Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Where Evil Comes From | Mark | Mark 5.1-20

Starting point is 00:00:05 Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. A few years back, a Yale-trained researcher, author, professor, and practitioner of psychiatry named Dr. Richard Gallagher made quite a splash in the mental health community because he wrote a op-ed in the Washington Post explaining how evidence from over 30 years of practice in research had led him to believe in unseen e-gallegrook. evil, the demonic. His article begins with the story of a patient he met in 1980 who could tell people their secret weaknesses without ever even meeting them. He told the story of meeting with this person for the first time, and when he met with her, she described in detail how his mother died painfully from cancer. And this wasn't the last experience that Dr. Gallagher had like this. It led

Starting point is 00:00:59 him to ask a question, and he posted that question in the Washington Post. I'll just read from his little op-ed. Is it possible to be a sophisticated psychiatrist and believe that evil spirits are, however seldom, assailing humans? Most of my scientific colleagues and friends say no, but careful observation of the evidence presented to me in my career has led me to believe that certain extremely uncommon cases can be explained in no other way. His point is clear. He knows mental illnesses. He spent his entire career working on them, and yet he's seen things which cannot qualify as mental illness, which are, after much observation, unseen evil. If I'm to be honest, I kind of actually identify with Dr. Gallagher's critics.

Starting point is 00:01:44 I've never had supernatural experiences of the demonic. Demons don't figure much into my daily life or my picture of the world. And I can't help my own skepticism. When I see Jesus cast out demons from people, and I kind of think, well, that actually looks a little bit like epilepsy or maybe a multiple personality disorder. So is the Bible confused? was Jesus mistaking mental illness for demon possession? But then I read someone like Dr. Gallagher, and I think he makes a compelling point. Shouldn't we ask the question? Shouldn't we at least think

Starting point is 00:02:13 through it? There are realities he and others have experienced, which demand us to at least ask the question. Could unseen evil be real? And could it really be influencing our world? It's not just with individual stories. How do we explain Nazi Germany, American slavery, the Rwandan genocides, without at least considering the possibility of, again, unseen evil influencing our world. Speaking personally, I've wondered if I struggled to believe in the unseen realm, if I struggle to believe in unseen evil because I've grown up in a naturalist culture, where supernaturalism is always suspicious, not because I've got a good case against supernaturalism, just because that's what people like me believe in a place like this. And as a result, our thinking about

Starting point is 00:02:58 Unseen Evil is atrophied. It's immature. It's not adult because we haven't grown up thinking hard about it. A little story makes my point here. A few years back, there was a nine-year-old named Jack Davis, and he heard what sounded to be the coolest job ever in the world. It was posted at NASA, and the job that they posted was a planetary protection officer. And so nine-year-old Jack, he gets out his letter writing paper, maybe he even had a little Jack Davis letterhead, who knows, and he starts writing his application for the job. He explains to them. He explains to them. He gets them that he's seen almost all of the space alien movies out there, that he is fully committed to re-watching men in black as many times as necessary to do the planetary protection job.

Starting point is 00:03:39 He signs the note, Jack Davis, Guardian of the Galaxy, fourth grade. It's a cute story, but a planetary protection officer doesn't protect the Earth from aliens as cool as that would be. They track asteroids that could collide with the Earth. So when it comes to the demonic, sometimes I feel like we're all nine-year-olds who've seen the movies and the TV shows about the demonic. And I wonder if our picture of the demonic is mostly shaped by horror movies and stranger things and images from our culture. And so when we read the Bible, kind of like Jack Davis reading about the planetary protection officer and all he's seen as Guardians of the Galaxy, we're reading our Bible and we're reading these stories of unseen evil. And we think it matches

