HOPE AGAINST THE LEGION
Inok Vsevolod (Filipiev)
The Gospel tale of how the Savior drove the legion of demons out of the possessed from Gadarene (Lk. 8, 27) reminds us yet again of the existence of the next world and of how its dark representatives influence a man's life.
As a citizen of any country needs to have at least the basic understanding of the people from the neighboring countries, so does a Christian need to know the mores and customs of the dwellers of the next world.
The Christian religious doctrine contains everything we need to know about the world of the fallen angels, demons, and about their fight against the human race.
This fight has a long history. The demons led by Satan cannot forgive humans for having been created by God as though in replacement of the fallen angels. For that reason, at the very beginning of the history of mankind, in Paradise, we see Satan trying and succeeding in tempting Adam and Eve. Satan prepared the ground for the first people to be disloyal to God.
The hate of the demons towards men increased even more when God Himself became man and suffered for the fallen Adam - for the whole of the human race - giving every person the opportunity to be saved.
Demons hate men so much that, were it not for the restraining power of God, they would instantly have poisoned the entire human race by their death-bringing presence alone.
For the good of man the Lord precludes demons from entering in direct contact with men except for the cases when, consciously or unconsciously, men themselves seek that contact. So, what is it that opens the doors of Hades, what gives us the opportunity to enter in contact with the demons? Any form of the occult, including fortune telling, astrology, spiritualism, extrasensory activities, the different practices of the New Age, not to mention blatant Satanism. Moreover drugs and alcohol also lead to direct contact with the demons and dependence on them: a man in a drug-induced trance or in a fit of intoxication enters the other world from the back door and obviously ends up in the realm of the fallen spirits. In our day and age of highly developed computer technologies that give man a false sense of his own power, many cannot even imagine that in reality they have long been the captives of the demons. For being possessed by demons does not necessarily manifest itself openly - that is, through shouting and fits. On the contrary, most of the time, possession is concealed beneath seemingly harmless attractions and tendencies and its frightening satanic nature is revealed only at the moment of a man's demise.
What else, except possession, can explain for example the recent death of a Japanese young man who died right in the midst of playing a computer game, from which he could not tear himself away literally for weeks?
Yet every single one of us, if he honestly examines his conscience, will find in himself traces or seeds of one or another demonic possession. Unable to communicate with men directly, demons influence us through passions playing on the threads of our passionate desires like puppeteers. And if there was a legion of demons in the possessed from Gadarene, we are daily attacked by legions of passions.
The Lord Jesus Christ cured the possessed from Gadarene, and He can cure every one of us. No matter in what demonic trap we find ourselves, no matter how low we have fallen, under no circumstances must we lose the hope in God's help. Hope in God is that saving straw that the drowning man clings to and survives the raging sea of passions against all laws of physics. O Lord, grant us to keep this bright hope till the end, till the very last minute of our earthly life.
Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Jordanville, USA November 27, 2005.
Translated from the Russian by Mariya Nekipelov.