“John’s baptism,” they replied.
4Paul said, “John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.” 5On hearing this, they were baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. 6When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. 7There were about twelve men in all. (Acts 19:1-7)
Let me start out by saying I’m not completely sure how to interpret what happened here. One commentary I read said that these 12 men that Paul found were not Christians at all and that Paul explained the gospel to them and then they believed. The Pentecostals say that they were Christians, but they hadn’t received the second blessing, the baptism of the Holy Spirit. (Salvation would be the first blessing.) Other people have other ideas. I’ll add mine also. Here’s what I think.
First of all, they were Christians. They had crossed over from death to life. Luke (the author of Acts) calls them disciples—Paul found some disciples. In the book of Acts and generally throughout the New Testament, if the disciples are not disciples of Jesus, the text makes it clear. If these men had been disciples of someone besides Jesus, Luke would have said so.
Also, Paul said, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” He knew that they had believed. Again, in the New Testament when the text doesn’t make it clear what someone has believed, it’s Jesus! These men were believers. (One of the commentaries I read suggests that Priscilla and Aquila may have told Paul that they were believers.)
Now what about the Holy Spirit? They had never even heard that there was a Holy Spirit. But I don’t think that that means they didn’t have the Holy Spirit. Paul says in Ephesians that when you believe, you are sealed by the Holy Spirit. I think they were believers and that they were sealed by the Holy Spirit. What they didn’t have is any obvious signs of the Holy Spirit’s power.
When Paul asked them, “What baptism did you receive (literally, “Into what were you baptized?”), they replied, “Into John’s baptism.” Paul told them that John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance and that his message was to believe in Jesus, the one coming after him. They were baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. They received power through the Holy Spirit to speak in tongues and to prophesy.
Now it sounds like they needed to be baptized into the name of Jesus and for Paul to place his hands on them for them to receive the ability to speak in tongues and to prophesy. But that’s not what happened when Peter preached at Cornelius’s house in chapter 10. While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit came on all those in Cornelius’s household and they began to speak in tongues (and, by the way, ‘speaking in tongues’ just means speaking in foreign languages) ...they began to speak in tongues and to praise God. They hadn’t been baptized yet and no one had put his hands on them.
Now here’s what I think. I think there is a second blessing. You do receive power from the Holy Spirit sometime after you believe—maybe immediately or maybe sometime later. But I don’t think it’s a one-time thing. I think the Holy Spirit gives you his power whenever he determines that it is necessary. There is a second blessing. But there is also a third and a fourth and many more.
And here’s something else I think. We should not try to ‘figure out’ God. We try to figure out God’s physical laws so that we can make use of them. We have cars and airplanes, telephones, computers, and so forth. We make use of them for our own benefit. God will not let us ‘make use of him’. He is God. You will not succeed if you try to figure God out. God does not want us to try to figure him out. What he wants us to do is to trust him! (I could say a lot more, but I won’t. I want to talk about the rest of the passage.)
Look at verse 8. According to verse 8, Paul went into the synagogue as was his usual practice to speak to the Jews. In fact he continued to speak there for three months. He spoke boldly about the kingdom of God and argued persuasively. They listened. But after three months some of them began to oppose him. So he stopped speaking in the synagogue. He took the disciples (apparently some had believed) and began to teach daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus. He taught there for two years. Through Paul’s teaching, all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord.
What can we learn? Well, for one thing, it may be appropriate to continue to teach and preach as long as people are willing to listen, but to go somewhere else when they begin to actively oppose you. I don’t think this is a rule, but it could be taken as a general guideline.
Also, this sounds a lot like No Pum’s ministry in Myanmar. He trains people to go out and start new churches. And furthermore, it sounds an awful lot like Jesus’s ministry. He made disciples and told them to go out and make disciples and to teach them to obey everything he had commanded. One of those things that he had commanded was to make disciples. We should be doing that, too.
