Why Did Demons Ask Jesus for Pigs?
00:00:00.000 | A listener named Calvin, great name, from Singapore, writes us today with a Bible question
00:00:10.800 | on Matthew 8.
00:00:11.800 | Pastor John, thank you for your ministry and for this podcast, which I've benefited from
00:00:16.040 | greatly.
00:00:17.040 | My question is over Matthew 8, verses 28 to 34.
00:00:21.000 | In this text, why did the demons ask Jesus' permission to be sent into the pigs when those
00:00:25.320 | pigs would be immediately drowned?
00:00:28.360 | Where else would they have gone, and where did they go after the whole herd rushed down
00:00:32.480 | the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the waters?
00:00:36.720 | This has always perplexed me.
00:00:38.360 | Pastor John, what can you tell Calvin?
00:00:40.760 | Not everybody knows this story, so probably we should read that section from Matthew 8
00:00:46.440 | that he's referring to.
00:00:48.680 | When Jesus came to the other side, so this is starting at verse 28 of Matthew 8.
00:00:54.600 | When Jesus came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed
00:01:01.280 | men met him, coming out of the tomb so fierce that no one could pass that way.
00:01:08.160 | And behold, they cried out, "What have you to do with us, O son of God?
00:01:13.800 | Have you come here to torment us before the time?"
00:01:17.400 | Now, a herd of many pigs was feeding at some distance from them, and the demons begged
00:01:26.080 | him, saying, "If you cast us out, send us away into the herd of pigs."
00:01:32.720 | And he said to them, "Go."
00:01:35.840 | So they came out and went into the pigs, and behold, the whole herd rushed down the steep
00:01:42.600 | bank into the sea and drowned in the waters.
00:01:47.360 | The herdsmen fled.
00:01:50.980 | Going into the city, they told everything, especially what had happened to the demon-possessed
00:01:55.560 | men.
00:01:57.640 | And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus.
00:02:01.480 | And when they saw him, they begged him to leave their region.
00:02:07.600 | Like, what?
00:02:09.600 | What?
00:02:10.600 | Oh, my goodness, the great liberator has come!
00:02:15.240 | And they tell him to get out.
00:02:17.640 | So before we get into the less clear and more perplexing parts of the story, let's just
00:02:23.760 | be sure that we don't miss what is crystal clear.
00:02:27.680 | Number one, the demons know who Jesus is.
00:02:31.380 | They call him the Son of God.
00:02:34.680 | Number two, they know that he has absolute power over them and can choose either to cast
00:02:41.000 | them out or not and to decide where they go.
00:02:44.840 | There's no negotiation here as if they were equal partners at the negotiating table.
00:02:49.400 | Jesus is superior, and they know it.
00:02:52.800 | Three, they know that in the future they are appointed for final torment, and they wonder
00:03:00.760 | if Jesus has come to start that final judgment.
00:03:04.760 | They say, "Have you come here to torment us before the time?"
00:03:08.760 | You know, we know there's a time coming when we're going to get final torment, but not
00:03:13.000 | yet, Jesus.
00:03:14.200 | Or is it?
00:03:15.200 | Or is it?
00:03:16.600 | And then number four, the fact that there was a herd of pigs nearby shows that we are
00:03:21.720 | in Gentile territory, since the Jews regarded pigs as unclean, Deuteronomy 14.8, and did
00:03:30.520 | not raise them for food or anything.
00:03:33.840 | In other words, this is one of those rare moments when Jesus is reaching out into the
00:03:41.120 | Gentile world as a pointer to the fact that his ministry is going to result in a global
00:03:49.880 | mission to all the peoples of the world, Matthew 28, 19, and 20.
00:03:54.360 | Number five, the number of pigs isn't mentioned in Matthew like it is in Mark 2000, but the
00:04:01.120 | herd is called "large," so that when the demons go out from the two demonized men into the
00:04:08.680 | herd and they all perish, we get the very clear sense of how big, how large, how serious
00:04:17.280 | this man's bondage was, or these men's bondage was, and how even this was no problem for
00:04:26.360 | Jesus.
00:04:27.360 | Number six, the fact that the demons pleaded to be sent into the pigs shows how much they
00:04:35.140 | hated roaming about in the world without any habitation.
00:04:40.880 | This seems to point to how evil they are and how the maximizing of their evil comes from
00:04:50.240 | entering into any kind of being they can get their hands on to ruin their lives.
00:04:56.480 | Number seven, but the demons could not have seen—this is part of what he asks—the
00:05:03.120 | demons could not have seen that their new habitation, the pigs, would suddenly run down
00:05:09.640 | the hill and all drown, because if in fact they saw that coming, they wouldn't have
00:05:16.280 | asked for it.
00:05:17.840 | That's not what they were trying to do.
00:05:20.440 | They were trying to get a new place to live and do damage, not a place to be destroyed
00:05:25.280 | in the sea.
