Sermons from Lone
Rock Bible Church The Field of Battle (Part 2) Writing from the battlefield of Ephesus, the apostle Paul described
his circumstances well when he told the Corinthian believers: “A wide door is opening
for ministry, and there are many adversaries” (1 Corinthians 16:9). The same could be
said regarding the gospel ministry here and now. What are those adversaries? Last week we felt it not a bad idea to go the city of Ephesus from whence the epistle is based (Acts 19). I’m not going to read Acts 19, but that’s where we’ll take most of our thoughts today. This is the backdrop against which the apostle said what he said in Ephesians 6. I don’t think things have changed all that much. As was said a week ago, what Paul dealt with was a pre-Christian culture which allowed for the onset of all manner of interesting spiritual events. What we live in today is accurately understood in many regards as a post-Christian culture, a similar spiritual vacuum, and problems abound today as they did then. They are clever people in the city of Seattle. In 1986, February 24, the name of the county was not changed. It was King County then; it is King County now. But the namesake of the county was changed. It was originally named after an Alabama senator who was a plantation owner in the 1840’s and 50’s, about the time Washington became a territory. The namesake was changed on Martin Luther King Day. There are clever people in the city of Seattle. I don’t know if that went to a ballot or not but nonetheless King County is now named after Martin Luther King, Jr. I saw this in the newspaper recently, also about Seattle. I would imagine this has to do with the people there who work with marketing the city. Seattle has a new label. Seattle is now to be known as metronatural. They have a definition for it as though it was from the dictionary. Metronatural
No less a personality than William Shakespeare had his own words for Ephesus. Shakespeare described the city Ephesus in the play “Comedy of Errors,” act 1, scene 2. He says this of Ephesus, the city where Paul had his adventures in Acts 19, “They say this town is full of cozenage” (fraud). “They say this town is full of fraud as nimble jugglers that deceive the eye, dark working sorcerers that change the mind, soul-killing witches that deform the body, disguised cheaters, prating charlatans, and many such like liberties of sin. Welcome to Ephesus.” How about that – as seen through he eyes of William Shakespeare. Paul wrote first and second Corinthians from Ephesus and says I Corinthians 16:9 that there are many opportunities but many adversaries. Do you get a sense of what those adversaries might look like just having read Shakespeare? What we talked about last week and will today has to do with those obstacles, those adversaries about which the apostle spoke and with which we deal today. We talked about ignorance, people who just don’t know, have not heard the gospel in terms they can understand. We talked about ill will; that is, the gospel of Jesus which is salvation by grace plus faith plus nothing. Whenever that gospel, the truth of the Scriptures, confront any religious form that insists a person must work his or her way to heaven there will be ill will. There will be sparks and certainly Paul experience that in Ephesus. Third is inconvenience. The apostle opened his school in the hall of Tyrannus during siesta time so those who would come had to give up their nap. Paul had to give up his nap after working with his hands making tents out of canvas all morning. He would go teach all afternoon. Isn’t it interesting that in the weakness of that situation, God took the gospel east and west of the Aegean Sea and saturated the western end of Asia Minor with the truth of Jesus Christ because of those saints who were willing to be inconvenienced for the Lord. Today we want to talk a bit about imitation, a fourth obstacle, perhaps the trickiest, the most deceptive. It says in Acts 19:11 that God was performing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul. God was doing this by Paul’s hand. This was the real deal in other words, what God is doing through Paul, performing extraordinary miracles so that handkerchiefs or aprons – his sweat bands from his labors, the apron that he would wear when he was working with his canvas and sewing his tents and so forth – even these items of his personal property, as they were carried from his body to the sick, diseases left them and the evil spirits went out. What is going on here is exactly a continuation of what we discussed a week ago and that is the gospel of Jesus Christ had to be authenticated, had to be confirmed from Jesus to Peter, apostle to the Jews, to Paul the apostle to the gentiles. They had to have the similar experiences. It was almost a matter of course to Him that He would be casting out demons and healing people. One time a woman came to Him through the crowd. All she needed to do was touch the hem of His cloak and the flow of her blood was dried up. She was healed of a 12-year affliction. Similarly, in Acts 2:43 it says: “Everyone kept feeling
