Chapter # 5 Paragraph # 1 Study # 5
December 22, 2020
Moss Bluff, Louisiana
(192)
1901 ASV
6 And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and worshiped him;
7 and crying out with a loud voice, he saith, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the Most High God? I adjure thee by God, torment me not.
8 For he said unto him, Come forth, thou unclean spirit, out of the man.
9 And he asked him, What is thy name? And he saith unto him, My name is Legion; for we are many.
10 And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the country.
11 Now there was there on the mountain side a great herd of swine feeding.
12 And they besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them.
13 And he gave them leave. And the unclean spirits came out, and entered into the swine: and the herd rushed down the steep into the sea, in number about two thousand; and they were drowned in the sea.
14 And they that fed them fled, and told it in the city, and in the country. And they came to see what it was that had come to pass.
15 And they come to Jesus, and behold him that was possessed with demons sitting, clothed and in his right mind, even him that had the legion: and they were afraid.
16 And they that saw it declared unto them how it befell him that was possessed with demons, and concerning the swine.
17 And they began to beseech him to depart from their borders.
18 And as he was entering into the boat, he that had been possessed with demons besought him that he might be with him.
19 And he suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go to thy house unto thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and how he had mercy on thee.
20 And he went his way, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him: and all men marvelled.
- I. Mark's Characterization Of The Confrontation of the Demoniac: 5:6-13.
- A. Mark organized his thoughts non-chronologically.
- 1. He tells us in 5:8 what brought out the demoniac's "great vocal cry" in 5:7.
- 2. It is almost as if he thought, after writing verse seven, "Whoops, I need to explain this loud cry".
- a. He did need to explain the demon's "...great voice saying...".
- b. But, to assume that he didn't realize this until after he wrote verse seven is a significant, and likely false, assumption. Mark, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, was not attempting to correct a flawed record. Rather, he was putting the most important issues on the front burner: it is more important for us, as readers, to read that the demons were in abject submission to Jesus in spite of their antagonism toward Him and their intense desire to control their powerful control over the demoniac, than it is for us to know what the particular challenge to that "control" was. It is significant that "Jesus was saying to the demon(s) that they had to relinquish their control over their human host". But, it is more significant that this "demon hoard" was in abject submission to Jesus.
- 3. Organizational factors are designed to help readers grasp the author's meaning and intentions.
- B. Mark's major point: the demon(s) recognized Jesus' absolute authority over them.
- 1. The demoniac "beheld" The Jesus from a significant distance.
- a. Mark used this particular form of a word which has its "beginning of meaning" at the point of "seeing" in 12 texts.
- b. Mark's use of this form of this word has this characteristic: the "seeing" brings an immediate awareness of certain implications to the viewer. In our current record, as soon as the demoniac "saw" The Jesus, the demons within him "knew" that their powerful dominion over their human host was at significant risk.
- 1) The demons would not have been unaware of Who Jesus Is (they claimed such knowledge), nor would they have been unaware of how Jesus had already, typically, treated their kind (He had, by this time, already cast out so many demons that the shockwaves of His dealings with them had reverberated throughout the Kingdom of Darkness).
- 2) This means that it is inescapable that the demons highly valued "hosts" for them to use to generate mayhem in the material universe occupied by humans. They were in significant distress over the potential loss as soon as they "beheld" The Jesus from a far distance.
- 2. Thus, the "beholding" instantly brought the danger of losses into primary focus.
- a. The participle is an Aorist: the "beholding" was "in an instant" and the reaction was instantaneous.
- b. The realization of the danger caused the demons to impel their host to "run" (one of only two times Mark used this word in his record) to Him. Obviously they thought their need to act to protect their position within the man was dire.
- 3. Additionally, the running ended with "prostration before Him".
- a. Mark only used the word "to prostrate oneself before another" in two places in his record: this text and 15:19. The second of these places uses the word to record the mocking of Jesus by the Roman soldiers: in other words, the self-prostration was "external only"; it did not signify the "heart", only the outward action.
- b. Demons do not "worship" (the Authorized Version's rendering of the word) God with any real devotion, nor do they prostrate themselves before Him except under duress. Point: they obviously thought that they might be able to dissuade Jesus from His intention to deliver the man from them if they gave outward signs of "humble supplication".
- 4. Even the "loud cry" in "saying" was a demonstration of their sense of impending loss. It would probably not be an overstatement that the demons were in a kind of panic over their intuition of Jesus' intentions.
- a. "Loud cries", by definition, seek to get, and hold, attention.
- b. The first time Mark recorded someone "loudly crying out" was in 3:11.
- 1) The parallels between 3:11 and our current text (5:7) are obvious.
- 2) Those parallels include...
- a) The fact that it was an "unclean spirit" in 3:11 and 5:7.
- b) The content of the cry in 3:11 was "You are the Son of The God", and the content in 5:7 was "What to me and to You, Jesus, Son of the Most High God...?".
- c) In 3:11 the record says the unclean spirits would "fall down before Him" (using the word prospipto) and 5:7 says they prostrated themselves to Him (using the word proskuneo). The meaning is slightly different, but the "point" is the same.
- d) The backdrop of 3:11 was "exorcism" (a "backdrop" established by 1:34 in its character as a "gloss"; a summary of the significant points) and the same is true of 5:7.
- e) At issue in every case of confrontation is the issue of "torment" (5:7) or "destruction" (1:24) in respect to His demand that the unclean spirit depart from his "victim host".
- c. Interestingly, Mark used the very word in 5:5 as he did in 5:7, but in 5:5 the "crying" was by the tormented man as he gashed himself with stones. The point: "crying out" is a demonstration of terrible agony of soul/spirit.
- d. This "loud cry".
- 1) "What to me and to You?"
- 2) "Jesus, Son of The God The Most High."
- 3) "I implore (in the strongest terms) You to swear by The God..."
- 4) "Do not torment me."