Hey I'm Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast. You remember in Back to the Future when Biff is chasing Marty for the first time through Hill City. I think it was Hill City, right? And they're driving along Main Street, and Biff isn't paying attention, and Marty's real good on his skateboard, and Biff, pow, fall down, go boom, right into a big pile of manure. He's got manure all over him because it's the grossest thing that anybody can think of. And I remember as a kid being like, yeah, that biff is the worst. And now he has poop all over him. You deserve it, Biff. Because it's just the epitome of grossness, of uncleanness, and of awfulness. And the fact that he ran into a big pile of poop instead of maybe like a big pile of squids, which also would have been funny in its own way. But the poop made it more effective because that's the grossest, whereas squids are weird or other things might have been hilarious. But but you need the poop to hit the unclean theme and make the kids giggle and have everybody get that that's just as bad as it could be. And that's kind of what the pigs were like in the Bible. The pigs were just the worst. And in fact, if you go to the Middle East today, pigs are still kind of the worst. It's a big time no-go zone. And there's a bunch of stuff about pigs and why they're gross and bad in the Old Testament, but here's one smoking gun passage that comes to mind from Leviticus 11. It just says, And the pigs, this is something that is unclean that you don't eat, because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed, but does not chew the cud, it is unclean for you. You shall not eat any of their flesh and you shall not touch their carcasses. They are unclean to you. And lots of smart people have theorized about why pigs were unclean and gross and bad for you and why they are on this list. I am not going to spend time doing that in this conversation, but just to know that there's a whole bunch of stuff like that in the Old Testament. And the idea is that pigs are just the epitome of grossness. So when we get to Matthew chapter 8, and we get to the part where Jesus has sailed across the Sea of Galilee to the region of the Gaterenes, which I don't know, it's not like a real famous, important place, but we figure out really quickly, ah, we are in Gentile territory here, even though this is a very short boat trip across, by today's standards, a relatively small body of water. Because in verse 30, well, okay, so Jesus arrives at the other side at the Gatarenes, and there's the two demon-possessed men that come out, and then like a horror movie, there's a whole bunch of voices coming out, and they're like, What do you want with us? Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time? We've talked about all of that. And then verse 30, it says, some distance from them, a large herd of pigs was feeding. So definitely Gentile territory wouldn't have had a large herd of pigs feeding outside of Capernaum, which was definitely Jewish territory. And now the demons are going to say something that at least your first time through this book, you would not have seen coming. Verse 31. What? Is that an option? Can we do that? Because, like we talked about the last couple of episodes, I don't really totally know what all the ground rules are for demons and spirit creatures and stuff, because the Bible really doesn't obsess about it that much. It comes up, there's the assumption of the reality of the spiritual world and the sense of the forces that are aligned with God and his glory and the redemptive plan, the kingdom, and all of that. And then the forces that are aligned with thwarting the plan of God and the redemptive story and the kingdom and all of that stuff. And that's where your demons fit in. And so the ground rules though, like how do you kill a demon? What do you do? Do you shoot it or hit it with like a holy water thing or some kind of prayer or blessing or crucifix? Like, I don't know, all of that stuff is made up after the fact. So apparently they know that one of the options is that Jesus can drive them out, that he has the authority to do this, and that he can put him in some other host. Well, at this point, you'd kind of expect Jesus to be like, why do you think this is a negotiation? If I am who you say I am, that sounds like the scene in Breaking Bad, where Walt is like, if I am as bad as you say that I am, then you should be very concerned. Like, if I'm the son of God and I'm as powerful as you say that I am, then why do you think you could negotiate with me? That's the answer that I would expect. But instead, he says to them, Go. One word, that's it. So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water. Okay, I want to go back to that one word that's in red. Go. If you have a Bible in front of you, you will see that the only word that is in red, Jesus' only line in this entire exchange that demonstrates his authority over the spiritual world and that gives the reader the suspicion that the demons were actually right and saying that this is the Son of God is go. That's it. Jesus walks up, he doesn't say anything. The demons start freaking out, like, oh, ah, we're nervous, we're panicking. It's like when you met that famous person that one time in that elevator in LA and you didn't know what to say, and you freaked out and you didn't know what to do with your hands, and you just kept talking and they just kept looking the opposite direction and nodding and stuff. One word of authority after they negotiate against themselves. Jesus didn't even say that he was gonna torture them or drive them out. They're negotiating against themselves, they're panicking, and then finally he's like, Okay, you got me, you gave me an idea, we'll just do that, I guess. Go. And that one word wields enough authority to thwart the plans and agenda and forces of darkness that are functioning in this legion of demonic activity to fix something that nobody could fix, that nobody could overcome or overpower because of the violence of these demon-possessed men. And then the demons do exactly what they negotiated for themselves. They go into this herd and they run off a cliff. And I don't, you know, the zombie guys maybe immediately felt better, but now you have zombie pigs and they do this crazy lemming crash over the cliff. And again, if you've been around the Sea of Galilee, that would have been a pretty dramatic image because those cliffs, those hillsides on the east side of the Sea of Galilee where this was happening, it was not a casual jaunt down into the water. It was death the second this herd of zombie pigs went over the edge. I mean, the steep bank is a bit of a translation euphemism for what that really looks like. And then, of course, they died in the water. There's no coming back from that. So then, at least in this passage, we don't really get a description right now of what happened to these guys. We assume that the possession is over and that they must feel better, and we get some parallel accounts elsewhere that indicate that they were better and wanted to follow Jesus around, if we indeed view those as uh identical accounts. But you know, we're just left to assume that things got better for these guys, and it seems like everything is great and wrapped up and things are in great shape, but that isn't actually how this is going to play out because, well, people are very scarable, very superstitious, very suspicious of outsiders, and also pigs are expensive. So, next time around, we're going to talk about the response that came as a result of this. But to put a neat, tidy ribbon on the conversation we're having right now, this is the epitome of uncleanness. And to the original audience, Jesus taking these demons and demonstrating this massive authority and sending them not into something that is attractive or clean or elegant or nice, like I don't know, like a peacock or a well-groomed camel or a battle horse, but instead into the dirtiest, stinkiest, yuckiest, manuriest thing like what Biff crashed into. Pigs is just a bonus laugh, high five mockery of the impotence of the spiritual forces of darkness here in the face of the spiritual forces of light, the son of God. That's where we're hitting pause for now. Tomorrow we're going to talk about how this thing shakes out with the people in the village. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.