a sense of awe;” This was right after Pentecost, in Jerusalem, when Peter was the
main player “and many wonders and signs were
taking place through the apostles.” Notably, in Acts 5:12, speaking of Peter: 12 At the hands of the
apostles many signs and wonders were taking place among the people; and they
were all with one accord in Solomon's portico. So we go from Jesus to Peter, apostle to the Jews, and now to Paul, apostle to the Gentiles in Ephesus and the healing properties of God were resting upon him very clearly. It is advisable to take the work of Luke in the book of Acts and to see all the things Peter did in the first twelve chapters of Acts, Paul did in the rest of Acts as a clear attempt on the part of Luke to say this gospel is consistent. It is the same real deal, whether it is Jesus, whether it is Peter, whether it is Paul. It’s the same. That would be the point of that activity. Is it true that bank tellers and so forth are not really trained to identify the counterfeit, all they are trained to do is identify the real thing? Is there any truth to that? That’s quite the case. When the real thing is there and we glom onto that and study that and focus on that and practice that and live that, the counterfeit is less likely to trip us up. But the counterfeit, nevertheless, is there. What was happening through Paul was the real deal. Now let’s look at the cheap imitation, what was happening through the Jewish exorcists. There are false teachers and false prophets and charlatans among us today, hopefully not in this room, who would identify with the church of Jesus Christ. The apostles in several places in the New Testament warned that heretics and charlatans and false teachers would invade the ranks of the church not from outside, but that they would come up from among you. It was the case then as it is the case now. I have six characteristics of the Jewish exorcists. First of all, they were a novelty. They were something new, something that glittered. Some of the Jewish exorcists went from place to place (verse 13). What made them a novelty was the mere fact that they were or claimed to be Jewish in a patently Gentile, pagan culture. A Jew in a culture like this brought with him some very unique properties. If a person was a Jew, claimed to be a chief priest, claimed to be or was an exorcist, then people would say, “Wow.” Why? Because the Jews brought with them a unique heritage. They were they were only ones in all the world at that time who believed in one God so they were an instant religious novelty. The word was out that the name of their God could not be uttered. The name is so special that no self-respecting religious conscientious Jew would say the name. By the way, these magicians and exorcists and soothsayers operated much of what they did under a cloak of secrecy. If you said things people would hear, the magic would go away. Superstition? Occultic activity? Sure, but that is what surrounded these Jewish sons of Sceva with this aura of mystique. They are Jewish. They have one God and you cannot even say His name. That probably drummed up some business for Sceva and family. They were a novelty. Secondly, they were itinerant. That means they did not stick around one place very long and by extension that means they did not get involved in anyone’s life. They were hit and miss. It says they went from place to place. Some have said of itinerant, even Christian preachers, evangelists, and so forth, it is their job to “blow in, blow up, and blow out,” and leave the locals to pick up the pieces. I would suggest that in the case of these guys, there were plenty of pieces to pick up. They were itinerant. They were like the snake oil salesmen of a hundred some years ago with the wagon and the cure-all. They would rumble into town and those who were in desperate straits would flock to them, hoping they could buy something from them that would charm away whatever would ail them. They were not resident. This is interesting because there is no substitute for resident Christians in the church, who care and who know and who are there and who support and who rejoice and who weep and who are permanent. I say beware of the itinerant, whether a traveler or one that can just be turned on and off with the flick of the remote. Third characteristics of these guys, they are confusing on the one hand to dangerous on the other. At best, confusing. At worst, just downright dangerous. It says they attempted to name over those who had the evil spirits the name of the Lord Jesus. Here you