Clough Acts Lesson 41

Economic Effects of the Gospel – Acts 16:16-24

Regardless of what secular history books wish to say, one of the most important events in European history was the introduction of Christianity across the Aegean. It also shows once again, in spite of popular opinion, Christianity is not a western religion, just a religion of the western white man. It is an oriental religion and incidentally came into the west; it came into the west by divine guidance as we saw last time. Now in Acts 16 we continue with the impact that this gospel had. And over and over again we will study in Acts, from this point forward, how the Word of God affects the Gentile world. Now up until this point we’ve studied how the Word of God impacts against Jews. Now we’re going to see how it impacts against us, against our culture, against the culture in which most of us have been cut, and that is western Europe.

Now when we do this we want to notice as we go through incident by incident, and I’ll try to divide up from now on each Sunday morning, one incident after another of the gospel as it penetrates into the west and we’ll try to look at different aspects of how this gospel undermines paganism, humanism and all other forms of human viewpoint, how it just literally digs the foundation out from under it. Now one of the areas where this does, one of the things we have to look carefully at because all human viewpoint is colored this way, and if we look at life from the human viewpoint we have certain constants, that is, founded on negative volition , rebellion against God’s authoritative Word. That’s the spirit of human viewpoint. We always know that human viewpoint winds up eventually, though it may take some time for it to do so, it always winds up eventually in idolatry, that is, it selects one portion of the universe and makes this portion of the universe God.

But there’s another characteristic of human viewpoint that is prevalent, very prevalent in our day particularly in America. This seems to kind of rub off on Americans more easily that other kinds of people and that is what we will address as pretended neutrality. That is the unbeliever loves to think of himself as intellectually neutral, that he just simply sits with an open mind and it just depends on who presents the most facts to convince him to jump one way or the other, that he otherwise, before the gospel comes to him he’s sort of like a sterile hospital room, no bacteria has been introduced, no sources of contamination but just a pure sterile mind. This itself is a religion and so this morning, because we want to set forward what we’re going to do again and again and again and again now that we’re into Europe, we’re going to go over this pretended neutrality until it almost becomes second nature to us and we’ll become very sensitive to where this touches us.

We’re going to state it under three points. Each of these three points will be stated in a generalized way so you’ll be able to apply these to whatever subject, whatever area of life you want to apply it to, but it will definitely be applicable to every area of life. That is, when a person goes against the Scriptures, as for example in Romans 1, he does not give thanks for God, the mind is filled with darkness, the word “darkness” is just another synonym for human viewpoint. When this happens they become seduced by belief, a religious belief, in pretended neutrality.

Here’s what it looks like. Pretended neutrality makes three claims; it makes these claims for every area of life. The first claim, claim number one, and it is a religious claim because it’s not based on anything what we’ll say is scientific, it is simply a religious claim that God did not significantly create X, and you can fill in X with whatever subject you happen to be concerned with at the moment, but that’s the first axiom, the first claim made by non-believing, non-Christian thinkers, that the universe was not made in any significant way, shaped by God. Now let’s take it out of the realm of the abstract and bring it down into a practical application. What this has said, and this is the way it usually comes to you, that I can teach this subject or that subject, say history or economics, whether God exists or not is totally irrelevant… totally irrelevant, it doesn’t make any difference, the subject matter is the subject matter and wouldn’t change if Christianity is true of if Christianity is false, that’s totally beyond the realm of this area of study. And they’re just completely separated, there’s no connection between the two. That’s the way this claim looks when it usually comes to you. But very carefully considered it’s religious claim. It’s a religious claim that insists that God in no way created the area of history so that if He didn’t create it the way it was it wouldn’t be the shape it’s in.

A second claim that pretended neutrality always makes and this too is a religious claim, and that claims that God has not and never will speak to X. That is, in the area of economics God has never spoken anything and can never and will never speak anything that would possibly influence monetary theory; that God has not, cannot and never shall speak anything that would influence mathematics. God has not, cannot and never shall speak anything that might influence biological theory construction. That is a religious claim because that claim itself cannot be justified scientifically. It can only be justified religiously. Most people refuse to admit they’re making the claim but in fact they are.

The third claim, which too is a religious claim, and by the way it’s a contradictory claim in the sense it’s internally contradictory, that says religion ought not influence X. It’s religiously saying that religion ought not to influence X, that is, religious matters ought not to be mixed into our subject. Our subject is pure of religious concern. But that position itself is a religious position.

