My friend Sean Demars is in his late 30s.
He's married to Amber. He has two school age daughters,
Patients and Bella. He's a pastor of a church in
Decatur, AL. Some of you may remember I took
a day trip to Alabama a few months ago.
It was to hang out with Sean, teach a group of pastors he
gathers, record a couple podcast interviews.
Sean has a large and colorful personality.
He has a weightlifter's physique.
He has tattoos. Just from looking at him, you
might be able to guess that he spent time in the army, but you
would not at all be able to guess what his life was like
growing up or the kind of person he was before he became a
Christian. Sean tells the story in a book
called Rebel to Your Will. He grew up with a single mom who
was addicted to drugs for his whole childhood.
For most of his childhood, he was homeless, living in their
car or in hotel rooms. His mom abused him constantly
and viciously. By his teens, he began doing
drugs, then selling drugs. He quickly got into trouble with
the law and he was placed in a juvenile detention facility in
Paint Rock Valley, AL. That's when he was 15.
It's a prison, but on the side of a mountain.
It's far from any town. While he was imprisoned in Paint
Rock Valley, Sean frequently cut his forearms, leaving them
zigzagged with scars. 1 morning, he tried to repeatedly bash his
head against a brick wall. The third time he did it, he did
it so hard that he fell flat to the ground and immediately 2
counselors came over to restrain him.
It was 9:00 AM. It was the third time he'd had
to be restrained that morning. How did Sean get from who he was
then to who he is now? What or who brought about such a
radical change? This morning we continue our
series in Mark's Gospel with chapter 5, verses 1 to 20.
If you don't have a Bible, please raise your hand and
someone will bring one to you. Feel free to put up a hand.
Dawson is already on the way. Just lookout for the man in a
blazer with the Bible. In this passage we meet a man
who lived alone, you might say, in a kind of solitary
confinement. He lived on the side of a
mountain in a kind of de facto imprisonment.
Verse five of our passage tells us that much like my friend Sean
when he was 15 years old, this man was always crying out and
cutting himself with stones. But then something happened to
him. Someone did for him what he
could never do for himself. Please listen as I read the
whole passage. Mark 5, verses 1 to 20.
They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the
garrisons. And when Jesus had stepped out
of the 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 that is Jesus 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 2000, rushed down the steep bank
into the sea and drowned in the sea.
The herdsmen fled and told it in the city and in the country.
And people came to see what it was that it happened.
And they came to Jesus and saw the demon possessed man, the one
who had had the legion, sitting there clothed and in his right
mind. And they were afraid.
And those who had 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.
And 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 marvelled. The Gospel of Mark records
several exorcisms, several times when Jesus drives a demon out of
somebody. But this one is the most
dramatic and detailed, and the passage raises very many
questions. Many of the questions that most
naturally occur to us, I would submit, are questions the
passage simply doesn't answer. To help us not be distracted by
them, I'm going to list several Why do the demons not want to
leave the region? Why do the demons want to enter
the pigs? Why does the herd of pigs rush
into the sea once the demons enter them?
Did the demons do that on purpose or by accident?
When the pigs drowned, what happened to the demons?
And what are we to make of Jesus permitting such vast destruction
of animal life? From another angle, what are we
to make of Jesus permitting such vast destruction of people's
livelihood and wealth? Our passage does not provide any
clear or explicit answer to any of those questions.
But I don't think we need to answer any of those questions to
understand the main point of the passage.
And I do think there's one crucial question that the
passage does answer, at least implicitly.
It's probably a question that occurred to many of yous.
You're studying the passage. Why does Jesus grant the demons
request to enter the herd of pigs?
I don't think the passage tells us explicitly, but I think we
can gather from the whole narrative.
I think the answer is that the demons treatment of the pigs
served to dramatically demonstrate Jesus's power.
Jesus's power was dramatically displayed and expelling the
demons from the man and restoring him to wholeness and
sanity. It was further displayed.
It was confirmed, attested, blown up and put on a billboard
by what the demons did to the pigs.
It made the invisible reality of that deliverance even more
visible. It was visible in the man
himself, but what it made visible was the magnitude of the
powers that were tormenting that man.
