Jesus went down to Capernaum, a town of Galilee.
He taught them on the sabbath,
and they were astonished at his teaching
because he spoke with authority.
They were astonished because they were used to hear teachers who were all talk. Some may have spoken at a high level of abstraction with no connection to daily life. Some may have promoted grandiose ideals. Others may have tried to impart some kind of practical wisdom which could be useful in daily life. But Jesus was different. His words affected the world more directly than anyone else the crowds had ever heard. His message was transformative. This was true for everyone who listened with faith. It was not merely a matter of some individuals finding a few interesting takeaways with which to enrich their experience of the world. It was rather than case that whole new vistas of reality and an entirely different paradigm were opened to those who listened with faith. It gave them not only something they could do themselves but itself did something within them. The words of Jesus were living and effective in a way that no one else's words had ever been. No man had spoken as this man had spoken (see John 7:46).
In the synagogue there was a man with the spirit of an unclean demon,
and he cried out in a loud voice,
"What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?
Have you come to destroy us?
I know who you are–the Holy One of God!"
When we hear the stories of Jesus casting out unclean spirits we tend to tune out. This is not a problem we are expecting to experience in our own lives. We wonder if perhaps the frequency of this sort of thing in the bible is some kind of cultural artifact or if these stories were coded ways to convey something that is merely psychological. But the enemy is happy to have us underestimate his presence and activity in our own world. We may often experience genuine spiritual warfare. But in order to survive it helps to recognize this is what is happening. We are meant to resist the devil so that he will flee from us. But we will not do so if we assume that the hostility of evil powers is merely a matter of bad luck. When we are being strategized against we will likely respond differently than to mere happenstance.
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you (see James 4:7).
It is a fair counterpoint to say that most people we know, from the very good to the morally corrupt and rotten, will never experience full-blown demonic possession. Thank God for that. Although to say that is not to say that all or most are free from some form of lesser oppression from the forces of the enemy, oppression from which Jesus desires to free them.
Even apart from the activity of the demonic we can still learn a lot from the way in which Jesus set such captives of demons free. Those demons caused individuals to perceive Jesus as a threat and to indulge in speaking all kinds of negativity. Step one for Jesus was to silence this demonic train of thought so that the hold evil had on the individual could be loosened. There might be a lot of resistance as the demon was cast out, as the attachment he had to the individual was broken, but even though this might have seemed worrisome to witness the demon was not ultimately able to do any harm to the him.
There is much in our own lives from which we still need to be set free. There is still plenty of disordered attachment and habitual sin that we need the authority of the words of Jesus to heal for us. But our minds do not always judge these things spiritually in the way Paul enjoined. We sometimes continue to think at the level of the flesh, to which all possibility of further growth and deliverance appears to be foolishness. We have received the Holy Spirit, but we do not always rely on the wisdom he teaches us in order to understand the world. We are meant to think, not as demons suggest, but with the mind of Christ. We need to be delivered, not just once at the beginning, but more and more. Let us listen to the words of the one who came to set captives free.
So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (see John 8:31-32).
No comments:
Post a Comment