Luke 9:1-6 “Then He called His twelve disciples together and gave them power and authority over all demons, and to cure diseases. (2) He sent them to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. … (6) So they departed and went through the towns, preaching the gospel and healing everywhere.”
We will end this section by looking at the very clear biblical example in the above quoted passage of scripture, of how much easier it is for saints to exercise their faith in God’s power once they have been exposed to it. In this passage we see the Lord Jesus sending the twelve disciples out on their own for the first time, to preach the gospel while at the same time healing the sick and casting out demons, for as we have already mentioned, that is the New Testament pattern for proclaiming the gospel. This passage declares that the disciples did exactly that, i.e. they preached the gospel and healed wherever they went. And so on the surface that outcome seems pretty straightforward, for Jesus told them what to do and they went out and did exactly that. It is only when we examine this account in a little more detail however, that we begin to understand what actually transpired on this occasion. This incident took place approximately midway through Jesus’ earthly ministry, and so the disciples had been with Jesus for well over a year by this time and had personally witnessed the Lord Jesus healing thousands of people and casting demons out of many of them. And so they had been fully exposed to God’s power being manifested through the Lord Jesus. But nevertheless before this time none of the disciples had healed any sick or cast out any demons themselves, for Jesus had never instructed them to do so. We know that to be the case because at a later stage the Lord sent out a further seventy disciples to do the same as the twelve, and afterwards they came back excited by the fact that the demons were subject to them in His name, which clearly indicates that this was a new experience for them (Luke 10:1-17). So why were the disciples quite comfortable to go out by themselves to heal the sick and cast out demons, when they had never done anything like that before? It was not because Jesus gave them faith to carry out His instructions, because they already had faith, but rather it was because as stated in the above passage, Jesus gave them access to God’s power for the first time, which resulted in them being able to exercise their faith in that power and thus go out to heal the sick and cast out demons. And so we see that when the scripture tells us that Jesus gave them power, the disciples would have physically experienced God’s tangible power coming on them thus causing them to recognise that they now had the same power that Jesus had to heal. And so that was the reason why they could quite easily go out on their own to heal the sick and cast out demons because they had finally been exposed to God’s tangible power for themselves. Thus they had full assurance (faith) that when they laid hands on the sick that God’s power would flow from their hands into the sick and heal them. Very clearly it was very easy for the disciples to exercise their faith in God’s power once they had personally been exposed to it. That same principle applies to all saints today, not only the eighty two disciples that the Lord sent out during His earthly ministry.
Michael E.B. Maher
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