Matthew 12:43-45 Letting the Guest Clean the House

To the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak takes us through his series on the book of Matthew called Not Your Average Savior. Let's listen in.

The Church’s Need for Community and God’s Word

Well, good morning, Recast Church. Welcome, I'm glad that you're here. I'm Don Filsak, I'm the lead pastor, and I am so grateful for the Thanksgiving service that we were able to have last week. I hope that it was a blessing to those of you that were able to attend, and I'm just really always encouraging to see how God is working in people's lives and the things that he's doing amongst us and in us as individuals, and so just very thankful for the opportunity that we had to share that gratitude together.

I'm speaking for all of us when I say this statement, and I'm not trying to be presumptuous, but we all need community. I recognize that you might not be a person who necessarily craves that. You might be a person who kinda likes to go it alone a bit and appreciates isolation to some degree.

You might recharge your batteries by being alone, but the reality of it is all of us need community together. We need to be in relationships with others, regardless of whatever you might feel about that this morning.

You need others in your life to sharpen your walk with Jesus Christ, and being involved in a church is the primary way that God has given to us for us to develop into the people that he desires for us to be, and so the church is a fundamental thing.

It's not a kinda optional thing in the sense of, yeah, well, take it or leave it. I can just grow on my own spiritually. You really can't. You cannot become the person that God wants you to be without being connected to others in the church, and we come together each week to hear from God's word.

That's one of the primary functions of the church is gathering together in community to hear and sit under the teaching of God's word, and not to sit under my teaching, not because I've got it all figured out, but ultimately, only in as much as I can connect us to God's word is what we do here valuable.

Jesus’ Warning About a Cleaned-Out Heart

This morning, we're gonna encounter an illustration that Jesus gave to those who opposed him, and to be quite honest, it isn't a very pleasant Christmas season type of message. A text about demon possession may seem a little bit more appropriate for October and Halloween than a message for the first week of December, but remember that my goal in bringing us back to the book of Matthew has been to get our focus and our eyes back on Jesus and make sure that our eyes are taking in Jesus more than just the nativity, more than just the little guy with cute rosy cheeks in the manger, but the guy who grew up to become the savior of the world, the one who went to the cross for us, the one who adamantly and consistently said, you need me to be okay with God.

He said some radical things,.

And so I wanna make sure that our eyes are on Jesus as he is and not on some Jesus that we've conjured up for a season. Now, granted, there is some benefit, there's some blessing in understanding that Jesus came in humility in that nativity scene, right?

The whole humility of coming in a manger and being born in that way, there's something that's powerful there, but there equally is something to the things that he said to us that are meant to challenge us and challenge our way of thinking and challenge our culture.

See, Jesus came with a consistent message that we need a savior, and he is that savior. He wasn't born in Bethlehem so that we'd have something to do in the middle of our wintertime, right? Like, I mean, the months get cold and get dark and there's not as much sunlight, so, you know, hey, it's really great to have Christmas right there in the middle of it so that we've got something to put our attention to and our minds to and decorations and all of that fun stuff, so there was a lot more to it than that.

But he came to be the savior of the world. As he grew and the world began to reject him, Jesus Christ doubled down on his message that we do not merely need reform. We don't merely need to think better thoughts about ourselves.

We don't even merely need education. It's not an issue primarily of education or reform, but what we need is a radical internal heart change that cannot be brought about by any amount of cleaning house.

It can't be brought about by our brooms sweeping up our lives and taking care of the insides of our hearts and just making sure that we follow a list of rules and do a bunch of things just the way that God tells us to.

This morning, we will read that we have an option facing all of us. We can either clean out our hearts and then leave it open for any guests that might happen to show up, clean it up and say anybody who wants to come in can come in, or we can invite Jesus into the home of our hearts and let our guest clean up our hearts.

That's the option that faces us. But no amount of cleaning before Jesus comes in is gonna amount to anything, and that's what we're gonna see in our text this morning. So I want you to turn there if you're not already there.

Matthew 12, verses 43 through 45.

It's a short text this morning. But if you don't have a Bible on your lap or a means to navigate to a Bible, then Craig is back here and he's got a stack of them. Just raise your hand so that he can see that you need a Bible and he will bring you one.