have these fellows, they are seven brothers. They have a father whose name is Sceva. He claims to be a Jewish chief priest. An obvious question to a student of this culture would be, “What would a Jewish chief priest be doing here?” The temple is a long want to the east. Could it be that chief priest should have quotes, and that the shingle he hung off the back of his horse-drawn wagon was, “Sceva and Sons, Chief Priest of the God of Israel.” Here they come, looking for help. Confusing, all the way to dangerous. There is a history of Jewish exorcism in the New Testament. We would be wrong to say that this is something trumped up. Back in Matthew 12, Jesus mentions this. Please know that when it comes to the world of the occult – and that is what exorcism is all about. The basis of exorcism, the point of it, is to drive out unclean spirits. We do not know particularly how that works, how they are identified, or what the dynamic totally is. Jesus mentioned it in Matthew 12. He says it like this, because when He cast out demons the Pharisees are accusing Him of casting them out by the power of the devil. They could not have been more wrong. He knew that and so says to them, “If Satan casts out Satan how shall his kingdom stand? You people are making no sense. But I, by Satan cast out demons,” he says, “by whom do your sons cast them out?” They were evidently having some success here. “But if I cast out demons by the spirit of God,” Jesus said, “then the kingdom of God is here.” And indeed it was. In Matthew 12:43 He picks up this theme once again, no doubt referencing the marginal success, if you will, of the Jewish exorcists. He says, “Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man,” (When you guys have a measure of your own success in this enterprise) it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and does not find it. We do not know exactly where that is or what that means, but we can envision a spirit out there just kind of going around looking for a place to live. Send us into the swine, they begged Jesus in Mark 5. They have to live some place. Passes through waterless places seeking rest and does not find it
– and says well, I think I’ll just back where I came from “and when it comes, it
finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order.” And it goes and finds seven other
spirits looking for roommates. They come back and they make the last state of that person
worse than the first. Look out. Your success as Jewish exorcists, in other words, could
make someone absolutely worse off then they were before. It could just confuse them. A friend of mine was born just prior to the
Salk vaccine and sadly, has spent her life with polio, twisted and bent over to a
considerable degree. In the late 50’s, at the age of 8, her mother, a Christian,
desperate to help straighten out her little girl, took to her to a meeting of Christians.
A big meeting, big building, lots of people, and the centerpiece of the meeting was an
individual who would later go on to want to build a 777 bed hospital in Oklahoma. The way it worked was like this. Someone
who wanted prayer for healing would come up a ramp on one side of the platform, would
advance to where Mr. Roberts was, would be prayed for and then would leave the platform on
the other side. In her own words, this dear sister told me, “I could walk, not well,
but I could walk. I made my way up that platform, came across the platform and was prayed
for by Oral Roberts. As I was going down the other side he grabbed the microphone and said
to all those many people in the room, ‘Look at this girl. She’s walking off this
platform! She’s walking!’” The place, of course, was full of joy. She said,
“Odd, I had walked on!” Folks, the magicians of Egypt turned a
stick to a snake and water to blood and called up frogs. What we see is not necessarily of
God. Can you imagine, now this Christian girl and this Christian family going on into her
childhood and life saying, “There must be something wrong with me? Confusion,
frustration, all the way to outright danger of overt demon possession and the destruction
that brings. Beware. They were a novelty, they were itinerant,
they were confusion to dangerous, fourth, they are fake. The Jewish chief priest in all
likelihood was neither. He attempted to name over those who had evil spirits the name of
the Lord Jesus saying, “I adjure you demons, by Jesus whom Paul preaches – you
know, that Jesus.” They are fake. They are thinking that if they only comes up with
the right formulation then they are the real deal, not too dissimilar from that fictitious
French archaeologist in the first Indiana Jones who puts on the ephod and the turban,
thinking that simply by wearing this stuff he can conjure up the spirits that will make
the Nazi regime victorious, if you followed the plot.
