Look across the page and let’s read together the scripture for today. Mark chapter 9 verses 14 through 29. This is God’s holy word. And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them, and the scribes arguing with them. And immediately all the crowd, when they saw him, were greatly amazed and ran up to him and greeted him.
And he asked them, What are you arguing about with them? And someone from the crowd answered him, Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that makes him mute. And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able. And he answered them, O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.
And they brought the boy to him. And when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell to the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. And Jesus asked his father, how long has this been happening to him? And he said, from childhood. And it has often cast him into fire and into water to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.
And Jesus said to him, if you can, all things are possible for one who believes, Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, I believe, help my unbelief. And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to him, you mute and deaf spirit, I command you come out of him and never enter him again. And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, he is dead. But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up and he arose. And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, why could we not cast it out? And he said to them, this kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.
Thus far, God’s holy, inspired, and infallible word. Thanks be to God. can be understood by almost everybody in any generation is, Lord, for us to understand this especially today. And we ask now that you would impress it upon our hearts and deepen our understanding of it. We pray, Lord, that the words of the preacher’s mouth and the meditations of our hearts as we think on these things will be acceptable in your sight. We do ask this in Jesus’ name.
Well, I have skipped a few verses here, but I’ll give you a summary of what’s said here in the ninth chapter of Mark. Mark 9, 9-13, which we didn’t read of course, covers the descent from the Mount of Transfiguration where Jesus had received visits from three heavenly personages, Moses, Elijah, and certainly not least, God the Father.
The visitor’s purpose was to encourage the Lord Jesus as the time of his painful death drew near. Disciples Peter, James, and John were with Jesus and were to keep what they saw and heard to themselves until after Jesus’ resurrection. This command prompted them to ask when a resurrected Elijah would appear. Jesus hinted that his cousin John, John the Baptist, had been given the role of Elijah for Jesus’ day. This coming off the mountain suddenly this group, I should say, coming off the mountain suddenly find themselves in the middle of a heated discussion. That’s where we pick up that which we’ve just read already.
Now, our points today are these. There are four of them. First, we have the dispute. Did Jesus’ disciples really have the power to cast out demons and perform other signs or not? The dispute. That’s what they were arguing about. Secondly, the problem. And it was a multifaceted problem. The father grieved and the boy did not get any better. And all the rage, the arguing and shouting and so forth really solved nothing.
Therein lay the problem. But then we have the victory. The power of Jesus, and it was not the disciples’ power, it was Jesus’ power. The power of Jesus was unleashed through faith and prayer. And finally, the purpose of it all. Jesus allowed this so as to confront everybody’s unbelief, everybody’s prayerlessness, everybody’s presumption. So we hope to cover those points for you this morning. First we have the dispute.
Did Jesus’ disciples really have the power to cast out demons? Well, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the nine disciples who didn’t go up on the mountain felt like that they had been left behind to handle this situation. Maybe at first they said, how come he doesn’t take all of us up there on the mountain? And I’m sure there are different reasons that Jesus had, but from the standpoint of the nine who didn’t go up on the mountain, they would have asked themselves, well, what then does the Lord want us to do while he’s up there?
And then this matter of the boy who was possessed and so forth came to their attention. And it would have been logical to say, well, the Lord must have wanted us to handle this. And why would they think like that? Because he had sent them out already to different places with the power to cast out demons. And that being the case, they would say, well, surely he has left us here to cast out the demon here that’s troubling the boy and his father and maybe even the community at this point. It’s also reasonable to think that the poor father hoped that the disciples were like the sorcerer’s apprentice. Of course, we have to improve it to make it plural there. But you know that story, the sorcerer’s apprentice?
First of all, it was a story by a famous German writer named Goethe. And then it was made into an opera. And finally Walt Disney seized on the music and put it with his film Fantasia. And if you ever saw that film, you see Mickey Mouse and the things that happened there.
What happened was that the sorcerer’s apprentice didn’t want to have to carry the heavy buckets of water. And he had a little bit of knowledge of how the sorcerer worked, so he said some magic words and things, and the broom turned into some sort of creature that had arms and would carry the water. All well and good up to that point, but then he couldn’t stop what he started. And the one broom turned into many brooms and many buckets of water.
And before you knew it, the whole room and castle or whatever they had there was flooded with water. this uh… situation was that jesus who had the power to heal and to restore was not there but the disciple says we know enough we’ve had enough experience in this and we’ll just take care of it this is why the lord left us here and to do that now that really wasn’t the case but jesus had other reasons as we’ll see so the scribes are monitoring, as they usually did, Jesus and his disciples.
