A Clash of Kingdoms

The Reading of Mark 5 and the Gerasene Demoniac

The reading today is chapter five, one through 20. They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. And when Jesus had stepped out of that boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs, a man with an unclean spirit.

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 the 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. And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him.

And crying out with a loud voice, he 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 was saying to him, "'Come out of the man, you unclean spirit.'.

And Jesus asked him, "'What is your name?'. He replied, "'My name is Legion, for we are many.'. And he begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. Now a great herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, and they begged him saying, "'Send us to the pigs, let us enter them.'.

So he gave them permission, and the unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs and the herd, numbering about 2 ,000, rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the sea. 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 had the Legion, sitting there clothed in his right mind, and they were afraid.

And those who had not seen it described to them what had happened to the demon-possessed man and to the pigs. And they began to beg Jesus to depart from their region. As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed with demons begged him that he might be with him.

And he did not permit him, but said to him, "'Go home to your friends and tell them "'how much the Lord has done for you "'and how he has had mercy on you.'. And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and everyone marveled.".

James 1:13-15 and the Danger of Temptation

James chapter one, verse 13 says, "'Let no one say when he is tempted, "'I am being tempted by God. "'For God cannot be tempted by evil, "'and he himself does not tempt anyone. "'But each one is tempted when he is carried away "'and enticed by his own lust.

"'Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin, "'and when sin is fully matured, it brings forth death. "'Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers.'". I think this passage gives us a lot of trouble in the Reformed world, because there are two ditches when it comes to talking about demons, but what I hope to prove to you is that while this text has demons in it, that's not really what this text is about.

This has two main points. Point number one is Jesus is expanding the boundaries and the borders of the kingdom of God into Gentile lands. And point number two is the radical reality of salvation that is brought on only by the decree of Jesus Christ.

And so what we have is a lesson about how one who is completely, by the world's standards, unsavable, the very worst of situations, becomes the evangelist to the Gentile nations and to the city of Decapolis.

But we often speak of these ditches, and so we have to deal with it. I told the guys on Wednesday night that when you come across texts like this, like if you're gonna preach about the Nephilim, if you're in Genesis 6, or if you're in Hebrews 7 and Melchizedek comes up, you can't just go through that text and be like, yeah, see, Jesus is the great high priest.

You have to explain Melchizedek. You have to do that. In this text, there is a lot of curiosity because we have a very vivid story of a demon-possessed man, and this demon possession is a little bit different than what we saw in the synagogues earlier in Mark.

This is a really wild situation here. And the ditches that we can fall into when we deal with demons and angels is, on one side, we can describe everything to them, and we can say, the devil made me do it, right?

Everything that's going on, the devil made me do it. I've been oppressed by Satan. That's why I'm doing what I'm doing. James obviously does not leave the door open for that. He tells us about our own corrupt nature and how we, in our own lust of the flesh, are carried away and open the door to that type of possession and oppression.

But then on the other side, which is more common for us in the reform camp, is that we say that demonic and angelic influence is basically charismania hogwash. It's nonsense. And what our problem is in our camp, this is what we're most likely to fall into here, is that we functionally deny the existence of demonic influence, and we hold to naturalistic interpretations of everything.

If I can't empirically observe it, then it's not real. Now, thankfully, there is a extremely popular podcast that's come out that, at the very least, has made people start thinking a little bit differently about this realm.

That podcast is called Haunted Cosmos. I don't listen to every episode, but I think it has some good things for people, at least to start thinking about, not everything in the world has a naturalistic explanation.

But see, biblically, there is zero doubt that a spiritual battle rages, that there are battles going on between principalities and authorities. And I think there's a hint in how Paul is talking about, in that text, principalities and authorities mean that there is demonic and angelic influence in the world, but they spend a lot of time with authorities.

The nations of the world, there is an allegiance that's being called to Christ, and there is an enemy that very much wants nations to not hold that allegiance. So let's examine the battle more closely.

The Kingdom of God Crossing into Gentile Territory

And as we see this vivid picture, I wanna put together, first, a curiosity, and it's one that gave me fits this week, is that we have a count of this event in all three synoptic gospels, but in Matthew, it's different, because in Matthew, he says that there's two men here, okay?

That does not create a contradiction for us, because what's going on here is Mark is writing, for a couple of reasons here. Mark wants to show the evangelistic nature of the kingdom, but Mark is also talking about the kingdom of God coming and it expanding its bounds.

