Acts 19:11-41 (February 25, 2024)

Acts 19:11-12 and the Purpose of Miracles in the Church

Turn in your Bibles to Acts chapter 19. We continue in our series through the book of Acts. We're gonna pick up where we left off last week and that is with verse 11 and we'll finish out chapter 19 together this morning.

You'll remember from last week, just kind of where we are in the story, that the Holy Spirit had fallen on the believers in Ephesus empowering the church for worldwide mission. And Paul taught and he trained those believers from the hall or school of Tyrannus and he sent them from there into the surrounding region to proclaim Christ such that all who dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, the scriptures tell us.

And that brings us to verse 11 and I just want to begin by reading the first couple of verses there, verses 11 and 12 and God's word says this, now God worked unusual miracles by the hands of Paul so that even handkerchiefs or aprons were brought from his body to the sick and the diseases left them and the evil spirits went out of them.

And so I'm gonna stop there with these two verses because there's a lot that we can talk about in just those two verses, especially by way of introduction to the rest of the passage. And the first thing I want to note is a little bit of a side point, but we've mentioned it several times as we've gone through Acts and so I just want to flag it for us and then move on quickly and that is what we see here with the work of God and the work of Paul and the miracles that are mentioned there in verse 11, it says that God worked the miracles, it means God is the ultimate cause and he did that through the hands of Paul, meaning Paul is the immediate cause of these miracles and so we can ask the question, who did the miracles, God or Paul?

And again, the answer is yes. And so we see God's work and God's work through means of a person. I don't want to spend too much time there, again, just flag it as another example of God using means and secondary causes.

Then the next part of the verse though, I do want to take a little bit more time with, says what does it say that God worked, who worked unusual miracles? Other translations might say extraordinary miracles or special miracles.

What is it that makes these miracles unusual or extraordinary? Probably the main thing in view is that these miracles happened in some unusual ways or extreme ways such that even the handkerchiefs of Paul or the aprons of Paul could be brought to a sick person.

Paul's not even there, they bring these garments to a sick person and they will be healed or brought to a demon possessed person and they will be delivered. These were probably garments that were used by Paul in his tent making work, maybe handkerchief to wipe the sweat off of his brow and you can imagine someone taking that, sneaking that maybe even from his shop and just by virtue of it being Paul's, God used those garments, those handkerchiefs, those aprons to heal or deliver miraculously.

This might recall in our minds that the gospels where some were healed by just touching the hem of Jesus's garment. God is working these miracles by the hands of Paul and even by the means of his garments in order to confirm Paul's message, to confirm the gospel, to confirm the apostles' teaching and that is the point of miracles in the book of Acts.

They confirm the gospel message that is preached by the apostles. God uses these miracles to establish his church and authenticate their teaching and so when you're reading through the book of Acts, you're gonna come across all sorts of things and one of the questions that arises through that reading is are we to expect the same today?

Are we to expect the same miracles today? Should we do everything that we see the apostles doing in the book of Acts? Maybe another way of asking this is what we see in the book of Acts, is it described for us of what happened or is it prescribed for us what we are to make happen, what we are to do or is it some mix of both in the book of Acts?

I would say it's some mix of both. Generally, this question is not just related to healing but what we would, what are known as the sign gifts. This includes healing, speaking in tongues and prophecy and so my question to that answer or my answer to that question rather is that the sign gifts as gifts have ceased with the closing of the canon of scripture.

The sign gifts as gifts have ceased. They were given to the apostles at the beginning of the church age to authenticate the message of the gospel and to establish the church and as the church was established, they began to fade and so we don't really have any examples of sign gifts in the New Testament after about the year 57 AD and I would say that with the closing of the canon of scripture, with the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem in AD 70, that those are good places to mark their end as gifts or as regular gifts.

That once the church is established, the church gives witness to the message, the church authenticates the teaching by its preaching, by its holy living, by its service, by its love for one another and that is what authenticates the message and adorns the gospel is the church's love for one another, the church's teaching, the church's service and holy living.

