So, what do we do with demons in the Bible? If you're anything like me, you were raised in the era of video games and the internet, and demons are like a snark or a goblin or something. They're a little red flame monster with teeth. They're impish, they cause problems, they advance the plot. They look like Tim Curry in Legend or Dave Grohl in that Tenacious D video, and they're red and they got the whip-snap pointy tail. And really, all of that is a product of stuff that was written over a thousand years after the New Testament. Overwhelmingly, our notions of demons are medieval and Catholic, and a mix of folklore with some satire that was intended to push back on the Catholic Church, most notably in the form of Dante's Inferno, which, as is the case with any work of art, given enough time, we lose our ability looking back in history to properly nuance and identify all of the little touches and flourishes that were going on there that the original audience, to those medieval works that I'm referencing, they would have caught that immediately. So you get this lore and this legend that builds up around demons, and overwhelmingly it's fantasy, it's nonsense, it's ridiculous, and everybody knows it's ridiculous. Bugs Bunny knew it was ridiculous when you get the fake devils popping up. But the Bible doesn't hold it out as ridiculous. The Bible predates all of that stuff, and demons just come up from time to time. And what's crazier to me is they come up in a way where it's like, well, yeah, you all know about the demons, right? In Matthew 8.16, which we looked at uh, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago, the demon thing comes up and it's just in passing. When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to him, and he drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick. Like, uh, okay. Like, I guess I'm gonna just raise my hand. I have a question about the demons, because I live in an era where those are video game characters. I mean, were there actually demons that were possessing people, or were people just nuts? And Jesus had some goofy, crazy ability to settle people down, like a crazy person whisperer or something. And obviously, that theory has been posited. One of the most famous Bible commentary sets that almost every pastor who you would ever engage with from the last 40 years would have on their shelf is this Barclay commentary set. And I don't know, I like commentaries, I like seeing what different people have thought at different times. And one of the things that I think is really interesting about Barclay is that he does a lot of good historical research. I mean, there's a reason people keep buying this thing. But also, speaking of buying things, he totally does not buy the demon thing. So you get to any of these passages and it'll be like, okay, well, obviously here, this guy was crazy, and Jesus found a way to make him feel better and meet his needs. And so the man felt that he had been healed, and that's just what needed to happen was somebody needed to say to him, You have been healed. And in fact, I think he might even say that about exactly the passage we're looking at right here. So I go on and on about some commentator you've never heard of. But of course, there are other commentators who are like, no, they're definitely demons, it's a real thing. They interact with the world, they go around doing damage and trying to thwart the plans of God, and they're invisible and they're a threat and they're a problem. And Jesus is quite literally confronting these forces of evil. Just in the interest of fairness, that represents the gamut of positions that people hold in recent years regarding what we do with descriptions of the demonic in the Bible. Now, I am one to go with what the assumption of the original audience that is implicit here must have been. I'm one to go with, well, let's take the text at face value and just operate with what they were operating with. And so what I'm going to assume here is that we're talking about actual forces of darkness, stuff that you can't see and that maybe you and I will never actually interact with, but that for whatever reason, we're really an issue at this time. Is it possible that I am over-supernaturalizing the text and that what we are talking about here are forms of psychoses, unrecognized and undiagnosed by the original audience? Jesus knows exactly what it is, but we're content to use the language of the day to just call it demon possession. It's possible, but that would be pretty wink-wink nod nod on the part of the Bible, because it consistently describes demons as an actual thing, and it consistently describes demonic possession as an actual thing. If this is some clever dog whistle way of describing a psychological phenomenon, uh, the Bible really doubles, triples, and quadruples down on it, and frankly, it comes off looking pretty inconsistent. I really do think the better read, and whether you agree or not, is just fine, but I think the better read on what the Bible is trying to do is that it is holding out the idea that this is an actual thing. Make up it what you will, I've already spent too much time on that. So when we get to Matthew chapter 8, verse 28, that we're looking at right now, Jesus goes to the other side of the sea, to the region of the Gadarenes. We'll talk a little bit more about where that is here in just a minute. And these two demon-possessed men come from the tombs and meet him, and they're so violent that nobody could pass that way. And they're saying all this stuff about what do you want with us? And I kind of jumped the gun in my edit the other day, fast-forwarding ahead to acknowledge the fact that these legions of demons, these groups of demons or something that are described beyond this text. And so when we hear these two guys saying, What do you want with us? It's not just about two guys who are standing here saying that. It's about the fact that they're about to get sent into a multitude of entities, not just one or two entities. And there are parallel texts in other gospels that maybe we'll have time to get to in a little bit that further give us the impression that we're not just talking about one force here or one force per person, as it were. So you get this violent crazy guy or a pair of them, as it were, and they first of all join with the devil and Herod in rightly identifying who Jesus is, even when his disciples cannot, as we discussed yesterday. And then they take it a step further and they somehow acknowledge an understanding of what the plan is with Jesus. Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time? Okay, so two things. One, does Jesus torture demons? And would it be bad if there are demons and he does that? I don't think I've ever uttered that question before in my entire life. If Jesus were just torturing random people to be mean, I guess that would obviously be bad because you know people are made in the image of God and have intrinsic value and all the other stuff that Jesus says. But there's nothing really in the Bible that's like, you know, who's precious in the Lord's sight are every little precious, precious, adorable, chubby-faced demon with their cute pointy little tails and their giant eyes and their salivating sulfuric acid. Like, no, uh the demons are are bad and they're just seen as bad from the beginning. And even the account that we get in the prophetic books in the Old Testament about an inside look at what the devil's about and what happened cosmically beforehand, even then, these are created beings who engaged in some kind of final and ultimate rejection of God. It seems like the whole judgment and question of the is there even a soul of the fate of the essence of these creatures, these characters who we don't learn a ton about from the Bible is already settled. And so it sounds scary to think of like Jesus torturing somebody, but this isn't really somebody. This is like some kind of demon evil Satan hell monster that's designed to wreck everything that's beautiful and good and right. So it's kind of a weird phrase. And I'm not sure if we're looking at an acknowledgement of the fact that God does punish these characters somehow, cosmically, or if what we're looking at is an attempt to throw mud at Jesus in front of, you know, all of his friends as they're walking around to make him look bad, like, yay, you don't know the guy that you're hanging out with. He's very powerful and he's very mean. Uh, either way, they go on to say, if you come to torture us, before the appointed time. And what does that phrase mean? It's important to note that that phrase, appointed time, or the notion of an appointed time or a reckoning is not isolated to this passage in Matthew 8. We get it all over the Gospels and even on into early in the book of Acts when it comes to Jesus. There is this constant push from the people around Jesus to be like, let's resolve this thing. Let's have a reckoning, let's deal with all the stuff that is wrong, let's straighten out the misconceptions in Luke. There's this push from the disciples to implicitly say, let's let's resolve the injustice that you have endured. Let's fix this thing that happened to you and have you be vindicated in front of everybody. And those Samaritans were mean to you. They didn't want you to come to their village. Let's have a reckoning right now. Let's burn that thing down. And Jesus is the one who's always pushing back on the reckoning. He never says, There will be no reckoning, there will be no end to history, there will be no appointed time. But instead, he's like, it's just not, it's not your problem. It's not for you to worry about. You're not fit to judge. I'm going to do the judging. That's a massive paraphrase on my part, but you get what I'm saying. So, one possibility is that they're saying that the appointed time is the grand reckoning of all of cosmic history, where every knee bows and every tongue confesses, and everything is made right, and all of the valleys are made high, and the hills are made low, and all the promises of Isaiah and all of the prophets come true, and all of that stuff happens. Another way to read this is that the appointed time is just the cross, that there's some defeat of death that occurs there, and that they believe they have some unique dispensation to run wild and do damage that gets resolved somehow when the age of the Holy Spirit starts, as Jesus goes to the cross, dies, is resurrected, ascends, and imparts the Holy Spirit. Now I understand fully that at this point there are people here who have been around church for a really long time, and you're like, oh yeah, demons, that's fine. I've already got that sorted out. I read the Bible several times, I had that internalized. I remember stuff that I heard in Sunday school. Like, I'm I'm good on my reconciling the world I know and see around me with the biblical reality of demons. I'm cool with that. High five, that's awesome. I don't think that's a naive or silly position to hold. Uh, that's great. I know there are others of you have been around church for a long time and you're like, yeah, about the demon thing. That one is always stuck in my craw a little bit. How exactly does this work? And maybe for you, you kind of wrestle with it and try to apply some kind of objectivity or healthy skepticism to it, but come up with a lack of data in the text or from your own experience. And as a result, you get to a place like I do where you're like, well, I got to interpret the parts of the Bible that are less clear in light of the parts that are more clear because I find the thing to be credible. So I'm gonna have to go with the tentatively move ahead with this framework of assumptions while still, if I'm to be honest, just saying, I got I got questions. I got a lot of questions about this. Then there are others of you who are listening to you talk about like all this cosmic chronology of redemption, and Jesus shows up and he dies and he goes to the cross, and then that changes the ground rules, and now the demons aren't allowed to run around and do stuff, maybe, and then the Holy Spirit comes and you're like, I don't know if I believe in any of that. Like all of this stuff is when it starts to sound crazy for me. And this is why I kind of bailed on church, because this stuff didn't make sense, and it sounds like a suspension of disbelief, and like we have to go to a really bizarre place to play along with the Bible and to run the mental simulation of God and the spiritual world. And this is kind of where my mental simulation runs out. To you, I would say, as a Christian and a guy who went to school for theology and Bible, I am empathetic to that. And I think there's a reason the Bible doesn't lead with that, is like, hey, here's the thing that you're gonna really need to agree on and sign off on in order for any of the Jesus stuff to make sense. It comes up a little bit, but it's actually shocking how little, given the enormous, listen to the weight of this thing. Given the enormity of the Bible, it's amazing how little this actually comes up. And most stuff, to those of you who are like, I don't know, it seems conflicting and weird when you listen to people talk about it. I agree. You listen to people try to codify this and turn it into a set of ground rules about how the spiritual and the demonic works. It's mostly drawn from fiction, it's mostly speculative, but every now and then we run into stuff from the Bible that talks about this, and then you get to grapple with it like I'm doing right now, and like apparently you're doing along with me. So, wherever you're coming from on this conversation, we have now addressed the spiritual elephant in the room, and we will get back to more deeply looking at this particular text that weirdly might take a whole week for this simple little thing. Oh well, whatever. We'll get back to that tomorrow. Thanks for hanging out with me and being willing to process the beautiful, obvious moral, ethical stuff of the Bible, but also processing the difficult for our 21st century empirical scientific method brains parts of the Bible. They're both in there, they both deserve our attention, and I think the grappling is a big part of the fun. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. Catch you tomorrow.