Sin

A demon-possessed man who could not see or speak is brought to Jesus. Jesus heals him. He can see. He can speak.

There is something here to rejoice over. Whatever people think of Jesus, a fellow human being has been relieved of his affliction.

But the Pharisees find something else to say. Jesus, they claim, drives out demons by Beelzebub, the ruler of demons.

Jesus answers their accusation. Then he makes the statement that has troubled readers ever since: a word spoken against the Son of Man can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Holy Spirit cannot.

The Gospels repeatedly show Jesus meeting people whose moral records were clearly damaged. Yet he rarely begins by examining those records. He does not normally ask how many commandments they broke, how long they lived wrongly, or how many individual sins must first be accounted for. Again and again, his attention moves to something more immediate: repentance, humility, mercy, forgiveness, and the abandonment of self-righteousness.

Every practical approach must begin with a foundation. If the foundation is wrong, everything built upon it will eventually collapse. My entire understanding of demons rests upon one principle that may initially sound strange, perhaps even offensive:

The problem of demonic affliction belongs foremost to the exorcist.

When modern readers hear the word adultery, they tend to imagine a moral category defined primarily by betrayal, romantic infidelity, or personal emotional disloyalty. But in the ancient Mediterranean world—and especially in Jewish law during the Second Temple period—the concept carried a much deeper anthropological, metaphysical, and even cosmic significance. The term μοιχός (moichos, adulterer) was not originally a vague ethical label.

In the previous two essays, I argued that the Parable of the Rich Fool is often misunderstood.

First, the story is not merely about wealth. It begins with an inheritance dispute and exposes the folly of accumulating possessions without properly considering mortality and succession. The rich man solves the problem of storage while ignoring the problem of inheritance.

Second, the famous words:

“You fool!”

The mainstream understanding of Hell is usually presented in a very rigid form: God judges people, condemns them, and sends them into everlasting punishment against their will. Hell, in this picture, functions as a kind of divine prison where the condemned are forcefully confined forever. The imagery resembles earthly courts of law. A judge pronounces sentence, officers seize the criminal, and the criminal is dragged away to punishment.

At first glance, the Qur’an and the Gospels appear to stand in stark contradiction on the question of whether human beings may be called “children of God.” The Qur’an explicitly challenges and rejects such a claim, while the Gospels seem to affirm it in various forms. From a surface reading, one might conclude that the theological worlds they present are irreconcilable, and thus unlikely to originate from a unified divine source.