Jesus, The Demon-Slayer

So how do we deal with evil. There are four steps:

1. We must expect struggles with evil. Satan has been defeated by Christ, but he will never give up. He will keep fighting.

2. We must actively live out our faith. Satan's cronies tremble before God's awesome power.

3. We must resist evil with the power of the Holy Spirit. We do this by going to the Lord in prayer for everything.

4. We must remember that as believers in Jesus we are on the winning side. We will be injured and we will suffer from time to time, but we will be free from spiritual bondage.

Jesus acted as a friend to the demon-possessed man. He asked the demons hard questions and expected mature responses. The demons knew that Jesus would radically change their lives, and they were not ambivalent when it came to radical change. When we encounter Jesus we can expect radical changes in our lives. We won't be the same. Either our hatred of Jesus will grow or we will draw closer to him in faith. The demon-possessed man received a new identity when Jesus answered his problems. The demon-possessed man sat at the feet of Jesus, which meant that he was now under the authority of Jesus. He chose to act responsibly. The man became free when he submitted to Jesus' authority.

The demon-possessed man was so grateful for his healing that he wanted to join Jesus and the disciples. Instead, Jesus told him to stay home, minister and witness to the people. In a sense, the man did join the group. He became a disciple. We are also disciples when we follow Jesus by faith by ministering and witnessing wherever we are. Sometimes we will be called to a different calling than the one we would have chosen, but it is important to listen carefully and obey the call to which we have been called. It is better to be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord than to be a prince or princess anywhere else-unless God has called us to be a prince or princess.

There was a cost to the healing. The cost was the loss of the townspeople's livelihood when the pigs died. The pigs were expensive property. They were sold to the Roman occupiers for food. The people did not care that the demon-possessed man was healed. They were only concerned with their livelihood. In other words, they were more concerned with material things than they were with spiritual things. They knew what to do when the man was sick, but now that he was healed they didn't know what to do. They could have rejoiced with the man, but to do that they would have to have been healthier themselves. They were sick and could not deal with the healed person in their midst, so their natural response was to reject this new element that had come into their lives, just like a body sometimes rejects a transplanted organ.

Christianity preaches a message of salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus. There is no violence in that message, so why do so many of the other religions in the world persecute Christians? It is because they recognize that Jesus can do things for the people that they can't. Jesus paid for our sin debt on the cross. No other religion can offer that. In other words, people of other religions are jealous of Christians-plain and simple!