Before you can hear the gospel, your idols need to be challenged.

Acts 19:23-41

One of the things you might notice as you read through the Book of Acts is that Paul, in his preaching, is always challenging the idols of a particular town or culture. In Acts 14, the people of Lystra think Paul and Barnabas are the human form of the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes because they healed a crippled man. In Acts 16, Paul confronts a slave girl with a evil spirit who practiced fortune-telling, a idolatrous pagan practice, and a lot of money for her owners. Paul and Barnabas get thrown in prison for challenging Roman practices of divination. In Acts 17, which Joe preached on last week, we see Paul in Athens confronting the idols of Greco-Roman gods that filled the city, pointing to the one idol of “an unknown god” and proclaiming that there was really only one God who does not live in temples made by human hands.

Then we have today’s text here in Acts 19, where Paul is in Ephesus—one of the major cities of the Roman world, and once again Paul confronts the worship of an idol—in this case the goddess Artemis and the business that surrounds her worship.

I had a chance to go to Ephesus in 2009, and of all the ancient sites I’ve visited I find it to be the most interesting and most representative of the world in which Paul preached.

Ephesus was a center of culture and commerce in Asia Minor, and the economy of the city was largely centered on the worship of Artemis, also known as Diana in the Greek pantheon.

The Greek version of Artemis portrayed her as a huntress, while the Romanized goddess was the patron goddess of fertility and money. Notice the contrast between the statues. The Roman version portrays Artemis with the fertility symbol of many breasts (or eggs, or fruits, depending on which interpreter you read). Worship of Artemis was designed to insure that the city would be prosperous.

Ephesus became a center for the worship of Artemis because many years before Paul arrived there, a meteorite landed near the city and when the people looked at the shape of the space rock they said, “Hey, this looks like Artemis!” So they assumed it was a sign from the gods—an image of Artemis come down from the heavens, and they built a massive temple to the goddess that was one of the wonders of the ancient world—a temple seven times larger than the Parthenon in Athens. The temple was administered by virginal young women, who represented the fertility of Artemis herself.

The temple became a religious Roman tourist attraction, with artisans making money selling smaller replicas of the goddess’ statue (which you can still buy there today). The temple of Artemis, like many ancient temples, was also a bank—the center of commerce for the prosperous city.

When Paul arrived in Ephesus, he continued the pattern he had maintained in his travels elsewhere. He would go to the synagogue and preach to the Jews about Jesus (we see this in 19:8). He performed some miracles that gave credence to his preaching. Look at 19:11, for example, where “God was doing unusual miracles through Paul.” Even towels that touched him had healing qualities. Some misunderstood Paul’s intentions and the power of the Holy Spirit, including the Seven Sons of Sceva who tried to cast out a demon in Ephesus, but got attacked by it instead, the demon uttering, “Jesus I know, Paul I know, but who are you?” So profound was Paul’s preaching and activity that it began to change people, like the magicians in Ephesus who burned their magic books after they heard Paul’s preaching about Jesus.

Much of Paul’s preaching took place in the agora of each town to which he traveled. The agora in a Roman city was the place where culture was formed. It was a place of commerce, a place to talk politics, a place where philosophers and teachers spoke with students and hearers, a place of religion dominated by the city’s patron god or goddess, a place of entertainment where the theater was nearby. As Tim Keller puts it, the agora was Harvard, Hollywood, the New York Times, and Washington all rolled up in one. Paul wasn’t merely doing individual evangelism in the agora, although that was certainly part of it. What Paul was really doing as he traveled around was identifying the idols. You do that, and then you can preach the gospel.

Every culture has its idols.

Every culture has its idols. Indeed, every culture is based on idols if it’s not based on God. Every culture and every person looks for something or someone to save them. The Roman world had many gods because there were many things that people thought would save them:

For some, it was beauty and sexuality that would save them: they worshipped Aphrodite

For some it was reason and pure thought: that was Athena

Maybe it was Vesta, the goddess of family, or Venus, the goddess of love.