They didn’t go on the mountain, of course, but they were around where the disciples, the ones who were left behind, were carrying out their supposed responsibilities. And they began to mock, as it were, the efforts of the disciples to cast out the demons, and they were unsuccessful. And so the scribes just turned this into a big ha-ha-ha to you. Your master is unable and you’re unable. And they said, no, he’s able. And they began to argue and fuss about that. And that was the dispute that came along. Well, who better to end the dispute?
The Lord Jesus Himself. Jesus was not taken by surprise. He didn’t come down the mountain and say, oh, what’s happening? He knew what was going on. He knew that this would take place and He knew that He had to be there to straighten things out. Jesus is able to do that not only for those disciples, but for us too. Jesus has not left us to fumble around in the dark, but to insist that He take charge and solve things.
And you sort of see that in verse 15 of the passage that we read today. What are you arguing about? He wants to know. Immediately, this crowd, when they saw Jesus coming, they were greatly amazed and they said, well, let’s bring it down to the very essence of the matter. Does Jesus have the power? Does He communicate that power to His disciples? Can this matter be solved? Well, that was a dispute. But again, the main point to see here is that Jesus can put an end to that kind of doubt. mocking, disputation, all the hullabaloo that was going on.
How we need the Lord Jesus to come to us, to be present. And He comes to us in the Word of God, in the Scriptures. Whenever we’re befuddled, when things are not quite making sense, when there’s a lot of carrying on and problems, the thing to do is go to the Word of God and let’s see what Jesus says and does. And in this case, he does bring a semblance of order to the situation there. He calms things down. He’ll do that for us.
If you’re troubled in your life, if things are mixed up and you’re not sure why things aren’t exactly the way they should be, just take it to the Lord Jesus. As the hymn says, take it to the Lord in prayer. Say, Lord, please straighten this out. Help me to understand. Help others to understand. Please be our help in a time of uncertainty and confusion. So that was the dispute. And then you have the problem. And we have to kind of back up before Jesus appeared.
You have a grieving father. How long has it been grieving? Well, we don’t know how old the boy was. Maybe he was a teenager by this time. But it had been a long time. And the father is basically saying here, as long as this child has been alive, it’s troubled me. I have not known what to do. I’ve had to pull him out of the fire. I’ve had to pull him out of the water. He can’t speak. He can’t hear. This is a terrible situation that I’ve had to live with for a long, long time. And so we might say accurately that the Father’s Spirit had been broken. And then even when Jesus appears, He’s not quite sure. He says, if you can, that’s when Jesus kind of rebukes him a bit.
He says, what do you mean, if I can? Real faith means, Lord, I know you can. Someone had come to Jesus at one point in another situation and said, Lord, you can heal me if you want to. And Jesus says, I will. I will do that. Well, the Father’s not quite at that point, but He’s moving in the right direction. Eventually, He’ll finally say, Lord, I believe.
Help my unbelief. The Son is another part of this problem. being in his totally unable situation, disabled situation, if you will. Son was, I would think, also given to an expression of abject fear. Now, what do I mean? I mean, I think that just about in any situation you put him, he trembled, he was fearful. how much thought he had, how rational he was, we don’t have any idea, but I think it’s fair to say that in addition to being mute and deaf, that he was fearful, very fearful. Even your kitty or your dog will tremble if the situation is dire enough. I think this young man was in that situation, knowing he could be overwhelmed at any moment.
So you have a grieving father and you have a boy totally disabled, but you have the crowd too. And they’re really getting into it now. We have the disciples and the scribes arguing, and then the crowd probably choosing sides there, and it’s just a big, as I called it a while ago, a hullabaloo, a real mess that’s going on. But what happens?
When Jesus appears, he’s up to the challenge. In other words, we might say, who can bring order out of all this chaos? But it’s the Lord Jesus who’s able to do that. He’s a person always filled with compassion. He cares about the Father in His long years of trying to deal with this. And now it appears that His hopes are dashed because the disciples can’t do anything for the situation. You have this father in that situation, and you have the son just unable to do anything.
But Jesus is there, and when Jesus is present, then things change immediately. There’s a song Oswald Smith wrote about when Jesus comes, the tempter’s power is broken. When Jesus comes, all tears are wiped away. He takes the gloom and turns the darkness into light. It’s a wonderful Christian song if you ever come across it sometime. But when Jesus comes is the answer.
When He’s there, when He’s there, things change. And again, we have to ask ourselves, Is He coming into our lives? Is He present in our lives? Or do we say, oh, He’s off on the mountain somewhere, too busy to bother with me and my troubles or our situation. But the Lord comes.
