Listen, when Peter says this, what tone is he using?
There's two ways to look at it. Peter says, resist him! He doesn't say resist him.
He's just some authority in that. And I say when I read that, yeah, I've tried resisting him. He keeps coming. And the Bible says, well, keep resisting, because the alternative to no longer resisting the devil is not worth it. Resist him steadfast.
That's what he means. Keep on doing it in faith. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher, Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the Book of Mark.
Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Today, Pastor Rick will continue teaching through Mark chapter 9 and his message called Educated by Failure. Verse 20 now, Then they brought to him, and then they brought him to him. And when he saw him, immediately the Spirit convulsed him, and he fell on the ground and wallowed foaming at the mouth. Well, just as the boy's father described it. But the sight of Jesus triggered an event. It triggered an episode with this poor child.
And this also tells us, this is a little child. He didn't do anything wrong to deserve this. It happened because he was born into a cursed world. And what can, what are you going to do with that?
You're born in a cursed world. Let's all gather at the service and wring our fingers. Or are we going to say, Lord, where are my strengths and what can I do with them?
I know where my weaknesses are. I'd like to sidestep those as often as I can. But it's so typical of the devil taking a cheap shot and sucker punches. He's going to do this again. But the mute spirit made a scene before he was going to be cast out, giving the spectators a sample of his power.
This is permitted by Christ on purpose. There's a purpose for him allowing this exhibition. You would think, why didn't he just shut this guy down? He did it with the other ones. One of them, he said, put a muzzle on it.
I want to hear you talk again. But this, he lets this one show off a little bit. This one was defiant right in front of Jesus. This one is an especially defiant and daring and dangerous demon.
This one has the ability to kill. That's why he throws the kid in the fire when he can, or the water when he can, causing the parents to have to keep an eye on him all the time. And so usually when evil spirits cried out in terror when they confronted Christ, not this one.
This one was more fierce. Verse 21, so he asked his father, how long has this been happening to him? And he said, from childhood. He said, it's always been this way, born this way.
At early stages it showed up, at the very least. The Lord is asking publicly for a history of this lad and what he's going through, because he wants witnesses. He wants people to understand the spiritual world is very serious and has no mercy.
And he's dragging it out into the light and exposing it. And to this day, we're learning from it. He wants it on record. And it worked, because Mark published it and so did Matthew and Luke. Also, these are some of the details that would explain to his servants why they couldn't throw this obnoxious imp out of the child.
Because this one was a real bad guy. There are different levels of demons, and I believe they are the fallen angels. And I believe that, and while I'm getting ahead of myself, I'll get to those verses later, and I will, Lord willing.
But they got these details about what they're messing with here. And this explains why the Lord allows the defiance. He wants future generations to know. Paul said it this way to the Corinthians. He says, lest Satan should take advantage of us, for we're not ignorant of his devices. Paul's writing about dealing with sinners.
He says, you know, you've got to know when to hit him and you've got to know when to hold back. Because we know Satan is up to no good and he wants to destroy the individual. We want to find a solution. And if the individual that's trapped in some egregious outward sin, if we can find a way to fix this, that's what we want to do. Tolerating a sin's not going to work.
Yet, slamming the person with no solution is not going to work either, because Satan would get in there and do damage. Peter put it this way, be sober-minded, be vigilant, because your adversary, the devil, walks around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Listen, when Peter says this, what tone is he using?
There's two ways to look at it. Peter says, resist him! He doesn't say, resist him.
He's just some authority in that. And I say, when I read that, yeah, I've tried resisting him. He keeps coming. And the Bible says, well, keep resisting. Because the alternative to no longer resisting the devil is not worth it. Resist him steadfast.
That's what he means. Keep on doing it, in faith, knowing that the same sufferings are experienced by your brotherhood in the world. You have other brothers facing the same devil, and they're resisting him. And you are supposed to be part of the same body, the brotherhood.
So from childhood. Again, it's not a morality. The kid did not commit a sin. Some do invite demons in, others don't. Verse 22, and often he has thrown him both into the fire and into the water to destroy him.