Why, he is no more a Jewish chief priest than I am, but he pretended to be
in order to turn the will and get the power. That is exactly what these individuals were
up to. They were fake. Not only fake, but they were ignorant,
ignorant to a devastating degree. They are naming this Jesus, whom Paul preaches. The evil
spirit (verse 15) answered and said to them, “I know Jesus and I know about Paul, but
who are you?” The demon knew more than the exorcist. A little bit of enlightenment, lest we
underestimate the enemy, when dealing with the demonic. Please realize they do know the
score. In Mark 1, Jesus is in a synagogue in Capernaum. There was a man in that synagogue
with an unclean spirit. Here he was, a demon-possessed guy in the house of God, if you
will. We can see how things had deterioriated at that point. When he saw Jesus he said,
“What do we have to do with you, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?”
This is the demon speaking, knowing that
the demonic hoards are doomed, doomed to the lake of fire. They know that and the
recognize Jesus from some spirit connection. Don’t ask me how that works. They
recognized Him and says, “I know who you are, the holy one of God.” He was
right. Later in Mark 5, when Jesus is casting the legion of demons out of the demoniac at Gadarrah they knew who He was. He dialogued with Him in terms they could understand. In Acts 16, when Paul was in Philippi, a demon-possessed girl who earned a good living for her owners followed Paul and Silas around the streets saying, “These men are servants of the most high God.” She was right because the demon within her knew who they were. Jesus I know, Paul I know of, but who are you? So this guy jumped on them, subdued all of them, overpowered all of them. They fled out of that house naked and wounded. These Jewish exorcists among everything else, also were quite inadequate. They just did not have it and they lost that one. But notice what happens afterwards. The Bible has a lot of interesting stories in it. We might think, “That’s quite a story,” but there is always a point. It always goes somewhere. 17 This became known to all, both
Jews and Greeks, who lived in Ephesus; and fear fell upon them all and the name of the
Lord Jesus was being magnified. Who is going to win that one? The name of
the Lord Jesus was being magnified. 18 Many
also of those who had believed kept coming, confessing and disclosing their practices. 19 And many of those who
practiced magic brought their books together and began burning them in the sight of
everyone; and they counted up the price of them and found it fifty thousand pieces
of silver. And the truth of Jesus prevails. The ministry of Paul is legitimized by the victory of the word of God. It’s a wonderful thing. The magicians of darkness and the Jewish exorcists are shown to be who they really are. It’s a good thing. The word of God prevailed. What prevailed? The simple gospel prevailed. Jesus died for our sins, according to the Scriptures. We come to Him by grace through faith plus nothing. That’s all that is necessary. It is such good news. Many were prompted. Many who were in darkness came to the light. They came clean. It says they were confessing and disclosing their practices. The secret of their magic in their own mind and in the world of the occult was keeping it secret. Not telling. Don’t say the formula. Don’t give the magic word. And once those formulas and magic words are spoken and disclosed, they are saying good-bye to all of this fraternizing with the dark side, to be done with it. It’s over. Their magic is nullified by their disclosure. They are not afraid of the cost. They did some math. Fifty thousand pieces of silver. In that day and age a piece of silver would have constituted a day’s wage. Fifty thousand days’ wages at the modest wage of $15 an hour, we’re talking about a six million dollar bonfire. What was it worth? Priceless. God’s word was the key. Verse 20: So the word of the Lord was
growing mightily and prevailing. God’s word was the key to light and to faith and
to growth then and now. It has not changed. We still teach our children and hopefully
remind ourselves that “we read our Bible, pray every day, and we grow, grow, grow.” Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the
word of God. God’s word shall not return to Him void. It all comes back to His truth.
Believers, beware. There is warning here for us and I do not think we ought to miss it.
