David: [upbeat music] Hey, everyone, David Bowden here, and we are in our third installment of sharing some of my sermons with you that I've preached on the Gospel of Mark. We've looked at kind of the beginning of Mark's gospel, showing how John the Baptist prepares the way for Jesus, how Jesus proves that he is the Son of God and the Messiah through his exposition and fulfillment of the law. And now we're going to look at a different proof, uh, of who Jesus is in his dominion over and power over the spiritual authorities, the demonic realm.
We're looking at Mark five and the famous story of the Gerasene man who's filled with demons. And there's some really interesting things in this story about how Jesus cast the demons into, um, pigs who, who hurl themselves off of a cliff. We're in a, an interesting region of the Gerasenes, and there's a lot going on here, especially when we look at Jesus's ministry to the nations and to all people groups.
And so I'm very excited to share this sermon with you on Jesus healing the demoniac of Gerasene.
So if you remember last week, Hayden preached on the calming of the storm. As Jesus crossed the Sea of Galilee, the storm broke out.
Jesus spoke to the storm, drove out the storm, and things were calm, and then they come across the sea to this place. Uh, I just want to remind you of that 'cause we're gonna have to hop back and forth between those stories in order to understand everything that's going on here in the story that Adrian just read for us. Um, Jesus has done the unthinkable.
He's exorcized a storm, um, and now he's gonna do something maybe even more unthinkable or, or just as crazy. He's going to exorcize a man of a legion of demons. Exorcisms are, are somewhat normal in, in Mark's gospel and in, in all the gospels.
We've already seen some exorcisms in Mark's gospel, and we're going to encounter several more. But this particular story is very unique because it is the longest and most detailed exorcism in all of Scripture. It's, it's also...
Some have argued that it's the longest description of a human being, his char- his characters and what he's doing, in the whole Bible. A-and, and for Mark, typically in Mark's gospels, he, he's the shorter of the writers of the gospel accounts. And if you, like, take one of his stories and compare it to Luke's version or Matthew's version, usually Mark's is the shorter, and Matthew's or Luke's is the longer.
But in this account, Mark's version is actually almost three times as long in word count as Matthew's. So Mark is trying to get us to stop and focus. Like, if you're, if you're used to reading Mark so far with us, you're used to seeing Mark say, "Immediately, this happens," and then he uses, like, two verses to talk about it, and then he's off to the next crazy thing.
Mark is a very fast-paced writer, but here he slows way down, and he's trying to get us to lean in to notice something really important. And so we're gonna try to find out what that is today. And the first thing of great significance that is the reason the story grinds to a halt and to this slowing pace is because of what... not, not just what Jesus does, but where Jesus is.
The location of this story is of extreme significance because for the first time in Mark's gospel, Jesus is leaving the little seaside town of Galilee, where, where it's a very Jewish community, a very insulated community, and he's crossing a sea to go to the nations, to the Gentiles, to the unclean. He is, he's fulfilling what the whole biblical story has been leading to up to this moment. Because when, when God planted Adam and Eve in the garden, He, He gave them a call to basically bless the whole world.
He told them to be fruitful and multiply and to cultivate the garden, understanding that that would mean that they would continue to grow and fill the whole world, all nations, all darkness, all chaos. They would fill it with the paradise of God and the people of God. The image of God would cover the whole world.
But there was this battle that took place in the Garden of Eden with this fallen spiritual being, the Satan, the serpent there, and man left God's paradise because of their conflict with this serpent, with this rival spiritual being. And now, s- instead of them spreading the image of God around the world, they start spreading the image of the serpent around the world, and nation after nation after nation starts getting conquered by rival fallen spiritual beings. And the question is, like: How is Yahweh, the one true God, going to conquer the world again and set everything to right?
How is He going to dethrone these spiritual powers? And His plan was to do that through a people, and that people came from Adam to Abraham and on down the line, that it was through Abraham's offspring that the nations, Genesis twelve says, "The nations would be blessed through Abraham's offspring." That word, nations, is the same word, Gentiles. It's, that's what we mean when we say the word Gentiles.
