A lot of teaching about Christianity misses Who Is Jesus. This article aims to focus on him and look at some of Jesus’ words on ‘faith’. Just what does it mean – is it screwing up your mind, throwing away your reason and believing the impossible, or something else? We must find out.
JESUS – GOD AND PERFECT MAN
Here, from Mark’s Gospel is an account about faith so that we will see it more clearly, and begin to grasp that based on Jesus’ words that will never pass away, this ‘faith’ is something we need so much, and that without it we shall not see life.
This story unfolds with Jesus becoming so well-known that crowds had come to listen to him. Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, who had unique authority to perform miraculous signs. The signs confirmed that Jesus was really who he claimed to be. The signs gave strong evidence that confirmed many Old Testament Scriptures about Jesus as Saviour. Many signs were miracles of healing, like cleansing lepers or giving sight to the blind, or even raising the dead. No one else had such divine powers. Only Jesus was God and perfect Man.
TRUE FAITH PERSEVERES
Setting the scene, we see a large room packed to over-flowing and four men carrying their paralysed friend on a simple stretcher-bed, in the hope that Jesus would heal him. But with the place already packed out, there was no way they could get their friend to meet Jesus. So, was their hope just a sort of ‘hope so’? No, it was more.
These men were determined not to be put off, so they quickly put a plan into action. They carried their friend up the steps outside the large house, onto the flat roof, where they then quickly removed the simple roofing materials to make an opening to let down their friend on ropes, right to where Jesus was standing. So, that is what they did, much to the surprise of the crowd, when the man appeared through a hole in the roof.
The account then says ‘when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:5). What a shock! But as soon as the religious professionals heard what they believed was shocking blasphemy, that a man was pronouncing the forgiveness of sins, they sat there with critical thoughts that only God is able to forgive sins.
