NOTE:
This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.
ENGAGE
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe there is a scene in which Mr. Beaver reveals to Susan that Aslan, the ruler of Narnia who represents Jesus, is a lion and not a man like she had assumed. Susan replies, “Ooh. I’d thought he was a man. Is he - quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion…”. Mr. Beaver replied, “Safe?...Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But He’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
TENSION
That is certainly an accurate description of Jesus isn’t it? In the gospels we are finding that a personal encounter with Jesus brings every person face to face with the decision to either reject Him and leave unchanged or to embrace Him fully and have his or her life radically transformed. Those who choose the second path find that it’s not always the easiest, but it does ultimately reveal that Jesus is good.
TRUTH
So far in this series we have seen people who made both choices. We’ve seen people like Simon the Pharisee who rejected Jesus and never got to experience the goodness of Jesus, But we’ve also seen people like the woman at the well and some of the people in her town and the sinful woman who anointed Jesus at the home of Simon the Pharisee who did embrace Jesus and who got to experience firsthand His goodness.
Today, we will read another account where we see people who make both of those choices. And like we often find with Jesus, the ones who embrace Jesus are often the ones who seem least likely to do so and the ones who reject Him are the ones who should know better.
The event that we’ll look at this morning is so important that Matthew, Mark and Luke all include it in their gospel accounts. We’re going to read Mark’s account, so go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Mark chapter 5.
[Read Mark 5:1-20]
There has been no shortage of suggestions for my sermon title this week. Gene Melzer suggested a couple – “Swine Lake” and “Deviled Ham”. The latter is certainly consistent with someone else who pointed out that if the demons had gone into a flock of chickens, we would be talking about deviled eggs rather than deviled ham.
Although it is not the main idea we’re going to pursue this morning, I think it’s important to point out that contrary to what many, even those in the church, think, Satan and demons are not just symbols, but actual living beings.
There are two extremes that we must avoid when it comes to demons. On one hand, there are those who deny their existence. At the other end of the spectrum are those who give way too much credit to Satan by blaming everything bad in their lives on demons. So if they have a weight problem, they try to address it by casting out the “demon of gluttony” rather than just cutting back on what they eat and getting some exercise. Or if they are struggling with their finances they blame it on a demonic attack when the truth is they just need to manage their money better. While it is true that Satan may take advantage of our fleshly weaknesses, those weaknesses are not caused by Satan or his demons.
The Bible is clear that we are all responsible for our own sin and that there is no demonic force that can take control of us and make us sin unless we allow it. While the man in this story is totally dominated by the demons in his life, this is an extraordinary case that is intended to show the extraordinary power of Jesus.
His book, The Screwtape Letters, is fiction, but in the preface, C.S. Lewis gives some good advice regarding this matter:
“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”
I think it’s also important to note that nowhere in Scripture do we find examples of anyone rebuking Satan and his demons other than Jesus Himself. Nor do we find any commands for us to go around rebuking, commanding, or binding demons.
With those important caveats in mind, let’s see what we can learn about the gospel from this encounter. We’ll begin with today’s gospel takeaway and then see how this passage affirms this idea.
TODAY’S GOSPEL TAKEAWAY
Only Jesus has the power to free me from my bondage to my sin
Just prior to this Jesus had been preaching in Galilee on the western shore of the Lake of Galilee. The evening before he and his disciples got in a boat to cross over to the east side of the lake. During the night a great storm came up and Jesus had calmed the storm and the disciples were filled with great fear because of the power of Jesus over the natural realm. But now He is about to demonstrate His power over the supernatural realm as well.
It’s important to note that after this event, Jesus does not do anything else here. He just got back in the boat and returned to Galilee. So once again, we find Jesus going out of His way to deliver one person. The only reason that He crossed the lake was to free this one man from His bondage to demons.