Hey, what was wrong with that guy who used to live out by the
tombs? Do you hear about that?
That weird guy Jesus came in. He seemed to be better after the
what? What was with that guy?
It wasn't mental illness, it was 2000 evil spirits tormenting
him. Jesus is granting the demons
request, showed the magnitude of the forces that were tormenting
the man, and thereby showed the magnitude of Jesus's power that
overcame them. It showed everybody around how
powerful Jesus is. You see, this passage is about
what Jesus did to this man and for this man.
But it isn't only about what Jesus did to and for this man.
It's about how the man himself responded and how his neighbors
responded. And it's ultimately about how
you will respond. Jesus won a decisive spiritual
battle against the whole legion of demons that day.
But Jesus confrontation with the legion wasn't the only front in
the battle. Instead, our passage reports a
multi front spiritual battle. Here's the main point of the
passage. Only Jesus can deliver you from
all of Satan's tyranny, including unbelief.
Only Jesus can deliver you from all of Satan's tyranny,
including unbelief. We see that theme unfold in our
passages reports of this multi front spiritual battle.
We'll walk through the passage into five points .1 torment.
We see the demons torment of this man in verses one to five.
Look again with me at those verses.
They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the
garrison's, and when Jesus had stepped out of the 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. First one tells us that Jesus
and the disciples crossed by sea and came to a new territory.
It's on the southeast side of the Sea of Galilee.
The place name Garrisons refers to the whole region. 1 notable
fact about this area is that in Jesus's day it was not inhabited
by Jews, but by non Jews, Gentiles.
That holds for the whole region mentioned in verse 20, the
Decapolis. That just means the 10 cities.
Each of those 10 cities were predominantly populated by
Gentiles. So this is Jesus's first foray
into Gentile territory and as soon as he arrives, this man
comes to meet him. We're told that he has an
unclean spirit, meaning he's possessed by a demon.
We will soon learn that there is more than one demon, but the
point here is that the source of his problems is evil, hostile,
powerful spiritual beings. This is not a mental delusion or
psychological disorder. This man lives under the
dominion of evil spirits. His whole life consists in being
tormented by evil spirits. He comes out of the tombs
because that's where he lived, among bones and the decomposing
remains of human beings. How could he live among tombs?
It's because tombs in that time and place were like big rooms or
chambers cut out of the side of a rock.
It can be big enough to stand up in, so he can make a shelter
that you can sort of camp out in.
This man lived in the tombs because he could not live
anywhere else. He had to live far away from the
living. He could only live among the
dead. His life was a kind of living
death. No human contact, no healing, no
relief, no pleasure, no enjoyment, no prospects for
change, only isolation and suffering and pain.
We learned that people often tried to restrain him with
shackles and chains. Whether they were trying to
restrain him from harming himself or harming others or
both, the text doesn't say. But it does tell us that however
often people tried to restrain him, he would break free with
superhuman strength, and so he suffered.
Verse 5 tells us that continually, night and day,
among the tombs and on the mountains, he cried out and cut
himself with stones. Meeting this man is like meeting
a zombie in a horror movie. He is the living dead, and all
this suffering turns himself destructive.
It seems like his only possible relief is in harming himself.
He's in torment. Neither he nor anyone else can
do anything about it. Now, on the one hand, this man's
suffering is extreme and extraordinary.
That's why the passage narrates it at such length.
You don't meet someone like this every day.
But on the other hand, this man's suffering is not unique.
When my friend Sean was near rock bottom, his life strikingly
resembled this man's story. But the point of Mark's
narrating this man's experiences is not merely to show us this
one man's suffering. It's actually to show us that
this man is more like all of us than any of us would want to
admit. This man is fully captive to the
powers of evil and beyond human help.
That's not only true of him, spiritually speaking, that also
is true or was true of every single one of us.
The spiritual condition we are born into is that of being
captive to powers of evil and beyond human help.
Hear how the Apostle Paul describes all of our condition
in Ephesians 2 verses 1:00 to 3:00.
