Month: August 2016

Fearing to Trust: Do We Miss God’s Open Doors?

Asking Jesus to leave our village comes in different forms. We might ask Him to leave the job site, or our homes, or nights out with our buddies or girlfriends — whenever His presence is inconvenient to our desires. God knows this and gave us insight into our rebellion through a story showing townspeople asking Jesus to leave when He showed them grace and a light into their souls.

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. (Mark 5:15 ESV)

And they began to beg Jesus to depart from their region. (Mark 5:17 ESV)

THE LORD PROMISES GOOD THINGS for us — hope and a future — if we would trust Him, but so often, we shrink back into the familiar, afraid to take the next step.

What holds us back?

The synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) describe an encounter Jesus had with demons in the area of the Gerasenes region, where He dispatched a legion of evil spirits from torturing the town madman and sent them into a nearby herd of 2,000 pigs, who rushed down a steep bank and were drowned. 

The outraged and frightened herdsmen ran to tell the townspeople what had just happened (“ComWoman Sharing With Womane quick!” they might have said. “You won’t believe this! You know that deranged dude? And the pigs? Well, you’ll just have to see this.”), and the townspeople immediately ran to the side of the lake where Jesus was teaching His disciples. Once they arrived, they begged the Lord to leave.

What?!

+++

AS WE READ THE ACCOUNT, safe and comfortable in our armchairs, most of us cannot imagine how the townspeople could have begged Jesus Christ, the Son of the Creator, to leave their village, when He had just demonstrated God’s amazing grace by healing the town madman. Continue reading “Fearing to Trust: Do We Miss God’s Open Doors?”

Demons and Disciples: Two Responses to Jesus

Jesus shows us two responses to His earthly ministry. One is from the demons, who knew who He was and rejected Him; the other is from His disciples, who, through faith, followed Him, even without full knowledge of His person. Today, He invites us to follow Him on faith, not on knowledge.

“The disciples were amazed. ‘Who is this man?’ they asked. ‘Even the winds and waves obey him!’” (Matthew 8:27 NLT)

“And (the demons) cried out, saying, ‘What business do we have with each other, Son of God? Have You come here to torment us before the time?’” (Matthew 8:29 NIV)

TWO VERSES APART. TWO SEPARATE RESPONSES.

In Matthew’s account of Jesus Christ’s earthly ministry, two radically different responses to the man Jesus were presented a mere two verses apart.

In the first case, His disciples — that is, followers of Jesus himself — expressed amazement that Jesus could be awakened during a storm and, 

Two Responses to Jesus - Winds
Jesus calms the raging sea.

with a single word, stop a storm that threatened their small boat. They wondered who He was!

In the second case, evil demons — that is, followers of Satan — cried out in anguish that Jesus, whom they knew as the Son of Almighty God, had come to send them to eternal punishment before their allotted time. They were inhabiting a man who lived among the tombs and, knowing Jesus would heal the man, begged Him to send them to a nearby herd of pigs.

How strange that those who knew Jesus were following the wrong guy and those who one day would shape the world for His Kingdom still hadn’t caught on that this was God’s Son.

True enough, the disciples knew Jesus was special. After all, they had obeyed His call to follow Him and had seen Him feed 5,000 men (and many more women and children) from a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. Top that off when, in a desperate panic, they had just awakened Him from a sound sleep to tell them their boat was taking on water in a sudden storm.

Jesus-heals-troubled-man
Jesus heals a troubled man.

Even so, they weren’t quite sure what to make of it all.

The demons knew. James, a half-brother to Jesus, assures us in his New Testament letter that “the demons believe … and shudder” (James 2:19 NIV). So, the point is made that, at least with Jesus Christ, seeing is not the same as believing.

+++

AT FIRST GLANCE, it would seem that the demons were more in tune with the Creator of the universe than the apostles were, even though the twelve men watched the Lord daily heal the physically and mentally ill and teach with authority in the various synagogues. Continue reading “Demons and Disciples: Two Responses to Jesus”