So what we’ve said here in these three statements is that it is impossible for any person in any field using any facts, using any methodology to be at all neutral. All men are committed for the Scriptures or against the Scriptures, from the very moment they take their first step they must decide to submit to the standard of Scripture or some other standard; they are making religious claims; no man is religiously neutral, he can’t be, because each of these three claims implies that he is saying something about God which is a religious claim.

All right, it’s that pretended neutrality that now Paul begins to hit. And we’ll see him very eloquently attacking it in Acts 17. But it was this problem that the early Christians encountered when they first invaded Europe. Since we, in our culture, continue the European culture basically, when we go to teach the Word of God or when we go to live out the Word of God as we’re going to see in Acts 16, we can’t help but constantly run up against that thing, just like a head-on collision, day after day after day after day after day we collide with it. And foolish we are if we don’t understand what, in fact, it is. You know, if telephones get in your way when you’re driving your car it would be kind of good to know that they’re there, and it’s the same thing in living the Christian life, this is sort of like a telephone pole that hops in the lane ahead of you and you ought to know it’s there.

There’s something else that we have to know before we go any further in Acts 16, besides the principle of pretended neutrality and human viewpoint we want to review a few things about the kingdom of man. The kingdom of man is Satan’s counterfeit to the kingdom of God. It’s simply a human viewpoint culture; in its kingdom form it began with Nimrod; it has always tried to gain ascendancy in the world and in 586 BC, according to Daniel’s prophecies, when Israel dropped out of the mainstream of political…the [can’t understand word] of nations, when it became submissive to Gentile powers, the kingdom of man came up in four layers.

The first layer was Babylon; the second layer was Medo-Persia, the third layer was Greece; the fourth layer was Rome, and so we have four layers in the kingdom of man. Now these four layers are still with us; they are somewhat suppressed because of the presence of the body of Christ in society but they’re there. They’re sort of like a limp air mattress, and when the rapture of the Church all of a sudden occurs, once again it will be inflated, and once again assume its form. Each of these four layers in society influenced us; the Babylonian layer gives us our economic ideas. The Medo-Persian layer gives us our global culture ideas. The Grecian layer gives us our rationalism ideas. And Rome gives us our bureaucratic and legal ideas. And so we are faced with the kingdom of man.

The last layer is Rome and it’s that layer that the book of Acts portrays as being invaded by Paul and when Paul begins to penetrate into this thing he goes all the way down, as we’ll see today, to this lowest level, the economic layer of Babylon. In this point, from this point forward in the book of Acts, there are only two instances where physical violence is used by the authorities against Christians: in Acts 16 here, and in Acts 19, and in both of those cases, when the physical violence is used against Christians it is used for precisely the same reasons, that Christians have offended the Babylonian nature of European culture, that is, the Christians have collided economically. That sounds strange but the spiritual collision is in a certain area always in the book of Acts, and the collision is over economics, the value of the market place. And these two and these two areas, these two collisions alone precipitated physical persecution against the church. Now it’s amazing, now that’s not true back in the early chapters of Acts, back when Jews, the Jewish culture was the center. Then the issue was always over theology, circumcision, non-circumcision, whether Jesus had added to Moses, religious questions. That was the point of collision, but now we’ve crossed the Aegean Sea and Paul sets foot in Europe, we come to a totally different situation in which the Christian impact hurts the world the most, in the area of economics.

Let’s see why; Rome had no objections to any religion as long as two conditions were satisfied. These two conditions are going to be violated by Paul in Acts 16. But these are two conditions that Rome insisted all religions hold to, they are two positions that even in which our own America we have to be careful of. This week I happened to be a judge in the American Legion oratorical context on the Constitution, and I was just amazed after the thing was over, listening to products of our school system sit up and give a Marxist view of the Constitution. They didn’t know it, they thought they were trying to be patriotic but I’ll show you why, in fact, they weren’t. I mentioned this afterwards to one of the men in the American Legion that was sitting in front of me, I said you know, I’ve judged this contest about six years now and every time I judge it I never cease to be amazed that our students don’t approach the Constitution any differently than Karl Marx would. And whoa, what’s this, what… And my point was that basically they start off with the preamble which sounds nice, that “We the people,” and so on, they go on talking about the power derived from the people. And I said you have to be careful about that and read the word “people” the way the people intended it to be read in 1776 and before the American Revolution, not just the Constitutional convention that came later, for this reason. Mao Tse-tung says all power from the people too; now how are you going to differ Mao Tse-tung from George Washington? There must have been a slight difference. But they both use the word “people” but they’re using the word “people” in a different sense.

