Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2262
“And they began to pray Him to depart out of their coasts. And when He was come into the ship, he that had been possessed with the devil prayed Him thathe might be with Him. However, Jesus suffered him not, but said unto him, Go home to your friends, and tell them what great things the Lord has done for you, and how He has had compassion on you.” Mark 5:17-19.
THAT is a striking name for a man, “he that had been possessed with the devil.” It would stick to him as long as he lived and it would be a standing sermon wherever he went. He would be asked to tell the story of what he used to be and how the change came about. What a story for any man to tell! It would not be possible for us to describe his life while he was a demoniac—the midnight scenes among the tombs, the cutting himself with stones, the howling, the frightening away of all the travelers that went near him, the binding with chains, the snapping of the manacles, the breaking of the fetters—and a great many details that he, alone, could enter into when he told the story among his own familiar friends. With what tenderness would he tell how Jesus came that way and how the evil spirit forced him to confront Him! He would say, “That was the best thing that could have happened to me, to be brought to the Master of that desperate legion of demons which had encamped within my nature and made my soul to be its barracks.” He would tell how, in a moment, out went the whole legion at the word of Christ!
There are some people who could tell a story very similar to this man’s—a story of slavery to Satan and deliverance by the power of Christ! If you can tell such a story, do not keep it to yourself! If Jesus has done great things for you, be always ready to speak of it, till all men shall know what Christ can do. I think that great sinners who have been saved are especially called upon to publish the good news, the Gospel of the Grace of God. If you have been valiant against the Truth of God, be valiant for the Truth of God. If you were not lukewarm when you served Satan, be not lukewarm, now that you have come to serve Christ! There are some of us here who might bear the name of “the man who was born blind,” or, “the leper that was healed,” or, “the woman that was a sinner.” And I hope that we shall all be willing to take any name or any title that will glorify Christ. I do not find that this man ever persecuted Mark for libel because he wrote of him as, “he that had been possessed with the devil.” Oh, no! He acknowledge that he was once possessed with the devil—and he glorified God that he had been delivered by the Lord Jesus!
I. I am going to make a few observations upon the passage I have chosen for a text—and the first observation is this, SEE HOW MEN’S DESIRES DIFFERED. We find in the 17th verse that, “they began to pray Him to depart out of their coasts.” In the 18th verse, “he that had been possessed with the devil prayed Him that he might be with Him.” The people wanted Christ to go away from them—the man whom He had cured wanted to go wherever He might go! To which class do you belong, my dear Friend?
I hope you do not belong to the first class, the class of the many who pray Jesus to depart from them. Why did they want Him to go?
I think it was, first, because they loved to be quiet and to dwell at ease. It was a great calamity that had happened— the swine had run into the sea. They did not want any more such calamities and evidently the Person who had come among them possessed extraordinary power. Had He not healed the demoniac? Well, they did not want Him—they did not want anything extraordinary. They were easy-going men who would like to go on in the even tenor of their ways, so they asked Him to be good enough to go away. There are some people of that kind still living. They say, “We do not need
a revival, here—we are too respectable. We do not need any stirring preaching here—we are very comfortable. Do not break up our peace.” Such men, when they think that God is at work in any place, are half inclined to go elsewhere. They want to be quiet! Their motto is, “Anything for a quiet life.” “Leave us alone, let us go on our old way,” is the cry of these foolish people, as it was the cry of the Israelites when they said to Moses, “Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians.”
Possibly these people wanted the Savior gone because they had an eye to business. That keeping of the swine was a bad business. As Jews, they had no business with it. They may have said they did not eat them—themselves, they only kept them for other people to eat—but now they had lost the whole herd! I wonder what all those swine would have brought to their owners? As they began calculating how much they had lost, they resolved that the Savior must get out of their coasts before they lost anything more. I do not wonder that, when men sell intoxicating liquors, for instance, or when they follow any trade in which they cannot make money except by injuring their fellow men, they do not want Christ to come that way. Perhaps some of you would not like Him to see you pay those poor women for making shirts. I am afraid if Jesus Christ were to come around and go into some people’s business houses, the husband would say to his wife, “Fetch down that book where I enter the wages and hide it—I should not like Him to see that.”