Jesus Frees His People: Westminster Seminary California 2008

In his address to Westminster Seminary, Derke Bergsma explores the profound ways in which Jesus liberates His followers, emphasizing spiritual freedom and the transformative power of faith.

The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.

The following is a message by Doctor Dirk Bergsma from Westminster Seminary, California. For more information about the seminary, visit us online at westcal.edu or call us at 760-480-8474. That’s online at wscal.edu, or call 760-480-8474. Please bow with me in prayer.

O Lord our God, open our eyes that we may behold the wonderful things of your word. Holy Spirit, enlighten our minds and move our hearts to respond with understanding and faith as we hear you speak to us from the sacred scriptures. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

I’d like to turn your attention to the healing of the demon possessed man, the Gadarene demoniac. I don’t know why we always have to have some big words to identify events in the Bible, but he’s called Gadarene because he came from a town called Gadara. I guess I’m a Chicagoan from way back, but that’s not Gadara. And he is demoniac because he was demon possessed. This is what the Holy Spirit has to say about this episode in Jesus’ life, which we call the healing of the demon possessed man.

¹ They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. ² And when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit. ³ He lived among the tombs. And no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain, ⁴ for he had often been bound with shackles and chains, but he wrenched the chains apart, and he broke the shackles in pieces. No one had the strength to subdue him. ⁵ Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out and cutting himself with stones. ⁶ And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him. ⁷ And crying out with a loud voice, he said, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” ⁸ For he was saying to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!”

⁹ And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” ¹¹ Now a great herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, ¹² and they begged him, saying, “Send us to the pigs; let us enter them.” ¹³ So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the sea. ¹⁵ And they came to Jesus and saw the demon-possessed man, the one who had had the legion, sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. ¹⁶ And those who had seen it described to them what had happened to the demon-possessed man and to the pigs. ¹⁷ And they began to beg Jesus to depart from their region. ¹⁸ As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed with demons begged him that he might be with him. ¹⁹ And he did not permit him but said to him, “Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” ²⁰ And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and everyone marveled. (Mark 5:1-20, ESV)

May the Holy Spirit help us to understand this gospel message.

Students, colleagues, staff members, in the big picture of things in the history of redemption, this episode demonstrates that the kingdom of God had arrived in the person of Jesus.

The kingdom of God was now among us, among humanity, and the powers of darkness were in retreat. I hope you got that. Because the evil spirits begged Jesus. They recognized that he represented a power greater than the one they were serving. So you see, when demons are subject to Jesus, this is simply the introduction to the story of the life of Christ, which ends when the head of the serpent is crushed by the seed of the woman. But that’s the big picture.

The specific event is this encounter of Jesus with a man who was demon possessed, this man who was under the control of the powers of darkness which Jesus was setting into retreat. In other words, this story of Jesus and the demon possessed man is a story of freedom. And if I were to make a sermon on this, and I don’t intend this to be a sermon, it’s an admonition, it’s a reflection. It’s a meditation, not a sermon.

But if I were to make a sermon and followed what I taught, if I practice what I teach, then I would say that the heartbeat of this text is summarized in the statement: Jesus sets people free. And if we read this passage further, then we discover the two major consequences of Jesus’ power: to set people free from demonic power and for joyful service. Now, most of it talks about Jesus freeing the man from the powers of evil.

But toward the end of the passage, you’ll notice that Jesus had a purpose in setting this man free, namely, that this man would serve joyfully his freeing master. And that’s why we have these great words when this man wants to follow Jesus. Jesus says, “No, go home to your family. Tell them how much the Lord has done for you. This is your service now. This is your response of gratitude.” And what does he do? The man went away and began to tell in the Decapolis.

And of course, we’re all Greek scholars around here, so we know that means ten towns. He went to ten towns and told people what Jesus had done for him. And I’m just saying this now because I know I won’t get that far because I’m going to concentrate on point number one. Jesus sets people free from demonic power, knowing that he was set free for joyful service. Well, when we speak of freedom, we have to ask ourselves, what is it? What is it?

