We’re talking about demons. I said at the start of the service, that’s why we have a kids program—to look after the little demons. Paul said, “Oh, mother-in-laws, are we?” That’s not fair to my wife’s mother-in-law. She’s lovely. My mother-in-law is also lovely. Miles said that’s decaf coffee, isn’t it? Demonic possession. It’s a tricky topic. I think when we talk about the topic of demons, we come to this with a whole spectrum of thoughts. If I went around the room and asked every person here, every second person would have a story associated with something of evil or an evil presence. For some of us here, the whole concept of an evil presence may be a very anchoring point of our faith. The realization of evil is a piece of evidence towards the realization of good, and yet at the same time, that same conversation could be the very thing that is a belief blocker to someone else.
That idea of thinking about demonic possession, the way movies have portrayed things, like famously *The Exorcist* has portrayed demon possession as this far-fetched, fanciful thing with holy water. Or you get movies where it’s much more fighting demons with guns and weapons. That kind of fanciful idea is so far-fetched that we can’t even grapple with that. The idea of demons becomes the very thing that hinders someone’s faith. We come to this topic with all those complexities. It’s a difficult topic to grapple with, and yet it faces us in the Bible. Here’s how I’m going to approach it this morning. I’m going to ask a series of questions and then seek to answer those questions. I’m also going to follow those questions up with what I think is often a better question for us to ask. One of the great challenges with talking about these kinds of topics is we really are reading in the margins of the Bible. That is, the small glimpses of this that we get through the text. We get little glimpses of it, and as we jump into those little glimpses, we get a picture of it. But it’s very dangerous that we build an entire picture out of one little glimpse. It’s quite hard for us to really nail down what we’re talking about. I’m going to answer some questions, and I’m going to follow them up with what I think are better questions to ask, and we’re going to spend a lot of our time in this particular text. So, buckle in. That’s what we’ve got coming.
The idea of demons becomes the very thing that hinders someone’s faith.
Question number one: demons and demon possession. Is it real? That’s question number one. I think we have a real worldview struggle here. The worldview struggle has a lot to do with where you’ve come from, what your background is, your cultural background. For some cultures and some of us here, that’s not even a difficult question to ask. We say, “Of course, demons are real.” For another group here, there’s a whole wrestle with a worldview around what is sometimes called naturalism or materialism. That is the worldview that comes from, “unless you can measure it, it doesn’t exist.” A scientific world has put us into that space. There’s something really helpful about that space, isn’t it? That we disregard things that we can’t measure. Unless we can measure it, we really can’t get a tangible grasp on it. What has happened there is in that worldview, the non-measurable has been completely dismissed as if it’s non-existent. I think many of us would resonate with some of those ideas and have that worldview whether we know it or not. Yet I think that worldview has left us quite lacking in answering some things that I think genuinely would make us uncomfortable.
I’ll give you an example. In the naturalistic, materialistic worldview, we end up with this idea that humanity is no more than what we can measure. To put it kind of crassly, at its most scientific basic level, a human is little more than $5 worth of chemicals and some electric impulses. That’s materialistic. That’s what you add up to. Now, if that idea makes you uncomfortable that I say, “What are you worth? Around $5 worth of chemicals?” If that makes you uncomfortable, it should. It should make you uncomfortable because that isn’t what adds up to be you, and you are not just what can be measured. You are not just the contribution you put to society. The other idea is people are only valuable based on how much other people value them. If someone is not known by anyone, then does it make a difference if they’re no longer existent? If that makes you uncomfortable, it should make you uncomfortable.
These are the reality. I think we live in a space where we actually dismiss the things that we don’t understand. That happens all the time. But the reality is, I think we’re more uncomfortable with some of that than we think. We are more than just the sum of our chemical parts. The Bible answers some of that question with the way it talks about humanity. Particularly, we see in Genesis, God breathes life into humanity. That word “breath,” *pneuma*—we get that word from pneumatics, air. That word “breath,” *pneuma*, is the same word the Bible uses to talk about spirit. The Holy Spirit is the *pneuma*, and evil spirits are the *pneuma*. That’s the language. That breath of life is the very thing for humanity that makes us more than the sum of our parts. It’s something that draws us into that picture of being made in the image of God. It’s more than just what can be weighed and measured. I think spirituality is actually more a thing in the back of our minds than often in a materialistic worldview we realize. For some of us, that may not even be an issue of the idea of spirituality, but it’s worth us wrestling with a little bit as we think about this idea.
