The Gospel of Jesus Disturbs the Peace (Acts 19:21-41)

• crowds of excited or jubilant or outraged Muslims chanting “Allahu Akbar”
• responding with passionate emotion to something that threatens or offends or reinforcesor delights their most fiercely held beliefs
• God is great! God is great! God is great! sometimes for hours
• most of us look at such a scene and wonder what could possibly motivate someone to do that
• some people just believe God is great
• for people who don’t think very much of God, or don’t think of God very much, such behavior is utterly mystifying
• I might suppose people like that just don’t think God is very great
• we are looking this morning at a very similar scene, except it’s from 2000 years ago and people are not yelling the name “Allah”
• instead they’re yelling the name “Artemis”
• just wait… you’ll see what I mean

where it fits

• Paul’s third missionary journey, city of Ephesus
• last week spectacular miracles and supernatural happenings, healings and exorcisms and such
• this week the public response

S&R Acts 19:21-41

what they need to listen for

• the thing that’s getting these people all riled up is the gospel of Jesus Christ
• happens pretty routinely
• 4 reasons the gospel of Jesus disturbs the peace

The gospel of Jesus is directed at winning the world

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.” ²² And having sent into Macedonia two of his helpers, Timothy and Erastus, he himself stayed in Asia for a while.

• lets us know that Paul was planning to finish his third missionary journey by going back over the places in Europe where he had planted churches on his second missionary journey, and then returning to Jerusalem
• also lets us know that Paul was already laying plans for a fourth missionary journey after going back to Jerusalem, a trip that would include a visit to Rome itself
• we’ll eventually find out that he was hoping to finally go all the way to Spain, what many of his fellow Hebrews considered the end of the earth… Jonah knew it as Tarshish
• the reason Paul’s long-term goal was to take the gospel to the ends of the earth was that Jesus told him to do that
• the Lord Jesus himself spoke those words to the apostles just before he ascended back to heaven

Acts 1:8 ⁸ But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

• Paul himself received the same command from the Lord. Speaking to people in Pisidian Antioch, applying Isaiah 49:6 to himself and taking it as a command from the Lord Jesus Christ to all his followers:

Acts 13:47 For so the Lord has commanded us, saying, “‘I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.’”

• the Christian mission has always been to take the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth to disciple the nations and teach them to obey everything that Jesus commanded
• the Christian mission has always been world conquest [[ ]]
• last week gospel of the Kingdom
• but people don’t usually want Jesus to be their Lord and king, to command them what to think and do and be
• just last week we had had multiplied thousands of people marching through the streets of our nation’s cities, chanting “no kings,” “no kings,” “no kings!”
• but Christ came to be king
• the good news of Jesus is that he has come to be our king
• the only way anyone will ever come to truly know the true Christ is to know him as king
• the only way anyone will ever see that as good news as if the Holy Spirit opens their eyes and changes their hearts
• the gospel of Jesus is directed at winning the world… that’s one reason it disturbs the peace

The gospel of Jesus is disturbing to economies

²³ About that time there arose no little disturbance concerning the Way. (the gospel of Jesus and the people who live their lives by it) ²⁴ For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines (little model temples) of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen. ²⁵ These he gathered together, with the workmen in similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. ²⁶ 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. ²⁷ 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.”

The temple of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and among the most popular pilgrimage destinations in the Roman empire. Thousands of people every year

Demetrius and many other artisans made a comfortable living manufacturing and marketing trinkets and talismans and idols to the many thousands of people who came to worship at the great temple—or just see it. So they didn’t like Paul at all. Paul was telling people that Artemis was either a delusion or a demoness, but definitely not a deity worthy of worship or devotion. Apparently his message was having enough of an impact that it was beginning to cut into Demetrius’ bottom line. So the guilds of the silversmiths and other workers in the idolatry trade suddenly had a new enemy: Paul, preacher of this new form of Judaism called “the Way.” The Jews themselves were bad enough, with their insistence that only their God really was God. Now along came this rabble-rouser, proclaiming that that one true God had sent his one true Son to be the Savior and Lord of the world. This message was bad for business.

The reality is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ often causes people to lose income. It can be bad for business. The transatlantic slave trade was a mainstay of both the American and British economies in the early 1800’s. Then a bunch of radicals, spearheaded by evangelical Christians preaching that the gospel of Christ does not allow Christians to own other people made in the image of God, mounted political campaigns in Britain and then America to abolish what they called the evil trade. Their political opponents argued that their gospel would cripple the economies of two continents. Within 70 years, not only the slave trade but even slavery itself work illegal both in the United States and throughout the British Empire. Hundreds of business concerns were forced to close and thousands of people did lose quite a lot of money. On the other hand, many thousands of people were free. Today, we are appalled to think that our ancestors ever thought it was right to own another human being like property. The gospel of Jesus did that.

