Sovereign Over Swine

Mark 5:1-20 · 2024-08-18 · Jason Wolin · Gospel of Mark | Cross and Crown

Mark 5:1-20 · Demons, Healing. Sovereign Over Swine — sermon from Cypress Bible Church on BibleSlides.

Sovereign Over Swine Download discussion questions (PDF) Slideshow for this message can be viewed HERE Introduction When we read the gospels we are confronted with miracles and the supernatural and demons. What do we do with this? For a modern person we really have to wrestle with this. How would you respond to a person who asks: “You don’t REALLY believe in demons do you?” The best way to respond to that, is by pointing out that this is really just a subset of the greater question, “Do you believe that God exists?” Because as soon as you grant the possibility of a spiritual realm, you’ve opened up the logical possibility of demons. After all, is it logical to believe that a GOOD personal supernatural being could exist, but an EVIL personal supernatural being could not? You can’t have it both ways. If God could exists, demons could exist. It’s quite clear in reading the gospels that the person who most believed in a spiritual realm, Jesus Christ, also believed in demons. That’s a helpful starting place but it doesn’t remove all the tension as we read the Scriptures. A lot of the tension comes as we compare our understanding the world based our current scientific discoveries and the primitive ancient understanding of the world. We know that ancient cultures had some pretty wacky views of the world. They had worldviews that were constructed without the benefit of modern science. We don’t blame them, but we know they were wrong. When the crops didn’t grow they prayed to the god of the harvest. When they didn’t have kids they prayed to the fertility god. When it didn’t rain they prayed the god of rain. And we look at that and say, “Well, they didn’t have the advanced instrumentation and mathematical models to understand how weather works. They didn’t understand the many problems associated with infertility.” We understand these processes scientifically. There isn’t a need to try to explain this stuff spiritually. In the absence of these explanation, they had to find some reason, some cause and so that’s how these ideas develop. So many people will look at a narrative in the NT like this and say, “Well, all I see is this sort of primitive thinking. It’s primitive to equate physical illness with demon possession.” If you count them up, there are six examples in the NT where Jesus cast out demons. Three of these had some external physical manifestation of demon possession (blindness, unable to speak, and epileptic) and the other three probably fall into the category of what we would classify as severe mental illness. In all six cases, we as moderns would likely diagnose the cause of the problem very differently. So is this primitive thinking? The answer is no. You want to know why this the case. Jesus believed in sicknesses not caused by demon possession an…

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