The Problem with Idols

At this time, our children can be dismissed to one last children's church until the fall.

And our leaders are anxiously awaiting their last time with you.

So make your way out there now.

If you're just joining us, we've been studying quite a while in the book of the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament on Sunday mornings.

This is going to be the last sermon in the book of Acts until the fall.

We're going to take a break.

Next Sunday, we're going to begin a whole new series on the topic of faith.

And hope you can join us.

If you'd like a sermon outlined for today's message, just raise your hand.

Rushers will give you one.

And he told the police that first he was hit by a violin.

Then a clarinet hit him.

And finally a large tuba.

Police told him they think it was an orchestrated attack.

So it happens.

Now we've been following the Apostle Paul on his third missionary journey in Asia.

And today we're going to continue to look at his ministry in the city of Ephesus, if you remember where that is.

Where is it?

Where is Ephesus?

It's right here.

Okay?

In Asia.

And today we're going to see that Paul will experience an orchestrated attack, actually.

Last time, when we were in the book of Acts, Paul was in the city of Ephesus, and Luke gives us four different scenes that he gave us about Paul's ministry there.

First, he helped 12 of John the Baptist's disciples believe in Jesus and receive the Holy Spirit.

Then Paul began to speak boldly in the synagogue, later to be transferred to the hall of Tyranus in Ephesus, where he continued to teach about the gospel and Jesus for the next year and a half.

During this time, Paul was also performing many extraordinary miracles and was getting a lot of attention regarding the gospel of Jesus.

And as a result, many people in Ephesus believed in Jesus and turned even from their dark magic and surrendered to Jesus Christ.

And that brings us to the passage we're going to look at today in Acts chapter 19.

Acts 19 · chapter mention

If you brought your Bible, you want to follow along as I look at it.

We begin in Acts, break in in Acts chapter 19, verse 23.

Acts 19:23

We're in the city of Ephesus, and Paul is about to encounter an orchestrated attack.

About that time there occurred no small disturbance concerning the way.

About Jesus, following Jesus.

For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith who made silver shrines to Artemis, was bringing no little business to the craftsman.

These he gathered together with the workmen of similar trades and said, Men, you know that our prosperity depends on this business.

You see and hear that not only in Ephesus, but in almost all of Asia, this Paul has persuaded and turned away a considerable number of people, saying that gods made with hands are no gods at all.

Not only is there danger that the trade of ours will fall into disrepute, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis might be regarded as worthless, and that she, whom all of Asia and the world worship, will even be dethroned from her magnificence.

When they heard this, they were filled with rage, and they began crying out, saying, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! And the city was filled with confusion, and they rushed with one accord into the theater, dragging along Gaius and Aristarchus, Paul's traveling companions from Macedonia.

And when Paul wanted to go into the assembly, the disciples wouldn't let him.

Also, some of the Asiarchs who were friends of his sent to him and repeatedly urged him not to venture into the theater.

So then, some were shouting one thing, some another, for the assembly was in confusion, and the majority did not know for what reason they had come together.

Some of the crowd concluded it was Alexander, since the Jews had put him forward, and having motioned with his hand, Alexander was intending to make a defense to the assembly, but when they recognized that he was a Jew, a single outcry arose from them all as they shouted for about two hours.

Great is Artemis of the Ephesians.

This passage is about the prevalence, power, and problem of idolatry.

I have three main points we'll consider today.

First, the gospel's threat to idols, second, the problem of idols, and third, the gospel's power over idols.

The first thing we see is the gospel's threat to idolatry.

Luke tells us that the time that Paul and his companions spent in Ephesus preaching the gospel of Christ caused no small disturbance in the city.

I think I have a couple of pictures of the ruins from Ephesus that we see today.

I don't know if it's, yeah, there it is.

And then another one, just kind of showing you the scene as it exists today, the ruins.

It was a pretty, pretty large city, wealthy city.

And Luke tells us that this disturbance wasn't just about Paul, but about the way.

Again, referring to the gospel and Christian faith, the way of Christ.

The riot that Demetrius the Silversmith started in Ephesus not only threatened Paul's life, but could have had they killed Paul or other things, put an end to the gospel's outreach in Asia.

This was a very, very dangerous situation.

And I think it's more dangerous than Luke even suggests, because when Paul writes uh later in his first letter to the Corinthians, he says that he fought with wild beasts in Ephesus.

