October 10
October 10
God’s word reveals to us the horrible nature of evil. God includes such moments because he knows evil doesn’t always appear to be evil to us.
We have a problem. Evil doesn’t always look evil to us. Sin is deceitful. Sometimes, what is evil in God’s eyes actually looks good to us. It is scary to think about, but we have the capacity to look at what God says is ugly and see beauty. We can look at what is destructive and see something that will satisfy. For instance, a man goes to the store to pick up an item for his wife, and he lusts after a woman in the produce department. In that moment he doesn’t see the horrible selfishness and destructiveness of lust; no, he sees beauty. A woman cheats on her taxes. At that moment she isn’t filled with a sense of the ugliness of her thievery, but rather is filled with the excitement of what she can do with her ill-gotten gain. A man eating a third piece of chocolate cake is thinking not about the idolatry of his gluttony, but about the luxury of the taste of chocolate. We are in grave moral danger when evil doesn’t look evil to us.
In Mark 5, Jesus heals a man with a demon. This account is surely in Mark’s Gospel to support his declaration that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God. No one but the Messiah could stand before the legions of demons that possessed and controlled this particular man and command them to depart. In this moment Jesus acts with the unparalleled power of the Almighty. But there is something more that we should notice in Mark’s account of this healing:
They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. 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. (Mark 5:1–5)
Why does Mark give us such graphic details about the condition of this man? Why doesn’t he just say that the man is possessed by many demons and then focus on the miracle of Jesus’s delivering him? I am convinced that one reason the detailed description of this man’s horrible condition is in the Gospel of Mark is because God loves us. He knows that evil doesn’t always look evil to us, so he shows us what it looks like when evil takes complete control of a person. No one would ever read this description and think that evil produces anything good. Your Lord is working here to open your eyes, so you may hate what he hates and understand why he sent his Son to defeat evil for your sake.