I Believe; Help My Unbelief

Introduction

The gave this sermon the title ‘I Believe; Help My Unbelief’, and the reason I did so is because this passage became a huge source of encouragement for me, especially when I was faced with my own doubts, my own inability, and a lack of trust in God. And this all came about as I started a new job this year at church, where my main responsibility is looking after the youth group. And I don’t know about other churches, but the youth group that I lead is certainly not the most engaged group of teenagers. Most weeks they make it very obvious that they are forced to be at church by their parents, and even during praise and worship it’s only the teachers that are singing, and most weeks I’m not even sure if they are listening to my sermons. And as I was faced with this week after week, I felt really discouraged, I felt like I was doing something wrong (perhaps I am). But regardless, I found this passage hugely encouraging, because it teaches us, at least in the matters of salvation, there is an inadequacy, a powerlessness to us, and that drives us to trust and depend on our only source of hope and life in this world, which is Christ. So as we dive into this passage today, I pray that this would also be a source of encouragement and hope for you too.

Our Helplessness

One of the striking things about how Mark narrates this event compared to the other gospel writers is that he goes into much more graphic and vivid detail about what goes on, and because of that Mark’s account is more than twice as long compared to Matthew’s and Luke’s account. This account occurs after the transfiguration: after this great moment of divine revelation, Jesus comes down the mountain and Mark describes a flurry of activity. And the scene that Mark paints is absolute chaos.

If we read verses 14-18, we see that as soon as Jesus and his disciples come down from the mountain, we see a big crowd in great commotion, arguing with one another and arguing with the scribes. In the midst of that we see a desperate father trying to get his son healed, and we see the spectacular failure of the disciples on public display, completely powerless, unable to help the father and his son, and unable to control the situation. The crowd is unable to help, the religious leaders are unable to help, and not even Jesus’ own disciples are able to help this poor man and his son. No wonder then that when Jesus came, Mark describes crowd seeing him, running up to him, and being extremely excited and greatly amazed, because they are desperately looking to Jesus in expectation.

The picture that Mark paints for us here is the utter helplessness of mankind. And this is exemplified in the plight of this desperate father and his son. Mark describes this son to ‘have a spirit that makes him mute’ in verse 17, and in verse 18 it describes this boy having recurrent episodes of being thrown to the ground, foaming at the mouth, grinding his teeth, and becoming rigid, which when looked through the lens of modern medicine, sound very much like epilepsy causing grand mal seizures. Matthew actually uses a Greek term (σεληνιάζεται) which in some translations is translated as ‘seizures’, but the term originally describes someone behaving erratically due to the powers of the moon, which reflects an ancient supernatural paradigm through which people understood seizure like activity.

But regardless of whether its medical seizures or this superstitious understanding of the moon, Mark very clearly and very dramatically portrays the plight of this boy in terms of demon possession. Four times (v18, 20, 22, 26) Mark clearly states how this boy has an unclean spirit that causes this boy to have convulsions, making him fall to the ground, foam at the mouth, and become completely unconscious. This unclean spirit is presented as an active oppressive malicious agent with this boy presented as a completely helpless victim. This boy is not just medically ill, he is repeatedly and dramatically assaulted by a demonic force. In verse 22 - ‘And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him’ - Mark shows that this spirit seeks to destroy and kill this child. Even if this boy truly did have epilepsy, Mark makes it clear that this boy’s epilepsy was just a manifestation of a deeper underlying spiritual problem, which was that he was possessed by evil spirit.

What Mark shows us through this graphic and dramatic story, and he is essentially describing our condition, our complete helplessness. And he shows us there are two reasons for this.

1. Firstly, we are helpless when we are without Jesus. We see this chaotic scene emerge out of the absence of Jesus while Jesus was up the mountain during his transfirguration, and we see this complete mayhem transpire during the brief absence of Jesus.

2. Secondly, it is not just because of the absence of Jesus we are helpless, but Mark shows us we are also helpless due to the presence of an external force: evil and sin. I’m not suggesting that we are all possessed by demons, but the presence of an active evil force in this world is a spiritual reality. Satan prowls and seeks to antagonise the Church and undermine its efforts. Satan seeks to keep people spiritually oppressed and blind. In Romans chapter 6 (Rom 6:12), Paul describes sin as a ruling oppressive power, showing that sin is not just a personal passive state of being, but an active external agent. So just like this boy, we are helpless not only because we lack Christ, but because there is active spiritual opposition in this world.

