Dealing with Demons, Part 1

Today, Chuck Swindoll sends a warning about the spirit world. Be aware, the enemy does not like to be exposed. And when the truth is proclaimed, he is especially hostile because he wants you to keep thinking he's not there and that his forces really do not mean all that much in our day. They are at work constantly in and around this wicked world. It's not uncommon to give little thought to the things we cannot see.

Out of sight, out of mind, right? Well, when it comes to ignoring the spirit world and the forces of darkness, the Christian can't afford to look the other way. Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll is teaching from the Gospel of Matthew and a passage that records a dramatic showdown between Jesus and two men under demonic possession. Through this study, we'll become equipped with spiritual weapons designed to defeat our invisible enemy.

Chuck titled today's message Dealing with Demons. You who are part of our ministry remember that we have been engaged in a study of the Gospel about Matthew. We find ourselves at the end of the eighth chapter. If you have a Bible, please turn to Matthew chapter 8. I'll begin the reading at verse 28 down to the end of the chapter. And once you locate that, you might want to put the outline that you've received over at Mark chapter 5. Mark 5, 1 to 20 is a parallel passage more in detail the events that happened in Matthew 8. So we'll be turning back and forth.

You might want to have that handy. Mark 5. And once you locate that, turn back to Matthew chapter 8. And I'll begin reading at verse 28. I'm reading from the New Living Translation. When Jesus arrived on the other side of the lake in the region of the Gadarenes, two men who were possessed by demons met him.

They lived in a cemetery and were so violent that no one could go through that area. They began screaming at him, why are you interfering with us, Son of God? Have you come here to torture us before God's appointed time? There happened to be a large herd of pigs feeding in the distance. So the demons begged, if you cast us out, send us into that herd of pigs. All right, go, Jesus commanded them. So the demons came out of the men and entered into the pigs. And the whole herd plunged down the steep hillside into the lake and drowned in the water.

The herdsmen fled to the nearby town, telling everyone what happened to the demon-possessed men. Then the entire town came out to meet Jesus, but they begged him to go away and leave them alone. We don't hear much today, even from pulpits, about the demonic world, so when we come across a section like this, our interest is piqued. In the time we have, we want to move into it to come to a little better understanding of what it involves, what it does and does not represent as the teaching of scripture is unfolded. You're listening to Insight for Living.

To study the book of Matthew with Chuck Swindoll, be sure to download his Searching the Scripture studies by going to insightworld.org slash studies. And now the message from Chuck about dealing with demons. Demonism is neither funny nor phony.

It is serious and it is real. As a result, we tend to go to one of two extremes when we come to the subject of demons. Either total denial, disbelief, thinking in our own minds that none of that is worth our time and energy, wasted effort to concern ourselves with that unseen world, it does not exist. And the other extreme is to treat it in a lighthearted way. After all, it may be there, but who really is that concerned about it?

I think there is a third, if I might add this. There are those who are inordinately preoccupied with the subject, and they see demons in virtually everything. One writer put it well, if Satan cannot pull you down, he will just as happily push you overboard. So that no matter what, it's the devil. My brother also in ministry tells of a man that he had been ministering to who believed he had the demon of nail biting.

Not really. It's like the demon of overeating. It's not the devil.

It's our desire for more food than we ought to be taking in. It's not about the enemy, it's about us. There's a whole lot of the wrong that happens that's our fault. I love the little story of the girl that had been mistreating her little brother. And she'd pull his hair and kicked his shins and finally the mother stopped her and said, why do you let the devil do that through you? And she said, well, the devil may have made me pull his hair, but kicking his shins was my idea. A lot of the stuff we do that's wrong is our idea.

It's what we want. But then there is the realm of the demonic. Whether you want to believe it or not, whether you want to make light of it or not, it exists. All of you and all of us who take the Bible literally understand that demons appear in the scriptures.

A couple of times mentioned directly in the Old Testament, more often in the New Testament, seven times in Matthew specifically, four times in Mark, once in Luke and once in John, and periodically in the letters. And from a gathering of information we draw from the Bible, we can make several statements about demons. They are actively engaged in evil objectives. They are devious, they are insidious, they are aggressive, and they are relentless. Not being humans, they neither slumber nor sleep.

They are forever at work, even when we are asleep. They are invisible, they are insidious servants of Satan, their father. They have supernatural power but they are not all powerful.

They certainly have more strength than we. They operate under this mysterious, we frequently refer to it as the permissive will of God. That means they bow to his authority. They obey his commands. They were never, to Jesus, a source of great disturbance.

They were more a nuisance. And it's clear from the way he dealt with them that it did not take a great deal of time or energy for him to dispel them. Martin Luther writes in his great hymn, and though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us, we will not fear, for God has willed his truth to triumph through us. The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him. His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure.

And I've always loved this one line, one little word shall fell him. We forget that. Because we are uneasy around invisible forces. And because we know enough to know that we are not as strong as they physically, it is easy to think that they and all their strength are able to take control of us.

Not so. They may attack, and their attack may make us miserable because of the vileness and brutality of their nature. But they need not overwhelm us or overcome us.

I failed to mention earlier something I should state. Demons are often the source of suicidal thoughts. They catch us in weak and despondent moments when we find ourselves feeling hopeless and they interject thoughts of suicide. There are those who play in the realm of demons thinking there's nothing to it.