Now look at verses 11 and 12. I’ll read them:
11God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, 12so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them. (Acts 19:11, 12)
God gives power to heal the sick and to cast out demons. He still does that today, especially in places where the gospel has never been preached. But even here in the United States where you can turn on the radio and hear the gospel any time, God still gives power to heal and to casts out demons. (But, if someone on the radio tells you to send some money and they will send you a cloth that they have prayed over and that you can place it on someone who is sick and that person will be healed, I’d be skeptical. God heals through faith, not through going through designated rituals or buying cloths from radio or TV evangelists.)
Now let’s look at verses 13 through 16:
13Some Jews who went around driving out evil spirits tried to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who were demon-possessed. They would say, “In the name of Jesus, whom Paul preaches, I command you to come out.” 14Seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, were doing this. 15One day the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and I know about Paul, but who are you?” 16Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and overpowered them all. He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding. (Acts 19:13-16)
I read somewhere that the Jewish exorcists would attempt to cast out evil spirits by repeating God’s name over and over again (something we are commanded not to do in vain, by the way). According to the theory, the evil spirits would eventually get tired of hearing God’s holy name and leave.
These Jewish exorcists apparently saw what was happening with Paul and were trying to use the name of Jesus to cast out evil spirits—maybe they looked at is a kind of a formula or an incantation. Witches and sorcerers use incantations and formulas. They think the demons will be compelled to obey them. They are not compelled. The demons are only subject to God’s authority, not to the authority of any people saying incantations. If the demons do what the witches or sorcerers want them to, it’s for the purpose of destruction, not because of any incantations spoken by witches or sorcerers or any rituals they may perform.
Well (to go on), eventually the seven sons of Sceva tried using Jesus’s name to cast out an evil spirit and got beat up and bloodied—all seven of them—seven—by one man who had an evil spirit—very spectacular and very scary. Evil spirits are not harmless when it comes to physical things! (But Jesus is greater by far than any evil spirits!)
But what’s the point of this account? Well, for one thing it shows that they shouldn’t have been messing around with this kind of stuff. They had no authority from God over demons or anything else. But the more important point is given in verses 17 through 20. I’ll read verse 17:
17When 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 (Acts 19:17)
You see? First of all this happened in order to bring glory to God. I believe that God arranged for it to happen. It wasn’t just a random event. The seven sons of Sceva had tried to use the name of Jesus in vain. Now people were seized with fear and held the name of Jesus in high honor. God will glorify himself! Now let’s look at what else happened as a result. Let’s look at verse 18:
18Many of those who believed now came and openly confessed their evil deeds. (Acts 19:18)
First of all, this says that many of those who were believers, who had eternal life through faith in Jesus, had not openly acknowledged their sins. Some of them possibly had not just confessed past sins but were continuing to sin. Let me quote something from James. This from James 5:14-16:
14Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. 15And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. 16Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. (James 5:14-16)
You see, the Holy Spirit is telling us through James that we do need to confess our sins to each other and to pray for each other. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. The sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit is to convict us of sin, teach us to confess our sins and then to go and sin no more. We must tell each other what we are struggling with and how we have failed and sinned and then pray for each other—pray for each other that we may sin no more. We must continually encourage each other and build each other up in Christ. We need to pray for each other continually. Of course we must confess our sins to God, too.
Let’s look at verses 19 and 20:
19A 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 fifty thousand drachmas. 20In this way the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power. (Acts 19:19, 20)
It sounds like these people were believers, and although they knew better, they were still practicing sorcery...or maybe they had just hung onto the scrolls. (I don’t know how they used the scrolls. But a long time ago I saw a book in the book store called The I Ching. It looked like a bunch of fortune cookie sayings. In the introduction it said that originally they examined the guts of chickens or something like that and came up with some numbers to point to a particular verse or passage. They said you could do the same thing by throwing dice and explained how to do it. The verse or passage you came up with would be your fortune or advice or whatever.) In any case, the scrolls were worth 50,000 drachmas. The NIV footnote says that a drachma was worth about a day’s wages. If you assume ten dollars an hour and eight hours a day, that’s eighty dollars a day...times 50,000 equals four million dollars!
