Deliverence in the Decapolis

I'll be reading this morning from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 5, and we'll read Mark 5, verses 1 through 20. They went across the lake to the region of the Gerizim. When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an evil spirit came from the tombs to meet him.

This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him.

Night and day among the tombs and in the hills, he would cry out and cut himself with stones. When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and he fell on his knees in front of him. He shouted at the top of his voice, What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Swear to God that you won't torture me.

For Jesus had said to him, Come out of this man, you evil spirit. Then Jesus asked him, What is your name? My name is Legion, he replied, for we are many. And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area.

A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby hillside. The demons begged Jesus, Send us among the pigs, allow us to go into them. He gave them permission, and the evil spirits came out and went into the pigs.

The herd, about 2,000 in number, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned. Those tending the pigs ran off and reported this in the town and countryside. And the people went out to see what had happened.

When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons sitting there, dressed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. Those who had seen it told the people what had happened to the demon-possessed man, and told about the pigs as well.

Then the people began to plead with Jesus to leave their region. As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him. Jesus did not let him, but said, Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has shown mercy on you.

So the man went away and began to tell in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him. And all the people were amazed. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind, but now I see. T'was grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.

How precious did that grace appear, the hour I first believed. Through many dangers, toils, and snares, I have already come. T'was grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.

When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we first begun. When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we first begun. When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we first begun.

Please be seated. And I'd be glad if you'd have your Bibles open at Mark's Gospel in Chapter 5. If you were to ask me to give you a summary statement of why Mark wrote his Gospel, I think I would answer something like this. He wrote it to show how the power of the incarnate Christ, the incarnate Son of God, was able to do battle and prove to be victorious over the power of the evil one.

It's not fashionable today to believe in the devil. In 1978, some thirty-plus theologians of the Anglican Church wrote a letter to the Times newspaper indicating that they no longer felt that it was possible for people to believe in a personal Satan and his emissaries in the world. And yet you cannot come to the ministry of the Lord Jesus and you cannot approach the Gospel of Mark without realizing that our Lord's perception of the world in those days, and I don't think we really have any right to say that the situation has changed.

In some respects it's perhaps worsened in some areas, as maybe I'll point out. Our Lord's perception of the world was of one in which evil forces prevailed. There was great unhappiness, bodily affliction, people in damaged conditions.

And he appreciated that this was as a result of man's disobedience to God and surrendering himself to the forces of evil. So here is our Lord, the incarnate Son of God, and He commences His ministry. And as you discover Him doing so in the first chapter of Mark's Gospel, you find that His sermon in His hometown of Capernaum is interrupted by a demon-possessed man.

Verse 24 of Mark 1, What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God. Jesus tells the man to be quiet. And when in the 39th verse of the opening chapter you read of our Lord Jesus, albeit not on a bicycle, but nonetheless traveling around Galilee, you discover Him preaching in synagogues and driving out demons.

When you move through into the third chapter, you again find our Lord Jesus emphasizing the ministry of demons and granting to His disciples, the 15th verse of chapter 3, to have authority to drive out such. His ministry in Galilee has been so pronounced that the religious elite in Jerusalem are disturbed. Verse 22 of chapter 3, and they send down a delegation to remonstrate with the Lord Jesus.

Their conclusion is this, Yes, His ministry is spectacularly successful, but the reason is, can you believe it, that they dare make such an assertion, He is possessed by Beelzebub, by the prince of demons. He is driving out demons. You move through to the 7th chapter of the Gospel of Mark, and you find again our Lord Jesus not put off by that allegation, but having corrected them and indicated that He has a superior power.

Beelzebub can't cast out Beelzebub, but He, the Lord Jesus Christ, has come on behalf of Almighty God to confront the forces of evil, and wherever He discovers them to be, He will expel them. So in the 7th chapter, the 24th verse, pitches the geography to the scene of Tyre and Sidon, and there He comes upon a woman who is concerned because her little daughter is possessed of a demon. The Lord Jesus, having in a friendly fashion discussed with her whether He ought to heal Israelites before Gentiles, He agrees to do what she wants because of her great faith.

