We are creatures of habit. Good ones, bad ones, useless ones. In this case I'll mostly be talking about the bad ones. Usually we don't understand that something has become a bad habit, aka demon, until a situation occurs that shakes up our little worlds. A good friend once told me, you can't change by being told about your flaws, you have to be shown. As I've been reading through Mark this past week I've realized that Jesus works in that very manner.
I didn't quite understand Mark 3:12 the first time I read it. In the verses prior to it, Jesus has been casting out evil spirits who shriek in pain as they realize that He is the Son of God. In verse 12 Jesus commands these evil spirits not to tell anyone who He is. It is written "Jesus sternly commanded the spirits not to reveal who He was." For some reason I could not wrap my head around the fact that Jesus did not want everyone possible proclaiming who He was, until I studied the story about the demon-possessed man in Mark 5.
When I started to read this passage today I thought that it was the perfect kind of scary, ghost story fitting of the Halloween season we are in. It tells of a man who was possessed by so many demons that he grew more and more twisted until he began to stalk through the cemetery every night howling and cutting himself with sharp stones. Some of the towns people became so terrified of him that they tried binding him in shackles and chains. However, the man was so strong with evil powers that he would snap the chains from his wrists and smash the shackles on his body. This man was quite a beast but still no match for the JC.
Jesus confronts this man head on and the demons, collectively called Legion, "begged Him again and again not to send them to some distant place." (v. 10). So in a move that would piss off PETA in a big way, Jesus casts the demons into 2,000 little piggies and sends them all the way home to the bottom of a lake. Now, anyone who has ever lived in a small town knows that big news spreads fast. Even trivial news spreads like wild fire in a rural town such as this, so one can imagine that word of Jesus' actions would get around quickly. The surprising part of the story is not that everyone finds out but how they react once they do find out.
Verse 17 depicts the crowd begging Jesus to "go away and leave them alone." Why would they do this? After all they knew about the struggles the demon-possessed man faced for so long and how he terrorized their town, how would seeing him healed and sane not drive them to worship Christ? It's really quite simple. People have been the same since the beginning of time, and we have always preferred the devil we know to the angel we don't. Those townsfolk we terrified of the demon-possessed man yet they grew to be comfortable with that terror. They knew that evil and thought it wasn't that bad after all. Jesus challenged them to flip their world upside down and recreate their understanding of what God was doing in the world as well as what He was calling them to do.
The demon-possessed man fell on the exact opposite end of this spectrum. Verse 18 shows the man begging to go with Jesus as He left town. Why was his reaction so different? Because he experienced the evil first-hand and the change that followed. The man was shown his flaws while the towns people were merely told about theirs. When he experienced the renewed life Jesus offered him he knew that there was no going back. The townsfolk merely saw that Jesus disturbed the life they had come to know and accept. Loosing that life was not worth gaining the true life that Christ offered them.
I wonder how often we do this in life. Obviously most of the time it wont be such an overt experience that threatens the demons in our lives but it's still noticeable every time we choose to move away from God in support of our own selfish motives. Jesus is constantly trying to show us the error of our ways but too often we have to become raving lunatics wondering around grave yards at night first before we let Him change us. Ok, that's an exaggeration I know, but we still need to be vigilant about ridding ourselves of the devils we know when there are plenty of angels out there waiting for us.
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