You see, the sign gifts were the foundation meant for when the church was being established but how many times do you lay a foundation when you're building a house? Once and then you build and I think that's what we see here as well.

Now, saying that, this does not mean that God is no longer working. This does not mean that God is no longer active, that God is no longer even doing miracles or even working miracles by the hands of men.

I would say that he is. Again, the way I answered that question earlier was the sign gifts as gifts to be pursued. So what we mean here is that God is still working but it means we are not to try to manipulate spiritual matters or pursue giftings that are no longer active for the church but God still works.

God still heals miraculously. If you get the weekly letter that I send out on Wednesday, several weeks ago, I sent a video. It was an audio recording of a Sunday school class. See, there was this pastor and he all of a sudden lost his voice, some sort of disease or injury that came out of nowhere and because he could hardly talk, he had this really raspy voice, he couldn't preach anymore and so he ended up having to resign as a pastor.

He saw a lot of specialists, I mean in the hundreds of specialists and doctors. None could help him and so he is left with a very raspy voice. Still loved the Lord, still loved the church. He was a member of a church and he was teaching Sunday school one day.

He was teaching from one of the Psalms, one that by the way mentioned about God healing all of our diseases and he's talking in this raspy voice and you can hear it on the recording and all of a sudden, he's in the middle of talking and all of a sudden, his voice returns to normal and he was healed just like that.

Right there, teaching Sunday school. He later went to the doctor. They could find no evidence that his vocal cords had ever been damaged. God had healed him. God still heals but that doesn't entail faith healers.

Or let's take tongues, another one of the sign gifts mentioned in the book of Acts. I take that the tongues mentioned in scripture to be real human languages that people either miraculously were able to speak or miraculously they were able to hear and understand.

I told a story at the end of the sermon last week about the young Hispanic man at the abortion clinic down in Florida. He heard the man preaching outside but the man was preaching in English but Alejandro heard every word in Spanish and he and his wife left the clinic that day and they have a baby today.

You see, God still works miracles of language but that doesn't entail conjuring up ecstatic speech in the church service. God still works miracles. Often we hear stories from the mission field where God uses miracles to authenticate the message of missionaries and dreams to point people to other people who will speak to them and tell them about Jesus.

Again, notice that God uses these especially when the church is being established in a place and among a people. This is the Holy Spirit empowering his church for worldwide mission. This is the Holy Spirit active and working in the world to bring glory to Christ.

I think this is what we see here in Acts 19. There's another sense about that phrase, unusual miracles that I would like to point out I think can help us make sense of the larger context of the passage and of the world that we live in.

The Miraculous and the Ordinary in God's World

And that is the unusual miracles are distinct from the miracles of everyday life that we think of as normal or maybe even natural. Here's what I mean by that. Normally you would define a miracle as kind of the suspension of the natural order of things.

That's how we talk about a miracle. The suspension of what is normal. Normally you step out of boat into the water, you sink. But Jesus walked on the water, a suspension of that, it's a miracle. Even if you take away that suspension of what is normal that we normally call a miracle, the world is still quite miraculous in its natural orders and process.

The things that we consider normal are actually very extraordinary if we stop and think about it. And so take Jesus, he put mud on a blind man's eye and the guy was able to see, it's a miracle. And we easily see that miracle, but we were harder to come around to think about the miracle that any of us actually see.

That we have these balls in our faces that take in light. And then we have, in there there's a dome that bends the light so that it can focus. And then each ball in our face that takes in light has a light regulator, we call it a pupil.

So that not too much light gets in that we can't see anything and not too little light gets in that we can't see anything either. And that as the light at the right amount enters into our eyes, as it travels inward it is converted in these special cells converted into electric signals that speed along to this computer we have in our heads, our brains, and converts that light that is coming in converts it into an image.

And all of a sudden you can see your little toddler with ice cream all over his face and it's cute and you love it, right? It's amazing that we can even see. But where's that ice cream come from? That's also a long story, that's also kind of miraculous if you stop to think about it.