People who stand to lose money because of the powerful transformations the gospel brings tend to fear or even hate the gospel. Casino owners. Loan sharks. Abusive landlords. Dishonest businessmen. Drug dealers hate the gospel. Pimps hate the gospel. And the list goes on and on.

The good news that Jesus has come to be king, and to rule over the hearts and the lives of people, rarely sits well with people who want to rule their own lives. The fact that he came to save us and to free us and to make us his own is challenging to those who want to be their own. [[ ]] x2 But Jesus is King, even over how we make our money. The Gospel of Jesus often disturbs the peace because it undermines and even overturns entire economies by transforming who people are and what they want.

The gospel of Jesus is directed at winning the world

The gospel of Jesus is disturbing to economies

The gospel of Jesus is destructive to religions

²⁸ When they heard this they were enraged and were crying out, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” ²⁹ 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. ³⁰ But when Paul wished to go in among the crowd, the disciples would not let him. ³¹ And even some of the Asiarchs, who were friends of his, sent to him and were urging him not to venture into the theater. ³² 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. ³³ 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. ³⁴ 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!”

The Greeks knew Artemis as the goddess of the hunt. The Romans called her Diana. But the way the Ephesians envisioned and treasured Artemis was unique in all the world. Part of it centered around a particular stone that was said to have fallen from the sky. Far more importantly, the Ephesians thought of Artemis as a kind of Earth mother. They thought of her as the goddess above all goddesses and almost all gods. Oh, Zeus was still the king of the gods, but nobody paid any attention to him. Artemis was the center of everybody’s attention in Ephesus. She was the center of everything.

Now here comes this guy Paul, saying that Jesus is Lord. He is above all the gods of the Greeks and Romans, including Artemis and even Zeus. Before it’s all said and done, Nut Case Paul will even say that Jesus is Lord above Caesar. Jesus is the king above all kings, and the God above all gods. No religion, no politics, no ideologies can begin to compare with him. He is Lord.

That kind of talk tends to disturb people. It sounds radical, fanatical, extremist, cultish. What is even worse, sometimes people even start to believe it. That was what was starting to happen with this Paul guy. He and his followers were a weird new kind of Jews. They had all of the exclusivism of the Jews that had been around for hundreds of years, along with a new passion and zeal to tell everybody from every religion that their Lord was the only lord worthy of worship and adoration.

That guy Alexander that you read about in verse 33 might be the same person as the “Alexander the coppersmith” that Paul warned Timothy about in his first letter to that young man while he was helping to lead the church in Ephesus a few years later. Paul said both that Alexander had made a shipwreck of his faith and that he had done Paul and the gospel plenty of harm. Here in this passage, back in Acts 19, it’s not clear what side of the ball Alexander is lining up on. All that can be said for sure is that people know he is a Jew, and that is enough to set them off in another spasm repeatedly shouting, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians.”

The one thing we could see clearly here is that people in Ephesus were very threatened about their religion by the gospel of Jesus. And what was true 2000 years ago is true to this day.

Christians say that Jesus is the way the truth and the life, and that no one comes to the Father by any path but Jesus. We say that because that’s what Jesus said. Christians say that there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we may be saved than the name of Jesus Christ. We say that because Peter said it first. And it ticks people off today just like it did so long ago.

No, I am not saying we should provoke people or insult them or disregard their feelings or disrespect their beliefs. We should love people enough to listen to what they have to say and to care what they mean by what they’re saying. We should be curious and courteous and kind. But beneath all of it, the basics haven’t changed. Jesus is the only begotten son of God, and the only Lord and savior of men. Only those who repent of sin and trust in the savior will find themselves in the Father’s presence on the other side of death. There are no exceptions.

That threatened people’s religious convictions then, and it does the same today. Sometimes they become downright hostile at that. The solution is not to cower in silence or compromise the truth or cloud the issue. It is to calmly, compassionately, but above all clearly speak the truth in love. The disturbance may blow over, or it may not. You might wind up with a happy ending, or it might get ugly. Just show and tell the good news about Jesus.

The gospel of Jesus is directed at winning the world

The gospel of Jesus is disturbing to economies

The gospel of Jesus is destructive to religions

The gospel of Jesus is disruptive to cultures

³⁵ 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? ³⁶ Seeing then that these things cannot be denied, you ought to be quiet and do nothing rash. ³⁷ For you have brought these men here who are neither sacrilegious nor blasphemers of our goddess. ³⁸ 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. ³⁹ But if you seek anything further, it shall be settled in the regular assembly. ⁴⁰ 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.” ⁴¹ And when he had said these things, he dismissed the assembly.

You see here a government bureaucrat doing what they do best: calming people down and convincing everyone to just go home. And notice how he does it: he tells them that they and their city are super special and nobody could ever doubt it. In other words, he tells them what he knows they want to hear so that he can get them to do what he wants them to do. I told you. He’s a bureaucrat. He makes his living doing this stuff.