We're talking about all the people groups of the world. And so, uh, you, you should also kind of have in your mind God's strategy to drive out the serpents of the world, the fallen spiritual powers of the world. You should also have in your mind, not just the garden, not just Abraham, you should also have in your mind, like, the story of Joshua, whenever he crossed the Jordan River as it parted and went into Canaan, and they battled Jericho, and they start having all these wars.
The wars are against these fallen spiritual powers, were, were, were often called the, the Anakim or the Rephaim. All of this ties back to the Nephilim in Genesis six. A-and there's this deep spiritual battle happening where God is trying not to kill and punish... the nations. He's trying to liberate them by getting rid of the power that's animating all the evil in their midst. And so Jesus is going to step into this story and start to complete it and fulfill it, and that is what Mark's gonna show us today.
So we're gonna go verse by verse through this thing and see what we come up with. So verse one: "They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes." So Jesus has crossed over from Jewish territory into Gentile territory, and he comes to the land of Gerasa and the Decapolis. So the Decapolis just means ten cities, and Gerasa was this port town into the Decapolis, and it's extremely significant because this city, the Decapolis, these ten cities, have been this hinge point in this area of Israel, and it kept getting taken over by different powers.
So most recently in, in Israel's history, the Phoenicians took it over, and they started to, uh, kind of Phoenicianize, if you will, all the Jews there and get rid of their Jewishness. Well, then a little bit while later, uh, before the Roman Empire started to grow, the Jews took it back over from Phoenicia, and they started to Judaize the town and started to tr- change its practices. Well, then Alexander the Great comes in with the Roman army, and he conquers it and begins his mass Hellenization project, which is the Greekification of the world.
And now Jesus is gonna come in, and it's like, who's this new king and conqueror who's coming in, and what's he trying to do? There's, there's been this hinge point in Gerasa about who's going to rule this land. So it's a very specific and significant place for the people of Israel and for the nations around them.
This location is not only significant historically, but it's also significant biblically because Jesus is repeating an image here that's very significant to the people of Israel. There was this storm on a body of water, and Jesus crosses it with his people through a miracle. He calms the storm through a miracle, and he crosses it and goes into Gentile territory.
This is exactly what happened when Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt in, through a miraculous action on a body of water into the wilderness, where they were gonna go to Canaan and confront all the spiritual powers of the Gentiles. It happened again, like I said, when Joshua crosses the Jordan River with a miraculous event, and he goes in, and, and, and they conquer Jericho, and they start the conquest of Canaan to free the Gentiles from their oppressive spiritual powers. Jesus is repeating this action in order to show us that he is this new Moses.
He is this new Joshua who's coming to do battle with the spiritual powers in the Gentile countries in order to liberate them and set them free from the powers that have controlled them for so long. But it's kind of this strange sociopolitical situation, and, and very religious one, too, for the Jews, because they're very confused about how they are to react to or, um, interact with the Gentiles. Because they believe that the Gentiles are unclean and that they are not supposed to be around them.
You might know, like, the famous story about the, um, the Good Samaritan, right? Like, uh, like Samaritans, or maybe the woman at the well would be a better example of this, this Samaritan woman, that you are not supposed to, if you're a good Jew, interact with unclean Samaritans. So they would even, like, walk all the way around Samaria just to get to where they were going, adding so much time to their journeys.
Like, how are Jews and Gentiles supposed to mix? What do they have to do with each other? And all of the, these questions about the Jews and the unclean Gentiles are gonna get heightened in this story, so that, like, Mark is...
Mark can show you. He knows everything that's on the line. Verse two: "When Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit." The whole story that we're gonna read here is ripe with imagery that's made to highlight the uncleanliness of the Gentiles to a Jewish reader, right?
You've got Gentile territory that's unclean. You've got a man full of unclean spirits. He's living among tombs because death makes you unclean, according to Jewish law, and then the spirits are cast into the most unclean animal, pigs.
All of this uncleanliness is intentionally being brought up and highlighted by Mark. But not only is the uncleanliness being brought up and heightened, the, like, the problem, the barrier, the, the, the struggle, the power that's there is being highlighted, too. Verses three to five: "This man, he lived among the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain.
For he had often been bound with shackles and chains, but he wrenched the chains apart, and he broke his shackles in pieces. No one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day, among the tombs and on the mountains, he was always crying out and cutting himself with stones." This man is like the physical personification and embodiment of death itself running rampant around the world.
