Week 18 ———  A Demon in the Congregation
Mark 1:21-28  Luke 4:31-37

Today, in 27 AD, Jesus is still on his three-week tour of Galilee without his disciples. Since we have no stories of this time, I will back up to discuss what happened on that Sabbath in Capernaum (the day before he left on the trip).

Picture it.  It is Saturday morning in Capernaum.  Jesus is teaching in the synagogue.  Luke says, “They were astonished at his teaching, for his word possessed authority.” Things are going so much better for Jesus here than in Nazareth.  As the people sit and intently listen, Jesus suddenly gets heckled.  Like the drunk guy who interrupts the act in a comedy club,  a man yells: “Leave us alone!”  Let’s read the scripture:

Luke 4:31-34  And he went down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee. And he was teaching them on the Sabbath, and they were astonished at his teaching, for his word possessed authority.   And in the synagogue, there was a man who had the spirit of an unclean demon, and he cried out with a loud voice,   “Ha!  What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God.”

Now I am thinking, ‘What is a demon-possessed man doing in the worship service?’  But Jesus does not seem to be surprised.

Luke 4:35-37   But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent and come out of him!” And when the demon had thrown him down in their midst, he came out of him, having done him no harm. And they were all amazed and said to one another, “What is this word? For with authority and power, he commands the unclean spirits, and they come out!” And reports about him went out into every place in the surrounding region.

Luke 4:40-41   Now, when the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various diseases brought them to him, and he laid his hands on every one of them and healed them. And demons also came out of many, crying, “You are the Son of God!” But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak because they knew that he was the Christ.

Mark 1:39    And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.

I am usually hesitant to talk about demons and Jesus casting them out.  I am not an expert on that subject. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, and no one ever talked about that.  But you can’t read the New Testament and ignore that Jesus did a lot of “casting out demons” and led his disciples to do the same.  We have so many misconceptions about demons from our tradition, from poor translations, and from all the supernatural stuff in movies, TV, etc. — so many misconceptions that it is complicated to talk about.  You have some people who believe that the talk of demon possession in the New Testament is only their first-century way to describe seizures, psychoses, or other disorders that we modern, informed intellectual people would describe as mental illness or medical disease.  There seem to be two groups of people.  One would attribute everything that goes wrong in the world to “the devil and his demons,” and another that denies the existence of evil spiritual beings.

It would be easier for me to skip this subject. But if I am covering Jesus’ 70-week ministry day by day. I can’t skip over every instance of him casting out demons because it is a big part of his ministry.

My question is, “Do you believe the Bible is true?”  If you say the Bible is true, then you are forced to believe in spiritual beings that we cannot see, for they are plainly discussed throughout the scriptures.  Michael Heiser gives a good overview of this in his book Supernatural, a shorter, simpler version of his book The Unseen Realm.  My thoughts here lean heavily on Heiser’s books, for that is where I learned to appreciate  (and gain at least a little understanding of) the vast discussion of the spiritual realm in the text of the Bible.  Before discussing the concept of Jesus casting out demons, we need at least some basic awareness of the spiritual forces at work in our world.  That is the focus for today.  Later, we will expand this discussion to what Jesus did in the synagogue in Capernaum that day and throughout his ministry.

In the beginning, there was God.  Yehovah.  There is one God who is the creator of everything. But other spiritual beings were created by God and are in place when man is created. God has a heavenly council of spiritual beings with whom he discusses his plans and often assists God in carrying out his will. These beings are frequently referred to as the heavenly host, gods, or “sons of god.”  The council is seen in Psalm 82.

Psalm 82:1-2    God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods, he holds judgment: “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?

Does that mention of “in the midst of the gods” bother you?  It sure used to bother me.  If the Bible teaches there is only one God, where did these others come from?  It is the Hebrew elohim, here translated as ‘gods,’ but don’t get hung up on that because that word“refers to any inhabitant of the spiritual world.”¹  So Yehovah is elohim, as are demons and the human dead in the afterlife because they are all inhabitants of the spiritual world.    When our translators choose the word ‘god’ to translate ‘elohim,’ we can be confused, thinking the Bible is talking about other beings similar to Yehovah.  Certainly, that is not true.  The Bible is consistent in noting the uniqueness and superiority of Yehovah:

1 Kings 8:23   O Yehovah, God [elohim] of Israel, there is no god [elohim- spiritualbeing] like you.

Psalm 97:9   For you, Yehovah, are most high over all the earth;  you are exalted far above all gods [elohim- spiritualbeings].  