We talked about that last week, that Jesus shows his authority over nature itself. And this week, we're gonna see that Jesus makes war with the one who is the king over the nations, because remember when the temptation happened, that Satan offered Jesus the nations, and we believe that that was an offer that had some skin in the game.

If Satan did not have those nations to offer, and Jesus knows everything, then that was not a real temptation. But Satan did have those nations to offer, but Jesus was going to take them by force. And we see the first legs of this today.

As Jesus goes to Gentile lands, he's crossed the Sea of Galilee, he's on the southeastern edge in the lands of, there's a textual variant, we'll say it in the land around the cities of Decapolis. There's 10 Gentile cities in this area.

And we see a man who Mark focuses in on, who is completely enslaved to the power of Satan. And so what I want you to see first is that when given over completely to the prince of darkness, what's gonna happen is you have a man who doesn't look like a man anymore.

You have a man who is living among the dead. You have a man who everyone would look at and go, whoa, that's bad. No one would claim that. One of the things I tell my high schoolers, as I warn them, I tell them all the time, first couple of weeks of school, I say, kids, no one, when they're 12 years old, dreams, one of these days, I'm gonna be a meth head.

So what I wanna do, I wanna live under a bridge, have no teeth, and scream at everybody and lick my gums. Nobody says that. And yet, it constantly happens. And the reason why it happens is because we, in our sinful flesh, will open the door and leave it wide open for Satanic oppression.

And in the Bible, when we see the word witchcraft, it is often translated from the Greek word pharmakia. And so we know that drugs, and we know that hallucinogenic, mind-altering drugs open a door into this realm of demonic oppression in this kind of world.

The Shackles of Satan: Seduction, Power, and Death

So what I wanna talk about first is, I told the guys again Wednesday, your audience, your application is for the people who are looking at you. And so as I think about this text, and we see a madman who's cutting himself, who's living in tombs, who everyone in the cities around has made a pathway around this place because they don't wanna go through this area because this guy's a raving lunatic.

It's as if he's a wild lion who's living in this valley. Everyone's making their way around, and we think to ourself, what is the real danger for us? So I wanna look at the shackles of Satan. Because the shackles of Satan, as we see in this text, are much stronger than the shackles of man.

The shackles of man are chains. And through the power of Satan, this man is ripping apart chains. Can you imagine what a fearsome thing to see? Would you wanna get anywhere near a man who's screaming obscenities, cutting himself naked, out in the wilderness, living in tombs among dead bodies, and can rip chains asunder?

What a scary thing it is. So what we have to look back on, and this is why I read the passage out of James, is that we have to examine the wiles of the enemy. And we have to study the enemy, not so that we would be like him, but so that we would be able to identify the bait on the hook that he latches us in with, and that he takes us into his schemes.

Because the shackles of Satan are, first, seductive. They are quite seductive. And you can imagine, in this man's case, he's been promised something. As he lives in this community, he's been promised something that is seductive.

And so, in taking the bait, he has opened himself up to this possession by legion. And I think the seductive thing that we see right away is, he's been given supernatural strength. And that appeals to men, doesn't it?

Men, what would you give for supernatural strength? The ability to just lift huge objects easily. The ability to tear metal with your bare hands. It's hardly to be imagined. And yet, that would be a seductive thing, because strength and power go together for men.

And so, this man has been given a bait, and often, the shackles of Satan are clothed in subtlety. They're hidden, and they look good until the mask is ripped off by reality. Our enemy is cunning. He is silvery smooth.

He has a sweet tongue. And our enemy comes to us, often as an angel of light, and he promises seemingly good things that are obtained by bad means. And then, when we bite on the hook, we are hooked. We see it in our world today, with drug use.

We see it with the fractiousness and the division within the church of God, that we hear, hey, we hear subtle lies like, look, we hold the truth, no one else does. You gotta separate. That's a lie of the enemy.

We see the lie of the enemy in our computer screens, in our phone screens, every single day. He has enslaved a generation of men with the subtle idea that, look, women are horrible anyway. They're going to divorce you.

So, guess what you should do, men? Forget them. You don't need that trouble. You can get your gratification on your phone screen every day, every single day, any time you want, and the bait is on the hook.

And all it takes is you grab it that one time and release the pleasure, here comes the shackles. And the shackles cannot be removed by the power of men. We see that as point number two of the shackles of Satan.