If you were to ask the average person in the mall or in some neighborhood encounter for a definition of freedom, I suppose most people would say freedom is the opportunity to do anything I please, free of all accountability, do what I want to do, do my own thing. That used to be a statement that was common among us. Free of parental authority if you’re a teenager, free of the teacher’s authority, demands attendance, get your papers in on time, free of police authority if you like to speed. Live as I please, do whatever I want.

Well, I tell you, folks, if that’s what freedom is, license to do anything I please, then this man was free before he met Jesus. Look at these words with me, will you? To begin with, he was free to live where he pleased, so he lived in a cemetery. That’s verse three: “This man lived in the tombs.” He was free to wear what he pleased, so he didn’t wear anything at all. He was a streaker in the cemetery.

Well, I guess most of you don’t go back that far, but when I was at the University of Chicago 45 years ago, it was a fad. They ran naked from one dorm to the other. It was called streaking. This man was a streaker in the cemetery, boy. Well, Freud said something about that. People tried to restrict his freedom with chains, leg irons. He somehow found them, crushed them on the nearest rock or something. He wanted to be free. If he felt like shouting, he shouted, waking up the neighborhood at 02:00 in the morning.

The Bible says,

⁵ Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out and cutting himself with stones. (Mark 5:5, ESV)

Well, friends, Jesus recognized that kind of freedom for what it really was: bondage, slavery to the power of demons, enslavement to the powers of darkness. So unfree was this man that he didn’t even have any personal identity. He didn’t even know who he was. You know, that happens now. Sometimes it’s more visible than other times, but we almost lose an identity to the powers that control us.

Just saw a program last night about gambling addiction, and who should they interview but John Daly and Charles Barkley. John Daly, the most powerful ball striker in professional golf right now, isn’t he? He claims to have lost $50 to $60 million, and he didn’t even have that much. So the IRS is after him, and the casinos are after him to pay up these debts, bondage to this evil power. And Charles Barkley, who said he’s lost ten to 12 million.

But he says, fortunately, I still have some money left and didn’t really come to the point of admitting his helplessness under this controlling demonic power. Well, this man lost his identity because he knew he was out of control. Because when Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He says, “My name is Legion.” Now I have a new living Bible translation which says that the demons respond, and they really did. They were so in control that it’s really this demonic force within him that’s responding and says, “Look, my name is Legion, for we are many.”

⁹ And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” (Mark 5:9, ESV)

And as you know, the word legion is not a name; it’s a number. And if we had asked you this morning what your name was and you said 2400, then we know there was something wrong, right? Now, the Romans called a whole division of troops a legion, and they were usually about 6000. Of course, we can’t say that therefore there were 6000 demons, but it means very many. You see, your name is your primary identity, right? If you were asked me this morning, who are you?

I wouldn’t have said, well, I’m a father of four great kids and 13 grandkids and a good wife and a husband of a good wife. No, I would have said, my name is Dirk. My mother, my wife calls me Dirk sometimes when I do things she doesn’t like. She says Dirk, but I know she means me. This poor man didn’t know who he was. He didn’t know who he was. He was out of control. And then something strange happens.

These demons, who respond to Jesus’ question, begin pleading with Jesus, and if you want more proof, I don’t know where you’ll find it, that Jesus represents the power of God against the powers of the demonic world, the powers of darkness. And they begin to beg Jesus not to send them out of that territory because they were rather comfortable there. They had their own way there; they had a lot of people to possess there. And so, they say, look, they begged Jesus to send them into the pigs. I don’t know how to explain that.

Can pigs be possessed by evil spirits? I know what happened there. I don’t know if that’s a standard that happens in other times. And I know what happened to these pigs. They went berserk. They ran down a steep place into the sea. If you visited the sea of Galilee on the north side, that’s where Gadder is. You know that. That’s the way the hill goes, right straight into the sea. It doesn’t flatten out on a nice beach where the pigs could stop themselves. Down they go. Pigs. They went crazy. Pigs usually don’t act that way.

