Mark 5:1-20 - The Only Person Jesus Told No

Hello. Welcome back to Tabernacle Talk. And today we are in Mark 5.

As we've been journeying through this first portion of the Book of Mark, we've been wondering about who is Jesus. And we saw in Mark chapter 1 that God says that He is His beloved Son and whom He is well pleased.

We saw Jesus' power over demons, over sicknesses.

We saw His teachings and His care, His forgiveness of sins, His claim to be the Son of Man from Daniel 7, the one that would dismantle and destroy this world's kingdoms and set up God's righteous rule instead.

We've seen how He ran afoul of the religious crowd of the day, that they had their interpretations of God's Word and their laws on laws on laws that they added. And Jesus says, you've missed the point.

Your use of God's law has been to destroy people and to harm people, to make it so that they do not receive things like food or even healing from injuries. And He says, you've completely missed the point.

We've seen how His family members and how the scribes and religious people, they have said that Jesus was crazy, that He was demon possessed, and that's how He was doing all of these incredible things.

And we've seen how He firmly rebuked that and how He began to teach in parables saying, hey, here's these heavenly truths masked with just these earthly stories, these things that you all know about as farmers, as agricultural people.

And I'm just going to give you a story about soil and seeds that you sow. And then He expounded on what it truly meant to those that really wanted to hear. And then yesterday, or whatever last episode was, we saw Jesus.

He went from kind of the Capernaum region, kind of that shore side of the Sea of Galilee, and He was going over to the region of the Decapolis, the Ten Cities, a Greek and Roman area where the Jews didn't really venture as much.

There wasn't as much recognition of God's holy laws, not so many kosher things on that kind of gentile side of the Sea of Galilee. But this is where Jesus was going with His disciples.

And we saw kind of a demonic attack against Jesus trying to destroy the ship that He was in. But He rebuked that wind and that storm, and He told it, Peace, be still, be muzzled, silenced. And He has power even over nature itself.

He has power over the spiritual beings and all that they control. And it shocked His disciples that He was able to do all of that. And that's where we find ourselves now.

We just come from this incredible display of power, and now we enter into Mark 5 and verse number 1. They came to the other side of the sea, to the region of the garrisons, or gatherings, gyrgocenes, depending on how some of the spelling things work.

As soon as He got out of the boat, okay, first to note, Jesus is the only one that gets out, which is a recurring thing that we'll see throughout this story.

As soon as He got out of the boat, a man with an unclean spirit came out of the tombs and met Him. Okay, demon-possessed guy running out of the tombs towards Jesus. It's a little freaky.

And as we look at Matthew's account of the passage, again, Mark is always right to the action, and so he gives you like all of the basic details. Matthew elucidates on this a little bit. Actually, it might be Luke.

I can't remember right off hand, but Matthew or Luke fills in. There was another guy there, but he wasn't really doing any of the speaking. And so Mark just focuses on this guy.

So it says in verse number three, this demon possessed man lived in the tombs and no one was able to restrain him anymore.

Not even with a chain, because he had often been bound with shackles and chains, but it torn the chains apart and smashed the shackles. No one was strong enough to subdue him.

Here's a person that, much like Samson in the Old Testament, he has such power that he has from this demonic spiritual being living inside of him that what would normally be physical limitations, he doesn't even have anymore.

He can just destroy anything that he wants. And obviously here there's some enmity, animosity between him and people that they are trying to chain him, they are trying to subdue him.

Verse number five, night and day among the tombs and on the mountains, he was always crying out and cutting himself with stones. Here, like this is torment and anguish that this demon is bringing into this man's life.

And this is what Satan wants for every person, for them to be isolated from everyone else. Here, he's out in the tombs and the mountains. He's far away from people.

He's alone. He is in anguish. He's crying out as we would read, as we would read in some of the parallel accounts.

This man was naked. I've heard some sermons before referencing this man as the nude dude in a crude mood and found some humor from that. And so he has no clothing.

He has no house. He's without the basic necessities that God wants to give people. And here he is self-harming that there's a hatred and a destruction, not just of everything around him and his relationships, but even of himself.

And this is what St. wants for every person, alone, isolated, depressed, without basic necessities and harming themselves in many ways.

Verse number six, when he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and knelt down before him and he cried out with a loud voice, what do you have to do with me? Jesus, son of the Most High God, I beg you before God, don't torment me.

For Jesus had told him, come out of the man, you unclean spirit. So here, though this demon has been tormenting this man, and Jesus says, hey, get out, you're done. And the demon goes, oh, please don't torment me.

Don't do to me what I've been doing to this guy, for goodness knows how long. And here the demon, it says, I beg you before God, don't torment me. So here a demon is begging.

That's very interesting. And verse number nine, what is your name, Jesus asked him. My name is Legion, he answered him, because we are many.

Now this could just be a demon, like speaking grandiosely. A Legion would be up to 6,000 soldiers in a Roman unit. And so there's at least some possibility that there might have been more than one demon that was hanging out.

