We’re going to be looking together tonight at Acts chapter 19. It can be found on page 928 in the Bibles in the pew in front of you.
A podcast host said recently that he had an atheist friend tell him once that when he interacts with people online, if he sees that the other person has the bio tagline of “sinner saved by grace,” then he knows or he expects that the interaction is going to get ugly, that he’s in for a fight. Why is that? I was talking to a campus pastor not long ago. He was telling me about a group of students on campus who say that he does not preach the Gospel, and yet at the same time they are always getting into theological arguments with one another. How do those two things go together? They shouldn’t. And for those who have been saved by God’s grace, who have received God’s abundant grace, we should be the first to extend it, and to extend it, and to extend it. And sure, the Gospel may offend; it often does. But a grace-bought Christian should not be offensive, and it’s a mark or a blot on the name of Him who called us by His grace when we are.
Now in Acts, everywhere the name of Jesus went there was trouble. You remember Peter and the apostles? They found themselves before the council in Jerusalem multiple times. They were the targets of rage and the threat of death. But they had committed no crime. And you remember what Gamaliel said. He said, “Let them go. And if this thing is of man, it will come to nothing, but if it is of God there is nothing that you can do about it.” And then we read about in Corinth where Paul was called before the tribunal and the people had made a united attack against him. But it was Gallio, the secular proconsul, who would not hear anything of it because Paul was innocent of any wrongdoing. There was no reason to hear the people’s complaints against him. You see, everywhere that the Gospel went there was trouble, but it was not because Peter and Paul and the rest were troublemakers. And in some ways, that’s what the rest of the book of Acts is all about as we trace Paul going eventually back to Jerusalem where he is going to be arrested. And he is going to Rome, and he will go to Rome in custody for sure, but he’s always able to defend and to be vindicated for his innocence at every step of the way.
Well tonight, trouble comes for Paul in Ephesus. We’ve been in Ephesus for the past few weeks in the book of Acts. Trouble comes to Ephesus. There’s a mob and a riot and a big commotion there, but Paul and the others, Paul and the Way, they were civil and upright and innocent at every step of the way. And there are three parts to this passage that we see tonight. Number one, there’s the controversy. Number two, the commotion. And then number three, the acquittal. Controversy, commotion and acquittal. Before we read, let’s pray and ask God’s blessing on the study of His Word.
Father, we thank You for Your Word and we praise You that every word of it is breathed out by You for our instruction, our rebuke, correcting and training in righteousness. And we pray that You would give us ears to hear what You have to say to us tonight, that we would be alert to Your message, that You would help us as we examine our own hearts and see where You call us to repentance and where You call us to walk in the way of Christ in faithfulness and obedience. We need Your Spirit and we need to see Jesus. Help us in all those things tonight. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Acts chapter 19. Starting at verse 21:
“Now after these events Paul resolved in the Spirit to pass through Macedonia and Achaia and go to Jerusalem, saying, ‘After I have been there, I must also see Rome.’ And having sent into Macedonia two of his helpers, Timothy and Erastus, he himself stayed in Asia for a while.
About that time there arose no little disturbance concerning the Way. For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen. These he gathered together, with the workmen in similar trades, and said, ‘Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all Asia and the world worship.’
When they heard this they were enraged and were crying out, ‘Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!’ So the city was filled with the confusion, and they rushed together into the theater, dragging with them Gaius and Aristarchus, Macedonians who were Paul’s companions in travel. But when Paul wished to go in among the crowd, the disciples would not let him. And even some of the Asiarchs, who were friends of his, sent to him and were urging him not to venture into the theater. Now some cried out one thing, some another, for the assembly was in confusion, and most of them did not know why they had come together. Some of the crowd prompted Alexander, whom the Jews had put forward. And Alexander, motioning with his hand, wanted to make a defense to the crowd. But when they recognized that he was a Jew, for about two hours they all cried out with one voice, ‘Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!’
And when the town clerk had quieted the crowd, he said, ‘Men of Ephesus, who is there who does not know that the city of the Ephesians is temple keeper of the great Artemis, and of the sacred stone that fell from the sky? Seeing then that these things cannot be denied, you ought to be quiet and do nothing rash. For you have brought these men here who are neither sacrilegious nor blasphemers of our goddess. If therefore Demetrius and the craftsmen with him have a complaint against anyone, the courts are open, and there are proconsuls. Let them bring charges against one another. But if you seek anything further, it shall be settled in the regular assembly. For we really are in danger of being charged with rioting today, since there is no cause that we can give to justify this commotion.’ And when he had said these things, he dismissed the assembly.
After the uproar ceased, Paul sent for the disciples, and after encouraging them, he said farewell and departed for Macedonia.”
The grass withers, the flowers fall, but the Word of our God endures forever.
