The Power Of Feeble Faith

It is long enough to exhaust all of your resources on physicians and health care.

It is long enough to physically exhausted and socially ostracized.

It is long enough to feel the breath of the creditors coming to take things away because of a lack of money.

It is long enough to have all hope wrestled away.

It is long enough for there only to remain just a feeble faith.

-Consider with me this woman. She is young, vibrant, healthy. She has a number of friends, close friends, friends who enjoy her company. She has her eye set for one of the young men in the synagogue. She is full of life and full of laughter and she suspects that the young man is interested in her just as much as she is interested in him. She has a warm home with parents who dote on her. She is the apple of their eye. There is nothing that they will not do for.

-All of that was to change though with one dreadful hour in her life. She suddenly finds herself in the clutches of a body that is violated by a malady. The issue of blood that refuses to stop. At first, she calmly talks to herself. “There is nothing to fear. This will pass and I will be fine.” But it doesn’t. It persists for a month, for two months, for six months. It continues and soon she informs her mother of the difficulty. Her mother is devastated because of the nature of the illness.

-Her mother finds it difficult to understand. How can my daughter be rendered unclean? The Old Testament Law stated that she was unclean (Lev. 15:25-27). There was nothing higher than the Law. What the Law determined was clean was clean, what was determined unclean was unclean.

-In this position of being unclean this young woman soon found that she was barred from the synagogue and from the Temple. Her worship was stifled. It was taken away from her.

-The mother begans to feel the stigma that will be associated with her daughter’s illness. What will Dad say? How will he react? What will the neighbors think? What will the synagogue think?

-Over the following months, both daughter and mother began to try to treat this malady. They tried everything. The Talmud, a portion of the Jewish Law written by the rabbis, had no less than eleven cures for this specific illness.

-The Talmud stated: Take of the gum of Alexandria the weight of a small silver coin; of alum the same; of crocus the same. Let them be bruised together, and given in wine to the woman that has the issue of blood. If this does not benefit take of Persian onions three pints; boil them in wine, and give her to drink, and say, “Arise from thy flux.” If this does not cure her, set her in a place where two ways meet, and let her hold a cup of wine in her right hand, and let some one come behind and frighten her, and say, “Arise from thy flux.”

-In another place the Talmud stated: Carry the ashes of an ostrich-egg in a linen rag in summer and a cotton rag in winter.

-With all of these proceedings, her faith began to waver. She went to doctor after doctor. Hopeful that each could help her to recover. But all to no avail. In fact notice what Mark 5:26 has to say: