God’s Word for You
Acts 19:36-41 The Law as Curb
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Tuesday, November 24, 2020
36 Since these things cannot be denied, you ought to quiet down. Don’t do anything rash, 37 for you have brought these men here who don’t rob temples or blaspheme our goddess. 38 If Demetrius and his fellow craftsmen have anything against anyone, the courts are open and there are proconsuls. They can press charges. 39 But if you want to bring up anything else, if must be determined in a legal assembly. 40 As it is, we are in danger of being charged with rioting today, since there is no explanation we can give on account of this disturbance.” 41 And after he said this, he dismissed the assembly.
There are four points in this passage which bear closer scrutiny and might not be clear or obvious to some readers. First, the chancellor says that the Christians “don’t rob temples.” The temples were well-guarded and, being stone, they were fairly secure places. They served as vaults for deposited money, and they seem to have contained a great deal of cash. An inscription from this period shows that quite a bit of this deposited money (offerings) made its way into the pockets of corrupt officials through bribes and other means. The chancellor wouldn’t want this demonstration to lead to an audit of the temple’s books.
Second, the Christians don’t “blaspheme our goddess.” There is a difference between advocating the true God and blaspheming a false one. Since no objection is raised against this point, we might suspect that men like Demetrius the silversmith and others had themselves blasphemed the goddess, not taking the worship seriously except to make a profit. This is the sinful difference between being confused about who God truly is, which is idolatry, and leading people away from faith in the true God for one’s own profit or benefit, which is the work of Satan himself. “You know that when you were pagans,” Paul wrote, “somehow or other you were influenced and led astray to mute idols” (1 Corinthians 12:2). Their fate is sad but inevitable, because it is without Christ. But as for those who lead people astray: “A mighty angel picked up a boulder the size of a large millstone and threw it into the sea, and said, ‘With such violence the great city of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again…Your merchants were the world’s great men. By your magic spell all the nations were led astray” (Revelation 18:21,23).
Third, he makes a reference to proconsuls in the plural. There should only have been one, and there are two explanations for Luke’s language. On the one hand, the chancellor might have been speaking rhetorically, something like saying “That’s why we have mothers and fathers” even though each of us has one mother and one father. But on the other hand, this might reflect the actual moment of this speech. In the fall of 54, the proconsul of Asia, Junius Sylvanus, was poisoned by two men sent by Nero. Those men, Celer and Aelius (or “Helius”), might have governed Asia together until the new proconsul arrived in the summer of 55. This detail would fit with the overall timeline of Paul’s third missionary journey (53-57 AD), some some commentators think that assassins remaining to govern until the new man arrived is improbable.
Fourth, the chancellor warns that their assembly was unlawful. The Romans did not like mobs, and this was hardly a legal meeting of the citizens of Ephesus. There is a time and place for everything (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8), and now was not the time for charges to be brought against the Christians.
The meeting broke up immediately. This is an example of the first use of law in the service of God’s plans, the law as a curb. The law keeps society in check. This is also called the political use by our theologians. As I tell my catechism students, the curb is what keeps you guys from driving up onto my lawn when you first get behind the wheel. The general rule of law keeps the nations of the world and the people of every community more or less in check and civilized. Of course this doesn’t work perfectly. Mankind is fallen and sinful. There will be wars, arguments, crazy men shooting people for no reason. There will be anger and fear and people reacting and over-reacting. But the purpose of the law as a curb is to give the gospel a stable place in which to work, which is what happened here in Ephesus. The unbelieving world does not submit to the political law (the law as a curb) out of love for God as Christians do, but out of the fear of punishment. Nevertheless, this fear opens doors to the preaching of the gospel, the turning of sinners to Christ in repentance, and the salvation of human souls.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.