But we want everybody to have a copy of God's word on your lap so that you can follow along. And that's for the rest of the message, but also if you don't have a Bible at home, please take that home with you.

We want everybody to have a copy of God's word at your place so you can read it and check it out for yourself. Matthew 12, verses 43 through 45. Recast this as God's word to us. This is what he desires for us to say.

A kind of crazy passage, a little bit strange and a little bit out there, and yet the very words of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Matthew 12, starting in 43.

When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest but finds none. Then it says, I will return to my house from which I came, and when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order.

Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation.

Let's pray as the band comes to lead us in worship this morning. Father, we come to a text that could be confusing to us, maybe even create some fear and some misunderstanding and some misgivings in our own hearts.

Father, I pray that you would open our eyes to see what you desire to communicate to each one of us this morning, to know whether or not we are under the protection of Jesus Christ or whether or not we are just open to whatever, whether or not we are a person who's trying to clean up our own lives and our own strength and in our own behavior or whether we are welcoming the spirit in us to change us from the inside out.

Father, I pray that you would be with this time of worship as we have an opportunity to reflect on the truth that you have loved us through the cross of Jesus Christ. And I pray that that would be the center point of our worship this morning, his sacrifice and resurrection, his victory over sin and his victory over death on our behalf.

Father, I pray that you would accept our singing as much more than just an exercise of our vocal cords, but it would be an exercise of our very hearts and souls given over to you. In Jesus' name I pray, amen.

Yeah, you can go ahead and be seated.

And I just wanna start off by saying thanks to Dave for leading us in worship. I appreciate the effort and time that he puts into just not only leading us on Sunday morning, but he puts a lot of time into selecting the songs as well and the whole team for playing and practicing and all that stuff, so grateful for that.

I'd encourage you to get comfortable and take advantage of coffee, juice or donuts while they are if there are any left. And remember that at any time, if you need to get up and stretch out in the back or do whatever it takes to kind of keep yourself comfortable and focused on God's word, obviously that seat could become a distraction that would keep you from hearing what God wants you or could keep you from hearing what God wants you to hear.

And so if that's the case, go ahead and get up and stretch out or do what you need to do. But also I would encourage you to keep your Bibles open to Matthew chapter 12, verses 43 through 45. Again, our text and our outline for the morning, a very short and bizarre passage for December and yet one that Dave kind of alluded to it, but it's been kind of a weird week for me.

I am, and I'm not trying to be overly dramatic, but in the process of preparing for a message on what Jesus Christ has to say about the demonic realm, it's been a really bizarre week. There's been some strange stuff and I don't take that, I don't take that lightly.

And I actually believe that there's some forces that would desire for this message to not go out. So that's the very nature of this message is one that we all need to hear, one that I believe that the evil one would desire for us to ignore him completely and just let him go about his merry way, doing the things in his life, in our lives that he wants to accomplish.

And so take that on Matthew 12, 43 through 45. I would suggest to you that when we talk about evil spirits, I probably grabbed your attention just in the reading of that and I think that when we talk about that kind of thing, our ears are a little tuned to it.

Just the phrase is unclean spirits, evil spirits or demons evokes within all of us, I think some semblance of serious response. Now, if it doesn't, there's another issue with that altogether. And yet I think that there's a curiosity that probably grabs us when we start hearing someone talk about demons.

Now, the fact of the matter is some of you, you have a visceral response when I mentioned demons, but it may be along these lines, maybe you feel incredulous. Like the feeling and the thought in the back of your mind might be Don, hold on a second, it's 2016 about to turn over to 2017.

You don't really believe in evil invisible spirits that possess or influence people, right? I mean, come on. I mean, we've got science now, we've got all kinds of, we've got psychology to explain the way that people behave, we've got behavioralism that will describe the way that people behave and it's all pretty clear that it's by environmental causes and all of that kind of stuff.

Now, others of you may have a story here in the room of a friend who heard from a friend about somebody who was possessed or a haunted house or something like that. So you're kind of like, well, no, it's real because I heard from a friend who saw a show or something and some of you have been a little bit too caught up in maybe the horror film genre or even the reality TV shows that are prevalent on cable now about ghost hunters and that kind of stuff and these electronic devices that can hear into the spiritual realm, whatever.

