The Exorcist

It’s October—which I think I got right this time—and it’s not hard to miss Halloween. Every year it seems you see more and more Halloween celebrations earlier and earlier in the seasons. And I know that Christians have different opinions about Halloween, and our permitted participation in it, but I don’t think any of us would disagree that a lot of people use this time of the year to really lean in to the dark stuff. It’s everywhere we look.

One of the places we see this fascination with darkness is with cinema. I read this week that at least seventeen new horror movies were released this month. And, of course, at least two of those were movies about demons. Ever since 1973 with the release of “The Exorcist,” horror movies have been fascinated with demons and demon possession. I’ve never seen any of these films, but from what I read about them the demons and their manifestations are presented in a very halloween-like way. In other words, they’re full of terrifying transformations and jump scenes on dark and stormy nights.

I wonder how many Christians have embraced Hollywood’s account of Satan’s minions. I grew up in the height of the “Satanic Panic” that swept North America in the 80s and 90s, where guys like Mike Warnke built a successful career making up stories about his past life as a Satanist priest who performed magic and summoned demons. It was all exposed as a sham, but people were hungry for it.

I remember moving out to a farm once on October 31 and friends of ours were very concerned that’d we’d be out on the road in the dark on “Satan’s night.” As we got close to our new home white owl flew down from a tree across the road and one of the people with us, a Christian, was convinced it was a dark omen.

It’s so interesting—and important—to compare all of this to what we see in Scripture. Scripture is consistently and persistently supernatural. One of Jesus’ main ministries was casting demons out of people, and the assumption behind each one of these stories is that we live in a universe inhabited by wild and evil powers, invisible to us, but who are able to cause us great harm.

1. The Man Restored (22)

But much of the time, when Jesus’ encounters with these dark angels are described, we read about it in surprisingly normal language. Consider today’s passage. During his strategic withdrawal from the Pharisees, while healing people, a demon-oppressed man is brought to him. And the chief symptoms of the demon’s work are that this man can’t see or speak.

These days, if we were to find someone who couldn’t see or speak, we’d want to bring them to a doctor and run some tests and get them a prescription. We have so much faith in the medical system, and not without warrant. Modern medicine has given is some incredible gifts. But there are some things that modern medicine can’t do. There’s some things that modern medicine can’t see. Namely, demons.

Now I’m not, for a moment, suggesting that demonic activity is one of the first things we investigate when someone gets sick. I think that would be foolish. But I also think it would be foolish to assume this never happens at all. At least when Jesus was ministering in the body, this seemed to happen fairly frequently.

But notice how Matthew talks about it. No sensationalism. No scary music or smoke machines. Demons are causing this man to be blind and mute, and Jesus “healed him, so that the man spoke and saw” (v. 22). Notice how the way the Bible describes these events gives us the perfect balance between making too much of demons or making too little of them.

Yes, they’re real. No, we’re not alone in this universe. We share this world with invisible kingdoms of dark spirits. And yet, there’s no need to walk in fear or superstition. Look at the overwhelming power of Jesus, who, with a word, tells the spirits where to go, and they just listen to Him.

2. The Crowds React (23)

And that’s the part that shocked the crowds so much. The Jewish people at that time believed in demons, and they even had their own exorcists who used strange rituals to try and cast demons out of people. The man being oppressed didn’t surprise them—what surprised them was the absolute authority of Jesus. No ritual, no magic, no incantations—He just speaks, and they listen.

And in verse 23 the surprise of the crowd is recorded for us: “And all the people were amazed, and said, ‘Can this be the Son of David?”’

It’s interesting to remember that a similar event happened back in chapter 9, verses 32-33. “As they were going away, behold, a demon-oppressed man who was mute was brought to him. And when the demon had been cast out, the mute man spoke. And the crowds marveled, saying, ‘Never was anything like this seen in Israel’” (Matthew 9:32–33).

The crowds marvelled at a display of power they’d never seen before. But they stopped short of drawing any conclusions about Jesus’ identity. But here in chapter 12, there’s a bit of a progression. “Could this be the Son of David?” Could this be God’s long-promised king? Could this be the Messiah?

It’s still a question. They’re not certain. Remember, Jesus has really challenged their expectations of what the Messiah would be like. But there’s some openness to considering that maybe He is the one they’d been waiting for.

3. The Pharisees Reject (24)

The Pharisees, on the other hand, have no such openness. Back in chapter 9, when the crowds marvelled, they blamed Jesus’ power on Satan. “But the Pharisees said, ‘He casts out demons by the prince of demons’” (Matthew 9:34).

And now they repeat the same charge. Verse 24: “But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, ‘It is only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons’” (Matthew 12:24).

