Jesus Can Really Help Us!!

The unclean spirit said to Jesus, ”What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” The unclean spirit not only recognizes the fact of Jesus’ authority, but with supernatural insight, he understands it. Jesus is the Holy One of God who has come to destroy all unclean spirits and to set up God’s kingdom. It was widely believed at that time that if one knew a person’s true identity and could utter his name, he could gain a magic power over him. This "confession" of the unclean spirit is best understood as a desperate but fruitless attempt to get control of Jesus or to make him harmless.

It is the power of God that works in Jesus and a mere word from Jesus will be sufficient. “Be silent, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.” Jesus comes from God with a power that gets right at the heart of that man’s problem. This is no aspirin religion here; no band aids that simply cover over the symptoms and leaves the problems untouched.

Jesus diagnoses this man’s problem for what it really is and gets at the root of it. He calls out the unclean evil spirit and sets the man free. Some people are so disabled that evil spirits actually speak out of them. Everything they say is a distortion meant to manipulate others to serve their ends. When a person lives as if he were the center of everything, it is an unclean spirit who is in control. The evil spirits are those powers at work both within and without that conspire against us to turn us away from trusting in God.

Sometimes we can notice it in others when we say, "What’s gotten into you?" Or after realizing what we have said or done to someone else, we may say of ourselves, "I don’t know what’s come over me.” And we really know that there is nothing we can do about it. Like the man in the synagogue, we seem to be a pawn in the hands of alien forces that exercise a power over us that we cannot overcome by ourselves. Our problem is that we often fail to turn to God in all our needs. We lack the very thing that prayer and trust in God would provide. But Jesus is here for us, the holy one of God, the more powerful one. He is the kind of teacher we need, and his word has authority. He is the one who gets at the root of our problems also, and does something that really helps.

God did not intend that his good creation should go so wide of the goal that he had set for his creation when he put us in his world. He determined to redeem and to rescue his creation. He sent his own Son equipped with his own authority and empowered to get at the heart of our problems and to do something about it. In his baptism Jesus identified with us at every point in our lives. He was not overcome by the problems he faced. He did not give in. He endured even to his death on the cross where he faced Satan and defeated him. And on the third day the Father raised him in victory. Out of that tomb Christ brought us a new power, a power that brings life out of death, a power that defeats the powers of evil at their own game. Jesus speaks the gospel to us when he says, I have freed you.