I forget if it's later in Mark or if it's in one of the other synoptic gospels that there's an account given of Jesus is talking to the Pharisees and he says, you're not really doing anything good for people.

Like, you're temporarily cleaning out their life, but you're not like inputting the Spirit of God into them. And so it's like you send out a demon from a man and the demon wanders far away.

But eventually, like he makes his way back and he notices, hey, like everything's totally clean and swept, but there's nothing really in here. There's no Spirit of God in here.

And so he goes and he brings seven of his buddies and they live inside of the man.

And it says, basically, you've just made him more miserable, a worse existence than he had beforehand before you came along with all of your moralizing that doesn't actually do anything to give people the Spirit of God or help them to have a

relationship with him. So it could very well be that there were multiple demons that were there. I do want to counter one kind of oddity that I've heard before.

Sometimes people, I understand it's in a desire to be biblical and to follow biblical things, but they'll take perhaps sometimes things of mental illness and people that are struggling with those types of things and view that as demonic, as people

being indwelt by demonic beings, and they will try to say, okay, I need to figure out the name of this demon, and if I can figure out its name, and so I'll ask this person who I think is demon possessed, I'll ask them what their name is, and if I can

get their name, then I can have power over them, over the demon, and I can tell it to leave. Honestly, there's a lot of kookiness that's going on there. Here, even as Jesus is interacting with this man, there's some unique things that we don't read

about in other places. This is the only demon that we read about in the Gospels that Jesus asks the name of, and there's at least some significance here.

This area of Gidera of Gergesa was a place where there was a very famous Roman legion, the legion fraternist, that they were stationed in this area of kind of Palestine-Israel region. And their emblem was a boar, which will become very apparent.

So here it was a very Roman patriotic place as far as the present Roman legion living there. As far as they were concerned, it was patriotic.

It was a place that was, if you think about it this way, Jesus has interacted with the political forces in Israel. They have not been fans. Jesus interacts with the spiritual forces.

So I'll phrase it this way. He's interacted with the religious forces of the Pharisees and the scribes. He's interacted with the spiritual forces of the demons.

And then even as he's crossing over the Sea of Galilee, he interacts with the storm and sea as being from Satan, and even some of the Psalms would lend some insight to that. And then now he's interacting with political strongholds as well.

And what Jesus says to this, actually, no, I'm going to back up one second. So here you have this man, he's got all these demons. The claim is I'm legion, so I'm up to 6000 demons because we are many.

Verse number 10, and the demons begged Jesus earnestly not to send them out of the region. They say, oh, don't we like it here so much. Don't make us leave.

Verse number 11, a large herd of pigs or boars, swine, were there feeding on the hillside. The demons begged him, OK, so they're begging again. Send us to the pigs so that we may enter them.

So Jesus gave them permission and the unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs. The herd of about 2000 rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned there. OK, suicidal pigs, what in the world is going on?

So it's unclear whether the demons were like, OK, we're going to kill these pigs or if the pigs were like, oh, no demons and they killed themselves, it doesn't state it there in the passage, so all we have is conjecture.

I've heard it referenced before with the political affiliation of the boars there. This would almost be like, you know, 2000 bald eagles killing themselves in America after demons enter into them.

It would be quite a shock and somewhat of a like civic outrage of what in the world like, you can't do that, this is a problem.

And I do want to mention real quick, so in fifth or sixth grade, I was in a Bible quizzing team thing at my church, and it was a whole sport thing. You would memorize pretty large portions of God's Word. There would be questions.

There was a whole buzzer system. It was a lot of fun, but we had to have team names. And because during that year, we were memorizing the Book of Mark.

I chose my team name was Legion and the Pigs. And I actually have a shirt that says Legion and the Pigs. And it's got the emojis of the devil and a pig.

And it's a great conversation starter to talk about Jesus. Even just little humorous things can point to Jesus. Use every way you can to talk about Jesus.

So verse 14, The men who tended the pigs ran off and reported it in the town and the countryside, and people went to see what had happened.

They came to Jesus and saw the man who had been demon possessed sitting there, dressed, and in his right mind, and they were afraid. For most people, if they see a man and he's running and naked and crazy, that would cause them to be afraid.

But this man, who after interacting with Jesus was different and now was sitting and clothed and in his right mind, it brings fear.

And sometimes who you are as you grow closer and closer to Jesus, as you become new in him, it might shock people that you are not the party animal. You are not the cursing sailor. You are not the jerk that you used to be.

And may we have that kind of change in our life, that repentance that we are no longer, we are observably no longer the person that we used to be.

Verse 16, those who had seen it described to them what had happened to the demon possessed man and told about the pigs. Then they began to beg him to leave their region.

OK, so I don't know if you guys have noticed, there's been a lot of begging all the way through and here these people, and again, they are nearby Israel where you could not have pigs, like you couldn't eat pigs, to touch a pig, it was unclean.