Apparently, Jesus’ withdrawal from the public eye didn’t last very long. We know from other passages that people didn’t do a good job of keeping Jesus’ miracles quiet, even when He asked. So the Pharisees find out and soon enough Jesus is back in conflict with these self-righteous enemies. “It is only be Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons.”

“Beelzebul” was a Hebrew name for Satan. It might come from Baal-Zebub, an ancient Philistine god whose name means “Lord of the Flies,” but it’s hard to be certain. What we know is that it’s a name for the chief of the evil spirits, and they Pharisees claim that it is by that power, not God’s power, that Jesus does His work.

Just think of how the Pharisees got themselves in this bind. They’ve decided that Jesus cannot be from God because He challenges their rules and traditions and expectations. Clearly, they’re on God’s team, so clearly Jesus must be wrong.

But they can’t deny His power. Jesus’ miracles were so obviously not fake. The Pharisees couldn’t deny they were real. But the Pharisees somehow need to explain where He got this power from. Because if Jesus does these miracles by God’s power, then the Pharisees must be wrong Jesus, and that’s not an option to them.

So Jesus must be getting His power from the other side. Not from God but from Beelzebul he has this remarkable power to cast out demons.

Like modern skeptics who choose to believe that life on earth was produced by a bunch of random accidents, the Pharisees latch on to a silly explanation for Jesus rather than admit the obvious truth that what they saw was being done by the power of God.

4. The Messiah Responds (25-30)

Back in chapter 9, when they first said this, Jesus didn’t respond as far as Matthew tells us. But this time, Jesus doesn’t let them get away with it. He knows their thoughts, as verse 25 says. And over the course of the next several verses, in five steps, He completely tears to shreds the Pharisee’s attempt to blame His power on the devil.

a. logic (25-26)

His first step is logic. Particularly, deductive logic. Deductive logic begins with a premise and from there deduces a conclusion about the nature of things. Jesus’ premise is found in verse 25: “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand.”

That is a premise that’s hard to disagree with. Everybody would have accepted the truth of this. If you have a kingdom or a city or a house in civil war, it’s going to do a lot of damage to itself. If a king starts fighting against his own soldiers, he’s not going to last long. Especially if another army comes to attack him. This is hard to argue with.

And from this premise, Jesus argues for a conclusion: “And if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand?” (Matthew 12:26).

In other words, does it make sense at all that Satan would be casting his own demons out of people? Why in the world would Satan be attacking Satan? How would his kingdom stand? Doesn’t he want his kingdom to stand, considering his enemy is the strongest person in the universe?

The idea that this is an inside job makes no sense at all. The Pharisees are inventing nonsense to avoid the obvious.

b. question (27)

The next step in Jesus’ response is the question found in verse 27. “And if I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges.”

As we’ve heard, there were other exorcists operating among the Jewish people at that time, including those authorized by the Pharisees. They used what could be fairly elaborate rituals for casting demons out of people, and yet apparently could be successful in the matter. Or at least that’s what they claimed.

And so if the Pharisees want to say that the power to cast out demons comes from Satan, they’re throwing their own people under the bus, too. On the other hand, their own exorcists should know better than anybody that you couldn’t use Satan’s power to attack Satan’s kingdom. They would certainly say that it’s only God’s power that could do this. Which means that the same must be true for Jesus.

We could sum up Jesus’ point like this: “let your own exorcists, who are fighting away in the trenches working a lot harder than me, tell you how silly you’re being to blame my power on Satan.”

c. claim (28)

And then, in verse 28, Jesus moves into his central claim. If the Pharisees are wrong about Him, and if He’s doing this by God’s power, then reality as they know it has been upended.

“But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matthew 12:28). If Jesus is casting out demons by the Spirit of God—which He certainly is, given the arguments He’s just given—then that means God’s kingdom is upon them.

We need to grasp how big this statement is and how big it would have been to them. The Jewish people believed that this present age of human history was full of darkness and chaos and the influence of Satan and his demons. But they believed that at the end of time, the kingdom of God would arrive and God would deliver His people from Satan’s power. Remember, in the Jewish understanding, the “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven” was an end-times reality.

And what’s Jesus saying to them? He’s saying: the kingdom of God is upon you, and that end-times deliverance from Satan that you’re looking for us happening before your very eyes.

This is stunning on so many levels. Jesus is showing that the Pharisees aren’t just wrong about him—they are wrong about everything. They are wrong about the whole timeline of history and the end of days.

They expected this clean break between this age and the age to come. What they didn’t realize is that this wasn’t how it was going to work. In Jesus, the age to come had broken in to this present age. The kingdom of God had invaded the kingdoms of this world and Jesus was already doing what they expected to come in the future.

They shouldn’t have been too surprised by this by now. “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand!” said John the Baptist. And Jesus’ absolute authority over demons was proof positive that the kingdom was not just at hand but was upon them.

