Power Over Evil: Jesus Brings Freedom!

[This was shared during worship with the people and guests of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

Luke 8:26-39
Someone has said that in our Gospel lesson for today, with its account of Jesus casting a legion of demons into a herd of pigs, we have the first recorded instance of deviled ham.*

Corny joke aside, this is an important text for us to explore. So, let’s do so right now. Please pull out a pew Bible and turn to Luke 8:26-39.

The incident that comprises today’s lesson is the middle one of three in which Jesus demonstrates that He is more than just a good man or a great teacher.

In Luke 8:22-25, just before our lesson, Jesus imposes His power on a raging sea to bring calm to it.

In Luke 8:40-56, Jesus gives life to a little girl who has died and healing to a woman who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years, demonstrating Jesus’ power over death and disease.

These are signs that Jesus has the same power as God and is God. As He says in John’s Gospel, “I and the Father are one.”

In the middle of those passages comes today’s lesson.

Verse 26 says: “Then they [Jesus and the disciples] sailed to the country of the Gadarenes, which is opposite Galilee.”

There’s some dispute among Bible scholars over exactly where Jesus and the disciples landed here. But there’s no dispute over two things.

First, they sailed to this place after Jesus calmed a raging sea, prompting the disciples to ask, “Who can this be? For He commands even the winds and water, and they obey Him?” The answer might have been clear to the disciples even as they asked this question.

There's a reason I say that. Turn to Genesis 1:1-2, please. The start of the first of two creation accounts given at the opening of Genesis says: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” God then imposed peace and order on the waters of chaos, just as Jesus did that during that storm on the Sea of Galilee. Life, the whole universe, came into being when God calmed the waters in Genesis.

So, as their boat lands on the shores of the Gadarenes, it’s beginning to dawn on the disciples that their rabbi is God in the flesh. 

The second thing about which there’s no dispute among students of the New Testament is that, wherever the “country of the Gadarenes” was, it was Gentile territory, populated mostly by non-Jews. That’s important later in the text.

Verses 27 to 29 say: “And when [Jesus] stepped out on the land, there met Him a certain man from the city who had demons for a long time. And he wore no clothes, nor did he live in a house but in the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he cried out, fell down before Him, and with a loud voice said, ‘What have I to do with you, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg You, do not torment me!’ For [Jesus] had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. For it had often seized him, and he was kept under guard, bound with chains and shackles; and he broke the bonds and was driven by the demon into the wilderness.”

Sin, you know, is a condition of isolation from God and isolation from others. It’s a turning in on oneself that leads to hopelessness.

When Adam and Eve fell into sin, they first tried to isolate themselves from God and then isolated themselves from each other by blaming one another for turning away from God and away from God’s will.

This man in the Gadarene tombs was in the grips of evil so badly that, even though he had a home and a family in the city, the demon that had control of him drove him to live in the tombs, among the silent dead, isolated. That’s what sin and evil can cause to happen in people’s lives. Their personalities are infected by a rage from hell itself.

One of the few times I have ever feared for my life came when I was in the presence of a person who had been subjected to physical and sexual abuse as a child and suffered from multiple addictions. In his adult years, his entire family became dependent on him in ways that were entirely unfair. In time, the hopelessness of his circumstances, along with having no real understanding of or relationship with Jesus Christ, had given an opening to the demonic in his life.

Once, at about 2:00 in the morning, I was called to the hospital ER where this man had been taken after sharing very specific suicidal fantasies with family and friends. Six of us were with him when the attending physician announced that would have to be kept overnight for observation. This man was slight of build and I was younger than I am today. Under ordinary circumstances, I'm sure that I could have taken him. But when the raging evil inside this basically sensitive man was detonated by that doctor's announcement, I was uncertain whether all six of us could subdue him. When he was in a rage, he was terrifying, not human!

Sin is isolating and when a spiritually defenseless person--a person who doesn't trust in Jesus Christ--allows it take root in their lives, it fills them with a life-negating, love-denying rage.

