I just finished my sermon for Sunday...and there is more good stuff than I can fit into the sermon.  So here is some of the overflow.

The Biblical account of Jesus casting out a "legion" of demons in Mark 5:1-20 seems bizarre to our modern ears in  a couple of ways.  First, demon possession is today largely the fanciful imagination of Hollywood, which at best is a distortion of Biblically revealed truth.  Many today would consider the Biblical record of demon possession to be a misdiagnosis of epilepsy or a pyschosis.  Nevertheless, Jesus views and treats demons (or evil spirits or fallen angels, as the Bible refers to them) as real and a real threat to God's people and Kingdom.

Second, there is the odd request (which Jesus grants) of the army of evil angels to be removed from a man and cast into a heard of pigs, which then commit suicide by rushing down a steep bank and drowning in a lake.  If nothing else, this made the event even more dramatic, public and note worthy.

Behind these bizarre components though, there is the grand good news that Jesus mercifully rescues an otherwise hopeless man from the clutches of Satan.  Score another one for Jesus.  I love that because, whenever I'm feeling hassled by spiritual influences, I've got the assurance that our Jesus is a Demon Defeater.