And verse 29 says, The demon has left your daughter. And so you go on throughout the whole of Mark's Gospel to see our Lord's ministry in terms of a confrontation of Himself with the powers of evil. Right at the last chapter, Mark will not get away from the theme because he will remind you in the opening verses of the 16th chapter that Mary of Magdalene was one who had had seven demons cast out from her by the Lord Jesus.

Verse 9, Mary Magdalene of whom He had driven seven demons. And when the Lord gives His commission to His disciples to go into the world, He tells them likewise in His name to come upon and exercise the force of evil. These signs will accompany those, verse 17, who believe in My name.

They will drive out demons. They will speak in new tongues. And so forth.

So I give you that little cameo, that little background insight into Mark's Gospel as I endorse what I said a few moments ago that if one was to pick out the main objective for Mark writing this Gospel, you could not go to a more accurate conclusion than to say that Mark was endeavoring to show how the incarnate Son of God came across the power of the devil and expelled it. What is demon possession? Well, my view is this, that demon possession is the attempts of the devil to do with a man what Almighty God did with the Lord Jesus. You say, what do you mean? Well, let me put this more theologically precise, in more theological precise language.

Our Lord Jesus is God incarnate. There is nothing about the Lord Jesus which is not God. The Lord God comes on earth and He's born within the womb of a virgin.

All that there is about the Lord Jesus is divine. He's man and yet He's God. Man really, He's fatigued.

At times He hungers. There's nothing phony about His humanity. But He's not man only.

He's more than man. He's a God man. No one stills tempest.

No one walks on water. No one multiplies loaves and fishes. There is more to the Lord Jesus than just man.

He's a God man, incarnate. And here is Lucifer who wants, if you like, to challenge God and to incarnate Himself in a man. And very often when you read about demon possession in the Scriptures, the actual word that should have been used by the translators is demonized.

The idea of a devil coming along and possessing and empowering and degrading man. Stay with me for a while as I introduce this subject because unless you get this clear, you'll not understand this historical narrative and its implications. And why Mark, in what was really a very short gospel, gives so many verses to this specific incident.

The Latin theologians will tell you that you are born in the imago Dei. Let's translate that, the image of God. There is something about you that is God-like.

The Mormons may have got it wrong in terms of taking some Scriptures to a conclusion that are not allowed, which speak of men and women as gods. But there is a sense in which we as evangelicals should not blush from this. Compared with the animals, we are noble.

The potential of man is almost beyond comprehension. Let us make man in our own image. Why did God make man to be glorified in man? Why is there an assault on man? Not because the devil is opposed to man per se, though he is, but because he is opposed to the image of God in man.

So if in some way the devil can trip man, if in some way he can cause man to lose his dignity, if in some way he can possess or oppress man, if in some way he can interfere with the purposes of God as far as humanity is concerned, then he is eclipsing God's glory. Now this is what Mark sees as he writes this gospel. Not just an individual rabbi from Nazareth distilling the sweetest teaching that ever man shared with another, but he sees the forces of righteousness colliding with the forces of evil.

Now it may be that in our Western world and with your Grecian mindset for most of us are brought up with the idea of the Greeks, we're more concerned about words than what we are concerned about works. That we go along with the Anglican theologians to some degree. Yes, we tip our cap to the concept of a personal devil, but really that's a little bit too much for us in respectable wording to believe.

Now I can tell you from my own experiences not only here, but especially in third world countries, that I've known the times when the devil has been so real I could almost touch him. Those of you who stay with this ministry and have done down the years will know that I don't make extravagant statements for the sake of. We wrestle not, says the apostle Paul, against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers.

Ephesians 6. Do you remember, I've quoted it before, it was dear Dr. Lloyd-Jones who said that for most evangelical Christians they put a full stop after the not. We wrestle not. Unless you believe in a personal devil and the affairs of evil and its effects on our world today, then in the name of God how do you explain, not past history, not talking about the Assyrians who have got problems with the way they behave, not talking about the ancient barbarians who have had great difficulties as far as their ethics are concerned, how do you explain that in your lifetime, every young person here, I'm involving you.