We went over all of that in the Book of Leviticus. And so here's people and they're doing, they're raising livestock that is against God's law, but they don't have like a recognition of wow, this man can command thousands of demons and they obey him.

Instead, they're just kind of worried about their either civic or the financial loss of these 2,000 boars. And it says that they begged him to leave their region. Okay, so so far, everyone that's begged, the demons begged Jesus, don't torment them.

They begged him not to send them out of the region. He listened to them for that too. And now the townspeople are begging him to leave their region.

Verse 18, as he was getting into the boat. So Jesus is the only one that's been interacting with these people the entire time. The disciples have not made it out of the boat.

As he was getting into the boat, verse 18, the man who had been demon possessed begged him earnestly that he might remain with him. Okay, Jesus has listened to everyone else's begging the entire time. And now this man wants to be with Jesus.

He wants to remain with him. Man, I think Jesus is going to say, absolutely, I would love to have you. Verse 19, Jesus did not let him.

The only person whose request does not get answered in this portion of Scripture is the person that wants to be with Jesus. Why in the world would Jesus not let him?

Says Jesus did not let him, but told him, go home to your own people and report to them how much the Lord has done for you and how he has had mercy on you. Jesus says, I'm sending you out to be an evangelist, to share your testimony.

Did the man know much about Jesus or him as the Messiah? No. Did Jesus expound to him substitutionary atonement?

He did not. He says, I want you to share your testimony. And that's all that God is asking of you.

And your testimony is powerful because the people that know you, they know who you've been. And it's only as they see that who you were, you are no longer, that you were a child of darkness, and now you are light in Christ.

Now you've been made a new creature, a new creation in Jesus. Man, that gives you power that you say, I used to do this, I used to behave this way, and now I'm different because of Christ.

That's why living a holy life, why living a repentant life is so important, not only because we want to follow and obey God, but as we do so, it gives credence, it gives credibility to our profession of faith.

And he says, I want you to tell them how much God has done for you and how he has had mercy on you. I want you to know today, if you're listening to this, God has done so much for you. God has had mercy on you.

Tell someone else about it. You guys can't tell my story, and I can't tell your story, but we have been given testimonies that we are called to share with those around us. What's the response of this man?

Does he say, oh, Jesus doesn't want me to be with him? I'm done with him. I'm not obeying.

Verse 20, he says, so he went out and began to proclaim in the Decapolis. He told the entire region, he says, I'm not content with just telling my town, I'm telling this whole 10 cities area, how much Jesus had done for him.

And they were all amazed, man. I do think it's interesting here. Again, Jesus tells the man, hey, go tell him what the Lord has done for you and how he's had mercy on you.

In verse 20, and so he went out, began to proclaim how much Jesus had done for him. Here Mark saying, Jesus is the Lord. And it is so clear and so obvious that this is who Jesus is.

He's not just some lesser thing. He is God incarnate. Tomorrow, we're gonna look at a great story in the end of chapter five.

But I wanna encourage you today, no matter how difficult of a situation that you're going through, if you're demon possessed, if you're alone, if you are self-harming, if you're ingesting things and chemicals or drugs or alcohol or anything to your

detriment and to your harm, know that God can deliver you just as he delivered this demon possessed man. And that when Jesus comes, he wants to make a difference in you that you are no longer the same person that you were yesterday or five years ago

or 10 years ago. He wants to continue to grow you so that your testimony can bring life and light and hope to others. He is the all powerful Lord. He has done amazing things for us.

He has shown us mercy.

Let's like this man, even if God doesn't answer every prayer request that we have with a yes, even when it seems like everyone around us is getting their prayer requests answered, even when it's demons and unbelievers that are asking God for things

and getting it. And yet our prayer requests are going, not unanswered, but they're getting answered with a no. May we be faithful to share our testimony because God had a better plan.

I forget if it's in Mark or if it's in one of the parallel passages. The next time Jesus comes to this region of the Decapolis, he has four or five thousand people that come and hear him, where before they wanted him gone.

Because of, in small part, the testimony of this man. The next time Jesus comes around, thousands want to hear about Jesus because of the testimony that they heard from this man, who Jesus said no to his prayer request.

If God answered every request of yours, he'd just be a genie in a lamp. He would just be, you know, your errand boy. When we come to God, we come to God saying, not my will, but your will be done.

God, I know that you don't have to say yes to this, and I will still follow you even if you say no. God answering your prayer request doesn't mean you're right with him. Look at the demons, look at the unbelievers in the passage.

And sometimes God tells you no, because there is a greater purpose and a plan that you could not have seen. And that's what this man discovered. I'm going to connect my sermon I preached a couple of years ago from this passage in the show notes.

If you want to watch or listen to that, you can feel free. Went over basically the same points today. But if you want to hear it in sermon format, because you just really love this passage, then I know you will enjoy it.

So thanks for tuning in today. And we'll finish out Chapter 5 next episode.