And you were 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, among whom we all
once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the
desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature
children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
What this man is, we all were, and some of us still are.
Spiritually speaking, the condition we're born into is a
living death. Spiritually speaking, by fallen
nature, each of us is a zombie. We're all the living dead.
My guess is if you're not a believer in Jesus, that
description sounds extreme or bizarre.
We in the modern West like to view ourselves as competent,
powerful, able, self-sufficient. We live by a myth of
self-sufficiency. We live by a myth of all
powerful individual agency. You can accomplish whatever you
set your mind to do, but there are powers that work in this
world that are stronger than you.
There are individual, individual, excuse me, there are
invisible powers at work in this world that are too strong for
you to do anything about. This world is a spiritual
battlefield. It's one thing to be in a battle
after training for it, preparing for it, and entering it with
eyes wide open. It's another thing all together
to be on a battlefield and not know it.
Notice how the effect of Satan's dominion in this man's life is
degrading and dehumanizing. Satan's torment aims to make
this man's life into a less than human one.
One element of that dehumanization is that the man
is driven to seek relief in harming himself, cutting himself
with stones. You bear the image of God, and
so does every human being you will ever made.
Just as you should treat others with respect and dignity because
they bear God's image, so you should treat yourself with
respect and dignity because you bear God's image.
Brothers and sisters, a passage like this, a statement like this
in verse 5, should stir us to compassion.
When someone is in such torment that hurting themselves feels
like their only form of relief, we should compassionately care
for them and do whatever we can to help them, support them,
protect them, and try to help get to the root of their
suffering. If you are ever tempted to harm
yourself as relief from suffering, reach out to other
believers. Reach out to people who know
you, people you can trust. Talk to me or Michael.
We'll be glad to meet with you, pray with you, offer you
whatever help we can, and connect you with counselors who
can help care for you over a longer term.
Satan hates image bearers and works to destroy them.
Jesus loves image bearers and works to restore them.
We begin to see how he does that in .2 confrontation,
confrontation. We see Jesus confront the
spiritual beings tormenting this man in verses 6 to 8.
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 adore you by God, do not torment me.
For he was saying to him, come out of the man, you unclean
spirit. In these verses, Mark begins to
recount the meeting between Jesus and this demon possessed
man in more detail. That the man fell down before
Jesus shows that the demons controlling him recognize
Jesus's superior power and authority.
Now it's difficult to even talk about the man's actions because
he's controlled by the demons. It's the man's mouth moving, but
it's the demons talking. Now the phrase what have you to
do with me is basically a plea to be left alone.
And the demons confess that Jesus is the Son of God.
There is a sense in which the demons answer the disciples
question. From the very end of last week's
passage in 441, the disciples asked who is this that even the
winds and the waves obey him? The demons answer rightly the
Son of the Most High God. Now that is a true answer, but
that does not tell us anything good about the demons spiritual
condition. You can believe and confess that
Jesus is the Son of God and still be a demon.
Genuine saving faith in Christ is much more than
acknowledgement of the truth about who He is.
Now the demon then speaking through the man, says I adjure
you by God, do not torment me. The statement is ironic on
multiple levels. It's ironic that the demon would
invoke God's name and power as if he expects God to be on his
side. It's ironic in that it echoes
language that exorcists in Jesus's day would use to bind or
cast out demons. They would adjure them in God's
name to come out that that kind of verbal formula is an effort
to verbally bind the behavior of a demon.
And so here the demon tries to verbally bind Jesus's behavior
as if he's the demon who needs to come under control.
This man cannot be bound by humans.
The demons who bind him try to bind Jesus.
It's also ironic because the demons ask not to be tormented,
which is exactly what they're doing to this man.
Typical bullies. They dish it out, but they can't
take it. These demons who show no mercy
are begging for mercy, and it's important to recognize that
they're begging. Now, First Eight gives us
background information that tells us what Jesus said before
the demons responded. Here, it's that he commanded
them to leave the man. Now, this interaction between
Jesus and a demon is different from what we've typically seen
so far in Mark's gospel. Typically, when Jesus casts out
a demon, he just says the command and the demon instantly
obeys. Here Jesus commands and then the
demon begs for mercy. Presumably, had Jesus chosen to,
he could have effectively removed the demon, or the 2000
demons by a word. But here it seems he allows the
demon to beg out these terms of surrender so that we would learn
and profit from the exchange. So there are two armies squaring
off here, Jesus on one side and, as we will soon learn, a whole
legion of Satan's army on the other.
