioned ability, or privilege, to tap into the Spirit’s
power at any time that they were both “in God’s will”, and acting “according”
to that will. I personally cannot conceive of any reason why God would want to
do such a thing as move a mountain from one place to another, but I do believe
deeply, that from the moment of the disciples receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit, should a situation ever arise where it would for some unknown purpose
seem reasonable, or necessary, to God, that such a thing be done, then any
believer could be used by God to tap into the power of the Spirit, and
mountains might indeed be moved. As I’ve already said, however, I can think of
no earthly reason why God would want to do such a thing.
In yet another reference from the New Testament (remember that
Scripture must be proved by Scripture), the same story of the boy afflicted by
seizures is told again, this time by Mark. In his recollection of the event,
Mark recalls Jesus telling the disciples, in answer to their question regarding
their failure at casting out the demon responsible for the boy’s affliction,
that:
“…”This kind can come out only by prayer.”Mark 9:29
There are at least three distinct,
and important things that we can learn here from the words of our Saviour.
First, the words “this kind” inform us that there are more than just a single
type of demon by which this fallen world is plagued, apparently demons of
varying strengths, and second, there are different degrees of skill (or faith?)
required to achieve different purposes. Though the disciples did not yet have
faith “as little as a mustard seed”, there are indeed earlier accounts of the
twelve casting out some demons, and performing other miraculous works as well.
Before Jesus first sent His disciples out on their own for a time, we are told:
“He called His twelve disciples to Him and gave them authority to drive out evil spirits, and to heal every disease and sickness.”Matthew 10:1
We are also told in Mark 6:12-13:
“They went out and preached that people should repent. They drove out many demons (by the authority Jesus had given them as noted in Matthew 10:1; see above) and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.”
Yet as we have seen, they failed in
their attempt to drive out the demon of concern in the story of the boy
suffering from seizures. That is because their faith was still so small that
only certain demons could be cast out by them; a “casting out” that was
apparently effected by the use of the authority
which Jesus had given them. And that is why Jesus replied to their question in
Matthew 17 by stating that the reason for their failure was because they only
had “such little faith”.
Thirdly, it should be noted here, that in this account given in
Mark, what Mark remembered Jesus as saying in regard to the disciples question,
was that “this kind can only come out with prayer”. This in itself, is of utmost
importance to our entire discussion about “how” one should pray. By Jesus’
statement regarding the necessity for prayer in casting out a particular type
of demon, we realize that whatever method the disciples were using to perform
their wondrous works, the authority for doing so which they had received from
Jesus, they weren’t yet using “effective” prayer as a means to accomplishing
their ends. Otherwise, they would have succeeded in casting out the demon in
question, and there would also have been no reason for Mark to explain in
chapter 6, verse 13, that the healings they performed, were done through the
agency of anointing the sick with oil, once again, apparently not by the use of prayer. And this
brings us back full circle to your comments on Matthew 17:20, where you ask:
“If "nothing will be impossible to you", then if we ask to cure cancer tonight, cancer should disappear. Right?”
We have already shown that Jesus was
not telling His disciples what they “could” do, but was illustrating for them,
what they “could not do”, and explaining to them “why” they could not do it at that time, because that type of demon
could only be driven out by prayer. The reason is very clear if you have read
the Bible with more diligence than it takes to extract random passages, and
then sew them into a tapestry of you own design.
When we earlier referred to the works
of John Bunyan, we illustrated quite clearly that a true prayer must reach God,
“through” Christ Jesus. Since at the time in question, the disciples who failed
to cast out the demon were not in the presence of God’s Son, who was up on the
mountain experiencing His Transfiguration, there was no channel through which a
prayer might be presented to the Father. As Jesus Himself said in Mark’s
gospel, that particular type of demon could only be cast out by prayer, so
there was no way the disciples could have succeeded. In whatever manner they
cast out the earlier demons, since they were not in the presence of the Lord at
those times either, we know that it wasn’t by prayer that they were casting
them out, otherwise they would have had no need of Jesus’ explanation regarding
prayer. They would already have prayed.
It may be unfortunate that we are not
informed in more detail of the method that they did use, other than that it was
by the authority Jesus had given them, and at times combined with the
"anointing with oil", but that probably makes perfect sense, since it
is not a limitation modern-day Christians have to contend with. By the power of
God’s Spirit since His arrival at Pentecost,
and the right-of-access that true believer’s enjoy as the result of our
relationship to the Father and His Son, we can live continually in the presence
of the Father, through Christ, and in Christ, we have a permanent channel to the
Father through which our prayers may pass. It must still be noted, however,
that should we place ourselves outside the will of God, by disobedience to His
will, or whatever other means, and thus create a wall of separation between
ourselves and Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, once again God will cease to hear our
prayers. As long as we remain in His will, however, we are one with Him, in
Christ, and we share in the power of the Holy Spirit, and nothing will be
impossible to us, as our Lord Himself stated:
“… ‘What is impossible with men is possible with God.’”Luke 18:27
(And with that, we will have to
finish up with this reference tomorrow.)
TO BE CONTINUED....
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