It involves light from the nearest flaming ball of gas in the sky, we call it the sun. And that light feeds grass out in the field in combination with some magic stuff in the dirt in combination with some water that also falls at irregular intervals.

And then that grows the grass and a large beast comes along and eats that grass and through his four stomachs he converts that into milk which you get by climbing underneath that beast and squeezing it and then you take that milk and you shake it really hard and add some sugar and it also grows from the ground, sweetens everything it touches and then you freeze it and then voila.

Ice cream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream. It's a really miraculous process if we think about it. This world that we live in, it really is an enchanted magical world so to speak. A lot of young people like to read fantasy literature.

The best fantasy literature, fantasy books will lead you to believe and help you to see that we really live in a fantastical world of our own. You see, we live in a world made of words. Yes, the rocks, the lakes, the trees, the pastures, the oceans, the canyons, all of it's made of words.

God spoke it into existence. God said, let there be light and there was light. God said, let there be every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth and there were spiders. Everything, God spoke it, it's made of words, of speech.

If God stops speaking, it stops existing. Everything is upheld by the word of his power. In other words, you don't live in the world that the materialist and the Darwinist insist that you live in. You live in God's world and it is wonderful.

And even the normal and the natural processes are miraculous in their own way. Further, we live in a world of spirits. We see it in verse 12. And the diseases left them and the evil spirits went out of them.

Spiritual Warfare, Exorcism, and the Difference Between Magic and Miracles

Here in the West, we tend to downplay the spirit world. We have a pretty good understanding of things of this world that we see. And so the other people, birds, trees, things that you can lay your eyes on, we understand that.

We also have a fairly good understanding or conception of otherworldly that we can't see. That the fact that, you know, there's heaven, there's hell, there's angels in heaven, God exists. We have a good understanding of these things.

Often we misunderstand the this world that we can't see. The realm of angels and demons and evil spirits and the Holy Spirit. But the Bible teaches the reality of these things too. Demons are real. We see this in the scripture.

We see that the evil spirits left them. We see these exorcists come and there's a kind of power encounter. For example, the old Greek and Roman gods that you read about, we see here in this passage later with the worship of Diana, the Greek name.

Artemis is the Roman name for the same goddess. The old Greek and Roman gods, they weren't make-believe. These were real demons that people worshiped. Had some power on the earth. They were later relegated to the realm of mythology only because Christ conquered them and vanquished them.

One thing you'll notice is that as Christianity wanes in the West, we are seeing a resurgence of the old gods. Witchcraft and outright paganism are on the rise here in America. And I believe there's a connection between the sexual deviancy of the pride movement, the bodily mutilation of the trans movement.

There's a connection with that and overt demonic activity. This is the world we live in. It's the world the Ephesians lived in too. Ephesus was a city of those who practiced magic and sorcery. It was a place of worshiping the demon goddess Diana or Artemis.

And as such, it was set up for this power encounter between the Lord Jesus and evil spirits. Let's read verses 13 through 20. God's word says, then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists took it upon themselves to call the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, we exorcise you by the Jesus whom Paul preaches.

Also, there were seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest who did so. And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus I know and Paul I know, but who are you? Then the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, overpowered them and prevailed against them so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded.

This became known both to all Jews and Greeks dwelling in Ephesus and fear fell on them all. And the name of the Lord Jesus was magnified. And many who had believed came confessing and telling their deeds.

Also many of those who had practiced magic brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all. And they counted up the value of them and it totaled 50 ,000 pieces of silver. So the word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed.

Having seen evil spirits cast out by the name of Jesus, these itinerant Jewish exorcists, they tried to use the name of the Lord as a means to try to do the same. They tried to harness this power that they've seen, but the spirit answers, Jesus I know, Paul I know, but who in the world are you?

You see these men, they were imitating the method of Paul, but without his power, which was the power of the spirit in the name of Christ. And this gets to the heart of the difference between miracles and magic.

