Jesus is Worth the Cost - Pastor Tom Loghry Rockland Community Church Download

In Acts 19:22-41, the Ephesians are concerned by the threat that Paul’s message is to their local god Artemis. We must make the same choice today between the gods of this world and the one true God.

Transcript:

Today's reading is from Acts 19, 23 through 27. About that time there arose a great disturbance about the Way. A silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought in a lot of business for the craftsmen there. He called them together, along with the workers in related trades, and said, you know, my friends, that we receive a good income from this business. And you see and hear how this fellow Paul has convinced and led astray large numbers of people here in Ephesus and in practically the whole province of Asia. He says that gods made by human hands are no gods at all. There is danger not only that our trade will lose its good name, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be discredited; and the goddess herself, who is worshiped throughout the province of Asia and the world, will be robbed of her divine majesty.

Let us pray. Dear Father, as we come before your word this morning, we pray that you would turn our hearts. Turn our hearts father, so that we would be completely devoted to you and to no one else. That we would worship you, oh God, and no other false gods we pray. In the Christ's name we pray, amen. You may be seated.

I've gotten to the stage in my life where it's not unusual for me now to say, when I was a kid. I was walking out of Dino's the other day and I pointed out to James that there used to be a video store in the same plaza. I remember going there as a child or, or to Blockbuster or to Diamond Video in my hometown of Pasco and renting a videotape to watch with my family. But as you know, over time things changed. Netflix first emerged as a service to mail you DVDs that you could watch, so you didn't need to go to the video store anymore. And then of course they began offering movies that could be streamed online, giving you instant access to any movie that you might wanna watch. And in the midst of all of that, there was also those RedBox vending machines that popped up offering the same video store selection in a much, much smaller space. And so one by one, the video stores closed; even RedBox is no longer. The convenience of streaming movies has become so popular that it progressively threatens even the big screen experience of going to the cinema. Most of you probably know that CinemaWorld in Lincoln recently closed, and other movie theaters are hanging on just by a thread. This is the nature of the market. New services arrive, and they bankrupt the old ones because of their superior quality.

In other industries, there's a lot of concern about that kind of thing right now when it comes to artificial intelligence. And I'm not gonna get sidetracked on that, but you can see we all kind of live under those sorts of tensions. And, and my purpose here is that I want you, I wanna put you in the shoes of a pagan idol maker, which might be a little bit difficult for you to do. 'cause you're like, what's that like? Well, as we see here in this passage, it's, it's like being someone who's experiencing a sudden competitor coming into your market. I want to put you in the shoes of a man who knew his business well, who knew his clientele, and who knew a competitor when he saw one. I want to help you enter that world so that you can begin to more fully reckon and imagine the real implications of the Christian faith. We often think of Christianity as something rather benign, pretty socially tame. I want to challenge you this morning to consider if that might only be because we have tamed it. That perhaps we might only be comfortable in our society because we've ripped out its teeth and removed its bite in our own lives.

First, we look at verses 23 through 27 here in Acts 19. The Apostle Paul has been spending the past two years in Ephesus, teaching the people there about the gospel. You'll recall he had a, a place in the hall of Tyrannus so that he was almost kind of functioning like a philosopher, as a teacher. And we learned that he has a great impact and influence not only in Ephesus, but throughout all that province of Asia, because it's a hub for that whole province. And so people are coming in, hearing his teaching, and they're going out from there. If you're not familiar where Ephesus is, it's in modern day Turkey. You can see that little red dot there kind of on the west coast. And so because it was a port city, it was very, very influential and as I shared last time, I had the opportunity to visit there, and the ruins are incredible. You can tell that it was a once great city, but one that is no longer.

Now, part of what made the city of Ephesus so striking in the world of the Roman Empire at that time was the temple that was constructed to the Goddess Artemis. Now. I, I have to assure you, I did not plan this talking about Artemis after we just had this big space mission. But you should know there, there's reasons why they named this space mission Artemis. You'll recall the earlier missions were named Apollo. Well, Artemis was the twin of Apollo. They're brother and sister. And Artemis was known, among other things, as being the goddess of the moon. So it kind of makes sense, you're doing a moon mission. And so, she wasn't only known as a goddess of the moon though. She was also known as goddess of the hunt, also childbearing. They kind of put a lot of things under her, which is why we actually see her appearing in quite a different form in Ephesus than we do in other places.

So on the left, you'll see that's kind of more of a Roman depiction of her, otherwise known as Diana. This is what the Ephesians would've been familiar with. You know, it's very, very different depiction there, and it's because what you have is this intersection between the east and the west. And so she's actually kind of a conglomeration of a lot of goddesses under this head of Artemis. Now, the temple that was constructed in her honor was actually one of the Seven Wonders of the World, it's known as the Artemesium. There's a couple of great videos you can find on YouTube about this. This one comes on this channel Told in Stone. You can see how, how huge it is. Her temple had 127 columns that were 60 feet in height, and this temple had been around for a hundred years, had been reconstructed a couple of times, but at this point, this is what it would've roughly looked like. And you can see the statue in there is just, is huge. And just to kind of put it in perspective, how big this place was, we were talking about Athens recently, and this is a video by Manuel Bravo, and you'll recall we talked about the Parthenon in Athens. Well, you see the Parthenon there, that's the temple of Artemis. Big difference in terms of size. And so it was a huge attraction. Not only you can imagine just the architecture itself, but particularly the Goddess Artemis and the promise that was offered to those who would worship her, who would bring sacrifice to her.

Now, just to kind of help you kind of appreciate the role that this temple had in relation to the city of Ephesus, you have to recognize that the relationship between the religious cult and the city is much different than the relationship between, like in America you have church and state and those are kept separate. Well, the Temple of Artemis was a state project. It was built by the city of Ephesus, and it was a main thing, main part of their whole civic life together. So that every couple, every few weeks in the city, they would actually have a, basically a two mile parade around the city. So you can see, actually I put the star there. That's where the Temple of Artemis is. That's kind of where the main hub of Ephesus is, and you see this path. So they do a whole parade around this whole area just to celebrate her honor. So kind of putting all those pieces together, you can see why, just on that, on those facts alone, why the temple would be influential and then, oh, there's also this, the temple was a bank. That seems weird, right? They would store all their money in these temples. Why would they do that? Well, because it was a sacred place, and so surely no one would try to rob money from a temple, lest you receive the wrath of the goddess. And so it was also the financial hub, not only of Ephesus, but I mean it was a major, major financial hub in Asia and for the Mediterranean.

So we're beginning to see why this place was such a big deal, why Artemis was, was such a big deal. And you can imagine how commerce really began to kind of revolve around the worship of Artemis, and that's what we find here in the case of a man named Demetrius. He, along with other artisans, are engaged in a trade of making cultic items for the worship of Artemis....