I'm not even going to the 1930s and the 1940s and the Holocaust. How do you explain that in your lifetime in Uganda it's estimated 2 million people were killed and in Cambodia 1 million people killed. And here we are claiming to be such sophisticated people.

Brute beasts don't do that to their own species. But we do. So what is the explanation? If the devil is not responsible, then come on Mr. Psychologist and tell me how you can understand the perversions of man as a whole, even if not as individuals, in our world today.

How do you explain the great problems that have confronted us in society in the last decade, let alone the last 2,000 years? Well, our Lord Jesus would have attributed a great deal of what goes on to the power of the evil one in our world. And so we see him coming to the land of the Gerasenes to a place sometimes known as Decapolis, the Ten Cities. It's in the southeastern region of the Sea of Galilee.

And he meets a man who, for those who make notes, I'll give you some alliteration, who I will describe as going through prolific torment. Prolific torment. The Sea of Galilee is 13 miles long and eight miles wide at its widest point.

And where our Lord has been, as you discover in the fourth chapter, to cross the sea at this particular part, he would have been on a boat journey of five miles. And as he gets off the boat, it's probably dusk. It's not too easy to determine, but it looks as though it's nightfall.

He comes across this unfortunate man who lives in the caves backing onto the southeastern part of the Galilean Sea. These caves were used as tombs. In those days they believed that demons especially frequented graveyards.

In those days being out at night, and not all of us are too happy about being out at night today, but in those days to be out at night before the cock crowed, and to be without a lantern was really to expose yourself unnecessarily to the dark forces of the evening and the early morning. Demon-possessed they dwelt in the haunts of the dead. To greet someone out at night was really to take risks that were uncalled for.

That's the backdrop, if you like, of this particular story. As Jesus meets a man in prolific torment. This fellow has got beyond the ability of others to help him.

He lived in the tombs, verse 3, no one could bind him. They bound demon-possessed people not really as an act of hostility, but to try to stop them from harming themselves more. But this is such a grotesque example of a man who has been demonized, that even the people from the Decapolis, from the ten cities can't aid him in any way.

He'd often been chained, verse 4, but he'd broken the chains hand and foot. He'd been chained, but tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. He was a danger to society, he was a danger to himself.

No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones. If ever there was a man who gives you an example of someone who has lost the imago Dei, it's this man, don't you see? This is the reason why Mark gives so much space to this account.

Here is, if you like, an illustration of all that Jesus came into the world to do. Here is man in his worst form, in his most needy state. Here is man going through prolific torment, and the question is, can this son of man, this Jesus, this God man, can he do something for him? Because if he can do something for him, then the thought is he can do something for everyone else.

Because few are as in a bad condition as this unfortunate Gadarene was. The Apostle Paul says in Ephesians 2.12 that there was a time when those Ephesians were without God and without hope in the world. Now I will allow that demon oppression, possession, influence is in graves.

Obviously it's not all as bad as this. But there is a sense in which when a person does not know the gospel, then he can identify with this particular man in all his dilemma. Because if you don't know God, you are without hope.

There's more than this man from the Gadarene tombs who's had a death wish. I've been pastor here for too long to believe that all this has got no relevance to what happens in Worthing in the 20th century. I've met too many old people who've told me that there have been moments when they have been so stretched in their nerves that they could wish themselves dead and some who've attempted it unsuccessfully.

Who is it that puts that sort of desire within the heart of man? Not man per se, not man in himself, but the one who wants to efface the image of God in the personality of man. And I say that if you look at this grotesque example of man in his need and see the Lord Jesus ministering, then it brings hope for anyone whose condition is less serious but nonetheless grave. Prolific torment followed by pacific treatment.

Verse six. I use that word pacific deliberately, not because it just fits in with the homiletics and I'll only give you that to help you follow the story in my teaching by way of application. Pacific means peaceful.

