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CHAPTER 5: FAITH (part 1)
“Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out? And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief.”—Matthew xvii. 19-20.
When our Lord and the three disciples came down from the Mount of Transfiguration they found a great bother going on at the bottom. A man had brought his lunatic son to the other disciples to be cured, and they had done all that they could, but the cure had not taken place; the boy was just as bad as ever. So the distracted father brought him to Jesus and He healed him at once. But the disciples were very worried at their own failure. “Why,” they said, “why could not we cast him out?”
It is easy for us to think of excuses for them. The boy may have been a particularly bad case or the devil unusually powerful, indeed our Lord tells them that :This kind can come forth by nothing but by prayer and fasting” (Matt. xvii. 21). After all, our Lord was God and they but men, is it so very surprising that they failed in an enterprise which evidently required the divine power to bring it to a successful issue?
However much we may desire to be kind to them, the fact remains that they knew they had failed our Lord, and He knew it. The healing of the sick and the casting out of devils are certainly impossible to the natural man, but the point to remember in this case is that the disciples were not just natural men, they were men whom our Lord had chosen and to whom He had give power to do, among other things, exactly this which they had failed to do. For we are told in an earlier chapter that “when He had called unto Him His twelve disciples, He gave them power against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease. . . . These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, . . . preach, . . . heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils” (Matt. x. 1, 5, 7, 8). They had been given a power which was not their own, just as we are given grace which is not our own, and when the need to exercise it arose they were unable to meet it; they failed in the very thing for which they were sent, the very purpose for which power had been given to them. There had be a failure then and a remarkable one, and the question which we have to investigate is, Where does the cause of that failure lie?
The divine power was a reality, and it was truly given, but apparently it was possible for that power to fail, to be as though it were not, which is a very serious matter. It was so even for our Lord Himself, for we are told that in certain environments even He was unable to do any mighty works.
If this is true of the special power given to the disciples and the like power of our Lord, it is also true of the grace which He gives us in the Church. There has been much controversy as to the irresistibility of grace which resolves itself into the question whether grace can fail or not. Whatever our theological views on this matter, it seems clear in practice that grace can fail. We have seen it fail in the Apostles, in countless Christians, and in ourselves.
But to what are we to attribute this failure? It can hardly be in grace itself, which, since it is the power of God, must be indefectible, for God cannot fail; the failure must lie in its effects, there must be something faulty in its connections with the human agent.
God Who has created us always respects the integrity of the nature which He has given, and will by no means overrule our freedom or take away from what is proper to our personality. According to the full theory of irresistible grace the Christ is no more than an automaton, set in motion by God, and without any power to resist or deflect the divine movement. In spit of its patent falsity such a theory is by no means uncommon, but it degrades human nature and ascribes failure to God Who cannot fail, rather than to man who, without God, could do little else.
Grace brings forth its fruit in and through the human agent and for its success it demands a certain attitude of mind and heart; when it fails it does so not because it is weak in itself but because of the absence of the right kind of response. This is clear from our Lord’s teaching, for, when the disciples asked Him, “Why could not we cast him out?” He did not answer, “Because my grace was insufficient for you,” but, “Because of your unbelief.” It is human unbelief, then, which is the cause of the failure of divine grace and not any defect in the grace itself.