Life of Christ #6- Jesus Went After the One Everyone Forgot | The Compassion of Christ

Whatever it is, they don’t want it. It’s a bad place. They did end up in the water, but not by any deed of His own. Now this brings up the question of…there are two references in the New Testament about demons and water. The Lord tells a parable of the haunted house and… I believe it’s a haunted house…and He says, and they go about in waterless places, and then He refers here: they are thrown into the water.

Brothers and those of you out there, be careful. You let your imagination run away with you a little bit. You don’t call things into focus sharply. You cheat a little. You cheat a little there and a little here, and who knows what you come up with. And so I am really using tonight as a night to balance in the midst of some really wild stories, to try to bring some things into balance. Well, you know the story. He cast them into the pigs, which seems to be a fitting place. The pigs, in turn, vote no. The pigs make a decision. I’d rather be dead than demon-possessed, and they take off for a cliff. And it is 2,000, is it not? 2,000 pigs go over the side, fall into the sea, and drown. What happens to the demons? We don’t know. I guess you could build a theology on the idea that if you can get a demon inside somebody and get that somebody dead, then the demon’s dead. I don’t have any idea. There’s been a lot built around that, too. I don’t know that much about demons. I don’t know any on a first-name basis. They did go into the waters. Perhaps that was their abyss. Perhaps nature came again and did the will of God.

What fascinates me is the value that men put on pigs; pretty shocking. But they chose their pigs over God. Maybe they didn’t know they were doing that, but they chose pigs over God. This story got back to town immediately, and the people came out and stared at Him, and they saw those corpses floating in the water. You can imagine what 2,000 dead pigs lapping up on the seashore looked like to those folks as they peered over and verified the story. And here stands this Man, and here stands a mad man…or here sits a mad man at His feet. They fall down in front of Him and beg Him to leave. They don’t beg Him to come; they beg Him to leave, and the only reasonable assumption is they were afraid they were going to lose more pigs.

There are a lot of people, or maybe you, maybe me, who want to keep the Lord out of certain territories because we’re afraid we’re going to lose more pigs. There might have…that might have been pig country. That was a Gentile country. That wasn’t Jewish country, and here was this Jew who just wrecked the pork market. That’s a lot of money, and that’s a lot of pigs; people won’t be able to get any pork in the market next week…and they’ve got other pigs on other mountains.

And there’s more, of course, to it than pigs; they’re afraid of a man with that much power. But it is incredible to me that the loss of pigs is what started it, and on that basis they ask the living God to depart from them. I don’t consider that a compliment to those people. Fear. Misplaced fear. Fear that went off in the wrong direction. Tom, were you about to say something? Audience: What happened to the demons?  Gene: What happened to the demons? Maybe they died in the water.

Now, brothers and sisters, I come to the end of this evening and come to the end of this story, and I have to laugh at myself. I have been sitting here trying my best to make you very conservative and very exact. Call this the way it’s written, not the way somebody would foul it all up, but I have to tell you that this story ends about as wild as a story can end. There is no way to get out of it. To me, it is absolutely incredible.

Here is a man who is cut and bleeding and naked with chains on him, and he is scarred, and he is unshaven, and he is wild, and he is absolutely the worst sight in the world, and he is at the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ right where He belongs. Here is the world’s most incredible theologian. This man is a theologian’s theologian. How long has he spent with the Lord? An hour? Two hours at the most. The Lord tells these people, “Alright, you’re afraid you’re going to lose more pigs. You’re afraid of Me. I will not come where I’m not wanted. I will leave.” He starts back toward the seashore, and this man comes, falls down before Him, and says, “Lord, take me with You.”

I don’t know if this man even knows Jesus’ name yet. Perhaps by now he has learned His name. He knows He’s the Son of God because the very demons within him testify to it. He wants to go with Him. The Lord looks back at the Gerasenes, and He thinks about that territory from there to Damascus, and these people don’t want Me. Well, I’m going to fix them well.

The Lord ordains an evangelist, and I’ll tell you, this man has got to be not only one of the greatest theologians who ever lived, but one of the greatest evangelists this earth will ever know. The Lord tells him to go home, tell his family what happened, and proclaim the work of God. This man, with no more information than that he has been healed, the demons have been cast out, and this is the Son of God, starts one of the greatest tours ever. With no more information than that, he goes back and evangelizes the Gerasenes.

He goes back to Gerasenes, and he goes to Hippo, or whatever the name of that town is, and all of those other big-name things, and all the way to Damascus, and he goes into village after village and city after city, and he stands in the marketplace and says, “Come here, I want to tell you a story. You see these scars; I put them on myself. You see these chains? They used to be on my hands. You see this face? It used to be mad. I am the man you heard of who once inhabited the wilderness and the mountains. You heard my screams at night coming over the valleys and hills, and something happened to me, and I want to tell you what happened to me! I was delivered by a mighty hand. I met the Son of God, and I know he was the Son of God because the demons even said He was the Son of God. I know He was the Son of God, and I met Him, and He healed me, and He saved me. He told me to come here to this town, into this marketplace, and to tell you to repent of your sins and trust in the living God. Wow. Praise the Lord.

There’s the story, and you can’t make that conservative, brothers. You can’t make that conservative. This is one wild story. Perhaps some of those villages later, when the disciples spread throughout all of Israel, came there and found that Man or found His converts or found people who said, “Yes, we heard, we heard of Him. We heard Him by a man who was once mad and possessed a legion of demons, and the man told us that God had had pity on him.”

That story encourages me because sometimes I need God to save me. Sometimes I need Him to heal me. I have needs. Sometimes I need God to forgive me; sometimes I need Him to direct me, give me hope, and give me faith…but there are times I just need pity. I need pity, and I have called out to the Lord, “Lord, have pity on me.” I don’t doubt that that man in those rare moments of rationalization would sit there with his bloody hands buried in his face and say, “God, please have pity,” and God heard him and sent His Son to pity him.