Jesus and Evil | Jesus The Redeemer | Pastor Joe Coffey

Luke 431 through

37 he went down to Capernaum,

a city in Galilee, and he was teaching them on the Sabbath.

And they were astonished at his teaching, for his word possessed authority.

And in the synagogue there was a man who had a spirit of unclean demon.

And he cried out with a loud voice, ha!

What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?

Have you come to destroy us?

I know who you are. The Holy One of God.

But Jesus rebuked him, saying, be silent and come out of him.

And when the demon had thrown him down in their midst,

he came out of him, having done him no harm.

And they were all amazed and said to one another, what is this word for?

With authority and power he commands unclean spirits, and they come out.

And reports about him went out into every place in the surrounding region.

Every.

Good morning and welcome to Christ Community Chapel.

So, so glad you're here.

Thanks for coming.

How many of you were able to come to premiere tonight?

Would you raise your hand?

How awesome was premiere night?

It was great.

I over 1700 of you, braved the weather to get here.

Those of you who weren't able to get here, boy,

we have created a recap video for you.

You should have gotten it in an email.

If not, you can go on our website and see it.

Also, we have a table out in the atrium that you can ask questions

and get the material that we handed out at premiere tonight, but,

it was such a great time.

Sometimes,

we need to look back at what God has done

and just be amazed

and then dream about what God wants to do.

Can do, will do in the future.

And that was what premiere night was all about.

Somebody sent me like, a a snapshot of our Facebook post.

That was a conversation between two of our members.

And what she wrote is what I felt.

She said, I cried.

I'm in my 37th year at the church.

Never dreamed we would see anything more exciting than what has already happened.

But I left, filled with anticipation and amazement

at the vision for the future.

I love that.

I love that the next big event is commitment Night.

And I think that commitment night,

might be a very emotional worship experience.

And I say that for a couple of reasons.

One is, you know, Jesus says that where your treasure is,

your heart will be also, that your treasure is connected to your heart.

And I think commitment night is a time.

I don't know if you ever have another opportunity

to have 2000, 3000

people who are throwing a bit of their treasure

toward Jesus and falling more

in love with Jesus at the same moment?

I think that will be overwhelming.

But the other thing is that we have a tradition here at TCC

that whenever we replace carpeting somewhere or flooring,

we give you a Sharpie and we ask you to, to go and write on the cement

before we put the flooring back down or the carpeting back down,

right on the cement.

Names of people that you want to see come to know Jesus.

And we have all kinds of stories

of people walking with friends or family members or coworkers

to a place in our building and saying, your name is right underneath our feet.

I wrote it here five years ago, and here you are.

Here you are.

So in Commitment Night, we're going to peel back

some of the carpeting and have you do that.

So don't miss Premier our commitment night.

It's going to be great.

And well, we're asking you to register because we need to know

that you're coming. We're going to have a meal.

And then we're going to worship together and make our commitment tonight.

Be great. All right.

Let's get into today's message.

I was reading in the book of Exodus, where the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt.

And Moses is out in the middle of nowhere and he sees a bush that's on fire.

So he goes over to it, and God speaks to him out of the burning bush.

And God tells him what,

God wants to do and what he wants Moses to do.

And Moses is supposed to go to Pharaoh,

the most powerful man in the world, and tell him to let all the slaves go in.

One fell swoop.

And then Moses has some questions for God, and they're good questions.

He he expects that he will have to answer these questions.

And the first question is, who am I when Pharaoh says,

who are you that I should listen to you?

What should I say?

And then the next question is,

who are who are you when they say, who is it that sent you?

Who should I say sent me?

So great questions.

Anytime someone is sent to save someone or redeem someone,

those are the questions they need to answer.

The questions of authority.

Who sent you and can you do what you say you can do?

We are in the second message of our ten week series, Calling Jesus the Redeemer.

We're spending ten weeks in the Gospel of Luke.

It's going to culminate on Easter and we are at Luke chapter four.

So if you have your Bibles, you can go ahead and turn to Luke chapter four.

You can wait for it to come up on the screen.

If you want to use one of our Bibles, it's on page 808.

Page 808.

The story that we just had

read to us is about authority,

and we find Jesus in the same place that we found him last week.

He's in the local synagogue.

And it struck me that, I don't know how many things rubbed

Jesus the wrong way about how they did services at the local synagogue,

but it didn't seem like it bothered him.

Like he went to the synagogue to connect with God and to worship,

and nothing else seemed to get in his way, which was a good thing.

Now, here are the three points that I want to pull out of this passage.

And they're on the card you got on the way in.

I want to talk about the authority of Jesus, the power

of Jesus, and the goodness of Jesus.

Authority and power, the authority of Jesus, the power

of Jesus and the goodness of Jesus.

Authority and power.

First, the authority of Jesus.

Look at verses 31 and 32.

It says, and he went down to Capernaum, a city in Galilee.

And he was teaching them on the Sabbath.

And they were astonished at his teaching.

For his word possessed authority.

Jesus taught in a way that they were not used to in the first century.

Most rabbis, when they taught, they cited sources

like they would, connect with a rabbi in the past who had a good following.