Our founding fathers did not derive power from the people. What they did do was say that the people had certain rights that the government better hold to, but the rights themselves do not come from the people, because if the rights come from the people then the people can take the rights back away again, and the “people” is just another synonym for the government. Watch how it works in the area of religion. Rome said any religion was okay if granted freedom, big if, if granted freedom by Rome. Now that sounds like a very nice statement, we have freedom of religion, Rome said so. Do you have freedom then? If the freedom stems from the government saying you’ve got freedom you don’t have freedom, do you? You only have freedom as long as the government gives you the right. But you see, the very claim that government gives you freedom itself is totalitarian. That claim is saying that the government has the right to give and the government has the right to take; no government has that right. That was the point of the American Revolution and the fight with George III, precisely the point, and it’s precisely the point that our high school students miss when they are taught the Constitution.

The point at stake here is the same thing as gun control laws. Now in our Constitution that’s one of the most beautifully worded sections, when it says that “the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” that’s what we’re talking about, there’s the Biblical right because there’s an implicit right that people have before the government had anything to say about it. That’s a right that preexisted government and government didn’t give that right, it recognized the right. There’s the difference. And that’s the point here. Rome said okay, Christians, you can exist if we grant you the right to exist. And the Christians said bologna, we’re not going to accept Caesar granting us the right to exist; Caesar doesn’t have the right to grant us the right to exist; that right is God’s, we have the right to exist implicitly and it doesn’t come from any government decree. The government that wants to can recognize our right to exist but the government doesn’t give us the right to exist, so watch the two verb; there’s a world of difference between recognize and grant.

A second principle of freedom that the Romans faced, and that was that any religion was okay if the common welfare was satisfied, if the common welfare was satisfied and common welfare is defined by the government. That’s the trick of the game. And so it was that Paul is going to be placed in jail because the Christian message, when it enters European soil is somehow against the common welfare, and therefore it’s declared to be the public enemy because the government decrees what is and what is not for government welfare. So keep these two principles in mind and as we go through the book of Acts watch how it comes out. Now what you’re seeing in the early chapters of Acts, 16 and following, is a foreshadowing of the future problem between Church and state. The Holy Spirit hasn’t developed it yet in all of its detail but it’s starting right here at the root of Christianity in the west. Christianity in the west will always have this problem; it will collide first with one area and then another area and each time we have a collision between the Word of God and the power of the pagan state you will see principle one violated and you will see principle two violated. Both of those principles are consistently violated by the apostles as they take the Word of God into Europe. They’re not out for a fight but it’s just the inherent nature of the gospel to violate those two principles because they’re false principles. It’s that principle and unfortunately, apparently in our social studies program, we’re not making clear to our young people, that those… that’s paganism and any Caesar, Mao Tse-tung or Karl Marx would agree with both of those principles. Communism will let any religion exist as long as its compatible with communism. So what does that do for the Christian? It puts him in a fine place.

Let’s look at Acts 16:16; the scene opens right after the conversion of the first European. Paul has just set foot in Philippi, and we go back to our map to see where we are. We have the invasion of Europe at Philippi; the crossing had just occurred, Paul moved from Troas in a 48 hour journey over to Philippi. Philippi was a Roman military colony, one of the chain of colonies that the Roman army engineers built to guard and protect the roads, to keep down terrorism and crime in the area and because they insisted on law and order the Romans had a magnificent system of highways, which then God used to spread the Christian faith. Well as they moved into Europe, we saw last time, their first convert was a woman businesswoman, a woman businessman if you want to say it that way, maybe I should say a woman business person. But nevertheless, she was the first convert and that was a little shock for Paul because Paul was used to dealing with men, not women, and the first time that he walked into Europe he had to deal with a woman. And this was just a warning to him by God to show that Paul, things are going to be different now you’re in the west. You’re not going to have Jewish synagogues to run to on every street where you can get some commonality of ground, none of that is going to be available, you’re going to have to kind of just do it and grab here and grab whatever you can get. So the first convert was Lydia. Lydia was not a poor woman; don’t get the idea because she apparently didn’t have any husband that she’s poor. She is an upper class person; the purple that she sold would be equivalent in the cloth market to a Lincoln or Cadillac in the car market. So therefore she did her stuff in a high class area of society.

Now the girl that’s involved in the story that was read a few moments ago, this damsel, would be equivalent to a girl today in the white slave traffic. Girls who are put on hard habits and hard drugs deliberately run by the syndicate and the mob to get the girls up to the point where they have such a high per day dollar habit that the only way they can earn money to give themselves the drugs is to go into prostitution. And therefore we have the so-called white slave ring. That’s the strata of society that’s involved in this story, and before the story is out a third person will be involved, the Philippian jailor and he’s a member of the structure of the bureaucracy. So now observe, the first three converts in Europe to the Christian faith were a person from the highest levels of society but a woman and possible a Gentile but probably most likely a Jew who was there with the rest of the Jewish women. Down in the lower class you have a girl freed from the white slave syndicate, and then sort of in between you have the Philippian jailer and these three represent the spectrum of the reach of the gospel as it will one day have throughout the west.