The demon (we’ll soon find out demons) in the man Jesus encounters on the shores of Galilee immediately recognizes his enemy: The One Who had gone toe to toe and defeated Satan in the wilderness,  Jesus. The demon calls Jesus “Son of the Most High God,” meaning the very embodiment of God, God in human flesh.

Now look at verse 30, please. “Jesus asked him, saying, ‘What is your name?’” The demon says its name is Legion, “because many demons had entered him.” Legion, of course, was the name for a unit of the Roman army consisting of 6000 soldiers.

This name not only tells us that this  possessed man was shackled by an army of evil, but also that human beings are the spoils of war that Satan tries to steal from God.

You see, Satan knows how much God loves us. (If Satan ever wondered how desperately God loves us, this doubts were eternally erased by the cross on which God the Son was sacrificed for our sins and by the empty tomb through which He opens eternity to all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus as their only Savior and Lord!) So, the devil wants to take us from God. He knows how much it hurts God when human beings walk away from Him and His will for our lives. But Jesus has come into this world so that all who believe in Him are out of the reach of Satan. As Jesus says of those who believe in Him in John 10:28: “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.” 

When they saw Jesus, the demons begged Jesus not to send them back to the abyss, the place of eternal death. Look at verse 32: “Now a herd of many swine was feeding there on the mountain. So [the demons] begged [Jesus] that He would permit them to enter [the swine].”

You know pigs aren’t kosher. Jews considered pigs to be unclean. Jesus is here clearly among Gentiles.

But even in this wilderness, Jesus has as much control over evil as He had when He confronted Satan’s temptations in the wilderness of Judea.

And even Gentiles, like you and me, can receive His grace and know God. Jesus permitted the demons to enter the swine herd and then, verse 33 says, the herd stampeded to their deaths in the sea below. The swineherds saw what happened and ran into town to tell others.

It’s probably not reading too much into the text to guess that they were mad. They (or the people they may have worked for) had money invested in these pigs. Now they were all dead.

Soon, the folks from town show up. Verse 35 says, they “found the man from whom the demons had departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus [the posture of a disciple learning from his new teacher], clothed and in his right mind.”

You’d expect them to be happy, wouldn’t you? They knew this trouble-making man and the problems he had caused. He wouldn't be causing trouble any more. But verse 35 says, “they were afraid.”

Should that surprise us? No. There are many people who would like to trust in Christ, to have a warm personal relationship with Him, to have His help and guidance in their lives, to live in the freedom of forgiven sin and in the hope of eternity with God. But they’re afraid that if they give Jesus an inch of their lives, He’ll take it over completely. And they’re right! The Lord Who gave His all on the cross and rose bodily from the dead, wants to save us body, soul, mind, and spirit. But if we aren’t willing to give our whole selves to Christ, our whole selves will die apart from Christ.

The townspeople were afraid that if Jesus could change the life of a man possessed by multiple demons, He could change their lives as well...and they preferred their favorite sins to living for Jesus. In honesty, aren’t there times when you and I feel the same way?

Verse 36 says that the crowds knew that Jesus had been the means by which the man had been “healed.” The word translated as healed is, in the original Greek in which Luke wrote, esothe, coming from the verb sozo, also meaning saved. The man wasn’t just healed, he was saved by Jesus, saved, as The Small Catechism puts it “from sin, death, and the devil.” Saving people, setting them free from sin and its consequences, is what Jesus said He came into the world to do when He read the words from Isaiah in his hometown synagogue: “The Spirit of the Lord...has anointed Me...to proclaim liberty to the captives..to set at liberty those who are oppressed.”

Folks, whatever oppresses you today--sins, anxious thoughts, tenacious temptations, grudge-holding resentments, horrible grief, or doubts about God’s grace, Jesus Christ can set you free of them.

