Verse of the day · October 16
What does faith as a grain of mustard seed mean in Matthew 17:20?
A crowd watched nine of the disciples fail to cure one boy. Their master was up a mountain.
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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, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.
Matthew 17:20
Jesus had sent his disciples out with power to cast out devils, and they had used it, and it had worked. Then he took Peter, James and John up a high mountain, where they saw him transfigured, and told the nine he left behind not to come after him. He did not come back down until the next day. A crowd collected while he was away, and it did not drift off; they stood there and waited for him.
A man in that crowd had a son with the falling sickness, and in his case, by divine permission, the hand of Satan was in it. Satan was allowed that hold on a man's body in those days; it was peculiar to that time. The fits came round with the changes of the moon, and they took the boy wherever he happened to be standing: he had fallen into fire and he had fallen into water, unable to help himself or get clear of whatever he landed in. He was an only child, and he had been like this since he was small. The father had meant to bring him to Jesus, but Jesus was up the mountain, so he asked the nine instead, and they attempted the cure.
Nothing happened. Nine men who had done this before stood over him in front of a whole crowd and could not cure him. And there were scribes in that crowd. All the time everyone had been waiting, they had been putting questions to the nine, to plant the idea that a man like that could not be the Christ — probably about Jesus, his family, his looks, the life he led. It was the scribes' moment, and they crowed over it.
Then Jesus came down. The crowd saw him coming, left the scribes, and ran to meet him. He asked the scribes himself what they were questioning his disciples about, and they gave him no answer. The father got to him, knelt, and said, "Lord, have mercy on my son: for he is lunatick, and sore vexed." The boy was not out of his mind; it was the falling sickness, and the fits were grievous. The father had named the symptom; the cure went past the fits to the devil behind them. "Bring him hither to me," he said. He rebuked the devil, the devil went out, and the child was cured from that very hour, and stayed well.
Afterwards the nine got him on his own, in a house they went into when it was over, and asked the question they had been carrying: "Why could not we cast him out?" They were worried. They wanted to know whether the power had been taken off them, and what they had done to lose it. And Jesus said unto them, "Because of your unbelief." He was not telling them the power had been taken off them; he was naming a fault of their own. Their believing would not have made the cure easier for God; he required faith in the men he worked through because that was his way of working miracles, not because he needed it. And he was not calling them unbelievers. Wherever faith falls short of the strength and the use it should have, there is unbelief. These men had faith. They did not have much of it, and they were not leaning on what they had.
The faith he was asking after was not a general willingness to believe true things; it had a particular object. He had given these men a commission: power to work miracles in his name, to stand behind the preaching he sent them out on the road to do. The commission is what they had stopped leaning on. Either they doubted it was still valid, or they feared it had lapsed when the journey he first sent them on came to an end, or they thought it had somehow been forfeited or withdrawn. The commission was a full one and it covered casting out devils without exception; what had failed was their reliance on it. What displeased him was not that they doubted themselves — a man is right to be unsure of his own strength — but that they distrusted a strength he had put in their hands.
So what he said next was said to stop them concluding the power was gone. "For verily I say unto you," he went on, "if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed." That seed was the smallest there was, and people used it as a way of saying a very small amount of anything, faith included. One reading makes the smallness the whole of it: a grain of real faith, actually leant on, and they would do wonders. Another takes the comparison to be what the seed does — the least of all seeds grows into the biggest of the garden plants, a tree the birds shelter in, and there is a principle of life in the grain reaching forward to great results. Whichever way the comparison runs, the condition he put on it was reliance: if they would truly rely on the powers committed to them.
Then he showed them what they might have done: "ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove." He seems to have pointed at a mountain as he said it, probably the one he had just come down from, in sight of the house they were sitting in — the nearest thing to hand that nobody could move. No hill was going to move. The mountain was the measure: things equally difficult and just as impossible-looking, whenever the glory of God and the good of men required it. What the saying was carrying was the line he put after it, "and nothing shall be impossible unto you." That is the direction it ran in: the spread of Christ's kingdom, the confirming of the truth, the good of mankind.
And it is a particular kind of faith: the faith of miracles, given to particular people while what they preached still needed backing of that kind. It is not the faith that assents to the Bible, and it is not the faith by which a soul believes in Christ as its Saviour. The faith of miracles has no power in itself. What it removes mountains by is God's power, pledged in God's promise, and the faith takes hold of both together. The commission was theirs, not everybody's; the distrust he objected to is anybody's — it displeases him wherever it happens.
When the men he works through fail, it does not stop his grace — if it will not go through them, it goes without them. The boy was cured either way; what the failure cost the nine was not his cure but their own hand in it. What had gone slack was their hold on the power, and what he told them was that it had not been taken away.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, Albert Barnes, Adam Clarke and B. W. Johnson. How these teachings are made