All right, let’s look at what happens with this girl. Acts 16:16. “And it came to pass, as we went to prayer, a certain damsel possessed with a spirit of divination met us, who kept [which brought], the word “brought” here in the Greek tense is imperfect, “who kept on bringing her masters much gain by soothsaying.” Now she’s in a situation that would approximate our syndicate operations. The other two places in Scripture where we have a demon type operation like this going on is in Acts 8 with Simon Magus and Elymas in Acts 13. So these were common kinds of shady dealings that was done in that day. So the girl has a spirit of divination; this is a demon indwelling, who happens to be a ventriloquist demon. There are different kinds of demons mentioned in Scripture and the ventriloquist demons are demons that are very effective, particularly against materialist thinking people. The materialist thinking people always think of themselves as non-superstitious. Okay, here’s a person who will be a person demon possessed in this situation with a ventriloquist demon. And what happens is, usually you’ll find them in fortune telling rings, you’ll also find them in the business of necromancy which is a long word which means consulting with the dead. And you can oftentimes find ads in the paper for this; they’re around here, I think there’s one or two in Lubbock that do necromancy, I’m not sure, there used to be. Anyway, the business goes on and for a certain fee they will agree to contact your dead relative. And one of the evidences that they will use that in fact they have contacted your dead relative is that they will be in a situation and this voice will actually seem to come from the ground. Not only that, but the voice when it speaks will speak intimate things that only you knew, you thought, with that other person.

I’ll give you a good example of it, was when Bishop Pike was interviewed on the Canadian broadcasting system along with a guy by the name of Arthur Ford, Arthur Ford had agreed to a public demonstration of necromancy in which he said to Bishop Pike that he would contact Bishop Pike’s dead son. I believe that Bishop Pike’s son died in an automobile accident or something. Anyway, when Ford went to conduct the séance things came up that only Pike and his son knew. And so most people thought why, surely there’s evidence that the dead have been contacted. Now a lot of this problem is that it’s not just hocus pocus, in other words, this business involves real supernaturalism but it’s a satanic supernaturalism and that’s what’s so hard for our generation. Some of it is just fluky stuff, Houdini for example spent much of his time and his wife to try to disprove the fake versions of necromancy.

But down through the centuries there have always been true necromancy in the sense that it was a miraculous operation going on. No dead person apparently has ever been contacted except one and that was when the witch of Endor tired it with Saul, and she was going through her hocus pocus and all of a sudden Samuel did come up from the grave, and she was shocked, which shows you that in that case when the real thing happened it showed the difference between the real contact with the dead and this pseudo operation that goes on but although this is a pseudo operation it’s not a fake operation. It involves a real demonic type situation where the demons in the person throws his voice so it appears to come from the ground. And you have (quote) “empirical evidence,” (end quote) that contact with the dead has been established. The ancient world knew this, Isaiah knew it and the Word of God condemns it; we are to consult the Word of God, not necromancy, but people who despise the Word always love to put something in its place.

So we have the rings that developed, much like our drug rings and our prostitution rings today and that’s the kind of deal that this damsel is caught in here. And it says, notice in verse 16, because this is the emphasis Luke wants us to see, notice the phrase, “who continually brought her masters much gain,” now that’s stuck in there to warn us about something. When we look at the text we don’t want to get diverted over to necromancy. It’s nice to know it goes on but Luke has already covered that in Acts 8 and Acts 13, now he’s got another point. The point of this story isn’t necromancy. The point of this story is the economics involved. Here’s where the gospel is going to touch the field of business, and oh, are men sensitive when you reach into the area of business and that’s precisely where the words and the Holy Spirit reach. Don’t worry, this is not a sermon on tithing, giving or pledging, so relax. We’re talking here about the unbelief and how the collision of the evangelistic thrust operates in that area.

All rights, so we have this girl and the thing it it’s fantastic profit. Now the profits, if you want an idea what this “much gain” is, were probably like the rate of profit on investment in the area of drugs and prostitution. It takes heroin or hard drugs that are sold on the street, whoever is investing the money in that kind of drug operation probably is making 100% maybe 200% or even more on their investment. It’s a phenomenal markup by the time the drugs actually come to people on the street in small little packets or cartridges or so on. The point is that whoever puts the original money up to buy the stuff in large lots has made a tremendous return on his funds; far better than any legitimate business. It’s the same thing in the area of prostitution. A girl might charge $50, $75, $100 but out of that money her controller or her pimp, he’s the one that makes most of the money, or he’ll pay it to her in drugs or something like that. Again, it’s a phenomenal rip-off, such that in a recent report the fourth most prosperous business in the State of Texas today is organized crime.