And I think this is helpful to remember when we look at this world. There is an inherent helplessness and futility that we can observe in this world, and people struggle and desperately fight against it, just like this father and this boy, but death is always a looming reality. And in the midst of that futility, and when faced with the ultimate reality of death, people grapple and struggle to find some sort of life, meaning, happiness, or purpose in the darkness of this world, whether it be through success, fame, philanthropy, legacy, pleasure. People strive to defeat death and sin, but I wonder if anyone truly does. And how can you, if you don’t believe in Christ, and not only that, Satan actively works against you?

I remember quite clearly a patient I met when I used to work at PeterMac hospital a few years ago. He was a man with an end-stage blood cancer called multiple myeloma, and his disease had progressed through all the lines of treatment available in Australia, and in a desperate attempt to survive, he flew to America and paid a lot of money to access various different drugs and clinical trials, which unfortunately didn’t work. He was clearly a very wealthy and influential man, having been a CEO of some sort of company in the past, but when faced with his mortality, I think felt this futility in all this success that he had achieved in his life, because after suffering from this disease, he had gone on to change his life’s direction from chasing after personal success to helping others, because he contributed heavily to a myeloma foundation to help others with similar conditions. I think this man realised that this life is not about himself, and he came really really close but he did not quite make the ultimate realisation, that this life is about Christ. And I wonder, if there was perhaps a darkness, a spiritual opposition, keeping him blind.

And I think we sometimes forget this spiritual lens when we view the problems of this world and our church. Just like how ancient people saw seizures through the paradigm of some supernatural force of the moon, I think we often view the problems of this world and our church through modern paradigms of culture, psychology, philosophy, etc. But Mark reminds us that in addition to these things, there is a very real spiritual opposition that we face as the church, and there is a very good reason why, Jesus, in the Lord’s prayer, teachers us to pray ‘deliver us from evil.’

So this state of humanity that Mark portrays for us I think is ultimately designed to make us realise how that there is nothing within us that we can do to rescue ourselves from this plight of sin and death. We are stuck in the depths of our sin, we are spiritually oppposed, we are completely unable to save ourselves, let alone save others.

Diagnosis

And why is it that we are in this plight? Why is it that we are without Christ? Why is it that we are spiritually oppressed by Satan? We see Jesus giving us a diagnosis in Mark 9:19. Here, we see Jesus completely exasperated by the crowd and the disciples, and he says ‘O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?’ Our problem is faithlessness, unbelief. It is faithlessness that results in us being without Christ, and it is faithlessness that allows us to be attacked and assaulted by Satan. We can see this in the disciples because perhaps the reason they were unable to exorcise this demon is that in the absence of Christ, they developed a form of unbelief that a lot of us have - self-belief. The disciples had every good reason to believe that they could cast out this demon: earlier in the book they were commissioned to do so and given authority by Jesus himself, and they had success in casting out many demons. And they must have tried numerous different ways to heal this boy, probably with a confidence they had developed in themselves based on past success, but they were unable to do so. And it was because they lacked a faith and trust in Christ, and rather they believed and trusted in themselves.

And we are often the same. As church leaders we encounter various challenges in ministry, difficult people and relationships, conflicts, and our instinct is to first rely on ourselves and trust in ourselves, drawing on our skills, past experience, and knowledge to bring a solution to that problem. And perhaps you have been successful at this in the past and you have built up a confidence in yourself. It is so easy to fall into the trap the disciples fell into, by standing in the place of Christ and seeking to exercise our own power. But with matters of the church, faith, and salvation, we need to bring it to Christ first and rely on Him, as the problems that we face are insurmountable without Christ, as they are problems to do with our fundamental condition of evil, spiritual oppression, and sin. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use our skills and knowledge when encountering these issues - they are a gift from God! But they are not to become a form of pride and self-reliance which make us forget to rely on Christ, and we must train ourselves to present these issues to Jesus first and rely on him only.

And I think this is a really important realisation that we must have, especially those who lead the church. The more we realise the depth of our plight, our helpless condition, and how we are completely powerless in the salvation of ourselves and those around us, the more we look outwards rather than inwards, the more and rely on an external source of help rather than relying on ourselves. Because as soon as we believe that by my talent, by my skills, by my experience, whatever it may be, as soon as Christ is out of that equation, we will end up just like the disciples, completely powerless and unable to help those around us; we will still remain in that helpless state that all humanity is in, spiritually oppressed, without Christ, all because of faithlessness.