It is probably early morning when Jesus steps out of the boat with His disciples in the country of the Gerasenes. Immediately, He is approached by a man who has an unclean spirit. That phrase – “unclean spirit” – is used frequently by Matthew, Mark and Luke to describe demons, who are fallen angels who have chosen to rebel against God and follow Satan.
The man lived among the tombs that had been cut out of the hillside near the shore of the Sea of Galilee. The people from the nearby town had apparently tried to deal with his unclean spirit by binding him with shackles and chains, but they had discovered that you can’t bind an unclean spirit with earthly chains. Night and day, he continually screamed and cut himself with stones. And we know from Luke’s account that he also ran around naked.
So it’s not surprising at all that as Jesus deals with this man, the disciples are nowhere to be found.
As soon as the man sees Jesus, he ran to him and fell at His feet. In a moment, we’ll see why that man responds in that surprising manner.
The rest of the account is arranged around four prayers/requests, so we’ll arrange our study of the passage around them, too
Four prayers/requests:
We will find that there are some surprises when it comes to Jesus’ answers to these requests. He answers “yes” to the requests from the demons and from the people who reject Him and he answers “no” to the man who says “yes” to Him.
The first request is made by the demon:
1. “Do not torment me.” (v. 7)
What is most shocking here is that the demons knew who Jesus was. So we discover here what James will confirm later in his epistle when he writes that the demons believe in God and shudder: demons are not atheists. They don’t worship Jesus, but they certainly know exactly who He is. In particular we see here that they know three things about Jesus:
1) His name – Jesus
2) Who He really is – “Son of the God Most High” – thus confirming the deity of Jesus
3) His power – They know Jesus has the power to send them to eternal torment – something that He will eventually do.
I think the reason that the man runs to Jesus and falls at His feet is because the demon recognizes Jesus and knows that it’s futile to try and run from Him and escape. So he does the only thing he can do, go directly to Jesus and ask Him to refrain from tormenting him.
It’s almost comical here that when the demon makes this first request of Jesus, he swears on God. That’s what it means when the demon says “I adjure you by God”. And then he makes the request that Jesus not torment him. The demon understands that is eventually his eternal fate, so he’s essentially asking Jesus not to send him to that place of eternal punishment right now.
Matthew’s account helps us understand why Jesus grants this request. There, we see that the demons asked Jesus if He had come to torment them “before the time”. At His second coming Jesus is going to condemn Satan and his demons to eternal punishment in the lake of fire. But since that was not His purpose at His first coming, He grants the request.
Jesus then asks the demon his name and he replies, “Legion, for we are many.” Legion is probably not his actual name, but he uses it to indicate the extent of this man’s demon problem. A Roman legion consisted of roughly 6,000 soldiers, so we know that there was definitely more than one demon that had hold of this man. Without a doubt this is the most far reaching case of a man being demonized in the entire Bible, and it is intended to show the extent of Jesus’ power over the demons.
This is a good time to point out here that it is difficult to tell here when the man is speaking and when the demons are speaking here. And we also see here that the man and/or the demons go back and forth between the singular – “he”, “me”, and “my” – and the plural – “they”, “we”, and “us”. Probably the best way to understand this is that the demons are speaking through the unnamed man and that in some places, it is probably a representative of the demons who speaks and in other places those demons all speak in concert.
The second request is also made by the demons:
2. “Send us to the pigs.” (v. 12)
There is no doubt that this request and Jesus’ granting of the request raise a number of perplexing questions – many of which we just can’t answer because God hasn’t revealed the answers.
What we do know is that Jesus has once again intentionally gone to a Gentile area since there is no way that any Jews would be raising pigs, since they were considered to be unclean.
The first question is why the demons would ask to be sent into the pigs. While we can’t be sure and there are a number of possible answers, I tend to think they knew that destroying a herd of pigs was going to cause trouble for Jesus.
