Mark 1:21-28 | Alien Power & Authority!

So, I’m pretty sure after last week with Wes sharing that photo of me in my house robe and my packers cheese head that it will not surprise anyone in here to say that I am sort of a huge nerd.

It’s something I used to play closer to my vest, but I just don’t really care any more. I’ve embraced it.

So much so that I plan on displaying a hobbit sword in my office. Rachel is against this, but I think it’s going to be amazing! The sword’s name is Sting. It’s an Elven sword that Gandalf found in a Troll-hoard. Gandalf gave it Bilbo who then gave it to Frodo. And it glows blue when orcs are close. Which is just the coolest!

And some of you have no idea what I’m talking about it… ha most of you have no idea what I’m talking about because I’m a huge nerd and you’re not and I’m perfectly fine to admit it.

Where are we going with all this!?

I’m getting there. Hang with my nerdiness. As you might be catching on, I’m a big science fiction and fantasy guy. Love Lord of the Rings and pretty much anything that has to do with outer space and star wars or star tech. If it’s in the sci-fi or fantasy genre I’ve probably seen it and probably thoroughly enjoyed it. (Live Long and Prosper!)

In any sci-fi or fantasy movies there are usually mysterious characters, sometimes aliens, but always mysterious figures have different kinds of magical powers.

In Lord of the Rings, there are Elves and Wizards. The Wizards are said to be some kind of fallen stars from another world who came to earth and as such they have magical powers. Super sooo nerdy? You say nerdy I say awesome… Patato, Patoto.

If you’ve been with us the past few weeks, you’ll know that we are in a series called Man of Mystery, examining the life of Jesus as He kicks off His ministry in what the Church through out history has come to call the season Epiphany on the Church Calendar. This is the season where we’re looking at the reveal of Jesus to the gentile people.

And while he was introduced to the world through a virgin birth and an angelic announcement most of His ministry was not so obvious. He often displayed otherworldly or alien power but it was just as often enshrouded in mystery and confusion.

His first hearers, much like you and I, were often left simply to wonder at this mystery man. Who is this Jesus and how should we respond to him.

And those 2 questions are precisely what the gospel author we’ve been studying is attempting to answer.

If you would turn with me once again to the gospel of Mark chapter 1, we’ll continue to press into these 2 questions together.

Today you will see that as Jesus continues to reveal himself to the world, as someone who is mysteriously otherworldly; He does so by teaching with authority and demonstrations of power.

Let’s read it together.

Mark 1:21–28 (NIV)

21 They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. 22 The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. 23 Just then a man in their synagogue who was possessed by an impure spirit cried out, 24 “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”

25 “Be quiet!” said Jesus sternly. “Come out of him!” 26 The impure spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek.

27 The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, “What is this? A new teaching—and with authority! He even gives orders to impure spirits and they obey him.” 28 News about him spread quickly over the whole region of Galilee.

Ok, so here’s what I want you to see. Firstly, Jesus came teaching (v. 21). And you might be wondering well what did He teach? We’re not told here in this particular section but if you remember from last week, we are told the paired down version of what Jesus taught on. From Mark 1:15

Mark 1:15 (NIV)

15 “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”

Essentially, Jesus taught about the Kingdom of God and what He taught was good news. He taught about how God, the King of all, had come near with Him, about how He had brought the rule and reign of God close and how just, merciful and kind this rule and reign was!

Jesus taught about what the King was like and how His subjects, which He promised to adopt as His own children if they would come into His Kingdom, should live. He taught about Kingdom values and Kingdom living. Jesus taught on how to live with less stress and anxiety in life and on how to find rest and joy for our souls.

Which makes it pretty easy to understand why this message is so often called good news. Right! Who in here could use a little bit less stress and anxiety and little bit more rest and Joy!? Well, Jesus came teaching us how to find both and how to draw near to the King and the Kingdom which offers it to us!

Now, this may sound obvious, but so many people miss it. Jesus came teaching truth. He came teaching objective truths about how to find life, joy, peace and rest in relationship with God. Again this should be obvious. It should be obvious to us that when the creator God shows up that He would know a thing or two about how to live the good life and that we would all do very well to pay attention to what He taught. But in a world that is very quick to tell people to live their own truth as if we were the author’s of truth rather than God, so many people miss this and so many Christians shy away from teaching what Jesus taught.

Why? Well because if there is such thing as objective truth, if there is such a thing as right and wrong, then we aren’t free to invent our own truth and realities. We aren’t free to live our own truth if the “truth” we choose for ourselves conflicts with God’s! And as it turns out, people don’t much like being corrected and they don’t like being limited.