But the outcome of the conflict is not in doubt.
It is not as if Jesus is going to lose.
It is not as if Jesus even has to fight.
As soon as Jesus opens his mouth, the demons start begging
for mercy. The demons are defeated as soon
as Jesus speaks. It's just a question of whether
they can obtain any favorable terms of surrender.
One lesson from this passage. Demons are real.
Demons exist. Demons harm people.
They're really at work in the world today.
But all of us who trust in Christ need have No Fear of
them, because next to him they're powerless.
Jesus is infinitely more powerful than any and every
demon. He is the stronger man who has
come to bind Satan and deliver Satan's captives.
That's why this confrontation quickly results in .3
deliverance. Deliverance.
Verses 9 to 13 report the somewhat surprising way in which
Jesus delivers the man from his demonic tormentors.
Look first with me at verses 9 and 10.
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.
A legion was a unit in the Roman army.
It's exact numbers varied, but it was typically about 6000
soldiers. Now the point here is not that
there were exactly 6000 demons inhabiting this man.
The point is just there was a whole lot.
They constituted a kind of unit of Satan's army.
The the fact that the demon is called legion makes crystal
clear what's going on here. This man's life is a spiritual
battleground between God and the armies of Satan.
And it's not just him. What's true of him is true in
one way or another of each of us.
Your life is a spiritual battlefield with eternal
consequences riding on the outcome of the battle.
Again, in verse 10, the text does not specify or imply a
clear reason as to why the demons don't want to be sent out
of the country or the region. And I've got better things to do
in this sermon than speculate. So we move on to verses 11 to
13. 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 2000, rushed
down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the sea.
One element of the passage that is not as obvious today because
of our kind of cultural background is purity.
This man was the epitome of unclean.
He's a Gentile, unclean, possessed by a demon, unclean,
dwelling in tombs, unclean. And then Jesus drives the demons
out into pigs. Which two Jews were unclean?
Now, despite all the questions about this part of the passage,
the main point is clear. The man is delivered and the
demons are defeated. Whatever the demons were hoping
for by being sent into the pigs, drowning is not exactly a
triumph. In fact, that this is an army of
demons who are in some sense drowning in the sea sets up an
echo of the Exodus. God parted the Red Sea so that
the people of Israel could come through, and then he closed it
up on Pharaoh's army so as to drown the Egyptian army.
Israel was delivered, the army of Egypt drowned.
Here this man is delivered, and the army of Satan is drowned.
As I mentioned at the beginning, Jesus's choice to allow the
demons to enter the pigs, presumably knowing what would
happen when they did, created a larger, louder demonstration of
His power. It created a standing witness to
what He had done. Every time somebody would walk
by that big old hillside where that massive herd of pigs used
to graze, it would prompt a series of questions. 2000 pigs
was a massive herd in those days.
Massive. Everybody would know about it.
Poof. They disappear whenever anyone
walks past for a long time afterward.
What? What happened to that enormous
herd of pigs? Where did they go?
Who did that? How?
Why? Whenever anyone saw it, it wood
forest A reckoning, It wood forest an accounting.
I grew up in California, and I heard a lot about seismographs.
If you don't know what a seismograph is, it's a
scientific instrument that measures the force of an
earthquake. It measures how much power the
Earth releases when tectonic plates slip past each other or
smash against each other. It tells you how powerful those
forces were. In our passage, the grisly death
of a huge herd of pigs functions like a seismograph.
It measures the impact of Jesus's deliverance of this man.
It shows us how much power it took to save him.
Only the kind of power that could drive out 2000 demons was
enough to make this manhole that also is a picture of our
salvation. Only the kind of power that
would enable Jesus to give his life and death on a cross and
pay for sins, and then rise again from the grave, triumphing
over death forever. Only that kind of power, only
that much power is enough to save you and enough to save me.