As I say, He’s not surprised by this. He knows what’s happening. He wants to be there. He wants to straighten out things and bring order and bring healing and deliverance to the Father and to the Son of His. So He comes in this situation and as we say, when the people saw Him, what?
They immediately looked to Him. It says that all the crowd when they saw Him were greatly amazed and ran up to Him and greeted Him. What that means is they stopped arguing. Even the scribes, I’m sure, just shut up. When Jesus comes, everything is changed.
What a wonderful thing for us to remember. This is how Jesus approaches us, not simply either to heal us, but also to save us. He is a Savior. Yes, He’s going to save this father and his boy out of a very difficult situation, but He wants to see them believe.
And again, by His Spirit, by His working in this one man’s life, and this was, I think, communicated to everyone around, Lord, I believe I believe. Help my unbelief. I know that I approach this situation lacking in a lot of things spiritually. But you’ve brought me to that place of believing and there’s so much in the terms of faith that I still need. Lord, help my unbelief. That’s what the Lord wants.
And what are we to believe? Now at this point, Jesus hasn’t died on the cross yet. He hasn’t risen from the dead yet. But this is what is needed to lead up to that. that you have to think that this Father, when He heard that Jesus had died and was told that it was for sinners, He would have said, Lord, I believe. And that Jesus rose from the dead, and He would have said, Lord, I believe.
And there’s so much more that He’s going to do. And He says, help my unbelief. There’s just so much that I have to learn and by which I have to grow. So Jesus approaches us, you see. And he says, I’m here not merely to heal you, to remedy the immediate situation, but I’m here to save you. That’s why I’ve come into the world, to save sinners.
He had this recent conversation with Elijah and Moses on the mountain. And why? Why did he have this conversation? We’re told in Scripture that they encouraged him, they talked to him about his going to the cross, okay? His recent conversation bolstered his determination to do everything that the Father had given him to do, and it can be summarized by saying, He came to overcome sin, to get rid of sin. You have sin in your life? Jesus came to deal with that. He came to overcome death. Are you afraid of death? Jesus says, trust in Me and death will just be a doorway that you pass through to go into the presence of the Lord. He came to defeat Satan.
Satan had put this demon in the man and given some sort of command to the demon, enter this boy or young man, enter him and take over his life and destroy it when you can. And I think the Lord had preserved this boy’s life up until this point. Otherwise, I think the boy would have been dead long ago. But the Lord said, I have plans for this boy and his father. And I’m not going to let Satan have his way. So what you see here is a problem, ultimately, of the devil and of sin and the conclusion of death. And Jesus says, I’m going to wipe them all away for those who believe in Me. Lord, I believe. Lord, I believe, said the man.
Well, we come thirdly then to the victory. Jesus is all about victory, you know? A passage like this just brings to my mind a lot of old Christian songs that I’ve heard through my life. One of them is, Victory in Jesus, my Savior forever. Oh, victory in Jesus. And that’s what Jesus is all about, victory for you. The power of Jesus, it’s not the disciples’ power, but the power of Jesus when it’s unleashed, overcomes all our enemies, all our fears and problems. And there are two things especially to remember about the power of Jesus.
It works through faith. Just about every person that Jesus healed, he wanted to know, do you believe? Where’s your faith? What about all this unbelief and all these things? And it works also very much through prayer. What did he say? The last thing he said, when his disciples were questioning him about all the things that went on, he said, this kind comes not out except by prayer, by prayer. So faith and prayer.
And you and I ask, what do we really need in our lives to get the full benefit of Jesus, our Savior? Help our unbelief, Lord. We’re convinced that you are the Messiah, the Savior, but what else do we need? Well, you need more faith. Lord, increase our faith. The disciples asked Jesus, he said, well, if you can just have faith like a mustard seed, you’re way ahead at that point. And keep praying, keep praying. Don’t faint. Men ought always to pray and not to faint.
Jesus comes to bring us victory. And let’s start with time. Jesus came to bring victory over the clock. Tick-tock, tick-tock, time is running out. Jesus says, don’t worry, I’ve got the clock in my power. And the date, what if you had come yesterday instead of today or tomorrow instead of today? Jesus says, no, this is the day. It’s all in my power. I knew what had to be done and I came down from the mountain and I came at this hour because you needed me here.” We might say that he arrived on time, as he always does. So he has victory over the clock and the calendar. He has victory over the scribes. They were really bullying these nine disciples who thought that they had things under control. The scribes were unbelievers.