And people all believed what that rabbi said,

so they would build their argument using what that rabbi said.

It's not a bad way to teach.

It's kind of like having footnotes in an article.

Jesus didn't teach like that, though.

When you read Jesus sermons, particularly like the sermon on the Mount,

Jesus says stuff like you've heard it said, you shall not commit adultery.

But I say to you, Jesus, Jesus cited himself, but I say to you,

any man who looks on a woman with lust has committed adultery in his heart.

You've heard it said, you shall not commit murder.

But I say to you,

if you're angry with your brother, you're guilty.

Jesus spoke in a way that was absolutely revolutionary.

And to speak with authority, you need you need two things.

You need the knowledge to speak, and you need the right to speak

first, the knowledge to speak.

I have a friend, who has a PhD in physics.

He had a his emphasis

was on molecular and cellular biophysics.

If that sounds smart, it's because it is.

My friend's crazy smart.

He did his dissertation on the process of blood clotting,

and, he has since done research.

Groundbreaking research on the molecule

called fibrinogen, which is, connected to blood clotting.

When I say groundbreaking research, what I mean is that my friend Nathan, now,

he knows more about fibrinogen

than anybody in the world,

which is just, you know, wild to think about.

If my friends sat down with

Jesus and they began to talk about fibrinogen.

My friend Nathan would end up taking notes.

Right, because Jesus would know

more about fibrinogen

than my friend Nathan.

There is no area of life

that Jesus does not have complete knowledge about.

There is no area of your life where Jesus doesn't know more than you know which is.

Which is why it's crazy that any of us would ever disagree with what Jesus says

about how to handle our sexuality, or how to handle our money,

or how to handle our relationships, or our marriage,

or our kids or anything.

Because Jesus has complete

knowledge in every area,

which is why he speaks with authority.

He has the knowledge to speak.

But the second thing is the right to speak.

Jesus comes as King

in the book Lord of the Rings by Token.

The third volume of Lord of the rings is called The Return of the King.

And in the moment when the king is kind of is coming into his own,

there's a paragraph where where somebody like lists out

all the titles of the king,

and Tolkien gives him a dizzying amount of titles.

There are like nine different titles.

And the reason that he has all those titles is that he is the king.

He is the rightful king of every province and every country.

Jesus comes with.

The title is King of Kings

and Lord of Lords.

There's a great quote that's attributed to a theologian named Abraham Kuyper.

I'm going to put it up on the screen and I want to read it to you.

This is what it says.

There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence

over which Christ, who is sovereign overall, does not cry.

You read that again.

There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence

over which Christ, who is sovereign overall,

does not cry

mine.

Jesus speaks with authority

because he has the knowledge to speak.

He has the right to speak.

And that brings me to my second point, which is the power of Jesus.

Verses 33 to 37

it says, and in the synagogue there was a man

who had the spirit of an unclean demon.

And he cried out with a loud voice, ha!

What do you have to do with us?

Jesus of Nazareth?

Have you come to destroy us?

I know who you are.

The Holy One of God.

But Jesus rebuked him, saying, be silent and come out of him.

And when the demon had thrown him

down in their midst, he came out of him, having done him no harm.

And they were all amazed and said to one another, what is this word for?

With authority and power he commands the unclean spirits, and they come out.

And reports about him went out into every place in the surrounding region.

This is early on in Jesus ministry.

We're only on chapter four of Luke,

and people don't know what to think about Jesus yet.

What's interesting is the demons know

that.

They know.

They know who Jesus is.

They know the power he has because this demon says, have you come to destroy us?

They know that Jesus is their enemy.

You are in the book of James.

There's a little part where James is saying that it's not enough

just to say that you believe in God,

and what James says is the demons also believe, and they shudder.

This is a demon shattering.

I think it's hard to imagine what this must have been like

in this, this little synagogue.

They have all of a sudden a man start to scream.

You know, in this version it says he.

He cried out with a loud voice.

And another version it says that he yelled at the top of his lungs,

terribly disconcerting.

A grown man screaming right next to you.

You would. You would scatter. I think people scattered.

But this isn't a man who's screaming because, he's mentally ill.

This is a man who's screaming

because of evil.

And there's something that is absolutely terrifying about evil.

When my wife and I are watching TV at home and a commercial comes on

about a horror movie, she will avert her eyes.

And if if the even the the talking in the music is

is kind of evil, she'll look at me like, turn it off, right?

And I have to mute it, you know, find the mute button

because it's terrifying.

Even make believe evil is terrifying.

Y'all, I have done it.

I read enough in history to know death stories about human evil.

I've read

stories about Stalin when he was at the height of his power,

stories about Saddam Hussein and his sons, the Taliban, Pablo Escobar.

There are bugs.

And I thought

about telling you some of those stories to give you an example of evil

and then tell you, you got to multiply it by a thousand, right?

But I was afraid that if I told you those stories, that

they would be so disconcerting that you wouldn't be able to get past them

and hear the rest of the sermon.

In fact, I ran it by my wife, and I told her a couple of the stories

and she was going, do not tell those stories,

Human evil is appalling.

