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In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear Sidney, today we rejoice to welcome you to the fellowship of our Lord’s altar, where he gives us his own body and blood for the forgiveness of all of our sins. What a delight for all of us to come to the Lord’s Supper, where Jesus gives himself to us, all of himself to us.
There’s a question about the Supper— I think it’s a wonderful thing to think about— is what is the main thing in the Supper? And we’re tempted to think, well surely the main thing in the Supper is the body and the blood of Jesus. After all, what could be more precious than this? What could be more valuable than this? What could be more wonderful than this? That Jesus gives us his own body and blood. But Jesus gives us his body and blood as a pledge so that we know how serious he is when he says, for the forgiveness of sins. The gift of the body and blood is there in service to this promise that your sins are forgiven. That’s what Jesus wants us to know more than anything else: that He loves us and that He forgives our sins. God be praised.
Today, dear saints, I want to think about this text from the gospel lesson in the visit, Mark chapter 1, the visit of Jesus and the disciples to the synagogue in Capernaum. But the two other texts from Deuteronomy and from Corinthians are so important and foundational for the Church. They’re just texts that every Christian should be familiar with and should have a handle on. I just want to spend a couple of minutes on each text so that we pay attention to them.
The first is Deuteronomy chapter 18. Remember Deuteronomy, the last book of Moses? Moses is preaching to the people before they go and cross over to the promised land. Moses himself was not able to cross over because of his disobedience, striking the rock instead of speaking to it.
When we read the books of Moses— well, maybe let me take a half step back. Jesus is, the Old Testament is a book about Jesus, and the Old Testament is a book about Jesus in three ways. Number one, it promises Jesus. Genesis 3:15, the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. Or, the Lord to Abraham about five times, in your seed all the nations will be blessed. And that seed promises from Isaac to Jacob and to Judah, the scepter will not depart from Judah until the Messiah has come. That Jesus would be born of a virgin, that He’ll be born in Bethlehem, that He will bear our sins and carry our iniquities. In other words, the Lord has promised to us by direct promise, number one.
Number two, the Lord is pictured for us in all sorts of ways. The Passover lamb is a beautiful picture, or the lamb of sacrifice, or all of the sacrifices. The priesthood is a picture of Jesus’ work of prayer. The temple itself is a picture of Jesus’ body and His ministry in the heavenly tabernacle. The flood, Peter tells us, is a picture of baptism. The manna from heaven is a picture of the incarnation of our Lord Jesus. All of these ways, Jesus is pictured in the Old Testament.
And then third, and maybe most importantly, Jesus is there. When the Lord is in the burning bush, when the angel of the Lord is preaching to Joshua, when the word of the Lord comes to the prophets, or when the Lord is walking in the cool of the day, that’s Jesus there. So Jesus is there promised, he’s there by picture, he’s there by his own person.
But when we read through— and this is sort of an amazing thing— when we read through the writings of Moses, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, there’s surprisingly few promises of Jesus, direct promises of Jesus. That’s why when we’re reading through those and we get to this chapter, Deuteronomy 18:18, it’s easy to remember, you only have to remember one number, 18 twice, Deuteronomy 18:18. And the Lord says there, “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers, and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak them to me; he shall speak all that I command him.” We should underline that verse with our gold highlighter because it’s one of the very few, maybe the one place where Moses gives a direct promise of Jesus.
And how do we know it’s talking about Jesus? Because God the Father quotes this verse whenever he talks in the New Testament. At the baptism of Jesus, “my beloved Son whom I love, listen to Him.” At the transfiguration, “my Son who I love, hear Him.” God be praised. This is one of those key verses that we just want to have ready in our study of scripture.