So it is that we have tremendous profit being made by people as long as there is a market for it, and there’s the key. And here’s what you want to see that’s so different in the first century from Christians today; the economic impacts were not made by fundy blue laws; the economic impacts were not made by saying we can’t sell product X, Y and Z in our city, we won’t permit it to be sold. Christians never did that approach. What Christians did in the first century that had a vast impact in the business world was they shifted people’s desires; they altered the demand for the product and that’s how they affected the area. We’ll watch how that happens here shortly.

So the emphasis, we know from verse 16, “who kept bringing her masters much gain,” that’s the key that Luke wants you to track as you go through the process. Acts 16:17, “The same followed Paul and us, and cried, saying, These men are the servants of the most high God, which show unto us a way,” not the way, “who show us a way of salvation.” At this point the girl wanted to, or at least the demon in her wanted to stop Paul’s invasion of Europe. Now Satan has an excellent G2 system and when Paul began to invade Europe he probably scrambled every spare demon he could find to stop this invasion; surely Satan recognized the threat of this to his own civilization. Our ancestors were trotting around Europe in their loin cloths and Satan wanted to keep them doing that, but Paul, under the spirit of God, brought the gospel to your ancestors and mine and when he did so Satan opposed him.

The technique of opposition in verse 17 is to syncretize the Christian message and absorb it into a human viewpoint religion. And here’s how it works; it works today if you’re not careful. That is, someone can use the word G-o-d and mean something completely different than you mean by it; it becomes sort of a general collection. If you want to believe in Bahaullah and I’ll believe in Jesus and you believe in Allah and so on, and we all kind of group it together under oh, we’re all different but we’re on the same road, you know, we all believe in the same God, that kind of human viewpoint. And this is called syncretism or eclecticism. The term, a “Most High God” that this girl keeps shouting, and that’s what she’s doing, the word here is the word for mantic, and she has a spirit of python and the python was the spirit of the Oracle of Delphi. And so she’d be kind of in a trance and she’d follow, everywhere Paul and Silas would go this girl kind of in a half drug like state would start saying this, “These are the servants of the Most High God, These are the servants of the Most High God, they’ve come to bring a ay of salvation.” But notice what she’d done; the demon powers had taken Paul’s truth, such as John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life,” that made Jesus Christ the only way of salvation, we call that the exclusivism of the Christian gospel, and had coated it with a term, a general term, “Most High God” that could have meant anything to anybody, and “a way of salvation,” instead of “the way of salvation.” This completely renders the Christian message impotent. The Christian message cannot be preached unless it is preached as THE ONLY answer. Most people will listen to you until you start talking like that.

Now if you do get in that position some day and people object to your exclusivism, here’s an easy… at least an easy way of maybe explaining it again to them so it’s less offensive and communicate. But you can ask them, does two plus two equal four in the area of math, most of the time unless you’re working on different number base or something. Yes. Does two plus two equals four in the area of physics and chemistry, again unless you’re working with another number system. Yes. In other words, you ask them, you can come to definite conclusions, can’t you, that two plus two is definitely four, it’s not five, it’s not six, it’s not three. Now that principle of operation works, doesn’t it? In physics, it works in chemistry, it works in statistics, it works in arithmetic, algebra, trig. Now would you mind telling me something. Why is it that the principle of getting a definite answer doesn’t work in the area of religion? All of a sudden the rules seem to be shifting. Before it was two plus two is four, if you don’t believe it you flunk the course. Now we come over here to religion and we shift the rule book and we say two plus two is whatever you want as long as you’re sincere. Now how come the rules all of a sudden shifted? Why is it that what we did over now no longer is good over here. See that itself is a religious position, it’s that neutrality we were talking about before, and yet time after time people will give you this song and dance about well, it’s whatever you believe as long as you’re sincere.

Well, Paul didn’t go for it, as explained in Acts 16:18, “And this the girl kept doing many days.” Over and over and over, imperfect tense, “But Paul, being grieved,” aorist tense, he got to the point where he was totally hacked. This word “grieved” means tremendously irritated, and the reason he’s tremendously irritated is because this goofball was ruining the exclusivist cutting edge of his gospel. He was trying to teach the Word of God and she was gooing him up. So, he “turned and said to the spirit,” or the demon, “I command thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And he came out the same hour.” The “same hour” is just instantly, it’s just another idiom, it doesn’t mean he waited 59 minutes for it to pop out. [19] “And when her masters saw that the hope of their gains was gone, they caught Paul and Silas, and drew them into the marketplace unto the rulers.”

