Jesus Heals A Man With Demons
JESUS HEALS A MAN WITH DEMONS
LUKE 8:26-39
Jesus remains calm in the presence of those who were frightened and disturbed.
Gadara lay across the lake somewhere on the eastern shore where the hills rise steeply near the Yarmuk Gorge. By this time it must have been almost dark, an eerie time to meet a violent maniac emerging with a yell from the tombs. In the cool presence of Christ the distraught creature became harmless, and begged the Lord to depart. He was Legion, he cried, torn and rent by a possessing host of evil things, tramping, tramping through his hot brain like a marching regiment of Rome.
Perhaps he had once hidden, a terrified child, or ran screaming from some bloodstained village street, when soldiers of the garrison systematically cut down parents and playmates in reprisal for the murder of some Roman soldier. And there were graves of the Tenth Legion in Gadara. Sir George Adam Smith, the geographer of Palestine, found the headstones on the site. Cast out from society and haunting the tombs, the broken-minded man saw the hated name, and went mad with passion, breaking bonds asunder and tearing his body with stones.
The Lord had to prove to the stricken creature that he was healed. It cost two thousand swine. How valuable is peace of mind? How precious is a soul redeemed …. The folk of Gadara, preoccupied with swine, bade him urgently to depart. They were in Christ’s presence and preferred swine. They had God’s salvation within reach, and chose swine.
Christ forces himself on no one. He went, but left behind the first apostle to the Gentiles, the healed lunatic. It was the Decapolis. A million Gentiles lived in its ten towns. The first missionary, in his borrowed fisher’s cloak, set out to evangelize.
Notes 8:31: “abyss”—the abode of wicked spirits (Romans 10:7; Jude 6; Revelation 20:3). 8:39: there was no need for secrecy here to avoid a false Messianic rising; this area was predominantly Greek, not Jewish, which helps to account for the presence of the swine.