Today we are looking at a rather remarkable story of Jesus as he leaves Nazareth and goes to Capernaum. As is his habit, he goes to the synagogue to teach. Again the people are amazed. But Luke tells us that the reason the people are amazed at Capernaum is not because of his gracious words, but because he spoke with authority. The Greek word for authority here is exousia, and can also mean “power.” The authority and power of his words were impressive — very impressive, as we shall see.
But as Jesus begins to teach something unusual happens. Almost as proof of the authority which Luke has been speaking to us about, an event takes place to prove the power of Jesus. It is a fulfillment of the passage of Isaiah that he read back in Nazareth: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed” (Luke 4:18). There was a man possessed by a demon, an evil spirit, there in the synagogue. The man began to yell at the top of his voice. Now you would expect that if this was a truly evil spirit it would yell something like, “Jesus, you are a fraud. There is no God, and you are not teaching people the truth. You have betrayed the teaching of all the greatest teachers of the past. Throw him out of here.” But, in fact, this demoniac says just the opposite. Listen as he says, “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are — the Holy One of God!”
Even more interesting is the fact that these are almost identical to the words we have coming from a demon possessed man living at Gadara — a different town and culture many miles away. When Jesus approached the demoniac in Gadara he said, “What do you want with us, Son of God? Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?” (Matthew 8:29). It carries with it the same idea. The demonic spirits in both these men realized they had been confronted by a higher power, in fact, the highest power in the universe. They also realized that their time was near. The appearance of Christ upon the earth marked the closing days of their freedom. But still their manner is subdued in the presence of Jesus and they honor him and speak the truth about him in his presence. They can do nothing else.
Passages like these cause some people a lot of problems. They do not believe in the existence of a personal devil or his angels, whom we call demons. Now this causes a considerable problem if we are going to take the Scriptures seriously. The Bible never tries to explain, or defend, the reality of a kingdom of evil in the world, it merely presents it as fact. People have tried to say that it was just that the biblical writers did not understand modern day psychology which can explain these kinds of emotional abnormalities. But if that is true then we must say that the Scriptures have deliberately misled us. If that is true, then you have to explain the similarity and consistency of the witness of these demoniacs. You have to explain how such mentally disturbed people could make such sense. Many people are surprised to find that it is demon possessed people who give us the clearest witness about Jesus Christ in the New Testament. But beyond that, you have to explain why Jesus treats these demonic spirits, who are inhabiting people, as real entities.
If you do not believe in the existence of the devil you have to account for the fact that Jesus spoke to him directly during his period of temptation in the wilderness. Now either Jesus was so exhausted and weary from his desert experience that he began to have hallucinations or what happened in the wilderness was quite real. To hear some people talk you would think that Jesus was having nightmares as a result of the pizza with anchovies that he ordered before wandering into the wilderness. Or maybe his fasting was causing him to see things. But the reality of the spiritual world of evil is quite evident from the Scriptures, and it is something to take seriously.
The Christian world, by and large, does not understand that we are in a spiritual warfare — a cosmic struggle between good and evil. It began with Adam and Eve and their experience with Satan, and continues to our day. But we have such a tame idea of Christianity that we think being a Christian means being a “nice” person. We are not alarmed at sin — we are fascinated by it. We look on it as an adventure, not as something dangerous. We want our children to be happy with no thought of their spiritual welfare. We are too comfortable and have life too good. Those before us did not have life as good and could sing with enthusiasm about another world which was coming. They sang things like: “This world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through.” Or they lifted their voices to hymns that said:
Jesus sought me when a stranger
Wandering from the fold of God;
He to rescue me from danger
Interposed His precious blood.
Christians from other generations took those words seriously. They knew there was a cosmic struggle going on for their souls and they prayed fervently that they would be delivered. We have lost that sense of struggle.
Rodney Clapp, a national Christian leader, tells of his experience in the church as a boy: “Growing up in the United Methodist Church myself, I distinctly remember Sunday school curriculum that taught us Christians are people who are polite to the postman. If there is no more to it than that, Christianity is just archaic language and mystified formalities.... A Christianity reducible to therapy or activism is, in the end, sentimentality. It is therapy and activism performed by people who could as easily do what they do without talk of Jesus and... the kingdom of God, but who have mouthed these platitudes so long they can’t quite let them go.”