They cannot be overcome with the means of man, with external means. The town had had him chained and shackled. They had had him banished into this wilderness, into this desolation. And what we will do often with the shackles of Satan is we will attempt with willpower and asceticism to throw off these bounds.

And it doesn't work because we are not strong enough to fight the spiritual battle by carnal means. And me saying, I'm gonna do, I'll never do this again, I'll never do this again, I'll never do this again, is a fool's errand.

Because the question is not about willpower, the question is about Christ's power and our listening to the Holy Spirit in our heart. And so what we have to do is we have to learn how to, in scripture, with worship and in fellowship and in accountability, to turn the noise down on our own self-will and the noise down of the voices around us so that we can hear the Holy Spirit and so that we can be conformed in the image of Christ.

But too often we are shackled in sin by trying to solve the problem with what our eyes can see. And so this man is hopeless, destitute, thrown out of the town. And so what we see is as the shackles continue and as we abide in slavery, that we will eventually abide in death.

And this is critical to understanding this passage. So the number three thing is that the shackles of Satan and the hook that's lured in, as James said, is going to conceive, give birth to sin, and then when it's fully mature, death, death.

So this man is a vivid object lesson of the end result of sin, which is that he is sleeping among dead bodies. It's the only place he can find comfort. It's the only place he can find shelter is in tombs.

Can you imagine? How hard up would you have to be to go sleep next to the cadavers in the rocky, stony tombs of desolation? It's madness. On his trip on that way, where he ends in death, he goes into delusion and self-harm.

The shackles of Satan bring delusion, mutilation. And we look to ourselves and we go, hey, there's not really a battle with demons. People who mutilate themselves, they have mental illness. And I just say, where do you think that came from?

Do we have satanic oppression in the United States right now? Have you heard anything about the delusional desire for people to mutilate themselves? Yeah, I think we do. We have it in the transgender movement, where we have a whole culture of saying it's good to mutilate ourselves.

That is satanic. That is demonic oppression. That is the principalities and powers. When you know, if you've been around young people long enough, you will know that when the drug use starts to coming in, you get depression and you start to get self-harm.

Cutting, slicing wrists, trying to bring pain on in a way that's not from the psyche but is from the physical. Trying to feel something, because the drugs make us so numb. That is satanic oppression. It's debasing.

And the person feels like there is no way to get out. Cutting yourself, screaming obscenities. We would look at that person and we go, man, that must be a crazy person, living on the corner of the street in a big city, panhandling money and yelling obscenities at people.

And we go, whoa, that is so uncivilized. And yet, that same thing, that's just a run of the mill day at Planned Parenthood. That's what they do every day, all day. Screaming obscenities and harming, mutilating.

That is the debasement. We see the devolving of the image of God into that of an animal. This man living like a jackal. Covered in blood all the time. You know he was. This man had to look like a hewn up piece of meat.

Cutting himself, screaming, slobbering on himself naked. What a terrifying sight. And we're gonna see the difference between the image of man and that of an animal in this story. Because these demons have almost, almost erased God's image from this man.

And that's what they wanna do. That's what Satan desires to do. God says, I've made male and female. Satan says, I want to erase that distinction. God says, I have saved a people. Satan says, I want to cause division within that people.

God says, I take no delight in the destruction of the wicked. Satan says, I take maximum delight in the destruction of the wicked. Let me get as many as I can to destroy. That's his enemy. Because what Satan does fundamentally in the shackles of Satan is they reverse the love of neighbor into a destruction of neighbor.

Look at this man's relationship with his people. His people have thrown him out. They're terrified of him because he's been doing violence to them. If we get into the cycle of sin, people will mean nothing to us.

The only thing that means anything to us is to continue the delusion and the shackles that Satan has put on. Because this pushes insanity, isolation from society. We are made to image God who is the triune Godhead.

God in perfect community from the beginning of time. We are made in his image. That's why we desire social interaction. That's why we desire to be together. That's why the means of God's conquestorial kingdom is the gathering of his saints in the church.

And Satan sees that, and all the schemes of Satan push into isolation. They push into dividing into smaller and smaller groups. Because when you're isolated, you're weak. Jesus said if you strike down the shepherd, the sheep will scatter.

And the scattered sheep are now susceptible to ravenous wolves. So this man is extremely susceptible to all of these delusions and panics because he's been thrown out of society. And notice this. Matthew gives the insight that the shackles of Satan, often it burns our conscience.