And so maybe from that, you're getting your information, you're getting some knowledge from that. But the reality of it is I would guess that some of us in the room, maybe even most of us in the room, when we talk about the demonic realm, when we talk about evil forces, there's a little bit of fear there.

There's a little bit of fear there. Now, that can be a healthy fear or that can be an unhealthy fear. But I would guess that there's something that's unhealthy or that there's something that is fearful there when we talk about this.

But before we dive too far into that aspect of the illustration that Jesus gives about the demonic in these three short verses, it would help a lot for me to remind us of the context because the context really helps to drive what the point of this passage is.

Many people have read this passage and thought, oh, it's just about demons and then left it at that level. But there's more going on here. Jesus is speaking to a group of people who are confronting him.

This is not an isolated conversation, an isolated teaching, but the teaching is set in a context that matters that we wouldn't get down to the meaning of this passage were it not for us going and looking at the broader context.

So the entire scenario, you really have to go back to verse 22 in Matthew 12 in order to really gain the point of what Jesus is saying here several verses later. Back in verse 22, a demon-possessed man was brought to Jesus for exorcism and healing.

Now, the text tells us that the man was blind and mute, and there seems to be some indication from the text that his infirmity, this man's infirmity, was actually caused by spiritual causes, that there was something about the casting out of the demon that led to his healing.

Now, Jesus healed that man, he cast the demon out, the man was able to see and speak, and that was not lost on the crowds. This is a guy who couldn't speak, was blind, and then Jesus cast a demon out of him, and now he's able to speak and he can see.

And the crowds went, whoa, wait a minute, what power is this? And they immediately went to question the identity of the one able to do these amazing things. Now, somebody who, maybe some of you in the room know somebody who's blind.

How many of you, if somebody walks up to a person blind and gives them back their sight, that person who's able to do that gets your attention? Does that person get your attention? And you begin to kind of question the identity of one who's able to do that, and that's exactly what happens to the crowds in this context.

And they immediately jump to what they understand to be the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy that people would be healed by the Messiah, the Son of David, and they begin to question out loud, is he the one?

Is he the Son of David? Is he the Messiah that was promised in the Old Testament? Well, the religious leaders didn't like that. As religious leaders often, and I'm one of them, so you gotta, I don't wanna be like that kind, but there's a lot of power that can be associated with spiritual influence over people, and they recognize that if they were to acknowledge that Jesus is the Messiah, then his power is on the rise, and theirs will, by nature, decline.

And so they wanted to hold on to the religious power, so they immediately accused, vocally, verbally accused Jesus of casting demons out in the power of Satan. They say, well, he's casting out demons.

Of course he has authority over demons, because he is driven by them, and he is one of them, so to speak. So Jesus took it then to those self-righteous Pharisees that we saw a few weeks ago in my message, where he accused them of having evil hearts that could be demonstrated by the overflow of their mouth.

He said, it's very clear that your hearts are evil, because you're in utter and complete rejection of the one that God has sent. Well, in light of that accusation, then the next week we looked at how they asked him for proof that he was indeed the Messiah.

They said, if you're willing to accept this adulation from the crowd, if you're willing to accept them calling you the son of David and calling you the Messiah, then prove it.

Well, he's just done a miracle.

He's just done an astounding miracle. And they said, but just give us one sign. Give us one more sign, and we'll believe. And he didn't completely reject that notion, despite saying it's kind of evil, their intention, that they want another sign when he's already done these things.

But he says, I will give you another sign. The proof will not be some parlor trick. It will not be some just chintzy thing that you can kind of second guess. But instead, the proof will be that I will go three nights into the grave and rise again in the same way that Jonah was in the belly of the fish and came back out alive.

Says, I will be buried. I will die, I will be buried, and three days later, I will come back to life. And that was the last text before we get to verse 43. And now in verse 43, this text is a continuation of Jesus chastising these hyper-religious leaders.

And it's very important that we understand who Jesus is speaking to about this whole demonic illustration. Who is he talking to about this? He's not speaking to homeless meth users or even outwardly evil meth producers.