You have this man who just lives in graves, and then he pops out of graves. Nothing can contain him or control him. And night and day, which is, like Hayden said earlier, is Genesis language.
D- first there was evening, then there, then there was morning, the first day. Morning and evening, the second day. Well, now, morning and evening, night and day, this death machine is spreading his fear and evil around Gentile lands.
It's, it's trying to show us that the Gentile world, just like the Jewish world, has a problem, that death has been their conqueror, and that there is nothing they can do to subdue him. They have this wild-... force that they cannot beat, these fallen spiritual powers, the power of sin, the power of death, and they need a liberator to come and to free them. And no one had the power to do it.
No one in the Gentile world had the power to fix it, and I bet they tried really hard. I bet they tried to bring their own exorcists. I bet they tried to bring their own magicians.
I bet they tried to bring, you know, soldiers who bound them with chains, and nothing worked. In fact, I bet it exacerbated the problem. And so Jesus is going to come and show that He is the new Adam, the new Abraham, the new Joshua, who can be a blessing to the nations, bring new creation to the nations, and conquer the spiritual powers that are ruling them.
So whenever this man sees Jesus, verse six, he runs to Him. He s- he sees Him from afar, and he runs to Him and falls down before Him. Here we have a really interesting turn of events in the story.
This demonized man runs to go meet Jesus because he sees Him from afar. This is really significant in light of the context of what to do with the Gentiles here, because the Old Testament is full of prophecies about the nations running to God, about the nations streaming to the feet of Yahweh, about all the countries of the world coming and bowing down in the temple in Jerusalem. And so in this ironic way, you have the demons in this man running and falling down before Jesus as this representation of what will soon happen to the nations and the Gentiles around the world.
The nations will stream and will come and will fall down before Jesus, and no legion of demons can stop that from happening. The nations will come to the light. Even the word here, kneel, is, is the same word that is translated throughout the rest of the New Testament as worship.
It is the same word that is used whenever we describe worship in the Bible. So it could be rendered that this, this man saw Him from afar, ran down, and worshiped Him. That's crazy.
[chuckles] Uh, now, there is definitely semantic range for this word to just mean bowing before an authority who has power over you, so I, I think it's the right translation. But the connotations that come with it are just... They heighten all the scandal around it.
Then verses seven and eight: "And crying out with a loud voice, he," the demonized man, "said, 'What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.' For He," Jesus, "was saying to him," the Gerasene man, " 'Come out of him. Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!' " So he falls down before Jesus, but he doesn't quite worship Him.
[chuckles] Those are not the words that come out of his mouth. They're not worship words. Instead, the demons start to plead with Jesus, because apparently Jesus had been commanding the man as he was approaching Him and running toward Him.
He was saying, as he was running toward, "Come out of him, you unclean spirits!" And so he falls down before Him and starts to plead with Him, and the first thing he says is, "What have you to do with me?" These are the exact same words that the demon, uh, spoke to Jesus in the very first exorcism in the Book of Mark. The very first time we see Jesus exorcise a demon, this is the same thing he says, "What have you to do with me?" So let's take a minute and look at this phrase, 'cause I don't really throw that one around all that often, and, uh, I think there's a lot going on here.
So the phrase, uh, was an idiomatic phrase that was used when two parties had very little or nothing to do with each other. So it might be because they're from two different backgrounds, one's rich, one's poor, um, they're on two different sides of the train tracks. Uh, it'd be a scandal if they were talking, and so you might render it like, um...
L- well, literally, the phrase is, "What is it to you and me?" is if you took each word and translated it literally. "What is it to you and me?" Which is even weirder, but it's akin to saying something like, "What is someone like you doing in a place like this?" But there also has this connotation of a threat behind it or some fear behind it or some accusation behind it. Like, "What do you have against me?" is also in this phrase.
And I think a really helpful way for us to figure out why are the demons, especially here in Gentile territory, using this phrase, is to look at the main place that this phrase is used in the Old Testament. And it is in a story where you have another prophet of God in Gentile territory, confronting a death-wielding plague. It is in First Kings, chapter seventeen, verse eighteen.