The question is still there: Are demons real? I think the answer the Bible gives us is yes. That is uncomfortable for some of us to think about. One of the challenges we have as we come to the Bible is how we approach the Bible because it’s a 2,000-plus-year-old book, depending on what part you’re reading about it, and we’ve learned a lot about the world since then. Do we read the Bible as something that is 2,000 years old? Mark just didn’t know any better. He thought it was demons, but actually, it was something else. Our approach to the Bible is that it is God’s word that is inspired by God. That means the very words of it surpass the knowledge of the author. Yet we still read it with the cultural context of what’s happening there. But I think it’s undeniable when verse two says, “When Jesus climbed out of the boat, a man possessed by an evil spirit came out from a cemetery to meet him.” I think we have to read that as what the inspired word of God says: a man possessed by an evil spirit came out to meet him. I think the answer is, demons, demonic possession, yes, it’s real. I think the answer is a bit more nuanced than that. We’ll get to a little bit more of that picture, but I think that’s where we start.
Is Demonic Possession Just Mental Illness?
The second question, and related to it, is: is demonic possession just mental illness? Is it just something that they just didn’t understand better, and that’s all that it was? To be fair, this story above all others in the Bible, you’ll get that picture. Let me read that again for you and just follow through this idea of mental illness. We first of all get this incredible story of a man in an absolute frenzy, a frenzy that gives him incredible strength. This man, we’re told, verse three, “lived in burial caves and could no longer be restrained even with a chain. 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.” Now, on one level, that sounds quite supernatural, doesn’t it? Yet, at the same time, we know stories of mental illness where someone is in such a frenzy that the human body does things that defy what we feel like it should do. It still feels supernatural, but also it feels a bit like it could be a mental illness.
It gets more that way. Verse 5: “Day and night he wandered amongst the burial caves and in the hills howling and cutting himself with sharp stones.” Now we’re really starting to feel the mental illness kind of space, aren’t we? It gets even more so when he engages with Jesus. We get what feels like multiple personalities, doesn’t it? This is verse 9: “Then Jesus demanded, ‘What is your name?’ And he replied, ‘My name is Legion.’” Talking using the language of an army, “‘My name is Legion,’ because there are many of us inside this man.” It very much feels mental health-ish. I can understand why someone would lean into that space. But I think the story doesn’t allow for that. The story doesn’t allow for that, aside from the fact that it’s already told us that it is an unclean spirit. The story doesn’t allow for that for us because of what happens next. What happens next is these personalities, these spirits, plead with Jesus not to cast them out, but to send them into pigs. Jesus does that. We’re told these 2,000 pigs run down a hill and kill themselves in the water. I don’t think the story allows us to think mental health. I don’t think Jesus has thrown schizophrenia into 2,000 pigs in this story. I don’t think it works. I don’t think that’s an adequate answer for this story. Not only do I think we should take the word of God as the inspired word of God, I don’t think this story allows for it. I would say the answer to the question, “demons and demonic possession, is it real?” The answer is yes. But the answer is nuanced.
What Does It Mean to Be Possessed?
The question is, what does it mean to be possessed? The reality is, if you bear with me for just a bit of a deep dive in language here, the language that the Bible uses is quite varied. There’s not one kind. We translate some things like this verse says “possessed.” But a deep dive into the original language is much more nuanced than that. For example, verse two, quite literally, the word had a spirit, a *pneuma*, in him. The word “in” there is quite a broad word. There are two words for “in.” One is in Greek, *en*, very similar to English. The other one is *eis*, which is kind of like “into.” We get this phrase, “he had a spirit in him.” Sometimes we translate that word “with” or “alongside,” or there’s kind of like a unity. What does it mean to say he had a spirit in him?