If He can cast a legion of demons from a man and give him back his right mind, He can free you and let you live with a mind filled with joy and thankfulness!

The Gadarenes asked Jesus to leave. But when we pray, like children, that Jesus will come into our hearts, He will do so and remain there as we continue to turn to Him each day for life, forgiveness, and help.

Our lesson ends strangely. After the Gadarenes asked Jesus to leave, He got into a boat to do just that. Jesus will not stay where He isn’t welcome. That's as true today as it was when He walked on the earth.

But when the man from whom He had cast out the demons begged Jesus to let him go with Jesus, Jesus “sent him away.” Jesus says (verse 39): “Return to your own house, and tell what great things God has done for you.”

Following Jesus can sometimes mean that we’re to go to unknown places among unknown people to share the Gospel.

But for most Christians most of the time, following Jesus means staying right where we are among people we already know and sharing the truth of new life for all who repent and believe in the crucified Jesus Christ.

And following Jesus in the town in which we were raised, among people who have known us for a long time, is probably harder than going somewhere we think we’ll be safe with Jesus. Every time the man freed from demons started to talk about what Jesus had done for him, there would have been someone who could say, “I knew you when...”

But if and when that happened, the man would have a ready defense: “I’m not talking about how great or good I am. I’m nothing. I was once so spiritually vacant that a legion of demons filled me. I’m talking about Jesus, the One Who cast out those demons and saved me to live with God forever.”

That’s why after Jesus told him to stay, verse 39 says of the man, “And he went his way and proclaimed throughout the whole city what great things Jesus [the One he knew was God] had done for him.”

You know what? We never learn this man’s real name. And it doesn’t matter because far more important than knowing his name is learning and taking to heart his life’s story:

• Knowing that Christ can save anyone, no matter how deeply given over to evil and sin they may be.
• And knowing that once Christ has saved us, whatever our jobs or stations in life may be, we all have a single mission, to tell others what great things God has done for us through the Savior Jesus Who died and rose to set us free to live with God for all eternity.

Through this one man, Jesus began the Church among the Gentiles. What might Jesus do through us when we tell others the great things He’s done for us?

*You can blame this groaner on Pastor Brian Stoffregen. Ann urged its inclusion. But I alone can be blamed for the decision to share it.

The God Who Loves to Set Captives Free!

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

Luke 13:10-17

The God we know in Jesus Christ loves to set captives free. God loves to free people from the prisons that the devil, the world, and our sinful selves can impose upon us.

In His hometown synagogue back when He began His public ministry, Jesus read words from the Old Testament prophet’s book of Isaiah: “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me… to proclaim liberty to the captives…” Then, the Bible tells us, Jesus said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

On this Sabbath day today, Jesus wants you to know that whatever sins or temptations bedevil you, whatever regrets you carry on your shoulders, whatever doubts you may harbor about God’s goodness or God’s Word, whatever feuds may mar your personal relationships, whatever failures you may rue, you can be set free.

Don’t let Satan rob you of the joy, and the peace, and the hope that Jesus Christ wants to give to you, even in the midst of life’s difficulties, pains, and challenges. Let Jesus set you free! You simply need to come to Him when He calls, as we’ll see in today’s Gospel lesson.

It tells us about something that happened in another synagogue in an unnamed town during Jesus' journey to Jerusalem and the cross, where He underscores His desire to set captives free, as well as His authority to do just that.

I’d like to ask you to once more this morning pull out the Celebrate insert and turn to today’s Gospel lesson, Luke 13:10-17 and this time, if you have a pencil or pen handy, pull that out as well. (Don’t worry; you’re not going to have to write any essays!)

Read the first verse along with me silently. “Now he [that is, Jesus] was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath.” Elsewhere in Luke’s gospel, we’re told that it was Jesus’ custom to always go to worship on the Sabbath day. The Bible also tells us that all of Jesus’ early followers and the apostle Paul were in the habit of honoring the Sabbath by worshiping God every week.