Now we have to go into some principles of economics to understand something about how the Word of God affects. First let’s go back to those three principles of neutrality. Remember I said if you could analyze any system by substituting for X whatever you’re interested in, so let’s go back to those three things that you already have and in place of X put economics. Let’s go back to the first statement, and now we say on the Biblical basis that God has created the very foundation of economics. What is the foundation of economics but the human being. The human being has value; it manifests itself in business transactions. Animals don’t have this kind of performance, you do. You’re made in God’s image and you impute value to products. Did your dog ask you how much the dog food costs yesterday? Does your dog have a problem with inflation? No. The dog doesn’t understand currency and evaluation, he’ll eat anything that you put in front of him, except dog food. And if that’s the case then we find a completely different behavior pattern between the humans and the animals. Humans have God’s image, so it does make a difference what man is, it does make a difference that God created us because if He didn’t we wouldn’t have economics.

The second principle; God has spoken into the area of economics, he’s told us not to get multiply indebted; He’s told us to minimize your indebtedness as a general principle of life because the more you’re in debt the more you are a slave. He has told us in Isaiah 1 that inflationary policies of the government is theft. He has told us that our priorities of investment ought to be in people’s character, not just material resources. So God has addressed Himself into the area of finance.

The third statement, therefore economics ought to be influenced by the Word of God. So now what are some things about economics, having looked at it. Check this out, we’re not neutral, we’re not going to pretend to be neutral, there is no other person that is neutral.

Now we come to three terms that will be used again and again; know these three terms and you can measure what’s happening in the text. Let’s look at these three words: produce, value, and price. Everyone is acquainted with the terms; not too many people know the difference between the second one and the third one. So we’re going to look and define each of the three terms and show that every day you buy something or anytime you sell something you’re using all of those three terms. Now to the degree that you know really what you’re doing, to that degree you’re successful economically.

The first is produce; produce is what’s made. It can come about in one of three ways; by labor, by gift, or by theft, but produce can’t come about in any other way. It’s either got to be produced by someone working for it, ripping it off from someone else, or having it given to you, but produce cannot be generated from nothing. God can give some things, that’s a gift. Your family can give you things, that’s inheritance or another way of giving, or somebody can just give something to you. Or you can go out and rip someone off. So we have these three systems of generation of produce.

Now we move to the second one, value of what is produced. Now over the centuries of man there have been big fights over how does value come about. The classical economist up to the days of Karl Marx argued that the value of your goods… suppose you are a carpenter, you like to build on your home, you have a little shop out in the garage, and you like to do cabinet work and you spend, maybe 100 hours making this homemade chair; put a lot of time in it, it’s a very eloquent piece of work. So by labor you’ve generated a chair. The chair is a produce; the question is, what is the value of the chair. Did the value of the chair come about because of 100 hours of labor? And this is what Marx said, this is what Adam Smith said and they’re all wrong because they all said that labor is what gives value to the chair. You say sure it is, by golly, I worked 100 hours on that chair and I’m not giving it away, it’s valuable. Yes, it is to you; the question is, what is its value to someone else. And the value it has to someone else is not a result of your labor. The value that chair has to someone else is how much they want to pay for it. It’s their idea of the value.

Let’s take another example. Suppose your hobby is making jewelry and you spends lots and lots of time making this eloquent gold necklace; hours are invested in making this gold necklace, and you’re flying your little airplane over a desert island and there’s someone down there starving to death on the desert island. And you have nothing except this gold necklace to give them and so you drop it; that’s your contribution. Well, is that considered valuable by someone starving on a desert island? No, they don’t care if you put a thousand hours or five thousand hours in a gold necklace, I can’t eat that. So it’s valueless for me in my situation. So the second term, value, does not come from the first one. The second term, value, comes from the consumer, the consumer’s desire. That’s where it comes from; the consumer’s desire places the value on a product. That’s important because Acts is going to tell us something about this.

The third thing is price. That’s how much it cost in terms of whatever currency is being used. Now if we had good currency with hard money, price and value could be measured very easily. What’s faking out one businessman after another today is that his values can’t be measured by the money because the money supply constantly shifts and we have inflation. To be facetious, as one person said, using the same theory the government is now using about expanding the money supply we could expand this building. Do you know how we could do it? Make the yardstick smaller and then we’ve expanded the number of square feet in the building; we’ve simply made the number of square feet smaller, so instead of 3,000 square feet we have 4,000 square feet. We had a building expansion program and it didn’t cost us a cent. The only problem is, it’s useless expansion, isn’t it. We’ve played with our yardstick but we haven’t generated any new produce and we haven’t altered the value. We’ve played games with the yardstick. So since this is all screwed up today, we won’t bother with this one, we’ll just talk about produce and value.