Again, writing from Ephesus to the Corinthians, the apostle says this is Satan. Of the
devil, he says, “We are not ignorant of his schemes.” We kind of know how he
operates. He says in II Corinthians 11, there are times the devil will disguise himself as
an angel of light. That would be deceptive. Wouldn’t it be much handier for God’s
people if the devil would always have a pitchfork and a tail and horns? Always look ugly,
always act mean, and always be right up front with his agenda. But that’s not the
case. That’s not how the devil works. In the secular world, the onset of the
occult and spiritism and so forth is saturating the culture. It’s everywhere.
Sometimes it looks helpful. Sometimes playing footsie with the spirit world seems to be a
good thing. Even Court TV brings us Forensic Files. We have “Physic Detective”,
and physic detectives tap into the spirit in order to do a “good thing,” solve
crimes. Doesn’t that sound good? Doesn’t that seem helpful? Shouldn’t the
devil get a kudo for that? Sometimes it just seems sort of harmless.
It’s only a horoscope, after all. Didn’t the Bible say something about avoiding
astrology in all its forms? I believe so. I believe God knew what He was doing there. It’s
just a physic hotline. Miss Cleo will help me. I need to know if it’s true love. It seems harmless, but what does it do? It
weakens us and blinds us to the truth of the enemy’s ploy. Sometimes people flirt
with the spirit world in an outright dangerous way. Sometimes it’s a Ouija board
where we literally are emptying our minds and calling on spirits. We ought not to be
surprised when they show up and give us serious grief and oppression and darkness and
confusion. Even in the Christian world; even among people who name the name of Jesus. I have known two different people on two
completely different occasions who had the very same thing happen to them. They went to
Christian meeting and it was their intent to have their minds opened so that they could
get something more from God. A part of this angers me because we are Christian fools if we
think there is something more than the gift of Jesus Christ In
each of these cases these two individuals opened and emptied their minds and prayed that
God would just fill. Oh, He filled and they got this amazing ability to write
uncontrollably and penned interesting messages, not of their own accord. Eventually they
got suspicious. After much anxiety, darkness of soul, misleading time spent, they realized
this is something strange. They challenged the spirits. I’m not making this up. These
are normal people. They challenged the spirits and learned that the spirit they were
dealing with was the spirit of antichrist. Their hands wrote that word of their own
accord. Let’s remember what anti means.
Antichrist does not mean “against” in this language. We use anti as
anti-aircraft. Yes, that’s against the aircraft and we like it that way. In Paul’s
world, the word anti does not mean “against”; it means “instead of.”
Christian people are being tugged and pulled every manner of direction, seeking more than
the simple gospel, something instead of the simple truth. We might even say that anti
could mean in addition to. Colossians 1, speaking of Jesus: 15 He is the image of the invisible God, the
firstborn of all creation. I ask you – what more could you want?
What more could there be? The book of Hebrews iterates this as well.
Speaking of Jesus, “Heir of all things, through whom He also made the world.”