This habit may seem contradictory to us. We know that the Ten Commandments commanded God’s people, the Jews, to “remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” But, good Lutherans that we are, we also know that (a) we human beings, having been born in sin, are incapable of keeping God’s commands perfectly and (b) keeping the law cannot save us from sin, death, and pointless lives anyway. Only Christ’s cross and empty tomb and our repentant faith in Christ can accomplish that.

So, why did Jesus and the first Christians make such a big deal of keeping the Sabbath? Because the Sabbath is a gift from God, an oasis on our weekly calendars where we can be met by the living God in His Word and in the strengthening fellowship of those who, just like us, are people of God’s Word. It can play this role as much in our lives today as it did in the lives of the ancient Jews. The New Testament book of Hebrews tells us:

...a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God's rest also cease from their labors as God did from His. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall through...disobedience...[as was true of God's people in their wilderness journey between Egypt and the promised land]

(It's interesting to me that the text says "make every effort to enter that rest." Sometimes, it requires a lot of hard work and effort to set aside time to rest, especially in these busy days.)

Further on in Hebrews, we're reminded of the part that Sabbath rest plays in the lives of believers, beyond just giving them time to recharge their batteries:

...let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day [of Christ's return to the world] approaching.

On the Sabbath, God cleans the clutter from our lives so that we can hear the clear, unambiguous message of the Bible together. This is what Martin Luther talked about in his explanation of the Third Commandment, to remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy:

We are to fear and love God so that we do not neglect His Word and the preaching of it, but regard it as holy and gladly hear and learn it.

Remember that Jesus came not to abolish God's law--including the commandment to keep the Sabbath, but to fulfill it. Though we will never keep the Sabbath with the same perfection and holy intentions that Jesus did, weekly worship was part of Jesus’ way of life and because the Sabbath is God’s gift to us, He wants it to be part of our lives, too.

The Gospel lesson continues: “And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight.”

You might want to circle the word “eighteen,” then draw an arrow over to the margin and jot this down there: Luke 13:4. In Luke 13:4, Jesus mentions “eighteen who were killed.” You might want to look that verse up in your Bible when you go home today. You see, there are no accidents in Scripture and so, when you see “eighteen” appearing in two passages just a few lines apart, you know that they share an important theme.

Luke 13:4 is part of the section of Luke’s gospel that comes right before our lesson for today. In it, Jesus encounters a group of people who are jabbering about the latest news headlines in the very same way you and I do that sort of thing today. Among the headlines that group was discussing was the then-recent tragic death of eighteen people killed when a tower crashed at a place called Siloam.

Jesus picks up on the tenor of the crowds' comments and asks them if any of them think that those who died were worse offenders of God’s will than they were.

This is a pointed question that relates to what happens in today’s Gospel lesson. People can be quick to attribute the hardships of others to their sins. You’ve heard people say things like that. But Jesus dismisses such notions. We do bring some bad things onto ourselves, of course. We also all can probably name times when we have eluded bad consequences for our bad choices. But usually, when we have bad things happen in our lives, it isn’t because we’ve violated God’s will; it’s because we live in a fallen and imperfect world where bad things happen. It’s the risk that all the living endure. That's because this is isn’t heaven.

Now, back in our Gospel lesson, notice that “a spirit” crippled the woman. “Medically,” one prominent New Testament scholar writes, “the illness has been diagnosed as spondylitis ankylopoietica (a fusion of spinal bones) or as skoliasis hysterica…, a hysterical rather than an organic paralysis.” Whatever the diagnosis, Jesus will soon make clear that this woman who came for Sabbath worship in spite of the bitterness toward God she could have felt because of her crippling condition, is being afflicted through no fault of her own. Her condition is caused by Satan, the prince of all the spirits--demons--in rebellion against God.