The crowds asked question—“could this be the Son of David?”—and Jesus’ answer was a firm “yes.” God was establishing His long-awaited saving rule here on earth through His anointed Messiah. The invasion had begun when the armies of heaven announced his birth, and it was only picking up steam. The warrior king Son of David was waging war on the kingdom of darkness, and none could stand before him. Heaven’s rule was upon them.

d. logic (29)

And to help draw out this point just a step further, in verse 29 Jesus uses logic yet again to ask the Pharisees a question. “Or how can someone enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house” (Matthew 12:29).

We’ve seen the setup in countless movies and stories. One group of people wants to take something from another group of people, but the thing they’re after is locked away and guarded by a whole bunch of really strong people. And so the thieves need to come up with some sneaky plan to distract the guards and slip past the defences and grab the treasure while nobody is looking.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the situation Jesus describes here. A house, full of treasure, guarded by a guy who looks like an absolute unit. And instead of some sneaky plan, the hero just walks up to the house, takes the guy out, ties him up, and then starts calmly taking his stuff out the front door and loading it into a moving van parked in his driveway. “I’ll take that, and I’ll take that, and I’ll take that.”

That’s the king of situation Jesus is describing here. His exorcisms are proof that He’s overpowered Satan. He’s tied him up and now he’s joyfully plundering his house without any interference. Nobody can get in his way or stop him, because he’s already beat the boss level. Satan is bound and gagged in the closet and can’t do a thing to stop him from taking his stuff away.

Here’s how one of my seminary professors summed up Jesus’ argument here: “Far from being an inside job, my attack is a direct assault on the strong man. Having first overpowered Satan, I can do what I wish with his agents.”¹Wes Olmstead, “The Shifting Tide—Jesus’ Rejection in Galilee,” BLST 721 class notes, spring 2022.

This is such an important part that I want to help us think about this for just a little bit more today. Because there is one other important place in the Bible that speaks about the binding of Satan. That’s Revelation 20.

“Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while” (Revelation 20:1–3).

Now as some of you might know, there have been fairly heated debates about this passage of Scripture and the binding of Satan. Some look at the binding of Satan in Revelation 20 and identify that with the binding that Jesus is speaking about in Matthew 12. Satan was overpowered and bound when King Jesus came the first time, just like He said here in our passage. And they would understand the thousand years to be a symbolic number, just like the many other symbolic numbers found throughout the book of Revelation. This thousand years symbolically points to a significant period of time during which Satan is bound and prevented from completely deceiving the nations, so that as the gospel is preached, people from every tribe, tongue, nation and language believe and are transferred from Satan’s kingdom into the kingdom of the Lord.

This is one way of putting Matthew 12 together with Revelation 20, and if you like big words, this view is sometimes called amillennialism. And in my opinion, it’s a view that has a lot going for it.

On the other hand, there are others who look at the ongoing activity of Satan in the New Testament—how he does continue to deceive people, how he’s referred to as the “god of this age” in Ephesians 2, how he continues to blind the minds of unbelievers like 2 Corinthians 4 says, how Peter warns us to be watchful of him and compares him to a roaring lion—and they ask, “does all of that really fit with the idea of Satan being bound and thrown into a pit?” And so they read Revelation 20 as describing something yet in the future. Satan is unbound and active in the world, and this thousand-year period is something that we’ll enjoy after Jesus returns again.

This is another way of putting Revelation 20 together with the rest of the New Testament, and if you like big words, this view is called premillennialism. And in my opinion, it also has a lot going for it.

And for years, I have tentatively embraced the truth that’s found in both of these views. On the one hand, we need to recognize that a definitive defeat of Satan happened when Christ first came. The kingdom of God is upon us, Satan has been overwhelmed by the power of Christ, and Jesus is plundering his house. The church can go into the world with absolute confidence that, try as he might, Satan cannot stop the spread of the gospel. When Jesus decides shine the light of His gospel into someone’s heart, Satan’s blinders are powerless to interfere (2 Corinthians 4:4-6). Even Satan’s attempts to hurt and harm us are used by God for good, and nobody—not even the devil himself—can snatch us out of our Good Shepherd’s hands.

And instead of anxiously scanning the newspaper headlines trying to figure out which world leader is going to be the antichrist and which new technology is going to be the mark of the beast, we should be courageously and confidently carrying the banner of King Jesus into every corner of the earth, because all authority in heaven and on earth already belongs to Him.

And, at the same time, we should not underestimate Satan’s ongoing ability to harass and hurt us. We’ve been told to resist him and be watchful. We shouldn’t underestimate his power over the systems and structures around us. “The whole world lies in the power of the evil one,” says 1 John 5:19. And so we wait for Satan to be dealt with once-and-for-all. We see the descriptions in Revelation about him making war on the people of God. We see the effects of that war all around us. And we long for the day when that roaring lion will be put away forever. “Even so, come Lord Jesus.”