First, the controversy. It’s this – naming and rooting out idols always hurts. Paul, you remember, is in Ephesus and Asia Minor, he has a burden to go onto Greece and then to Jerusalem, and ultimately he wants to go into see Rome, but while he is still in Ephesus, verse 23 says that, “About that time there arose no little disturbance concerning the Way.” Now the Way of course is the way of Jesus. It’s the name for that early community of the followers of Christ. And this new movement, the Way, and its message proved to be a threat to some of the people in Ephesus. Demetrius was one of them, and Demetrius is the one who got all of this trouble started. He was a silversmith. He made silver shrines to the goddess, the Greek goddess, Artemis, and he brought a lot of business to the craftsmen who were in Ephesus. People from Ephesus, people from all over the world, they would come to visit the temple of Artemis in Ephesus and they would buy their own shrines to the goddess, Artemis, while they were there.
And here is Paul and Paul threatened to mess all of that up. And here’s how Demetrius put it. Verse 25, “Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people.” How did he do it? How did Paul turn away a great many people? Verse 26 says it – by “saying that gods made with hands are not gods.” And what Paul preached and what many people believed was not good for the way of life for many in the city of Ephesus. Like Demetrius said, their business would take a hit, the temple and its worship would suffer, even the reputation of the city itself would be in danger in light of Paul’s message to the people in Ephesus and around Asia. That’s because when Paul and the others preached Jesus and the kingdom of God, part of their message was to turn away from idols. Back in Acts 15 it was the Jerusalem council, and you remember when they came together they wanted to lay no other burden on the Gentiles than to stay away from things polluted by idols, and from blood and strangling and sexual immorality. And when Paul was writing to the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 1:9, he wrote about how they had turned to God from idols to serve the living and the true God. Following Jesus means turning away from idols.
But that means a lot more than what it might sound like on the surface because idols have a way of knitting themselves, stitching themselves into all sorts of areas in our lives. Just look at the way it was in Ephesus. Artemis was their religion. And Demetrius talked about it. Verse 27, “She whom all Asia and the world worship.” There was ritual. There was tradition. There were stories that went along with the worship of Artemis. This had something to do with the transcendent and the spiritual that we all seek after. It was about worship, but it was also just business and there was this whole economy that had apparently built up around Artemis and the temple. And the popularity and the reputation of Artemis affected the bottomline for certain silversmiths and for workmen in similar trades. It was about money and worship and civic pride. We can say patriotism, perhaps. Because the Ephesians were proud of Artemis – “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” What they were saying is, “Make Artemis great again!” And by saying that, by saying that Artemis is great, they’re saying that Ephesus is great and they’re wanting to see that Ephesus remains great. That’s part of their cry. That’s part of the reason for their uproar. Like the town clerk said in verse 35, “Who is there who does not know that the city of the Ephesians is temple keeper of the great Artemis?” They liked it that way. They wanted to keep it that way.
So there’s worship, there’s money, there’s civic pride. I think we could also say that race is involved in their uproar. Of course race is involved in some way because we see that Artemis here was a Greek goddess, a goddess of the Gentiles and not of the Jews. And what happens when a Jewish man tries to stand up and speak in the midst of all this uproar? Well, when he stood up to speak and they recognized that he was a Jew, they just got more agitated and they got louder and louder. They would not hear what this Jewish man, Alexander, had to say.
And you see, that’s what idols do. They start to claim more and more of our affections. They start to claim more and more of our hearts. They start to take over more and more of our lives and that’s why they’re so hard to rip out. I’ve mentioned Rich Cohen, the writer, before and his son’s youth hockey team. And he wrote a book about it. He wrote a book about one season in the eleven and twelve year old hockey league in his community. And he wrote this. He said, “In the spring of 2019, I asked my big sister why I cared so much, why I was losing my mind. She said, ‘This is what it’s like to send your kids into the world. Your child is not just like you or raised by you; he is you. And when something wrong or unfair happens to him, it brings up things that are so deep and primal it feels like you will die from it.’”
And that’s true, but that’s also what happens with idols. And whether that’s the idol of youth hockey or the idol of children themselves, it hurts to rip them out because idols can stir up deep emotions. Whether it’s idols like work, school, sports, fraternity, even family can have a way of becoming an idol to us. And over time, idols have a way of taking over our identity – spiritually, emotionally, relationally, financially. One way I think that we can identify idols is to ask ourselves, “What is it that you love so much that you love it to death?” In other words, “What is it that you grip so tightly that your grip starts to ruin your ability to enjoy the thing that you are holding onto; it’s crushing when it does not match your expectations?”
