Postkiwi

A Man with an Evil Spirit

Jesus and his disciples went to the town of Capernaum. Then on the next Sabbath he went into the Jewish meeting place and started teaching. Everyone was amazed at his teaching. He taught with authority, and not like the teachers of the Law of Moses.

Suddenly a man with an evil spirit in him entered the meeting place and yelled, “Jesus from Nazareth, what do you want with us? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are! You are God’s Holy One.” Jesus told the evil spirit, “Be quiet and come out of the man!” The spirit shook him. Then it gave a loud shout and left. Everyone was completely surprised and kept saying to each other, “What is this? It must be some new kind of powerful teaching! Even the evil spirits obey him.” News about Jesus quickly spread all over Galilee.

Footnotes: Mark 1:23 evil spirit: A Jewish person who had an evil spirit was considered “unclean” and was not allowed to eat or worship with other Jewish people.

Mark 1:21-28 (Contemporary English Version) (CEV)
© 1995 by American Bible Society

I’ve come across a few people who want to tell everybody else they’re God’s holy one. Or the Son of God. Or the new Christ. But to have people on the edge of psychological/spiritual stability yell out who Jesus is… that’s another thing. My first reaction when reading this as a young person was one of appreciation of the capacity of Jesus to deal with destructive and oppressive forces in the lives of people he met.

I had regular encounters with people who demonstrated the kinds of behaviours being described here. I was keen to see what Jesus did, and perhaps follow in his footsteps. I noticed, for example, that Jesus didn’t deal with shouting people by shouting back at them. His authority was not based on the using the ‘correct words’ or the ‘loudest voice’. Nor was it based on physical shaking.

In the 1980s I went through my own shaking. I was involved in a number of deliverance ministry sessions in which deeply wounded people sifted through the crisis points of their lives and claimed spiritual victory. In some cases there were deep sighs and cries of agony as painful memories were resurrected and dealt with in the name of Jesus. I began to wonder if what we were doing was really all that helpful for those in the ‘inner healing/deliverance’ sessions. The physical expressions of ‘release’ may not have been due to evil spirits leaving. They may have been just expressions of deep hurt.

I was deeply impressed by the advice given at a Vineyard Ministries conference around that time. The common sense approach he advocated involved honouring normal medical procedures including physical, psychological and psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. If it became clear that there was something more, something sinister, involved in the oppressed person’s life, then would be the time for spiritual discernment and careful ministry of deliverance. But again, no need for shouting, shaking or magic formula.