Now in Acts 16 the girl had produce, in the form of services. She sells services to people, the service of necromancy, divination. When Paul comes in, as a result of the gospel, he destroys the produce because of the judgment of God and the produce goes to zero. Paul has destroyed wealth in this situation, wealth as measured by the value system of the criminal. And this is a direct impact into the financial world, a destruction of value because the produce was destroyed. Paul is guilty here of destroying wealth, but the wealth in God’s sight is illegitimate. So here is a business impact that the gospel has made.

I’ll give you another illustration. A friend of mine went into the ministry years and years ago; when he first began his ministry in a major metropolitan area one of his first people to come out and become a Christian was the madam of the largest whorehouse in the place. And she started coming, getting into the Word, he didn’t make a big issue out of it but she always came, and then finally she’d bring a girl. And so the first Bible class there’d be three or four girls with her, and then next Bible class five or six more, and these girls would become Christians. Well, all the legalistic Christians in the community got up in arms because the prostitutes were going to XYZ church. Of course the mystery has always been, I wonder how they knew they were prostitutes. But nevertheless, this went on and finally the whole operation was closed down because most of them had become Christians and the rest just taken off to other places. So there was an example of the same kind of thing where the gospel impacted, not on a legal level it impacted at the produce level; it simply destroyed the produce.

Now in Acts 19 we will later see the gospel impacts the level of value. Here silversmiths made idols. And they were selling the idols in the marketplace for a certain price. All right, suppose the silversmith had a thousand good customers. Paul comes in and teaches the Word so what happens? Now instead of a thousand customers he’s only got 200 customers. Paul took away 80% of the market by teaching the Word of God. Now how did he do it? Because he passed a law that said don’t buy idols? Not at all. If he’d done that he’d had 2,000 people tomorrow buying idols; laws don’t work that way, they only stimulate rebellion. So what Paul did was he changed the value system so nobody wanted to buy the idiot things. He put the silversmiths of Ephesus out of business so they caused a riot and tried to jail him.

Now do you see how the gospel makes an economic impact? It does so by changing and shifting the market value. Said another way, if the American public suddenly tomorrow had Biblical concepts of value it would cause a terrific, catastrophic alteration in production systems because there would be certain products that people just wouldn’t bother with. Now what we could do with people in that kind of an industry? The industry would be wiped out. And for a while people would be thrown out of work and that’s what you’ve got a problem with here. You’ve got men thrown out of work; in this case they’re not only thrown out of work and their industry has been destroyed but you’ve got the syndicate involved.

So in Acts 16:19 we have the government stepping in as the government always does when this kind of a situation happens. They have affected the common good of the community. Remember I said, keep your eyes on two principles, Rome will tolerate religion as long as it has a right to give freedom to the religion and be as long as that religion just minds it business and doesn’t bother the common good. So verse 19, “and when her masters saw that the hope of their gains was gone, they caught Paul and Silas, and drew them into the market place unto the rulers.” Now the rulers that are here are Roman praetors, and you’ll notice the charge that is brought to them because Philippi is a Roman colony. This same charge is being made against Christians today; latest example the city of Dallas; in the city of Dallas a group of Christians had the audacity to suggest that possibly the public school system might have on its lists of supplementary textbooks one dealing with creation as well as evolution. But this was such an intellectual threat to the humanist biology teachers, mind you, it wasn’t even required, it was just supplementary, it was such an intellectual threat that they went out and they gathered all the liberal clergymen together and the liberal clergymen went down to the Dallas school system and said this violates separation of Church and state.

Of course they forgot that the humanist biological system is also violating the Church and state, but because they hold to the system of pretended neutrality that didn’t matter. So we have a situation now in Dallas where it’s the Christians who are disturbing the peace; the classroom was, you know, religiously neutral before these Christian parents had to butt into the system and the same charge is made. The Christian evangelical community of Dallas has upset the common good. Now watch what happens. The same thing that’s going to happen here. They may not be thrown in jail but it’s the same spirit; no different, Dallas, Philippi or anywhere else. It’s the world system; it hates the Word of God.