Even when our conscience gets seared, the person knows that it's wrong. They're not proud. I was talking to Cooper, I believe, on Friday night. We're talking about even the far-gone atheist. They're very hesitant to say blasphemous things about Jesus specifically.

They'll say things they don't believe in him, but they will not often say that Jesus is just a lying huckster. They are very far gone when they say things like that because God has made us. And because the rocks and all of creation cry out that Jesus is the son of God.

And so it is a truth that's burned into the psyche of humanity. And when we, in our delusion, suppress the truth, we are at odds with nature and the way that God has created things. And so because of that, when we are enshackled and we are enslaved to Satan, what we will try to do is we will try to find drug buddies so we can all get together and do fentanyl together.

Don't ask me why.

You're a zombie.

You don't really know that someone's there, but you'll do it anyway. And we know this to be true, that people find small groups of people to encourage them in their delusional sin. This is the anatomy of how oppression works.

This is the anatomy about how Satan operates because we feel better in our delusion when more people share our delusion. Ultimately, Luke 8, 27 tells us this man is naked and he is totally stripped of dignity.

He is covering nothing. There is no hope, no future, shame, fear, beastly, gripped in hate and hopelessness. That is the situation of the demoniac. Now, depressing stuff. Did you know that every step towards that begins with a suppression of truth and thinking just like Adam and Eve did in the garden, that God is withholding something from us and that we can take it because we know just a little bit better than God.

That is always the lie that starts us down this path of demonic oppression. It is a dangerous thing to sin. Church, do we remember that? We tell white lies. We let our eyes linger a little bit too long on that Facebook short and the algorithm sees and it feeds us more.

We will gossip just a little bit, just a little bit, make it sound like a prayer request. And never do we realize, A, that that sin nailed Christ to the cross and that he bled and died to forgive you for the heinousness of that act of rebellion against God.

But I think also in our blindness and delusion, we think that we are great and we think that we can take our sin and that we can keep it in a little box and we can keep it under control. But it's like keeping a honey badger in that box and he's gonna bust out and he's gonna go crazy and rampage through the house and destroy everything in there.

I'm sure at one point this man thought that he had everything under control until Legion completely comes in and dominates him. And that's where we find him. And Christians, if we want to make way, look, we're all sinners.

In this side of glory, there's not gonna be a perfect purging of sin out of our midst, but God has given us tools in Matthew 18. God has given us tools in this body to where we're not on this path alone, to where we can rebuke and exhort and encourage.

And we should live our lives with a couple of people who know intimately what's going on in our life and what's going on in our house. And when we have that, we have a safety net of people who can identify the sin that we are so blind to and we can treat it and pray and cry out to God about it in repentance at its early stages before it's got us tearing ourselves apart.

Sin is extremely dangerous. And notice that the Lord of glory knows all about this man. And he goes across the sea for this man, for this man. And this is one of the wildest stories of the New Testament because it is totally turning everything that we know about how to start a movement completely on its head.

Because Jesus' first envoy into the Gentile nations is to save a man who looks like an animal and who acts like an animal. So that's bad news, right? Sin is dangerous. You will fall into it. It will give birth to sin and it will mature into death.

And that is the path that we all walk. And yet, and yet, there's this thing. We see it in verse eight, there's a turn. Even the demons believe and they shudder. Verse eight, he had been saying to him, this is Jesus, had been saying, come out of the man, you unclean spirit.

Jesus was getting off the boat, walking onto the shore and praying for this man and talking to these unclean spirits as soon as he steps foot on the shore. And these demons are in a very dangerous place now because the Lord has turned his sights on Legion and he's going to make war.

And this is going to be a very anticlimactic war for the demons. They don't have much to say. You're gonna see that they sound like the bleeding of sheep or the screaming of pigs in this story. All they do, the whole posture of big scary Legion is to beg things of Jesus Christ.

That's all they do. There's no demands, there's no threats. There's just on your knees begging. But it's not the kind of worshipful on your knees. He had been saying, come out, come out. For the demons, you have to understand that this is not an ethereal thing.

That's what we so often think of this realm as, is we think, hey, there's this spiritual battle going on. That doesn't really make sense. Maybe I read This Present Darkness and got scared a little bit a few years ago in the 90s.

Yeah, a few years ago, like a long time ago in the 90s. Okay, and that was going on. And now I don't know, like I'm just living my life. I'm in the mundane. Look, guys, there is demonic stuff going on and it's not ethereal, it is real.