But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us. You can hear the father's plea, my child. This especially violent demon, as mentioned, taking opportunity to destroy him. That's what he was after. That's the objective of the underworld. That's why we don't bargain with the underworld. And if you can do anything, discouraged by the failure of Jesus' disciples, the father still hopes. And so again, we may suffer great setbacks and defeats.
Paul wrote this, the great apostle Paul, the Jeremiah of the New Testament. We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed. We are perplexed, but not in despair.
Don't undervalue that. We don't know what God is doing, but we're not giving up. That's what it means. We're perplexed, but not in despair. We're not getting lost of faith.
He continues. Persecuted, not forsaken. Are you kidding me? I thought if you're being persecuted, Christ is not protecting you, so he evidently is forsaking you. That's carnality. Christians have gone to the stake and burned alive knowing Christ had not forsaken them. That's the whole idea behind Christ standing up when Stephen's being stoned and standing up to receive him.
I'm right here. I see them stoning you, but they don't see me bringing you into heaven. You see it, struck down but not destroyed. The church is still here, world, and the church will stay here. The church, as we know it, won't be here, but believers will be here through the great tribulation period.
The church will be outlawed, illegal, gone, but there will be converts during the great tribulation such as the world has never known. Paul said this earlier in the second Corinthian letter. Some of his experience as a great leader, a miracle worker, for we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came upon us in Asia, that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength.
And pause there. You've heard that he won't give you any burden greater than you can bear. That's not accurate. There's a lot of truth in it, but Paul is saying we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, and yet he had nowhere to go but up. And then he says, so that we despaired even of life.
We hated life. That's how bad it was for Paul. And yet, how does he go out? Total believer. And so, now that we're getting these fundamentals straight, but if you can do anything, he comes to Christ. He says the Father, here in verse 22 at the bottom, have compassion on us and help us. The mom is likely there. He's certainly including the child.
The father is at the end of himself because of his child's condition. Verse 23, Jesus said to him, now this must have hit the witnesses pretty strong because again, it is preserved. If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.
I'm going to get to the punchline right away. All things are possible to those who believe. What happens when I want to believe but I don't?
And that's what we're dealing with here. So this is very interesting to me as a human being who knows there is a God, who knows his name, who knows his nature as much as he is revealed, as much as I can handle. I know the character of God.
I look at Jesus Christ. You see the son, you see the father. This father of the child, he wanted to believe but he did not have belief enough. Not by the standards that Christ was calling him to believe at the moment and yet Jesus worked with a little bit of faith. He did that with the bread and the fish. I mean if he can multiply bread and fish, he can certainly do something with just a smidgen of faith. He doesn't turn the father away.
That's not enough. I told you if you could believe the impossible. Well, he didn't believe the impossible enough but he wanted to. Great struggle of trusting God in the midst of terrifying circumstances when you don't know what's going to happen. Well, are they going to skin me alive?
How far is this going to be allowed to go? I personally believe that Christians who are persecuted, God meets them. He doesn't just let them suffer as sufferers go. I believe he works with them through whatever it is they're facing.
Not to put a ribbit on it and call it something other than what it is. It is still persecution. Verse 24, immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, Lord I believe, help my unbelief.
Again, the word for child here is small child. Lord I believe, help my unbelief. This is without hesitation, without pretense. You're not faking it. Well, you know, I'm going to act like I believe because that's what he's looking for. He's flat out, I don't have it.
I got a little bit. I believe but I don't understand. I believe but I don't believe like you want me to believe. That's what Peter was saying, Lord I love you but I don't love you as much as I thought I loved you. And yet, the Lord did not chase Peter away and doesn't chase this man away, doesn't chase me away. Hell cannot beat our weakness.
That's what we have to learn. God's not stopped by it. If hell could beat our weakness, Christ would say, I'm sorry, the sign says you have to have faith this tall and you don't have it so you can't get blessed today.
It's not what he says to him. 2 Corinthians, Paul learned this, my strength is made perfect in weakness, not Paul's strength, Christ's strength. How many times have I have said that and felt that there has been no movement of God, no victory, no contribution from heaven and yet here I am still a believer. So the contribution was given and the proof is the faith.