They usually like to just slobber around and get overweight and are lazy. I hope that doesn’t remind you of some people you know. But you see, that stirred up the population. Before that, the people of Gadara weren’t concerned about this poor man running around wild in the cemetery. But now, 2000 head of hogs, these were small towns. There were probably 200 and 5300 population per town, which means 2000 hogs represented something of a great measure of the economy. That’s where people had jobs, raising piglets, preparing hams and marketing all of this.

And you say, well, what are they doing with pigs? When the Mosaic law said, hey, no pork, no pork. Well, I don’t know how to proceed with that. Maybe they were Galilee of the Gentiles, and the Gentiles did this thing. Maybe they were unfaithful to their own heritage. But we do know that it disrupted the economy, because then the people of the city start to come to Jesus to see what’s happened.

Because in verse 15, we read,

¹⁵ And they came to Jesus and saw the demon-possessed man, the one who had had the legion, sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. (Mark 5:15, ESV)

He used to run around like a wild man dressed, you know how he used to run around, and now in his right mind. And they said, praise the Lord. No, they didn’t, did they? It says, “And they were afraid.” Did you get the connection? The demons were afraid of Jesus because they recognized that he represented a power much greater than the one they represent.

And now these people are afraid because they serve the same power. And that’s why they plead with Jesus to leave their territory. You ruin our economy, Jesus. And so, you know under what? Demonic power, greed, economic advancement, they were under that they preferred to the authority of Jesus. Well, what does this episode remind us to understand once again? Well, doesn’t it remind us that there is freedom only in Jesus? Real freedom, only in Jesus, because we human beings are dependent creatures. We are not independent, we are not in control. We are physically dependent.

If you don’t believe that, stop breathing for ten minutes. See what happens. We are physically dependent on the air we breathe, the water we drink, and if we say we want to be free from this necessity of breathing, I’m tired of it. Well, you know what that is? That’s the freedom of death. Because all so-called freedoms outside submission to the lordship of Jesus is a freedom, a false freedom that ends only in death. So you see, if we refuse to acknowledge the authority of God in our lives, that doesn’t make us free.

It simply makes us in bondage to some other authority. As Jesus himself said, you cannot serve God and mammon, that which is opposed to God, which means we had better pick our masters.

²⁴ “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. (Matthew 6:24, ESV)

I close with a fish story. This is the famous Strimple fish story. Now, I never heard it from his own lips, but I did hear it from students. Two students especially were sort of mimicking Dr. Strimple’s fish story with great respect, of course, as students always do if they try to mimic their professors.

And if I don’t have the details quite like Strimpel liked to say it to his classes, well, you’ll forgive me, but it goes something like this. I want you to imagine a fish. Let’s make it a tuna. They’re quite common out here in the Pacific. As long as that tuna stays within the Pacific Ocean water, it can live, gets its nourishment, its oxygen supply, it can live, it can move, it can go all the way to Hawaii if it wants to, right? And it can have its being.

And you know that the statement comes from the Bible, to live and move and have its being. But I want you to imagine that this tuna fish is swimming below the surface of the ocean and happens to look up and sees in the sky a seagull floating in the air.

²⁸ for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ (Acts 17:28, ESV)

And the tuna says to itself, oh, I wish I were as free as a bird. And it wants to be free like a bird so badly that it turns towards shore and takes a mighty lip and lands on the sands of the beach, free to die.

Flap around a little while, free to die. Well, fish don’t often do that, but a lot of people do. They replace an environment of life that God has provided and substitute for it the so-called freedom that ends in death. Paul put it this way: In him we live and move and have our being. This is real life in its abundance.

But the same apostle who said, “God, we live and move and have our being,” also called himself a bond slave, a doulos of Jesus, because Paul knew that the highest form of human freedom is submission to the mastery of Jesus. As Jesus himself once said,

³⁶ So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. (John 8:36, ESV)

Now go and proclaim that message to ten nations. Let us pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you that when Jesus is our master, no other power can ever dominate us, and we pray that we may live to serve him who has shown us such mercy and set us free. In his great name we pray, Amen.

You’ve been listening to a message from Westminster Seminary, California. For more information about this recording or Westminster Seminary California, please visit us online at wscal.edu or call us at 760-480-8474.