Aware of this, Jesus said, “You of little faith, why are you discussing among yourselves the fact that you have no bread? Do you still not understand? Do you not remember the five loaves for the five thousand, and how many baskets you gathered?” (Matthew 16:8-9)
Jesus warned his disciples about the yeast of the religious leaders and scholars. He referred to their doctrines, but the disciples thought he said this because they had forgotten to bring bread with them. Jesus rebuked them and indicated that the misunderstanding occurred because of their lack of faith. He had miraculously multiplied food to feed thousands of people, and the leftovers were more than what they started with. If they had faith, the disciples would have known that food was never a problem with Jesus, so they would have excluded the lack of bread as a possible interpretation of what Jesus said about the yeast of the religious leaders and scholars.
There is a tendency to claim that misunderstandings and misinterpretations of Scripture are due to a lack of education or training, or to an ignorance of theological systems and histories, or biblical languages and interpretive methods. Faith is rarely, if ever, mentioned by theological teachers as a factor in understanding biblical statements and doctrines. But Scripture makes it a defining factor. Technical knowledge can serve faith, but it cannot supplant or replace faith. Scholarly tools and methods are useful only after faith is present. Without faith, they are worse than useless, because a faithless scholar will take God’s revelation and drive more forcefully toward a wrong direction than someone without specialized training. The worst of the worst are usually religious scholars, or those who think they are scholars.
As Isaiah said, “Lord, who has believed our message?” and “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, so that they would not see with their eyes or understand with their hearts, and turn, and I would heal them.” The religious leaders and scholars that avoid making faith a defining factor in understanding often fall under this condemnation. They ordain one another as gatekeepers of Christian doctrines and biblical interpretation, but they are the ones who fail to understand anything, because they approach Scripture with faithless assumptions. All their systems and methods, all their degrees and credentials, cannot make them understand. They lecture others, but they themselves cannot repent and be saved.
Jesus said that the Pharisees did not believe Moses, and so they also could not believe Jesus, because Jesus was the one that Moses predicted. Counterfeit Christians do not believe Jesus, and so they also cannot believe me, because I am the kind of disciple that Jesus described. Jesus himself walked with some disciples who were puzzled about what happened to Jesus after his crucifixion, although Jesus explained it multiple times before his death. So Jesus rebuked them and said that they were slow to believe the prophets. Faith was the issue, not tools and methods. Unbelief prevents a person from grasping the most simple and direct statements from Scripture. We see this in theological writings constantly, whether by the most revered historic theologians or the most celebrated modern scholars. They often appear worse than illiterate — completely broken in their stupid minds — because they have no faith.
Unbelief rules out God’s way of thinking from the start. What God’s word says is assumed to be impossible. This assumption of unbelief is so strong that the reader often fails to see the true meaning as a possibility before excluding it. The true and obvious meaning does not even cross his mind. Faith is foolishness to the Faithless, and the spiritual is unintelligible to the unspiritual. The result is that the Faithless are the most stupid things on the face of the earth, because they cannot even understand plain words and sentences.
Cessationism is a prime example. The Faithless cannot see Jesus as a miracle worker and healer except in a book or in distant history. The mere possibility that God would heal the sick according to our faith is a threat to how the Faithless are perceived by themselves and how they wish to be perceived by others. This is because they have no faith, so that if God were to answer faith, he would never answer them, but he would answer thousands of others who have faith. Healing is only one example, but God would not answer them on every single item that he promised to faith, while he answers thousands of others because they have faith. This makes it impossible for the Faithless to maintain their religious authority and reputation.
The Faithless consider themselves superior Christians, the best of the best, and they despise the people that they consider less educated but who believe the word of God about signs and wonders, healing the sick, and prosperity and success. But because faith is the dividing line between genuine scholars and counterfeit scholars, and between the spiritual and unspiritual, the Faithless are exposed.
Therefore, they must insist that the things promised to faith have ceased. They cannot believe God as he is. But of course God is only as he is. He is not something else, and anything else is not him. This means that whatever the Faithless believes is not really God. In other words, they cannot believe in God, but they can only pretend. To maintain their self-perception, that they are wise scholars, and to maintain their control over religious people and the perception that they are holy leaders, they must exterminate the doctrines of faith. They must sometimes even condemn the works of the Spirit and call them the works of demons, and thus commit the unpardonable sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Many of them have done this. They cannot be forgiven, and they will burn in hell.
When the Faithless read about a healing miracle in the Bible, they might confess that it happened in history, but their application would turn the passage into a metaphor on how Jesus heals our soul. However, there are other passages in the Bible that directly teaches about how Jesus heals our soul. If the Bible also wishes to teach us about how Jesus heals our bodies, what would it take for us to admit it? Regardless of what the Bible says about receiving healing by faith, the Faithless refuse to accept it, because their scholarship begins from unbelief. Regardless of what a passage says, the Faithless always redirect it to address only what they can accept. This is because their religion does not worship God or follow Jesus at all, but their God is Faithless, and they follow only unbelief and tradition.
When the Faithless read about the teaching of faith in the Bible, they turn it into a lesson on determination and endurance. However, Jesus said that faith can throw a mountain out of the way, and it can uproot a tree and replant it into the sea. This is not metaphorical, because when Jesus offered this teaching, he cursed a physical tree and it withered from the roots. He said that if we have faith, we can do the same things that he did, and we can do even greater things. Because the Faithless has no faith, they cannot walk in the power that true faith possesses. To them, faith can only mean an attitude that enables them to suffer problems and not solve them.
The most important factor to understanding the Bible is faith. If you assume that resurrection cannot happen, then when the Bible refers to resurrection, you will think that it is a metaphor. If you assume that God does not prosper his people with riches, then when the Bible promises prosperity, you will make it into a metaphor. If you assume that God does not heal the sick, you will turn healing into a metaphor. Everything that the Bible says, you will turn it into a metaphor for only something that you can accept. And thus the Faithless have made God himself merely symbolic, because they do not truly believe in God. So many of them think that they are scholars and heroes, but they are unsaved, and they will burn in hell.