Mat 17:1-18:20: The True Currency of Faith: Listen to Him.

Your faith didn't fail. What you were handed failed. The slow, quiet erosion you've been feeling — the sense that the system you were given is self-referential, that doctrine points back to doctrine, that pressing it finds nothing underneath it — that isn't doubt. That is the absence of ground. And the ground was never doctrine. It was the oracular Word of the Hebrew prophets, fulfilled in one person, converging across centuries onto Jesus of Nazareth. This episode shows you what that ground looks like when Matthew puts it on full display. Matthew 17 and 18 are not a miscellaneous collection of episodes. The Transfiguration, the lunatic boy, the temple-tax coin, the question about greatness, the lost sheep, binding and loosing — these are a single sustained demonstration of one subject: the Prophetic Word of Messiah, its priority above every other kind of religious claim, and what it looks like when people, including the disciples, mistake something else for it. What does it mean that Moses and Elijah appear beside Jesus on the mountain — and that the Father's voice singles Jesus out above them? What is Peter actually saying when he proposes three tabernacles, and why is it wrong? Why can't the disciples cast out the demon — and what does the disciples' grief at the passion prediction tell us about the faith they don't yet have? What is the temple-tax coin really about? And what kind of prayer does Jesus actually promise God will answer? These are not separate questions. They have one answer. #MosesAndTheProphets #Matthew17 #Matthew18