The same thing is true of the epistle lesson from 1 Corinthians chapter 8. It’s just one of those verses that we want to be meditating on because it’s so fantastically practical. Here was the situation. In the pagan world, they would connect the pagan altar and the butcher shop next to each other. You didn’t want to just butcher the animal and not be able to eat it. So they would go and offer the animal to the pagan gods, and then they would butcher him up and sell it. And this became a scandal in Corinth. Can a Christian eat pagan meat that was offered to the idol? Paul says, “Yeah. Idols are nothing. There’s one God, the Father, one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things are, for whom we exist.” We don’t need to… The idols, the demons, are empty. They’re nothing. There is only one God. So the Christian is free to eat this meat.
But, Paul says, some are weak and troubled in their conscience, and for their sake, we refrain from eating meat. Paul says, “I’d rather eat no meat for the rest of my life than trouble the conscience of my brother or sister in Christ.” So that the Lord has set us free, this is the point, the Lord has set us free. But we do not use our freedom as a cloak for vice, nor do we, in our freedom, cause one another to stumble. We are bound to the other’s conscience.
Now that’s frustrating, but it’s true. Your life is not for yourself. We don’t live for ourselves. We live for the Lord, and we live for our neighbor, especially for our Christian neighbor. We have to give concern to their conscience. St. Paul says it like this, “Thus, sinning against your brother and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I’ll never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble.” It’s a text that we should just all be very familiar with and should have in our own mind as we think of what it means to love one another, as we rejoice in the freedom that the Lord Jesus has given us, but we don’t use that freedom to cause one another to stumble, but rather we serve one another in love. We’re not set free to sin; we’re set free to love and to die and to live with courage.
Now, that’s what I want to talk about in the sermon. So let’s get started. Three points. I want to title this sermon, how about this? Maybe I’ll just tell you the title; that’s almost enough. The title of the sermon is this: Obedient Demons.
Obedient demons.
Now, isn’t that amazing? Here Jesus comes into the synagogue in Capernaum, and there’s a man, a demonized man, and Jesus says, “Leave him alone,” and he shudders, and he leaves him alone, and the demon, the text says, obeys Jesus. We’ll talk about it in these three ways.
One, Jesus fights for us against the devil. Two, Jesus wins the fight. And three, Jesus gives us this victory in our baptism.
First, Jesus fights for us against the devil. We have to realize that salvation is a battle. The Lord is fighting for us, and in that fight for us, he’s fighting against our enemies. Christians are bound. Christians are captives. Yes. Christians are held in the bondage to sin, as Jesus says, “whoever commits a sin is a slave to sin.” And Christians are naturally, according to the flesh, captive also to death and to the fear of death. St. Paul says in Hebrews chapter 2 that we are held captive to the devil by the fear of death. So sin, death, and the devil are holding us captives. But, Jesus comes to set us free.
The picture that Jesus preaches is the picture of the strong man. Remember the strong man? The strong man sits and he holds all his stuff and he’s all in peace, but then a stronger one comes and ties up the strong man and throws him down, and the stronger one loots the castle. That’s the picture that Jesus tells about how he comes to attack the devil. It is amazing to us that the very first time the gospel is preached, it’s not preached to people, it’s not preached to sinners; it’s preached to the devil himself. When the Lord in the garden says to the devil, “her seed will crush your head as you crush his heel.” When Jesus is rescuing us, He’s rescuing us from the devil, from the devil’s captivity, from the fear of death, and setting us free.
So when Jesus fights for us, and second point, Jesus wins. This has to do with the obedience of the demons. I heard— I haven’t seen this show, some of you might have seen it; I’ve heard of it— there’s a show called The Dog Whisperer. Have you heard of that thing? Where apparently if you have a really bad dog, you’ve got to call this guy in, and he comes and he can talk to the dog, and the dog does whatever this guy says. And there’s maybe another guy called the Horse Whisperer. And then— and I don’t actually believe this is true— but I heard there’s someone called the Cat Whisperer. I don’t know how you whisper to a cat.