These spiritual beings were created to dwell with Yehovah and to be a heavenly council. 

We see them in the scripture doing 2 basic things: 1. to take part in decisions and 2. to be his task force to accomplish certain things. (When they are in the job of messengers, we see them called ‘angels’ for ‘angel’ is the English derivative of the Greek ‘aggelos’ and Hebrew ‘malach’, both words which mean ‘messenger.’ )  In 1 Kings 22, Yehovah has decided that the wicked king, Ahab, has to go.  In the meeting of the divine council, Yehovah lets the council decide how Ahab will meet his end.  They also assist in the judgment of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (Daniel 4).  [Read the chapters listed.  Both of these decisions end in very creative punishment.]  Heiser says, “God doesn’t need a divine council, but he chooses to use one.” In the same way, Yehovah does not need humans to help him in his work, but he chooses to work with us.  He didn’t have to have Moses raise his staff to part the sea or have the people march around Jericho to make the walls fall.  He can do anything without us.  But God chooses to live in community with us.  He wants us to work with him in his kingdom. He chooses family.  

In the beginning, it wasn’t just God and Adam and Eve in the garden.  Yehovah’s heavenly family was there also.  The garden was designed to be where all of God’s family could live together.  And Yehovah wants so much for all of his family to be together.  It is like a mother’s joy when all her children are back in the house together.  But one of God’s heavenly beings decided to rebel.  The accuser, the satan, a heavenly being, rebelled against Yehovah and convinced the humans to rebel also.  When sin and rebellion came, the garden in Eden was shut down, and God could no longer dwell with his earthly family.  The rest of the Bible after Genesis 3 is the story of God’s plan to reunite his family all in the same place.

I had been taught that before humanity was created, there was a great rebellion, and 1/3 of the heavenly beings were cast out.  This is based on Revelation 12:7-9, but that passage is associated with the birth of the Messiah. This rebellion in Genesis 3 is the first of three rebellions by heavenly beings.    When the satan rebelled, he was expelled from God’s presence and “thrown down to the ground” (Isaiah 14:12).  The earth now is a place of death (introduced by sin) and is no longer fit to be a place for God and his heavenly beings.  The satan becomes the ruler over the place of death and over all who die.   And things on earth go from bad to worse.

After the satan and the humans are cast out of God’s space, evil multiplies to the point that Genesis 6:5 tells us:   “Yehovah saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”  Also, in Genesis 6, in this setting of man’s horrible dive into wickedness, the second rebellion of the heavenly beings happens.  There we have that story of “the sons of God” fathering earthly children, whom the Bible calls the Nephilim.  Genesis 6:4 tells us the “Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward,” and calls them “mighty men.”  They were giants, fierce warriors, and they were evil.  You must refer to the New Testament for further information(2 Peter 2:4-6 and Jude 6.)   Peter and Jude both share information from the book of 1 Enoch, which, though not considered scripture, was deemed worthy of quoting in scripture. (This book teaches that demons are the unembodied spirits of the Nephilim who perished in and after the flood.)  These rebellious heavenly “sons of God” were sent to hell to be judged later.  We will see more of the Nephilim later.

God commanded humans to “be fruitful and multiply” to spread his kingdom throughout the earth.  But they don’t want to disperse and so they build a tower in Babylon.  This displeases Yehovah, so he meets with his heavenly council and says, “ Come, let us go down and there confuse their language so that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:7).  We all know this part of the story that tells how the nations listed in Genesis 10 came to be.  However, many of us have never noticed Moses’ comments on the Tower of Babel story in Deuteronomy.

“Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations;  ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you.  When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.  But Yehovah’s portion is his people,  Jacob his allotted heritage.  (Deuteronomy 32:7-9)

God divided the people into nations, assigned to be under members of his heavenly council (the “sons of God”).  There are 70 nations mentioned in this part of Genesis.   The nation God left for himself was Jacob (Israel). That is why the next thing in Genesis is God calling Abraham.  But God did not abandon the other nations.  He planned to make of his people, Israel, a kingdom of priests to carry his message to the world.  Through his people, through Abraham, Yehovah planned to bless the nations.  But these members of the heavenly council took advantage of these nations.  They managed the nations unjustly and demanded to be worshiped.  So, the other nations began to worship these members of God’s council instead of Yehovah, God himself. This is the Third Rebellion of God’s Spiritual Beings.