We might not have the precise spiritual form of bondage that
this man had, but each of us by fallen nature are subject to
evil powers beyond our control, are hopelessly enslaved, and are
beyond human health. Not to mention the massive debt
of sin we've all racked up by the way we've rebelled against
God. What kind of power does it take
to deliver from that? The Gospel of Mark's answer is
the cross and resurrection of Christ.
That's how He pays for all the sins of all those who will turn
from sin and trust in Him. That's how He releases us from
death's dominion. That's how He guarantees us an
eternal welcome in His Kingdom by His death and resurrection.
And all you need to do to receive that infinite merciful
power is turned from sin and trust in Him.
All you need to do to be released from sin as completely
as this man was released from 2000 demons is turned from sin
and trust in Jesus. If you're not a believer in
Jesus, I would urge you come to Him in faith today.
He can make you as sound and sane and whole and happy as He
made this man. And that's what he promises to
do for all who believe. And yet we know that not
everyone will believe. This very passage shows us that
even the majority of the people who saw what had happened didn't
believe in Jesus, didn't accept it .4 Unbelief, Unbelief.
We see widespread unbelief in response to this miracle in
verses 14 to 17. Look first at verses 14 and 15.
The herdsmen fled and told it in the city and in the country, and
people came to see what it was that it happened.
And they came to Jesus and saw the demon possessed man, the one
who had had the Legion, sitting there clothed and in his right
mind. And they were afraid.
Naturally the news spread quickly.
When people came to see what had happened, they saw a man who was
previously The Walking Dead, now clothed well, sound of mind,
sitting there listening to Jesus's teaching.
The fact that he was clothed implies that he was previously
unclothed. Jesus has restored this man's
humanity. Jesus has restored this man's
sanity. Whereas previously chains
couldn't restrain him, now he's sitting there willingly,
peacefully, quietly listening to Jesus teach.
This is a perfect calm after the raging storm of demon possession
last week. In the passage we studied, Jesus
calms an outer storm. Here he calms an inner storm.
And the result, the peace that follows, is just as perfect,
just as instant, just as complete.
Just as the man's demonic torment is a picture of all of
our fallen condition by nature, so also his restoration is a
picture of what it means to become a follower of Jesus.
To be converted to Christ is to be transformed by his grace.
To be converted to Christ is to be rehumanized after being
dehumanized by Satan. To come to Christ is to be
restored, made well, made whole. To come to faith in Him is to
have both your humanity and your sanity restored.
To come to faith in Jesus is now to experience an inner, peaceful
compulsion to listen to him and follow Him.
If you're a believer in Jesus, does anyone in your life think
you're crazy for being a Christian?
This passage shows the shoes on the other foot.
Jesus restores your sanity. But not everyone who saw the
evidence embraced Christ for themselves.
Look at verses 16 and 17. And those who had 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. Sometimes people think that the
townspeople asked Jesus to leave because they were mad about the
financial loss they'd incurred through the death of this
enormous herd of pigs. But actually the text rules out
that interpretation. And not only do I think that is
not the case, but I think it cannot be the case.
Here's why. It's not the herdsmen who begged
Jesus to leave. It's the people the herdsmen
told it to, who then came and saw what had happened.
It wasn't the owners of the pigs who asked Jesus to depart.
It was simply people who came face to face with Jesus's power
and they were unnerved by it. They didn't want anything to do
with it. The key is right there at the
end of verse 15. They saw the man sitting there
clothed and in his right mind and they were afraid.
Their right to be afraid. Jesus power is infinitely
greater than anything they can comprehend.
Their right to be disturbed. But that disturbance, that being
shaken up should have resolved itself into being drawn to
Jesus, trusting in Jesus instead, that disturbing, that
being shaken up resolved into opposition.
Get away from us, get out of here.
We don't want you anywhere around us.
They recognize Jesus's power, but they viewed that power as
being kind of like the reactor core of a nuclear bomb.
Yes, I recognize that is a very powerful device.
