EPISODE 64 ACTS CHAPTER 19 " Artemis of the Ephesians is not that great"

Welcome to Share the Word. In the great city of Ephesus, Paul and his team find themselves in a city obsessed with an idol all their own. And when growing Christianity and rabid idolatry collided, things exploded. What were the pagan religions in Roman Empire like? Well, we'll find that out in chapter 19. Acts chapter 19.

Artemis of the Ephesians is not that great. I've often watched a TV show called American Idol. Are you familiar? It's a talent show for singers. It's been on American TV now for like 20 years. The title comes from a reality that Americans idolize popular musicians who've become big stars.

And doing well on American Idol, especially winning that show, could give someone a big boost toward becoming a pop star. Or as the title suggests, maybe even an American idol. I'm old enough to remember when the Beatles first came to America. Girls worshipped them, and boys, like Tony, wanted to be them. I saw a funny clip on YouTube from a late night comedy show the other day. They had Paul McCartney of the Beatles fame in a New York City building where they taped their show.

He was stationed outside the elevator doors on a certain floor, and when the doors opened, ding, there stood Paul McCartney waiting to get on the elevator. Each time they did that, grown women, many of them my age and older, seeing him in person started squealing like 10-year-old little girls, like just like 60 years ago when they saw the Beatles first singing She Loves You, yeah, yeah, yeah. Performers I remember from the heyday of rock and roll, like the late '60s and into the 1970s, are sometimes still referred to as rock gods. And people of my generation talk about them with near reverence. It's a little different for this current generation, either. I read that Taylor Swift, for example, has over 300 million social media followers.

If the elevator doors opened and Taylor Swift was standing there, how many young people today would also scream in delight or go speechless and faint, just as if they were encountering a divine being? It's not very far away from worship, is it? And it's not just in the music sphere, of course. Others idolize Hollywood celebrities or sports stars or, as crazy as this sounds, even spiritual gurus. The Bible has a lot to say about idolatry, and none of it's good. In one of the Ten Commandments, Israel was warned not to make any idols or worship any idols.

And similarly, in the New Testament, the Apostle John finished his first epistle with this simple warning: My little children, guard yourself against idols. I realize when I use the word idolatry today, most minds immediately jump to somewhere in the distant past, when people we think of as ignorant and superstitious worshipped statues made of rocks or wood. But is there really a lot of difference when you get right down to it? I mean, isn't idolatry still idolatry? We're going to explore that today as we come to an interesting chapter, Acts 19, where Luke is describing events Paul and his team experienced in a city obsessed by idolatry. We learned in the previous chapter that when Paul was heading back to Jerusalem and Antioch from Greece after completing his second missionary journey, he stopped at this big city called Ephesus.

The city is gone now, but in the middle of the first century, it was on the coast of what is now western Turkey and was a major city in the Roman Empire. It was actually the capital of the heavily populated province of Asia. And definitely it was on Paul's list to plant a church there. While he was initially only there for a few weeks, Paul had made some good contacts after speaking at the synagogue of the Jews. He himself had some pressing reasons to get back to Israel, to his home church in Syria. But he had brought Aquila and Priscilla to Ephesus with him specifically to help establish a church there.

Then, after finishing his business in the east, he would head back to Ephesus and join them. Sounds easy when I say it, doesn't it? Actually, Luke remembers, he says here, they traveled the interior route, as it calls it here, which means overland. The trip from Jerusalem to Ephesus overland is 1,200 miles. So Paul, to return to Ephesus and continue the work there, traveled 1,200 miles on foot. That's remarkable, and that's why I'm remarking on it.

How driven was this guy to share the good news? How convinced was he that God had called him to plant churches in these Gentile cities and that everyone there needed to hear the gospel? So once back in Ephesus, Paul ended up spending almost three years in that place, which became a very important hub of early Christianity. Luke tells us in the early part of chapter 19 about a couple interesting experiences I'll comment on briefly because I want to focus on something else later in this chapter more. He mentions first that Paul met some disciples in Ephesus who had been followers of John the Baptist. These had to be Jewish people.

Like Apollos, who we learned about earlier, these men had heard about Jesus directly or indirectly from the prophet John the Baptist, but didn't know the whole story. They'd been baptized to show they wanted to turn their lives toward following God, as John the Baptist challenged people to do, but they didn't understand the significance of Jesus' work at the cross, for example, and how it can atone for our sins. Paul explained all this to them and that they must believe into Jesus as their Savior and leader, which they were ready to do. Then it says he baptized them as Christian believers. He shared more with them too, I'm sure, about the Holy Spirit's coming, about the formation of the Christian church and what all this stuff meant to them. This was all news.

When they accepted Paul's message and he laid his hands on them, Luke tells us this is the same thing Ananias had done the night Paul accepted Christ, and Luke says they received the Holy Spirit. There is tangible proof of that as they experienced something like the apostles had when the Holy Spirit first came on them in Jerusalem at the outset. Remember the day of Pentecost. I'm guessing Luke tells us about this because he is describing another category of people, we could say, who are being joined to the growing Christian movement. Remember when the Holy Spirit first came on the apostles in Acts chapter 2, that's when the church was born. Then Philip shared the word in Samaria, Luke tells us in chapter 8.

