A TERRIBLE PRAYER
‘And when they saw Him, they besought Him that He would depart out of their coasts.’
This is the most terrible prayer that ever man uttered to God. There was Christ the Saviour, Christ the Healer, coming to them: coming to them, too, in all the power of His great goodness. He had just shown it in His stilling of the tempest, when even the winds and the sea obeyed Him. He had just shown it in His rescuing the poor man who was tormented by the devils.
I. A warning.—We often find people wishing that they had lived in our Lord’s own days, and fancying that if they had seen Him work His miracles, and heard Him preach His sermons, then these things would have exercised such a power over them that they could not have helped being very much better people than they now are. This incident is meant to stop all such false notions. Christ manifested Himself to these people with some of His very greatest miracles, casting out even a legion of devils—real evil spirits—from a person they all knew; and all that came of it was that they only wished to be well rid of Christ. So it might be with us, and you may be sure that so it would be with all those people who turn away from the Church’s teaching now. Those who will not believe and pray now, would have rejected Christ then, however little they may think it. Nay, if Christ were to come to them, they would find so little in Him to please them that they would do as these people did in the Gospel, and pray Him to depart out of their coasts.
II. The reason why.—What was it that these people clung to so much as to make them wish to get rid of Christ? The answer is very instructive. It was their property. They were afraid for their goods. It was the destruction of the swine that went against them. You know that swine were forbidden creatures by the Law of Moses, so that these people had no right to keep them at all. Our Lord’s permitting the destruction of the swine touched the consciences of those people at once. It was the same thing as letting them feel that He could not come among them without their faults being brought to light, without their having to give up their sins, their ill-gotten gains, and whatever else there was that was wrong.
III. The question for us is—may not many of us be just like these persons who asked Jesus to depart? Could we bear it if we, for conscience sake, were called upon to submit to any real loss. There is hardly a house which would not have to suffer some loss, if Christ were to come and destroy whatever we have got wrongfully, as He destroyed those swine.
IV. The meaning of loss of fortune.—May not the destruction of these swine teach us a great lesson as to the meaning and notion of those losses of fortune, those losses of property or social position, or whatever else men delight in, which so often come upon us? When God suffers some heavy loss to fall upon a man, it is often with the view of rousing his conscience to see the things which stood between him and Christ.