Text: Matthew 8:28–34
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé

A Peculiar Madness

It is good to be back with you all this morning, to open the Bible together. Please turn with me to Matthew 8:28. Thank you all for the many ways you have served us in the last few weeks with the arrival of baby Winnie. We were most grateful for your prayers, meals, and love. My thanks as well to Pastor Dan and Mr. Love for so ably filling the pulpit while I was away.

Let’s begin by getting the text before us, beginning in Matthew 8:28, which picks up immediately after the scene Pastor Dan brought us through last week, in which Christ calmed the quaking seas. This is the Word of the Living God:

“And when he came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men met him, coming out of the tombs, so fierce that no one could pass that way. And behold, they cried out, “What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?” Now a herd of many pigs was feeding at some distance from them. And the demons begged him, saying, “If you cast us out, send us away into the herd of pigs.” And he said to them, “Go.” So they came out and went into the pigs, and behold, the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the waters. The herdsmen fled, and going into the city they told everything, especially what had happened to the demon-possessed men. And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their region.”
-Matthew 8:28–34

Thus ends the reading of God’s Holy Word. May he write it on our hearts by faith.

The Devil & The Disenchanted West

In the preceding text, we saw in vivid display that Christ is Lord of nature—that is, that he can command the winds and waves, the very laws of the physical world. Christ is Lord of nature. Christ speaks to nature as a subordinate. In what we just read, we see in equally vivid display that Christ is Lord of that which is above nature—he is Lord of super-nature, of the supernatural.

Now, this runs us headlong into what tends to be a massive barrier for modern Westerners to properly understand and receive and respond to a text like this. And it’s important that we pause and identify this barrier, lest we crash into it and fail to see the glory of the Lord and his Kingdom.

See, there is a peculiar kind of madness that has infected Western thought and culture since at least the so-called Enlightenment—namely, that we tend to think of the world as a mere collection of particles, physical processes, governed by orderly natural laws, and nothing more. Our culture has developed an increasingly strong presupposition that all things can be stripped down to cause and effect relationships among physical things.

There are many varieties and strengths of this kind of thinking, from a vague kind of scientism to full on atheistic materialism and nihilism, but the fact staring us in the face unavoidably is that many see the world as basically a massive machine of moving molecules—cause and effect. Atoms colliding.

At bottom, this is really a silly idea, since it would make even the thoughts of our minds nothing but cause and effect movements of atoms and electricity—which means that even the thought “All that exists is the physical world,” is nothing more than atoms moving, neither true nor false, ultimately meaningless.

Such a conception of the world would reduce all things—including human thinking, including your very thoughts—to billiard balls on a giant pool table. Most people don’t think this kind of thing through, because if they did, they would understand that if that really is what the world is like, then there is nothing but blind and meaningless determinism.

But despite all of our disenchanted babblings, despite our folly shrouded in philosophy, we live in a world that is seething with spiritual power. There is not a single unspiritual corner of this Universe. There is not a cubic inch of the cosmos that isn’t claimed, counterclaimed, and fought over by devils and angels. And the likely reaction that you and I have to sentences like the one I just said—that kind of mild sense of incredulity that probably flitted through your mind—just goes to show how thoroughly we have been catechized by the disenchanting forces of modernism, scientism, and materialism.

Now, the problem is that this instinctual Enlightenment rationalism, rather than equipping us to deal with reality, has actually left us, has actually left this world, terrifyingly vulnerable to the schemes of the devil and the demonic. Remember what Paul teaches us in Ephesians 6:12,

“For 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.”
-Ephesians 6:12

When you wake up in the morning and when you walk out your front door and when you go to work and when you parent your kids and when you pull out your credit card to buy something and when you sit down for dinner, you do so in the midst of the unyielding hatred and opposition of ancient, undying, maleficent spiritual beings bent on your utter destruction.

And our world is largely blind to this reality, blind to the powers and principalities set against God and his people—which is one reason the text we have in front of us is such a gift. It is a gift to have light break into the dark places that we cannot see. This text does that; it illuminates what is hidden.

What The Devil Does

One of the first ways that Matthew’s account of this encounter does this illuminating work is to show us what it looks like when the enemy is at work. Verse 28 tells us that,

“…when he came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men met him, coming out of the tombs, so fierce that no one could pass that way.”
-Matthew 8:28

What was the effect of their demonic possession? Notice the themes: Death. Violence. Evil. Madness. They are driven to live amongst the tombs, to live amongst the dead. They are driven to fierce violence, attacking any who would stray too close, apparently cutting off an entire area of the community from access by their senseless violence. The parallel accounts we have in the other synoptic gospels, Mark and Luke, show us in even greater detail the kind of torment that this demonic possession entailed. It destroyed the possessed, and made the possessed a destroyer of others.

