Do you sometimes have to be reminded of things you know
well? All this week we have read these
passages from Isaiah where the Lord is reminding the people that He is the
creator, redeemer and sustainer. He has
reminded them that He is sovereign over all things, that there is no other like
Him, none which may be compared to Him, no God but Him. In all this He is reminding them that He is
their God, that they need neither fear nor follow any foreign gods. That this God is the God of Israel should be
both comforting and encouraging. He
promises deliverance in spite of their sins because of His everlasting covenant
with them. When God makes covenants they
don’t expire and they aren’t annulled by man.
The people surely needed to hear these things and to believe them as
they were exiled in Babylon. A foreign
nation and their gods looked for all the world to be triumphant, invincible and
invulnerable. At that time, however,
there was arising quickly the Persian empire to topple the Babylonian empire
and yet, in the midst of this chaos was the nation in exile, at the mercy, it
seemed, of its masters. That this nation
within a nation was vulnerable was simple to see and into the midst of all this
vulnerability and uncertainty came the voice of the Lord through the prophet to
reassure and comfort. A wonderful thing
and yet how can they believe against all the evidence to the contrary?
This man is a complete mystery. Jesus goes to the country of the Gerasenes
and no Gospel writer tells us why He went there, simply that they went. This was a place where Jews didn’t go, it was
completely pagan and one of the places where they believed the gates of hell were
set up and Jesus went to the worst place and the worst man in that area. He went to the tombs to a man even these
pagans were afraid to approach. Everything
about this scene, from the country itself to the tombs, the demon possessed
man, the cutting and therefore bleeding, to the pigs, screams unclean at a
level we really can’t imagine and yet this is where Jesus went with the
disciples. He went among the Gentiles to
reveal His power to them and left this man as a witness. If you want a picture of grace, unmerited
favor, God randomly choosing someone to bless, you couldn’t do any better than
this man.
We forget this important lesson most of the time. “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood,
but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over
this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly
places.” The problem is that we do
wrestle against flesh and blood and we use fleshly tactics and when we do, we
lose the ultimate battle, the spiritual one.
We fuss and fight amongst one another and when we do who wins? If we do our best to remember and remind one
another of this great truth we might actually gain some ground in this battle
and the kingdom might truly advance. As
it is we waste our time fighting the wrong battle and we waste our assets and
energies. We tie up our intellectual and
spiritual assets in futility. Jesus
didn’t go argue with the demoniac, He spoke to the real enemy and won the
war. Let us no longer fight silly
skirmishes when there is a real battle to be fought and won!
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