Jesus is actually the Saviour of His people. He
really is God. When we see Jesus working, we
actually see God at work. And last time we were in Mark's
Gospel. Sam, you might have to slow down a bit so I can keep
up with everyone else, mate. Otherwise, my tiny brain is going
to... You can just read it quietly.
Please read it as much as you can, mate. My brain's living
in a fog at the moment, so don't make any waves, is all I've got
to say. Thanks, mate, that's really good. Anyway, last time we were in
Mark's Gospel, we had the crossing of the sea, and we see that the
Lord Jesus in the Gospel and in all of history, always operates
with all of the authority of God, with all of the knowledge
of God, with all of the power of God. And so he does nothing
by accident. He crossed the lake, left those
crowds behind on the other side, and he crossed the lake knowing
that he was going through a storm. knowing that he was going to
take his disciples to a place where they feared for their very
lives. And the purpose of going across
the lake was not just to go for a sail on a pretty lake, but
he had a purpose in crossing the lake because this man was
on the other side. So, let's read that wonderful
section of Mark's Gospel, chapter 5. Verse 1, they came to the
other side of the sea into the country of the Gerasenes. When
he got out of the boat, immediately a man from the tombs with an
unclean spirit met him. And he had his dwelling among
the tombs, and no one was able to bind him anymore, even with
a chain. because he had often been bound
with shackles and chains, and the chains had been torn apart
by him, and the shackles broken in pieces, and no one was strong
enough to subdue him. Constantly, night and day, he
was screaming among the tombs and in the mountains, and gashing
himself with stones. Seeing Jesus from a distance,
he ran up and bowed down before Him. And shouting with a loud
voice, he said, What business do we have with each other, Jesus,
Son of the Most High God? I implore you by God, do not
torment me. For he had been saying to him,
Come out of the man, you unclean spirit. And he was asking him,
What is your name? And he said to him, My name is
Legion, for we are many. And he began to implore him earnestly
not to send them out of the country. Now there was a large herd of
swine feeding nearby on the mountain. The demons implored him, saying,
Send us into the swine so that we may enter them. Jesus gave
them permission, and coming out, the unclean spirits entered the
swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea,
about 2,000 of them, and they were drowned in the sea. The
herdsmen ran away and reported it in the city and in the country.
And the people came to see what had happened. They came to Jesus
and observed the man who had been demon-possessed, sitting
down, clothed, and in his right mind, the very man who had had
the legion. And they became frightened. Those
who had seen it described to them how it had happened to the
demon-possessed man and all about the swine. And they began to
implore him to leave their region. As he was getting into the boat,
the man who had been demon-possessed was imploring him that he might
accompany him. And he did not let him, but he
said to him, Go home to your people and report to them what
great things the Lord has done for you and how he had mercy
on you. And he went away and began to
proclaim in the Decapolis what great things Jesus had done for
him, and everyone was amazed. So here we have this picture
of the demon-possessed man from Gadarene. And it's a picture,
as all pictures of salvation in the Scriptures are, a picture
of how sinners are saved by the grace of God. And we see things
here that the Lord Jesus has done for each and every one of
His chosen sinners. Remember as we saw before that
this man that God went across the lake to sea to visit that
day, was loved by Him from eternity. He was loved by Him even in his
terrible, terrible state. And may God the Holy Spirit remind
all of God's children again of what they were as Adam's children,
running wild in this world. It's a sad, sad situation, isn't
it? We live in a world that is under
the curse of sin. under the power of Satan. In
Ephesians 2 there's a description which is so true, isn't it? We
were dead in trespasses and sins in which we once walked according
to the course of this world, according to the prince of the
power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of
disobedience. So Satan is at work in this world
amongst the sons of disobedience. But also, we must remember always,
no matter what we see in sin around us, we were part of it
ourselves. Among whom also, we all once
conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the
desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children
of wrath, just as the others." But in the Scriptures there are
some great buts. In the world there are terrible
buts, but in the Scriptures there are great buts. God, Ephesians