They too, at least many of them, believed the gospel, and again there was tangible proof that the Samaritans were accepted by God and joined into the Christian church. When Peter shared the good news with the Roman Gentiles at Cornelius's house in chapter 10, similar phenomena occurred as proof that Gentiles could also be accepted into God's family. And now, when these followers of John the Baptist that Paul met at Ephesus, we could call them Jewish Old Testament believers, again there was some kind of visible proof that God would welcome them as part of his family, the church. That brings up the question in my mind, is it normal for visible supernatural phenomena to occur every time someone accepts the gospel message? Well, it's not. In fact, I've never even seen that, and I've seen a lot of people accept Christ as their Savior over the years.

So why in these cases? Remember, Acts is the unfolding history of the earliest Christianity. Maybe God was visibly demonstrating, both to those who shared the word and those who received it, that the gospel was in fact for everyone, no matter who they were, no matter what category of people they fell under, that He was building His church from people from all backgrounds and all places. That's probably why He used visible signs at the outset like this during this foundational era. Christianity is really for the whole world. God wanted to show that, and God will welcome anybody into His family who puts their faith in Christ.

Now, Luke says at verse 11 and following, God was performing extraordinary miracles in Ephesus at the hands of Paul. Healings and exorcisms were happening in that city. This kind of supernatural authority clearly marked, Luke is showing us, Paul as an apostle of Jesus Christ. Such supernatural demonstrations showed a measure of Christ's authority was on him. If you notice throughout Acts, Paul has told us about some of the remarkable experiences surrounding first Peter and now Paul, and there are definite similarities. He's showing us their specific apostolic authority and God's special superintendence over their lives.

They both did unheard-of miracles. They both healed lame people. They both confronted and overcame sorcerers. They both were miraculously released from imprisonments. They both had demons who came against them that they were able to exorcise from afflicted people. They both even had at least one experience of raising a dead person.

Again, these things are not normal. Then or certainly now. And that's what made them clear signs of God's power resting on these chosen men, who we call apostles. Connected to this, I like the sort of funny incident Luke brings up next, starting at verse 13, when some religious impostors in the city of Ephesus tried to exorcise demons in the name of Jesus, as they had seen Paul do. They imagined that by saying the magic words, In the name of Jesus, they could command demon entities. Luke says an evil spirit on one such occasion replied to those guys, We know who Jesus is and we know who Paul is, but who in the world are you?

And then the man possessed by the demon, in a fit of superhuman strength, assaulted and beat the crap out of them. Demonic power is real, and those guys found out the hard way they were no match for it. They'd not been given the authority by God to take them on. But Paul had, and the supernatural displays of authority accompanying his ministry in Ephesus, even over evil spirits, made a huge impression on those who witnessed it or heard about it, probably because that city at the time was a center for occult practices. Now Luke says a lot of people who had been into the occult in Ephesus, once they became believers in Christ, burned their books of magic incantations in a public display in the city, renouncing the powers of darkness.

If you've had any contact with the occult, by the way, or have occult literature or paraphernalia, I strongly suggest you follow the example here, and that is destroy it. As Paul writes elsewhere in the New Testament, there cannot be any fellowship between light and darkness, between Christ and Belial, meaning the devil. Roman historians of that time wrote about the foothold the occult had in Ephesus. In fact, examples of the books containing incantations that Luke mentions here are in several museums in Europe today. These scrolls are still known, in fact, as Ephesian scripts because Ephesus was such a center of the magical arts.

As a result of these things, Luke tells us, meaning as a result of hearing about Paul's God overpowering the demon entities behind their occult practices, a solemn fear descended on the city, and the name of the Lord Jesus was greatly honored, and the message of the Lord spread widely and was having a powerful effect. So Christianity was making a deep impact in this large but spiritually dark city of Ephesus. The magic arts books burned, Luke says, in our terms, cost more than a million dollars. Beyond that, the business of making little silver idols to sell to all those who came to Ephesus to visit their impressive temple of Artemis was taking a serious hit. That temple, by the way, was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world you may have read about.

It was much larger than even the Parthenon in Athens, and lots of the people in Ephesus, in one way or another, made a living off the worship of the goddess Artemis, the goddess of fertility. In this temple was what they claimed was an image of that goddess that had fallen out of the sky. Scholars believe it likely was a meteorite, but one that apparently, from the right angle at least, if you had a good imagination, sort of resembled the figure of a woman. Paul's insistence that there was only one God and that idolatry was nonsense was winning hearts and minds in that city, but at the same time, very negatively impacting the silversmiths and other artisans that made and sold little idols and souvenirs of this goddess. People coming to faith in Christ, turning away from idols, was tanking their business. That stirred up opposition, as you can imagine, and that eventually led to a riot.

