Jesus and Demons Part 1 (2)
Eric Durso
The Gospel of Mark • Sermon • Submitted
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October 25th, 2020
This morning we come to one of the most bizarre, fascinating, challenging texts in the New Testament. If you’ve been with us, remember that last week Jesus’ calmed the sea and demonstrated his power over nature. This section follows naturally and shows another angle of Christ’s supremacy and authority: this authority over the demonic.
Some people simply disbelieve the existence of spirits. Others obsess over them. Both of these are wrong, but we have a different problem. We affirm our belief in the demonic, we hardly know what to do with it. Other than great stories for the campfire.
If we are to have a biblical worldview, we actually need to believe in the unseen spirit-realm. We have to embrace reality as God says it is: matter is not all there is, that God is a spirit, and he is the creator of spirits we cannot see. If we were to put on the biblical lens, we’d encounter the world as it truly is: a material world and a spiritual world, coexisting, and often interacting.
Our text this morning is one of the most dramatic scenes in the New Testament. It’s a scene where the spirit world and the material world collide. I’ve decided to take two weeks to deal with this text because I think we need to construct a worldview that’s foreign to our modern minds. So this morning we are going to use this text as a springboard to address the whole subject of demons, and then we’ll next week we’ll look more closely at the details.
Let’s read the text. Mark 5:1-20. This text will launch us into a study of demons. We’ll look at this particular text more next week. This week we’ll jump around a bit.
Here is an epic encounter between Jesus and a legion of demons. This may be like a skirmish in a great centuries long war that has been happening, so to understand, we need to think about this war that’s been going on from the beginning.
To understand this, I want to start unpacking truths about demons. Eight truths about demons.
First, demons are powerful.
Let’s start with Satan. The Bible teaches that Satan isn’t a symbol of evil, not a force or a figure of speech. Satan is a person. We first encounter him in Genesis 3 as the serpent, as he is introduced as one who aims to thwart God’s plan for creation by tempting Adam and Eve to sin.
Evaluating from Ezekiel 28, which seems to describe his first sin and his banishment from heaven, we learn that he was a creature and was likely the highest of God’s angelic creation. 28:12 “You were a signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty; You were in Eden, the Garden of God…” vs 14 “you were an anointed guardian cherub; I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God”… vs 15 “You were blameless in all your ways from the day you were created, til unrighteousness was found in you.” Beautiful, filled with wisdom and splendor. He was beautiful and glorious, he was the ruler of the hosts of heaven, possibly something like the Prime Minister of the universe. There were no higher creatures than him-- but there was God.
Satan is a creature of immense power. Power beyond human calculation. Demons, under his rule, do his bidding.
Second, demons are numerous
Satan rebelled against God, because of pride, and was thus cast to the ground. So this dazzling creature, created to stand in the very presence of God, to run the universe in service to God, turned against him. His power was even demonstrated in his fall, because according to Revelation 12:4, he somehow persuaded a third of the angels to come with him, to wage war against God. I don’t know if that means Satan was such an awesome creation that ⅓ of the angels actually felt he had a shot at winning.
You say, “So one-third of the angels followed Satan-- how many is that?” We get hints of the great number of angels throughout Scripture. In Luke 2 at the announcement of Jesus’ birth there appeared a “multitude of angels.” God’s is sometimes called the “Lord of Hosts” which refers to a great number of heavenly hosts. In Revelation 5:11 John hears the “voice of many angels, numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands”-- literally the Greek says 10,000 times 10,000, and thousands of thousands”-- but 10,000 was the highest number in the Greek language, so it might be like saying, “Billions and billions.”
This is our world: infested with myriads of demons. They don’t procreate, but they’re numerous.
Third, demons are influential.
Satan and his demons work in the world system. Satan is referred to as the “god of his world” (2 Cor. 4:4), “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). 1 John 5:19 says “the world world lies in the power of the evil one.” In John 12:31 Jesus calls him the “ruler of this world.” So he works in world systems, in philosophies, in ideas, in worldviews, in politics. There are no neutral ideas: they’re either true or false; and if they’re false, they’re anti-truth.
But they also work against individuals. When addressing the people in Ephesians 2, Paul writes, “And you were once 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.” Evil spirits are at work in individuals - the sons of disobedience. That is, everyone who is not protected by the sovereign power of Christ is a vulnerable target for evil. And this is what we encounter in Mark 5. Here’s a man who was the victim of demonic cruelty. Here’s a man who is being destroyed by demons.