Well, it's that's uh metaphorically a figure speech referring to the rioting crowd trying to get at him.

Uh and in his second letter to them, he called he talks about his dangerous time in Asia in 2 Corinthians 1, 8 to 10.

He says to them, We don't want you to be unaware, brethren, of our affliction which came to us in Asia, that we were burdened excessively beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life.

Indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves so that we could not trust in ourselves, but in God, who raises the dead, who delivered us from so great a peril of death, and will deliver us, he on whom we've set our hope, and he will yet deliver us.

Paul and his team had spent several months now in Ephesus, and up till now, the way the Christians' and gospel was tolerated was not a problem.

It became a problem when it started to affect the incomes of the idol makers.

The silversmiths trade union.

Demetrius was the union boss of the trade union, and uh he noticed a drop in their income in the city from the silversmith's work, making and selling silver images of Artemis and her temple.

And that was a direct result of Paul's preaching.

People were abandoning the idols, they're losing money.

Um the temple to the goddess Artemis in Ephesus was built around 550 BC.

Here's an artist's rendering much later of that building, uh, the temple of Artemis.

It measured 400 feet by 200 feet, and it was considered at the time one of the seven wonders of the world.

Uh, people from all over the world would visit, uh they'd bring their money, and uh thousands and thousands of tourists would visit the site every year, and and the temple served also, which is interesting to me, it served as a regional uh treasury and bank in the ancient world.

Merchants, kings, even some cities made huge deposits of money there, um, confident their money would be kept safe under the protection of the goddess Artemis.

It was a powerful place and deeply, deeply impacted the people in Ephesus.

Demetrius complained that the silversmiths were losing a lot of money because people were turning to Christ and abandoning the idols.

And the gospel of Christ then became a threat to their idols.

In Ephesus, the kingdom of Artemis is being threatened by a new king, Jesus.

Demetrius' arguments were very clever.

He doesn't just appeal to their loss of income to gain a hearing.

Uh he argues three other things that really hit them with rage.

First, he argues that the silversmithing trade itself would lose its good name.

Uh, your trade, the things you've learned, been handed down to you all of your life, uh, is being going is going away.

It's like the threat of AI to many occupations today.

It's going away.

Let's rise up and rage against.

No.

Um he argues also, secondly, that the temple of Artemis would lose its wonder and prestige in the world.

This is one of the one of the best places people come to visit.

And then he argues that the goddess Artemis herself would lose her divine majesty in worship.

So what he's doing, he's he's covering his real economic interests with religious zeal, um, inferring that the gospel is an extreme threat against the worship of their goddess Artemis.

Demetrius complains that Paul is persuading large numbers of people in Asia by his teaching, saying gods made with hands are no gods at all.

And Paul has been preaching this so often, so much in Asia, that it actually became a well-known saying.

Demetrius quotes him: Gods made with hands are no gods at all.

That's what Paul's been passing around.

It became that pervasive.

Um Paul's argument was though, Paul's argument was persuasive.

Many people turn from idols worshiping Artemis.

Um and Paul was saying basically it's ludicrous for you guys that you can create your own God with your own hands.

Does that make sense to you?

Uh in Romans 1, Paul describes it as exchanging worship of the true God for something you made.

Um, this means that when, this is very carefully, listen to this.

When Paul preached the gospel in Ephesus, he was also, I think he did this everywhere, by the way.

When Paul's preaching the gospel, he's also preaching against idolatry, the main threat to King Jesus and the true God, wherever he went.

But there's one God, one Savior, Jesus Christ.

You see, everyone is worshiping someone or something to get meaning and identity and fulfillment in life.

Something.

And when Paul was preaching to the intellectual cultural elites in Athens, if you remember, his speech climaxes with a critique of idolatry.

In Acts 17, 29, he tells the Athenian philosophers, you know, being then children of God, we ought not to think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone formed by the art and thought of man.

Man creates something and he calls it a god.

Don't think that a God made by human hands is a true God.

We that we can create our own God.

Um Paul in the book of Romans says that making an idol is nothing less than foolishness.

Absurd.

Uh, it's absurd because an idol that is looked to to give us purpose, uh give purpose to his followers, is at the same time created by the person worshiping it.

Does that make sense to you?

What is that?

But wait, you say, that was then, this is now.

We're not an animistic, polytheistic culture.