But the greater question is why Jesus would agree to this plan. Obviously, He could never have done such a thing in our culture. First of all the EPA would have fined Him for polluting the Sea of Galilee with the pig carcasses and declared it to be a superfund site and Jesus would have to pay to clean it up. And then think about the kind of trouble he would have been in with groups like PETA and the SPCA for such cruelty to animals. The SEC would have been investigating Him for impacting the markets for pork futures and the Federal Trade Commision would have probably accused Him of trying to artificially increase the price of baby back ribs and bacon.
I’ve even seen people use this account to criticize Jesus or to prove that He can’t be God because He was heartless to treat the innocent pigs like that. All I know for sure is that those pigs belonged to Jesus because He created them and He had every right to prove His mastery over both nature and the supernatural by any means He wanted.
The third request comes from the people of the nearby town.
3. “Depart from us.” (v. 16)
Once the herdsmen saw the pigs rush into the sea, they went back into town to tell everyone what they had just witnessed. And when they came to where Jesus was, they saw the man, who was now dressed and in his right mind. You would think that they would be overjoyed at what Jesus had done to free this man from his bondage, but instead “they were afraid”.
And that fear led them to beg Jesus to depart from their region. This is really heart breaking. These people were more concerned about a herd of pigs than they were about this man. This is such a vivid illustration of the depravity of man. These people were more comfortable being in the presence of evil than they were to be in the presence of a righteous God. They were more comfortable with sin than holiness. And there was nothing they could do on their own to overcome that. Sadly, they asked the one person who could have helped them overcome their sin to get out of town.
The last request is made by the man who had been freed by Jesus:
4. “Let me go with you.” (v. 18)
Ironically, this is the only request that Jesus says “no” to. Jesus tells the man to instead go home and to tell his friends about the mercy that Jesus had on him. And that’s exactly what the man did. And the people marveled at his testimony.
We never hear of this man again, but we do see the results of his testimony in that area. In Mark 10, we see that Jesus goes to minister in the area east of the Jordan River and when He arrives there, great crowds gathered to hear Him. Since we have no evidence of Jesus ever sending anyone else to that area to prepare the way for Him, I have to believe that those large crowds were due, at least in part, to the evangelistic efforts of this one man.
So how does this passage reveal that…
Only Jesus has the power to free me from my bondage to my sin
This story reveals that there are two kinds of people who are under the domain of Satan and who need Jesus to free them from that bondage.
First, there are those like this demonized man who are completely under Satan’s control and who obviously need to be freed from that bondage. In most cases, these people have not come under Satan’s power overnight. Usually they give Satan a foothold in their life and it just continues to spiral until they become completely demonized like this.
This is why the Old Testament has such strict prohibitions on getting involved in any way in the occult and Paul writes in Ephesians that we are to have nothing to do with the unfruitful works of darkness. That means that something that might seem harmless like reading your horoscope or playing with a Ouija board or going to see a psychic is such a big deal because it can open the door for Satan and his demons.
But there is a second group here who is also in bondage and they need the transforming power of Jesus just as much as this man. Outwardly the people of the city may have looked like decent, respectable citizens. But they were actually in Satan’s domain just as much as the demonized man. Paul wrote about that in his letter to the church at Ephesus:
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
(Ephesians 2:1–3 ESV)
The “prince of the power of the air” is another name for Satan. And what Paul reveals here is that all of us were under his power at one time. We were dead in our trespasses and sins and, as a dead person, we could do nothing to free ourselves from the bondage of our sin.
And this second group, even though it might not be as obvious to us, is just as much in need of Jesus to free them from that bondage as the demonized man was.
These people were so blinded by their desire for their own comfort and their possessions that they couldn’t see that needed Jesus, so they asked Him to leave town. And Jesus did what they asked because He doesn’t remain where He is not wanted. And unfortunately, that is still the way the majority of people respond to Jesus.
APPLICATION
As far as I can tell, there is no one here this morning that fits into the first group. I don’t see anyone running around naked and cutting themselves and shrieking. But, as the passage we just read from Ephesians 2 points out, we’re all either in the second group or we were there at one time. While there are many implications for our lives that we could draw from today’s gospel takeaway, let me leave us with just one.