No, I don't want to touch it, thank you.
No, I don't want it living next to me, thanks very much.
I want it sent away as far from me as it can possibly get.
They got the power, but they rejected it.
A lot of people claim they would believe in God if God showed
them more evidence. A lot of people claim that they
believe in Jesus if they saw Jesus do a miracle.
Here, as so often in the Gospels, you have people who
come face to face with hard evidence of a miracle as
dramatic as you could ask for. 2000 pigs drowning in the sea.
What on earth just happened? And yet they do not believe.
They reject Jesus. They don't want anything to do
with Him. The fundamental reason people
don't believe in God through Christ is not lack of
information, but the condition of the heart.
It's that we want the wrong thing.
Control is a deep heart idol. A guy like this who can do this,
you cannot control. We prefer control to submission,
and Christ's power is uncontrollable.
You cannot set limits to the demands he puts on you.
You cannot draw a boundary that Jesus has to respect.
Hey, Jesus, you don't get to do that.
I've set up a boundary. Thank you.
No boundaries will contain Jesus.
To come to faith in Christ is to give up control.
Sin, you think is controllable. I've got it under control.
I know what I'm doing. I can keep it limited over here.
I've got this sin you think is under control, but the way Jesus
will transform you is not controllable.
Sin makes us prefer control to health.
Sin makes us prefer control to sanity.
Kids in the congregation, do you ever think somewhere deep down
in your mind and heart, that your life would be better if
Jesus would just go away? Do you ever think that your life
would be happier, smoother, easier, better if you could ask
Jesus to leave and he would? That's what the people who saw
this miracle wanted. They wanted him gone.
But it's not what the man himself wanted.
We see what he wanted from Jesus and what Jesus wanted for him.
And .5 proclamation. 5th and final point .5 Proclamation.
This is the last stage in this spiritual battle.
For now. This is the outcome of Jesus
victory in this man's life. Proclamation.
That's the theme of verses 18 to 20.
Look with me first at verses 18 and 19.
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. Now in these verses, Jesus
grants the townspeople's request.
They ask. And the next thing we learn is
he's getting into a boat to leave.
And the man he has marvelously delivered wants to come with
him. He wants to get into that boat.
The phrase that he might be with him exactly echoes chapter 3
verse 14, which speaks of Jesus calling the 12 apostles that
they might be with him. Now, I don't think this means
that the man is asking to become an apostle.
Like, hey Jesus, could you take the 12 and make it 13 for me?
I don't think that's what he's asking.
Instead, I think what he's asking is that he wants to be
with Jesus as much as the apostles get to be with Jesus.
He wants to stay with him, go with him, see all that he does,
be with him. That's a good desire.
A desire to be in Christ's presence is a mark of genuine
faith in him. Faith is not a bare mental
transaction. Real faith gives birth to a
desire to have intimate fellowship with Christ.
So the man wants something good, but Jesus has in mind something
better. Why does he refuse the man's
request? Because in this instance, he
wants the man to be not merely a disciple, but a missionary.
This first Gentile convert is going to become, in some sense,
the first apostle to the Gentiles.
Jesus wants this man to go among those who know him and bear
testimony to what Jesus has done for him.
More on that soon. But now we need to ask another
question. Why does Jesus command
proclamation here when elsewhere he forbids it?
We've seen often in Mark's gospel that when he heals
someone or drives out a demon, when the demons confess who he
is, he tells them not to tell anybody.
And he's going to do that again later in Mark's gospel.
So why the change here? The key is that he's in Gentile
territory. When he's in Jewish territory,
he's among his own people. That's where he's living.
That's where he's carrying out his whole mission.
If the crowds swell up too fast, if they kind of swarm him, well,
that, that that'll cramp his agenda, it'll cramp his
timeline, it'll threaten all kinds of danger.
Also in Jewish territory there's a whole wide mix of expectations
about who the Messiah is going to be and what's he going to do.
Here in Gentile territory, this is not where Jesus is going to
stay. He's going to return maybe once
in his earthly ministry. It's also there's no
pre-existing expectations for what the Messiah is going to be
like. So yeah, he's fine with not
preaching here and leaving this healed man in his place.
