Holy One of God

Saying, "Let us alone! What have we to do with You, Jesus of Nazareth? Did You come to destroy us? I know who You are --- the Holy One of God!"

Mark 1:24

It might seem obvious, but I’ve learned a lot from my twenty year study of the titles of Christ. What started as a challenge to find a name of the Lord for every day of the year ended with a deeper love for and fellowship with my Savior. I also discovered things that I never heard preached on before and I never knew were there. One example of this is insight I’ve gotten from the “demonic titles.”

Sometimes when Christ healed the sick, He also cast out demons and a few of these carried on a conversation with Him. They addressed Jesus of Nazareth by name without any formal introduction, because they knew who He was. He cast them out of heaven even before the foundation of the world.

The thing that surprised me about the demonic titles is that they all speak truthfully of who He is. These evil spirits address Him as Christ, the Son of God, and even the Son of the Most High God (Luke 4:41, Mark 5:7), but they never own Him as Lord or Savior. The title Holy One of God is never spoken except by fallen angels as if it were a phrase they heard in heaven before Satan rebelled against the Lord of Hosts.

I find it interesting that demons never insulted the Son of God nor made disparaging comments about Him as did His human adversaries. Christ’s dissenters, on the other hand, called Him Beelzebub (Matthew 10:25), a Samaritan (John 8:48), and a glutton (Matthew 11:19), not knowing the condemnation they were laying up for themselves. “But these speak evil of whatever they do not know; and whatever they know naturally, like brute beasts, in these things they corrupt themselves” (Jude 10).

The demons not only knew who Christ was, they knew that their punishment was ready to be handed down and they begged Him not to cast them into hell before their time. Although condemned and without hope, they appealed to Him on the basis of who He is: the Holy One of God.