The proof is in the faith, still trusting, still serving, still looking to do my best. Verse 25, when Jesus saw that the people came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit saying to it, deaf and dumb spirit, I command you, come out of him and enter him no more. This part where it says Jesus saw the people coming, running together and that's when he went into action is telling us this is not entertainment. I'm not trying to give people something to watch for the sake of watching it. He tells the demonic spirit to come out of him and don't come back.
It's critical, is it not? Which tells us he can come back and he has a whole parable on that one but he can't come back for this lad. Verse 26, when the spirit cried out, convulsed him greatly and came out of him and he became as one dead so that many said he is dead.
A parting cheap shot that serves no purpose but to terrorize the witnesses and harm the lad. If I cannot have you to torment, then no one else can have you to care for you. That's Satan and we find this in people. You find this in human beings that have this attitude.
If I can't have you to make miserable, then nobody can have you to take care of you. And God says we'll see about that. You know we're pretty much sheltered from the even darker evils that lurk. Any of you familiar with far-reaching ministries? They're facing evils that we don't get to see on a regular basis.
They face them on a regular basis and they take dealing with those things to another righteous level that needs to be given because they understand the activity of demons on human beings. Verse 27, but Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up and he arose. The Jesus factor makes a difference. If he doesn't take you by the hand and raise you up in this life, he'll do it right after this life if you belong to him. Had Jesus not touched him, then what would have happened?
Well, he probably would have been dead. So there the demon takes his little shot and leaving because he was a particularly fierce one. Verse 28, and when he had come out into the house, his disciples asked him privately, why could we not cast it out? They were disturbed. They were humiliated. They didn't let this go and nor should they have. It would have been something wrong if they were, I'm good.
They didn't do that. Their inability to prevail over evil bothered them. First, the first reason is what Jesus says, this kind, when we get to verse 29.
As I mentioned, a particularly fierce demon. But I want to repeat some of what we've already covered because I think it's that important. Sometimes we believers encounter defeat in ministry, in spiritual warfare, whether it is in the battle of our inner life to be pure or maybe efforts to reach others with the gospel or to help others, we encounter defeat. What would happen if we encountered these defeats and quit? Then we would be a defeat for someone else to have encountered.
The idea is to keep moving forward. Inner city ministries, you're going to face a lot of defeats, a lot of things you can't fix. They're that far gone. I think that the same sins operate in more middle class areas but they're more polished.
You can cover them up. You're better at dealing with them even in many cases than what's in inner cities where the tragedy has been allowed to just run for so long. It's so deeply embedded into the individuals and the families, it's very hard to get out. And yet, people in those families get saved nonetheless. Miracles breed a craving for more miracles if you're not careful, if you're not moving by faith. It is not now the normal to Christianity to perform visible signs. Not to say they don't happen, especially in foreign countries where the Bible is not available, where freedom is shut down. You do have higher reports from trustworthy sources of miraculous activities.
But in other areas where the word is allowed to be preached, that is supposed to be what carries the church and moves it forward and is used to save souls. Something spectacular is a wrong basis for faith. God said, what do I got to do? Juggle balls up in the, you know, what do I have to do to get you to believe?
How about I just show you the facts? Oh, that's not good enough. I wouldn't say that to the Lord. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God, Paul concluded. That's where it had come. But God used the miracles, they are part of the process.
But they weren't a permanent part. And so it is, I think, delusional to think that we can do miracles as the apostles, as many as we read in the book of Acts, just, you know, raising the dead. And if you say, I don't agree with you, Pastor, show me.
Very simple. But that's not the whole story. I know some of you cringe at this because you're not listening, maybe. All you've heard is no miracles.
Ah! You've run out, your head has run out of the building. Sir Robert Anderson, you know, he's British, if he gets a sir in front of him, in his book, The Silence of God, said this, the plain fact is that with all who believe the Bible, the great difficulty respecting miracles is not their occurrence but their absence. He says, I don't have a problem believing miracles, I have a problem that I don't see them. Why, how come I don't see the miracles anymore? He goes on to answer that, but I've already answered it better than him, incidentally.
Not true. Acts chapter 28, and it happened that the father of Pubilis lay sick of a fever and dysentery. Paul went into him and prayed and laid his hands on him and healed him. So when this was done, the rest of the house on the island who had diseases also came and were healed. So healings were taking place by who? The Apostle Paul.