Fourth, demons are destructive
Now, there are all kinds of ways Satan and his dark forces fight against God and his purposes. Remember John 8:44 which says that Satan is a murderer. He is a destroyer. He wants to destroy God and every that points to the goodness of God.
Satan wants to destroy the body. In the gospels, we see demons as the cause of muteness, blindness, physical deformity, seizures. In Luke 9:39 there’s a child, a young boy who is convulsed, foams at the mouth.” In Mark 9:20 it’s described as trying to throw the boy into the fire. Now in our text, notice that the demon possessed man is is cutting himself. This most certainly is demonic influence.
Satan wants to destroy the mind. In our text again, the man is clearly out of his mind. He can’t think clearly. His thoughts are dominated and distracted by the demonic. Satan is a deceiver, he can darken the mind (Eph. 4). Satan’s attacks on humanity are an attack on the mind, the way one thinks.
Satan wants to destroy God’s image. He hates God, and thus humanity who bears his image is deplorable to him. He loathes us. He wants us destroyed, and since God is gracious, since God is a healer, since God is compassionate, he wants to keep us as far from God as he can.
Now, there’s some strangeness to all this. Often in Scripture we see that demons will actually aid people in certain ways.
Fifth, demons can and often do work through human beings
Let me give you some examples.
Divination is described in the Bible as demonic. What’s divination? It’s essentially fortune-telling. Divination must have been a common practice among the pagan nations because Israel was not allowed to do it, and if anyone did they’d be guilty of evil and put to death. In Acts 16:16 we read about Paul and Silas going to pray and the text says, “They were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune-telling.” And she goes around saying “These men are servants of the Most High God who proclaim to you the way of salvation!” Eventually Paul gets so annoy and casts the demon out of her. But demons can inhabit people and then give them insight that they wouldn’t otherwise have.
Magic. Magic in Scripture is demonic. I’m not talking about pulling a quarter out of someone’s ear. Sometimes Scripture calls this sorcery. The Bible recognizes these things as legitimate. Pharaoh had magicians who could imitate the miracles of Moses. In Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar has magicians, sorcerers, enchanters in his kingdom who fail to interpret his dreams. In Matthew 7, Jesus himself acknowledges that there will be people who do mighty works in his name, but will still be cast out and judged by him. According to Scripture, magic is a real, and it’s demonic.
Spiritism. A third way demons aid humans is through what is called spiritism. This is when people try to speak with spirits, even the spirits of dead people.
Possession. The most famous case is our text. Demon-possession, or demonization, is when a demon essentially jumps into the driver’s seat and starts using the body for its own purposes. Demons can speak through people, and control people giving them unnatural strength.
If you’re not a Christian, you might be thinking, “Man, what is this, Halloween Sunday?” I promise, we didn’t plan to preach on demons to Sunday before Halloween, but here we are. You may be thinking: This seems so odd, do they really believe all this?
it’s not just Christians who have believed in the existence of the spiritual realm. In fact, scholar Craig Keener wrote an article studying demon-possession in various cultures and concluded “spirit-possession beliefs are geographically and culturally pervasive.” In other words, his study concluded that the belief in spirits is something that all peoples in all places at all times have believed. If you want to deny the existence of spirits you put yourself in the awkward position of disagreeing with just about every culture in just about every age.
The ancient Egyptians believed evil spirits could inhabit people and could only be expelled by magical incantations. The Akkadian culture dealt with demon possession by creating a small figure of the demon that was oppressing someone and throwing it in the fire. In the 5th century Greco-Roman world they believed that the fly was an embodiment of the female demon called Nasu (I have too many Nasu’s flying around in my house).
Even pre-Christ Judaism had adopted methods of dealing with demons. In the apocryphal text called Tobit, Tobit drove off the demon named Asmodeus by burning the heart and liver of a fish. In rabbinic literature, Solomon was described not only as having been wise, but also as having masters spells and incantations to control spirits. In fact, Solomon was thought to be so powerful over the evil spiritual forces that many rituals and incantations included chanting his name. I’m not saying all these things are true, just that the belief in the spirit realm has been more common in ages past, and our modern age is the odd one that doesn’t.
I don’t cite these beliefs because they’re valid. I’m simply pointing out that nearly every culture in every place in every era has held a strong belief in spirits. It’s only in our modern, “scientific” age that we act as if it’s weird.
Francis Schaeffer makes a fascinating point about this: He tells you to imagine that you’re sitting in an airplane. You’re in the middle seat, and on your left is a tribal, spirit-believing pagan. He hasn’t a clue how the airplane flies. The man on your right is an engineer. He doesn’t believe in anything supernatural, but he knows every nut and bolt on the plane, how the thrust of the engine makes it fly.