It is,

incredible the capacity

that human beings have for evil.

But all human evil is diluted.

It's all diluted.

What happened in that synagogue

was not diluted at all.

It was pure evil.

Something you have never probably

been in the presence of.

And all of a sudden, there, in the presence of this evil

and Jesus is there.

You know, I always love movies, where there's a bully

and the bully is put in their place because it always happens in the same way.

There's a bully who's terrifying someone,

who's weaker than the bully.

And then, a champion kind of comes into the scene and takes

the person that's being bullied and puts him behind him or her behind him.

And then that champion deals with the bully.

That's what Jesus is doing.

Jesus is face to face

with evil, unpredictable,

powerful, dark, menacing.

But Jesus is not just unafraid.

Look at what Jesus does.

He speaks.

And, and the demon

right away has to capitulate.

This man is screaming, I know who you are.

Likes just yelling.

And Jesus looks at him and says, be quiet and boom, he's quiet.

Jesus says, come out of him!

Boom! The demon obeys.

No negotiation, no struggle.

Jesus power is overwhelming and that means a few things.

It means that we are not alone

in our struggle, struggle against evil,

against the darkness of a world

full of injustice and suffering.

It means that Jesus has the power to deal

with the evil outside of you, the terrible brokenness of this world.

And Jesus has the power to deal with the evil inside of you.

The terrible brokenness of your own heart.

It means that

Jesus didn't just come with the authority to teach.

He came with the authority to rescue,

to set us free, to set you free.

And that brings me to my final point,

which is the goodness of Jesus

authority and power.

You know, there are times when

when you have a struggle against good and evil,

and it's pretty obvious.

But then there are

there are casualties that are kind of innocent casualties

of a battle between good forces and evil forces.

And we see that in our world

many times there are civilian casualties that we mourn.

When you have, struggle between good and evil

in the human body, where you have somebody with cancer

and they start to get chemotherapy,

then anyone who's had chemotherapy knows that chemotherapy

not only kills the cancer cells, but chemotherapy

many times will kill many healthy cells as well.

My best friend in high school, when we were, seniors, his dad had cancer.

And, his dad

was going through chemo, and it seemed like the chemo was working

and the cancer was shrinking and and that we were all hopeful.

And then his dad took a turn for the worse.

And his dad died right around Christmas.

But two weeks later, as the new year began, they received a letter

from his doctor and the letter said, this is the year

we will declare Jack lives free of cancer

because the cancer was gone.

It was the cure that had killed him

with Jesus.

Jesus is dealing with a man where evil has spread its tentacles

all the way through him, and Jesus reaches in

and rips out the evil

but doesn't hurt the man.

That's the verse that says, Jesus rebuked him, saying, be silent, come out of him.

And when the demon had thrown him down in their midst, he came out of

him, having done him no harm.

You know, when Jesus

teaches us to pray in the Lord's Prayer

and he says, lead us, pray this lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

The reason we can pray that is because of Jesus.

Because Jesus has come

and he's more powerful than evil.

This means that evil will never have the last word.

Not evil, not suffering, not death, not disease.

Because Jesus has come.

That's why he's doing this.

That's why Jesus,

in the midst of a synagogue, a man who is demon possessed, is there.

And Jesus confronts this man is what I want you to get in your head.

Is that that image of a movie

with a bully where the champion comes and takes

the person who is so frightened and being bullied, puts them behind him,

and then says to the bully, you deal with me, that's Jesus for you.

Whatever it is

that is causing you anxiety and fear,

I just want you to know that you have a champion.

And that's what Jesus is doing right here.

I think if this guy could have asked

a couple of questions, I think he would ask this.

I think he would have said, Jesus, can you save me?

Can you save me?

To which Jesus would have said, I am King of kings

and Lord of Lords.

There isn't one square inch of this entire universe

that I do not say is mine.

I can save you.

But then the other question is just as important.

And the other question that he would need to ask is, Will you save me?

And that's the question that appeals

to love and goodness.

Are you willing to do this?

To which Jesus would say, greater love is no one than this,

that a man lay down his life for his friends.

And then Jesus goes to the cross.

So I want you to know you have a Redeemer

who is powerful, more powerful than pure evil.

That which means Jesus is more powerful than anything that you have ever faced

or will ever face.

But you have a Redeemer who loves you so much

that he was willing to go to the cross,

die on your behalf, then resurrect with power

so he can say to you,

you don't have to fear evil anymore

because I have delivered you from evil.

So great is Jesus the Redeemer for you.

Would you pray with me?

Father in heaven.

I come to you, and I am,

I'm always so grateful.

I'm grateful for all the stories

that you have chosen to put in your word.

But this story is one that,

is just amazing to me

that Jesus confronted not just human evil.

He he confronted the source of, of all evil, a pure evil,

and defeated it with, with just the words so powerful

is your son.

But then your son loves us

so much that he was willing to go to the cross.

Thank you.

Thanks for giving us a wonderful Savior.

Thanks. Thanks for giving us a Redeemer

who has power and authority, and also is so good

and so loving.

Thank you.

We pray this in his name. Amen.