2 verse 4 says, who is rich in mercy because of his great love
with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses,
has made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been
saved. And so if you've got your text
of the scripture there, there are about six characteristics of
this unsaved man. And in the balance that scripture
often brings, there are six wonderful characteristics of the man after
he has been saved. And so I thought if we went through
those, God the Holy Spirit might teach us some valuable lessons
today. The first characteristics of
this man and of all people outside of the Lord Jesus, he's a man
with an unclean spirit. As we saw in Ephesians, all of
Adam's children are held captive to Satan. And such is the subtlety
of Satan's power that people are left unaware of it. They don't know the futility
of it, they don't know the state of their lives. They are blinded,
they are deaf, they are dead. This man, in verse 3, dwelt among
the tombs. He dwelt among the places where
dead people live. So unbelievers are never really
comfortable in the company of God's children. They prefer the
company of the like-minded. The dead people spiritually,
those who are spiritually dead, seek the company of other dead
sinners. John 3, in John chapter 3, the
Lord Jesus says that they don't come to the light, they won't
come to the light for fear, They loved darkness rather than
light because their deeds were evil. Everyone practicing evil
hates the light and does not come to the light lest his deeds
be exposed. And so this man had an unclean
spirit, he lived among the tombs and no one was able to bind him. He broke the shackles that they
put on him. He tore the chains apart. Such is the power of demonic
activity in people. But all of us once were like
that. We weren't going to be bound by anyone. We weren't going
to allow anyone to be the ruler of our lives. We will be like
God, said Satan in the garden, and we live our lives in our
Adam flesh saying, no one is going to rule over me, and especially
God is not going to rule over me. I will be the boss of my
life. And until the Lord Jesus meets
with us, we will not be bound by anyone. We may give assent
to their power over us, but in our minds we will always be saying,
we will not have this man to rule over us. And the truth of
it is, We just bristle, don't we? When someone tells us what
we have to do, instantly our Adam flesh rises up and says,
I'm not going to be told what to do. You're not going to make
rules for me. I am the boss of my life. Children come out of their mother's
womb with their fist clenched. And we live our lives until God
tames us. We live our lives unable to be
bound. And this man, in the fourth instance,
was screaming among the tombs. The people who are outside of
the Lord Jesus and live their lives without Him as the centre
of it and without a knowledge of Him that He brings into their
lives, their speech and their conversation and their activities
are as wise as people screaming, aren't they? To contemplate life
without God who gives life, God who rules life, God who is absolutely
sovereign over all things, is irrationality. I have seen so
much of it and heard so much of it in the last few days. Intelligent people behaving in
the most extraordinarily irrational ways. A Feng Shui expert came
out to work out where my cousins grave was to be buried and how
it was to be situated and you can't put trees in a certain
place because the spirits won't flow properly and you can't put
a concrete slab and a rock over the coffin because the spirits
can't get out through the concrete. How on earth do you think you're
going to constrain spirits? Spirits? By bits of concrete
and rocks and things. Now, these are intelligent people.
He's written a book about it. You can go and buy his book about
all this hocus-pocus. It's just nonsense. And they
claim to be wise, and yet, according to the Scriptures, they became
fools. To calculate without Christ is
foolishness. And so this man had an unclean
spirit. He dwelt among the dead. No one was able to bind him,
his words are irrational, and he gashed himself with stones. His life was self-destructive,
wasn't it? Everything, all the activities
of men outside of the Lord Jesus are self-destructive activities. They do us no good. We collect
all the things we want to collect. We collect experiences and we
collect things. But it's irrational. A cousin
of mine was buried in a box. Death says that there is judgment. Death says that you are not God. Death says that all the things
that you collect in this world will have no meaning. outside
of the Lord Jesus, there is no meaning. And lastly, this poor
man in verse 9 was entangled by a web of demons and a web
of sin. What is your name, says the Lord
Jesus. The Lord Jesus spoke to these
demons and commanded them, what is your name? And he said legion,
a Roman legion was over 6,000 troops. It could have been somewhere