A simple example, but we’ll all watch a certain game this fall, won’t we? It’s a game. It’s leisure. It’s entertainment. It’s a way to relax. And yet it doesn’t take very long before watching that game can ruin our day, our weekend, maybe even our whole fall because we’ve gripped it so hard that we’ve ruined the ability to enjoy it. Why is that? Because it’s an idol. Idols do that – we grip them so hard we start to kill it. Or maybe you can even say it a different way, thinking about it in a different way – “What is it that we have such a tight grip on that when we actually look at it and examine it, we realize that it has a grip on us and it’s killing us?” Artemis had a grip on the Ephesians, and when she was threatened, it caused no little disturbance. That’s the controversy.
Now what about the commotion? We see the commotion starting in verse 28. Maybe you’ve heard it before that the medium is the message. The medium is the message. In other words, the way you choose to communicate something says as much or more than the message itself. So for instance, if you say, “I’m sorry” in person says more, doesn’t it, than saying “Sorry” on a text message. There’s something about being in person, that medium of communicating in person that has a note of interest and concern and compassion that you can’t get with a simple text message. Well the way or the medium in which Demetrius and the craftsmen express themselves said a lot about who they were and their message. Because by the time that Demetrius had finished his speech, this trade guild had gone from a simple labor union into an all out mob. Verse 28 says, “When they heard this, they were enraged.” Enraged. And they didn’t have very much to say. It says that they just keep crying out, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” but their message was clear, wasn’t it, because this was a mob. And what’s the message of a mob? The message of a mob is confusion, it’s disorder, anger, fear, foolishness, hostility, violence.
And that’s exactly what we find on display in Acts chapter 19. Verse 29 says, “The city was filled with confusion and they rushed into the theater, dragging with them Gaius and Aristarchus.” Those were Paul’s travel companions. Verse 32 says, “Some cried out one thing, some another, for the assembly was in confusion and most of them did not know why they had come together.” They couldn’t come to agreement. They would not listen to reason. And for two hours they just kept crying out the same thing, over and over again. It took the town clerk to come in there and quiet them down and he called them out for what they really were. And he said it in verse 40, he says, “We really are in danger of being charged with rioting today.”
You see, they looked ridiculous. They were ridiculous. And that’s part of the takeaway of this passage. It’s not a very flattering picture, is it, of the worshipers of Artemis. Their actions together with their speech communicated a message of confusion and outrage. They were the instigators. They were the troublemakers. They were the ones who were the threat to the stability of Ephesus. It says a lot, doesn’t it, about the message of a mob mentality. That’s why it makes me sad when I read things like how many people think of the term “evangelical Christian” as being associated or being a term for a certain type of divisive political label. That’s why it makes me sad when evangelicals are the most likely to believe, according to certain surveys, believe conspiracy theories, and how some churches are growing simply by appealing to culture warriors and not with the Gospel. And sure, those things are probably overstated in some ways and I don’t think that represents our congregation here, but we’re not immune to it. Are we? And what does it say about the message when the carries of the message are associated with confusion, disorder and conflict?
Now I don’t know who it was that said it first, but sometimes you hear that the “what” and the “how” of Gospel ministry. The saying is, “What you win them with is what you win them to.” What you win them with is what you win them to. And it means something like this – if you attract someone with entertainment and gimmicks, then you’d better continue to produce entertainment and gimmicks to keep them. But the flipside is true as well, isn’t it? And if what you have is a message of peace and love, then that should express itself peacefully and lovingly. If what you have is a message about the power of God for salvation, that should express itself not by relying on the power of man but by relying on the power of God. And see, this commotion in Ephesus, it was not caused by Paul and the Way. No, the Ephesians; it was the Ephesians who were guilty of stirring up trouble. This is the way of the world. This is the way of the world and the flesh and the devil. It is not the way of Jesus. It is not the way of the kingdom of God. Don’t get pulled into the mob because the mob is guilty of confusion and disorder. The verdict that we find on the Way, even by this city official, is that they are above reproach.
And so that’s the acquittal that we find in these verses, and this scene, the closing verses of chapter 19, this scene with the town clerk, it’s an example, it’s a great illustration of what we find in other places in the New Testament – places like Titus 2. Titus 2 says, “Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent, so that an opponent may be put to shame having nothing evil to say about us.” Think about Daniel in the Old Testament when they were trying to catch him in some sort of wrongdoing. You know what they caught him in? The only thing that they could catch Daniel doing wrong was praying. And that’s a shame even to the officials that were there. Peter talks about it as well. First Peter 2 says, “Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable so that when they speak against you as evildoers they may see your good deeds and glorify God in the day of visitation.”
