Lord of Ephesus, Lord of All

March 18, 2001
Rev. Steve Schlissel

Before we look at this text let me just give you the briefest review.  We looked in Acts 15 which is the pivot, the core, the center of the book of Acts. That is where the Gentiles are given the green light to come into the kingdom of God, into the covenant without needing to become Jews. That is the key and that is what all the action is leading up to in the book. In chapter 8 we are meeting Paul who is going to be running in this relay race meeting up with Peter to take the baton from Peter and go to the Gentiles. Now Peter will keep running and he will go to the Jews. But Paul appears and he is running behind Peter and he catches up and he takes the baton in chapter 15. There it is handed to him, that he can now freely run the race to the Gentiles and bring the message of salvation. He started bringing that message in chapters 13 and 14 but it was challenged and in chapter 15 it was settled that his message was in fact authentic. It was the message to go to the whole world that through Jesus Christ apart from the Jewish rituals and apart from the Jewish distinctives and practices a Gentile can be fully engrafted among the people of God. And it is in the 16th chapter that they go into Europe.  In the 17th chapter we see them in Thessalonica and Berea and Athens and in chapter 18 we find Paul’s work in Corinth, a very important center. And then in chapter 19 Paul makes it to Ephesus and the ministry is described in Ephesus. Now Ephesians is going to be the most profound perhaps in my judgement anyway, the deepest and clearest and most mature thinking to be found of Paul in the NT literature. And this is the book of Ephesians. And it is no accident that these people were prepared to receive it. Teachers learn while they teaching. And Paul I don’t think was an exception to this. And he spent three years there. And you get people who ask you questions and you get challenged and Paul was able also to grow and develop. So in a way you can say that in the book of Ephesians humanly speaking was not possible until he had spent that time in Ephesus. This by the way for those of you are interested, even though some say that it was a circular letter, and not really addressed to the church at Ephesus, we would hold that it was and that the references and allusions in the book of Ephesians certainly resonate well with the account that we read in chapters 18-20. So we are looking now in Paul’s moving on from Corinth into Ephesus. And in looking at this we noted first of all that there were two instances of John the Baptist’s disciples being brought up and into the church and seen as full members. The first was Apollos who was more carefully instructed in the way of Christ by Aquilla and Priscilla. And then we saw also the 12 disciples of John the Baptist at Ephesus who were given the Holy Spirit at the laying on of hands by the apostle Paul. And we interpreted this to mean that Jesus was incorporating John the Baptist into the kingdom fully so that all the rear was brought up. Remember that John went forward. And then Jesus got up to him and went past him and now there were plenty of John’s disciples all around. He had very serious followers. And now Jesus has not forgotten them and we are given this little scene in chapter 19 for us to know that Jesus has now thrown back the rope as it were and covered them and pulled them all up into the church. And they are given the Holy Spirit. The last instance of a miraculous manifestation of the giving of the Holy Spirit in the book of Acts upon those who as it were converts. They were not actually fully converts in that sense.  They were half converts because they were in the covenant. They were addressed as believers. But the Holy Spirit had not been given. And this is now given to Paul to bring the last ones up, John the Baptist’s disciples. Just as it was given to Peter to be there when the Holy Spirit was given to the Jews, to the half Jews and to the Gentiles. So now the baton has been passed to Paul and the Holy Spirit is given to those who were in the beginning John’s disciples. So that is the first picture that we see here which is a rather artistic completion of John the Baptist’s work as his people are incorporated into the body of Christ fully. And we also noted that when you look at it that way you avoid the silly and prophetless questions that many people become obsessed with as they look at this verse and they ask, well do I have to speak in tongues when I believe. Or what about baptism issues and so on and so forth. These are quite beside the point when you look at it in a progressive way and see what it is that Christ is doing at Ephesus with the disciples of John. The second thing that we noted and we have already implied this, is that in this passage you see a marvelous authentication of Paul and his ministry. We have told you several times already about the parallels of the ministries of Peter as recorded in the book of Acts and the ministry of Paul.  So Paul and Peter in many senses in terms of their deeds, mirror one another.  Miraculous escapes from prison.  Miraculous healings of lame people. Raising someone from the dead.  And power over demons and so forth.  Even to the point where Peter’s shadow would fall upon people and extraordinary healings too place. So also we read in Acts 19 that Paul’s handkerchiefs, aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them. I will just note parenthetically that this is why you have to interpret these passages fully in terms of the context and the whole theme of scripture or you will become like one of those maniacs from Texas who offer the special prayer cloths that touch their shoes and were used to shine their holy shoes and were dipped in the Jordan or maybe the Rio Grande or whatever. And they will mail them to you for a faith and love offering and then of course you get that in the mail and nothing happens except your poorer for it. That is not what we are given this text for, to see how you can do magic tricks.  We are given the text to see how Christ was authenticating this man who would bring a message that would turn the world upside down.  He is God’s authorized agent and what we are looking at here is the power and the vivid signs and seals as it were to his apostolic authority and ministry. That Christ was with him. This is not a message about us doing miracles. This is a message about Jesus making sure that his message is listened to and that people have no excuse as this massively new thing is going to occur to the Gentiles.  The Gentiles are hearing this message and they see it authenticated.  So we have the general idea.  Now Jesus incorporating John. Jesus authenticating Paul. And now Jesus antagonizing Artemus is what we will get to today. But of course this is to misstate the case since there really is no Artemis.  Most scholars think that it was a meteor that fell in this area which was regarded as somehow related to Artemis who is related to Diana who is related to other deities of the pantheon of the pagans.  And this particular one in Ephesus had many distinguishing characteristics. But she didn’t exist.  There was no such thing as Artemis. Paul tells us that there are no idols. People think of them as real. But they have no reality.  So what we really have here is Jesus antagonizing the followers of Artemis. People who were following nothing. And when you read this and you get that this was the situation at Ephesus you can see Ephesians 2 come into your mind. You were bound in craziness following the spirits who deceiving people in this world.  In chapter 4 you can get the idea of Paul saying that surely you heard the truth as it is in Jesus.  And you turned from darkness to light. And you have become sons of light. And you must no longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. This is as if Paul is reading this piece on Artimus that I gave you and giving his analysis of it. This is total narishkite. It is foolishness. It is the evidence of a darkened and dead mind and a dead heart. And yet the people were bound to it. And Paul came in through the gospel of Christ and set them free. Now the last incident in his authentication was concerning something that he really didn’t have anything to do with directly. It was the seven sons of Sceva who were Jews and thought that they would capitalize on the Jesus name.  