…Sometimes God writes stories without an immediately clear solution so as to cause readers to think and ponder. God provokes consideration so that a person comes to genuine understanding and conviction. We teach in this way to our kids. Sometimes, instead of simply giving them the answer, we help them struggle through a process to learn the answer. In the previous passage, Jesus never explicitly answered the question of who could cleanse from the internal defilement of heart. Of course, we now know the answer, which is Christ. The shed blood of Christ in his atoning, substitutionary death on the cross, cleanses from sin.
But there remains a question of how that cleansing gets applied to a person. It’s not automatic, because not all the world is saved. Christ’s death did not magically effect every single person. Here we also know the answer. Faith. Faith worked upon the grace of God. What is faith? We might answer simply, “believing God.” That’s certainly true.
But we need the Scriptures to communicate to us what genuine, biblical, faith is and looks like. We need the Scriptures to be the teacher, to form our understanding, to establish our framework for life and salvation. Because even the demons believe certain theological truths, but they certainly don’t express saving faith unto God. We need to know how God defines faith so that we know if we actually have believed God. What we have here in this passage with this woman, is a testimony of genuine faith that pleases God. And the person who expresses this sort of genuine faith, will be the person who receives such a cleansing from God to wash away all the defilements of the flesh…