But also, Jesus is not an abstract spiritual proclamation. The kingdom of Jesus is real and it's tangible and it has complete power over unclean spirits and over demons because these demons know, unlike many in the church today, these demons know that Jesus presents a real threat to their dominion.

His presence is a threat because make no mistake, this is an invasion into Gentile territory. What do you call someone who comes into the country and tries to change the religion of the country? Saudi Arabia would have no trouble identifying what that is.

Those are enemy combatants, okay? Jesus is coming with this religion of the God of Moses and he is bringing it into the Gentile shores and he is invading because his kingdom is going to grow beyond where it was, where Israel was the wild branch, where Israel was the one that had wild grapes.

It never blossomed into the vineyard because it was always waiting for the fulfillment of Christ who was gonna come and be the true vine, the true Israel, and this was going to have the biggest grapes you ever saw in your life because his vine was going to stretch to all the nations.

The blessing of Abraham fulfilled in Jesus Christ. The blessing of Abraham would be every nation. His descendants would be like the sands of the seashore. That wasn't gonna happen in the extremely small, confined area of Israel.

It was always going to go out further than that. And so Jesus steps foot on enemy territory and he makes war, he makes war immediately. And this demon knows it. He's quick to acknowledge the identity of Jesus and what his reaction is is to beg clemency.

Jesus' Authority Over Demons and the Limits of Their Power

Here's what he says. After seeing Jesus from, oh, I should make this note. This will help with this passage. The pronouns in this passage are wild, okay? You got masculine, you got neuter, you got plural, you got singular.

Here's the deal. Is the man talking or is legion talking? It's indecipherable and it doesn't matter. Every time that this man or legion is talking, it's the same voice, okay? The man is so far gone and so under the possession of legion that for them to talk is the same thing.

And so here's what he says. After seeing Jesus from a distance, he ran up and bowed down before him. And crying out with a loud voice, he said, what do I have to do with you, Jesus, son of the most high God?

I implore you by God, do not torment me. Parallel passage. Matthew 8, 29 says, behold, they cried out saying, what do we have to do with you, son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?

Before the time. Luke 8, 31. They were imploring him not to command them to go away into the abyss. This is a very interesting thing. And it highlights the insanity of Satan, right? The insanity of Satan.

Satan rebelled against the most high God and he was cast down out of heaven. And what Satan knows is that his time is coming. His time is coming. And as an insane person, Satan's response is not to repent and to bow the knee because he is prevented from doing so by the Lord's will and his perfect will, but Satan instead wants to break as much as he possibly can before his time.

And so what the demons do here is the demons beg Jesus not to torment them because their time has not come. And this is an eternal torment to be thrown into the abyss where they will make their domain forever.

That's what hell was created for. The lake of fire was created for the fallen angels and for Satan. And man joins them because of our rebellion, our satanic rebellion against God. Hell was not made for man, hell was made for the fallen angels.

But because of man's belief in the lies of the fallen angels and because of the oppression and the dominion of the prince of the power of the air over those sons of disobedience who are ordained to be vessels of destruction, they will make their abode in the lake of fire forever.

And that gives God no pleasure whatsoever, but it does show his perfect righteous justice and it shows his compassion to save some who were rebels. It's not our time. It's not our time. Who are you, Jesus, most high God?

Understand here, this is important for us in the church, critically important, that acknowledging who Jesus is will not save you. It will not save you. It is a dependence on the kindness and mercy of Jesus that is the substance of faith.

And we know that faith is a gift of God out of his grace. Ephesians 2, eight and nine. Because if we could conjure up faith, then we could brag about it. If we could come up with our own faith and say, yeah, I do believe in you, God.

I'm glad that I figured this out. Then we can boast because we have become the spiritually enlightened ones. But we are not Gnostics. We do not believe in spiritual enlightenment and spiritual umpires.

We believe that out of God's grace, which is his unmerited favor and his kindness towards some, that he has given us faith. And that faith is belief. That faith is a fealty in Jesus Christ. That faith is a belief and a dependence on his kindness and his mercy and his salvation.

These demons know nothing of Christ's salvation. They do know who he is, but they don't want any part of it. They don't want any part of it. They want his mercy without allegiance. They're trying to break everything he's building and they want clemency.