What we might call black magic or dark arts. You see, the main difference is the personage behind the acts, God or evil spirits, spirit and dwelt believers or pagans. And another difference would be that the dark magic is an attempt to manipulate matter and manipulate power, especially using words and incantations.

See these exorcists, they tried to manipulate the name of the Lord and use it as a charm. And those who practice this sort of black magic are trying to harness and manipulate power that is outside of themselves and then try to bend it and bend the world to their own desires.

Whereas Jesus, he had the power within himself and he used it rightly to restore and to rightly order things in the world. You see magic as practiced here by the Ephesians, magic is humans attempting to act through spirits.

Miracles are God who's spirit acting and often through humans. Magic is humans attempting to control spirits. Here's the thing, this side of glory, we don't do that. We will judge angels one day, but we don't yet.

Therefore this black magic and the occult is the sin of Adam recapitulated. It's grasping for the fruit too soon and it's disastrous. You see, we're not to command the spirits or try to manipulate them.

Rather we pray and Christ commands and God works and he does so according to his own pleasure. We cannot manipulate it. And so in this story, what we see is that instead of the exorcist casting out the demon, the man with the demon cast out the exorcist and they flee and run away naked.

Their attempt at magic fails. And what happens is many of the Greeks and the Jews, they heard about this and fear fell on them. And verse 17 tells us that the name of the Lord Jesus was magnified and evil spirits went out of some people at the sight of Paul's sweat rags.

But these professional exorcists, demon caster outers, they failed and they fled naked and wounded. Jesus won this power encounter and he was magnified. And this led to many people believing, they were coming to confess their sins.

Many of them had practiced magic such that they brought their books of incantations and formulas that they had used to manipulate spirits and they burned those books. The worth of these books totaled 50 ,000 days wages.

Piece of silver was a day's wage. Total 50 ,000 days wages. If you take it kind of an average salary today and you do the calculations, they burned about $10 million worth of books that day. And so one thing we see here is that repentance is often costly.

Another thing we see here is the surpassing value of knowing Christ. That Christ is greater value than the 50 ,000 pieces of silver. Christ was greater value than the material of the books and the knowledge that were represented in those books and Christ was of greater value than the $10 million worth of knowledge.

Think about the parable of the hidden treasure in the field. Man, Jesus told this parable, man sold everything he had to go buy this field because there's treasure hidden in it. Treasure was worth more than what he gave up to get the field.

And what they gave up was worth more than the 50 ,000 pieces of silver. Whatever you have, Jesus is of more value than that. Lay it at the feet of Jesus. He is of greater satisfaction to you. He is of greater value to you.

And if there is anything that is incompatible with following Christ as we're gonna see this was, if there's anything incompatible with following Christ, lay it down. If there's anything that distracts you from following Christ, if there's anything that hinders you from following Christ, if there's anything you have that is weighing you down from following Christ, burn it, burn it all.

So the Ephesians did. Not only the cost of the books, but the cost of breaking with their past. See, these were magicians. And there was no way for them to be a Christian following Christ and also practice this dark magic, this sorcery.

Those two things were incompatible. It's called syncretism when you try to mix Christianity with native religion, such that the two are intertwined. That syncretism is easy to spot, especially when you're dealing with animistic religions.

Somebody in a tribe comes to faith. It's like, no, you can't offer a sacrifice to the fertility goddess in church. It's easy to spot that kind of syncretism. But what about in our context? Where we've been a culture that has been Christianized and now that's waning.

You see, we have to be on guard against a different type of syncretism. We have to be on guard against syncretism with apostasies and heresies and errors that were birthed in this Christian order and have gone astray.

But they were birthed in this Christian order such that they might even have a veneer of Christianity to them that are ultimately disastrous. Things like feminism or socialism come to mind. A good bit of what goes by the name of theistic evolution is just syncretism with Darwinism.

We have to set fire to everything that raises its hands against the Lord's anointed, against the Lord's Messiah and burn it all because Christ is more valuable. And what was the result when the Ephesians did this?

