What have I to do with thee? We need Christ, we are alienated from God, we need his forgiving love, his pardon. We need to trust in what he has done for men and women in suffering and dying on Calvary’s Cross, to bear himself the eternal punishment due to us for our sin. But, before we realise these things, before we grasp our need of forgiveness and new nature and a relationship with God, we respond to this message: ‘What have I to do with this? This has nothing to do with me.’ What have I got in common with religion? What have I got in common with Christianity, with Christ, with Christians? Of course, before we are truly converted we have nothing in common. We have no spiritual life in us. What authority do you have over me?, we ask. Well, of course, all authority. He is God, he is the Creator of all of us and we owe him our love and our worship.
We are not demon possessed, but before we are converted our state is reflected in this man. Some of us, like him, try to get as far from God as we can. He lived in the tombs; he couldn’t stand friends or company. We have heavenly home and Father, but we don’t want to know him. What is our motto before conversion? ‘Leave me alone, I don’t want to know.’ It was no good reasoning with him; he was too busy avoiding human contact, shunning warmth and all normal interaction, and he was not going to listen. The preacher can say, ‘Stop chasing after this world, it is going to cheat you’, but we will not listen, however much the life of sin is hurting us.
None of us rush about as mad things but as unbelievers we are running from God and are driven as people by earthly whims, things we want, and think we need to have. We are out of control. We have no spiritual order in our lives. We have no communion with God, and are pure earthlings. This man’s behaviour was extreme, but it is a picture of us.
They are dual minded, torn in two different directions; part of them wants to find God, but another part wants to get as far from Christ as they can, and to go back into the world. They hear of the possibility of having new life and coming to know the living God, and immediately in rushes all the antagonism and doubt, scorn, prejudice, and they are divided people. Some come to a church and say ‘I wish I could find Christ.’ They say, ‘I know there is a God’, and they mean it, but then they don’t return for weeks.
The demon possessed man could not stand to be clothed. He wanted to be like an animal. We are rebels who have thrown off having a living spirit, flesh and blood. We are supposed to be living beings made in the image of God, but we reject it as an encumbrance.
They could not bind him, not even in his own sake. So too with us. Christians talk of the love of God, and we are afraid that we can’t have our own way. Christ saw us and where we were heading and he came into this world to die for us. The preacher can speak of the love of Christ but it is hard to move us with that message. We cannot be tamed until the Spirit of God moves in our hearts.
‘What have I to do with thee?’ What a question! Is it in your mind? The answer is everything. He happens to be your Creator, Lord, and would be your Saviour and your judge also. Don’t let anyone say, ‘Torment me not.’ It is our instinct to say it. How could God torment, when he saves the soul? What is it to become a Christian? It is to gain life, a friend in heaven, to be beloved by God, to have one who hears all your prayers, to have an emancipated mind. The tragedy is that we experience torment when we reject the gospel, because we will spend the rest of our lives tormented by covetousness, pride, and deceit, and then will come old age, and finally by death.
Some of the angels fell, and then man fell. Look at the difference. They are remanded, awaiting judgment. We are still on earth. In a sense they are further down the same road of judgment that we are on. If you meet a man in the late stages of a disease, and then see another man in the early stages of the same disease, you know what is going to happen to him. When you see the state demons are in, you are looking at the same condition we have, only it is seen in more vivid colours. You look at the advanced stage of your own state.
Before conversion that is attitude of so many. We need a Saviour; he died for them, but before we realise this and that we need a new nature, we respond, ‘This has nothing to do with me.’ He is the Creator of all of us and we need to learn of him; we are subject to this world and devil., but we reject him, ‘What have I got in common with religion? Nothing.’ What disrespect! I don’t want to repent, or tell him I need him. I don’t want to worship. Christ deals with one in that state. ‘Come out of the man’, prompted this. The man never asked or wanted it. He is compelled to approach. We are shown a miracle in which Christ entirely takes the initiative. Reaches out to one of the worst. Why did Christ love this man? Probably he was seducing and raping before being driven out of town. How could Christ love him? He loves the man he would make him when changed, after deliverance and cleansing.