He understands what’s really getting under people’s skin. They like to think that their city and their culture is the greatest in the world. Everybody likes to think that about their own city, their own country, and their own culture. We sure do in America.

But the gospel of Jesus Christ is already undermining the Ephesian culture. It’s already beginning to convince people that Artemis is not a deity. At best she was a delusion, at worst a demon. So her temple was likewise no big deal. By the late Roman Empire, the 3rd or 4th century after Christ, the gospel of Jesus had become dominant across the Roman Empire, and pagan temples were increasingly neglected or dismantled. The Great Temple of Artemis was abandoned, and its stones were repurposed for other buildings, including Christian churches. Today, only a single rebuilt column and a few scattered ruins remain at the site in modern Turkey. Archaeological excavations in the 19th and 20th centuries uncovered parts of the foundation and artifacts. Many of those are now in the British Museum.

You see, the gospel of Jesus disrupts whole cultures. That’s one of the reasons it disturbs the peace.

The gospel of Jesus is directed at winning the world

The gospel of Jesus is disturbing to economies

The gospel of Jesus is destructive to religions

The gospel of Jesus is disruptive to cultures

By now you might be thinking to yourself, “If the gospel of Jesus really is so disturbing to economies and destructive to religions and disruptive to cultures, why do we believe it and proclaim it? Doesn’t that make us the economy disturbers and the religion destroyers and the culture disruptors?”

That is a fantastic question    . It’s not so much that the gospel disturbs and destroys and disrupts these things. It’s that the gospel transforms people. It delivers people from the Kingdom of darkness and transfers them to the Kingdom of light. It changes them from servants of sin and self and Satan to the servants of the Lord Jesus Christ. So economies transformed by the gospel actually become better and more prosperous and more humane economies, made up of people who work to provide their own needs and share some of what they have left over to help others when they can. A gospel seasoning sprinkled across any economy inevitably moves it toward a basic free market approach but with the natural controls that will rule in the hearts of people whose minds are shaped by the gospel of Jesus.

The same is true for cultures of all sorts in every ethnicity and every language and every people. Every culture remains uniquely itself, only transformed by Jesus, just like every person who ever comes to Christ remains uniquely himself, only transformed by Jesus. Have you ever seen an indigenous tribe worshiping Jesus with their own unique style of music and dance? Someone introduced them to Jesus, gave them the Bible in their own language, and launched a new flavor of Christian faith. It’s happened and is happening all over the world, and it’s staggeringly beautiful to behold.

The one of the three that does not survive its encounter with the gospel is religion. There is one God, and one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ. The only religion that can survive the gospel of Jesus is the simple necessity of repentant faith in Jesus Christ, lived out joyfully in the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount. The gospel of Jesus Christ aims to fill every corner of the world, with nothing left for other deities, spiritualities, or religions.

God wants us to know the gospel, show the gospel, and share the gospel. So what is the gospel? The gospel is not three easy steps you need to take to get to heaven. The gospel is not a procedure to follow.

The gospel is first and foremost a piece of news. It is literally good news—the good news that God has sent his Son into the world to rescue us from sin and self and Satan, at the cost of his own life, his life lived out for us to fulfill the law of God that we could not keep, his life laid down for us willingly on the cross at Calvary, his life taken up again three days later in power and glory as he rose from the grave, his life poured out in profligate generosity through his Holy Spirit, And that, of course, is exactly what our entire study of the book of acts has been all about.

We respond to this spectacular good news by clearly turning from our sin and gladly putting our faith in Jesus Christ our Lord and savior. And then we act that decision out by being baptized into a church and then living in fellowship with that church family for the rest of the time God gives us in this life. We spend however many decades or months or weeks or days that might be living the gospel in fellowship with our new family.

Eternal Father, in this very moment, we turn again from our sin and ourselves to you and your glory,

Trusting only in your Son’s sacrifice for our sins to make us right with you.

We want to shelter ourselves in the shadow of his cross,

Bathe ourselves in the blood that he shed there for us,

Robe ourselves in his righteousness,

Renew ourselves in his resurrection,

Lose ourselves in his Lordship,

And find ourselves in his friendship.

We want him to become for us, for today and forever, wisdom from God, and righteousness, and holiness, and salvation.

For he is the One who suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to you, our Father.

1Co 11  ²³ For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, ²⁴ and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” ²⁵ In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” ²⁶ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

²⁷ Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. ²⁸ Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. ²⁹ For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. ³⁰ That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. ³¹ But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. 

4 questions for examining ourselves

1. Do I turn from my sin and trust Jesus alone to make me right with God?
2. Has my trust in Jesus led me to follow him in baptism, like he wants?
3. Has my trust in Jesus led me to be part of a specific church family, like he wants?
4. Is there some other sin I need to turn away from right now, before I eat and drink?