Jesus is not going to come back except maybe once.
So he leaves this man. He sends this man home.
And in this case, sending him home means sending him to the
mission fields of the man obeys Jesus.
Verse 20. And he went away and began to
proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him.
And everyone marveled. Verse 19, Jesus tells the man to
tell everybody how much the Lord has done for you.
Verse 20, he tells how much Jesus had done for him.
It's not a mistake. That's not a slip.
That's sound theology. All we hear about the effect of
the man's preaching is that people were amazed.
But later in Chapter 7, Jesus is going to return to the region
and people come to him expecting healing.
So clearly word has gotten around.
We don't know the exact outcome of the man's preaching, but we
do know that he sowed some gospel seed.
We do know that it made some impact.
We do know that Jesus name and fame spread at least somewhat in
that region. Now, to help us apply these
concluding verses and the whole passage, I want to focus our
application on four points. Mercy, prayer, missions, and
testimony. Little bit of application,
reflections, some short, some a little longer.
Mercy, prayer, missions and testimony.
First, mercy. Note what Jesus commands the man
to proclaim in verse 19. Tell them how much the Lord has
done for you and how he has had mercy on you.
Jesus's exorcism was an act of mercy.
How much mercy? Infinite mercy?
What kind of mercy? Omnipotent mercy?
Jesus is omnipotently merciful and mercifully omnipotent.
Omnipotence without mercy is scary.
Mercy without omnipotence might not be strong enough for your
problems. Jesus has both.
What mercy do you need from the Lord?
Whatever it is, ask Him for it, beg Him for it, plead with Him
for it, and don't give up until He blesses you with His mercy.
Second application. Prayer.
In our whole passage, Jesus grants 3 requests and denies
one. A couple of you noticed this and
commented on it and emailed me about it.
I appreciate that. It's a good observation.
The pattern is surprising, maybe even shocking.
Verse 10 the demons beg not to be sent out of the country and
Jesus grants that. Verse 12 the demons beg to be
sent into the pigs and Jesus grants that.
Verse 17 sounds, people beg Jesus to leave and he grants
that. Verse 18 The healed man begs to
go with Jesus and he denies him. Where's the logic in that?
A request granted is not necessarily a sign of grace or
approval. A request denied is not
necessarily a sign of judgement or disapproval.
Jesus might refuse your request for some very good thing because
He has something that he knows is better.
Third Point missions. Later in Mark's Gospel in
chapter 13 verse 10, Jesus is going to say that before his
return the gospel must first be proclaimed to all nations.
Here in our passage we see in a sense the very first
anticipation of this world widespread of the gospel.
This is the first time the gospel crosses a cultural or
ethnic boundary. In Mark's Gospel, this first
instance of the gospel spreading to Gentiles and among Gentiles
is something like the birth of cross cultural missions.
Now in all four gospels and the book of Acts after his
resurrection, Jesus commands his disciples to bring the gospel to
every tribe, tongue and nation. One of the reasons this local
church, Trinity Baptist Church, exists is to continue the spread
of the gospel to the ends of the earth.
A friend of mine, Brooks Buser, runs a missions training school
called Radius International. The goal of Radius is to provide
a year long intensive training program to help equip people who
mean to bring the gospel to utterly unreached people groups,
people who have never heard the name of Jesus.
In an article for 9 marks from a few months ago, Brooks hopefully
lays out four different lanes of what faithful missions work can
look like. I'm going to lay out those four
lanes and tweak them slightly. In a sense, these progress from
the easiest to support or do to the hardest lane one training
national pastors in many regions of the world.
There are decent number of local churches, maybe a large number
of Christians, but not much theologically rich pastoral
training. There's one reason Michael and I
are proposing that we support the work of Mike Crist at the
Nairobi Institute of Reformed Theology.