“And when her master saw that the hope of their gains was gone, they caught” them, [20] “And they brought them to the magistrates, saying,” and here’s the charge, and watch how clever this little charge is. It’s a charge that mirrors the charge you may face one day, “These men, being Jews, do exceedingly trouble our city, [21] and teach customs, which are not lawful for us to receive, neither to observe, being Romans.” Now there’s several clever little things, oh so clever about these people. Notice how they redefine the issue. You know what the issue is; they’re a syndicate and they just got shut down, that’s the issue. But they redefine the issue as one of race. You see, it’s those Jews that have come against us Romans, notice the stress on it to polarize the community that it’s the Jews against the Romans instead of what the issue is.

It’s always easy to polarize people along racial lines. You watch this happening in Africa, big bad countries of Rhodesia and South Africa, horrible places because those white bigots that run those countries… oh is it really; one of the real reasons why South Africa and Rhodesia are being targeted is because most of the world’s gold supply comes from South Africa and most of the world’s chromium supply comes from Rhodesia and the simple economics is that the white businessmen that control the gold and the chromium insist on getting a fair price for their gold and chromium. And watch, when the whites are overthrown and the black regime how the white businessmen that was shedding these great crocodile tears about the racist policies of Rhodesia and South Africa, watch them rip-off the blacks. Watch them rip the blacks off of their chromium and their gold. See, selective use of morals, it’s very effective, it snows most people.

The same thing here, they redefine the situation so it appears to be a racial issue, it’s the Jews versus the Romans. Of course, the irony of it is that Paul is both. He is a Jew and he is a Roman but they don’t know that yet.

Then the next charge besides redefining it in racial terms is they “do exceedingly trouble our city.” See, there’s the violation of what theologians call the bonum communitatis, the good of the community, the common ground, the common welfare. They “exceedingly trouble the city.”

And now in verse 22 the third element, they stimulate mob action. The mob comes up against them. You watch how the mob is always involved in Acts, it’s a preview. The mob is the water that can be blown into foam and waves by the spirit, that’s according to Daniel and here we find the mob rising up against who? The Christian minority, that’s who. So watch it, we may live to see that happen to us. Acts 16:22, “[And the multitude rose up together against them;] and the magistrates rent [tore] off their clothes, and they kept on,” imperfect tense, “commanding them to be beaten.”

Now the people that are beating them are called the lictors, you’ve seen a symbol on your dime of the Roman lictor. It looks like this. During World War II Benito Mussolini’s fascist party had three of these on all their aircraft and their military markings. It comes from the fasces that the Romans carry, the lictors, these are rods and included in the rod is an axe, and everywhere the Roman Praetor went he had a lictor and the lictor would carry this on his shoulders, the rods and the axe. Anybody think of what these are symbols of? Corporal and capital punishment. They are the symbol of the executionary power of the state. Everywhere the lictor went went the fasces, and thus the word fascism arose in history. You might even say very facetiously that in verse 22 you have the rise of fascism in Europe, first expressed against the Christians. And so they beat them; they disassembled this thing, it’s put together with some wire and rope, you disassemble it, get a few of the rods out, in this case since it wasn’t capital punishment they didn’t bother to use the axe but they did use the rods that were part of it.

Acts 16:23, “And when they had laid many stripes them, they cast them into prison, charging the jailer to keep them safely,” which really means, translated verse 24, that “Who having received such a charge, thrust them into the inner prison,” Roman prison had a form on the outside that was kind of semi security and then they had the inner prison which was kind of like group solitary confinement, in other words, they used the solitary concept but they put no walls, no air, nothing, just ground everybody in there, and then they made their feet fast in the stocks, that’s so you could sit in your own excrement while you’re going off. So this is how the first Christians were received in Europe; a wonderful standing ovation you might say.

So what can we say about where we are at verse 24? We’ve watched the gospel impact Europe. It attacked first in the area of changing people’s economic ways and as a result of that hit the jugular vein of the kingdom of man. Did it ever dawn on you why in the book of Revelation in the future the Revived Roman Empire isn’t called the Roman Empire? It’s called Babylon, that ground layer seems to be characteristic in the coming days because Babylon is the economic name of the system, and there is where Christians will have the tightest, or believers during that time will have the roughest time, in the area of economics.

The role that we find Paul and the early Christians in is the role of suffering; they wind up in verse 24 with their feet in stocks. This happened so many times in the first 200 years of the Christian faith, thousands of Christians had to be put in the stocks, those that weren’t decapitated, that Tertullian devised s slogan, [Clough gives Latin phrase], he said “nothing the limb feels in the stock when the mind is in heaven,” and that slogan became the battle cry of the Christian, that when they put your feet in the stocks become occupied with the person of Christ and you won’t feel the pain.

So this is where the Christians were left and next week we’ll see how this goes to a second crisis and Paul begins to challenge in another new area.