Greetings

Greetings, everyone! Grace to you in our Lord Jesus, and welcome to Friday’s edition of EDiBS. It’s great to have you along on this final day of our study week, and my prayer is that you continue to be blessed as you join in for our daily time in God’s Word together. Today we move into the second half of Acts 16, so open your Bible and if you would, join me for a word of prayer as we begin: 

Prayer 

Lord Jesus, thank you for this day. We ask that as you draw near to us through your Word over these next few minutes, you would continue your transforming work in our hearts and minds so that we continue to mature as your followers. We are grateful for this time, and we ask that you bless it for our good. In your precious name we pray, amen. 

Getting Started 

As we get started today, with Paul having cast a troublesome demon out of a slave girl in Philippi, there is anger on the part of her owners and trouble on the horizon for Paul and Silas. Our focus: mob rule in the marketplace. 

Acts 16:19-24 

19When the owners of the slave girl realized that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities. 20They brought them before the magistrates and said, "These men are Jews, and are throwing our city into an uproar 21by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice." 22The crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas, and the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten. 23After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison, and the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully. 24Upon receiving such orders, he put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.

When I was a kid in elementary school, there was a fight on the playground. It was one of those unfortunate, very unevenly matched bully incidents, and one of the kids was getting his clock cleaned. He was a boy everybody picked on anyway, and so there were no sympathizers in the crowd. I was new at the time, having just moved to town with my family, and didn’t know the dynamics of the situation, so I tried to go in and separate the fight — which, as we all know, is a noble-but-stupid thing to do! What happened was that I started getting my clock cleaned too, but it began to happen just as the teacher on yard duty came in to break things up. 

Who ended up getting in trouble? I did – along with the other boy who had been beat up. The kids watching said that the smaller, younger boy had picked the fight with the older, bigger boy by tripping and then kicking him, and that I had jumped in to help him. Neither of those things was true, but the bully got off, and the other two of us were sent to the principal’s office. To add insult to injury, there was still corporal punishment in those days, and so after getting beat up on the playground, we both got spankings with the paddle too!

In today’s reading, we have something similar going on – similar but far more serious, far more severe, and far more dangerous. Paul has cast a demon out of a little slave girl. “That’s good,” you say. Yes, from our perspective. But from the perspective of her owners, who made a living off of her because of that demon possession, it’s a bad thing. With the demon now gone, gone also is what very likely has been their primary source of income. Some commentators through the years have even called this girl’s owners occultic pimps…bad actors who have been spiritually prostituting her for financial gain. 

The result of this development is first one of anger on the part of the slave owners, who seize Paul and Silas from the group and drag them into the marketplace, and second one of mob mentality when the crowd gets involved in the situation and begins to take up the attack with them before the magistrates. As we said a few moments ago, things go from bad to worse very quickly in this situation, and to understand why that is the case, I’d like to share the observations of the great New Testament scholar, F.F. Bruce, on the matter. By the way, I have a book by him in my library called New Testament History, which is a classic in the field of New Testament history and one which I highly recommend to all of you. In it, he makes several important points with respect to why this situation in the text blows up as it does. 

To begin with, Paul and Silas are probably singled out not only because they’re the leaders of the missionary group, but also because they’re the most obviously Jewish men among them. Luke is a Gentile, and Timothy is only half Jewish. Paul and Silas look Jewish, and as Dr. Bruce says, Anti-Jewish sentiment lay very near the surface in pagan antiquity. 

Which is why — not at all coincidentally — the slave owners and the crowd with them appeal to the magistrates to act based on the Jewishness of Paul and Silas. Did you notice how their accusation begins? “These men, being Jews...” The rest of the charges are pretty vague. But again, that doesn’t really matter because of the longstanding, built-in bias against those who are Jewish. 

There’s a third reason that this situation goes downhill so quickly, and it is this: Since Paul and Silas are Jews, the people in the crowd and the magistrates with them assume that they’re not Roman citizens. Meaning what? Meaning that they can do whatever they darn well please to them, because people who don’t have Roman citizenship have no civil rights and are subject to whatever the evil mind of men can conjure up to do with them. F.F. Bruce writes, 

There was great indignation that residents of Philippi, themselves Roman citizens, should be molested by strolling peddlers of an outlandish and new religion. Such people had to be taught to know their proper place and not trouble their betters. 

And so it is that Paul and Silas are terribly beaten and thrown into a maximum security prison — and this while plans are surely being made for their execution the following day. 

Wrapping Up 

When we come back to this scene after the weekend, we’ll want to talk a bit more about this predicament and do a little more background work on Paul and Silas to prepare for what’s coming up. But as we wrap up for the day, though it’s hard and uncomfortable I’d like to leave you with the picture of two broken, bruised, bleeding men with their feet in stocks, facing certain death at the hands of people who hate them. What are they thinking? How are they feeling? What is it, really, that has put them where they are? And finally, how will they respond when the time comes for them to speak in their own defense – if indeed they are even given that chance? 

How would you carry yourself in that situation? How would I? Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of Paul and Silas as we follow this through. Let’s feel it, if we are able. And then let’s see together what happens as the Lord begins to work His mighty power upon the situation. 

Take care everyone; thanks for a great week, do have a great weekend, and I’ll see you back here to talk about these things again next time. God’s peace, and the joy of our Lord Jesus be your abiding strength!