He is not speaking to gang members. He is not speaking to murderers. He is not speaking to people who steal candy from babies. He is speaking to the who's who of religious leaders of his era. Now I don't think I can overstate to you how clean and righteous these people looked to their generation.

Like you pick the most spiritually minded, like I think in our generation, you might say Mother Teresa, for example. Imagine that Jesus shows up to Mother Teresa and accuses her of being evil and having an evil heart.

Like that's the kind of thing that everybody would have been scandalized by. They would have been shocked.

Are you serious?

If those guys are evil, what about us, right? Because I mean they are the cream of the crop. These guys were the best that religion, religion, religion, laws, rules, these are the best that religion can ever produce.

They kept laws and rules. Jesus at one point actually illustrates it by saying, or gives us an example of the level of their religion as an accusation, but it's an ironic accusation because he says, you even tithe on your spices, he says to the Pharisees.

So picture a scenario where they go shopping to buy cinnamon, okay? So they head over to Meyers, they need some cinnamon for their Sunday morning cinnamon roll tradition. So they go and they buy some cinnamon and then they measure it out on the scale and weigh one tenth of it and bring that to the offering to the temple.

That's the degree of religious behavior of these guys that he is accusing here in the text. So it's fundamental and extremely important that we understand who he is giving this illustration to. They are the cream of the crop.

These guys looked righteous,.

They looked religious,.

And they looked really, really clean. And the way he starts in verse 43 probably grabs everyone's attention but indicates very little of where he's going. So I think in the context that he's speaking it, the people probably were like, I don't really quite know where he's going but he has our attention.

Since he's just cast a demon out of a man, the Pharisees may think he stopped his criticism of them. And now he's just gonna go on to explain the process of exorcism and they're gonna kinda learn something.

So maybe they put their learner cap back on.

And they were like, okay,.

Maybe we can catch him in something that he's gonna say wrong here or whatever. They probably had that attitude. But at the same time, they're like, okay, maybe we're off the hook. And he does indeed begin by addressing what happens to an evil spirit when it's cast out of a person.

He says that when a spirit is cast out of a person, it wanders around seeking rest. But if it finds no rest, which rest seems to imply the inhabitation of a person. It seems like that's the resting point of demons is that they want to be embodied.

But in the case that they can't find someone to embody, it seeks then to return to the person where it used to reside, says Jesus. Now there's a couple of observations that are important as we remember that Jesus is illustrating here.

He is using, that's the first thing. Jesus is using exorcism as an illustration. We know that by his final statement. Look down at verse 45 for a second. He concludes with this. So will it be with this evil generation.

So will it be with this evil generation. He's identifying something about the people that are addressing him and the culture around him by using an illustration of demon possession. So there's something else that's going on here.

But secondly, we also need to be mindful that Jesus believes in evil spirits and their power and influence. That means that we need to look at this text from two different perspectives. We've got a little bit of a challenge in front of us and I'm gonna kind of help us walk through and that is that there is indeed the illustration that we have to deal with, but then there's also the meaning behind it.

Context requires that we need to figure out what Jesus is saying to the Pharisees as the highest priority in this text. That's the context. That's why it exists in our text. That's why this illustration about demon possession is there is because Jesus wants to say something to us about religious hearts.

To understand his message to the Pharisees, we need to delve into the illustration and understanding about what he is saying about the demonic realm. If we only think this passage is about demon possession, then we're gonna miss the true force, however, behind Jesus's words.

So we need both of these aspects. We need to understand the illustration in order to get the point. And with that hopefully clear to you, Jesus says some things that should open our eyes to the spiritual realm.

Six Observations About Demons From Matthew 12

Here are six observations about demons from this short passage. So here are six observations that we see from the way that Jesus offers us this illustration. First, Jesus takes for granted that the demonic realm is real.

There really are demons. Jesus believes that there really are demons. There truly are fallen angels. Jesus in our text has just encountered one who has been troubling a man by disrupting his life with infirmity.

And Jesus cast the demon out, healing the man. The way he rolled and the way he worked on this planet while Jesus was in flesh, he was here, and he worked on casting demons out. And they interacted with him and they spoke with him through people and there was that ongoing thing.