Demetrius, he stirred up the people against Paul, but when the town clerk was able to quiet the crowd, to quiet them down, he absolved Paul of any wrongdoing. Verse 37, “You have brought these men here who are neither sacrilegious nor blasphemers of our goddess.” Verse 40, “There is no cause that we can give to justify this commotion.” Now understand, Paul did not water down his message. He spoke boldly. He called the people to repentance. He said that gods made with hands are not gods. There is an offense to the Gospel – it confronts idols, it challenges tradition, it reorients relationships, it impacts the marketplace and lifestyle and Paul’s message did all of those things, but here’s the thing – it did that for Paul as well. And think about what Paul had said about his own reputation. Think about what Paul had said about his own boasts – a circumcised Jew, a pharisee, a Hebrew of Hebrews, full of zeal and blameless. And what did he call it all? “Rubbish.” He called it all rubbish in order that he might “gain Christ and be found in Him.” Paul started with himself.
When we were in Peru this summer on our short-term trip, a bunch of us got sick with a stomach illness. I’ll spare you the details! Someone – I was telling the story one time, they wanted me to include the detail that mostly it was men and boys; the women were tougher than us! But the stomach bug swept through about half of our team. It didn’t last long for most people, but it was not a pretty scene. And incidentally, you notice that they didn’t ask me to give the Peru report last week! But as this spread through the team, at one point I went up to one of the rooms and I cleaned it out and I filled up a garbage bag full of stuff that just had to go. And I went down to the receptionist, to the front desk, and tried to work through the language barrier to tell them, “This is garbage” – ———— – “This needs to go!” And he looked at me and we’re working through that language barrier and he just said, “Rubbish?” “Yes, si! Definitely rubbish!” And you see, Paul said that about all the things that he could be most proud of – his background, his training, his accomplishments, his resume – rubbish. It was all rubbish compared to a life in Christ.
Now, now apply that to Artemis and the Ephesians. And what Paul’s basically saying there is that one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and the pride of the Ephesians is rubbish. That may cause offense, don’t you think? But here’s the thing – Paul was not offensive. Now some will say, “What about Jesus and turning over the tables and clearing out the temple?” Well, that was a prophetic sign, and if some of you think that you are called to that office you probably have bigger problems than what we’re talking about tonight. And also it’s because Jesus began in the household of God, but to the outsiders, Paul was not offensive. He didn’t stir up a mob, he didn’t yell and scream, he didn’t deal in soundbites and catchphrases and clickbait. No, what he did was he told people about Jesus. He reasoned and he persuaded and he preached the cross. And that’s the key to the whole thing, isn’t it? He preached the cross and he began with himself.
John McVey sent me a link this last week of a clip of an old Alistair Begg sermon. And in the sermon, Alistair was talking about preaching the cross to ourselves. He said, he pointed to that old question, “If you died tonight, why should you be let into heaven?” He said, “If the answer is anything in the first person, if it’s ‘I did this. I did that. I, I, I,’ then it can only lead to arrogance or despair. It has to be, it has to be in the third person. ‘He did it. Jesus accomplished it in my place.’” And Begg talked about the thief on the cross and he was imagining this scene about the thief on the cross appearing at the gates of heaven. “Why should I let you into heaven? How did you get here?” “I didn’t do anything.” “Well what do you know about the doctrine of justification by faith alone?” “Never heard of it.” “What’s your view of the doctrine of Scripture?” “No clue.” “Well how did you get here?” “The man on the middle cross told me I could come.” And that’s it. That’s it. That’s the message of the Gospel. That’s the message of grace. And anything of our own doing apart from the cross can only lead to arrogance or despair. The cross humbles us, doesn’t it? The cross humbles us.
And we have to start with preaching the cross to ourselves so that we take the message of the cross not with arrogance, condemnation, anger, divisiveness. No, we take the message of the cross in weakness, in patience, love and charity. Because without the cross, we would be in the same place as those idolaters in Ephesus. And by the way, we still have plenty of idols in our own lives and in our own hearts that still need to be rooted out, don’t we? Paul started with himself. He preached and was shaped by the cross. And when the cross offended, and it will, he could still be charged the whole time with no wrongdoing at all. We read it in verse 40, “There is no cause that we can give to justify this commotion.” And from there, “when he had said these things, he dismissed the assembly. And after the uproar ceased, Paul sent for the disciples, and after encouraging them, he said farewell and departed for Macedonia.”
Let’s pray.
Father, we give You thanks for the testimony and the example of the apostle Paul and of the beautiful display of Your grace in his life. We give You thanks that You have called us out of darkness, You have called us out of idolatry to turn from idols, to turn to You and to worship and serve the living and the true God. And so we pray as we come to this passage tonight, as we leave from here, that You would help us to examine our own hearts and examine our lives and to look for those places, those things that we are so holding onto that it leads to nothing but death. Help us to flee from them, to turn from them, and to find life and joy in Christ and the way of Jesus. Turn us from our idols. Turn us to the world with a message of freedom and to do so with love and joy. We pray all of this in Jesus’ name, amen.