They had just found a new name that they could cast demons out with and they say, in the name of Jesus be gone. And the evil spirit says, I know Jesus and I know Paul. But who are you?  And they hand the seven sons a beating that made them run out bleeding and naked. And then we know that this had a profound impact on the area as the difference between Jesus and all these other names that were used is made clear to the people in Ephesus. Another note that I want to make before we get into these texts and applications is concerning Paul’s travel plans. I want you to please look down to verse 21. “Now after all this happened Paul decided to go to Jerusalem passing Macedonia and Achaia.  After I have been there I must visit Rome also.”  So Luke is dropping that hint again that we are moving toward Rome in this book. We got as far as Ephesus. But we looking to get to Rome. That is the goal of the book of Acts to get us from Jerusalem to Rome. We are following the progress.  How the gospel got there and was established there by the apostle whom God in Christ had just authenticated. And so he says, I am thinking about going to Rome. And we are going to follow the way he got there. Something like the Israelites getting to Egypt. It wasn’t direct. It was quite complex. And that is the rest of the book. “And he sent 2 of his helpers, Timothy and Erastus to Macedonia while stayed in the province of Asia a little longer.” And what follows is a description of what happened while Paul was still there. This is the last incident before we see him move on himself to Macedonia and to Greece. Now in these travel plans in a reference to them would be in chapter 24:17 of Acts where it says as he is giving his testimony before Felix.  “After an absence of several years I came to Jerusalem to bring my people gifts for the poor and to present offerings.” This is the time that he is talking about now. I am only telling you this not for some profound theological, moral or character building reason. But so that you have a sense of what is going on in these pages. The text that we read in Acts 19 doesn’t say why Paul decided to go to Jerusalem and why he was planning to end up in Rome and why he was leaving at this time. Why was he going to Macedonia and Achaia?  He was going there to get money.  He was going there to get money to bring to the saints in Jerusalem. He was collecting an offering. This offering is referenced in other parts of the NT. I just want you to see how alive and pulsing this book is. When you look at this book and you see other texts from the NT you see the story unfolding here. So you have to compare scripture with scripture. When you go to 24:17 he says that he went ahead to Jerusalem. But he had to get the money to bring to Jerusalem because the apostles said, remember the poor here. You can go preach to the Gentiles, but remember that we are suffering here and are being persecuted by our brothers and we need help. Paul said, that is the very thing I was eager to do.  Galatians 2, to bring the money. There are sections of these letters that are devoted to these offerings. There are people’s names that are given to us that are associated with these offerings.  These offerings are not incidental to the drama and the movement of NT apostles and not separate from understanding the epistles. In other words you cannot understand the epistles of the apostles without these offerings.  So for example in 1 Corinthians 16 since 1 Corinthians is written from Ephesus and he says, “Now about the collection for God’s people, do what I told the Galatian churches to do, on the first day of every week each one of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with his income. Saving it up so that when I come no collection will have to be made. Then when I arrive I will give letters of introduction to the men you approve and send them with your gift to Jerusalem. If it seems advisable for me to go also they will accompany me.” We are pointing this out because if you get stuff like this it will deliver you half way free from the bondage of versifiers who will go to 1 Corinthians 16, take the verse and say, this is the will for you. And separate it from the actual reality, the history that lay behind it. Now you have to get your lessons from God from the whole history, not from isolating verses from the context. So Paul is writing to the Corinthians, get the money ready. I am coming here and I want the cash and you do your best to give it to me. Then when he is on his way to get it in Corinth and he is in Macedonia which it says in 2 Corinthians.  And on his way to the Corinthians from Macedonia he writes chapters 8 and 9 of 2 Corinthians which are all about this offering.  That is what those sections are about.  “Now brothers we want you to know about the grace God has given the Macedonian churches.” They had given a lot of money out of poverty for the saints in Jerusalem. And guess what?  I want you to do the same.  Your money is going to be a real acid test of your commitment to Christ every time this way. If it is not there neither is your commitment. Now it is true that you can give a lot of money and not be committed. But it is not true that you can’t give money, that you can withhold and still be called committed. People who love Christ love to give money to his cause and love to give money to the people of God who need it. It is not something that they have to have their arms twisted. They just need to be reminded once in a while of the blessing of this. In 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 you have an extended set of reasons for being generous. Forget the tithe. People who don’t tithe are really risking a severe judgment from God because you are stealing from him. This is not dealing with the tithe merely. This is dealing with caring for Christians who have less out of your abundance. Paul says these Macedonians didn’t have a lot. Out of their poverty, they were like the widow who gave out of her poverty. And they made sure that the needs of the saints in Jerusalem were cared for. And I want you Corinthians to match them. This is very clear mundane Christianity. Your money shows your faith. You can tell your Christian commitment by your checkbook. Or your credit card statement.  And in Romans 15 to complete just these historical notes and these connections within the letters and the Acts. As Paul writes Romans from Corinth or Cenchrea he says, “This is why I have often been hindered from coming to you” but now that there is no more place for me to work in these regions and since I have been longing for many years to see you I plan to do so when I go to Spain. I hope to visit you while passing through and to have you assist me on my journey after I have enjoyed your company for a while.  Now however I am on my way to Jerusalem in the service of the saints there.” That is this trip that Paul is speaking about in Acts 19 that he then takes after the description given of the riot at Ephesus.  Paul starts to move to get to Jerusalem to give them the money. You read about this in several letters. This is a big important journey that he is thinking of going on. And then he tells these saints in Rome, Macedonia and Achaia were pleased to make a contribution for the poor among the saints in Jerusalem.  They were pleased to do it and indeed they owe it to them. “For if the Gentiles have shared in the Jew’s spiritual blessing they owe it to the Jews to share with them their material blessings. So after I have completed this task and have made sure that they have received this fruit, I will go to Spain and visit you on the way.” I hope this is not too boring for you. I find it somewhat invigorating to get above the pages for a moment and see the movement within the texts and to see how they are a weaving by God of history with a doctrine in personalities and in real events. Now we go back to chapter 19.  And we want to see what happened after the beating that this evil spirit gave to these seven frauds. 