Jesus believes in demons. Second, demons can own a person. You see that in the text. You saw it earlier, you would've seen it earlier in the text when the man was possessed and then you actually see it in other contexts as well.

But in verse 43, it's clear that the demon in this illustration dwelt within a person and had to be kicked out, had to be removed. Further, it's implied that the preferred place of a demon is in residence with a person.

And even further in verse 44, this demon in Jesus' illustration calls the person from which he was cast a really scary term. He calls him my house. My house, the place that I live.

My house.

He identifies some level of ownership over the person in our text. This is where we get the phrase demon possession,.

By the way.

The word demon possession does not occur in the text of the Bible. It comes from this notion of this demon here in this text calling this person my house. It's a possessive pronoun, mine. Even in Scripture, it doesn't seem to be a common occurrence.

So you're kind of going, well, should we be watching for this everywhere we go? No, it does not seem to be in the scope, in the broad history of Scripture. Remember that we see centered around the life of Jesus quite a high level of demonic activity, but I believe that that is in part because the Messiah was here in flesh, and Satan was indeed churning the engine of his opposition all the more because he knew who the Messiah was, and he was in opposition to him.

So I think there was a high level of demonic activity surrounding the life of Jesus, but that doesn't mean that demonic activity isn't going on around us on a regular basis. I think they're not as prominent and not as willing to play their deck and show us their hand as often in this time and era.

But the first thing was that Jesus says that demons are real. Second, demons can own a person. Third, demons have a will. They are sentient beings with a will and desires. Verse 44 actually even records for us in an eerie way a self-conversation that a demon has with himself.

It records the decision-making process. Well, I couldn't find another house, and so I'm gonna go back to mine, says the demon. He wanders around in the desert for a while, doesn't find a suitable home, and returns to the place from which he was cast out.

He's shown to be a being with a will and a desire and a plan and able to plan. Now, the fourth thing that I wanna state, it might seem obvious, but when you really think about it, the concept becomes a bit confusing because we haven't really thought through it very well, most of us, and that is that demons have a negative effect on people who they are influencing.

So demons have a negative effect on people that they are influencing. Now, that seems to be a given, but what we have not thought through very well is the way that demons can influence us, the ways that demons can influence people.

They appear in Scripture to be able to control speech, to control muscles, to control thoughts, a high level of capability of control that might be pretty, again, scary and is the stuff of horror films and things like that.

You kinda look at that and go, oh yeah, I've seen some of that. I remember coming across a movie when I was a little kid and I wish I hadn't, but there's those things that are out there that we ought not to, as Christians, be playing around with, because if you believe that Jesus is true and you believe that the Scripture is true, then you believe that the demonic realm is real, and if you believe that it's real, then you shouldn't be playing around with it, right?

Anybody with me on that? If there's anything that has to do with demonic things, man, I mean, movies, Ouija boards, anything that might even just scratch the surface of that kind of stuff, man, we just have no business playing around with and running with.

But that's a side note that wasn't in my notes.

So that's a freebie.

But it's really intriguing to me to just think in terms of how do they influence? I would suggest to you that they are indeed able to control a human at the level of possession like we talk about in the Bible where a little boy is cast into the fire multiple times and he can't even control his body and Jesus cast the demon out of him and he's normal standing there.

And so there's this kind of stuff that happens. And the most common word for demon activity is not demon possession. As I mentioned earlier, it's not even, that phrase does not occur in Greek. The Greek word is demonized.

That's the word that occurs for the man who is mute and blind earlier in the text that Jesus cast a demon out of him, but he's called demonized or as many translations will translate it, demon oppressed.

The ESV likes to use that because demon possessed is a little bit more driving and something that we like to avoid in our terminology. We like to think, oh wait, I can't be demon possessed, right? Because I've got the spirit of God alive in me.

And so, but is that any better than being demon oppressed? Or, you know, so thinking in terms of a demon having influence, some level of influence in a person's life. The Greek phrase seems to cover a whole spectrum of levels of influence in the demonic realm over a person.

Jesus implies, think of it in these terms, Jesus implies that Peter was under the influence of Satan, just as he merely suggested, no, Jesus said, I'm going to the cross, I'm gonna die. I'm heading back to Jerusalem and they're gonna kill me.