And our Lord Jesus has just been with his disciples on the sea of Galilee. A furious squall, verse 37, previous chapter, comes up, the waves break over the boat so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus is in the stern, sleeping on a cushion.

The disciples are afraid. What is it? This man, he sleeps. He needs to sleep.

He's a human being. But he's more than a human being if he sleeps through this. Wake up, teacher.

Don't you know we're drowning? And Jesus stands in the fullness of his deity and he addresses the storm and he tells it to be muzzled, to be quiet, as an owner of a dog might tell a fierce dog to shut up from barking. And the storm is quiet. Can the Jesus who calms the sea calm the psyche? Can the Jesus who is Lord of the elements be Lord of the depths of a man's nature? Pacific treatment follows prolific torment.

When the man, verse 6, sees Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees. Sometimes you can learn from the oddest encounter of someone with the Lord Jesus. He runs to the Lord Jesus.

My dear friend, if you have problems this morning, however grave, wherever you put them on the sort of Richter scale of demon or satanic influence, wherever you're at, surely the best advice that can ever be proffered to anyone is when you see Jesus from a distance, run towards him. He ran and he fell on his knees in front of him. I'm not suggesting that his ambition at this stage was right, but his direction was correct.

He probably had some idea of demonic worship. After all, it's demonic to take stones and to cut yourself. The prophets of Baal did that, you remember? The Old Testament.

And those of you who still think that this preacher is really an anachronism from the Victorian age, where were you last Sunday evening? Did you listen? I'm not talking about being here, though we're always glad to have you here on a Sunday night. Did you listen to the BBC? The religious slot at 10.30? Demonism? The Church of Satan? In this country? This wasn't put out by some card carrying Bible-thumping evangelical. This was the broadcasting media, backed by Scotland Yard, so concerned of the widespread evil in terms of witchcraft in our country that they flashed an emergency telephone number on the screen at the end of the program to ask if people were getting involved and were frightened of this sort of stuff, to phone them.

Not so much an anachronism, more perhaps of a prophetic statement. This man, it seems to me, wants from the wrong motive to worship. What do you want with me? If I put that across in the way that I did, you'd accuse me of being histrionic on the platform.

But look at verse 7, he shouted. He shouted at the top of his voice. This man is in agony.

What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Isn't it amazing that he's got an accurate diagnosis of who Jesus is. This is not just a messianic title. Spiritual Jews might be perceptive in seeing our Lord Jesus as fulfilling the messianic claims, but this man, his perception is higher.

What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? And how about this for ironic logic. Swear to God that you won't torture me. Here is this man praying to the Lord Jesus on behalf of his own evil well-being.

The man's evil well-being. Swear to God that you won't torture me. You see what's happened, this man is demonized.

You again can accept or reject what I'm saying, but I won't change it because I believe it's directly from the Word of God. There are forces of evil in this world. The Bible predicts that ultimately the forces of evil will be dealt with by the superior forces of the Lord God Almighty.

The devil and his demons will be cast into the lake of fire, into the abyss. What that means I don't know. I don't claim to know.

But I cannot do justice to the Word of God by backing off from these statements that Scripture makes not only in Mark's Gospel, but throughout the whole of the Old Testament and also picks up back reference from the, throughout the whole of the New Testament and picks up back reference from the Old Testament. Time is coming when the victory of our Lord Jesus on the cross of Calvary where He exposed principalities and powers shall be clearly seen by the eradication of evil in this world. God is not through with this world.

I hope He'll come this evening. As I speak on the problem of ecology, I won't be giving you an ecological lecture. I will be giving you a biblical perspective on creation.

It will be somewhat different from the way David Attenborough handles it. God's not through with this world. This world will be returned back to what it originally was in its pristine days when it fell from the hands of Almighty God.

When God spoke, He said, Oh, everything was good. It was good, it was good, it was good. Six times it was good.

The only thing that was not good was that man was on his own, so God gave him a wife. He made it perfectly good. Seriously.

Then everything went hellishly wrong. This man tries to dignify himself to the position of God. He buys the lie.