They want to be left alone to do evil. Boy, there's a sermon in that, isn't there? Christians, have we left people alone to do evil just so we can be left alone ourselves? You know that the enemy cares nothing about us making our proclamations and about us hugging each other's neck and being happy in the little place.

He cares tremendously about what happens at the end of this story. Because every time Jesus releases the captives and every time people start acting like they have true faith, there is economic loss to the pagans and the world gets turned upside down every time.

I've heard it said, and I think it's true, do you realize that we would have economic calamity if abortion was completely abolished tomorrow? We have built our country on the backs of women aborting their babies.

And there would be tremendous consequences economically if that practice was stopped tomorrow Tremendous consequences. Christian, are you ready for that? I think we have to be ready because what Jesus doesn't do is leave people alone.

He confronts them and he confronts the evil. And these demons just wanna be left alone, live and let live. What do you care about Decapolis, Jesus? And Jesus says, Decapolis is mine. It's mine and you're not going to stay there.

Because understanding this, the timing appeal is not gonna work. Why is it not gonna work? Because Jesus' time has come. Remember back to chapter one, the kingdom of God is at hand. The kingdom of God is at hand.

The demons have had this land under their thumb for too long, for centuries. And now the king has come and they wanna stay in this region. Because this region, it's not that it's special, it's that they've been setting up camp here and doing a lot of good for the kingdom of darkness.

They'd held the people blind and afraid in this area. So why do they wanna go into the pigs? There's a lot of weird stuff in commentaries. There's a lot of weird ideas, right? Why do the demons wanna go in the pigs?

Is it because they can't exist out in the air? No, the reason they wanna go into the pigs is because they firmly want to keep rooted in this principality. It's this area they wanna be. They look at the pigs as being a half step for them to be able to keep their foothold in the area.

If we can stay in these pigs, Jesus is gonna leave eventually and we can go get somebody else. That's the plan, that's the plan. So the unclean spirits, poetically, are going to come out of an unclean man into unclean animals.

That is the irony of the passage. These demons, though, if we got real scared of them, and we should be somewhat afraid, right? The devil is a lion prowling. We're told in Jude that we should not even blaspheme the demons, right?

That we should say, God, rebuke you. We do not have power over them. Jesus has power over them. But these angelic beings do have finite knowledge, finite. They are not omniscient. They don't know everything that's gonna happen.

Because these demons, when they ask to go into the pigs, they think that they will be safe in the pigs. They don't understand that the results of going in the pigs are the same as the results of banishment.

Why do they not understand this? Because they don't understand the purpose of God. And they don't care about the purpose of God. That is the debased mind. We don't care about the purpose of God. It doesn't mean anything to us.

And so these beings are finite. And so what happens is, when they go into the pigs, the pigs have no image of God in them, do they? Pigs are animals. If you've been around pigs, they're one of the smartest animals that there are.

They're very smart. One might say they're sometimes devilishly smart. They can remember. They are frustrating. They know things. They can be trained quickly, and they go back to feral in 30 days. They're one of the only animals in the field that does not have fright of man.

They don't run away, they attack. They are aggressive. But these pigs, they don't have the image of God. And so these demons, who have so controlled this man to the point of death, to where he's mutilating himself, to where he's living in these tombs, when they go in the pigs, they're going like full throttle.

There's no subtlety, and they go into the pigs, and the full death spiral that they've already worked in their practice in this man instantly goes into the pigs. And so the pigs have no resistance at all, and they run straight off the cliff and die.

Why?

Because the purpose is for banishment. Some might say that Jesus fools his enemies here. Would you say that? I think so. They think that they're being given clemency, and Jesus knows that he is banishing them, that they are going back to the air, out of this region, because what's gonna happen in this region is the war of the gospel, the war of the gospel, of critical importance, and this is for us to understand.

The Demoniac's Deliverance and the Mission to Decapolis

When it comes to sin, I know you don't live this way, and I know sometimes we forget it. And I have these counseling calls, and I understand, and I talk to men and women all the time. Here's what you have to understand.

Demons have zero, zero resistance to the commands of God, zero. They must obey immediately. They have no power over Jesus Christ, and neither does your sin over you, Christian. Do you need to hear it again?

Your sin has zero power over you, Christian. What you have are all the tools of righteousness. Why do we fear? Why do we fear? Will Jesus start a good work in us and then leave it incomplete? I think he's promised something different than that, that he will complete every work that he started in us until the day of glory, that we are in the hand of our creator, and that nothing and no one can take us out of his hand.