Here is a link to the audio. And here is Matt's really excellent class--Part One. More to follow through the month. Enjoy!
Last week, you might
remember, Jesus calmed and rebuked
a great hurricane of a storm raging over the Sea of
Galilee.The day before, Jesus
had preached for a whole day,and then the storm was
during the night and now, as the night is giving
way to day they arrive on the other
side of the lake in Gentile Country.
I know what I'd be
thinking as the boat hit the land. Coffee, for heaven's
sake, and
some delicately fried fish.You know that quiet
restful meal in the aftermath of a crisis.So grateful to be alive, that the dawn has risen, and the sky is rippled
with pink and golden and stillness. And yet, we do not have
perfect peace. As the boat slides up on
the beach, though the wind and
waves are calmed, the disciples, are living with the new sure
and terrifying knowledge that the person in the
boat with them,Jesus, is the person of Psalm
89:9 who controls the weather, who speaks and all
creation obeys him. He is the Lord of
Creation. Nobody in the boat
really wants to find out
what else he is Lord of as they climb out of
their boats, stiff, exhausted, relieved, casting the eye about
for breakfast.
Mark tells us that Immediately, as Jesus stepped out of
the boat, a Man with an Unclean
Spirit came suddenly towards them. Matthew and Luke both
recount this event. Matthew remembers two
men
but doesn’t tell us
anything about the second. Luke adds
that the man "for a long time had worn no
clothes." All three gospels make the
special point that, 'he came from the tombs.'
So here you are, a straggler on, following Jesus. You've just nearly died. And as you step on to
sane dry ground, a crazy crazy man,
completely naked, comes racing down from
the tombs. You don't want to really
be here anyway in gentile country, and you notice there are
foul unclean pigs everywhere and so on top of being
hungry, worn out, and afraid of your good
friend Jesus, you’re calculating in
the back of your mind how long it will take to
ritually purify yourself once you get back home, but the straw that breaks
the camel’s back is this man running maniacally
towards you, covered with a stench of
death.
Naked, crazy, living in a cemetery—and not like cemeteries where we might go and
walk around and picnic on the
gravestones—no this is a cemetery of
open tombs hewn out of the side of a hill, tombs you could walk
into where bodies were laid
out to decompose and then all the bits
gathered up and put in a box. He lives there. The word is to dwell, to settle down.
And he's crazy. Mark says that he had
been previously bound. Over and over again the
community had tried to restrain him. What kind of person do
you try to restrain? A person who is out of
control, who is dangerous. Matthew says he was so fierce no one could pass by that way. you restrain someone who
is ruining everything, hurting people, hurting
himself. There's an indication
that he has been becoming more and
more violent and out of control because they used to
restrain him, but they no longer do. He became strong enough
to wrench the chains apart, to grind the shackles.
And now, he lives among
the tombs, and, verse 5, 'he was always crying and cutting himself with stones.'
We don't really have
this in this culture, but where I grew up
there were people who we called 'fou'—crazy. There was a woman in my
village who wandered from place
to place moaning and carrying on.
In the towns and cities you
would often see a single solitary man or
woman, filthy, dressed in scraps from
the trash heap, shouting or carrying on. You wouldn't stop and
greet a fou—they live in a separated
way, outside, crazy.
In cold countries we
incarcerate people like this, but this man, this man seems like the
hulk. He can break chains, he's super human. And that's exactly the
point. It’s not just him, he has what Mark calls
an Unclean Spirit. And not just one unclean
spirit, because look at verse 9, Jesus says, 'What is your name,' and the man doesn't
answer, a spirit inside him
answers that the name is Legion 'for we are many.'
As unpleasant as it is
for us sitting quietly in this place with nobody
screaming or yelling, we need to deal with what
this Unclean Spirit is. Paul writes in 1
Corinthians 6 verse 19 …do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit
within you, whom you have from God? Remember that when you
come to faith in Jesus, when you give yourself
to him and trust in him for
everything—for salvation, for the needs of the
body and soul, for the renewing and
transforming of the mind—he comes to live in you
through the Holy Spirit. All of us are a body
with a mind and a soul,
but within us can live
Jesus, through the Clean Pure
Perfect Holy Spirit, God. When you give yourself
to Jesus, he gives himself to you, he lives in you. The Holy Spirit has
power over you. Anyone who is in Christ
has had the many supernatural—that is, not natural—experiences of sorrow
for sin, of joy, of gratitude in the
midst of things being kind of a wreck, of peace, that is, knowing that everything
is going to be ok even when all
circumstances suggest that nothing will ever be ok again. The Holy Spirit has
power in our lives
to make us do what we
would not naturally do.
This man had a Legion
of Unclean Spirits living in him. A Legion is like 6000
Roman Soldiers. It’s a way of indicating
a very large number. This man is overrun by
filth, depravity, brokenness and hell. He is naked. The first act of
bringing sanity and forgiveness to Adam and Eve in the face of their sin was God's slaughtering
an animal and covering them with
the skin. This man is naked and
wounded. He has been cutting and
hacking and destroying himself. The spirits in him are
the complete opposite of the Holy Spirit who lives
in you if you belong to Jesus. The spirits in this man
are from hell. They belong to Satan who
rebelled against God, who was cast out of
heaven, and who is allowed to
roam over the earth, joining with us in
ruining God's creation. These spirits can take
up residence
bringing their power and devastation into the human mind,
heart and body. They can, and they do. They have in this man. They have made hell
alive in him.