So, back to Psalm 82, where we see Yehovah  judging them:

Psa. 82:1    God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:
“How long will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked? Selah
Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;
maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”
They have neither knowledge nor understanding,
they walk about in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
I said, “You are gods,
sons of the Most High, all of you;
nevertheless, like men you shall die,
and fall like any prince.”
Arise, O God, judge the earth;
for you shall inherit all the nations!

Yehovah says to the divine council in Psalm 81:6, “You are elohim, sons of the Most High, all of you.”   They are his sons; he created them to be family, just as he created us to be part of his family.  They were created to assist him in ruling over creation, much like we were created to have dominion over the earth.  But something went wrong.  They did not follow Yehovah’s method of dealing justly with the nations.  They were supposed to shepherd the nations and teach them the ways of Yehovah, but instead, the people learned nothing.  They were left in the darkness instead of leading them back to Yehovah.  The spiritual beings demanded to be worshipped instead of Yehovah.  So verse 7 tells us, “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.”  This council is being judged and found guilty, and the wages for their crimes is the loss of their immortality; they will die like humans. And Yehovah will inherit all the nations.

Now, back to those Nephilim.   The Nephilim who died became demons.  But many lived on the earth and reproduced and carried this bloodline through the time of David.  We see them in Numbers 13:33 when the children of Israel were at the edge of the promised land, and they sent spies to the land. In the report of the spies sent in to scout out the land of Canaan:  “And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”  

Their fear of these giants is greater than their faith in Yehovah’s promises to conquer the land for them. They choose not to enter the land, so all of these adults (other than Joshua and Caleb) die.

But their children are given another chance.  Just before entering the land 40 years later, God directed them to go against the armies of Sihon and Og, the king of Bashan.  The Bible tells us these two Amorite kings were rulers of the Rephaim³ (Deuteronomy 2).  This time, instead of running scared, they face and eliminate the descendants of the Nephilim.  They continue to encounter these giants, and you see that this conquest of Canaan is a spiritual battle as well as a physical battle, and you begin to understand why God insisted some cities be destroyed entirely and everyone killed.  The bloodline of the Nephilim was demonic and needed to be destroyed to stop their influence in the land.  But they were not completely successful.  Joshua 11:21-22 tells us, 

Joshua 11:21-22   “ And Joshua came at that time and cut off the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the hill country of Judah, and from all the hill country of Israel. Joshua devoted them to destruction with their cities. There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the people of Israel. Only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod did some remain. 

Unfortunately, the few descendants of the Nephilim that remained continued to cause trouble for Israel.  We know that Gath becomes a Philistine city. You know the name of one of the Rephaim from Gath.  He was defeated by the shepherd boy David.  (Gath was the hometown of Goliath and other Anakim.)

Once again, Yehovah desires to reunite us all, as it was in Eden.  God’s plan at the Tower of Babel to start over with the nation he would build from Abraham does not bear fruit because, again, humans are disobedient and faithless.  There were some excellent leaders of the people of Israel, but even the best of them, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, and David, were sinners and disobedient to God’s plan.  So God’s nation, Israel, fails to be what God wanted them to be.   But God has not given up on humankind.  He still wants to redeem us and live together with us in a new Eden.  Heiser says: 

“Humanity could not be trusted with reviving the Edenic kingdom rule.  Only God himself could do what needed to be done.  Only God could meet the obligations of his own covenants.  But humanity would not be set aside.  Instead, God would have to become man.  Instead, God would have to fulfill the Law and the covenants himself and then take upon himself the penalty for all human failure.” ² 

So God has a plan for Jesus to be the one who could live a life without sin and remove the curse of death. Have you ever wondered why God’s plan for Jesus to die for sins and to remove the curse of death is not simply described in the Old Testament?   Scattered prophecies hint at this, but why didn’t God spell it out plainly?”  Why didn’t God say, “Hey, in a few hundred years, I’m going to send Jesus to be the Messiah and die on the cross for the sins of mankind”?   Instead, we have all of Isaiah’s prophecies of the suffering servant, but nowhere in Isaiah’s prophesies is the word ‘messiah’ found.   It is almost like God wanted to keep this plan a secret that could only be seen after it happened.