Treatment

So then the treatment, the solution, is to have faith. Look how powerful faith is - Jesus himself says in Mark 9:23 ‘All things are possible for one who believes.’ But there is profound irony in the phrase to ‘the one who believes’/‘have faith’. It is only in Mark that this dialogue about faith between Jesus and the father of this child is recorded. And this dialogue is so precious because it reveals to us the true nature of saving faith. This is quite specific to the Korean church, as when we see a devout believer, we often say that they are ‘믿음좋아’ which translates to ‘their faith is good.’ Faith is almost seen as a badge of honour, as a skill or power that you cultivate. But Mark shows us that the true nature of saving faith is the complete opposite.

In Mark 9:24, we see the father of this child cry out ‘I believe; help my unbelief.’ The desperation of this father is almost palpable through the pages of the book, and it is this very desperation that encapsulates what faith is really like. This father’s desperation comes out of his painful realisation that there is nothing he can do to save his son, and he’s realised there is nothing the religious leaders, the scribes, or even the disciples can do to help his son. All he has left is Jesus. And he is desperately clinging on to this last glimmer of hope, in Jesus Christ. True faith is not a skill or power or a merit that you collect up for yourself. It is a complete emptying of oneself, an acknowledgement that we are completely powerless and helpless, and that our only hope, our only source of help, and our only strength is Jesus Christ. True faith trusts in Jesus so much more than the self, that even the faith takes no confidence in itself - which explains why this father cries out ‘I believe, help my unbelief.’ True faith trusts in Jesus despite how hopeless or difficult the situation may seem. True faith yields one’s own insufficiency to the perfect sufficiency of Jesus.

And what happens when this father puts all his trust in Jesus and not himself? We see in verses 25-27, Jesus rebukes this evil spirit, and for one last time this boy as a seizure and the spirit leaves him. Notice how Mark describes the boy being like a corpse in verse 26, in the Greek ‘νεκρος’, which in every sense of the word means ‘dead.’ Even the crowd agreed as they said ‘He is dead’. But then Jesus takes him by the hand, lifts him up, and he stands up back to life. We should be cautious, as we should not look to immediate empirical results, to see whether God is active or not, because God may still be acting despite what we may see. Part of faith is trusting in God despite the circumstances. And the faith of this father, who believed despite his son appearing to be dead, is rewarded, as the son is eventually freed from this evil spirit and brought back to life.

Then Jesus begins to talk about prayer. The disciples ask him ‘Why could we not cast this demon out?’ in verse 28. And Jesus makes a pecular comment in verse 29 saying ‘this kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.’ It’s not that this demon was a special breed of demon that required some sort of special prayer to drive it out. What Jesus is saying is that prayer is the very expression of trusting in God. Prayer is the focusing of our faith on God alone. And in effect, prayer is the very acknowledgement that true power and salvation is found in God alone, and not in us. That’s why prayer is needed to drive out this demon, because exorcism is outside the scope of what we can do, just like salvation, and we can only trust in God’s power alone.

So if faith and prayer is the complete trust in God and the complete lack of trust in ourselves, what is it that makes Jesus trustworthy? I don’t think it’s by coincidence that Mark places this account sandwiched in between the transfiguration and Jesus predicting his death and resurrection. We are able to completely trust and yield to Jesus because He is the one revealed to be the one and only pre-existent Son of God in the transfiguration, to whom all authority and power in the universe has been given. And this very same powerful God in the Flesh, is revealed to be the one who loves and cares for us so much that he is willing to die for us on the cross. It is the divine Son of God, in his atoning death and resurrection, that forms the foundation of our hope in our hopelessness, our power in our powerlessness, and our salvation from our sin and spiritual oppression. This is why we can completely trust in Him to help us, to help our church, even though things may seem impossible and hopeless.

Conclusion

So I hope you can see why I found so much encouragement through this passage, and I hope it has encouraged you too. Throughout the passage, we see this repeated idea of the disciples inadequacy, our inadequacy. And this inadequacy stems from the fact that what Jesus calls us to do surpasses our own abilities, as we are dealing with supernatural realities of sin and evil. But by the grace of God our inability and inadequacy is not a barrier to our ministry. It is actually something that the more we realise, the more it drives us into true faith in Christ, and the more it drives us into complete dependence and trust in Him through prayer. And this is all because Christ is our ultimate hope, power and strength, because of who He is and what He has done for us. I pray that all of us here today will remember this in our ministries, because we are sure to encounter difficult times. In those moments, no matter what the circumstances may look like, dive deeper into the security and perfect power of Christ in prayer, trusting in Him rather than ourselves because only He is trustworthy, and God will respond to your faith, just like He did for this father who desperately clung onto Jesus for hope.

Sources:

PNTC (Edwards)

TNTC (Schnabel)

NIGTC (France)

Preaching the Word (Hughes)

NICOT (Lane)