Verse 17, “When this became known to the Jews and Greeks living in Ephesus they were all seized with fear and the name of the Lord Jesus was held in high honor.” They knew at that point that the name of Jesus was above every name. That it was not like the name of their local deities. These people were given faith and they recognized that they are dealing here with something different. The antithesis is coming to Ephesus. And it is coming strong.  Many of those who believed now came and openly confessed their evil deeds. A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls the total came to 50000 drachmas.  Now a drachma is approximately a day’s wages for a worker.  So you have 50000 days wages.  Or 50000 men, their pay for a day.  Which means that it was a lot of money that they had spent and invested in this nothingness. And they realized now when they saw what Christ could do exclusively that they held his name in high regard and they backed it up by action. They said, if in fact Christ is so unique and his way is the only way, then what are we doing messing around with this stuff, these incantations and these formulae and these methods that really are nothing?  So to burn them is to only give them their just deserts.  That is what they are meant for. They profit us nothing. And so the antithesis arises because this is going to set in motion a series of events.  “In this way the word of the widely and grew in power.” Here is Luke’s recurring phrase telling us how Christ is managing history and the affairs of his church.  God had done something now and the word spread. And the word is going out and people are becoming Christians. These people started to act on their new beliefs and acting on conviction brought serious opposition. You can look at this way. When the church acts the culture reacts. You can have an action and equal and opposite reaction in unbelief. And now these people burn their scrolls and say, we wash our hands of these pagan ways. And well they had a riot. This church is supported on the antithesis. When the church blurs it, God brings it back.  When our first parents sinned God said in bringing about the promise of salvation he said, I will put hostility between the serpent and the woman. That hostility is the antithesis between the line that is being saved and the line that is rejected. And so there is hostility and then the promise.  And I will crush the serpent’s head.  If there is no antithesis we are caught up with the world and we are indistinguishable from it. If we are indistinguishable from the world then we are nothing. And so God builds his church on the antithesis.  If you can erase the antithesis you erase the church. We are no different from anybody else. So when the church starts to blur it in history as we have done for 150 years, eradicating the differences in worldview between the church and the world, God is going to bring about the antithesis.  He has to because of his program to build a church. You cannot build a church without that hostility between the church and the world. And we see in Ephesus how this hostility played out. I just want to take a quick look at it in verses 23-41 because Ephesus is going to be put on a firm, firm footing. And Jesus will make the antithesis clear.  Luke’s account shows the unbelievers there to be utter fools in this narrative.  First of all verses 23-26. “About that time there arose a great disturbance about the Way.” That is what we are.  We are on the Way.  “A silversmith named Demetrius who made silver shrines of Artemus brought in no little business for the craftsmen. He called them together along with the workmen and related trades and said, you men know that we receive a good income from this business.  And you see and hear how this fellow Paul has convinced and lead astray large numbers of people here in Ephesus and in practically the whole province of Asia. He says that manmade gods are no gods at all.”  Imagine that.  Now we can see from this that the core issue was money.  That was really prompted the whole riot. And it comes out right at the beginning as Alexander makes his speech. What is he concerned about?  Religious differences? He is concerned about the cash man.  They had been eating very well. Their tables have the latest dinnerware. They have beautiful and wonderful homes and it is all because they are making a mint by selling idols and related items at the temple of Artemus which was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.  It was a magnificent although pagan. But magnificent to behold.  127 ivory columns. And people would come from all over to see this.  They would go on vacation there. They had a month’s festival there each year where people would not work. They would just hang out and buy things.  And then they would take their stack of souvenir’s home.  So these guys were in this business and they were making a lot of money. But then it says, “There is danger not only that our trade will lose its good name but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemus will be discredited and the goddess herself who is worshipped throughout the province Asia and throughout the world will be robbed of her divine majesty.”  We will call this the coordinate issue.  The core issue was playing on prejudices of the people.  And then we will see that it was sloganeering.  Now when they heard this they were furious and began shouting, Great is Artemus of the Ephesians.  Great is Artemus of the Ephesians.  Soon the whole city was in an uproar. They started hearing people chant this thing and they said, what is this.  You have finally 500 people saying, great is Artemus of the Ephesians.  It starts to reverberate and people say, this is fun and they start running in and they don’t even know what they are doing. These crowds and mobs that we told you about in the book of Acts, you watch how they act as a man with a head and body and feet.  And they start to behave as if they are individuals. Now everybody is shouting. The whole city is in an uproar.  The people seized Gaius and Aristarchus, Paul’s traveling companions from Macedonia and rushed as one man into the theater.  Remember what I told you about this theater?  It was bigger than Madison Square Garden. It held more than 25,000 people. So you had quite a few thousand people that needed to be accommodated and they are rushing over there looking to do something. And so the third factor that we see here is the crowd behaving as a mob.  Now the confusion comes to a fever pitch and you can see how Luke is masterful at making them be foolish by their own deeds. He is just reporting what they did. The assembly was in confusion. Some were shouting one thing and some another.  Chaos.  It says some were shouting one thing and some another and most of the people did not even know why they were there. A mob mentality, just doing what comes naturally.  Seeing what other people do. Monkey see, monkey do.  “Now the Jews pushed Alexander to the front and some of the crowd shouted instructions to him.” You have to speculate as to what was going on here.  But it seems as if the best speculation is that Alexander was pushed to the front on behalf of the Jews who would take an opportunity here to distinguish themselves from the Christians because we know that he is a Jew. We will find that in a moment. And so the idea was that this is going to make a lot of trouble. Lets send Alexander to be our spokesman.  