I. Consider the casting out of the devils. (1) The Gospel narratives are distinctly pledged to the historic truth of these occurrences. Either they are true or the Gospels are false. (2) Nor can it be said that they represent the opinion of the time, and use words in accordance with it. This might have been difficult to answer, but that they not only give such expressions as "possessed with devils," and other like ones, but relate to us words spoken by the Lord Jesus, in which the personality and presence of the demons is distinctly implied. (SeeLuke 11:17-26.) (3) The question then arises Granted the plain historical truth of possession, what was it? The demoniac was one whose being was strangely interpenetrated by one or more of those fallen spirits who are constantly asserted in the Scriptures to be the enemies and tempters of the souls of men. There appears to have been in him a double will and double consciousness sometimes the cruel spirit thinking and speaking in him, sometimes his poor crushed self crying out to the Saviour of men for mercy; a terrible advantage taken, and a personal realization, by the malignant powers of evil, of the fierce struggle between sense and conscience in the man of morally divided life.
II. The entrance of the devils into the swine. (1) Of the reason of this permission we surely are not competent judges. Of this, however, we are sure that if this granting of the request of the evil spirits helped in any way the cure of the men, caused them to resign their hold on them more easily, mitigated the paroxysm of their going forth, this would have been motive enough. (2) The fact itself raises a question in our minds which, though we cannot wholly answer, we may yet approximate to the solution of. How can we imagine the bestial nature capable of the reception of demoniac influence? If the unchecked indulgence of sensual appetite afforded an inlet for the powers of evil to possess the human demoniac, then we have their influence joined to that part of man's nature which he has in common with the brutes that perish, the animal and sensual soul.We may thus conceive that the same animal and sensual soul in the brute may be receptive of similar demoniacal influence.
H. Alford, Family Treasury,1878, p. 180
References: Matthew 8:28-34. Parker, Inner Life of Christ,vol. ii., p. 49. Matthew 8:29. H. W. Beecher, Sermons,2nd series, p. 611; C. Kingsley, Village Sermons,p. 65.Matthew 8:34. G. Calthrop, Words Spoken to My Friends,p. 239; R. Heber, Parish Sermons,vol. i., p. 160; W. F. Hook, Sermons on the Miracles,vol. i., p. 225.Matthew 8. J. E. Vaux, Sermon Notes,3rd series, p. 2.