To some degree or another, we want to live our own lives in the way we want to live them, but in spite of whatever “truths” we tell ourselves, according to Jesus and His Word, many of us love trash that we call truth, and it leads us anywhere but to the good life we all desire!!

It’s true, for many, objective truth is offensive, but because God is good and because God loves us, He came to us in our confusion and in our darkness to shine a light; the light of truth which what Jesus came teaching!

Christian, if you’re here this morning and you know Jesus, you have a unique perspective on truth because you know the author of truth personally. Do not shy away from teaching it as Jesus teaches you! Now, we don’t need to be combative with the truth we know. Jesus was rarely combative. He was firm in His convictions to be sure and stern at times, but He was never rude. He was always loving and always sought other people’s interest in both what He taught and in how He taught. To the strong and the proud he was strong with his convictions and to the weak, confused and lost he was compassionate and meek with His convictions and the truth, but always He was loving and Kind. In every case when Jesus taught, He did so with an aim to build up and to care for the listeners. We would do wise to follow His example.

All that to say Jesus came teaching truth and we should too.

And I want you to notice how he taught the truth. He taught with authority and power!

Look back at the text. We see that a demonized man enters Jesus’ place of teaching and then he proceeds to make a disturbance.

Mark 1:24 (NIV)

24 “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”

This guy makes a big disturbance, which is just like the demonic!

In my men’s group a few weeks back one of the guys in my group shared a note from his study Bible that explained what we can expect when the demonic is involved. It’s so good that I want to share it with you now.

From my friend Joe’s Study Bible:

Here is Satan’s Plan against us: he plans sow seeds of ________in our minds.

Doubt… Makes you question God’s Word and His goodness.

Discouragement… Makes you look at your problems rather than at God

Diversion (Distraction)… Makes the wrong things seem attractive so that you will want them more than the right things.

Defeat… makes you feel like a failure so that you don’t even try.

Delay… Makes you put off doing something so that it never gets done.

Division… Satan loves to divide believers by having them make mountains out of mole hills to break unity and fellowship in Jesus over things that aren’t worth breaking fellowship over.

This is his playbook and what we can expect to find when demons show up.

Now I’m not suggesting that there is a demon behind every thought or bad decision we make or bad emotion we have, but if one of these d-words is present you better believe that the Kingdom of darkness is afoot. These things are all apart of what the enemy sows whether it be from corrupted people or from one of is demonic hordes. The origin of these things is not from the Lord of light, but rather from the prince of darkness!

And here in our text this morning, we see one of his agents arrive on the scene trying to distract and divide those listening to Jesus teach some truth. A crazy person shouting crazy things in a Church gathering is a big distraction. We’ve had it happen here. And I know for a fact that there were 2 couples that were at the gathering where a mentally disturbed individual and possible a demonized individual took to our stage to pronounce what he said was prophetic judgement on us as a Church. There were 2 couples visiting that day who have not been back to our Church because of that craziness!

This guy is on the scene, tasked by demons to distract people from coming to Jesus. He’s also there to divided people. Think about. What would you think about me if a crazy man showed up in this service shouting and carrying on about me? Some of you might lump me in with him. Guilt by association.

The religious leaders of the day made this exact claim. They told their people that Jesus was only able to cast out demons because He himself was one!

So we’ve got a guy who shows up heavily under the influence of the demonic and I want you to see how Jesus deals with him.

Jesus uses His authority and the power His authority vested in Him to silence the schemes of the enemy!

Jesus came teaching with authority and power and because of the truth that Jesus made possible, you can too!

And that’s what I want to spend the rest of our time together unpacking!

Before we talk about the authority you and I have as children of the King of Kings, I want to first teach you some objective truth: the world you and I live in is more than physical. There is more to our world than what our physical senses can taste, touch, hear, see and smell. There is more to us and more to our realm than what we can test via the scientific method! Our world is physical, but it is also Spiritual. Our world overlaps with the Spirit world. Angels are real and so are demons.

And while the Bible doesn’t say much about either, what it does say leaves us with some puzzle pieces we can bring together to determine that Angels are real and that they are powerful. Some are good and some are evil. And the fallen or evil ones, Satan and demons, they seek to counterfeit, pervert and destroy what God creates. What God creates, Satan counterfeits. He counterfeits and corrupts God’s creation with an aim to kill, steal and destroy (John 10:10).

And in the same way we can see God sending angels to interact with our world to influence people for God throughout the Bible by encouraging and protecting them, demons also are able to interact with the physical world and with human beings exerting different levels of influence upon people and our world.