What I want you to see is that the enemy’s tactics are right clear to see right here, even in seed form. Every part of his strategy is pretty much revealed—at least in principle—in that picture.

I’m not saying is that the only way the enemy is at work is in the overt possession of human beings—though that is real. But what always happens when the enemy is at work? What does he do? What is his aim?

To steal, kill, degrade, destroy. To murder, corrupt, mutilate, and disfigure. He hates God, and so he hates God everywhere he sees God, and so he hates above all creatures that creature which bears the image of God—man. This is a highly important point for us to grasp, because it helps us understand—not just this text and others like it—but our own world and present culture.

What I’m saying is that when you see those hallmarks—relentless, malevolent, senseless, unyielding hatred and violence and disfiguring and destroying and defiling of that which bears God’s image—you are emphatically not looking at the mere movement of molecules. You are not emphatically not looking at merely human evil—but at the activity of men and women who are a part of a spiritual kingdom, enslaved in spiritual bondage to death.

That is precisely how the Bible describes the fallen human condition, for example, in Colossians 1:13, where Paul describes salvation as the transferring of a citizen of the domain of darkness into the Kingdom of God’s beloved Son.

So let’s get specific. Let’s pull back the veil and see our own time in light of these things: What are you seeing when you see so-called doctors burning unborn children to death with poison, tearing them limb from limb, crushing their skulls, and vacuuming them out of their mothers’ wombs as if they were a cancerous growth?

Are you merely seeing wicked people doing wicked things? Are you merely looking at the movement of matter? Emphatically, no. You are looking at the alliance of sinful man and demonic powers. That is demonic.

What are you seeing when you see a people celebrating the surgical removal of a man’s genitals or a woman’s breasts? What are you looking at when you see Bruce Jenner or Ellen Page?

Are you merely seeing wicked people doing wicked things? Are you just looking at mental illness inflamed by pop-culture stupidity? Are you merely looking at the movement of matter? Emphatically, no. You are looking at the alliance of sinful man and demonic powers. That is demonic.

What are you looking at when you look at the numbers that were just released for birthrates in the US? What are you seeing when you see a culture that is systematically abandoning marriage and childrearing in favor of casual, fruitless sex and dual-income, childless households that worship comfort and autonomy and call what God calls a blessing a curse?

Murder, destruction, hatred, sexual folly, gender-bending insanity—all of these things are demonic graffiti on that which displays the image of God in creation. And so the great irony of our culture is that we are are a people of demon-worshiping materialists.

On paper, we tend to talk as if life is a matter of molecules in motion, then proceed to wage undeniably demonic war on God's image. We dismember unborn children, cut off male genitals and female breasts, exchange marriage and childbearing for barren, dual-income-no-kid households, economically enslave, steal, kill, disfigure, and destroy, because ours is a culture enslaved to demons.

So one of the devil's most effective strategies has been the disenchanting of the West—the promulgation of the lie that the world is just brute stuff—that humanity itself is just brute stuff, the descendant of lighting-struck primordial goo. But don't be deceived: We wrestle with powers and principalities in the heavenly places, not mere stuff. Not mere brain chemistry and billiard-ball atoms.

The Demons Believe—& Shudder!

Which is why it’s so important to see that Christ is Lord of the supernatural, just as he is Lord of the natural. This blazes out of Matthew’s account here in Matthew 8.

“And when he came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men met him, coming out of the tombs, so fierce that no one could pass that way. And behold, they cried out, “What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?”
-Matthew 8:28–29

As James 2:19 teaches us, so we see here: Even the demons believe—and shudder! The demons know who this Christ is—the Son of God—and their inevitable doom. “Have you come here to torment us before the time?” They know that there is a day appointed on which God will judge all his enemies.

And they know that as the Son of God, they are dealing with one who has nothing whatsoever to do with their domain: “What have you to do with us, O Son of God?” The Kingdom of God is utterly alien to their twisted domain. Matthew continues the account in verse 30,

“Now a herd of many pigs was feeding at some distance from them. And the demons begged him, saying, “If you cast us out, send us away into the herd of pigs.” And he said to them, “Go.” So they came out and went into the pigs, and behold, the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the waters. “
-Matthew 8:30–32

What we are seeing here in this account, as we saw in previous accounts of Christ’s victory over demonic oppression, is a shadow of what Christ has come to do, and his power and authority to do what he came to do.