But you have a really bad dog, and this guy comes, and the amazing thing is that the dogs do what this guy says. Now, this is the picture. Jesus is the demon whisperer. If there’s anything more rebellious in the whole world than a demon, I don’t know what it is. The demons do their own thing. They are out to kill, steal, and destroy. And yet Jesus says a word— a word to them, and they obey Him. They do just what He says. Like obedient children, they can’t help it.
“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.” But Jesus rebuked him, said, “Be silent, come out of him.” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying out with a loud voice, came out of him. And they were all amazed so that they questioned among themselves, “What is this? A new teaching with authority. He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”
Again, the demons do what Jesus says. And Jesus tells the demons to leave you alone.
This is the third point, that this victory over the demons, this victory over the spirits of darkness, this victory over the devil, Jesus gives to us in our baptism. Maybe most explicitly, we see this in the old baptismal rite that Luther appended to the Catechism. It has a minor exorcism at the beginning of it. It says, “Depart thou unclean spirit, and make way for the Holy Spirit.” That’s part of the baptism. We ourselves have the baptism. Do you renounce the devil and all his works and all his ways?
In baptism, in your baptism, the Lord Jesus Christ is delivering you from sin, death, and the devil, delivering you from the fear of death, delivering you from the thing that is the most dangerous of all: your own sin and the consequence of it. He brings it all to us freely. Beautiful.
I was talking this week to a doctor, and he said, “Brian, you wouldn’t believe how my patients are coming to me; every one of them, and saying, hey, can you get me the vaccine? Can you get me in there to get the vaccine? Well, can you bend the rules just a little bit for me to get me in there?” And he said to me, “If only people were clamoring for Jesus as they were clamoring for the vaccine, we wouldn’t have any problems.”
Now I want to think about this because this is not to say anything bad about the vaccine. We thank God for medicine. In fact, you know, sometimes we have to take medicine that we don’t want to take, and people have said, “Pastor, is this… like you’re taking medicine for depression and stuff like this,” and we say, “Is this right? And is this good?” And we understand that medicine comes as a gift from God as daily bread. You know, give us this day our daily bread. One of the things included in that is good doctors and good medicine. So we give thanks to God for it.
But in the midst of a crisis, what it starts to expose is what are we really afraid of and what are we trusting in. You can take the vaccine; that’s fine, but you cannot put your trust in it. You can try to do what you can to avoid death, but you cannot be afraid of it. That’s idolatry. That’s idolatry. We are set free from the fear of death, and our trust is in Christ, in Him alone. Our life is in His hands.
He’s numbered the hairs on our head and He’s numbered our days. He knows when we live and when we die according to His will and in His timing, and so we seek after Him. The most dangerous thing in the world is not getting sick. The most dangerous thing in the world is standing before the judgment of God, holding in your hands your sin.
This conversation with a doctor reminded me of this passage from the large catechism. This is Luther talking about baptism. Let me read it to you. Luther says, “Suppose there were a physician who had such skill that the people that he treated wouldn’t die. Or, even if they did die, that he would afterwards heal them and they would live forever.” Just think about that doctor— how the world would snow and rain money upon him. True.
Luther says, “Because of the pressing crowd of rich men, nobody else could get in to see him. But now, here in baptism, there is brought free to every person’s door just such a priceless medicine which swallows up death and saves the lives of all people.” God be praised. Thus, we appreciate and use baptism rightly and draw strength and comfort from it. You’ve already been vaccinated against the worst disease of all: sin.
And death for you is no death at all, but to close your eyes and to open them to see the face of Jesus. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be careful. I am saying this: you have nothing to be afraid of. You belong to Jesus. The demons cannot frighten you. The grave cannot frighten you. Sickness, poverty, pain— these cannot frighten you. You belong to Jesus and He belongs to you.
So rejoice. The one who commands even the unclean spirits and they obey Him, that same one is with you. And He’s promised that He will never leave you or forsake you, that He will be with you always, always, even to the end of the age. God be praised. Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.