Some relied on Mars, the god of war, for their salvation.

In Ephesus, it was Artemis and the business that she both represented and brought in. Demetrius and the other merchants believed that the economy of Ephesus couldn’t do without her because she was a cash cow they worshipped. They believed couldn’t do without her. In fact, that’s probably as good a definition of an idol as I can imagine. A idol is anything you absolutely cannot do without. It’s the thing you rely on to save you.

It’s easy for us to think of this story from Acts as being absurd, the product of an ancient world where ignorance was common. We’re much more sophisticated now. No one, after all, worships these silly gods anymore.

Well, they may not be cast in wood or stone anymore, but the idols are still with us. No amount of human reason and enlightenment has gotten rid of them completely. Indeed, God has been warning us about them from the beginning.

The first of the ten commandments, for example is, what? You shall have no other gods before me. Sounds kind of pretentious of God, doesn’t it? The Israelites certainly thought so at different times, attracted as they were to the worship of other gods who were much more exciting, offering sexual pleasure and the promise of riches and prosperity all in exchange for keeping a statue happy.

But the first commandment was a statement by God. Have no other gods because none of them can save you. The other commandments reflect this. Martin Luther once said that you can never break commandments 2-10 without breaking the first one.

Think about it. Don’t steal is one of the commandments, because having that thing won’t save you. Don’t murder, because killing your enemy won’t save you. Don’t lie because you’re trying to save face—that won’t save you either. Don’t commit adultery, because that relationship won’t save you.

Anything you think will ultimately save you is an idol.

Anything you think will ultimately save you is your idol. That thing or person you can’t live without is your idol. When you say, “If I have that thing, then my life has value,” that’s your idol. Any created thing we look to for our salvation, our security, our value—it’s an idol. Even the good things in our lives can take on the property of an idol if we choose to make them ultimate things

Demetrius isn’t so much a devotee of Artemis the goddess of business as he is the money she and her temple generates. If Artemis goes down, so do his profits.

Money is a potential idol in every culture. Money in itself isn’t bad, it’s neutral. It’s a tool. But when we make money into an idol, that thing we can’t live without, that thing that will ultimately save us and give us value, then it becomes and idol that has to be confronted.

Some scholars believe that child sacrifice was part of the worship of Artemis in other parts of the ancient world. We find that abhorrent, but isn’t that what happens when we make created things our idol? How many families have been sacrificed by an absent parent at the altar of success? Flip that over and you can see how children may become idols themselves. When parents look at their children as ultimate things, when they live their lives through them, the children can become little gods and goddesses that determine the parents’ worth and the prospect of their salvation. Ask any teacher who is in the room today and they will tell you about this particular form of idolatry!

A lot of idols in the ancient world were sexually oriented. In Ephesus, for example, the worship of Artemis was connected to sexuality. In what many consider to be the first example of public advertising in history, one of the street stones in Ephesus has this etching on it. Notice the faint outline of woman adorned suggestively, a heart to indicate love, a foot to show the consumer where to go, and a hold carved out where a man could stack coins to see how much it was going to cost. It’s a brothel advertisement.

Now, a couple of series back we learned that sex is a good thing, something God created for us. But when we make good things into ultimate things they become our idols. We live in a culture that worships sex. Many people think that sex will save them, make them whole, make them feel good about themselves. We judge people based on their attractiveness, put pictures of them up on the wall and on the screen like they did in Roman bathhouses. Many believe they can’t live without sex. It’s their whole identity. It’s interesting that now the word “pride” has been connected to sex—a sure sign that sex has become an idol.

You think politics is going to save the world? Ideology is simply an idea turned into an idol. Elephants and donkeys are created beings and neither they, their ideas, nor their devotees are going to save us.

You think the military power of Mars is the god that really keeps you safe and secure? Ask the parade of fallen empires in history if that worked out for them. You think carrying a gun is going to save you—think you can’t do without it? It might be your idol.