And Peter says, no, I won't let that happen. There's no way. I mean, you die? Are you serious? No, we already know that you're the Christ. You're not gonna die. And what does Jesus say to him? Get thee behind me, Satan.

Some influence of Satan in the notion to Peter that, oh, Jesus, you got another path. You can go another way. You don't have to go that way. So the thoughts, the suggestions, the theological inaccuracies that Peter held to are attributed to some level to Satan.

Satan, we know, entered Judas when he betrayed Jesus. There was an indwelling of sorts and an empowering by the evil one when he went and traded those 30 pieces of silver for the Messiah, for his friend, Jesus.

We also see Satan taking on and indwelling an animal in the form of a serpent or a snake and tempting Eve in the garden. Able to influence, able to speak into, able to control to varying levels and degrees.

And I can't quite parse that out. And explain it all in depth and in detail. But I can tell you that there's a variety of different activities and behaviors in the demonic realm to influence people. And it always results in a negative thing.

The fifth thing, according to verse 45, demons vary in level of evil. Now that might be new to some of you, but it's right here in the text and it's quite clear. They are all malignant. They all have evil in their drive.

They are all in opposition to the glory of God. And all would seek to mar and damage the image of God, which is us. They all loathe and hate and despise the things of God and seek to sow distrust and untruth and all kinds of brokenness.

They are all evil. But this demon, in our text and in Jesus' illustration, is able to go out and find seven spirits. What does the text say? More evil than himself. More evil than itself. He's able to go out and find seven who are worse than him so that he can retake his house.

And that leads to the last observation about the demonic realm, the sixth one. We learn that demons will work together. This demon in the illustration of Jesus enlists the help of other demons in order to retake its home.

The demonic realm has some kind of organization, some kind of interaction, some kind of interrelationship. And I'm not ready to quite go to the detail of the very popular books, This Present Darkness or Piercing the Darkness.

Did any of you read those? Anybody even know what I'm talking about? Really popular in the late 80s, maybe early 90s. Some of you are going, I wasn't even around then.

The books are still there, guys.

So you, Frank Peretti wrote those two books. Intriguing, interesting. I read them when I was in high school. I thought that they were somewhat beneficial, but also equally not the main source for where you want to obtain your understanding about the way that things go in the unseen realm.

That's not, it's not the Bible. You want to turn to what God's word has to say about the things that are going on in the unseen realm. And that's one of the, this is one of those texts that's hitting on it right here.

But I do believe that this illustration that Jesus uses from the spiritual realm does indicate that there is indeed some semblance of or level of collaboration in the demonic realm. And so all of these components, all six of these components of this illustration conclude that a man who is possessed by a demon has a demon cast out.

And when the demon comes out, he cleans up his life, he gets it in order, he does good and cleans up his act. That's what this guy does. It says he sweeps up his heart, he cleans it all out. He works hard.

He's like, okay, I finally got, I finally got past these demons. I finally got past this issue. And now I'm just going to clean up my life and just really, maybe I'll start tithing on my cinnamon. Maybe I'll start walking little old ladies across the street.

Maybe I'll start volunteering at church. Maybe I'll start giving more to charity. I'll, I know, I'll just go and rake leaves for shut-ins. I'll do just really nice and good things. I'll clean up my heart.

I'll take care of this because the demon is gone now. And a lot of us might have the thought that getting rid of evil in our lives is the battle. Getting rid of evil in your life isn't the battle. Getting righteousness in your life is the battle.

Getting the presence of good, not the absence of evil. Nobody is going to get to heaven on the basis of the absence of evil in your life. You're only going to get to heaven by the presence of the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

That's the only way you're going to get there. And so this cleaning process begins. And I think many of us can relate to the cleaning process of this man. Problem, you see it in the text. Cleans up his house so that more guests can come over.

And that demon returns with seven friends and there's this ominous conclusion in verse 45. The last state of that person is worse than the first. Jesus is, bear with me for a second, but he's literally saying it.

He says it, just not directly, but he's kind of saying better one demon than eight, okay? Better one demon than eight. This guy is bad off now, okay? He had this demon cast out, cleaned up his act, eight now, and he is in a world of hurt.