We get another nuance later in the passage, and that is the language around the pigs. When the language around the pigs happens, the language changes, and the language is *eis*. It’s this “into” language. We get this nuance that what does it mean to be possessed by a demon? Is it *eis*, into, like consuming decaf coffee, the demon goes into you? Or is it with you? There are other stories in the Bible that have a whole spectrum of that. There’s a woman, we’re told, who has a spirit of weakness or illness. That spirit of illness causes her to be crippled, to be kind of a hunchback. The way that spirit of illness is portrayed is that she is, the language is, “freed from” that, not “out of” but “freed.” The Bible has a whole spectrum of that. I think we want to be very careful when we come to this idea of demon influence that we don’t grab hold of this internalized “something in someone” picture. The spectrum of the Bible is much more nuanced, much broader than that.
When I say yes, I think it’s real, I want to say it’s nuanced. The number of accounts where it is an affliction that feels like it’s very part of the person, who they are, is only a part of the picture we see in the New Testament. The biblical spectrum is far broader than even that. For example, Jesus is tested by Satan. Some similar kind of language of evil influence, but very different, right? Or in Timothy, Paul writes to Timothy, 1 Timothy 4, and he says, “People will be led astray by deceptive spirits.” Once again, that word *pneuma* is used. That seems like there’s an evil spiritual influence but quite different. Or the woman in Luke that has an illness spirit. The spectrum is broad. I just want us to come at it with that.
I also want to say, across the whole Bible, we have this real flood of stories of demonic possession in and around Jesus’ ministry, and it continues in and around Paul and Peter’s ministry. It doesn’t look like that anywhere else in the Bible. It makes sense that when the Son of God showed up on this planet, there was a push, a surge of evil in and around him to see his ministry put to a stop. It makes sense that in the early churches, as that movement continued to take off, that evil forces might have continued to have an emphasis there. It makes more sense across the whole Bible and across the whole world today that we may not see that kind of influence. What that is to say is it’s nuanced, but also we want to be careful not to be looking for these things under every single rock. Satan is not omnipresent. Demons are not omnipresent. They can’t be everywhere. God is the only one who fits that category. We want to be careful that everything isn’t attributed to that. I think there’s a far greater problem that the Bible speaks about consistently from beginning to end, and that is the problem of the human heart.
Where Are You Giving Satan a Foothold?
A better question than the question over “is it demonic possession?” is the question, “Where are you giving Satan a foothold in your life?” That is a far greater question, a far more broad and realistic question for many of us on a regular basis. The reality is that what comes from the evil world is alluring. It is portrayed as something in this story. Powerful, isn’t it? A man who can break chains. There’s a picture of power. Yet the other picture we get very clearly from this story is death. This man is living amongst the tombs. He is an outcast and outside of the other people. We might live in a space where we do see the allure of evil in different ways. The worldliness of our world draws us in. We want to be careful about where we are giving Satan a foothold. That language is used in the letter to the church in Ephesus, Ephesians chapter 4, where Paul is saying, “Flee from all this kind of worldliness.” He uses the language about anger. He says, “Even anger can give the devil a foothold in your life.” You get the picture of what that looks like. The idea of if you’re trying to climb a wall, the difference it makes when your foot finds a solid place to push up from—the difference it makes in your climb is a game changer for climbing a wall. The same thing is true here. When we give evil, when we give Satan a foothold in our life, we give him a place to increase influence, a place to climb up. Where are you giving Satan a foothold in your life?
A better question than the question over “is it demonic possession?” is the question, “Where are you giving Satan a foothold in your life?”
The Authority Question: Are We Able to Cast Out Demons?
Part two. Part one was the reality question of demons. Part two is the authority question. Here’s the question: Are we able to cast out demons? Once again, I think it’s actually quite hard to answer. Jesus does, certainly. He gives the power for his disciples to cast out demons. We get a couple of instances of that. The disciples directly. Susie and I have been watching *The Chosen* series recently, and we’re up to about season three. I love the scene where Jesus sends his disciples out. If you’ve seen it, there’s kind of this montage they do. It’s black and white, and the disciples are just out. There are no words. It’s just music, and they are just fumbling their way through the ministry. They are praying for people. You see it in their eyes. They go, “Oh, we’ll pray for them. This is not going to work.” By twos, they’re looking at each other going, “This is not going to work.” When they’re healed, the disciples—the way they’ve portrayed it, it’s not the Bible, I know, but the way they’ve portrayed it—the disciples are more impressed than the person that was healed. They’re like, “What? I did that?” When they cast out a demon, they’re like, “What? That happened with us? This is crazy.”