Now what most people know about demons comes from hollywood movies which is unfortunate but because of that we usually end up on 1 or 2 places. Either we don’t believe angels or demons are real, or if we do, we don’t think they existence in any meaningful sense; we live as if they are just tucked up in the attic and live as if they don’t exist.

Or we become overly fascinated with them to the point that we see demons everywhere behind everything bad thing that happens and/or we live in tremendous fear of them.

Either way we tend to make too big a deal about demons or not a big enough deal about them. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

The Apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians that he doesn’t want us to be unaware of Satan’s schemes or be outwitted by him (2 Corinthians 2:11).

And so I want teach you a bit as Jesus taught so that you can teach like Him exercising a similar authority and power over the demonic as He did.

And while I realize some of what I’m going to tell you is mysterious, can we all just agree that we should expect to find some mystery if Jesus is the one we’re following. As has been highlighted throughout our series, Jesus wasn’t always completely clear and was sometimes cryptic. If we’re going to follow in His footsteps we should naturally expect to find things a times are not always as straightforward as we might like and sometimes we may come up against some alien powers or otherworldly supernatural things.

As I said demons are not everywhere or behind every bad decision we make, but as believers, Paul tells us plainly in Ephesians 6:12 that our battle is not against flesh and blood but against the demonic that stands behind it. So while demons are not everywhere, every Christian should know where to look for them and how to deal with them when they show up!

Here we see a man who is said to be possessed by an unclean spirit in the NIV translation of the Bible we’ve been reading.

And here’s the first thing I need you to know. The word possession does not exist in the Greek. Possession just isn’t a great word to use when talking about demons because possession assumes ownership and demons don’t own anything. God owns it all! The word that is most often translated as demon possessed is better translated as demonized or something like under the influence of an unclean spirit or demon.

When you see possession in the Bible, I want you to think influence not ownership! Demons can have varying degrees of influence, some of it quite strong as in the case of this man, but they don’t own people and they can’t own Christians. Christians are owned or possessed by God and His Spirit! But that doesn’t mean Christians can’t be influenced by demons sometimes to a very strong degree even.

And here’s how this works. Demons gain influence by being granted permission. At it’s simplest, spiritual warfare boils down to authority.

Adam and Eve, when they rebelled gave their authority and dominion over earth to Satan making him what the Bible refers to as the prince of the earth or the prince of the air. And now Satan has a large degree of authority to roam the earth and bring accusations and death and destruction upon the earth and it’s people. It’s not complete authority. He’s on a leash from God so to speak, but it’s a large degree of authority.

But when Jesus shows up, He comes with a greater authority. An authority that the people recognized as He taught and an authority that demons recognized when He told them to shut up or come out of people.

And then after Jesus is raised to life and raised up Heaven to the right hand of the Father, He tells us that ALL authority in Heaven and Earth has been given to him and then He does something crazy. He commissions us to go and make disciples in His name.

So here’s how you can think of it. Even though we are less powerful than angels and demons, when we get saved we get seated with Christ and He raises us with Him in authority over angels and demons! (Eph. 2:6)

Think of the great commission where Jesus says, ALL authority is mine, now YOU go and make disciples… think of that as being deputized in the Spiritual realm.

If you know and love Jesus not only are you His brother or Sister and a son and daughter of God, but you are also a Sheriff in His Kingdom with the full backing and authority of your government and King, who is the Lord of all Lords and the King of all Kings!

This means that to a certain degree, demons have to listen to Christians because we have delegated authority from Jesus who has ALL authority.

Here’s an illustration to help you wrap your mind around this.

Think of a young punk kid who pulls you over for going 5 miles over the speed limit. This is one of my favorite things. Getting pulled over by an 18 year old! This kid has lived no significant amount of life, he might be a party animal of low character, but in that moment his character or lack there of has no bearing on me or his authority, as long as he’s in the bounds of the law he has the full backing of the state of Ohio and it’s legal system and buddy I better comply or the weight of all that force and power is gonna to come down on me.

If he wants to write me a ticket for breaking the law, he can and I must comply. Now it’s also worth mentioning that his authority is not absolute. Right, he can write me a ticket for breaking the law, for speeding, but he can’t write me a ticket for having smelly breathe as offensive as that is! The law limits His authority.

This is what you and I are like in the Kingdom. We have delegated authority over the demonic, but our authority isn’t unlimited! If we had unlimited authority in the spiritual world we could do exactly what Jesus did. We could walk into hospitals and tell everyone to be healed and they would be, but we don’t have unlimited authority. As we share union with Christ, a measure His authority has been delegated to us to wield but it is only effect if it’s wielded in harmony with God’s will and purposes and in accordance with his legal system, laws and decrees.