What should they have done with the scrolls? Some people might have said, “You should sell them. Think of how many people you could help with four million dollars! You could use it for mission support and spread the gospel to the ends of the earth!
But these scrolls were evil, a tool of the devil. There was absolutely no good in them. Would you sell them to someone else to use so that they could lead to his destruction rather than to yours? I hope not!
One time many years ago I was cleaning out a closet and found a big box of romance novels—maybe a hundred of them. Mooma’s relatives used to trade them around. At first I didn’t think it would be right to throw them out because they didn’t really belong to us. I said that I thought they were garbage and Mooma agreed. She said that love stories didn’t used to be full of sex, but now they were. Well, that was a good reason to throw them out, but wasn’t my primary reason. I thought that if people spent their time reading love stories, they would soon learn to put their hope in “living happily ever after” in this life rather than putting their hope in Jesus and really living happily ever after. Mooma didn’t really want me to throw out the love stories. They weren’t ours. But I argued that if someone left a box of garbage in your house, would you feel obligated to save it for him so that he could be polluted by it later. Anyway, I not only threw out the love stories, but tore them up (maybe a little overkill, but it was symbolic).
The owners of the four million dollars worth of scrolls burned them. They ensured that no one else would use them toward their own destruction. They did the right thing. Would you be able to do the same? You don’t expect to ever own anything that can only be used for evil and is worth four million dollars? How about something worth 1000 dollars? Maybe a big collection of rap CD’s. Would you sell them or throw them out.
Now, with us, there are some things that are neutral. They can be used for good or for evil. And there are some things that have absolutely no good purpose—only evil. Around 40 years ago, I had a collection of Playboy magazines. They were probably a lot tamer back then than those sorts of things would be today. Where I worked a bunch of us would go out to lunch together and once a month we would buy a copy of Playboy. It would be passed around and then would wind up being deposited in my file cabinet. (Probably no one else wanted to keep them in his office, but I didn’t think too much about it.) Every once in a while someone would stop in my office and page through one of them.
As I became closer to Christ I thought that it wouldn’t look good to have those magazines in my file cabinet and they needed to go. But didn’t feel that I could throw out something that didn’t belong to me. So I put them in boxes and hid them under a table behind a bunch of other stuff. Finally, I decided garbage is garbage no matter whom it belongs to and pitched them. (I think I did it late at night, too.)
Well, I said that there are some things that are evil and have absolutely no good purpose. For other things, it depends on what you use them for. They can be used for good or for evil. If you have something like that and are tempted to use it for evil, would you sacrifice the good use and get rid of it to keep from falling into sin. (Your computer can be used to encourage a friend by e-mail or for internet gambling or looking at pornography—or in the case of some of us, for wasting time. The same with the TV. You can watch garbage or something that builds up.) What would you do? What will you do?
“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” (1 John 2:15) To have the love of God the Father in you means that God the Father will be able to love others through you. If you love the things of this world God the Father will not be able to love others through you.
The bottom line is, “What are you willing to give up to serve Jesus?” Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.” (Luke 9:23, 24) There is nothing on earth that remotely compares with what God has prepared for those who love him. “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.”
Verses 21 and 22 say:
21After all this had happened, Paul decided to go to Jerusalem, passing through Macedonia and Achaia. “After I have been there,” he said, “I must visit Rome also.” 22He sent two of his helpers, Timothy and Erastus, to Macedonia, while he stayed in the province of Asia a little longer. (Acts 19:21, 22)
I don’t have much to say about them except that Paul probably starting to prepare or to be prepared for his arrest in Jerusalem and martyrdom in Rome.
[prayer]