What I’m suggesting is that the binding if Satan fits in with the general pattern we see with the first and second comings of Jesus: it has already happened, and it has not yet happened. Just like the kingdom of God is already here in some ways, and not yet here in other ways. In Christ, we are already new creations, even as we wait for the New Creation which is still in the future.

Similarly, Satan has already been overpowered, even though he has not yet been completely eliminated. The invasion has begun, and victory is certain, but the war is not yet over.

And so I think today’s passage, put together with the rest of the New Testament, has something important to say to people of different end-times perspectives. Some people really like the idea of the kingdom being here and now, and they should be reminded that there’s a lot that hasn’t happened yet. Satan is still a force for evil in this world. We spend our lives “waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13).

On the other hand, for people who really like the idea of everything still to come, they might need to grow in their appreciation that Jesus has already been crowned the king, He already has all authority in heaven and on earth, Satan is already overpowered, and we are already citizens of a kingdom that is upon us.

e. warning (30)

And because tha tis true, the Pharisees need to be really careful of how they respond to Jesus. There’s a reason the very next thing Jesus says to them, back in Matthew 12, is a warning. “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Matthew 12:30).

If Jesus is the Son of David, leading the charge as heaven invades earth, if He’s overcome Satan and is plundering his house, then the time has come for people to decide on whose side they stand.

During times of peace, people can debate and toss opinions back and forth and can afford to be unsure about things. But when war breaks out, you don’t have that privilege anymore. When the king rides into town, you need to decide if you’re with Him or with His enemies.

And that’s the message of the New Testament. John the Baptist and Jesus and the Apostles didn’t give sales pitches for how much better Jesus would make them feel. They said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” “Now he commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30). “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20). That’s how they talked.

And this doesn’t mean that Jesus and His messengers aren’t patient with people as we help them understand the gospel. But it does mean that the message we patiently try to help people understand is that the kingdom of heaven is upon us, the King is commanding us to repent, and there’s no such thing as being neutral.

You may have heard the phrase that you can’t be on the fence with Jesus because the devil owns the fence. Actually, there is no fence. If someone chooses to be undecided about Jesus, they’ve already decided that Jesus was wrong about who He said He was. “Whoever is not with me is against me.”

Conclusion

The good news is that if you’re still alive, it’s not too late to walk across that line in the sand and stand with the Son of David. If you hear these words this morning and you know that you are not with Jesus, don’t drag your feet. Come to Jesus for rest. Take his yoke upon you and learn of Him. Find rest in His teaching and His person. Find rest in His death and resurrection. The saviour will receive all who are weary and heavy laden, and He will give you rest for your souls.

And if you have—if you have come to Jesus—then today’s passage helps you recognize who you really are and what your story really is. Do you know who you are? You are plundered goods. Before Jesus, we were all “following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience” as Ephesians 2:2 tells us. But Colossians 1:13 tells us that “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13).

We’ve been rescued. We were locked up in the strong man’s basement, and when Jesus tied up our captor, He came down and unlocked the door and took off our chains and brought us out into the sunshine of His loving, saving kingdom.

If you are in Christ, that’s your testimony! And it’s not just your testimony, but it’s the future testimony of others who God will yet rescue through the powerful work of the gospel as we faithfully proclaim the gospel and make disciples of all nations.

Do you see that evangelism is an act of spiritual warfare? Spiritual warfare isn’t just something that happens sometimes when we do evangelism. No, the act of proclaiming the gospel to those who do not yet believe is itself one of the most direct ways we confront the powers of darkness in this world.

And the overwhelming power of Jesus is why, while we need to be watchful, we don’t need to go through our life in fear of of the darkness. Satan is dangerous, but greater is He who is in us than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4). You don’t fear the schoolyard bullies when your dad is beside you.

So enjoy the victory of Jesus this morning. As we take up the bread and cup, we remember that Satan’s supposed hour of victory—Jesus hanging on the cross—was in fact the hour of his defeat. Though he lashed out, fangs bared, at the heel of Eve’s offspring, that heel crushed his head. All of the sin that Satan could accuse us for has been paid for in full. No matter what you’ve done, Jesus paid for it in full on the cross and there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The fear of death that Satan used to keep us in bondage has been conquered by our rising king. Any damage Satan can do to us in this age will be undone 1,000 times over at the return of our king.

So eat, and drink, and believe, and march out into battle. Whether it’s a hostile workplace or a difficult classroom or a challenging home environment or a sinful habit that’s going to tempt you again or the opportunity to bear witness to Christ to those who don’t know him yet, this week is going to be war. But march into that war assured of the victory that Jesus bought and paid for with his own body and blood.