This means if we have given permission for Satan to exert influence in our life by (S.O.U.L.L.) sinning habitually and letting it go unconfessed and repented of, or if we’ve given permission to Satan by practicing occult activities, or withholding forgiveness, or someone in our family line has opened us up to his influence by their sin or we have come into agreement with Satan by living a life that is shaped more by his lies than God’s truth. If we’ve opened the door through S.O.U.L.L. then we’ve granted permission legally to Satan and his demons in the court room of heaven, we’ve signed a contract so to speak for him to have a greater degree of influence in our lives than would normally be permitted over a Christian.

And to be free from that influence then, (The 4cs) we need to confess the sin, cancel the legal permission granted (you an think of this a tearing up the contract) and then at that point once the legal authority is taken away, then you can use your delegated authority to evict the wicked Spirit from your life. And then we usually spend some time recommitting the area of our life that was affected back to the Holy Spirit to cleanse and fill us.

This process is known as the 4cs. Confess. Cancel. Command. Commit.

Now I realize I covered a lot and you probably have a lot of questions. Honestly, I need to do a whole sermon series on this. There’s a lot more to cover but you’ve got the jist of it.

Here’s what I want you to know from this passage. Jesus has ultimate authority and power and if you’re in, in you have a measure of that same authority and power. He’s seated far above every ruler and authority and if you’re in Him, you are seated with Him far above every ruler and authority as well! You have power and authority to resist the devil. Yes, even to cast demons from your life and from your lives of your loved ones!

Demons are not everywhere, but if you’re doing what I’ll call the spiritual weight lifting. If you’re involved in deep Christian community, if you’re reading your Bible regularly and spending time with the Lord and your practicing the spiritual disciplines and yet you’re still stick in a certain area of your life with sin, you could have some level of demonic influence that needs to be kicked out.

Friends you can’t cast out the flesh. When I mean by that is we all have sin in us and that sinful nature chooses to do sinful things a times. We can’t cast that out. We need to transform that by renewing our minds with God’s word and by sharpening each other in community and holding one another accountable and positioning ourselves to be filled with God’s Spirit. But if you’re doing those things and your still are consistently failing at the the same sin or have an issue in your life that no amount of Christian community or Bible reading is taking care of, then you may have an issue that’s being supercharged by the supernatural. You can’t cast out the flesh, and neither can you disciple a demon. Demons need to be cast out!

Now some pastors would question the wisdom of me sharing what I’m about to share with you but I want you to know the freedom that I’ve experienced. I’ve not been secretive about the fact that early on in my ministry I had a server addiction or pornography. I hated it and yet I consistently failed and looked at the garbage.

I was in accountability groups. I went to Church. I confessed when I failed, which was a lot. I fasted. I read my Bible and prayed when I was tempted. But nothing worked. I consistently failed. At best, I was only able to ever manage the addiction. At best I learned to manage it. And then I went to a spiritual warfare conference and started to learn some of the things I’ve just taught to you and I met with a friend of mine and I did the 4cs. I confessed somethings to him I had never confessed. He prayed over me and canceled any legal ground that was given because of my sins. And then He command, if there is any evil spirit in, on or around Levi to leave and never come back. And Church I felt something leave. I can’t explain it other than I felt something leave and to this day I am free of the addiction to porn. I don’t look at the stuff. By God’s grace I have experienced a freedom I truly never thought would be possible for me.

And I’m not the only one who’s experienced this. There’s another gentleman with a very similar story to mine who went through our freedom ministry bout 6 months ago. And while nothing flashy happened in our prayer time. Right, we’re not about a circus or craziness, our freedom ministry looks mostly like prayer and some tears as we work through past trauma and invite Jesus to heal people and free people. This man didn’t feel anything other than a weight coming off as he says it, but as we prayed through the process with him and I would say he felt loved on by his brothers in Christ and then we exercised the authority of Jesus to get him some breakthrough and freedom! And to this day his struggle with porn is all together different. He’s living with a new sense of freedom and victory over what used to be a major source of failure, condemnation and shame in his life!

Here’s the deal, Jesus has things to teach us about authority and power, things that come to us when we enter His Kingdom that has come near. Because He’s the King, if we know him and are united with Him we can resist the devil and he will flee! If we hold to Jesus’ teachings and know His truth, we can live free! And because we’re seated with Christ in the heavenlies, we have intimacy with the Father and authority over the Enemy! This means we no longer struggle against sin as victims, but we wage war as victors!

So what do you say, Church! Let’s go to war! Jesus taught with authority and power and we can to! Let’s stop laying over and letting Satan walk all over us! Pick up your authority and let’s take the fight to him!

Pray. Free