Jesus is the radiance of the Father’s glory, the exact representation of His nature. 3And
He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds
all things by the word of His power When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at
the right hand of the Majesty on high, What more could we want? What more could
there be? If Jesus is not enough, there is nothing wrong with Jesus; there is something
wrong with us. We do not need more than Him. The beauty of the gospel is that God would
come to people who did not deserve His grace, and say, “Here is My Son. He died on
the cross for your sin. All you need to do is put all your trust in Him alone.” That’s
it. That is the most glorious truth we could
sanction in our minds. Anything in addition to that, to enhance that, simply shows a
deficiency in our souls, not in the person of our Savior. Beware of imitations. Beware of
distractions. Beware of extras. Beware. We are not ignorant of his schemes. Finally, what this leads to, beginning in
verse 23 of Acts 19 – any time the gospel makes a dent in the culture as it did in
Ephesus, we have all these people walking away from their previous way of life and hitting
the silversmiths in the pocketbook. Any time that happens we have conflict. Jesus said it
this way. You cannot serve God and money. It is impossible to serve two masters, Jesus
said. It cannot be done. Either He owns it or I own it and if He owns it there is no
conflict. So when six million dollars worth of
trinkets and magic stuff goes up in smoke on the streets of Ephesus and the silversmiths
who build little shrines to Artemos of the Ephesians, the local goddess, they see their
business start to take it in the bottom line, they notice and they say we cannot allow
this to go on. When income is threatened, people take notice and persecution begins. This
is how it was in eastern Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s when the economy was in
the tank. Those who were blamed were those who were not liked for being Jews and
anti-Semitism began making its way to the ugly head it developed. Someone had to be blamed
when things were not good. The silversmiths got together – this
is in the second half of Acts 19 – and rallied around their goddess, Artemis of the
Ephesians. Who is she? Artemis of the Ephesians is an interesting goddess of mythology,
the ancient mother goddess of Asia Minor. She is not the same as Diana, the Greek and
Roman goddess. In about 800 B.C. a meteorite was recovered that fell from the sky to
Ephesus. It was a meteorite that was interestingly shaped in the form of a woman who was
multi-breasted. They figured this must be something from God and it has everything to do
with fertility and productivity. They built her a temple, which measured
about 200 feet by about 400 feet. And because of the city of Ephesus being cosmopolitan
and very religiously tolerant, folks came from all over the place to worship the goddess
Artemis of the Ephesians. She was enshrined. She was venerated. A calendar year was
developed for her and they had a festival in the spring of the year which in all
likelihood was when this riot took place. The silver workers made little statues. If
you have ever been to the city of New York, you can get little statues of the Empire State
Building. In various places around the world you get these things as trinkets and
souvenirs. Indeed they were that, but much more. They not only were a souvenir and stood
for the greatness of the city and of their goddess, but they had religious significance as
well. So the silversmiths got all worked up because their silver trade was being hurt by
this sect of the Jews teaching that Artemis was not the right god. A riot ensued. If you read Revelation 18 you see that an
interesting dynasty falls. The great whore Babylon bites the dust in Revelation 18.
Fallen, fallen, is Babylon the great. What is Babylon? Babylon in Revelation 18 is an
interesting but consistent mixture of people’s notion of religion combined with
economics. Who is it who wails when Babylon falls (Revelation 18)? Those who wail are
those who have worshipped the beast on which she rides and those who have gotten very
wealthy trading with her. Economics and religion came together there. They’ll come
together here. Inevitable conflict whenever the faith impacts the culture. When there is trouble, when Christian
people find ourselves in trouble, and we do, sometimes we instinctively blame the devil.
We think that Satan has just to be here. Perhaps he is, but sometimes that is just
automatic. I have come to realize over the years that the devil is not always necessary to
our problems. When I see Christians at odds I ask myself
what sets us off? What puts us at odds with other Christians or with Christian
institutions? Often, it’s money or things that money can buy. Oftentimes, the
criticism of the church is, “All they want is your money.” Within the church,
the criticisms are how we spend our money. That’s why sometimes Christians go to war
over things like carpet, pulpits, music, things we can see or hear or touch and we closely
identify with our faith. Sometimes that’s precious. Other times, it is a point of
conflict. The other night at Awana, kids were getting crumbs on our floor. I found myself,
at least for a minute or two, more concerned about the floor than concerned about the
souls. That is so natural and so wrong. The Bible says we are to be good stewards,
not owners, and regardless of our trappings and the things that may cost us, the things
that may set us off, we need always to remember Micah 6:8: He has told you, O man, what is good; That business about walking humbly with our God is where we will go in Ephesians 6 because part of that is having the savvy and the awareness to put the armor on in order that we might walk with Him. Lord willing, in a week we will start breaking it out and getting dressed. "Scripture
taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Jim Carlson 2006, Lone Rock Bible Church, Stevensville Montana, USA |