Is your career the hope of your salvation? Your spouse? Your retirement fund? Your home? They might be your idols.

Again, none of these things is inherently bad. It’s the value we assign to them that makes them an idol. Any created thing that we count on to save us, that we feel we cannot live without, is an idol.

People react violently when their idols are exposed.

Now, no doubt I just ticked some of you off in the last several minutes. That’s what happens when our idols get challenged. In fact, a great test to tell what your idols are is to pay attention to the things that make you angry when someone challenges them. Perhaps you are holding on to something, some idea, or someone so tightly that you leap to defend it with your anger. Been on Facebook lately? You see a lot of people defending their idols with nasty words. Trust me, I have a pantheon of idols of my own—perfectionism, success, status… I get angry at criticism, for example, because it attacks the idol of my perfectionism. Look closely and you’ll find that we all have an agora or temple in our lives that are full of those idols..

And none of us likes to have our idols exposed. The people of Ephesus rushed to the theater, which seats about 25,000. I stood there once as I read this passage. It’s scary to imagine standing in front of a hostile, frantic, and confused crowd—many not even knowing why they are there. It was a dangerous moment in Paul’s life, but even then he wanted to speak with the crowd. That could have been the end of him—but that was his way. He confronted the idols.

Maybe that’s because he knew the value of confronting them in his own life. In his case, they were religious idols—keeping the law, for example. Being a Pharisee, doing everything perfectly and making sure others did as well. Paul knew violence—you remember that he had reacted violently to the early Christians when they challenged his religious idolatry by preaching the grace of God through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Paul had wanted to kill them. Now he was one of them, confronting the idols.

But it wasn’t the idols themselves that Paul was confronting so much as the power behind them. Paul called them the “principalities and powers”—those forces of evil bent on our destruction, the force of sin and death that keeps us enslaved to them via our idols. And everywhere Paul went, he poked the principalities and powers in the eye with the reality of Christ, who is the only savior the world can rely on.

The cross exposes our idols.

In Colossians 2:15, Paul says that on the cross Jesus disarmed the principalities and powers, exposing them and their idols to public disgrace and forcing them to march in a captive parade, much like those the Roman emperors used to display their captured booty after a victory in battle. It was on the cross that Jesus demonstrated the way God is saving the world—not through might, but through suffering, not through power but through humility. The cross exposes the world’s idols for what they are: created things with no ultimate power and with no possibility of saving us.

Your career can’t die for your sins. Neither can your bank account, or your family, your politics, your nation, your health, or anything or anyone else. Created things are inherently finite things. They can all be taken away, and when that happens, who will be left to help you? Who will be left to save you?

The city manager standing before the crowd that day in the theater believed that the Temple of Artemis would stand forever. So, he told the crowd, essentially, don’t trouble yourselves over these rabble rousers who threaten our beloved Ephesus idol. We know that she and everything she represents is the real deal.

All our idols will eventually be toppled. Jesus is all we have left!

But today the great temple of Artemis in Ephesus is no longer there. All that remains is a single column standing alone in a field. Ephesus itself is in ruins. The tourists come to look at its remains. Great is Artemis of the Ephesians? Hardly.

The same will happen with all of our idols one day. They will all be toppled one way or another. Better to put our trust in the one who is the world’s true savior… forever. He is the only one who can save us. The only one we can trust. He is no idol. He is Immanuel, God with us.

What idols do you continue to hold on to? What gives you ultimate worth? What would you be willing to give up in order to follow Jesus? Would you lay them all at his feet, to have them all subjected to him?

That’s what he demands from us in love. After all, in the end, he is all we have left!

 

Source:

My writing for this sermon was inspired by Tim Keller’s lecture, “The Gospel and Idolatry” at the 2009 Gospel Coalition conference where he talked about Acts 19. You can view the full lecture here.