Starting point is 00:04:16 what we've seen on television. Jesus and Mark's thinking about the demonic isn't based on horror movies or TV shows. It's not childish thinking about the demonic. It's mature thinking. and it's deeply realistic. It cuts straight to the heart of our bigger questions about evil, injustice, what's wrong with the world and how it might be fixed. In Mark 5, Jesus gets off a boat, and he confronts a foreigner who's been living in tombs, and this person cannot be bound by iron. Let's pick up the story. And Jesus asked him, what's your name? And he replied, My name is Legion, for we are many. And he begged him earnestly not to send him out of the country. Okay, so let's pause in the story. Did you catch the demon's name? It's Legion for We Are Many. And did you catch the

Starting point is 00:05:02 demon's request? He says, don't send us out of the country. Doesn't that sound like a weird request to you? I mean, how about don't send us to hell instead? Maybe that's what we would expect him to say. Why are these demons afraid of getting sent out of the country? It seems totally out of place with our picture of what demons are. We need to put on our first century sandals for a moment because Mark's original audience would have known some things when they heard this passage. First of all, they would have known what a legion was. A legion was the name of a division of 6,000 soldiers in the Roman military. Now, Rome used these legions to occupy foreign countries like Israel. And so Rome's message was clear. They said, look, if you rebel against us, your occupier, you will die. And people tried, and they did die.

Starting point is 00:05:51 So what do you think the average Jew hoped his Messiah, his king would do? Well, he expected the Messiah to come along and to kick the legions of Rome, which were occupying Israel out of the country. Do you see what's happening in Mark? We have a Jewish Messiah who is confronting a legion, occupying a man, and what is that legion's request? Don't kick us out of the country. Don't end our occupation. So what's Jesus do? Verse 11.

Starting point is 00:06:19 Now, a great herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, and they begged him saying, send us into the pigs, let us enter them. So we gave them permission, and the unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs, and the herd, numbering about 2,000 rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the sea. With a single word, their occupation ends. The Legion has a momentary reprieve in a herd of pigs before Jesus deports them out of the country. So the occupation is over. Messiah one, unseen evil, zero, and Jesus hasn't even broke a sweat. But we have to not miss the irony here because it's super thick. This is great ironic stuff. On the one hand, this story is exactly what Jesus' Jewish audience would have loved. Sending a legion into a herd of unclean animals who run off a

Starting point is 00:07:05 cliff and die, that's exactly what they wanted to have happened to Rome. Get those unclean swine out of Israel. But you've got to see the two-edged sword. Because the man Jesus rescues, he's not a Jew at all. He's actually Greek. And the problem that Jesus is dealing with isn't the legions of Rome, it's the power of unseen evil behind Rome. The Jews in Jesus' day had a serious political problem, Roman occupation, and they wanted, they needed a political solution. But the throne of the Roman emperor is too small for Jesus. Political solutions were too small for Jesus. He didn't come to take sides. He came to take over and to defeat the powers of unseen evil, which are behind every Rome, behind all political machinations. We think that the

Starting point is 00:07:51 answer to all the world's ills is to just defeat the other tribe. We've got to get the bad guys out of the country. We need to deal with the other political party, whoever that is. Maybe it's people who don't share my gender. Maybe it's people who don't share my race. Maybe it's people who don't share my sexual orientation. My politics might fill in the blank. We've got to get rid of those people because they're the problem. But Jesus shows us that the real problem, behind every problem, is the power of spiritual darkness, sin, and death. And much to people's surprise, he hasn't come to deal with the superficial problems, the ones that we tend to think of as the main problems, but he's come to deal with the root issues. The demons take this guy off the field of God's

Starting point is 00:08:30 purposes for his life. The same powers of darkness take cultures and civilizations off the field of what God wants them to do in the world. So today, I want you to pray for yourself. Ask that King Jesus would set you free from the powers of sin, from the powers of darkness and death. But likewise, I want you to pray for this world. Not that your enemies would be destroyed, dismantled, or defeated, but that God's kingdom would destroy the powers of darkness behind that evil,

Starting point is 00:09:01 that the people held in its grip would be set free. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually.

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Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Where Evil Comes From | Mark | Mark 5.1-20

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