This might be the weirdest verse in the whole Bible.

Here’s the story: Jesus just freed two wild men from demonic oppression. The demons left the men and inhabited a herd of pigs, which then went crazy (whatever pig-crazy looks like) and drown themselves in a nearby lake.

When the herdsman went into the city to tell what had happened… this happened.

The people begged Jesus to LEAVE THEM.

WHY would they beg Jesus to leave when He just freed them from the terror of two demonized wild men? You’d think the people of the city would be relieved, happy, thankful. But they weren’t.

They were more afraid of Jesus than they had been of the demons.

I’ve been wracking my brain about this one. It’s hard to grasp.

I wonder if their thoughts went something like this…

“If Jesus can address the ugliness in these men with such decisive authority, what would He say or do about MY hidden junk?”

That’s when fear of exposure sets in. It’s when shame overrulues. That’s when we clamor to keep our sin hidden so the neighbors don’t know. So our spouse doesn’t know. So nobody knows.

We’d rather remain guilty in the dark than receive forgiveness in the light.

That’s like preferring to have cancer that nobody knows about than making the disease known in order to receive healing.

I don’t know if that’s it – but it’s a possibility.

We do strange things to keep up appearances. We even avoid the cure in order to hide the disease.

We are afraid of ourselves.

PRAYER FOR TODAY:

“Jesus, give me the courage to seek the reality of forgiveness instead of the appearance that everything is OK.”