You’ve got the spirit-believing pagan and the materialist engineer. And Schaeffer asks the question: “Which of these two men would best understand the universe?” Now both are wrong, but he points out that the pagan, at least, is operating with both halves of the pie, while the engineer is denying the existence of one half. The engineer is out of step with reality because he shuts off the existence of anything we cannot see, feel, or sense.
What about you? I think we moderns would see the engineer as the one more in touch with reality. But when you think about it, he’s like a man in a house denying the outside world exists. It doesn’t matter how much he masters what’s in the house. If he denies the existence of an outside world, he’s going to misunderstand reality itself.
Believers, we are not materialists. We believe in this stuff.
Sixth: Demons hate Christians
So much of what we read about demons doing is against the church. They hate Christians and they hate the church. What do they do?
They attack assurance. The whole armor of God described in Ephesians 6 is meant to help us gain an assurance of our great salvation. The implication is that if we don’t wear it, we’ll lack confidence and assurance.
They tempt to sin. Satan tempted David in 1 Chronicles 21, Jesus in Mark 1, Peter, Ananias and Sapphira. It’s hard to know exactly how it works, but they can be at work in tempting believers.
They inflict pain. We see this in the case of Job, in the case of Paul, when he describes his “thorn in the flesh” as a “messenger of Satan sent to harass him.”
They deceive the church. In 1 Timothy 4, the “doctrines of demons.”
They divide the church. In Ephesians 4 we’re told that if we let anger take root in our hearts against others, we’re giving the devil a foothold. Satan loves to divide churches, and I think he has been particularly successful this year in America.
They distract the church. As we saw in Mark 4, when the word goes forth, Satan loves to snatch it up before anyone actually receives it.
And now in our text we encounter a man who is absolutely engulfed in demonic evil. He lives in utter moral perversion. The man’s appearance must have been hideous and grotesque. He probably had open wounds all over his body; he’s a bloody mess. Pulled out hair, scabs. His stench was probably foul. He is not merely oppressed, here is a man possessed.
Okay, so let’s pause and recap. Satan and his demons are way more powerful than us. These creatures are myriads. They are influencing our whole world. They want to destroy people, all people, regardless. They work through humans. And they hate us with a cruel and grotesque hatred. They want to destroy our bodies, destroy our minds, destroy our dignity. They’re going to attack our assurance, they’re going to tempt us to sin, they’re going to inflict pain, they want to divide the church, they want to distract us from the word. Ultimately, they want to bring hell on earth, and where they can’t, they want to drag those on earth to hell.
What in the world are we to do? Mark 5. Here comes Jesus.
Notice, first of all, that the man can do nothing to save himself. He is utterly hopeless, bound to destruction, and lost unless a power greater than the demons can deliver him.
Second, notice the disciples. They’re absent. They cannot do anything. This is a power beyond them. All they do is stand back and let Jesus work.
Here’s the big idea of today’s message: demons are real, they’re dangerous, they’re destructive, they’re deceitful, and you and I can do nothing against them. Friends, we do not talk to demons, we can’t control demons, our only hope is our Almighty Jesus Christ.
Ephesians 1:19- and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might 20 that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. 22 And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
Seventh: Jesus has authority over demons.
Friends, you’re a helpless, vulnerable, person in comparison to the world you live in. Last week, we talked about storms. You live in a world with dangers beyond your control. You live in a world with threats you cannot eliminate. And you have a Savior who is Sovereign over it all. And he says, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?”
And this morning we are reminded of some bad news: the dangers are worse than even what we can see. We don’t merely wrestle with flesh and blood. We aren’t merely threatened by viruses and elections and car accidents and wicked people. There are a swirling world of invisible evil that works tirelessly to seal our fates in hell. We see a glimpse of a man dominated by these forces.
What is our hope? Jesus Christ.
Eighth: Jesus himself will judge all demons.
Matthew 25:41 indicates that he has prepared the Lake of Fire for the devil and his angels. He cast them out of this world, then condemned them to an eternity of suffering they deserve. Revelation 20:13 And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. 14 Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. 15 And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
This scene in Mark 5 is a preview of the power King Jesus will display when he exterminates all these vile spirits, banishing them from our world forever, and then ushers in his kingdom.
Listen: if you’re afraid, if you’re concerned, if you’re wondering about the demonic threat in your life, here’s what you must do. You must confess your sin to Jesus, repent, and embrace him as Lord. He, and he alone, can protect you. He, and he alone will forgive you.