Here is what you do Alexander.  Make sure that they know that the Jews who are faithful to Moses and not responsible for this. But these Jews who were getting Gentiles to love together Jesus, they are the ones who are responsible for it and so we will be distinguished from them and you can kill a few Christians and it will serve our purposes quite well. So they gave him instructions and he motioned for silence in order to make a defense before the people. But as soon as he said, brothers of Ephesus, “I am a Jew” he made his fatal speaking error. “When they realized that he was a Jew they all shouted in unison for about 2 hours, Great is Artemus of the Ephesians.”  I mean after all he didn’t worship Artemus. The Jews weren’t buying these trinkets or these idols. They were not going to the temple to make offerings. And so they said, you are no different from these Christians. We are pro-Artemus. And you can see how reasonable they were at this point in time. Their answer to everything was a slogan.  Great is Artemus of the Ephesians. And then the final part of this scene is the clerk. So you get it with the five C’s here. You have the core issue as revealed by Luke as money. The coordinate issue or playing on prejudices. The crowd taking over like madmen. And then the confusion that ensued. They didn’t even know why they were there. And Alexander being brought up forward and being rejected. And then the city clerk comes which is something like the mayor. And he quiets the crowd and said, “Men of Ephesus, doesn’t the world know that the city of Ephesus is the guardian of the temple of the great Artemus and her image which fell from heaven?” Here is that meteor that we speculate was the original source of this myth concerning Artemus in Ephesus.  Not the idol that you saw in the picture by the way.  Separate media.  “Therefore since these facts are undeniable you ought to be quiet and not to do anything rash. You have brought these men here though they have neither robbed temples nor blasphemed our goddess.  If then Demetrius and his fellow craftsmen have a grievance against anybody the courts are open and there are proconsuls. They can press charges.  If there is anything further that you want to bring up it must be settled in a legal assembly. As it is we are in danger of being charged with rioting because of today’s events. In that case we would not be able to account for this commotion since there is no reason for it.”  And there is very interesting extrabiblical evidence that Rome had some agitators at this time saying that these provinces are being given too much room and too much democracy. And so they were agitating for stamping down on democratic sort of gatherings. And now this guy knew it and he said, if they come and check this out and they see what you do with your democracy and how we don’t use the courts but rather we go crazy in public we are serious danger that Rome is going to put its heel on our neck and crush us. And then they said, boy, if we thought business was bad because of Paul, business can really get bad if Rome takes over everything. So after he had said this he dismissed the assembly and the clerk with his little speech brought deliverance for the Christians. You saw that Paul’s traveling companions from Macedonia were the ones who were brought into the theater. And Paul of course also wanted to appear before the crowd but the disciples forbade him. And even some of the officials of the province, friends of Paul, sent him a message begging him not to venture into the theater.  It was a dangerous place.  And so at least Gaius and Aristarchus had their lives in jeopardy. And then God delivered them.  He could have done one of those marvelous thunder claps that breaks your ears and brings you down to the ground in pain. He could have sent lightening and zapped a couple of Ephesians. He could have destroyed the temple of Artemus on the spot. But he had a little clerk stand up and say, “Men, what are you doing?  Everyone knows how great Artemus is. And don’t forget, the Romans are looking and they will kill us if we are not good. So go home and do it court if you like.” And they all went away and God used him to bring deliverance for the church that day.  It was very clear he was not a Christian.

Now let me move on from this scene and ask how these things relate to us today and how they apply.  The applications can be very vast. But I want to make just one little point and then give you some examples. That is what we see here is a collision of worldviews.  And Jesus directing this collision. It is worldviews in collision. One has Christ at the center with every reason to believe in him. The other has any number of things at the center, whether it is scrolls, magic, idolatry, what have you. And we have the same thing today.  We say, Great is the God of the Bible.  God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Jesus Christ his only son our Lord who died for us and rose again from the dead. The Holy Spirit who is gathering a church.  We say that we have reason to believe this. We have history to believe it and we have rational explanations for life as we know it. Great is the God of the Bible.  Today we live in a culture that says, great is man. Not the God of the Bible but man is great.  And we look at history and we see the product, the fruit of the thought that says that God is great and now we look at the fruit that says that man is great and we say, really, is he that great?  What have you got?  Kids who go to school with guns and pop each other every chance they get. They lose an argument and they kill each other?  What do you have?  Kids that pierce themselves with every sort of imaginable sort of piercing. Who cover every part of their body in tattoos in order to disfigure themselves and call it art.  What do you have?  Teen-aged suicide so that the kids are learning to kill themselves younger and younger?  What is the greatness that we have of man without God.  All who hate me love death. But you cannot get an argument going. You can only get a slogan.  We say, great is God’s law. They say, great is man’s law. We say, look at what God’s law has done. Wherever it has been honored and obeyed in all of history, how God has blessed that people whose God is the Lord and who abide in his Word. It has been said that in no Protestant nation has there been a famine. An interesting little tidbit if it is so. It would involve a number of providences in order for that to be so. But certainly including a reverence for God’s law and his ways.  But we hear, great is man’s law. And what is the product?  This is the product.  Every time something happens on earth there is clamoring for another law.  You will not read of anything where there is a tragedy and there is not a cry for more laws.  This is the instinct, the method to deal with everything as another law and another law. And more gun control laws.  How do those gun control laws keep kids from killing other kids?  The so now who can keep up with the law?  Who can keep up with the tax code? We say great is our creator.  We are told, great is evolution.  