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Sunday, September 2, 2012

In A Pig's Eye

I just got through reading the story in the New Testament where Jesus runs across this whopping scary dude in the rocks who nobody wants to tangle with.  He is flat stone crazy, screaming and cutting himself all day and night.  Who wouldn’t want to detour around the block to avoid him?  Yet the locals put up with having him there.  Now Jesus shows up, and lo and behold the man starts talking in fear and revealing that there are many who have taken up residence inside him.  These evil spirits are immediately in fear of Jesus because they recognize him as all-powerful and beg him not to send them back to the abyss, but to send them into a herd of pigs nearby instead.  It’s kind of interesting that the first thing they do is run the pigs they now inhabit off the hill and into a lake and kill them all.  Guess setting up house inside a pig isn’t all that much fun even for demons (and since I’ve seen pigs wallow and I’ve seen what they eat, I’m not surprised.)

So what’s the outcome of this in Jesus’ generation?  Everyone marvels and then immediately wants Jesus to leave because they fear him.  He’s cured this guy and is sitting talking to him normally, and yet they don’t find good in all that…they reject it.  I suspect the same thing would happen today.  The newspaper would carry the story “Itinerant religious wacko kills farmers swine herd -- Lawsuit for theft of property pending.  Preacher being held in county jail for disturbing the peace.”  We live in an unbelieving generation much like in Christ’s day, where recognizing good and evil is rare.  We rationalize and excuse behavior, and we seek only after material gain and power. 

We are still rejecting the good over the evil far too often, and the cost of that will be high.




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