Mark 9:24, “I do believe, help my unbelief!”
What is the spark of primal faith that creates a faith in Jesus that is able to ask Jesus to create faith in the midst of faithlessness? Of course, the answer would be the sovereign grace of God (Eph 2:8). However, if all of God’s grace flows only from Christ (a bit like how all energy on Earth originates in the Sun)…..what might we say about this?
Recall that in His death, Jesus bears and dies for the sins of all His own. What sins? All sins. And is our faithlessness a sin? Yes. Thus, on the cross, the perfect faith of the Incarnate Word descends to and embraces the faithlessness of His people, embracing our faithlessness in His faithfulness; faithfully enduring the condemnation deserved by our faithlessness and receiving as a result the Father’s faithful resurrection from the dead. A resurrection by which the faithful Christ is raised up from the depths of damnation poured out upon Him for the sake of our faithlessness and by which also all the faithless ones for whom He died are raised up with Him as faithful ones in Him.
So, then, is not the resurrection of Christ—the resurrection of the faithful one who descended to and died as the faithless ones—is not His resurrection from the dead the source and ground and reality of all our faith? What I mean to say is, is not the creation of faith in anyone an application and instantiation of Christ’s resurrection?
Before Christ, our faith is a dry skeleton in the valley of our soul, such that the only way it can lay hold of anything is for it to be raised up from the dead. And it is thus raised up from the dead only by prior and gracious union to the one who bears and becomes that dried out skeleton of our faithlessness and is—from that place of faithlessness (faithfully embraced)—raised up again. In other words, whenever true faith in Christ is born, it is an echo and image—an application and an appearing—of the resurrection of Jesus; it is a reality grounded in the resurrection of the crucified Lord just as a leaf’s unfolding on the tip of a branch is grounded in the root’s drinking nutrient deep beneath the soil.