We ask these people to look at their presuppositions. And to show us any mutation that has resulted in greater complexity that is beneficent, which is profitable. Show us an instance of a mutation that has been healthy and productive rather than destructive to the organism. And they say, we won’t discuss it. Great is evolution. And if anyone dares to say so much as something like intelligent design they are hounded and persecuted with a chorus that is reminiscent of this chapter as if it was just lifted out of the Bible. Instead of saying, great is Artemus of the Ephesians they are saying, great is Darwin and great is evolution. And this has been chanted so loud and so long that you have an entire culture that simply takes it as a given. That it is the presupposition that evolution is true and anything that even smells of any being behind the creation is evil.  Philip Johnson who is an advocate of this intelligent design idea said, “Once upon a time the story that we are told today says, the world was ruled by cruel religious oppressors called Christians.  Similar to the wicked step mother and step sisters in Cinderella who tried to prevent people from thinking and from marrying their true love.  Liberation from this oppression came via Darwin who taught us that our real creator was a natural process that leaves human reason free to make up new rules whenever we want.  Most modernist intellectuals interpret the story that way and of course a liberated Cinderella is not likely to give the wicked step mother another chance to enslave her.” And that is why you see Christianity faring so poorly against all other religions in the public square. They talk about freedom of religion. But they only will tolerate Islam. They will tolerate Judaism. They will tolerate all kinds of other religions, paganism. But Christianity, they hate Christianity and they regard it as the fundamental core evil from which all other evils flow.  Now what happens when you try to have a discussion about this?  Well listen, can you show me the evidence for evolution?  Can you show me a couple of missing links?  Are they still missing?  How long it is that you say you have been looking for this now?  That you are certain that these transitional forms were here?  How many species as we know them can we find evolving into different species?  Great is Darwin of the evolutionists!.  Slogans, chanted again and again and again.  We say, great is the gift of life.  God gives life and it is not an attribute as Rushdoony said so beautifully. It is a gift. God gives life. They say, great is the quality of life. The quality of life is what makes life wonderful. Not that life itself is a gift from God.  And so abortion deals with slogans. Euthanasia deals with slogans.  Dying with dignity. If it fits on a bumper sticker it is a good candidate for an argument. If it doesn’t you can’t bring it up.  That is why in debating abortionists they will not allow you to use photographs to show the baby in utero or to show the product of abortion. Why?  Because once they do that everyone looking will know that abortion takes a human life. There will be no argument left. So they say, we can only use our slogans. Pro-choice. But what about the babies? There is no pro-choice. You are against choice. Slogans, slogans, slogans.  We say, great is purity in this generation.  We are told, great is sin. It is freedom, sexual exploration.  We say, great are children. They say, great is birth control.  Slogan, every child a wanted child. But lets discuss this. First of all I am very much in favor of birth control and I wished that all unbelievers would use it and that it would never fail. But for Christians we say, great are children. They are gifts from God, our heritage and our portion.  To pick up the baton to bring it to the next generation. But you see that we cannot deal with this rationally. It is only sloganeering. We say, great is covenant education. They say, great is statist education. And they get worse every administration. From Reagan’s promise to eliminate the department of education, when that didn’t happen, since then we see an increase in spending, increase in spending.  Downturn in scores, downturn in scores and what is their answer?  More money, more power, national standards. More statist control.  More taking away of freedom.  If we can only take your freedom we will give you the results.  Slogans, never evidence. Slogans, you cannot engage them on the evidence. We say, great is the family, great is the church.  Then great will be the state. We are told, no, first great is the state who will then define the church and define the family. It is already to define the family out of existence saying that homosexuals are families. And now we have fools lined up to latch onto the government breast as churches to make themselves dependent upon them in the so called faith based initiatives or FBI for short.  So that the church becomes utterly dependent on the state and it only takes the wave of a hand to either put them out of existence or thoroughly neutralize their message. Thank God that there is opposition to it from both sides and it probably won’t get in any place in any form as it is being proposed now. The point is that it is increasingly clear that there is no reasonable possibility to debate in our day. We are dealing with situations and I think that all of us have come to feel it when we talk our co-workers. When we talk to somebody we meet on the street.  You try to bring them the message of Christ and you try to bring them the position that the God of the Bible is the true God. That God’s law is the best way to live, that our creator is God and that he gives life and that to live a life of purity is an advantage and not a defect.  And that children are wonderful and that covenant education is wonderful. And what we are told is slogans. What about socialization?  Now of course we all do. I would like to tell you about socialization.  I am about to tell you that our children being home schooled are able to find adult models in their siblings and their friends.  Have you noticed that my children are more comfortable talking to adults and very, very loving toward other children?  Yes, that is all well and good, but socialization is important too. Now when that happens to you I am just going to beg you to do one thing.  Just yell, Great is Artemus of the Ephesians.  What are you doing? Well I am engaging in the same quality of dialogue as you.  We just don’t seem to be able to get to any point where we can begin a discussion.  All you do is to throw slogans at me instead of looking at any evidence. And why is this? Because as Herbert Schlossburg noted in his book, “Idols for Destruction” quoting Marshall Mcleuen saying that he was right in saying that environments tend not to be noticed. “We see many of their explicit contents but the environments themselves are imperceptible.”  And Os Guiness put it this way.  “We do not see the environment” and listen carefully, “We do not see the environment because we see with it.” We use the environment to see. We don’t see it because we are using it to see.  It is what enables us to see. It is what colors what we see.  It is out glasses.  These presuppositions.  That means that we are influenced says Schlossberg, by ideas we do not notice and therefore are not aware of their effects on us. Or if we see the effect we find it difficult to discover the cause.  We see with the media. That is why they are called media.  It comes between us the and the world. Somebody wrote and article recently and I was very happy to see the title, “It is the Media, Stupid.” The media through which we gaze upon the world informs our worldview. And particularly and I am going to devote the rest of our time together today to the television and covenant education as opposed to government education. These create, these are the environment for us. It is like the air that we breathe.  