Power over Demons
Luke 4:31-37
Jesus and his disciples make it to a
Gentile region on the other side of the lake, where a demon-possessed man comes
to meet him.
But this is not any demon-possessed
man: this man has many, many demons. A Roman legion had 6000 soldiers: that may
be an exaggeration, but Luke says that many demons had gone
into him
As a result, this man was powerfully
deranged. He was out of control: naked, living in the tombs, fleeing to
solitary places having broken his chains and overpowered his guard. We're faced
with a different sort of chaos.
This wild-man comes out to meet
Jesus, and it's immediately clear who is in control. The demons had complete
power over the man, but at Jesus' word they are helpless. Three times, we're
told, they beg him: they know where the power resides.
Just as Jesus brought calm to the
storm in the lake, so he now brings calm and order into the life of this man.
We find him afterwards sitting at Jesus' feet, dressed and in
his right mind.
Why did Jesus allow the demons to
destroy the pigs? Well, it is the pigs that show us that this episode was a
genuine encounter with the forces of evil. If it weren't for the pigs we might
be able to say that this was only a miracle of psychology: that Jesus somehow
simply changed the mental state of the man, restoring a deranged man to sanity.
But the destruction of the pigs shows us that the demons were real. Jesus had
confronted the powers of evil and won.
What a scene it must have been as
the maddened herd of pigs raced down the bank into the lake! No wonder the
people were overcome with fear and asked him to leave.
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