Demons And Daughters (Mark 5) Series

Demons and Daughters

Mark 5

Good morning! Please turn in your Bibles back to Mark 5. We jumped ahead in the story for Palm Sunday and Easter, but now we are going to pick up where we left off in Mark 5. And honestly, as I’ve been working with this passage this week, what has emerged is a much more personal picture of Jesus than where we’ve been the past two weeks. With the story of the crucifixion and resurrection, we’ve seen Jesus in His role as the redeemer of all humanity, past, present and future. We worshiped the exalted, risen Jesus.

But sometimes when we look at the big picture, we can forget that Jesus isn’t just the savior of all mankind. He is the savior of individuals. He is my personal savior. And so we are going to zoom in from the 30,000 foot view and back to how Jesus dealt with three individuals. Three characters who could not have been more different from each other. They came from different walks of life. Different cultural and economic backgrounds. Different religious backgrounds. Jesus met each one of them at their point of need. He met their need, and he transformed their lives.

And I am praying that He will do the same for you this morning. Wherever you are, whatever your need, whatever your past, the good news is that Jesus is a personal savior. And if you allow Him to, He can be your Savior.

Let’s look at our first character. This is Mark 5, beginning in verse 1:

5 They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes.[a]

Let me pause here for a little background here. At the end of Mark 4, Jesus got into a boat with his disciples and crossed over to the other side of the sea of Galilee. And whenever you see Jesus going from one side of the Sea of Galilee to the other, understand that He’s going from primarily Jewish towns to primarily Gentile towns. So Gerasa is part of the Decapolis. Now if you look at Matthew’s account of this same story, he refers to it as the country of the Gadarenes. But don’t let that throw you. This isn’t a contradiction in Scripture. Gerasa was a much larger town, and would have been more familiar to Mark’s Gentile audience. It’s a little like when you’re telling someone who isn’t from Alabama where you’re from, you might say Montgomery instead of Prattville. Now, some skeptics have gotten really picky and pointed out that Gerasa is pretty far away from the Sea of Galilee, and since this story ends with a herd of pigs rushing off a cliff and into the lake it can’t be true. And there is a town in the same region called Gergesa, which does have a cliff overlooking the lake, as well as a number of tombs, so its possible that an early scribe simply missed a letter. But none of that really matters to the story. What matters is what happens there. Let’s keep reading:

2 And when Jesus[b] had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit. 3 He lived among the tombs. And no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain, 4 for he had often been bound with shackles and chains, but he wrenched the chains apart, and he broke the shackles in pieces. No one had the strength to subdue him. 5 Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out and cutting himself with stones. 6 And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him. 7 And crying out with a loud voice, he said, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” 8 For he was saying to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” 9 And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” 10 And he begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. 11 Now a great herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, [another indication that they are in Gentile territory] 12 and they begged him, saying, “Send us to the pigs; let us enter them.” 13 So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the sea.

Now, there’s a couple of things that are worth noticing about this passage before we get to the main meat of it. The first is sin’s ability to isolate us. This man lived all by himself among the tombs. Everyone was afraid of him. No one wanted to be around him. And I’ve talked to a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts that will tell you that the deeper they got into their addiction, the more isolated they became. What might have started out as something social inevitably became something they did alone. They would hide their drinking or drug use from other people in their lives, because they were ashamed of how powerless they had become to control it. Eventually, every relationship in their lives deteriorated, and the only thing that mattered to them was the next hit or the next high or the next bender.