Jesus does give his disciples that authority. There’s another story where he sends out 72. We don’t hear a whole lot about who the 72 are. But they are given—they come back marveling that even the demons shuddered at Jesus’ name. So even not just the 12, but that power is given beyond them. Peter. There’s a point in the story of the early church where people say they’re trying to even have his shadow cast on them because of the power that is coming out of Peter’s ministry. Paul casts out demons. The early church does. Yet, not a single letter of any of the New Testament letters talks about it. There does seem to be a shift that happens there. I would be really careful here. I firmly believe the spiritual world, as I’ve already said, exists and is real. I completely believe that the gifts of the Spirit continue in the church today. Yet I want to say the emphasis for the church, the thing that Paul wants to constantly tell them to be reminded about, is not this kind of spiritual warfare, but the kind of spiritual warfare that happens in our hearts when we wrestle with temptation and sin. That is by far the emphasis there.
Whose Authority Do You Trust?
I think one of the answers to the question is thinking about what that means. It does seem like God has given his disciples, not just the 12, but beyond them, the authority that comes with Jesus. But I think there’s a better question to ask. And that is, whose authority do you trust? Because I think the danger that happens when we talk about this kind of thing is as much as we say it’s the power of Jesus’ name, the danger is we fall back on the person who might be casting out the demon. I’ve already done it. I’ve already talked about Peter and his shadow. I’ve already talked about Paul. There’s a danger. As much as we say it’s the authority of Jesus, we quickly move to, “Yeah, but this person has the gift.” I think that’s dangerous ground. The question is, whose authority do we trust?
I went down a rabbit hole a number of years ago on spiritual warfare. I grew up in Papua New Guinea, in a third-world country where certainly stories of spiritual warfare and things I engaged with fit that brief very much. To this day, as I look back at stories I heard, I still don’t know how many were real and how many were stories. I was a kid, and I heard these stories. I saw things or experienced things that I really can’t say what that fits as far as the picture of reality. But what I heard as well was this kind of spiritual warfare that displayed as this wrestle and argument that happened verbally. I think you know the kind of thing I’m talking about. I’m not trying to mock anyone here, but that kind of language that says, “I bind and break and loose in Jesus’ name! You have no place here! And in Jesus’ name, I cast you out, and you should be free!” It’s this ongoing rattle that happens—extended, fast, passionate, violent wrestle. I want to say that picture is not a picture of authority.
Let me use a very simple illustration. Many of you are familiar with the classroom. If you walked in and you heard a teacher in the classroom yelling to their kids, saying, “I’m the one in charge here! You guys have no place! The principal told me, and he said I can come in here. I can do anything I want, and you guys have to… and you better sit down!” Because you walk in and you hear that, you think that person doesn’t have any control over their classroom. But the teacher who walks into the classroom and says nothing, and the kids sit quietly at a table—that doesn’t exist. But the teacher who says, “Quiet. Listen up,” and the kids are quiet and listen up, that’s authority, right? If you take the same picture with the military, the general who says, “Charge!” and people charge, the general who says, “Stop!” and people stop, that’s authority, not the one who wrestles and argues.
That’s the first thing I’d say. That’s just an illustration. But even more, drawing into exactly what the Bible tells us. Jesus tells us how to pray. In fact, he gives us an example prayer. The exact words, and it sounds nothing like that. Every single demonic possession story we have in the Bible sounds nothing like that, ever. No one ever talks like that. It doesn’t exist. I don’t want to say if you’ve come from that kind of background—I really don’t. I understand that the spectrum of Christianity is broad, and I have a lot of love and passion for other churches that are much more focused in spaces of spirituality. But I want to say that when we look in the Bible, the Bible shows us what spiritual warfare looks like. These are the words: “Your kingdom come. Your will be done.” The authority is there in Jesus. The end of the Lord’s prayer: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
It’s not a wrestle. It’s not a fight. It’s not a battle. It’s not a command. It’s not demanding. It is asking the one who has the authority to do his thing, his way in our lives.
