For the Love of Swine

I often marvel at the human capacity to continually mistrust the things God does. I have found myself there many times and I have seen others do the same thing. Yet, it still confounds me. As I was reading through the Gospel of Luke I found a story that made this point in a very poignant way.

The story is one that is fairly familiar to most of us who have frequented Sunday school, and it is found in Luke 8:26-37. Here Jesus has crossed the Sea of Galilee into a land inhabited by Gentiles, and He is welcomed first by a man possessed by a legion of demons. Christ’s conversation with the demon is, in itself, very interesting, but it is not important to my point. It is enough to say that Jesus cast the unclean spirits out of the man and into a herd of swine. The swine then ran down into the sea and drowned.

The people of the nearby town heard of this and they ran out to see. They found the man there, who had been possessed. He was sitting silently, now in his right mind. They were amazed at his transformation, but they did not react as we might expect. Rather than praising God or worshipping, verse 37 says, “Then the whole multitude of the surrounding region… asked Him to depart from them, for they were seized with great fear.”

Why would they ask Him to leave? The Bible says they were afraid. But of what? Afraid that He may heal more of them? Could it be that they were afraid of what they would lose? Could it be that these people were more concerned about losing a herd of pigs than they were about this man being made whole? Surely people cannot be so materialistic… can we?

How many times in our lives have we told God to leave us alone because of what we may have to give up? We may not say those words. We would never come right out and say we want Him to depart, but our actions say it even more clearly. We cannot let go of the swine that God’s work may cast into the sea. Why can we not praise Him for the spirits He sets free? We hoard to ourselves pointless, dirty things that would ruin us. And then we are angry when He removes them. I guess we may be more like pigherders than we suspected.