Mass healings. Then we get to the end of Paul's ministry. He's in jail now.
Well, when he writes this, this is his next to last appearance in jail, likely. He writes, Erastus stayed in Corinth, but Trophimus I have left in Miletus sick. I couldn't heal him.
He's there sick, that's where I left him. This inability to continuously dole out the miracles was part of the process of God. Incidentally, Trophimus, whom Paul could not heal, he was present when that lad Eutychus fell out the window at one of Paul's long sermons.
You think I go a little long. Paul preaches until people drop out the window and die. Trophimus was there, and yet Paul could not heal him. So did Trophimus say, well, I can't believe this is a little one.
I've got a little bellyache. You can't fix it. He drops dead. You raise him up.
What's going on with this? He does not do that. There is no evidence that any of the apostles performed any miracles during the latter years of their ministry. You get to their letters, it is about the truth. It is about faith. And they did not say to Jesus Christ, the signs and wonders that we were doing seem to be fading, so we're not going to follow you anymore and preach you anymore.
That would have been right out of hell. Miracles faded as the church became strong in truth. In fact, when people were believing because of the message and the presence of the Holy Spirit, which is why he was given at Pentecost for us to be witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the outermost parts of the world. I believe in the gifts and miracles, but I believe in faith more. You cannot eliminate the supernatural from Christianity and still have Christianity.
It belongs here. Hebrews 10, verse 38, Now the just shall live by faith, but if anyone draws back, my soul has no pleasure in him. That's pretty serious. That's a pretty serious endorsement of faith. The just live by trusting God, and if you draw back from trusting him, you have my displeasure. So it does not say not that the just shall live by signs and wonders but trust even without signs and wonders. Hell hates our faith more than anything. He hates that we're simply going to trust God. He hated it in Job, and he hates it in every other believer. Verse 29, almost done, So he said to them, This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting. Don't lose the significance of this kind. Much of the information about demons and fallen angels is shrouded in mystery for us.
We were not told many details. There are other demons out there that are even worse than this one, far worse, locked away, thank God. We read about that in Revelation, Chapter 9. The key to the bottomless pit was turned and let these demons out like locusts. And then significant verse number, 9-11, Revelation 9-11, And they had as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in the Greek he has a name Apollyon, destruction.
This guy is so bad that right now he's locked up. He can't get out, and he's not going to behave until God releases him on the world to do what God wants him to do. A global spiritual emergency is coming.
And so when Christ says this kind, it is stated this way in contrast to worse ones. He says, can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting. Who's praying, praying, praying? Excuse me.
Couldn't get past that one. Who's doing the praying and the fasting? Who's doing the talking? Well, obviously, Christ fasted and prayed himself strong enough because who else has got this kind of power in Christ? And then we don't hear about the apostles always doing it that way.
How much prayer and fasting is not said? This kind of faith is uncommon. Is Christ saying to them, you know, sometimes there are those demons that are that strong that it will take me to do it? Well, I believe that, and we see it happening in the book of Acts. Now, I mentioned about the Bible not saying where these demons come from, but the Bible does say this in Matthew 25. Matthew 25, verse 41.
I should read that to you. He will say also to those on the left hand, depart from me, you cursed into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels. You see, I think that encompasses the demons because they're not going to be still walking around. They're going somewhere, and I think that the demons and the fallen angels are the same. Failure, it ruins some, but it educates others.
What are we going to do with it? When you fail as a believer, you get educated, whether it's in mercy and grace, whether you just cannot clean up the inner man, but you say, you know what, I'm going to learn to not be so critical of others because I know myself that I failed. Failure will either ruin your faith or educate it. Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio for this study in the book of Mark. Cross Reference Radio is the teaching ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. To learn more information about this ministry, visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com. Once you're there, you'll find additional teachings from Pastor Rick. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of each new edition of Cross Reference Radio. You can search for Cross Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. That's all we have time for today, but we hope you'll join us next time as Pastor Rick continues to teach through the book of Mark, right here on Cross Reference Radio.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-11-05 23:00:12 / 2023-11-05 23:10:02 / 10