NOTES for Luk 4:37-44
When demons find themselves face to face with Jesus, they usually understand better than people who they are dealing with. Is that good for us? It is hard to answer unambiguously. Of course, it is better to be a human being, even a fallen one, than a fallen spirit. Yet a human being does not possess the clarity of spiritual vision that belongs to spirits, who retain that clarity even after their fall.
Perhaps this is connected with the differences between fallen angels, who remain purely spiritual beings even after the fall, and human beings, who from the beginning were conceived and created as twofold beings, both spiritual and natural. And in a human being, it appears that the natural component takes the main blow.
Of course, the fall itself is a spiritual phenomenon. It is connected with a person's spiritual choice, with the decisions a person makes at a certain moment in his history. But judging by everything we know today about fallen man, the consequences of that wrong decision distorted his nature far more deeply - meaning, of course, not only and not so much his physiology as, above all, his psyche - than his spiritual life.
Today this may strike us as unfortunate and irritating. Yet our own nature, by taking the main blow upon itself, may have significantly weakened the influence of spiritual evil on our spiritual life. In a certain sense, one could say that our own nature, physical to a lesser degree and psychological to a greater one, became for us a kind of safety cushion, softening the blow of the forces of evil against that spiritual core of our personhood without which we simply would not exist as human beings.
The price of this softening was, among other things, the lack of clarity and distinctness in spiritual sight that marks fallen man. This defect is overcome only on the spiritual path, on the path of deepening one's relationship with God. That is why many do not recognize the Messiah in Jesus. But the fallen spirits, who have not lost the clarity of spiritual sight, see Him with complete clarity and understand perfectly who stands before them. Only this understanding does not bring them any closer to God. The issue is not knowledge in itself, but how that knowledge affects one's relationship with God, and whether it helps on the way into the Kingdom.