"We Are Beggars. This Is True.” (So What Kind Of Beggar Are You?)

On February 18, 1546, at the age of 62, the noted German church reformer, Martin Luther, died. They discovered a piece of paper in his pocket which recorded Luther’s last written words. The final sentence read: “Wir sind Bettler. Das ist wahr.” (“We are beggars. This is true.”) Do you know what Luther was getting at—the biblical truth he was expressing? Today we’ll meet three groups of beggars: demons, a stunned crowd, and one believer. They each begged Jesus for different reasons. As Luther correctly stated, we all are beggars. The question is, what kind of beggar are you?

A little over a year into his three-year ministry, Jesus left his base on the northwest coast of the Sea of Galilee where he had exhausted himself from constant teaching and healing. He urged his disciples into a boat and sailed across the Sea of Galilee. It’s not clear how far they got before the storm hit—the one that was so furious that even the experienced fishermen among the disciples thought they would drown. Jesus calmed the storm with a simple rebuke—as if the wind and the waves were nothing more than a blaring car stereo that even a child can silence with the push of a button. The disciples were amazed…and afraid of Jesus. “Who is this?” they asked.

Well, it wasn’t just natural storms that Jesus could calm with a rebuke. He could and would quiet supernatural storms as well. One such un-holy kamikaze lashed out at Jesus when he arrived on the southeast coast of the Sea of Galilee. Racing down from the nearby cave-like tombs and shrieking at the top of their voices were two men—both demon-possessed (Matthew 8:28). They wore no clothing and their bodies were covered with scars where they had cut themselves with rocks. Their ankles and wrists were rubbed raw from where the local townsfolk had chained the men, hoping to control them. But the demons gave the men the strength to break those chains. Luke, the author of our text, focuses only on one of the men—the spokesman, and so we’ll direct out attention to that one man as well.

After falling at the feet of Jesus, the man, or actually the demons inside of him, screamed: “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don’t torture me!” (Luke 8:28) And so we meet the first group of beggars: the demons. I say demons, plural, because when Jesus asked for a name, the head demon replied: “Legion,” for many demons had taken up residence in the poor man. Now a legion of soldiers in the Roman army could number anywhere between three to six thousand soldiers. Were there really thousands of demons in this one man? It would seem so because later when Jesus allowed the demons to go into a herd of pigs nearby, the gospel of Mark tells us that there were about 2,000 pigs that were affected.

Wow. A legion of demons—thousands of evil angels bent on destruction! Jesus was clearly outnumbered, but he was not outmatched (Joshua Bernau). Even the demons admitted this as they threw themselves before Jesus and begged that he would not throw them into the Abyss, that is into hell before the appointed time.

I wonder if we acknowledge what these demons acknowledged—that hell and God’s judgment is no trifling matter like being sent to your room without supper? The demons dreaded being sent to hell. They knew it was a terrifying place of torture. Yet when we willingly engage in sinful behavior like when we let our eyes roam where they shouldn’t; when we hold on to our money as if it was ours to keep; when we even so much as grumble, do we catch ourselves, repent of those sins or just shrug them off? Have we become so calloused to our pet sins that we don’t even have the sense of a demon to shudder when we think about God’s judgment that ought to crash down on us like a snapped ponderosa pine smashing into a car parked beneath it? Friends, like the demons in our text, we have a need to throw ourselves at the feet of Jesus every day, and in our humility beg that he doesn’t send us to hell.

As the demons continued to beg, they implored Jesus to be allowed to go into a herd of pigs that were feeding nearby instead of to hell. Jesus consented and gave a simple command, “Go!” and the demons went. Jesus controlled these demons as he had controlled the storm on the Sea of Galilee: with his powerful Word.

As soon as these servants of Satan slipped into the swine, they went psycho. The pigs rushed down the slope and plunged headfirst into the lake where they drowned. The demons had not wanted to be sent to hell, and yet quite puzzlingly, they performed a dry run of what will happen to Satan and all his followers on Judgment Day. The Apostle John writes in the book of Revelation: “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)