Here, the prophet Elijah, the quintessential prophet of Israel, has been trying to prophesy to Israel and to their kings, but to no avail. They're not listening, and so he's like, "Okay, fine, I'm not gonna do miracles there in Israel anymore. I'm not gonna prophesy in Israel.
Instead, I'm gonna go to Gentile territory," and he starts hanging out with this Gentile widow and performing miracles for her. Well, she is going through a lot of hardship, and eventually her son dies, and she thinks that it's Elijah's fault, that he came and he brought his God with him, and now her gods are punishing the son and killing him. And so she says the same thing.
She says, "Elijah, what have you to do with me?" Asks the same question: "What do you have against me? Why are you here?" And she accuses Elijah that his presence has brought her son's death. But then Elijah does what Jesus is about to do.
He drives out death and resurrects the son into new life. So that's what Jesus is going to do here. So it's, it's so interesting to me that Jesus is, is repeating such a huge, critical, and familiar story to His Jewish audience about the q- like, the quintessential prophet-...
Elijah in Gentile territory, performing a sign to show as like a rebuke to Israel that they haven't been listening, but also as a promise to the Gentiles that he will come to them and bless the nations. Jesus comes, and he's met with the same question: "What have you to do with me? What does your presence, Jesus, mean for the Gentile nations?
What's a guy like you doing in a place like this?" Why is Jesus in the Gentile territory? And the answer Mark is giving us, and the answer he's giving to the Gentiles, is that God is coming to the Gentiles to set them free. What does Jesus have to do with the nations?
He is their liberator. Why is he there? To drive out death and the evil spiritual forces around them in order to raise them to new life.
But the demons have a different conclusion about why he's there and what he has to do with them. They think he's there to torment them, right? Which I think is actually a really fair statement, but we're gonna start to see, the story's gonna start to pull apart two characters for us, the legion of demons, which are gonna get one reaction from Jesus, and the human being made in the image of God that he is setting free.
So he's not there to torment the Gentile man, but he is there to punish the evil spiritual forces. It's an understandable conclusion that they think that Jesus is there to torment them. After all, he is on the war path, just like Joshua was, to conquer the evil spiritual forces.
He's come to overthrow them. That's, uh, that's, that's why they think that, that, that Jesus has come to torment them. A- and it's heightened also by the fact that they know that this is war.
They know that there's a battle happening because of how the demons talk to Jesus. Some really weird things happening here that we need to talk about, because i- in, in a sense, what they're doing, and stay with me here, [chuckles] the demons are trying to exorcise Jesus from the land. They are trying to perform an exorcism ceremony on Jesus, and it's going to fail miserably, right?
Look at this. Th- this phrase, "I adjure you by God," that phrase, "I adjure you by God," is a known exorcism formula among the pagans. You can find it in writings of Egyptians and Babylonians.
You can even find it in your own Bible in Acts nineteen. The Pharisees know this phrase, and they don't have any of the Holy Spirit's power, so they start going around and trying to exorcise demons like Paul was, and they say, "I adjure you by God," and then they end up getting filled with demons themselves. [chuckles] Like, it doesn't work for them.
They're trying to use these, like, pagan, mystical formulas. And so these demons are trying to drive Jesus out of the land. They don't want him in the land.
That's, in fact, that's why they start saying his name, because it was a standard exorcism formula to say the exact name and title of the being you were trying to cast out in order to exert authority over them. So they use the name Jesus, because that was his name, but then they use his title, Son of the Most High God, and they're trying to get him out. "I adjure you, Jesus, Son of the Most High God, do not torment us.
Leave us alone." They're trying to cast Jesus out of the land, and it, it doesn't work [chuckles] at all. Uh, this isn't a confession of faith by the demons, okay? This is not a confession of faith.
It's a contrived and futile formula. They are trying to use made-up magic to get rid of the one with all true supernatural power. And all of this goes to show that the fallen spiritual powers that have oppressed us and our world for so long, they have zero authority over Jesus.
He's the one who made them before their fall. He knows them. He has authority and power over them.
But before we move on from what they said, I do want us to focus on the title they use for Jesus, because it is a fascinating title. It's the first time it's used in Mark, and I think we need to ask the question, because I think the story, the narrative, is setting us up to ask this very question. Because the way the story ended last week with the, the calming of the storm, the disciples are afraid, and they say, "Who is this then?" Right?