It might not be too hard
for you to see hell in the news and the ruined lives of
others but if you look very far
down, into the depths of your heart, not making excuses, not blinking or turning
away, you might see some very
ugly things in yourself. I looked at myself this
week and found that I was
really angry about some things. Am I justified in being
angry? Not so much. Has God given me his own
self? Then I do not do well to
be angry. And yet, that blackness
is down there, abiding deep. We have to look hard to
find hell around here, this man, it was all over his poor
broken body.
I read this week that
this man had it worse than Job. Job lost everything and
was sick, but he had a long
conversation with God.
This man is not even
allowed the use of words. The demons,the Legion, speak for him.
They propel him toward
Jesus and fling him down on
the ground, the word is for worship, for obeisance to
someone greater, of kissing the hand, and when Jesus speaks to
the man, they answer. In fact, as soon as they
see Jesus, they become hysterical
and screaming, 'what have you to do with us?' And they try to force
Jesus into an oath--'I adjure you'—not to torment them. They are asking for
Jesus not to send them into the Pit, the place of waiting for
the ultimate and final torment of hell. He has the power to send
them there, but they beg him not to, and then they beg him
not to send them out of the region, for, says Mark, 'Jesus had been saying',
that is, he began saying and kept
on saying from the moment he saw
the man, 'come out of the man.' They know they've got to
obey.
They are trying to buy
time. And so Jesus, verse 11, lets them enter into a herd
of pigs.
Now, some of you might
be thinking, poor pigs. And others of you might
be thinking, why didn't he cast them
into the pit. For those of you upset
about the pigs, well, there's no answer
that will make you feel better. Jesus is Lord over
heaven and earth, over the waves and the
wind and over the demons. Just as he has the power
and authority to rain down fire on Sodom
and Gomorrah, the power and authority
to send his people into Exile, just as he has the power
and authority to dispatch any of us
this morning, he has the power and
authority to consign these pigs to the devil who hurls them down the
beach to their watery grave. What can I say, it’s not
pc. This is not going to be
the place you go to make Jesus relevant. But I think our worry
for the pigs very often eclipses our
compassion for the man.
Look at the visual of
all that evil coming out of the man. You can see it. It takes up a vast herd
of pigs—That’s how much evil was
in this man. And then it’s gone, in
one word.
Now to those of you upset that Jesus didn't just
send the demons into the pit. This is the great
mysterious providence of God, isn't it. The fact is that God let
Satan in in the first place, knowing that he would
ruin everything, knowing that we would
plight our way with his,
knowing that it
would culminate in the death of Jesus himself. And yet he allowed it. He not only allowed it, he uses the spiritual
forces of wickedness that rebel against him to sharpen and hone us, to test us like metal is
tested or tempered in fire. He allows Satan to
persecute those whom he loves so that we will be weak, so that we will be
forced to depend on him, so that we will not be
able to take credit for the work that he does in the world and in our
lives. Which takes us back to
the man.
This man is so broken, he is so wounded and there is no pulling
himself up by his bootstraps to clean himself up and
come into church. He doesn't have any bootstraps. He is nekked. He is bleeding. And this is where I want
you to stop identifying with the poor sorry
disciples clustered together in sheer horror, nor with the pig herds who are pulling pigs out
of the water as fast as they can to
haul off to market, and making ready to run
to town to tell everyone what's
happened,nor Jesus. Don't put yourself in
the place of Jesus—
because that's what we
like to do, isn't it? Look at that poor sorry hellion over
there. Let me go help him put on
some clothes and stop cutting himself. No, put yourself in the
place of the demoniac.
Before Jesus saved you,
you were on the road to hell. You may not have had
6000 demons making themselves
comfortable, but you were in the dark, you couldn't make it
better, there wasn't anything
you could do to climb up the long sides of the
pit you were in. And then Jesus just
spoke, he made you alive, while you were dead, while you were a sinner, while you were his
screaming naked enemy, he breathed into you gave you a desire for
himself and clothed you, and gave you your mind
back. Look at verse 15, he was clothed and in his right mind.
And that's when everyone
is scared out of their boots. The whole town is here
now. The pigs are still being
hauled out of the lake. And this man, this crazy crazy wounded
man is sitting, like a reasonable person
you could have inside for dinner. Just like the disciples
in the boat are more afraid after Jesus calms the
storm, the people in this town
are more afraid than when they had a
crazy guy living in the tombs. They beg Jesus to go
away. Get out of here. We're
happy with the evil we know and love. You, you go away.
Don't be upset when
people utterly revile and reject you and are repulsed by your
love for Jesus. Don't take it
personally. These people beg Jesus
to leave. And he does. He gets back in the boat
with his probably now
totally hysterical disciples. And, verse 19, he doesn't let the man come
with him. Here, even before he
sends out the 12 and the 72, he sends out this man. This is the first man
who's allowed to talk about what Jesus has
done for him. He says 'go, tell your family'. And this man goes to all
ten cities of that region. He goes to every market, every dinner party he
can get invited to, and he tells everyone
about Jesus. Can you imagine the
story from his perspective? You should be able to. What has Jesus done for
you? Did you used to be
awfully angry? And now you're still
angry but you feel really bad about it, and it’s getting to be
less every day? Were you dead but now
you are alive? Jesus is the Lord of
Creation,
and he is Lord over Hell
and the Power of Hell.
Let's pray together as
we close.
Lord Jesus Christ, cast out the
works of darkness and destruction in our lives. Clothe us in your love,
transform and renew our minds, fill us with yourself. Amen.
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