We don’t think about it often. We just breathe it. For a fish it is water. For us it is the message in the media that gives us the contents and the details that shape and inform our worldview. In the case of the Ephesians, when they burned those books they were rejecting the way that they had been looking at the world. They had been looking at the world through those books, thinking that through those books they would have a power to control the world. So those books became the medium for interacting with the outside world and the forces out there. They said, we need these books standing between us and the weather. We need these books standing between us and a relationship. Just like people go today to somebody who is going to tell them whether this guy they just met is the right one. That person is called a medium. They stand between you and the world. And the other world, the nether world.  When they learned about Christ and his superiority they rejected their former way and embraced Christ. And that is why Paul would write to them later, “Surely you heard of him and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus.  Therefore I forbid you to live like the Gentiles who are bound in the futility of their thinking.”  You have to have Christ as the mediator now.  Christ is the medium who stands between you and the world. Who teaches you how to interpret the world.  Lets note perhaps not even parenthetically but as an idea that we should understand, that when they burned the books it was not a superstitious burning as if those books were intrinsically evil and to look at them was somehow going to degrade them. It was a rejection of a way of looking at the world. It was a rejection of a worldview.  There would be nothing intrinsically sinful about picking up one of those books and reading it critically and saying, this is the stupidest stuff I have ever heard. It is not that you become tainted by reading the book. You become tainted when you use the book to tell you how to relate to the world when it interprets things for you, when it governs your thinking.  This is important because it distinguishes us from fundamentalists who think that the evil is in the thing itself. And if you can only avoid touching that many evil things that somehow that will be righteousness. But it is actually an understanding in looking at things from God’s perspective so that you can interpret everything as God would have us interpret it that we find the deliverance and the salvation.  They have made a determination to see through light and not through darkness. Nothing would have been wrong with analyzing those scrolls that they burned especially in order to help other people to be delivered from them.

Now let me try to show you what happens when we have others inform our worldview, other media.  Particularly television and statist government education. Or what is called the public schools.  The first thing is, is that it is asking you to look at everything through this filter.  Now this next thing is that it is telling you what you are going to see.  If night after night after night after night you watch television you only see what they put in front of you. You are not seeing what is on one side or the other.  And most of all you are fulfilling John Lennon’s song, “Imagine there is no heaven and imagine there is no hell” because all that you watch on television tells you that there is nothing up here.  And you look up and you say, you are right, there is nothing up here. And it says, there is nothing down here. And you look down and you say, you are right, there is nothing down there. You can only see what is put in front of you. And the effect of this limiting worldview being fed this, hour after hour, day after day, week after week and month after month with the doses that we have is catastrophic.  Steve Wilkins wrote and article in which he said that he was terrified at the statistics that 98% of all American households have at least one television, 40% have three or more.  52%, that is half the children aged 5-17 have a TV in their bedroom.  25% of children aged 2-5 have a television in their bedroom.  70% of day care centers have televisions. You go into the dentist’s office and you see television.  It is professional baby sitter for America.  It is the companion of old age instead of the family.  66%, 2/3 of Americans watch TV while they eat dinner.  25% fall asleep at least 3 nights of the week watching TV. He gets scared thinking about that.  I can hear him now.  Oh ma.  The average amount of time the average US household has the television on per day is 7 hours and 12 minutes. If you take the time they spend on the job and the time they spend sleeping and factor that out they spend all their waking hours in front of the television with those blinders on.  Now what do you think happens when that becomes your view? What happens when you have patches over your eyes for a long time and you in darkness and then suddenly somebody brings you light, suddenly?  Ugh.  And that is what it was like for the Ephesians as the light came to them. They said, this hurts. But you know what, this is a good hurt because I now I see how nonsensical this other stuff was. Today a group of people simply cannot be faithful Christians and continue to look through television, continue to educate their children through modern statist schools because that is where the worldviews are shaped.  That is where you catch your worldviews. Your worldviews are given to you through what you are looking at which tells you, this is reality. This is important. Nothing else but what you see is going on in the world. This is your small little world.  Let me tell you what is going on.  Trust me.  Trust me, I have seen everything that happened in the world today and what I am telling you is the important stuff.  Trust me. This is a fundamental and vitally important thing for everyone of us to understand because it is the battle that takes place prior to the issues and prior to the arguments.  It is a battle for the environment through which the issues will be viewed. It is a battle for which pair of glasses we are going to have on. Once the glasses that distort are worn by a person all you will get is slogans.  They don’t want to take off those glasses and so they just give you the regurgitation of whatever it is they were taught in high school or college.  This is what started the trouble in Ephesus when people traded in the wrong way of seeing for the right way of seeing and the guys said, you know what, our money is in jeopardy.  Like them big money is at stake today in the wrong way.  In the educational institution that will do anything to keep those billions flowing to a non-productive and decadent and failed system. In the abortion industry, in the feminist industry.  In the homosexual industry. The way to begin to engage the battle today is in some senses easier than it was for the Ephesians.  