Who is this guy? Who is Jesus? That's the title of this whole series in Mark, and we, we named it that because we think that's Mark's thesis.
He's trying to ask you the question, "Who is Jesus? Who do you think he is?" And so we get a really unique answer from Mark here. We get the Son of the Most High God.
That... Tho- those words, Most High God, are extremely significant to be spoken inside Gentile territory, because the word God or Son of God, these are very common terms for people to throw around about their own supernatural powers or, or false idols or fallen spiritual deities. They would talk about them all the co- all the time.
They're these lowercase g gods. But here in Gentile territory, a bunch of fallen lowercase g gods start proclaiming and admitting that there is one God who is the high God above all gods, that he is the one true God, and Jesus is his Son. Jesus is the physical embodiment of God Most High.
He is the God over all the little gods, and it's happening here in Gentile territory, where they have served the little g gods for all human history.
And so this, and this confession, I think, is also another ironic foreshadowing or prelude to the legions of confessions that would come from the lips of professing Gentiles throughout the centuries to come, that these nations who have served false gods and, and, and made-up images and, a- and pretend idols, that they would realize that there is one true high God above all gods, and they will confess him one day.... verse nine, "And Jesus asked him, [chuckles] 'What is your name?' And the Gerasene man, he replied, 'My name is Legion, for we are many.'" Jesus did not need this demon's name to drive it out.
He's done that so many times with demons. He does not need their name. Instead, Mark gives us his name in order to progress the story, to tell us some important information.
Legion, as you might know, is the, is a Greek word for the largest Roman military unit. So you have like, you could have, like, a troop or a group. I don't know the other ones, I just know Legion.
It's the big one. Uh, and some people have said it's fifty-six hundred soldiers, and that is the largest way that Rome counted and grouped their men. So to have a legion of Roman soldiers was to have the biggest, baddest sword that the biggest, baddest empire could wield against you.
And so speaking militarily then, this, this, this has a lot of significance, um, both militarily and the fact that the word legion f- makes you think of Rome. So militarily speaking, uh, this heightens again, what, what I think maybe it s- looked like I was guessing at or, or poking at, that this is a military conquest. Jesus is here to do battle, just like Joshua was when he crossed the Jordan.
Jesus crosses the Sea of Galilee, and the first thing he comes across is an army. But just like in Jericho, the first battle that Joshua fought, there's no contest. They march around the city, and everything falls.
Like, God has all authority over the armies and the spiritual powers of this world. So in the same way, Jesus comes, and he says, "Come out of him, you unclean spirit." And yeah, "Sure, I'll permit you to go into some pigs." Like, he has all authority. He conquers a legion, fifty-six hundred, with just the power of who he is and the power of his word.
But it's also interesting that there's this Roman connotation, too, to the word legion, because Rome was the superpower over the Decapolis and had completely driven out all other forms of culture and identity from the Phoenicians, from the Jews, from the, uh, the, the pre-existing Greeks that had been there, and they had, they had brought conformity and an iron fist.
And, and that kind of same thing has, has kept happening to Israel, that their surrounding nations, whether it was the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the, or the Phoenicians or the Greeks, they were always coming in and conquering the Jews, and their latest conqueror was the Romans. And so Jesus is saying that, "I can not only beat the spiritual power behind the power, but I will free you and liberate you from your oppressors and your captors, even from Rome itself." Jesus is bringing a military victory here.
Verses ten to thirteen: "And he," or the, the demons, "begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country." Don't kick us out of Gentile territory. We wanna keep partying here and ruling people. "Now, a great herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, and they begged him and said, 'Send us to the pigs; let us enter them.' So Jesus 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." The demons knew that Jesus had all authority to cast them out, so they start to barter with Jesus and ask him to send them into a herd of pigs. And I don't think the narrative is asking us to consider why the demons had the motivation to choose the pigs. I just think enough can be said that they didn't wanna be hostless.
They didn't wanna be homeless. They wanted to inhabit an unclean thing. That was what they wanted.
They w- they moved from tombs to pigs. And, and we also aren't told why Jesus gave them permission. Again, the narrative isn't asking us to, or leading us to ask that question.
