6/20/21 Luke 8:26-39 “When Good Becomes Evil!”

18 Jun 6/20/21 Luke 8:26-39 “When Good Becomes Evil!”

6/20/21   Luke 8:26-39         “When Good Becomes Evil!”

When I first started being a pastor 15 years ago, I had very little experience in most parts of ministry.  I have held onto the Lord’s hand many times as I have stumbled my way through a series of ‘the first time I have ever done this’ events.  I praise the Lord for His patience with me and also the patience of the congregations we served.  One of the ‘first time I have ever done this’ events was the leading of our youth group and how it evolved.  The Lord was great in putting all this together.  I have noticed something of these young people and this was also true when our girls were of that age.  Many of them really like to hear a scary story; the scarier the movie the more they like it.  We have even played some games in youth group where we start out telling a story and soon it takes a scary turn.  I have a hard time comprehending this as I have never really liked scary stories or movies.  I feel that life is scary enough for me.  I don’t need to find other ways to be scared.  But I also realize that when I am with younger people like this, mine is a minority opinion.  Anyway, we have fun trying to scare ourselves.  Today we are going to look at a scary story from a very famous piece of Scripture of a demon possessed man.  Hopefully, there is much that we can learn from this.

As I just mentioned we like to scare ourselves.  G. Maynard Pittendreigh tells the story of a young person who was in a car accident and ended up drowning in a large river and they never found the body.  You guessed it, that area of the river was soon deemed as haunted and people would swear that they saw strange lights in the river.  This went on for many years and soon it was a legend of sorts.  Eventually a group of high school students got curious.  One night a large group of students came to see what this eerie phenomenon was all about.  It was very dark and they found the soft and muted light.  It took some time but finally one student got up enough courage to go down by the river and see what was going on.  As he neared the water’s edge, he suddenly heard a crash in the brush and something making unreal noises came out and chased him.  It scared him right up the bank and back into his car.  It turns out that two of his classmates had waited by the river to scare whoever came down.  This is another false legend revealed.  I have heard of many these legends over the years and most if not all of them are false.  I think that there is even a TV show about these things.  Once again it almost seems that we like to scare ourselves.

Now let’s turn our scariness to our reading.  Jesus had just calmed the storm at sea and now they set foot on the far side of the lake, a land that is considered to be pagan and relatively wild.  This is an area where good Jewish people would never set foot.  But I think that Jesus knows exactly what He was doing.  They land and immediately are met by a madman.  I would guess that the disciples had to be a little scared.  I mean here is a raving lunatic coming at them naked.  He probably had chain remnants hanging from his wrists.  He is living in the tombs which are a scary place to begin with.  This wild man comes up to Jesus and throws himself at his feet.

The point I am trying to make here is that there is evil in the world.  The people of Biblical times dealt with the devil in a straight forward fashion.  The Bible pretty much always just calls a spade a spade.  Here, Satan is dealt with as a deadly adversary.  And again, we have Jesus going right to the devil with his message.

In today’s world we have a lot of trouble calling evil what it is, evil.  It’s not politically correct!  We have talked several times about how we will try to do anything so that we don’t have to call something evil.  Just think about that for a minute.  Plus, we live in a world where evil is ok.  It is not only ok but it is good and things that are good are looked upon as evil.  If we had something like this happen today, we would have to say that the man in the tombs was mentally ill or maybe even normal by today’s immoral standards.  We would have to try to understand him.  We would have to delve into his childhood.  We would have to bend over backwards and give into his every whim, but we could not call him demon possessed.  That just goes against everything we do.  And yet, and yet there is something like a third to half of all people who are locked up for a mental illness who are demon possessed.  Amazing how blind we have become.  We could end up being called mentally ill for saying things like this man is demon possessed. Good becomes evil.  This is the type of thing that will become our downfall.

This may be a little off track but I have to tell you about an annual church conference I once attended.  They had someone keeping track of how many men spoke at the conference, how many women, how many young people, how many minorities and so on.  This data was then compared to the percentage of men at the conference, women and so forth.  This was then presented to the conference at the beginning of the last day.  We were supposed make some changes because one afternoon session there were 70% men speakers when there were only 48% men at the conference.  I think that it is fairly obvious to most of us that this is ridiculous.  If I had dared to bring this up, I would have been labeled as wrong and dealt with accordingly.  The point I am trying to make here is that now in this country we run the risk of being labeled as bad and wrong anytime we try to do the right thing.  Evil is in this world today as evil has become good.  As a matter of fact, evil runs this world.

Now before we decide that this is just a modern phenomenon, let’s look a little closer at our Scripture.  What happened here?  Did the people come out and cheer that this man had been returned to normal?  Did they cheer because evil had been sent into the lake or abyss?  No!  They embraced Legion and all of his demons.  They were ok with all of the things that he had done.  Instead, they send Jesus away.  They send good away so that they may keep the evil.  This is no different than the whole world that we live in today.  Our whole country has to be considered to be on the far side of the lake, pagan territory.  Evil is welcome and good is sent away.  Look at the United Methodist Church and how evil they have become!

Now let’s take a look at how Jesus reacts to this.  I have already mentioned that He came across the lake for this man.  Also notice that it isn’t the man who is talking here but the demons.  Jesus seems very calm about this and asks his name.  The demons inside the man answer, “Legion.”  This is a significant name because legion in the ancient context meant many.  A Roman legion was one of about 6000 men.  So, there are a lot of demons in this poor man.  It’s amazing he could even function.