Will Willimon, a United Methodist seminary professor at Duke University has called this kind of Christianity “sentimental atheism.” He says, “We go about being the church as if God did not matter. In fact, we suspect that much of our minutely mandated processes have an implicit function of giving us the illusion that something is really happening among us of great significance, even though none of it is adventuresome enough to be directly dependent upon the workings of a living God.” The question that gives us pause is: “How much of what we do as a church could be done through strictly human effort? How much of what we do is unexplainable outside our dependence on the supernatural working of a living God?” Those kind of questions shake me to the core. If there is anything I pray for in our church it is that the Spirit of God would move in supernatural ways that are unattainable through human effort. If we are only doing things which can be accomplished by human effort we are no more than another lodge or civic club. Only if we are reaching out to the lost and lives are being transformed here by the Spirit of the living God do we have the right to be called a church.
One of the things I notice about this story is that Jesus is not alarmed by the presence of this demoniac. It is quite the reverse. In many of our movies we see perspiring priests nervously praying and waving the cross or other religious objects. Perhaps there is shouting and great confusion. But in this story Jesus is in complete control. Jesus tells the demon in a stern voice to be quiet and come out of the man, and it immediately obeys. It reminds us of what James said in his epistle: “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that--and shudder” (James 2:19). They were terrified at the presence of Jesus because they knew he had come to destroy them. If there are no demons then we are forced to say that this story grossly misrepresents the facts and distorts the reality of what happened. If there is not a real kingdom of evil, and the telling of the story is accurate, then Jesus is either duped by the popular thinking of his day or he is psychotic. But if we take the story at face value it not only makes sense, it explains much of what we struggle to understand about the evil which is present in our world. The evil in the world is not the result of corporate structures or political regimes. It is not just the accumulation of human acts of evil. There is a source of evil at the core of our world which first displayed its power and purpose in the Garden of Eden and, in an even greater way, displays its evil intent in the world today. We have gone through social crimes such as the evils inherent in wars bent on genocide both civil and global. We have experienced or witnessed evil at the personal level, and are fed a steady diet of it on the evening news. We are often astounded at the evil human beings can perpetuate on each other. Are these things freaks of human nature or inherent in it? Is there a personal presence of evil in the world which, if left untamed, will eventually destroy it? The Bible’s answer seems to be clearly affirmative.
Jesus, in speaking of the devil, said: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). All those who would work to destroy life are the agents of the evil one. They come to kill and destroy. Those who live for God are for life. Even in the Lord’s prayer Jesus teaches us to pray to be delivered from the power of evil. Actually, Greek scholars point out that the phrase, “deliver us from evil,” is more accurately translated, “deliver us from the evil one.” If Jesus taught us to pray to be delivered from the evil one in his model prayer then the existence of the evil one is beyond question.
Many people do not understand where these demonic spirits originate. Classic orthodox theology explains that Satan was at one time the highest angel in heaven. His beauty, magnificence and power were beyond comparison in the created order. But he rebelled against God thinking he could usurp God’s place. He was not satisfied with being the greatest in the created order, he wanted to be God. It is interesting that this is the same temptation which the devil posed to Adam and Eve. “Eat this fruit,” he said, “and you will become like God” (Genesis 3:5). What appealed to him he was sure would appeal to others. Remarkably, this is the same suggestion made by the New Age religion of our day. They tell us to: “Discover the god within you!” In Satan’s revolt he took many of the angelic beings who sided with him. These rebellious, fallen angels became what we now call demons. So God did not create evil, but He did create the possibility of it when he granted the power of choice to his angels, and eventually to us. The problem is, we not only have the power to choose, we have a bent toward evil since the Fall. And there is a force at work to influence and push us in the direction of evil. The only way to counter that force is by seeking the help and presence of God in your life. You cannot combat this on your own. Jesus taught us to pray for help: “Deliver us from the evil one.”
But as powerful as the devil is he is no match for Jesus. Jesus Christ speaks one word and the demon in this man flees. Luke, the writer of this gospel, is also a physician. He is careful to tell us that when the demon left this man it did not harm him. All the people were amazed and they exclaimed to each other, “With authority and power he gives orders to evil spirits and they come out!” The apostle John wrote, “He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8). And the Son of God is well able to destroy the devil’s work. That is why it is important to stay near him. The author of Hebrews tells us, “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death--that is, the devil--and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15).
We sometimes get the idea that the devil is another god on equal par with God or Jesus Christ. That is not the case at all. The devil is merely a fallen angel. Compared to us he is very powerful, but he is no match for Jesus Christ. The book of Revelation shows the devil and all his forces being defeated by a single blast of breath from Jesus Christ. In the end the devil is thrown into the lake of fire. His kingdom is completely decimated, and he and his followers are sealed in the pit forever (Revelation 20:10). Satan is a malignant reality, but he has already been defeated by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That defeat will be all too apparent at the end of the age when the Bible says, “And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever” (Revelation 20:10).
Until that time the Bible gives us this important warning: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:10-17).
Rodney J. Buchanan
January 29, 2012
Amity United Methodist Church
rodbuchanan2000@yahoo.com