You see what happened in Ephesus. We have the same stuff going on today. The big money is on the other side. Try to get a grant from any National Health Institute. Get a grant from any major university to study creation issues. Ask for a dime. Try to get money to teach the value of purity in schools, not simply as an option but as the only way to live. That is not where the money is. The money is someplace else. And that is why when we approach these things in the public square we are met such great hostility. And then they bring in these other philosophical issues in chants and slogans to bolster them up.  The coordinate issues. We see the crowds. The entire crowd that we face today has been indoctrinated into this worldview. The television has done it to them and the government schools have been successful. They don’t educate people except to indoctrinate them into a statist worldview and it has worked. It is a rare child in a government school who can think his way out of a paper bag. Confusion in the nation that we see.  What can we do about this? And here is the thing that makes us most culpable. Because the three things that I am going to suggest to you that ought to be done are three things that can be done. There is nothing keeping us from number one and that is to have strong Christian families.  There is no law against strong Christian families.  There is no law that says that a father cannot lead his children in devotions or teach them the word of God or bring them to church or spend time with them or love the mother. There is no law against these things. Let the pagans go to hell with their way of wrong thinking. But there is nothing stopping us from doing it right.  Nothing. There is no law against it. There are certain pressures and you need certain wisdom to walk between the raindrops on occasion. But it can be done. So lets be strong Christian families. I will just leave that for another time.  Number two is a negative thing which is even easier.  Shut off the television.  Don’t train the children to think that reality consists in ten minute intervals followed by a commercial followed by another ten minutes of stimulation, followed by a commercial.  We teach them to think in terms of structure. That is why you cannot engage children. That is why kids who come here from television households and I don’t mean in this church but in all churches, cannot sit through a sermon.  Why should they? They have never had to pay attention for more than a minute watching Sesame Street. It is scaled down so that you get the most bang for the buck.  Quick. Then they go to the next thing.  A, the letter A.  The letter A. And then they go on to the next thing. So their circuits are connected short attention span. And that is just one little Mickey Mouse part of it. You go the content of commercial television and you see it is what somebody called the devil’s pulpit. It is like opening up a sewer and just pouring the sewage into your house and saying well come on in. It won’t effect my children. Just keep it coming, keep it coming. And another thing is the inability to follow a story. There is a qualitative difference between a movie and a television show. A television show must manufacture. In a movie you can watch at your leisure and you can actually see a beginning, a middle and end. A story developing and you can critique the story and try to understand the story. Of course reading is even better.  But the point is that if you watch commercial television it builds a way of seeing into your world where slogans become everything.  You read about the way they advertise. This new book came out how they market to kids and how they segment teens into midriffs and mooks.  Those are the models that they are supposed to encourage the kids to buy by looking at these. You saw a number of years ago soft drinks actually used body parts to sell. Not even a statement that our soda was better tasting.  No such thing. Our soda is associated with a belly.  Or a hip. You see big billboards with a hip and a can of soda.  And they do this sort of thing more and more where there is no statement made regarding the quality of a product or its superiority.  It is simply associated with a body part.  This is the way it is marketed.  How could this possibly be?  Because you have a passive imbecilic population that has been taught and trained to absorb what is in a narrow tunnel. And just look for stimulation out there. What they don’t tell you is that there is a world of stimulation right outside that. It is called family, neighbors, good deeds and books and history. It is called work and projects and hobbies. None of these things count.  Everything is reduced to the what you see there and they give you the sun glasses through which to view it. But as I say there is nothing to prevent any Christian from shutting it off or at least controlling the amount that comes in. There is no law that says you must watch television. We do this voluntarily. And what I am suggesting to you is that this makes us part of the crowd.  The reason that there is no antithetical war in the US is because the Christians are part of the problem.  They are doing the same stuff that the others are doing. Their worldview is shaped by the same stuff.  They are sending their kids to the government school. And when a person goes to a Presbytery exam and says that he thinks that when elders send their children to statist schools should be bumped from office. It should be a requirement that elders provide a Christian education to their children, they don’t allow that man into the denomination. Now lets just turn to education for a moment because again here we have something that we are able to do. A. A. Hodge writing in the late 19th century concerning how the kingly office of Christ is compromised by Christians who advocate government schools. Now remember that statist schools and statist education was not uniform or accepted at this point. It was a controversy and being discussed. I want you to hear, I beg you to hear what this man said before the reality set in. Before the government took sole possession of education and said that it is our job. Listen to what this prophet said.  “It is capable of exact demonstration which is proof, that if every party in this state has the right to exclude from the public schools whatever he does not believe to be true,” religiously that is, “then he that believes most must give way to him that believes least and that he who believes least must give way to him that believes absolutely nothing no matter in how small a minority the atheists or agnostics may be.”  In other words the least common denominator must exclude religion. Now remember that this is before they had the grip that they have now. He is warning what would happen. “It is self evident that on this scheme if it consistently and persistently carried out in all parts of the country, the US’s system of popular education, that is educating the people, will be the most efficient and wide instrument for the propagation of atheism which the world has ever seen.”  Before it existed he said, just the fact that you will have government education in a land with different religions means that every religion must be shut out and only atheism may be taught.  Then he talks about the impartiality between positions of Jews and Mohammedans and Christians and so on.  “Philosophy, ethics, jurisprudence, political and social science can be conceived of and treated only from a theistic or from an atheistic point of view. You are either going to teach these things as if God says this about them or as if you don’t need God to understand them. “The proposal to treat them from a neutral point of view is ignorant and absurd. 
