Choose to Hear His Voice

2 September 2025  Luke 4:31-37

“What have You to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who You are – the Holy One of God!”  Luke 4:34

Jesus didn’t have much to say to demons.

When Satan himself showed up to tempt Him for forty days in the wilderness, Jesus had a rather longer conversation with him. But even then, He mostly just quoted scripture: “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him alone shall you serve’” (Luke 4:8). That seemed to be about all Satan could take, and he departed from Jesus, at least for a while (4:13).

But Jesus said hardly anything to demons. When he encountered a demon-possessed man in the Capernaum synagogue, He spoke only two words, which amounted to, “Shut up and get out!” And they left – a little truculently, but they left (cf. 4:35).

The demons were terrified of Jesus. They believed He had power to destroy them, and they had enough regard even for their hellish existence that they didn’t want to die. The demons had a kind of faith that even some disciples don’t have – they believed Jesus was God, they believed that Jesus was far more powerful than they were, and they obeyed Jesus when He spoke. That is one of the reasons that merely believing that God exists and speaks with authority is not enough for salvation: “Even the demons believe that, and tremble” (James 2:19).

That’s not enough to get a meeting with Jesus. That’s not enough if you really want to hear His voice. He doesn’t have much to say if you don’t know anything more than the demons do.

The demons are certainly right about one thing – Jesus certainly does have power to destroy them. “In Him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:19), and that included the power to speak creation into being. And what could be made by a word could be unmade by a word – of course Jesus had the power to destroy demons. So why didn’t He? It is because Jesus has so much respect for us, and for all creatures. He wants us to see exactly what we choose, and if we choose hell, He wants us to be able to see it, to experience it in its fullness. The continued existence of Hell, in a way, is a sign of God’s respect for his intelligent creations. He permits us to be able to receive whatever it is we choose, even if it is not Him.

In the end, God says to all of us, “Thy will be done.” For demons, and the ones who follow them, it may be the only words of God they ever hear, because Jesus doesn’t have much to say to demons.

There are those who say that they will never believe unless they “hear a voice.” Jesus started a conversation with Satan by quoting scripture in the face of temptation (cf. Luke 4:1-13). Satan walked away from that – he couldn’t stand it. If we want to hear the voice of Jesus, really hear Him, then maybe we have to stick around the Bible-talk longer than Satan did, to learn its accents and figures of speech, to anticipate where it is going and why. Augustine was around Bible-talk for years, from his mother Monica, from other Christians, from Bishop Ambrose. It seeped into him only very slowly, but enough so that when he finally heard the words, “Take and read,” he recognized the Voice that he had always been yearning for, the Voice that was finally the answer to his yearning: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee” (Confessions 1.1.1.).

Some will never believe unless they hear a voice. The Voice speaks in the accent and vocabulary of the Bible. If you want a talk with Jesus, start there.