They did not believe Jesus was the Messiah. And unbelief can be a great hindrance to the work of the Lord. Remember the people in Nazareth? He couldn’t do many great works there because of their unbelief. It’s a problem, it says. But He came to overcome that kind of unbelief, the scribal unbelief, if you will.
Any influence that they have over people, He came to overcome it. Everybody was confused until Jesus showed up. And it says they all looked to Him. They all greeted Him. they were rightly concluding that He was the answer to what was needed here. So He’s got victory over the clock and the calendar over the scribes and their unbelief, and He has victory over the disciples. Wait a minute, they’re supposed to be on His side.
What did Jesus say to Peter when He had told him he was going to have to suffer and be arrested, die, and all these things? Peter said, no, that never happened to you, Lord. And Jesus said, get behind me, Satan. Not that Peter was Satan, but that he was echoing those sorts of words of unbelief there.
Victory over the disciples whose unbelief was tied to pride and to presumption. We are Jesus’ disciples. That was their prideful thought. And He will always use us whenever we want Him to. That’s presumption. Well, Jesus was going to cut down their pride and to work against any sort of presumption and say, everything you have, anything you want, you have to just do like this fellow did and say, Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief.
Then He had victory over the demon, of course. My, what a struggle! Now of course we know Jesus could just snap his fingers and the demon would go away and the devil would flee and so forth, but this is all in Jesus’ teaching ministry here. And so the demon fights fiercely. uneven contest, and of course, he lost, but you’ll notice how he takes the boy and throws him down, and he foams at the mouth, and he seems so resistant, and the Lord is saying, up to a point, and he’s saying, well, go ahead, give it your best shot there, because in the end, this boy that God has preserved, even through all these years, this boy is mine, I’m going to have him for myself. So we have victory over the demon, victory over the devil. It’s a physical victory. There’s certainly physicality involved here and psychological victory too. Everybody’s thoughts, even the disciples’ thoughts. Victory over everything that would prevent us from coming to Him who is able.
Lord, if you are able, Jesus says, not only am I able, But I will do it. By the way, never say if to Jesus. If you can. You might say well if you want to, but don’t say if you can. Because Jesus can. I’ll guarantee it. Well that brings us then finally to the purpose. Jesus allowed this so as to confront everybody’s unbelief, prayerlessness, and presumption.” Unbelief. What does he say here? Oh, faithless generation. Faithless generation. A lot of unbelief here. The purpose is to try to knock down that unbelief.
Prayerlessness. This kind does not come out except by prayer. In King James, there’s another added words to it, to prayer and fasting, but it’s still prayer. Fasting is just a more intense form of prayer. And that may or may not be in the original text, but the point is prayerlessness here. These were not a praying people. Not the scribes, not the crowd that had gathered, not even the disciples were fully engaged in prayer as they ought to be.
How come we couldn’t cast him out? Now Jesus doesn’t use these words, but here’s what He says, did you pray? Well, you gave us this power and we just figured that we had the power to do that. How much did you pray over this boy? How much did you cry out to God? How much did you say, Lord, our faith is so weak, help our unbelief? How much did you say, Lord, only Jesus’ power can save this boy. We don’t have it locked up somewhere in some reservoir that we can draw it out. Prayerlessness. Jesus says, the purpose of my having gone through all this is to show you how much more you need to pray than you do.
And then presumption. Now the man, the father, says, I asked the disciples, and they were not able. And then elsewhere in Scripture we read that He gave them, the disciples, power over unclean spirits. And their question is, well, why could we not? And I think Jesus says how much prayer went into all this. Prayerlessness. Presumption. We thought enough power and so forth to deal with this. We thought you left us here to take care of it. And Jesus says, no, I left you here so you’d learn something too. Philippians 4, 6.
In every situation, by prayer and petition, or prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. Now, we usually think that means, oh, I need a new car, or I need to be well from some illness or something that we have. But Jesus says, this is how you need to operate in your life. You need prayer. Pray without ceasing. The Lord said through the Apostle, pray without ceasing. Always give thanks to God, but never fail to call upon Him with your requests. And I just close with these words from the Westminster Shorter Catechism actually.
Prayer is an offering up of our desires to God for things agreeable to His will in the name of Christ with confession of our sins and thankful acknowledgement of His mercies. That would have been a good one for these disciples to have thought about. It came a little bit later than them. But it’s certainly worth our paying attention. Just make sure that what you ask for is agreeable to His will. But how do I know that? Read your Bible. You’ll find out.
Father in Heaven, thank you for our being able to join in this lesson of Jesus’ appearance and victory. Whatever our problems, Lord, You’re able to solve them. Help us to rely on You and to be patient as You work, but never to doubt, Lord, that You are able and You will help us. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.