In a word: He came to crush the dominion of darkness and establish his glorious Kingdom. He came to defeat, disarm, and destroy the work of the enemy. As 1 John 3:8 puts it, the Son of God appeared to destroy the works of the Devil.

What does that mean? It means that he came to take away the power that the enemy had over his people: Sin. Accusation.

In 1 Peter 5:8, the Apostle calls the devil “your adversary.” Adversary is something of a legal term in Scripture; it describes a kind of prosecutor before God, someone trying to convict another of guilt before God.

So in the first two chapters of Job, Satan is an accuser of Job before God. So in Zechariah’s vision in chapter 3 of his book, Satan stands next to Joshua the High Priest accusing him before God.

And so the demonically inspired masses, whose father was, according to Jesus, the devil—accused Jesus falsely in court and in his trial as he went to the cross.

The Adversary works through accusation. You can know he is working when you feel the sharp accusation of your sinfulness—but not in a way that would drive you to the throne of grace. Have you felt the pressing of accusation—“Remember that thing you did? That was despicable. You are a worm. You are disgusting.”?

See, unlike than the conviction of the Holy Spirit, which always moves us from sin to confession to pardon to assurance, this voice moves you from accusation to self-justification and pride or to despair and depression. It’s either, “You are a despicable worm. Work harder or you are done.” Pride. Or it’s, “You are a despicable worm. Look at your weakness and despair of hope.”

And what Christ will do on the cross is to remove the power of accusation by paying for sin, crushing the serpent’s head, and ransoming—that is, buying back—his people from the domain of the enemy. If you are in Christ, you have been freed from sin. It is forgiven you. And its power has been broken—you are no longer its slave, but Christ’s slave, the Father’s son.

So the works of the enemy have been crushed. Destroyed. His power is broken, he is bound, and his house is being plundered now, such that we can proclaim with the heavenly hosts in Revelation: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.”

This is why the doctrine of Christ's victory over the powers—his enthronement in heaven, his binding of the strong man and plundering of his possessions—is such an essential part of the gospel. See it hinted here in his absolute command authority over the demonic powers.

The Crowd’s Response & Ours

Finally, we see the crowds response in verses 33 and 34,

“The herdsmen fled, and going into the city they told everything, especially what had happened to the demon-possessed men. And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their region.”
-Matthew 8:33–34

Why did they respond as they did? We can’t be certain, as Matthew doesn’t tell us. Many commentators speculate that the loss of such a large herd of livestock would have been damaging to their economy—a parallel account in Mark’s gospel puts the number at around 2,000 animals.

Whatever the reason, this is not an uncommon response to Christ. Maybe your mental picture of the Lord is a sort of generally approachable, meek and mild sort of guy. There is an element of truth to that; the Lord is near to the brokenhearted. He is meek. He is the God of joy and wedding wine. He is the God who made a world with ridiculous toddlers and glorious brides on their wedding day and good food and beauty—all of it.

But we are prone to having an incomplete picture of the Lord, to leave out the simple fact that he is terrifying. He is awesome in his power and authority and holiness—and here is just a small taste of that in the scene before us.

This must have been a terrifying sight for the townsfolk—this man with the authority to command legions of demons to go, and to see a herd of several thousand pigs rush headlong to their deaths. Christ’s power is awesome and terrible and righteous and shocking.

And so here’s the deal: Any time in the gospels where we see Jesus do something, then see people respond to him, we are being called to account ourselves. As with the scene last week, when the Lord calms the quaking seas, and the disciples stand in awe of him. Will you stand in awe of him?

Or as we will see next week, when the Lord forgives the paralytic, only for the scribes to question his authority to forgive sin. Will you question his mercy and authority? And when he then heals the paralytic, leaving the crowds astonished and glorifying God. Will you glorify God at the glory of Christ?

So there is a question implicit in each of these scenes and therefore in our text this morning as well, the question, “Will you respond as they did?”

Will you flee Christ, demand that he leave when he makes you uncomfortable? When he makes demands of you? Will you kneel to him, or flee from him? When he sends the Spirit to convict you of your sin, will you fall down and wave the white flag in repentance and lean into his mercy, or will you run and hide and self-justify?

Know this: You cannot trifle with this Christ. He will not allow it. You cannot have it both ways: You will either fall and worship him, or flee from him or beg him to leave. My plea to you this morning is to come to him, to shelter in him, to trust him, and to worship him.

He is worthy of it. He is the Lord who shakes the heavens, who disarms the powers and principalities and puts them to open shame. He is the Lord who puts demons to flight with a word. He is the Lord who forgives sin and heals. Trust in him today.