People don't believe in these many gods, and they hardly believe in God.

So why preach to us about the problem of idolatry?

Because it is a problem.

I'm preaching about idolatry because it still exists today with us, more subtly, less overtly, but is still an acceptable practice in our own culture.

You don't have to bow down to a some statue or mythical Greek god to worship an idol, although some still do.

An idol can be anything that you or I make an ultimate in our life.

The ultimate, the ultimate reason to live, the ultimate purpose for my life.

Um that thing that makes me feel like I'm somebody.

It can be anything.

Whatever you're looking to, to give you meaning, identity is an ultimate thing.

Without it, you would lose your identity.

You'd lose your reason to live, who you are and why you're important.

You'd lose it without that.

It's not God giving you that, it's an idol.

In his, this is interesting, in his book uh Habits of the Heart, Robert Bella, who is, by the way, not a Christian, he has a he describes American culture as expressive individualism.

And when he applies that to religion, it means that Americans feel that no one has the right to tell them who God is.

Expressive individual.

No one has that right to tell me who God is.

Well, that's no one has the right to tell them what I should believe.

No one has the right to determine uh my spirituality.

I get to determine that.

People have the right to worship the God that they like and prefer.

In other words, at the very heart of American culture is the very thing that Paul says is wrong.

We can't create our own God.

We either accept the true God and who He is, or we are serving something else.

We cannot make our own God through human design and will.

And yet, sadly, we do it unknowingly, even all the time.

We make gods of money, career, pleasure, relationship, prestige, possessions, multitude of other things that are created things.

The things, those things that we're willing to sacrifice for to get what we really want in life.

Purpose and meaning.

We'll sacrifice time with our family and parenting our children on that idol's altar.

We'll sacrifice it.

We'll sacrifice our health on idol's altar.

We'll sacrifice our marriage on the idol's offer altar.

We'll sacrifice our integrity on that idol's offer.

Because we want that.

And this is how I get it.

That's all Artemis was to them.

The goddess Artemis was their protector, their provider.

She was the one providing all their wealth.

She was the one protecting their large bank.

Jesus and the gospel is a threat to every single idol who claims to have power in our lives.

Threat to all idols, ancient and modern, that humans make and rob God of his glory, the creator.

Jesus, by the way, did talk about these things, and one thing he singled out was money, was a very common human idol.

Very common across the board.

Matthew 6, 24, and Sermon on the Mount, he says, No one can serve two masters.

Either he's gonna hate the one and love the other, or he's gonna be devoted to the one and despises the other.

You can't serve God in money.

You can't.

One God you're gonna give your life to.

The apostle Paul called this is interesting, he called covetousness an idol.

Um, what's covetousness?

It's wanting something more than God to make us happy and fulfilled.

We covered it.

Because that's the answer.

What we're looking for.

Colossians 3, 5, put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

To New Testament believers in Jesus put idolatry away, he's saying.

Covetousness.

Back in Ephesus, the idol of money, the idol of Artemis, caused caused a very violent reaction when those idols were threatened.

And you know what?

When our idols are threatened, we're gonna see the same thing.

This is kind of one way you tell it if you're serving an idol.

Um, I'll get to that in a minute.

Luke shows us in this passage the paradox of both the weakness and power of idols.

Idols are weak because they are empty, they're gods of our own creation.

We just created him in our mind.

Uh I talk to people who just can't accept the God who's self-described in the Bible.

Well, then you're creating a God that you want to have, but not the God that is.

You see?

You're making your own.

Expressive individualism.

The gods we make are powerless.

Paul said, the gods made with human hands are no gods at all or human mind.

Uh, Paul wrote to the Corinthians who had a huge problem with idols.

Believers in the church in Corinth had a huge problem with idols.

1 Corinthians 8, 4 to 6.

Therefore, concerning the eating of things offered sacrificed to idols, we know that there is no such thing as an idol in the world, that there is no God but one.

For even if there are so called gods, whether in heaven and in earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there's one God, the Father, from whom all things exist for Him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him.

Idols cannot deliver on what they seem to promise us.

In fact, just the opposite.

They will disappoint us and sometimes cause us harm.

Uh what do I mean?

I read an article recently by a woman who worked as the CFO of a major investment bank in New York City.

Her article was entitled, Is There Life After Work?

And she confronted a myth, a myth she had believed and adopted in her life.

