Verse of the day · October 17
What is the father asking for when he says help thou mine unbelief?
The father wept, and what he said named his own weakness.
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And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.
Mark 9:24
Jesus came down from a hill where he had been with three of his disciples and found the other nine in a crowd, with scribes arguing at them, and asked the scribes what the question was. Neither side answered him. The scribes said nothing because he had arrived; the disciples said nothing either, and left the whole thing to him. The man who answered was the father of a sick boy. His son had a spirit in him that took his speech away, and when it took hold of him it threw him into convulsions and left him foaming at the mouth and grinding his teeth. The fits had worn him to a skeleton, thin and haggard from the violence of them. And his account had one more thing in it. "I spake to thy disciples," he said, "that they should cast him out; and they could not."
The doubt had already reached past the nine to their master; the scribes were very likely insinuating that he could not do this either. The father had been standing there through all of it.
"Bring him unto me," Jesus said. They brought him, and the sight of Jesus set the fit off: the spirit threw the boy down, shook him, convulsed him, and he lay at Jesus' feet, unable to stand, rolling and foaming. Jesus asked the father how long it had been going on, and the father said, from infancy. Often the spirit had thrown him into the fire and into the water to kill him. His faith was very weak by now, and perhaps weaker than when he had first set out from home with the boy. Then the father asked, with a condition hung on the front of it: "if thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and help us." The us was two people — the boy on the ground, and the father, in pieces over him.
The if was on the power. There had been another man once, a leper, who came with the same kind of condition pointed the other way: he had no doubt about the power and wondered only about the willingness — "if thou wilt, thou canst," he said. This father never questioned the goodwill. He questioned the ability, and his reason was close at hand: the men who had just failed with his son were men who cast devils out in Jesus' own name, and had done it for plenty of others before.
The reply kept his word and turned it round. "If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth," Jesus said. It was a quiet check on the weakness of his faith. He had put the if in the wrong place, and the answer moved it onto his own believing without ever asking him to take it back. The question had stopped being whether Jesus could and become whether the father could.
The promise is worded more carefully than it sounds. "All things are possible to him that believeth" — possible to be done for him, by God, and not possible for him to go and do. What that sentence credits to faith is God's own doing. Faith is not where the power comes from. It is what receives it.
Straightway, the account says. The moment he understood where the condition had been put, and that everything now followed from it, he cried out — loudly, and in real distress: part indignation at his own unbelief, and part fear that the unbelief was going to cost him the cure. He heard a rebuke in it, and the tears came from that: grieved to be thought a man with no faith, and feeling for his son, he wept. He made no attempt to cover the weakness. He named it.
What followed it was a claim, and it was about the very thing he had just put the if on. "Lord, I believe": persuaded of the power now, and persuaded of the pity, and confident that the cure he had come for would not be prevented by the want of faith. And in the same breath he said how little of that belief there was.
What he found in himself was a little faith in that power with a great deal of unbelief mixed through it, and what kept the faith small was the size of the boy's disorder. The thing he wanted mended was the very thing making it hard to believe mending was possible. So the rest of his sentence asks for something to be handed over. He had seen that believing was not in his own power, and that he had no strength of his own to set against his unbelief: the faith would have to be given to him, and the power against the unbelief given with it. At its shortest it comes to this: help me against the unbelief, and give me a power to believe. He asks pardon for the unbelief as well as power against it, and grace to make up whatever the faith is short of. That does not make him unusual. Every believer, sooner or later, ends up using the same words, because faith in this life stays imperfect and often very weak in its working. The answer to that is to ask for the help rather than manufacture it.
He did not undertake to go away and work the missing part up himself; he brought the shortfall as it stood. The crowd was closing in by then, waiting to see how this would come out, and Jesus did not keep them waiting: he spoke to the spirit — "Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him." The weight is on that I. You resisted what my disciples told you; now I am telling you. The spirit tore the boy on the way out and left him so still that people said he was dead, and then Jesus took fast hold of him and lifted him up, and he got to his feet, perfectly well. The fits had come and gone all the boy's life, and one clause of that command shut the door on them — "enter no more." It was said partly with the father in mind. His faith in the cure still needed settling when the words were spoken, and that clause was there to settle it, and to leave him in no fear of the disorder coming back.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, Albert Barnes, Adam Clarke, Charles Spurgeon, B. W. Johnson and the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary. How these teachings are made