Luke 17:5-6 “And the apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith." (6) So the Lord said, "If you have faith as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be pulled up by the roots and be planted in the sea,' and it would obey you.”
Another reason why it is important for us to correctly interpret the previous quoted passage of scripture is because it refutes the false narrative that says, because faith comes by hearing, the more we hear God’s word the more faith we will have. And so with that erroneous interpretation of scripture the logic is applied that if we eventually get enough faith then we will finally be able to move mountains and walk on water. The problem with that interpretation of scripture however is that it strongly implies that, initially at least, believers don’t have enough faith even though God requires them to live by faith. And so believers that are taught that error find themselves constantly trying to acquire more faith so that they can finally live as God intended them to live, while some just give up saying that they will never have enough faith. Simple observation however shows the narrative of believers having insufficient faith to be false, for if we just look at salvation for example, we can clearly see that the moment people hear the truth of the gospel preached they are immediately able to respond in faith and are thus saved. They do not have to repeatedly hear the same gospel message proclaimed to them until they finally have enough faith to respond and be born-again. As we can see from the above quoted passage of scripture the apostles initially had the same misconception about faith, for they also mistakenly thought that if they could somehow get enough faith that they would be able to walk in the same amount of power that Jesus walked in. They had not heard the false narrative about increasing their faith through hearing God’s word however, and so they simply asked Jesus to increase their faith, thinking that He had the power to do that. Jesus responded to their request however by telling them that faith the size of a mustard seed (which is the smallest seed there is) was more than sufficient to move mountains. In other words Jesus was telling them that they already had more than enough faith to move mountains, and that it was not insufficient faith that was preventing them from walking in the same power that He walked in.
Michael E.B. Maher
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