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| Essential 100 -- The Kamakazi Pig Episode | | Date Created: Apr 07, 2005, 05:57 AM |
64 — Thursday April 7 — Mark 5:1-20
Oddly, I love this story for how incomprehensible it is. The intricacies of the war between God and Satan should be outside the domain of what I can comfortably understand and digest. This story contains just those kinds of features that I can readily believe come from a witness who has seen stuff that they don't understand either.
The first is how demons appear to have to tell the truth when they come into contact with Jesus. Why? Satan still manages to be the smooth father of deception in the temptation narrative. Are they such a different class of being than he is? Why don't the demons use the situation to their advantage, pretend that Jesus is another possessed person and thus try to plant doubts in the minds of the on-lookers, if not the disciples themselves?
But then, of course, there's the whole pigs thing. Why would the demons want to go into a herd of pigs, especially since once there, the first thing that they do is commit suicide (porcicide?) so that they're no longing even in the pigs at all? And why the suicide? Imagine if they had stayed in the pigs! What a Doctor Who episode that would have been for the Jewish nation to be terrorized by a herd of intelligent killer non-kosher pigs! What could be the motivation for throwing themselves off the cliff. If they're so suicidal by nature why did the demon-possessed man not kill himself? Are a fleet of demons really happy occupying one man?
Yeah, I've read the commentaries and heard the explanations. I can't say that any of them really impress me. And, as I said, that's probably just as well. A Scripture that is really a glimpse into realities which are too large for me should contain stuff like this (and like the book of Revelation -- what a way to end E100 that's going to be!). I fully expect to be baffled no matter how long I study it, but when we get to heaven to say "Ah, of course, that's what was going on there." |
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