And I have determined throughout my ministry to warn all people against that. You may see it as a game. They don't. You're in their field of battle.

And in that field, they are very much at home. You are not. I want to add this, too, because I've been engaged in preaching against the enemy and the dark forces throughout these more than 50 years. I have rarely seen it fail that when I speak of demons and Satan himself, almost without exception, attacks come my way.

Not only my way, but in the lives of those who listen and enter into it. I've experienced interruptions in worship services. I have been in the midst of situations that cannot be traced to any other source than the demonic realm. I was in a church service where the subject was introduced and we were moving through it and some of the plaster fell off the wall, if you can believe it. So watch out.

I doubt that's going to happen, but it did in that case. I've received letters and messages that from the strangest sources and later attacks in my own family. So I would add, without trying to be in any way sensationalistic or dramatic, be aware the enemy does not like to be exposed.

And when the truth is proclaimed, he is especially hostile because he wants you to keep thinking he's not there and that his forces really do not mean all that much in our day. There are multiple millions of them. They are at work constantly in and around this cosmos, this wicked world.

Let me clarify also because there's faulty thinking about it. The words demon possession are not biblical words. We have demon influence and demon oppression and demon obsession and demon possession almost as if there's a gradation of demonic activity.

There may be, but the word in the scriptures is always demonized. Demonizomai is the word demonized and it has in mind the idea of the activity of demons in the lives of human beings. The word describes the control a demon has over an individual so that he or she could not successfully restrain or control the demon alone. Alex Konya, K-O-N-Y-A, has written a fascinating book, Demons, a biblically based perspective.

In it he writes this of Demonizomai. It is the invasion of a victim's body by a demon or demons in which the demon exercises living control over the victim, which the victim cannot successfully resist. One is demonized when a demon or demons takes up residence in that person's body, resulting in degrees of derangement and the inability of the possessed to free himself or herself from the demonic control.

Possession, he refers to, occurs when the demons go beyond exerting mere influence and actually indwell their victims. That's what we find in Matthew 8 and Mark 5 and also in Luke 8, which is another parallel passage of the same account. Jesus encounters a man who has demons. Now the setting of this is very clearly arranged in Matthew 8. Jesus is at Capernaum, verse 5 it is, and then Jesus visits the home of Peter, which is in that same village of Capernaum located on the north-northwest corner of the Sea of Galilee. In the passing of time, Jesus tells his disciples to get into the boat and be ready to go to the other side of the sea. A little later in the passage, Jesus gets in with them, verse 23, and they together go through the storm and find their way to the Gadarene area or the Gerasene area. There are cliffs there today that might very well represent the place where this occurred.

As the crow flies, it's about a six-mile sail from Capernaum to the Gadarene area across the northern part of the Sea of Galilee, and that's the journey they took. And what they are met with is a terrifying sight. Terrifying. I've got my little ribbon from my Bible at Mark 5, and because it's a little more in detail there, I'm going to refer to that more often than I normally would, but Matthew 8 states that there were two men who were possessed by demons who met him, they lived in a cemetery, and they were so violent that no one could go through that area. Interesting term, a rare Greek term translated violent, used in Paul's words to Timothy toward the end of Paul's life, where he refers to the end times as being a time of great violence. Here and there as well, it has in mind a treacherous situation. One of my mentors used to render it savage times. The situation around the demonic individuals is savage-like. So much so that children and adults alike were not safe being around these individuals. When you get to Mark's gospel, one of the two is highlighted.

Doesn't mean there was only one, just probably means one of the two was more prominent and the spokesman for the two. So when we read that Jesus, I'm in Mark 5 now, verse 2, climbed out of the boat, a man possessed by an evil spirit came out of a cemetery to meet him. The man lived among the burial caves and could no longer be restrained even with a chain. Notice how strong the demon makes this individual. Whenever he was put into chains and shackles, as he often was, he snapped the chains from his wrist and smashed the shackles.

No one was strong enough to subdue him. Chances are good that most of you have never witnessed a demonized individual, or if you did, you didn't realize the source. It is obvious in this case that the man is beyond himself in strength, and there is a source of strength within him.

Please observe the relentlessness of the terror. Day and night he wandered among the burial caves and in the hills, howling and cutting himself with sharp stones. Should have mentioned that a characteristic of demonism is this masochism that accompanies it.

The tendency to hurt oneself as if to get rid of the evil within, and the man is literally slicing at himself with these sharp stones. We read further in Mark 5 verse 6 when Jesus was still some distance away. Now watch closely. The man saw him and ran to meet him and bowed low before him. Remember, there is one in greatest authority over all existence and that would be the Son of God himself. So this demonized individual reaches the presence of Jesus and he bows.

And now notice the response. The demon speaks through the vocal cords of the human being. Demons have no vocal cords. They are spirit beings without bodies.

When they are in bodies, they're able to use things within that human body, in this case the throat. With a shriek, he screamed, why are you interfering with me Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Interesting, he knows him. Every demon knows the Son of God and every demon knows that his days are numbered. Chuck Swindoll is talking about dealing with demons. And please keep listening over the next few days as we pull the curtain back and see the hidden world of demonic influence.

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The material includes background articles, application, and even a variety of relevant pictures. So whether you're a serious student of the Bible or you're just beginning to learn what it means to follow Jesus, we believe Swindoll's Living Insights commentary on Matthew will help you. To purchase both volumes, go to insight.org slash store. Or call us.

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