between 3,000 and 6,000. I think the point of what's being
said is that the sin and the entanglements of Satan in the
lives of non-believers are infinite. and trying to keep them under
control by the activities of man in this world is as hopeless
as trying to keep 20 plastic balls down in a bath of water. We cannot do it by ourselves. We have no ability. We are blind. And so, such is the state of
this man, possessed by unclean spirits, possessed by a legion
of demons, dwelling with the dead. But then some remarkable
things into all this darkness comes the Lord Jesus. The light
of the world steps into this man's life. And it's the Lord
Jesus again, always, in all of salvation, who takes the initiative. He's the one who crossed the
sea. He's the one who went through
the raging storm. He's the one that came to the
Gadarene. and he's the one that caused
the Gadarene to run to him. So you call his name Jesus for
he will save his people from their sins. The man ran. Spurgeon has a beautiful
comment on this man running. He says, The needle of a compass
will move towards the magnet once the magnet has moved near
it. Our heart manifests a sweet willingness
towards salvation and holiness when the great and glorious goodwill
of the Lord operates on it. It is ours to run to Jesus, as
if all the running were ours. But the secret truth is that
our Lord runs toward us, and this is the very heart of salvation. Psalm 64 says, how blessed is
the one you choose and bring near to you to dwell in your
courts. We will be satisfied with the
goodness of your house, your holy temple. Psalm 110 is a famous
psalm about the Lord Jesus and it says that God will make his
people willing on that day. And so, in the name of the Lord
Jesus, we call on people, I call on you to run now to Jesus, like
this demoniac, with nothing but sin in us. with time fleeting
away from us and running fast, with eternity pressing down upon
us, with hell beneath and heaven above, a sinner run, run to the
Lord Jesus. If you would have forgiveness,
peace, pardon and eternal life, you must run for it. And this
I know, if you do, you will find God your Father running to you
in saving mercy, love and grace. When sinners need mercy, they
run to get it, and God runs to give it. The man ran to Jesus,
and he bowed down before Him. He worshipped Him, it says. So
it's an extraordinary confusion, isn't it, that there is this
man who comes running to Jesus and worships Him, and yet he
has this multitude of demons in him. Such is the confusion
of life before God's children are saved. and then he casts
the devil out of him. That devil that took captive
our father Adam all those years ago and brought sin and death
and destruction into this world, he is God's devil and God exercises
absolute authority over him. Jesus just speaks a word to the
devil. He speaks a word as they beg
Him. They implored Him not to send
him out of the country in verse 10. And then they ask him, in verse
12, having seen the large herd of pigs, the demons begged him,
it says, send us into the swine so that we may enter him. And
it's Jesus who gives permission. Just as he did with the wind
and the waves in the storm, Jesus gives permission. He commands
and it is done. And coming out the unclean spirits,
entered the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank and
into the sea, and about 2,000 of them, and they were drowned
in the sea." And so there is a picture here,
isn't it, of our Lord Jesus as absolute sovereign king of this
universe. These demons, a legion of them,
were compelled to come to Christ's feet and bow down before him,
like a dog who's been belted by its master comes cringing
to his feet. And so they must receive permission
from the Lord Jesus to do anything. He allowed the demons to enter
and to slaughter this huge herd of pigs. And there were about
three good reasons, no doubt many more, why the Lord Jesus
did this. He wanted this poor Gadarene
to know and remember what these demons of hell would have done
to him had it not been for his divine saving intervention. Please remember that the Lord
Jesus had constrained the demons even though there were 2,000
of them. They cannot operate in this world outside of God's
absolute authority. So he wanted this man to know
how serious his situation was. He wanted to get the attention
of the people of this region, and we'll see that he did. And
I think the Lord Jesus wanted the man to know that the destruction
of the demons was such that they would never return to him again. They were drowned in the sea. As 1 John 4 says, you are God's
children and have overcome them because he who is in you is greater
than he who is in the world. God's children have nothing to
fear from demons. They cannot indwell God's children. The natural Adam flesh of man
is ripe for demons to come and control. But God's children cannot. And for God's children, and for
all of Adam's children, we beg people not to have anything to