Listen how Luke describes it here. Demetrius, a silversmith in Ephesus, called together those in his business, along with others employed in similar trades, and addressed them like this: Gentlemen, you know that our wealth comes from this business. As you have seen and heard, this man Paul is persuading many people that handmade gods aren't really gods at all, and he's done this not only here in Ephesus, but throughout our entire province. I'm not just talking about the loss of public respect for our business. I'm concerned that the temple of the goddess Artemis will be losing its influence, and that Artemis herself, this magnificent goddess worshipped throughout our province of Asia and all around the world, will be robbed of her prestige. At this, it says, their anger boiled, and they began shouting, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!

Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! Soon the whole city was filled with confusion, Luke says, and everyone rushed together to the amphitheater, dragging along Gaius and Aristarchus, who were two of Paul's traveling companions, two people on his team. Paul wanted to go into that amphitheater where the mob was gathering, but believers told him, some of the officials, in fact, in the province told him, Paul, don't go there. You'll be risking your life if you enter the amphitheater. Wow, things kind of got out of hand. By the way, this amphitheater, we know from its ruins, was a stadium that seated more than 25,000 people.

And picture this. Luke says, for two hours that night, two hours straight, this throng of people stirred up by the angry silversmith Demetrius pulled together, were continually shouting, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! So, this was a very volatile situation. Paul was wise to listen to the advice of the local officials, who had already become believers and told him to stay away. The city clerk, who we would call the mayor of Ephesus, was finally able to get control of the situation in the amphitheater by convincing Demetrius and his fellow artisans and the crowd they incited that their complaints could be handled by the courts, and if Paul and the Christians had broken any laws, that they would be punished.

But if this mob took matters into their own hands, they warned, they would only end up bringing down the wrath of Roman authorities on them, something nobody in their right mind wanted. Ephesus was at that time a free city in the empire, meaning Rome gave them a lot of local autonomy. But law and order, that in Rome always had to be maintained. The town officials knew that, and they emphasized that. If you don't get a handle on the situation here and disperse this crowd, Demetrius, all the things that we enjoy could change rather quickly. The citizens finally understood his warning, and cooler heads prevailed, and the crowd finally dispersed.

I was thinking, for most of us, we probably never heard of Artemis of the Ephesians before reading Acts chapter 19. In reality, Artemis, as it turns out, was not so great. Her little silver idols were really just souvenirs. Her temple is now in complete ruins. Few people even remember the cult of Artemis. But the message of the one true God and His Son Jesus Christ that invaded Ephesus in the middle of the first century, that is still very much alive and growing 20 centuries later.

There were a lot of idols before Artemis, and there have been a lot since, even to our day, as I explained at the outset. They all come and go. Their influence peaks and wanes. In fact, to me anyway, almost nothing is sadder than an 80-year-old doddering once-upon-a-time rock idol trying to prove he still has it up on the stage. Neither meteorites and ancient pantheons of made-up gods, nor modern celebrities whose adoring fans fill stadiums today, are worthy of anyone's worship. They're pitifully poor substitutes for the one true God who made us and loves us enough to come into our world and die for us.

He alone is worthy of our worship and devotion. We should be saying, Great is the Lord, Jesus Christ. I hope this stays with you as we leave Acts chapter 19, because when you get right down to it, idolatry can be anything or anyone that takes the rightful place of God in our hearts and minds. It doesn't have to be an imaginary god or goddess made out of wood or stone, or even a superstar celebrity that we are consumed with. It can also be things which, when kept in a healthy perspective in our lives, are positive. If we want to check ourselves for the inroads of idolatry, we should probably honestly ask questions like this: Whose approval do I need the most?

What am I willing to really sacrifice for? What or who do I trust in more than God? What do I love and value more than God? What am I pursuing that I believe will bring security and meaning into my life other than God? The things that we answer to those questions may well reveal our personal idols. At the end of the day, it's only our relationship with Christ that will matter once this life is past, so it only makes sense during our brief time here that we put our relationship with Him above any other, that we keep our devotion to Him above any other, our pursuit of Him, our loyalty to Him above any other.

Because anyone or anything that is shaping how we think or what we love more than God and His Word. That person or thing has taken God's rightful place. That has become our idol. As Jesus put it, Worship the Lord your God and serve Him alone. Around the year 55 A.D., a team of Christians led by the Apostle Paul brought the gospel and its power to radically change things to the great but spiritually dark city of Ephesus. Light and darkness collided there.

The grip of the occult and idolatry was broken, and Artemis, the false goddess of the Ephesians, proved to be, in reality, not so great after all. Many of us today find ourselves in places where spiritual darkness is growing, where idolatry in one form or another seems to be dominating. Paul later wrote back to the Christians in Ephesians a few years after all this played out this important reminder. It's for them, and it's for us. Once you were full of darkness, but now you have light from the Lord, so live as people of the light. Thanks again, Paul.

What a great insight to this chapter. And it's so important to truly ask ourselves, who do we really worship? Is it the money, the big house, the fame, or is it our Lord who gave us all we have and all we are? Thanks again for listening, and we pray that you'll help us share the good news of the gospel. Don't forget to visit thesharetheword.org. It's all free to download, listen, and to share.

As always, from all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.