It's speeding through these details in order to slow down to get us to focus on other things. So I'm not gonna speculate about why Jesus allowed them to go either. Suffice it to say, the demons entered the herd of two thousand pigs, and the fact that they are pigs and what they, what happens to them is what is highly significant.
So swine, pigs, were quintessentially unclean animals for the Jewish people, but conversely, they were quintessentially normal livestock for the Gentile nations. Uh, that's why they had them in such quantity. By Jesus driving the demons out of the Gentile man, Jesus was showing that the Gentile himself wasn't clean, and, or wasn't unclean, and that all Gentiles were not unclean.
Instead, what Jesus is doing here is he's separating the clean from the unclean. He takes the demons out of the Gentile man, and the next time we see him, he's clothed, in his right mind, seated, ready to follow Jesus, and he puts the demons, the unclean power, where they belong, with the unclean beings, and he's saying, "Gentiles are no longer unclean." Like, this is Jesus saying, "I will come and save the nations." And so that's what Jesus is doing here. But then the, the demons run away from Jesus unknowingly into the lake, and they are drowned and conquered there.
And that might seem, again, like a strange detail, but it is full of significance. The first, uh, thing we need to see here is, and, uh, maybe I should just recognize this: we need to understand that this was a massive economic stake. Two thousand livestock, gone.
I mean, this is multiple families' income for multiple generations just gone. So this is a costly thing that's happening, and if it is a lesson, and if it is a picture and an illustration, which I think it is, it's a very expensive one, and so we, we, we, we don't wanna be light with it. Like, th- these people's lives were ruined for, for Jesus to make this point.
So what is the lesson? Well, the demons now drive themselves back into the lake that Jesus just crossed over.... The chaotic waters that Jesus crossed over, that Hayden talked about last week, are a picture, like he talked about, of evil, wicked nations and the demonic forces behind them.
Chaos waters are a picture throughout the Bible of these evil forces, and some commentators have said that the storm that came against Jesus was actually demonically powered. I don't know about that, but it's interesting. And, and so when Jesus cast the, the, the power out of the sea and calmed the storm, he's foreshadowing what he, what he's about to do with the, with, uh, the demoniac.
He's casting the powers out of him. And, and, and so what's interesting is this chaotic water is... that, that the demons tried to use to stop Jesus from getting to them, is the place that they ended up dying themselves. Uh, th- they, they were fleeing Jesus to go do damage elsewhere, but instead, in the execution of their plan, the demonic powers are killed by their own designs.
They fall into their own trap, right? They drown in the sea that they tried to wield against Jesus, or my favorite turn of phrase, they were hoisted by their own petards. [laughing] And this is exactly the story that gets picked up at the end of the Bible, in the Book of Revelation.
Satan and his evil forces rise up out of the chaotic waters, a- as, in the form of all these different dragons and beasts, and they come, and they start to oppress and do damage to Israel and to the nations. But then in Revelation 20, Jesus defeats Satan and throws him where? In a lake.
Now, it's a lake of fire, but it's still a lake [chuckles]. It's the same story happening again. This is a physical picture here, with the drowning of the pigs, of the spiritual reality that was soon to take place on the cross of Jesus.
On the cross, Satan sought to destroy Jesus. The serpent sought to swallow up the son of Eve and Abraham once and for all by drowning him under the waters of death on the cross. And yet through that, Satan himself was defeated and thrown into the lake.
Satan always beats himself. [laughing] He always falls into his own traps. On the cross, all of Satan and, uh, and all his minions' accusations are proven to be without their sting.
So in the drowning of the pigs, we see what Jesus is ultimately going to do to every spiritual power that opposes him in the future. Real quick, there's also a different image happening here with the pigs in the water, because if you're a Jewish person and you are reading about all this uncleanliness, and then the unclean thing goes into water, what are you thinking of? Cleansing.
Like, you're thinking about cleansing. After you become unclean in the Book of Leviticus, you have to go ritualistically wash, and then you become clean. So also, this is a really unique and ironic picture of how Jesus was going to cleanse the unclean nation of the Gentiles.
So that's just cool, too. All right, we've got to move on. Fourteen and fifteen: "The herdsmen fled and told it to the city and in the country, and people came to see what it was that had happened.