Lord willing, we'll be hearing from Mike in our evening service
2 Sundays from now on the 26th. Have a kind of extended time of
Q&A, getting to know him, hearing about that ministry with
a view to potentially supporting it as a Church Lane 2, planting
English speaking or other trade language churches in cross
cultural contexts. That's what Michael was helping
to do in Dubai for the past several years before moving
here. And over the past several months
we've heard from Andy Johnson and John Pentecost about this
type of work. If I'm not mistaken, we have
former members of each of those churches visiting with us this
morning. You can hunt them down, try to
figure out who they are. Andy and John are both serving
English speaking churches in large cities in Central Asia.
One of the great advantages of that type of church is it can
provide access to nearby believers who might be in much
less reached places or among much less reached peoples.
Friends of mine and Michaels who pastor at different churches in
the United Arab Emirates have trained pastors from Egypt,
Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and other places like that.
Lane 3 planting indigenous language churches in places
where there are hardly any Christians.
This work is much closer to the frontline of global gospel
expansion. If you're working to plant an
Arabic speaking church in Cairo, Egypt, or a Kurdish speaking
church in the Kurdistan regions of Iraq or Turkey or Syria,
you're working in a place that has hardly any Christians and
among a people that has hardly any churches.
Or considered Japan, which has had some access to the gospel
for hundreds of years, and yet we're professing Christians
remain a teeny tiny minority. Lane 4 Planting churches among
people groups that have no gospel access.
These are cultural and linguistic groups to whom no one
has yet brought the gospel. In his article, Brooks reports
there are roughly 3100 language groups who still have yet to
hear the name of Christ. Brooks goes on.
Church planting in this category is often slow, hard work due to
the lack of translated materials, the need for language
acquisition, harsh living circumstances, and governments
hostile to Christianity. As we pray for opportunities to
advance the gospel globally, even as a young, small church,
pray that we will find ways over time to support work in each of
these lanes. Some of those might come easier
than others. Pray especially that the Lord
will raise up people from among our membership who will work in
lane four, who will bring the gospel to places and language
groups where Christ has never been named, just like this man
did when Jesus sent him home. For all of us, remember that we
will not all go, but we all must tell.
Telling is required. Whether you tell other people
about Jesus here or on the far side of the globe is ultimately
up to Him. Whether you stay or you go, you
must tell. 4th and finally, testimony, testimony.
What is the what is Jesus commanded man to do in verse 19?
Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done
for you and how he has had mercy on you.
If you're a believer in Jesus, even a brand new one, tell your
friends and family and neighbors how much the Lord has done for
you. Tell them how He has had mercy
on you. Tell them your testimony.
And by testimony I mean how the Lord saved you, how He brought
you to faith in Jesus. While sharing your testimony is
not in itself evangelism, sharing your testimony can be a
part of evangelism. It can spark evangelism.
It can confirm and help your evangelism.
It can help people see the personal difference that
trusting in Jesus makes. Sharing your testimony can often
help to put Christ saving work into categories that people can
resonate with and more easily understand.
This is one reason why we regularly interview members on
Sunday nights to hear their testimony.
What does that do? As we hear dozens of testimonies
of how people have come to know the Lord, it shows us the varied
means He uses to bring people to faith.
It reminds us that He has power to give sight to the blind and
life to the dead. It's a reminder that the gospel
is his power to save. You should also share
testimonies of how the Lord has continued to work in your life.
Bear witness to how God's grace has continued to transform you.
Tell your Co workers, tell your neighbors, tell your parents how
much the Lord has done for you and how He's had mercy on you.
Only Jesus can deliver you from all of Satan's tyranny,
including unbelief. Only Jesus can supernaturally
restore your sanity. Only Jesus can deliver you from
slavery to sin. Only Jesus can give you a new
heart. Only Jesus can give you His own
spotless record of righteousness before God.
Only Jesus can sink all your sins in the depth of the sea
like a herd of 2000 pigs rushing down off a Cliff and drowning.
How much has the Lord done for you?
He's sure done a lot for my friend Sean.
He's sure done a lot for me. And Jesus has plenty more where
that came from. Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, we praise you for the power of your mercy in
and through our Lord Jesus Christ.
We praise you for the deliverance you alone are able
to bring about. We pray you'd work that
deliverance in each of us. In Jesus name, Amen.