And that is the point.  God did want to keep it a secret.  Jesus was to come and live a sinless life and be an innocent man crucified by the forces of darkness and then resurrected.  But if the forces of darkness, the satan, and the demons (the fallen former council members) knew God’s plan, then they wouldn’t fall for it.

That is how Paul understood it:

1 Corinthians 2:7-8   But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Near the end, when Jesus tells his disciples he must suffer and die, You don’t hear them say, “Well, of course, you are… that is just what we read in the scriptures.”  No!  Peter basically tells Jesus that it is a dumb plan.  Those Old Testament scriptures that we now, looking backward, see so easily were predicting Jesus’ death and resurrection, which were almost impossible to know before it happened.  Even after the resurrection, the disciples need supernatural help to understand what happened:  

Luke 24:44-45   Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”  Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.”

These evil beings used to be in God’s council.  They are intelligent; they know the scriptures.  But they are not all-knowing.  They recognized that Jesus came as the prophesied son of David to be the Messiah.  You see these demons over and over shout it out, “You are the holy one of God” You are the son of God.”  And so they know they have to do something to stop him.  So they arranged to have him betrayed and crucified.  And when he died and was buried, they thought they had won.  Imagine their surprise when Jesus shows up in the place of the dead and lets them know he is just there for a few days because he is being resurrected.

Jesus defeats the curse of death.  Our debt of sin is paid in full.  Death no longer has any hold on us.  The satan, the lord of death, and his demons no longer have any hold on us.  God’s kingdom is being rebuilt, one believer at a time.  God is redeeming us so that we can again live with him.

Following Jesus’ ascension, Pentecost comes. Pentecost is the grand reversal of what happened at the Tower of Babel.  At Babel, God divided the people into nations with different languages and gave each nation to his heavenly council to reign while he chose one nation to rule himself.  At Pentecost, God brings all these nations together:

Acts 2:5  Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven.

It is not a coincidence that the nations listed in Acts 2 are the same nations listed in Genesis 10.  While at Babel, the nations were divided because they couldn’t understand each other’s language, at Pentecost, every nation can now understand the disciples, and God reunites the nations under Him.  About 3000 are saved. These new believers in Jesus will leave Jerusalem and return to their home countries to spread God’s message.   The kingdom is expanding, and the nations are being redeemed.

God’s message will be spread.  His will will be done.  The battle is over, and the forces of darkness have already lost.  If you are in Christ, the satan has no hold on you. He is lord of the dead, and death has been defeated in Christ.  The demons have no hold on you.  You are no longer part of their kingdom when you join the Kingdom of God.  Jesus will come again and fully restore God’s kingdom.  As Peter says, we will be promoted to heavenly status, “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). The Bible refers to it as ‘glorification.’  We will be as God created Adam and Eve to be: immortal, glorified images of God, dwelling in the presence of God.

But until then, we must see the world as Paul did: Our struggle in this world is not against people but against the spiritual forces of evil.  

Eph. 6:10-13   Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.  Put on the whole armor of God so that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. 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. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.

In the past few weeks, we have talked about discipleship as apprenticeship, about how we need to spend time with Jesus so that we can imitate him.  I shared Romans 8:29, which said God had destined us from the beginning of time to be conformed to the image of his Son.  This is something God will accomplish.  I don’t want you to feel guilty about those areas of your life where you are not like Jesus.  Being like Jesus is not a task you do, so God will not be angry with you.  Guilt is not the attitude you should have.   Instead, this is the attitude I want you to have:   Gratitude.  

Be grateful that our God Himself is looking forward to the day He will bring about our glorification.  When he will transform us, when we replace this perishable body with the imperishable, when we put on immortality and become partakers in the divine nature, when “we shall be like him.”   Meanwhile, we live in such a way that the people around us, who have been ensnared by the trap of the devil, will want to join us in the family of God

1. Heiser, Michael. Supernatural. Kindle edition, page 18.
2. You will see these descendants of the Nephalim in the Old Testament called ‘The Anakim’ (the giant descendants of Anak), or the Rephaim (which is Hebrew for “lofty terrible ones”).
3. Ibid. page 96.