We see it in verse 20. So the word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed. Amen. May the word of the Lord grow mightily here and prevail. For time's sake, I'm just gonna reference verses 21 through 41.

The Riot in Ephesus and the Threat of the Gospel to Idolatrous Economies

If you read that passage, you see there's a riot in Ephesus. And the reason there's a riot is because you have the silversmiths there in Ephesus. They are making idols to Diana. Ephesus is a center of Diana worship.

And so you have people that are traveling there. You have people that are buying idols from there. And they sense that because of Paul's message that their craft, their trade, their business is threatened.

And so they stir up this mob and they go to the amphitheater there in Ephesus. And I mean, it'll seat, I wanna say like 15 or 20 ,000 people. We've been there and I remember sitting at the top of this amphitheater and I could hear people all the way down on the stage at the bottom talking.

There's talking there, no microphone or anything. That's the acoustics of this place. So you imagine 15 ,000 people there chanting, great is Diana of the Ephesians. This will be loud. That's the riot that was there.

I make two quick points in one application and we'll be done. From this story, what we see is that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. This riot was called because the silversmiths feared losing their money and they were willing to stir up riots for money.

They were willing for people to give their souls to a demon for money. They were willing for their land and their people to be kept in bondage for money. It was not that money is evil unto itself. It's not, it's a tool.

It can be used for much good. But greed and the love of money is demonic. That's the first point. Second point is that the gospel will necessarily upset economies when those economies are built on rebellion against God.

You see, Ephesus was the center of Diana worship and as such, the economy depended on Diana worship. It depended on the making and selling of idols and people believing and trusting and needing those idols in order to worship, in order to be in good standing.

It depended upon worshipers making pilgrimages from other places to Ephesus. And they would need places to stay and they'd need places to eat. Their economy was built on this false worship. And Paul's gospel, which emptied Diana of her power and turned away many people from her worship, threatened this economy.

And you know, when one's pocketbook is threatened, they react hard. Can you think of any application to our day? Is there any practice that if overturned by the gospel, would have substantial economic repercussions for our society to deal with?

There are probably many we could point to. I think the most obvious one is abortion. Our economy in many ways is built upon the blood of 60 million babies. Because our economy is designed for women to be in the workforce in the same ways as men, as the norm.

And this drives production up, drives labor prices down, which couldn't happen if those ladies were at home nursing those babies that they aborted. So if we are, by God's grace, successful in abolishing abortion in our land, it's going to have significant impact on our economy.

And we're gonna have to reevaluate a lot of things to get in line with how God has ordered the world. And I can assure you, the demons react hard. And so we need to be ready. Last thing, I wanna point out one thing from verse 21.

Having been to the ends of the earth, so to speak, the apostles having been witnesses to Jesus in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth, and the Holy Spirit having fallen in Jerusalem and in Samaria and on the Gentiles, and now in chapter 19 to the dispersion, Paul must now travel back to Jerusalem.

He's bringing it full circle. But notice what verse 21 also says. After I have been there, I must also see Rome. He must also see Rome, for the kingdom must advance and keep advancing, and it will. The kingdom of Christ is the stone that Daniel spoke about in Daniel chapter two, that grows into a mountain and fills the whole earth.

And no earthly opponents nor evil spirits can stand in the way of the Lord, nor can they stand in the way of the church, empowered by the Holy Spirit for worldwide mission. Let's pray together. Our Father in heaven, we come to you now asking that your spirit that indwells us would empower us for mission here in Traverse Grass and Northern Greenville County and the state of South Carolina.

Lord, I pray that you would, by your grace, empower us to speak well and speak often of our Lord Jesus Christ, that others would hear and hearing they would believe. Lord, I thank you for our partnership with international missionaries through the IMB that are taking that good news to the ends of the earth.

I pray that you would bless their efforts and that you would exalt the name of Christ so that the nations would be glad in him. We ask all of this in the name of Jesus, amen.