The myth was this.

Well, if you work like a dog most of your life, you put everything else second, put the money away, then you know what?

You can live the way you want the last third of your life.

It's a lie, she says.

That's what she did.

Work, work, work.

This is what she said.

Work, work, work, sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice to get more money and have the life she dreamed.

But she said it was a lie.

Why did she say that?

She was successful.

She worked like a dog all her life.

Now she's retired.

Now she can.

Here's why.

She said when she retired and left her job, it absolutely devastated her.

She couldn't move on.

She said, I didn't know how to value who I was apart from what I did.

Because what I did was who I was.

There's the idol.

Her identity all wrapped up in it.

She thought work was her servant to get her the life she wanted.

But it actually became her idol.

She just couldn't feel good about herself without working her job.

That's one example.

Idols will lie to you and disappoint you.

They can't deliver.

Luke shows us the power of idols and the destructive force they can cause in our life when we face the loss of it, like this woman did.

In Ephesus, the people became furious, filled with rage at the loss of their prophets, the loss of their devotion to Artemis.

And anger can be a sign of idolatry in our heart.

It can really tell us that.

Be aware of yourself.

It's like God said to Cain, why are you angry?

Why is your countenance falling?

Why are you?

And I've asked myself this through the years, and every I would say most every single time.

Well, I wouldn't be angry if I could just have that.

I'd be really happy, but I ain't got that.

I lost that.

So now I'm not happy.

I'm angry.

Ooh, there's an idol there.

See, I didn't like the loss of that.

They became furious.

And anger can be a sign of idolatry in our heart.

I'm just saying a sign.

Not all anger is idolatry.

Okay.

We won't just be sad or grumpy.

We're going to be ballistic.

It touches us that deeply, whatever we're living for, whatever idol there is there that we're facing the loss of.

We're going to go ballistic.

That's what happened in Ephesus.

That's a that's exactly the pattern of where the idol can disappoint you.

The people are so upset that they caused a riot and it threatened Paul's life.

See, here's the thing.

You may believe in God, you may even believe the Bible.

You may go to church, you may do great acts of service.

But if there's anything in your life functionally more important than God to you, your happiness, your identity, your meaning, your security, your hope, then that is something you've functionally made into a God.

The language of idolatry for us would go something like this.

My heart says I believe in God, but if I could just have that, you see, if I could, if I could just, then I'd really be content and happy.

See, what I'm saying by that is I'm not really content with just God, the true God.

Um, but if I just had this or that or could achieve this, then I'll be somebody, I'll be happy, I'll be safe, I'll everything will be okay.

And when we don't get that, see, we've had our whole focus in the wrong place.

Whatever that is that is more important to you than God, that is something you've made into an idol.

Now, what's interesting is that most of the idols, uh, perhaps in our life aren't even bad things.

They're not bad things.

Like drug addiction, alcoholism, pornography, and all the other addictions are forms of idolatry.

Most of the time, uh, our idols tend to be good things we look to to help us face our life instead of facing it with God.

What help was helping you to do that?

Family can be a powerful idol.

Money and prosperity can become a powerful idol.

Beauty, a relationship we have that we can't live without.

Talents, achievements, pleasures, all good things that we place as an ultimate thing we must have in order to be somebody.

I'm not saying all those good things are idols.

I'm saying anything can become an idol when it's re-usurping the true God of the Bible in our life.

The problem with idols is they enslave us.

We get addicted to what they promise us, thinking we just keep going by what that idol can give it, we'll be good, like that woman.

Paul even suggests that when something other than God takes the place of God in our life, there's even a dark, deceptive, spiritual, demonic influence at work behind the idol that we've made for ourselves.

In 1 Corinthians 10, uh, he says, What do I mean?

That a thing sacrificed to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything?

No.

But I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God.

And I don't want you to become sharers in demons.

He's talking to believers.

You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons.

You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.

Why do you provoke the Lord to jealousy?

See, serving idols, um, God takes that personally.

We are his children, and he he's jealous for our intimacy and relationship with them.

The ironic twist that Luke uh shows us in Ephesus is that the real problem with idolatry is the idolater.

Idolater.

Let's finish Acts 19, beginning um in verse 34.

But when they recognized that he was a Jew, this is uh Alexander, uh a single outcry arose from them all as they shouted for about two hours, Great is Artemis to the of the Ephesians.