And as a result of that, the whole created universe is contaminated. It's not going to be left like that. The whole of the world, says the Apostle Paul, waits its own redemption.

You thought about your redemption, my friend. The Bible speaks about the redemption of the universe. There is something cosmic about the victory of the Lord Jesus.

That's why there's such a hellish fight going on these days in terms of the devil still in his last throes trying to prevent God from achieving what his purposes are. What have you and me in common, Jesus? That's the literal translation of verse 7. What have you and me in common? Swear to God that you won't torture me. You see, it used to be thought in those days that if you got a man by his name, you had a sort of handle on the argument.

So here is the devil rightly distinguishing who Jesus is as this man in his terrible state comes towards the Savior. Pacific treatment. The Lord Jesus then starts to deal with him, doesn't he? He tries to get this man to appreciate who he is.

What is your name? So confused is this dear fellow. It seems as though he's got 6,000 of the military inside his head. I want to remember a graphic description by dear brother Ron Whalen in terms of a migraine.

He said, it's like having 10 people with a pickaxe inside your head trying to get out. Ron is gifted in metaphors. And that's the sort of thing only compounded, made absolute.

My name is Legion. What is your name? My name is Legion. He answers a question that wants a singular as a response with a plural because this is the nature of his possession.

He's multi-possessed. My name is Legion. For we're many.

So Jesus ministers to this man in a way that's brought criticism ever since as far as commentators are concerned who always know better than God, or some of them. Jesus wants to help this man in a pacific fashion. He wants to still the storm that's raged in his heart for years.

And so, so Jesus sees a large herd of pigs feeding on the nearby hillside. Verse 11. And the demons who are always concerned about not going into the abyss before time, realizing that ultimately they're on a lead, but the lead is in the hands of God, they beg Jesus to send them, not out of the area.

So Jesus allows them to go into the pigs. Now if you want to know what the end objective of the devil is as far as humanity is concerned, watch those pigs. And don't give me any comment in terms of it wasn't right for Jesus to do this to those dumb animals.

Here is something far infinitely greater than a dumb animal. Here is the eternal well-being of a man made in the image of God, but that image has been defaced. So Jesus gives him a lesson once and for all, and all the bystanders, as he told those legions of demons to leave the man and to hit the pigs.

And when they get inside the pigs, they rush them down into the precipice and straight into the sea where they drown. So the demons finish up in the abyss in any case. And these people for all time, and those who will read with thyself, anointed by the Spirit, have an illustration in centuries to come of what the devil intends for the sons of humanity, the sons of Adam, absolute destruction.

Do you realize this, my friend? You Christian people who sometimes hear in the West, I say this with love in my heart, so sophisticated, so easily able to read these accounts and think of them in terms of yesteryear. Those of us who've got a sort of dichotomy, who live in a real world on a Monday through to Saturday and then become spiritual on a Sunday. Don't you realize that unless you see the world in this back cloth, you haven't started to perceive the world as Jesus perceives it.

Unless you see people potentially lost as this man was lost without our Lord Jesus Christ, then you haven't got a grain of understanding why it was John Mark wrote this gospel, dictated to him by the Apostle Peter who had seen these incidents and witnessed the power of God Himself. The herd about two thousand in number rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned. Here I say was prolific thought, or prolific torment, followed by pacific treatment.

And here, if you please, is pathetic temperament. You say, what do you mean? Well, look at verse fourteen and onwards. These people who see what has happened, they rush to the Decapolis and there they tell others.

Decapolis was an area which was independent from Syria and from Israel. They had their own particular relationship with Rome. It was a little Greek enclave.

It was an area that produced great philosophers. It was independent, impervious to the Jews, and in some way independent of Rome. And these people, they go back to these sophisticated cities and they say what Jesus has done.

They explain, if you like, the wisdom of God and they distill it within the crucible of their own wisdom. The world by wisdom never knows God. The world by wisdom cannot understand God.

It needs the Spirit of God to interpret what God does in the world to make sense of it. And these people with all their learning, these people who will give to the Grecian world yet, great philosophers, in their wisdom they come. Verse seventeen.