And they came to Jesus and saw the demon-possessed man, the one who had the legion, sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid." [chuckles] Before we notice anything else or talk about anything else, we have to stop and notice the most shocking thing in this entire passage. There's a lot of cool biblical allusions, there's a lot of cool stories being finished, there's a lot of promises about the nations and about what God's going to do to the spiritual powers. But at the heart of it is a transformed life.
Like, right here in the middle, you have this man who had fifty-six hundred demons inside of him, who lived in crypts, who, who, who could, through brute force, break iron chains. He spent night and day tunneling through the mountains and the tombs, crying out and performing self-harm, mutilating his body with sharp flints and stones. This man has gone an, undergone an inexplicable transformation, and that, that can only occur through an encounter with Jesus.
Like, this is what Jesus does. This is what business he is in. He goes to the most unlikely candidates for transformation, the weakest, the most evil, the most vicious, the most scary, and he turns them into people of love, and mercy, and proclamation, [chuckles] goodness, and those are the people he's using to replant Eden.
Like, that's my story. [chuckles] Right? It, it's your story if you've met Jesus.
He transforms us. And so we've heard the story, we've seen what Jesus does, we've seen the power he has. Well, now comes the response.
What's your response going to be? Verses sixteen to twenty: "And those who had seen it described to them what had happened to the demon-possessed man and the pigs, and they began," the citizens of Gadarenes, "they began to beg Jesus to depart from the region." They start trying to exorcise Jesus again, just like the demons did earlier. So as Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by Jesus, he starts to beg, but he doesn't beg for Jesus to leave and says...
He begs that he might be with him. Like, he doesn't want to leave Jesus' side, but Jesus does not permit him to stay. Instead, he said to him, "Go, go home.
Go to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how he has had mercy on you. And when he went away, he began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and everyone marveled, or everyone was afraid." So this is the application. There's two responses in this passage, and the disciples aren't mentioned....
The disciples are watching all this happen, because the last time they saw this story unfold, it was on the boat with the storm, and they were afraid, and they were like, "Who is this guy?" Well, now he's gonna do it again, and they're gonna show- he's, Jesus is gonna show them the right reaction they should have had, but it's gonna be through this Gerasene demoniac. This man begs to be with Jesus. He knows who he is, and then he's happy to be sent out to be a gospel proclaimer all around the world.
That's one option. The other option was to do what the Gerasene citizens did and cast him out. "Get out of here.
I beg you to leave our country." And the question that I wrestled with the most in thinking about this passage was, why on earth were they sending Jesus away? And I c- I can get the whole, like, well, I mean, he just cost them thousands and thousands of dollars, right, in the, in the pigs drowning. But I, I think that points to a bigger issue, which is when Jesus comes into your life, when Jesus was coming into the territory, the, the kingdom of Gerasa, he was saying, "I'm your new king, and I'm gonna drive out anything that is unclean.
And while that might come at a really high cost, I'm gonna show you a picture in this Gerasene man of how worth it it is." But the Gerasenes did not want to pay the cost of following Jesus. They didn't want him to drive out everything that they held so dear, all the unclean, broken, wicked, evil things that they held onto. It wasn't worth it for them to beg to be near Jesus.
And so I think that's the question that this text is pushing toward us is, you've seen who Jesus is. Are you gonna come out of here begging to be near him, and then anywhere he sends you to go, to the nations, to the hardest-to-reach places, will you go? Will you be like an Eden planter?
Will you go be like this freed Gerasene man and take the good news and the mercy of Jesus anywhere he sends you because you know who he is, y- he's- you've encountered him, you love him, you wanna be with him, and take his fame and mercy to the world? That's one option. Or will you give lip service to Jesus?
Will you just say his name like a demonic incantation? Will you claim that he is Messiah, Most High God, King, but then whenever he comes in to drive the uncleanliness and the evil and the things that are holding you captive, when he comes in to drive those out of your heart, are you gonna say, "All right, Jesus, give me some space, 'cause that's way too expensive. That costs me way too much." But really, what's happening is you're holding on to a legion of evil that he [chuckles] wants to set you free from so he can put you in your right mind.
All the evil in this world makes us crazy, [chuckles] and he wants to set us straight.
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