I think that’s the picture of spiritual warfare we have. The better question to ask is, whose authority do you trust? I want to say this before I go on to my final question. If demons exist and if there is some level where God has invited his people to pray, and he’s given us a model to pray that says, “deliver us from the evil one,” then we should. If you ever want prayer for any of these things, healing or spiritual wrestles, I will always be willing to pray for it. It’s not something we commonly do in this kind of language in our church. We have, and I am happy to anoint people with oil. That is a picture of prayer we get in the Bible. I’m happy to lay hands on people and pray for them. That’s something we’ve done in our church, and I’m happy to do that. If you would like that, the invitation is there because we believe in a real God. We believe there is more to this world than what we can measure and weigh. We’re invited to ask. So, let’s do that.
Why Does It Seem to Happen in Some Countries and Not Others?
One last question. Why does it seem that demon possession seems to happen in some countries and not others? If I ask the question even more, it seems like sometimes we hear these stories more from what feels like less educated countries than more educated countries. If I was to put the language of a skeptic there, why does it happen in some countries and not others? The Bible very clearly says Satan is clever. He’s a schemer. It’s the first picture of the serpent in Genesis, that he is more crafty. I think it’s fair to think that Satan is going to always aim to use what works best. The reality is, across the Bible, there is a whole set of schemes that we see at work. This is not the only one. It’s right to think—and this is extra-biblical, this is thinking just logically in our world—it’s right to think that in a place where spirituality is much more likely to result in fear and capturing people’s hearts when they see manifestations of these kinds of things, it makes a lot more sense that Satan would use those strategies in those places. In other places where we are inclined to dismiss the spiritual and think it doesn’t exist, dismiss it as other things or coincidence or an unexplained something else that’s going on, it makes sense that maybe that’s not used as much.
But I think we have to put the final caveat on it, and that is that in some third-world countries, some other countries that are more open to it, there are stories that I think probably aren’t spiritual warfare that people think were. There are things that happen in the West and in other countries that are less inclined to it where spiritual warfare is happening, and we dismiss it. I think both those things are true. It’s right to say the spectrum is there as well. We see misdiagnosed situations in both. Famously, the French poet Charles Baudelaire said, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn’t exist.” I think that is true sometimes when it comes to spirituality. It is a powerful thing for us to just dismiss spirituality entirely. I think that evil has played their game well in that space.
What Captivates Your Heart?
I think a much better question to ask is, what captivates your heart? Because here’s what we see. Anything outside of Christ is a prison. Anything that captivates your heart outside of Christ is a prison, and we need to be set free from that. What captivates your heart? Just a quirky part of this story as it comes to its end is this story of the pigs. What’s quirky about it is Jesus casts the demons into these pigs. They run into the water. The village people come. They see this man sitting at Jesus’ feet, calm, and what do they say? They say, “Leave us.” Isn’t that crazy? This guy has been running around, cutting himself, howling, can’t tie him down. Now he’s sitting calmly, and they say, “Oh my goodness, we don’t want a guy with this kind of power around.” Or maybe it’s their livelihood that’s upset them. 2,000 pigs is a lot of pigs. One pig will feed an entire village for a feast. 2,000 pigs are a lot. To be fair to these people, Jesus, the non-pig-eating Jew, shows up there, kills 2,000 of their pigs, and they go, “How dare you? This is our livelihood.”
Whatever has captivated these people, whether it’s fear of that authority or whether it’s losing their livelihood, they are captured by that. They are imprisoned by that so much so that they cannot accept Jesus for who he is. The question becomes, what captivates our heart? What are the things that draw us away from Jesus? What are the things that close our mind off to the work of the Holy Spirit? What captivates your heart? Because anything outside of Jesus is a prison.
Anything outside of Christ is a prison, and we need to be set free from that.
It is a tricky topic. I’m happy to talk more. I’ve tried to condense a whole lot in there of what we see across the Bible, and I’m happy to keep talking about it. I think where we need to land is the authority of Jesus and the freedom that he offers. There is a great promise that he will indwell in us his Spirit, the Holy Spirit. That is an invitation that is transformative. That is an invitation that will transform us more and more to be like him. We should invite that and seek to be captivated by him. In the name of Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.