00:05:26.980 | And from what we know of Jesus in the Gospels, he would have known what was about to happen,
00:05:35.960 | so that what they feared—namely, that he was here ahead of time to begin their final
00:05:41.360 | judgment—was in fact true.
00:05:46.280 | He had not let them escape into some lesser being for the misery they had brought on this
00:05:54.720 | couple of men, but he had appointed them to depart, as it turns out, without any habitation.
00:06:03.120 | And the fact that it was lost in the sea points to the fact that he was sentencing them probably
00:06:11.560 | to the abyss.
00:06:13.960 | Now, all that seems more or less clear, but is there more that can be said as to why Jesus
00:06:25.320 | would bring about the destruction of the pigs?
00:06:30.000 | And the last two verses are very surprising, and I think they encourage us to go further
00:06:37.880 | in our thinking.
00:06:39.980 | They say, "The herdsmen fled, going into the city, and told everything"—and it
00:06:48.320 | doesn't say especially about the pigs; it says especially about what happened to the
00:06:52.240 | demon-possessed men.
00:06:53.680 | In other words, they foregrounded deliverance and liberation and freedom and healing.
00:06:59.720 | "And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him, they begged
00:07:04.200 | him to leave their region."
00:07:06.120 | Now, two amazing things have happened in this Gentile region suddenly and by the power of
00:07:13.040 | Jesus.
00:07:14.040 | Number one, two demon-possessed men were now free, and their humanity was restored.
00:07:21.400 | Their relationships were restored.
00:07:23.800 | I wrote a poem one time just making up the fact that they were married, perhaps, and
00:07:28.280 | had children, and their lives were ruined, and their families' lives were ruined, and
00:07:31.640 | maybe, I don't know.
00:07:33.520 | But they were ruined, and now they're not ruined anymore.
00:07:36.640 | Their humanity is given back to them.
00:07:38.160 | And the second amazing thing that happened was a large herd of pigs was destroyed.
00:07:44.320 | Now what this causes me to ponder is another situation in the Bible where Satan attempted
00:07:51.720 | to negotiate with God, namely, in the first two chapters of Job.
00:07:56.680 | Satan asks permission to afflict Job, and God gave Satan permission, which proved to
00:08:05.880 | be a test of Job's faithfulness to God.
00:08:10.800 | Job would face the choice—you can love God and trust him, or you can love your possessions
00:08:19.120 | and your family and your health more and curse God for taking them away.
00:08:24.640 | In other words, God used Satan to test Job.
00:08:30.520 | Now it seems to me that's more or less what's going on here.
00:08:36.560 | Jesus comes into this Gentile world, he conquers the devil, he sets the prisoner free, he presents
00:08:43.800 | himself as a great deliverer, able to restore life and hope, but he also takes away a herd
00:08:49.680 | of pigs, the livelihood, the wealth from some in the community.
00:08:55.160 | He forces a choice—prosperity over love, money over Jesus, human resources over divine
00:09:04.720 | power—that is, the power and grace of Jesus to give life and hope, or the love of possessions
00:09:14.520 | and wealth gotten from these pigs.
00:09:17.920 | And to our utter amazement, they beg Jesus, the life-giver, the devil-defeater, the hope-maker
00:09:25.520 | and giver, to leave their region.
00:09:29.480 | So it seems to me that the story has several levels of meaning.
00:09:35.160 | One, Jesus is the Son of God.
00:09:38.120 | Two, Jesus is triumphant over unclean spirits.
00:09:43.000 | Number three, Jesus liberates the captive and gives hope to hopeless people, even Gentile
00:09:49.680 | people.
00:09:50.960 | And four, but Jesus demands a choice—love him and his salvation, or love your prosperity
00:10:00.560 | and your wealth, namely your pigs.
00:10:03.960 | And they failed.
00:10:04.960 | They failed the test.
00:10:05.960 | And Matthew reports it, I think, in the hopes that we will not fail that test.
00:10:13.960 | Indeed.
00:10:14.960 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:10:16.040 | And thanks for the Bible question, Calvin.
00:10:18.400 | We publish this podcast three times per week, with over 1,500 episodes now in the archive.
00:10:22.680 | You can find them, you can subscribe, or you can send us your own questions.
00:10:25.960 | You can do all that online at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:10:33.080 | How do we get tricked into sinning?
00:10:35.880 | Tricked into sinning.
00:10:37.480 | That's the question on the table.
00:10:38.560 | Next time, we will hear from a listener named Gabriela, who lives in Sweden, a very secular
00:10:42.800 | country, and she has needed help getting clarity on this very question in her own ministry
00:10:47.720 | to unbelievers there.
00:10:50.120 | So how do we get tricked into sinning?
00:10:53.520 | I'm Tony Rehnke, and we'll see you back here on Wednesday.
00:10:55.400 | Bye.
00:10:56.400 | Bye.
00:10:56.400 | Bye.
00:10:57.400 | Bye.
00:10:57.400 | Bye.
00:10:58.400 | Bye.
00:10:58.400 | Bye.
00:10:59.400 | Bye.
00:10:59.400 | [ Silence ]