do with demonic things in this world. To have nothing to do
with tarot cards, have nothing to do with astrology. When you
see them, turn away from them. have nothing to do with those
fruitless deeds of darkness. But here we also have this wonderful
picture of the new man. Let's follow through some of
the wonderful things that have happened in this man's life because
of the Lord Jesus coming to him. Firstly, he has given him rest. In verse 15, they came to Jesus
and they observed the man who had been demon possessed. Firstly,
He was sitting down. This man who had been running
wild and screaming and unable to be chained even by man is
now sitting down. This man who had spent most of
his life amongst these tombs, naked it says, is now clothed. All of us come into this world
naked. All of us will seek to be clothed. We will do what Adam and Eve
did naturally. We will stitch together fig leaves. of our own righteousness, fig
leaves of our own works, fig leaves of our own religious activities,
and we'll wear those fig leaves as if it's a clothing. But God
strips away those refuges of lies, and He clothes His people. He clothes them with the righteousness
of the Lord Jesus. Like the prodigal son, who returned
and found the father running to him. He clothed him with the
family robe, the righteousness of the Lord Jesus. He put the
family ring on him. He reminded him of the everlasting
covenant of love. He put the family's shoes on
him, the gospel of peace, and he came and brought him and his
family to a banquet, the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus, the banquet
that God's people feed upon all the time. So this man was brought
to rest, this man was clothed, this man was now in his right
mind. God's children have the mind
of Christ. A right mind is a sound mind,
a mind that agrees with God, that says Amen to God's word
and doesn't fight and squabble with it. Someone said, every
man is out of his mind until he has the mind of Christ. But there's a reaction when this
change comes, isn't it? And we see that these people
who had seen all this became frightened. They became frightened in verse
15. So when God saves a sinner, others
who thought that they were all right are terrified by it often,
especially if the saved man was once one of them. These poor
souls were terrified in the presence of almighty mercy, God's love
for this man and his saving grace. Why were they terrified? because
they knew nothing about it. They still lived in their bondage. The only difference between them
and the demon-possessed man was that they were held in chains
and tamed by society. They mistook their change. They
thought they were free and He was bound, but in fact they were
just as bound as Him. And once again the Holy Spirit
shows us that fear comes when the Lord Jesus is revealed. The men on the boat feared for
their lives when they were about to drown, but when Jesus revealed
who he was, they feared a very great fear. These men who had
lived in fear of this demon-possessed man and wouldn't even go through
that way where he was amongst the tombs, now seeing this man
sitting down, clothed and in his right mind, they became frightened. They became frightened of something
else altogether. So the Lord Jesus changes fear
to another form of fear. And in verse 18, we have a wonderful
picture of something else that happened in this man's life.
If you can see it there, Jesus was leaving, having been begged
to leave by these men who were frightened. The demon-possessed
man begged Jesus that he might go with him. God's children, having met the
Lord Jesus, don't want to ever be parted from him. They have
such sweet fellowship with him when they meet with him that
the times when he's absent are times that they grieve over and
they long to have him back with them. He has promised that he'll
never leave us nor forsake us, but there are many, many times
in our lives when we feel that he's very, very distant from
us. This man pleaded with the Lord
Jesus that he might go with him. But Jesus had a purpose in saving
this man. He says to him in verse 19, go
home to your people. These people, in verse 17, had
begged Jesus to leave their region. Jesus left this man there and
said, you go home to your people and report to them what great
things the Lord has done for you and how he had mercy on you. Spurgeon said, can you not imagine
the scene when the poor demoniac went home? He had been a raving
madman and when he came and knocked at the door, don't you see his
friends calling to one another in fear? Oh, there he is again. And the mother running upstairs
and locking all the doors because her son who was raving mad had
come back. And the little ones crying because
they knew how he cut himself with stones because he was possessed
by devils. And can you picture their joy
when the Father opened the door? He said, Father, I am not what
I was. All the evil spirits are gone.
