The Demon-Possessed Man - Hold the Bacon, please.

Luke 8:32 Now there was a herd of many swine feeding there on the mountain; and the demons implored Him to permit them to enter the swine. And He gave them permission.

Ted Steinberg wrote a small article about our friend 'the pig'. In the early 1800's, pigs used to wonder the streets of New York, other cities as well, but we'll stick to this well-populated city. The pigs would walk amongst the people eating garbage and waste and those people that were not as well to do as others would go out and kill the animals and feed their families. While the pigs did clean up some of the garbage, they added their own garbage when they would defecate on the sidewalks. There were many times they tried to ban the pigs from the streets but were set back by protesters - mostly housewives and the less wealthy. Then in the mid-1800's, cholera set in. The disease spread and was found to be caused by unclean conditions. Nothing is more unclean than pig poop in the streets. The police formed a troop that marched the pigs uptown, instilling a ban in the city of the pigs and clearly dividing city and country.

While we see the cute little piglets and mud-cooling, pink-skinned bacon givers in a better light today, this article gives us a pretty good analogy to the choice made by Jesus to throw the demons into the swine.

At first glance, the pigs seemed to be doing a service to the city - cleaning up the streets of its garbage. Satan always looks good at first glance. This is why it is often so tempting to step into sin - it seems good on the surface. The people thought the pigs were a help to them, it was providing them food for their families. The results of sin can falsely seem like a good answer at the time - a lie to save yourself from being embarrassed, or a slip-up on your taxes so your not financially burdened. But as time wore on - decades later - the urine and everything else that pigs naturally get rid of, caused disease. The same with sin. The natural decay that sin causes soon leads to a deadly result. The only option in both scenarios is to rid the place of the problem. They drove the pigs out of the city. Are we ready to drive the sin out of our lives?