Life of Christ #1 – What It Really Means to Follow Jesus | True Biblical Discipleship

I’m going to ask you brothers, in all of your reading — and I would suggest this to those of you listening, even if you’ve read it. Pick up The Master Plan of Evangelism by Coleman and go back through it again sometime soon. If nothing else, just kind of review it so that as we penetrate the life of the Lord, we can remember that something is going on here besides His teaching, besides His healing, even besides His position as Savior and Lord. Everything that is happening, at least 24 eyes are watching it, actually, probably around 40 eyes. Probably around 20 people eventually became His very close inner circle. Frankly, I doubt if there were many people outside that circle other than the masses. Some people talk about the 20 and then the larger group, but it was basically the Lord and 20 people.

Okay, now we come to the passage that falls next: Mark 1:21 and 23–28 and Luke 4:31. We have the introduction of healing, and we have suddenly here at Capernaum been introduced to demons…or a demon. This is the first time Scripture brings up the subject, and it makes no introduction. Mark obviously thought everybody understood what demons were, and he just says “demons,” and he has left us, of course, with 2,000 years’ worth of conjecture. And now, brothers, I’m going to conjecture about demons. What are they? The answer is: neither I nor anybody else in the universe knows, not on this planet at least, what a demon is. (Author on demons) did us a great disservice when he conjectured that demons were left over from the earth’s former creation. That was speculation, but so was his idea of a former Earth. He had the idea that the earth had been created, it had fallen, and it had been created again, and that demons were citizens of the first fall of the first civilization, and then had gone through some fall, the recreation of it, then Adam and Eve were created, and so on. A lot of people teach that as though it were in the Scripture. That was pure, unadulterated conjecture. There is not only not a verse to back that up; there is not even a thought to back that up.

I think the question that I want to ask is: to what realm do they belong? Do they belong to this realm or to the other realm? Every passage of Scripture in the New Testament that I find shows the other realm to be the Kingdom of God and under His rule – totally a Kingdom that is His. I know Job records Lucifer coming into God’s presence, but I still don’t find that realm inhabited by dark beings. In contrast, we get the very distinct impression that the outer atmosphere of the earth is where the forces of darkness live.

A passage of Scripture speaks about demons going into waterless places, and the monks of the 3rd century believed demons lived in deserts, so they moved out into the desert to battle them. What you ended up with was a bunch of crazy single brothers out there seeing all sorts of stuff that didn’t exist. Very young, dumb, and old, dumb single brothers covering the entire Sinai desert, living in caves. It was a mixed-up world out there, to say the least.

Waterless places. I have this sense: a demon is a spirit, but a spirit that does not have light and is not light. The Spirit of God is light. The spirit within you is and has light. There is light in that spirit. Imagine a spirit in which there is the opposite of light; there is darkness—literally, a darkness-kind-of light. You understand what I’m saying? It emits darkness. My own judgment is that whatever a demonic spirit is, it belongs to this realm; it is a spirit that is darkness.

Sometimes science helps us understand things better than we could ever understand them ourselves, and it sometimes finds the inexplicable, especially in astrophysics. They come up with interesting things, and as they delve into the particles of the universe, they are finding that gravity is almost a universe within itself, that there are three elements to our universe, and two of them, by their very nature, have light in them. But gravity is void of light. And gravity is either made up of something that is non-matter or so small in matter that it defies comprehension.

Scientists speak of a shadow universe around us. To explain it, they would conjecture: if there were people in the shadow universe, the universe that belongs only to gravity, the element of gravity, there would be no light in that universe, and the only way they could communicate with us would be through gravitation. We would never pick them up on our radio scopes. If they had some dirt and dropped it in your hand, it would go right through your hand, because its elements are outside of the electron and the proton and those things that make it up. It is a realm in which there is no light. And it does exist. They have been able to find it, though they know little about it. They call it the shadow universe.

Well, think in terms of spiritual things. Spirits without light, but rather who live in and abide in a realm in which darkness is in itself an energy and a force. I don’t know a whole lot about demons, but I can tell you two or three things about them. One is that they could see the unseen because they knew Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and it was obvious they wanted him known as the Son of God. He did not want them to declare him the Son of God, and it’s possible he was even trying to keep that fact secret because being the Son of God belongs so much to the spiritual realm. He was coming as the Son of Man, who lived in the physical material realm and was doing what he did as a man for the sake of man to redeem the tragedy of Adam. And the demons seem to have been trying to shift the attention. They were trying to shift the scenery on the stage to his godship, whereas he was coming as man to man to rectify the fall as man.

Well, anyway, that’s one thing. The other one is, and I’m just going to have to give my own personal testimony. I made a decision when I was a new Christian to not worry about devils and demons, demonic spirits, and I never have. And interestingly enough, I have never had any great encounters with them. Now, I have brothers who live right next door to me who see them and encounter them all the time, and they’re on their bedpost, and they’re under their house. They’re up in the sky, and they’re running life, and they’re messing up the world and politics, and half the people around them who got one, and I made the decision that I was not going to concentrate on them. I have never been afraid of one, I’ve never encountered one, and I don’t worry about them. I tell you that I live a far healthier life as a Christian. I know I do more than a person who concentrates on them. In fact, I would almost conjecture that the powers of Satan are only strong when they are allowed to be by concentrating on them.

I think we do a great disservice to the Christian faith by giving a great deal of attention to them. If we have to do anything, if we are ever put into a position where we have to do anything, we have to simply recognize that they were crucified. The powers of darkness were crucified on the cross of Christ, and the Lord Jesus Christ had a very healthy attitude toward demons. They were something to be brushed aside as quickly as possible and go on with work. He stood at the cross and beyond the cross in his dealings with them. He saw himself as the total conqueror of them, which he was upon the cross.

Now, we live beyond the fact of the cross; in time and in space, we are beyond the cross. That’s very helpful to us. We don’t have to imagine by faith that we’re beyond it—we are beyond it, and we look back to it and see his victory and our victory. I really would beg you, if we are to have the mind of our Lord and if we are ever to get back to a moderated and sensible practice of the Christian faith, well, some of us who have a natural predilection to being obsessed with dark spirits are simply going to have to lay it down.

Years ago, a little catchy phrase went around America. You would say, “Have you seen Joe or John?” And even if it were your brother or your mother or your sister or your dad, you would say, “John who? Joe who? Mary who?” And I would say that the best thing for any of us to do is when someone brings up the devil or Satan, you could say, “Satan who?” as though you had never heard of him. I assure you, your walk with the Lord will be healthier.