Mensa Otabil - A Demon Possessed Man (10/08/2025)
Welcome to a brand new week. This week we are starting a study from Mark chapter 5, and we’re going to look at Jesus’s encounter with a man who is demon-possessed. So we begin with Mark chapter 5, verses 1 and 2:
«Then they came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gadarenes. And when He had come out of the boat, immediately they met Him out of the tomb, a man with an unclean spirit.»
The background of the story is that Jesus and His disciples were on the Sea of Galilee. There was a huge storm, Jesus was asleep in the boat, and the boat was in jeopardy. The disciples went to Him and asked for help, and of course, Jesus came and stilled the storm. So now they have come out of that storm to land, and it’s dark; they are in the country of the Gadarenes, and they are met by a man who is demon-possessed. The picture here is that they’ve come from a storm outside, and they meet a man who has a storm inside of him.
How is Jesus going to deal with this internal storm within the man? There are two things I want to point out for today. The first is that the passage says the man was living in the tombs. In those days, the tombs were burial places hewn out of rock, limestone. It’s not like a cemetery of today. This would be a rocky, stony area, and the man is among the tombs. The picture is that of a man who has left the land of the living and is living in the land of the dead. In a sense, you could call him a living dead man. He seems to be alive; he seems functional, but then his whole lifestyle is one of death. He has been cut off from society; he can’t live among regular people, even though he is a human being.
The reason the passage assigns to this man’s behavior and where he lives among the tombs is that the passage says he has an unclean spirit. Something bigger than himself has taken charge of him-an unclean spirit. An unclean spirit is basically a spirit that is evil or one under Satan’s command. Not all spirits are clean; there are spirits that are unclean. An unclean spirit, when it takes control of a person, begins to drive that person to do all kinds of things that are not clean. An unclean spirit can lead a person to manifest extreme hatred, extreme anger, a lustful life, a life full of greed, and vice. This man is alive; if you saw him, he’s a human being, but inside him there is a storm, and the storm is not of his making. The storm is there because something else is contending with him internally.
So Jesus comes, and the man met Jesus. That’s how the Bible puts it-Jesus didn’t meet him; the man met Jesus. This means he confronted Jesus; he came out against Him in this stony, rocky area where dead people have been placed. Jesus then has to confront this man. The picture of the man here resembles many people; they seem to be okay, but something inside them-a storm brewing-drives them into wrong places, drives them into crazy actions, and leads them to do very destructive things. We will learn more about this man and how the spirit harassed him, and of course, we will learn about how Jesus Christ, the great Deliverer, came and set him free. I believe if you find yourself or anyone you love in this situation, deliverance is coming to you this week.
Let’s pray. Say with me: Heavenly Father, You still the storms of the sea. Come and still every storm raging in my life. In Jesus’s name, Amen.