English common law is unintelligible if not read in the light of that religion in which it had its genesis.” You cannot understand English common law which is our heritage unless you understand Christianity which gave birth to English common law. The English language cannot be sympathetically understood or taught by a mind blind to the everywhere present current of religious thought and life which expresses itself through the terms.  In other words English itself is peppered with religious words. So when you say, good bye, it means God be with you. But you are not allowed to say good bye if you understood what it meant today. Take a look at geography.  You cannot name a city in California which has no connection to Christianity. You have St. Francis, the angel, St. Joseph, St. Bernard.  One saint after another and we are told that you cannot even learn geography.  How about Pennsylvania?  Bethlehem, Nazareth. So on and so forth.  That is what he is saying. How can you tell us that you are going to be religiously neutral in education because you cannot teach philosophy, ethics, jurisprudence, politics, science?  You cannot teach geography. “The history of Christendom, especially the history of the English speaking races and the philosophy of history in general will prove an utterly insoluble riddle to all who attempt to read it in any non-theistic religiously indifferent sense.”  Now what do you see today except that history is taught today in colleges campuses only from alternative viewpoints.  Only from a black perspective. Only from a feminist perspective and the oppressions of males. This is the only permissible way.  You cannot teach Shakespeare at some colleges because he was a misogynist they say.  “It is certain that throughout the entire range of the higher education, a position of entire indifferentism is an absolute possibility.” Let me go on and quote from him in another section.  “The prevalent superstition that men can be educated for good citizenship or for any other use under heaven without religion is as unscientific and unphilosophical as it is irreligious. It deliberately leaves out of view the most essential and controlling element of human character that man is constitutionally as religious and that is loyally or disloyally as he is rational. That morals are impossible when dissociated from the religious basis out of which they grow. That as a matter of fact human liberty and stable republican institutions in every practically successful scheme of universal education in all past history have originated in the active ministries of the Christian religion and in these alone.” In other words if it is going to work it has to be the church doing it where they are.  “This miserable superstition rests upon no facts of experience and on the contrary is maintained on purely theoretical grounds in opposition to all the lessons which the past history of our race furnishes us on the subject.” So you see today that math is taught from a subjective point of view because to teach that there are absolute right or wrong answers is oppressive to the individual who gets the wrong answer.  It is just like Romper Room. When we were growing up there was a do be and a don’t be.  The don’t be is gone.  This is in all areas of thought and life. The entire educational process has been stripped of religion and made completely subjective. So how do you get morals and how you they teach ethical behavior in school today?  Love yourself. You see it on the bus ads around here. Learn how to love yourself and you will solve all the problems not realizing that that is the problem. That because this guy loved himself more than he loved everybody else he went and popped everybody and it doesn’t happen that when you love yourself you love other people more. It is when you love other people more which is based in a religious principle. Or else why should I?  If it is survival of the fittest then I am going to be the one who survives by being the strongest and the most unconcerned with the effects on other people.  I will give you one more quote. “But more than all atheism taught in the schools cannot be counteracted by theism taught in the church.” Isn’t that what you hear?  It is all right if you send your kid to a neutral education.  Math is math no matter what.  2 + 2 is 4 and it doesn’t matter that they learn it in a public school because they come home and they learn about Jesus from you guys.  So there is no conflict. “Atheism cannot be taught in the schools and counteracted by theism taught in the church.” Theism and atheism cannot coalesce to make anything.  All truth in all spheres is organically one and vitally inseparable. That is why they used to call it a university because you learned to see things from one Christian perspective in all departments of life.  “It is impossible for different agencies independently to discuss and to inculcate the religious and the purely naturalistic sides of truth respectively. They cannot be separated. In some degree they must recognize each other and be taught together as they are experienced in their natural relations.” So either you are going to teach kids Christianly and how to look at atheism or you are going to teach them atheistically on how to look at Christianity. But you are not going to have an amalgamation.  That is why kids come home from school and disbelieve what their parents tell them.  That is why kids come home from school and don’t believe the Sunday School stories. That is why they watch television all day and are not convinced by what they hear from the pulpit. Because they are learning how to filter out in their rejection mechanisms what doesn’t fit their worldview. Listen to this statement and remember that it was uttered in 1886.  A. A. Hodge says, “I am as sure as I am of the fact of Christ’s reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education separated from religion as is now commonly proposed will prove the most appalling enginry for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief and of anti-social, nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political which this sin rent world has ever seen.” Before the fact. You put public schools that are not Christian and you will have a nihilistic state where they don’t know an ethic from a hole in the wall. So what happens when somebody gets popped at these schools? Send in the psycho babble counselors to affirm everybody else and lets love each other more.  Has it been working by the way? I don’t think so.  The battle of Ephesus was won by ordinary means, a mayor. God uses normal means.  Jeremiah says that the lessor officials told Jeremiah and Baruch to go hide before they went to the king with his message. And then later on it says that after the king wanted to kill Jeremiah they couldn’t find him because the Lord had hid him. When you put those two together the Lord had hid them by having somebody tell him, go hide. God uses normal means most of the time. God used a mayor. But today we cannot rely upon a mayor to come and save us. Certainly not in NYC. We cannot rely on political officials to come and save us because we won’t take the first step that the Ephesians did in honoring the antithesis. And that is rejecting the media of looking at the world in a way that is not compatible with Christ. We have not taken this step and therefore we don’t have a battle. The key is the television and the government schools are not means to an end. They are means to a means which informs all ends. If you get the means, the media, you are going to color everything on the other side. And that is why a television free household is manifestly and clearly different. A television disciplined household is manifestly and clearly different from those households where televisions reign supreme. You cannot serve both Christ and television. You cannot serve both Christ and government schools. You cannot. That is how you learn to see the world. And just as the Ephesians sought to use magic as a means only to discover that magic used them, so also TV and government schools make willing victims into tools.  We have no confrontation today because we churched Christians are for all intents and purposes on the world’s side. The church is on the world’s side because it has seen the world through the lens provided by the world. That is why John tells us, don’t love the world or anything in the world. Don’t use the world to interpret the world.  See the world through Christ’s eyes and not through the world’s eyes. The world is not going to tell you how bad it is. And yet the word of God is so honest that when you look at it it tells you how bad you are. It tells you how mixed your history is. What other book is like the Bible that tells us our own history honestly?  It starts with the thing that shapes our worldview and there is still time. The time is now but we have to start with the worldview shapers. Jesus is indeed Lord of Ephesus.  Jesus is indeed Lord of all. But he will not be seen in that high capacity if Jesus is displaced while we let others shape the worldview of ourselves and our children. If that is what you have been doing, repent, not simply for being sinful but for being a fool repent and turn away from folly and have your world informed by Christ.  Now when that happens does that mean that you cannot touch a television program because you will become wicked?  No, remember what we said about the books. It means that you will be in the judging position.  You will see it and be able to criticize. You can listen to music that may not be Christian and tell the use that it might have and the disuse and the danger. Not you have to run through the channels and say don’t touch me.  You will be in a position to use all things and to judge all things.  But you cannot get that way if what you are using is using you. So Jesus is Lord of Ephesus and Jesus is Lord of all. Lets make sure that he is Lord of our worldview and that the way we look at the world is shaped by him and that we may know how high and wide and deep is the love of Christ. And we may know this love that surpasses knowledge that we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Amen.

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