IMPLICATION FOR ME
• If I want Jesus to free me from my bondage to sin, I must let Him do it His way
We began this morning with the idea that Jesus isn’t safe, but He is good. But the problem is that most people want a “safe” Jesus. And that can even be true of those of us who have put our faith in Jesus. Like the townspeople in today’s passage, most of us are OK with a safe Jesus who will take us to heaven, but who will keep his nose out of our business and who won’t interfere in the way we live here on earth.
Most are Ok with a Jesus who will help us have better marriages and raise our kids and who will help us enjoy our jobs and who will make sure we have enough money to buy all the things we want. But we’re not nearly as comfortable with a Jesus who tells us to take up our cross daily and follow Him or a Jesus who tells us that if He is going to come into our lives, then there are some other things that will have to go.
Most of us are comfortable with trying to handle our own sin by making a New Year’s resolution or trying harder or even signing up for a12 step group to overcome our addictions. But we’re not nearly as comfortable with giving up control of our life to Jesus and trusting that He is indeed good and that therefore He will do whatever is necessary to get free us from our sin.
ACTION
There may be some of you here this morning who have been trying to deal with your sin on your terms for your entire life. Perhaps you’ve just tried to ignore it or excuse it. Perhaps you think that your sin really isn’t all that bad compared to the sin of others who are a lot more like the demonized man we read about today. Perhaps you believe that the good in your life outweighs that sin. But as we’ve seen this morning you are dead in that sin and there is nothing that you can do in your own strength to bring yourself back to life.
Fortunately for you, Jesus has provided a way, His way, to be freed from that spiritual death and bondage. He died on the cross to pay the penalty for your sin so that you could be right with God. And then He rose from the dead to prove that He has power over death and sin. And if you will put your faith in Him, and yield control of your life to Him, He has promised to free you from the bondage of your sin and give you spiritual life.
But this implication is also applicable for those of us who have committed our lives to Jesus. Even though we intellectually know we can’t overcome the sin in our lives on our own, our natural tendency is to try to do that anyway. And while we might see some short-term success with that approach, that will never give lasting results. The only way to be freed from the bondage of our sin in the long-run is to give it over to Jesus and to ask Him to remove it from my life. Let me be honest here. Sometimes, Jesus has to take us through some pain to get us there. It’s not always a safe process. But what we can trust in during that process is that Jesus is good and that He wants what is best for us, even though the journey may not always be comfortable.
This morning, if you are in bondage to sin and you are willing to let Jesus to free you from that, we are here to help you in that process. Whether you need to commit your life to Jesus for the first time or you have already done that and you just need Jesus to help you get free from some sin in your life, we would like to pray for you and help you walk through that process.
So I’m going to do something that we don’t do very often here. I’m going to ask everyone to bow your heads. And if this morning, you need Jesus to free you from your bondage to sin, would you just raise your hand? Would you do that whether you need to commit your life to Jesus for the first time or whether you just need some help overcoming some sin in your life? The only ones who will know that you’ve raised your hand is me and the other Elders. We just want to be able to pray for you and to talk to you more about how we can help you.
[Prayer]
INSPIRATION
Even though Jesus isn’t always safe, He is always good. So, as we’ve seen this morning, He showed love and mercy to a man in bondage to sin who didn’t deserve to be freed and couldn’t do anything on his own to be freed. And He’ll do the same for you if you’ll just let Him.
Discussion questions for Bible Roundtable
1. What are the two extremes when it comes to thinking about Satan and demons? What are the dangers of each extreme and how do we avoid them?
2. Is it possible for a disciple of Jesus to be “demon-possessed”? Support your answer with Scriptures.
3. What does this passage teach us about why it’s good that God doesn’t always answer our prayers the way we want?
4. How does this passage help us understand why God doesn’t immediately take us to heaven to be with Him physically as soon as we become disciples of Jesus?