I shall live in the tombs no longer. I want to tell you how
the glorious man who brought my deliverance accomplished this
miracle. I have come home healed and saved. Oh, if such a one possessed with
sin was here and would go home to his friends and tell them
of his release, I think the scene would be somewhat similar. The
miracle seems to me to teach that the power of Christ to save
from sin does not lie in the person saved. It lies wholly
in Jesus himself. Further, I learned that though
the person to be saved has gone so far that you could scarcely
expect faith from him, yet the gospel coming to him brings faith
with itself and does its own work. The gospel is a seed that
makes its own soil. It is a spark that carries its
own fuel with it. It is a life which can implant
itself within the ribs of death. Yes, between the jaws of destruction. And so this man was sent not
just back to his own home and family. In verse 20, he went
away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis. Decapolis just
means ten cities. And he had a simple thing to
do, to proclaim what great things Jesus had done for him. That's our job as Christians,
isn't it? We proclaim the praises of Him. We just tell people what Jesus
has done for us. We bear witness in this world
to who Jesus is and what he has done. And then the scriptures
then take that witness and we see more and more and more. As
we go to God's word, we see the depths and the wonders and the
heights and the extent of that love of God. We get so excited
about Jesus at first, and then we realize that He's loved us
from eternity. We know that our sins are forgiven,
but then we see that He's taken them away completely and He never
remembers them anymore, that He loves us with an everlasting
love. And so this demoniac, this man
who seems so hopeless and helpless is sent off to be a preacher
in this region, a region mixed with Gentiles and Jews. And then in Mark's Gospel, we
have a wonderful picture of what happened in the Decapolis. In
chapter 7 of Mark's Gospel, the people were astonished. and they
talked about the Lord Jesus and said, He has done all things
well. As He came back there and the
people themselves brought death and others to Him. In Mark chapter
8 in that same region a multitude, a great multitude came to Him.
And Jesus fed this multitude, and the people were amazed. And
so this man was sent to proclaim Jesus. And he proclaimed Jesus,
and when Jesus returned to this region where they'd asked him
to leave, he was now welcomed and did great things there. So
such is the nature of it. Also in history, the Decapolis
is another place that is used mightily by God, when finally
God destroys Jerusalem. His destruction of Jerusalem
is done in a very powerful way. As the Jews revolted against
Rome and Rome said, enough, and they were going to crush the
Jews, what the Jews did is all the legalists, the Pharisees
and the priests and the leaders, all rushed to the one place that
they thought where safety was. As close to Jerusalem, as close
to the temple as you can get, they went there. And Titus came
and he besieged that city. 1.2 million Jews died in Jerusalem. You can read Josephus' account
of it and it's horrible. But something even more remarkable,
the legalists came into Jerusalem and were trapped there and died,
hundreds of thousands of them. But God's people were told to
leave. The Christians left Jerusalem
and they went to a town called Pella. Pella is one of the towns
of the Decapolis. And so the fruit of this Gadarene's
life is amazing, isn't it? And so it's a story that gives
us great hope, isn't it? Where things seem absolutely
hopeless, where we would look with the eyes of flesh and see
no hope, we see that in the Lord Jesus what's impossible with
men is possible with God. that when He comes to save, He
comes with all of His power, with all of what it is for Him
to be God. He deals with people. He takes
away all of their sins. The Lord Jesus doesn't create
possibilities, He creates realities. He doesn't make offers and opportunities,
He just does because He is God. and then God's people bear witness
to Him. And then we wait and see. It
might be a long time and we may not see much fruit of it, but
we wait and see what God does, because His gospel, His power,
and as Jesus said, His words are life. They are spirit and
they are life, and they do their own work. So this man gives us
great hope. No matter who we see around us,
we always have reason to pray and to hope that God may take
the worst that we can see, the most hopeless that we can imagine,
and use them in mighty and powerful ways, because He is God. Let's pray. Heavenly Father,
we thank you that the Lord Jesus came down from heaven suffered
the storms of sin in this world, suffered Your wrath, Heavenly
Father, and absorbed Your wrath for Your people absolutely perfectly. He took away their sins and He
now clothes all of His people with a right mind. With the mind
of the Lord Jesus, He takes away all of our sins and robes us,
Heavenly Father, with a robe of righteousness which is fit
and ready at all times of our lives for us to enter into Heaven's
glory where we will be like Him at times and see His face. We praise you, Heavenly Father,
for the Gospel of our Lord Jesus. We praise you for his finished
work. We praise you for his effective work in the lives of your people.
Amen.