And the demons know exactly who Jesus is and His power.  They beg Him not to send them to the abyss but they would rather go into a neighboring herd of pigs.  Just by this we see that the demons know that Jesus is boss and can command them.  So, Jesus sends them into the pigs and the pigs are driven mad by the demons and jump into the lake to get rid of them and they drown.  Jesus doesn’t send them to the abyss; they send themselves by being in the pigs.  This seems pretty familiar.  Jesus never sends anyone to hell; we find our own way of getting there.

One of the reasons I love to write sermons is that I always learn something.  My question was and maybe yours is the same, why did Jesus do all of this and as many as 2000 pigs died?  The answer was obvious after I read about it.  Matthew tells of this same incident only there were two men in the tombs instead of one.  Either way, the point is that one or two people are worth far more than thousands of pigs.  Jesus has dominion over all things including the devil and we find that we are far more valuable than all these pigs which would have been worth a lot of money.  Jesus will preserve our life if it is at all possible.

And when we think about it, this is what Jesus is doing today.  The evil that is around us is as real as it was 2000 years ago.  But Jesus is still there and he hasn’t given up.  I meet people all the time who have been really through tough times in life.  If something could have gone wrong for them, it has.  Sometimes these people keep reaching out for more pills or more medical care.  Sometimes they demand attention.  Unfortunately, the last place where they think to look for help is Jesus.  It seems that we have to go through the depths of suffering before we can find Him.  I know that I sure did.  I also know that there is not one thing that we can do that will drive Jesus away from us forever.  No matter what we have done or what we do, He is there waiting.  We can be naked and living out in the cemetery and Jesus will still be waiting for us just as He was there for man containing Legion. Praise the Lord for that!

I think that another word that we could use here is change.  Jesus changes lives.  This is what He did for Legion as He got rid of all the demons.  This is what He does today.  There are people here today that have changed lives because of Jesus.  The beauty of all this is that Jesus never changes lives for the worse.  You will always have a better life with Jesus than you have had without Him.  And this is always.  If you don’t believe it, then look what He did for Legion.  Here was a wild man.  He was crazy!  He would have been ranting and screaming.  He would be chasing people down the streets.  He was very strong as he could break chains.  All the people would have been scared of him.  After just meeting Jesus, just meeting Him, he ends up at his feet.  Then he wanted to go with Jesus.  That is a change that we can all see.  The same thing can be said of me.  I am totally changed from the person I used to be before I met Jesus and I wouldn’t trade this new life for anything.

So, we know that we have evil everywhere and that Jesus changes lives.  The reason that He does all these things is so that we can have a purpose in our lives.  Notice that Jesus doesn’t want Legion to come with Him on His travels.  Jesus wants him to go back to his family and tell everyone about what had happened.  In other words, he wants him to be the first missionary to this pagan region.  This is going to be one tough region to evangelize because, if you remember, these are the people who asked Jesus to leave and evil to stay.  These people are uncomfortable with Jesus.  So, Jesus has taken the toughest case of the area and made him into a devout follower.  Legion now has a purpose in life and that is to tell all the people he sees about what has happened to him.

I think that we are so fortunate today that we don’t have people who have lived with evil so long that they embrace evil and tell Jesus to get away from their lives or do we?.  I could name many people I have met who are like this and are doing this.  You don’t have to know these people for very long to find that they have no purpose in life.  Oh, they can tell you differently but deep down inside the only purpose they have is in fulfilling what Satan has planned for them and that is really nothing.

So how do we know if we are living out God’s purpose for our lives?  We have talked of this several times.  One of the obvious ways to tell if you are following God or not is by what you are doing.  Is it making you feel good?  Do you get that inner satisfaction by what you are doing?  Is what you are doing compatible with the Scriptures?  These are just a few ways to tell if you are on the right path.

Today we have talked about evil being real and I think that we all agree that it is very real and very scary.  We have talked about how God has sent us Jesus to preserve our lives or to change our lives.  He does this so that we can have a purposeful life.  This is also very real.

One of the things that I stress that really helps in these situations is to pray; read your Bible and pray.  There are many folks in this world and I wouldn’t doubt that there might be one or two here today that say that they believe in Jesus but they just don’t have time to read the Bible and pray.  I really struggle with what to say when I hear such things, because it has nothing to do with time.  It only has to do with priorities.  When you are thinking that you don’t have time, then you are actually falling into the trap that Satan has set for you.  He has tricked you.  He doesn’t want you to talk to God so he makes you as busy as possible doing things that are not right with God.  You do them so much that you think that they are ok.  As I said earlier, evil becomes good.

You don’t have time not to have a prayer life.  Sometimes it is hard to do and sometimes you will miss a time but be sure to come right back to it as soon as you can.  Think about it this way.  If you don’t have enough time or rather your priorities don’t include God, then why should God waste His time in blessing you.  I’m sure that He has plenty of devoted people to answer.  Also, He can’t answer your problems or help you in any way unless you ask.  Ask and it will be given to you.  Try not to be like our people in the story who embraced evil and shunned good.

It is not unlike a story told by James Chandler.  A father was watching his 7-year-old son play in the sand box.  He watched him move several large rocks out of the sandbox.  However, there was one very big rock that was giving him a lot of trouble.  He tried several times to remove this boulder.  But each time he would get it almost out, it would roll back into the sandbox.  Finally, the last time it pinched his fingers as it rolled back.  The father then came out to his tearful son and asked him what the problem was.  The son told him the whole story of what happened as only a 7-year-old can do.  Then the father asked, “Why didn’t you use all the strength you had?”  The boy said, “But I did.  I did.”  The dad responded by saying, “No you didn’t son.  You didn’t ask your dad.”  Together they moved the rock.

Together with God you can throw evil out of your life and begin a new one where Jesus is the number one priority.  Praise the Lord that He never gives up on us.  And thank you Jesus for first loving us.  Let’s pray.