And they begin to plead with Jesus to leave their region. It's incredible. Incredibly sad.

It's amazingly up-to-date. Jesus, who sees the wretched state of this man, who gives awe and illustration of what he can do, who places the value of a human soul over against however many pigs that there may be in that area, is criticized and asked to leave. All down the ages, the world has been refusing Jesus because it prefers pigs.

Jesus is not a comfortable man to be near. You'll never get him hitting your level of respectability. One of my great concerns is that our Lord was amongst us today.

We might feel uncomfortable in having him present in the tab. Did you hear that? Because sometimes we compress what we believe to be the activity of God and we have our own little smug understanding of what religious practices really are and Jesus blows those apart. He puts his wine in new wineskins.

It's pathetic, isn't it? The people began to plead with Jesus to leave their region. I haven't time to stay with that. Let's go on to the last few verses.

Pathetic temperament followed by, if you like, a prophetic testament. Verse 18. As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him.

Now, you've got to understand what discipleship really means. Turn back to chapter 3, will you? Verse 13. Jesus is calling the twelve, alright? Jesus went up on a mountainside and called to him those he wanted and they came to him.

In other words, the evangelist Mark is using, if you like, that little formula that indicates what discipleship really means. The man wants to be with Jesus. Jesus has wanted twelve men to be with him.

That's why he's appointed this group of Jews, so he can train them and tutor them and send them out to preach his gospel and to heal the sick and to free demon-possessed people. Well, this man, and you can understand his reaction, he's been so helped by the Lord Jesus, he's perhaps so embarrassed by the way his contemporaries are reacting to Jesus, so he says, let me go with you, let me be one of your disciples. Jesus says no.

And in a way that's utterly uncommon as far as Mark's gospel is concerned, he tells this man to stay where he is, to go to his family, to move amongst the Decapolis, and to tell them how much the Lord Jesus has done for him. You see here, and it's marvelous, those of you who've got a missionary heart, and thank God for the number of people who come to the tab who are involved in missions, here, if you like, is an intimation of the missionary mandate. You see, Jesus' gospel is going to show the Greek world that actually through their intellect they did not know God nor ever could know God.

How is God to be known? Well, Jesus gives an example by a demon-possessed man, a Grecian man. Jesus takes this man, the worst of the case, that he could possibly find, and he shows the Gentiles who are living in the surroundings of the land of Palestine what the gospel can do. The first evangelist to the Gentile world, and this shows the amazing nature of our God, was not a philosopher, was not one who'd been to Athens, was not one who'd stuffed himself with Plato and all the other philosophers.

Here was a man who was demon-possessed, with a legion of demons, and Jesus says, this will be my man for the Gentile world. Isn't that marvelous? He does that today. He takes the weak things of this world, the unwise things of this world, the off-scouring of this world, that which this world calls dumb, Jesus calls precious.

And he releases people. He sets them free. He fills them with his Spirit, and he gives them a God-given commission to go and tell others of the gospel.

I've run out of time. When I was in a temple in India, in Nepal one day, a place I should never have been, I had an encounter with evil spirits. I've mentioned this once before from this pulpit.

I mention it again because it ties in with what I've been saying. I shouldn't have been there. I went as a tourist to take photographs.

You never go into a temple as a tourist, as a Christian. You realize that temples are the headquarters of evil. That night, as I lay in a place called Pokhar in Nepal, it seemed as though all hell was let loose against me.

Powers of evil. Lights in my head, little dots of light coming bigger and bigger and bigger, spinning around like a Catherine Wheel, breaking into thousands of pieces with the hideous pictures of the Hindu gods and then starting all over and over again. I cried to the Lord for Him to forgive me for my stupidity of exposing myself to the forces of evil.

Now, I say that not to impress you or not even just to disgrace myself in your estimate, but to show you that I do believe that the powers of evil today are with us and are forceful. Thank God for the deliverance that there was in the Decapolis and perhaps in lesser ways in our congregation this morning as we've probably no one so acutely in difficulty as this man. We can know deliverance ourselves right now.

Let us stand.