After quieting the crowd, the town clerk said, Men of Ephesus, what man is there after all who does not know that the city of the Ephesians is the guardian of the temple of the great Artemis and of the image which fell down from heaven?

So, since these are undeniable facts, you ought to keep calm and to do nothing rash.

For you brought these men here who are neither robbers of temples nor blasphemers of our goddess.

So then, if Demetrius and the craftsmen who are with him have a complaint against any man, the courts are in session and pro-consuls are available, let them bring charges against one another.

But if you want anything beyond this, it shall be settled in the lawful assembly.

For indeed, we are in danger of being accused of a riot in connection with today's events, since there is no real cause for it.

And in this connection, we will be unable to account for this disorderly gathering.

And after saying this, he dismissed the assembly.

This passage, I want you to see, this passage, this thing in where Paul ends his ministry in Ephesus, does not end with a speech by Paul or speech by Peter or any other Christian.

It ends with a speech by the city clerk.

This is extremely unusual in the book of Acts.

It's unique.

Luke records what the city clerk is saying is that these Christians aren't disrupting our worship and social order.

You guys are.

You think that Artemis is the basis of our social order, but it's actually you who worship her that are disrupting the social order.

The city clerk rebukes them and says if they have a complaint, they actually have laws and courts where they can be heard and appealed to.

And if they keep this riot up, uh they're gonna have to, they're gonna be facing Rome, who are gonna take away their freedom if they don't calm it down.

That brings us to the last point, the gospel's power over idols.

Notice that the reason for all the anger and violence in Ephesus was because Paul and his team had been preaching the gospel of Jesus for months, and many were converted to Jesus Christ and abandon the idol worshiping.

Those who were converted to Christ abandon their idols just like they did in Thessalonica, that Paul writes to them about in 1 Thessalonians 1, 8 and 9.

He says to them, For the word of the Lord has sounded forth from you, not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also every place your faith toward God has gone forth, so that we have no need to say anything.

For they themselves report about us, report about us what kind of reception we had with you, and now how you turn from God to I from turn to God from idols to serve a living and true God.

Because of what was happening in Ephesus, the the gospel of being spread throughout all of Asia.

Um Luke is telling us that the gospel of Jesus conquers the idols in our culture, in our life.

Jesus alone has been given authority in heaven and in earth.

Why do you think the Father gave Jesus ultimate reign over all things?

It's because Jesus conquered the power behind all other gods and forces against us at the cross on which he was nailed, as Paul refers to in Colossians 2.

When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he made you alive together with him, Jesus, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us, he's taken it out of the way, nailed it to the cross.

When he disarmed the rulers and authorities, he made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through him.

Because Jesus himself was surrounded by an angry, murderous mob in obedience to his heavenly father, he offered himself as a sacrifice for our sins, and God exalted him as God, Lord, Judge of all.

Acts 2, Peter says, This Jesus, God raised up again, to which we are all witnesses.

Therefore, having been exalted to the right hand of God, having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured forth this which you both see and hear.

Therefore, let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.

At the end of his first letter in the New Testament, the Apostle John issues an earnest warning to believers in Jesus.

This is what he says.

1 John 5, 20 and 21.

And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so we may know him who is true.

And we are in him who is true, in his son, Jesus Christ.

This is the true God and eternal life.

Little children, this is the last thing he said.

Guard yourselves, believers in Jesus, from idols.

They'll tear you apart.

I'll end also by saying, let us repent of anything we've exalted above Jesus as our Lord and Savior, and acknowledge him as Lord in every area of our life.

All of our idols are nothing.

Jesus is everything.

Here's how you conquer any idols in your life.

Very simple.

Love Jesus more.

Love Jesus more.

Behold him on the cross, dying for you.

Just for you.

See him embracing you in heaven one day.

Bow down and worship him when we're together now.

And if you've ever done never done so, believe in him.

Receive him as your Lord and Savior.

Let's pray.

Father, thank you that Jesus is everything.

He is preeminent.

He's the firstborn of all creation, the beginning and the end, the power, righteousness, and wisdom of God, the Savior of the world.

Father, we repent of anything we have even unknowingly made an idol.

We repent of looking to something other than you to give us our comfort, our purpose, our meaning, our happiness in life.

Help us now to live for Him who gave Himself for us and will come again to make everything all right.

I pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.