DEMON-POSSESSED?

Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that He and His disciples were not even able to eat. When His family heard about this, they went to take charge of Him, for they said, ‘He is out of His mind.’

And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He is possessed by Beelzebub! By the prince of demons He is driving out demons.’ (Mark 3: 20-22).

Crazy? Demon-possessed? What made people reach this conclusion about Jesus?

Does a demon-possessed man heal the sick and cast out devils? What symptoms did He show that they should call Him “demon-possessed”? Was He raving like a lunatic, cursing and foaming at the mouth? Was He crazy because people followed Him in droves when He brought relief to their suffering? Were they so used to being ill-treated by their religious leaders that anyone who came to them in mercy and treated with compassion was classed as mad?

Anyone with half a brain should have recognised that Jesus was the sanest person who ever lived. If sanity was gauged by the way He treated people, then no one on earth ever was or ever will be more “with it” than Jesus. What prompted His family to think that He has lost it? They had lived with Him for thirty years. His heavenly Father had affirmed Him at His baptism with an audible voice from heaven. Could there be better approval than that? Did His godly life so offend them that they classified Him as “out of His mind”? Even His mother sided with His siblings.

And what of the religious leaders? Wasn’t “possessed by Beelzebub” going a bit far? Of course their logic was illogical, as Jesus pointed out:

So Jesus called them over to Him and began to speak to them in parables. ‘How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house without first tying him up. Then he can plunder the strong man’s house.’ (Mark 3: 23-27).

This statement is loaded! Logical, first of all, to show up the foolishness of the so-called educated ones. But also loaded with hints about who He really was, if they were wide awake enough to recognise the clues. What was He saying? Who was the “strong man” of whom He spoke? What was His mission? Of course He was telling them in cryptic language that He was the “strong man” who had come to “tie up” the strong man and plunder his house. Wasn’t He doing that right in front of their eyes? Wasn’t that why they called Him demon-possessed because they had never seen anything like that before?

‘Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.’ He said this because they were saying, ‘He has an impure spirit.’ (Mark 3: 28-30).

These men were skating very close to what Jesus called “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit”. What was that? According to Jesus, anyone who attributes the work of the Holy Spirit to the devil is cutting himself off from any possibility of the Holy Spirit’s work in his heart. Such a person is doomed because the Holy Spirit is the only one who can awaken a dead spirit to the things of God. When someone deliberately rejects the work of the Holy Spirit as demonic, he has no recourse to the power and the presence of God.

Believers are sometimes plagued with the fear that they have committed the unpardonable sin when they have done something or other which has driven them into guilt. First of all, the Holy Spirit is not the accuser. That is Satan’s title and Satan’s job. He can say nothing else because he is under divine judgment and he can only speak what he hears. Condemnation is his voice, not God’s voice.

Secondly, God does not tell us what we are as far as our past is concerned. He tells us what we are as far as His work is concerned. He has attributed the righteousness of Jesus to us and that is what we are (2 Cor. 5: 21). The Holy Spirit speaks to us of righteousness (John 16: 10), not of guilt. He does not drive us by guilt or fear. He draws us towards Jesus who is everything we are and everything we need.

To repudiate the work of the Holy Spirit and to speak blasphemy against Him takes a deliberate and considered choice and is a very serious move for anyone to make. Anyone who loves Jesus would never go that far, even in a moment of passion because he is held in the grip of His love.

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

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