Keep that in mind as you read along silently with the next part of our Gospel lesson. “When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, ‘Woman, you are set free from your ailment.’ When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.“

If you will, please underline the words “set free.” Behind those two words in our translation is a single verb in the original Greek of the New Testament: luo. It can mean not only set free, but also unloosed, untied, or unshackled. As a sign of His power to set all people free from the more lasting scourges of sin, death, and futility, Jesus set this woman free from her crippling condition.

Read on with me, please. “But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, ‘There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.’”

The synagogue leader seems more concerned that his tidy little worship service has been disrupted, than He is amazed that God’s mercy and love has come to the place or that a woman once doubled over in agony was standing straight and praising God!

One of the biggest problems in the contemporary Church is caused by theologians,  bishops, pastors, and laypeople who think that no matter what God’s Word tells us about God’s will, grace, and power, they know better. Instead of “standing under” the Bible, which is what the word “understand” means, they presume to stand over the Scripture, claiming to understand things that God, Who inspired the words of the Bible, didn’t know. The synagogue leader had this same kind of presumptuousness. Fortunately, Jesus corrected this misled leader right away.

Take a look at what happens next: “But the Lord answered him and said, ‘You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?’”

The use of the term, “the Lord” is no accident. The word in the original Greek of the New Testament is kurios. It’s the usual Greek rendering of the Name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush: Yahweh, I AM. In Jesus, Yahweh, God, was speaking to this presumptuous synagogue leader, setting him straight, along with any in the synagogue who might agree with him.

Underline the word "untie" in verse 15. In the Greek, it's luo again. “How dare you, you hypocrites!” Jesus is saying. “You would do a little work by setting an ox or donkey free to get water on a Sabbath day, treating animals better than human beings! But, you want to keep me from freeing this woman, who has been bound by Satan all these years!"

A denominational leader once told the true story of a brilliant pastor who, by use of a formula he had created, was able to project at what times of year his suburban congregation would grow numerically.* This went on for years. The young pastor later confessed that he felt no real need to pray. He had church growth all figured out. One Sunday, two elderly members of the congregation asked if he would mind if they used the church basement one afternoon a week to pray for the congregation. The pastor couldn’t see the harm, told them it would be OK, and thought no more about it.

Some months later, the congregation had a phenomenal growth spurt--including incredible spiritual growth--that the pastor’s calculations couldn’t explain. It actually bothered him! A thought crossed his mind. “No, it couldn’t be!” he told himself. But he decided to check the church basement on the day of the week that those two women had set aside for regular prayer for the congregation. To his absolute shock, he saw that there were now sixty people praying with those two women. (I would love for something like that to happen at Saint Matthew, by the way!)

It’s hypocrisy for us to say that we believe in the God of the Bible and then expect Him to stay within the orderly parameters we try to impose on Him. As our second lesson for today reminds us, our God is a consuming fire. God's power is beyond our control, no matter how wise, upstanding, or clever we may think we are!

Just as an aside, there’s a phrase I’d like you to put in brackets in verse 16. It’s “daughter of Abraham.” This is the only place in all of Scripture where that phrase is used, though there are many places that speak of the “son of Abraham.” Jesus and the early Christians may have been surrounded by a male-dominated culture. But they were no part of it. Men and women, both created in the image of God, are equal in the sight of God. No wonder that Paul writes in Galatians that in Christ, “there is no longer Jew or Greek…slave or free…male and female…If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.”

Our lesson ends with Jesus’ opponents put to shame and the crowd rejoicing at the wonderful things Jesus was doing.

Whatever it is that may be afflicting you or people you care about today, turn to Christ, expect Him to do the unexpected, expect Him to set you free to live for Him, in this life, whatever it may bring, and in the life to come.

This morning, may God set you free in all the ways you need God’s freeing action…and may you praise God for it. Amen!

*I heard Paul Cedar, then president of the Evangelical Free Church, tell this story at a Billy Graham School of Evangelism at Wheaton College back in 1993.