The Gospel narrative about the Saviour’s expulsion of a legion of demons from the possessed Gadarene (Luke (8:27) reminds us with renewed force of the reality of the other world and of the influence that the evil members of that world have on men’s lives.
Just as the citizen of any nation needs to possess elementary knowledge of neighboring peoples, of their mores and customs, so does a Christian need to know the mores and customs of the denizens of the other world. Christian teaching contains all the necessary information for us about the world of the fallen angels – the demons, and about their struggle against mankind.
This struggle has an ancient history. The demons, led by Satan, cannot forgive people for having been created by God in the place of the angels who had fallen away. For this reason, at the very beginning of human history, we meet Satan in the Garden of Eden, tempting Adam and Eve and succeeding. Satan prepared the way for the first people to betray God.
The demons’ hate for people increased a hundredfold after God Himself became incarnate and suffered for the fallen Adam, for the entire fallen mankind, granting to each person the possibility of salvation. The demons hate people to such a degree that were it not for the restraining force of God, they would have immediately poisoned all of mankind with their lethal presence. For man’s sake the Lord does not allow demons to have direct contact with men, except in cases where man himself consciously or unconsciously seeks such contact. What, then, opens the gates of hell, what opens up for us the possibility of being in contact with the demons? It is all forms of the occult, particularly sorcery, astrology, spiritism, extrasensorics, and various New Age practices, not to mention overt Satanism. Moreover, drugs and alcohol also lead to direct contact with the demons and dependency on them: being in the state of a narcotic trance or alcohol-induced delirium, a person enters the other world through the back door so-to-speak, and naturally ends up in the domain of the fallen spirits.
In our age of high computer technology, which imbues man with a false sense of his own might, many people have no idea that in reality they are already in the clutches of the demons. Demonic possession does not necessarily have to appear in the form of open madness, with screams and attacks. On the contrary, the possession is frequently veiled under the guise of harmless amusements and habits, and its horrible satanic essence is revealed only at the moment of a person’s perdition.
How other than possession can we explain, for example, the recent death of a Japanese youth, who died in the very midst of a computer game from which he was literally unable to tear himself away for weeks on end?
Moreover, if we genuinely analyze our conscience, each one of us will find traces or vestiges of one or another form of demonic possession. Unable to be in contact with people directly, the demons influence us by means of our passions, pulling the strings of our passionate desires like puppet masters. And if the Gadarene was possessed by a legion of demons, we are combated on a daily basis by a legion of desires.
The Lord Jesus Christ cured the possessed Gadarene, and He has the power to cure each one of us. No matter what demonic traps we may find ourselves in, no matter how low we may fall, we should never lose hope in God’s help. Hope in God is that straw of salvation at which the drowning man clutches and, contrary to all physical laws, swims out of the turbulent ocean of passions to safety. Grant, O Lord, that we retain this bright hope to the end, to the very last moment of our earthly life.
