We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

We come to another critical time in the early Christian religion. It's easy to miss this point because Luke is more concerned with exonerating Paul before the Emperor's court than with actually writing history. Luke's narrative mentions Paul's role in turning Ephesus into the new capital of the Christian message to the Mediterranean world.

Paul had already stopped here on his way home some months previously. He had left Aquila and Priscilla in charge, who in turn educated Apollos. When Apollos went across the sea to Corinth for a few years acting as an apostle there, it was about the same time Paul began a fresh visit to the churches he had planted. Luke tells us Paul passed through mountainous areas, hiking the back roads across the land we call Turkey today, and eventually made his way back to Ephesus as promised.

Ephesus was an ancient city, and the Roman headquarters for the entire region. It was also home of the Temple of Diana. The temple had been destroyed and rebuilt at least a couple of times in the past, and the identity of the local goddess is not certain. Later worship of Diana included elements drawn from Cybele. The idol itself was supposed to have fallen from the sky at the hand of some other ruling deity.

About all we can make of the legends is that a meteorite fell near there, and someone was able to discern in the surface of the largest piece of this space rock an image of this pagan goddess. This talisman was kept in the temple until its final destruction a few centuries later after Paul's time. When the Greeks had conquered the area, the locals simply embraced the name of Artemis as the nearest in the Greek pantheon to the original goddess of the locals. When Persia took the area, the temple rituals gained elements of Isis worship. When it was Rome's turn, the name of the goddess was changed to Diana.

The temple was a major source of income, keeping a large sector of the local economy busy turning out figurines and amulets celebrating the idol and the temple structure. As a natural harbor, the city saw countless tourists and business travelers who would buy these trinkets.

Upon arriving in Ephesus, one of the first things Paul encountered was a dozen Jewish men who were echoing the message Apollos had been preaching before he learned about Jesus. As a senior rabbi himself, Paul was able to get across to them the updated story, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. A major change between the Old and New Covenant was that, upon His Ascension into Heaven, Jesus sent back His own spirit to inhabit those who followed Him. The repentance ritual John the Baptist had preached symbolized this new spiritual change. As soon as these men embraced their Messiah, the power of the Holy Spirit manifested in them much as He had at Pentecost in Jerusalem.

This boosted Paul's message significantly, because people could see the powerful change. With their support, Paul spent some months there teaching in the synagogue. A great many Jews were moved to embrace Jesus as their Messiah. However, there were some who were more worried about the institution of the synagogue, and they began slandering Paul to the local pagan people. Frustrated, Paul took the church crowd with him to a leased facility owned by someone named Tyrannus. Over the next two years, not only the City of Ephesus, but a great many surrounding towns and cities in Asia Minor heard the gospel where people embraced Jesus as Lord. Ephesus was no longer just the city of the mother goddess, but the city of the mother church that gave birth to dozens of smaller churches in the region.

Furthermore, God witnessed to Paul's calling through miracles, so that common items of clothing over which he prayed would carry the power to heal throughout the region. But Satan was not idle, turning this whole thing into a circus. Ephesus was a famous market for magic and miracles. Jews would get in on this business by pretending to exorcise demons, a service for which they charged hefty fees. There were seven of these hucksters who called themselves "Sons of Sceva" (referring to a Chief Priest in Jerusalem) who tried to leverage the the fame of Paul and the now legendary miracle powers of Jesus to chase demons out of people. They happened to try it with a genuine case, and the demon answered that he recognized both Jesus and Paul, but these Sons of Sceva were nobodies. The demonized man brutally beat them and chased them out onto the street.

When this story made the rounds, people took Paul and his message much more seriously. The power of the gospel was changing lives on a huge scale. People began to abandon their pagan cosmopolitan morals for the strict holiness of the Christian faith. At one point, they held a bonfire in which they burned their "Ephesian Letters" -- magic rituals recorded on expensive scrolls for which Ephesus was a famous market. The total value was more than a laborer could earn in two lifetimes.

At some point, Paul felt the drawing of the Spirit to revisit Macedonia and Achaia, and began talking about a need to return to Jerusalem, but to also visit Rome. To prepare for the first part of this journey, he sent a couple of friends before him into Macedonia, Timothy and Erastus, while he stayed a little longer in Ephesus. That is, he stayed until there was a major disturbance in the city.

Luke refers to this rising Christian faith as "the Way", likely a local nickname. It was powerful enough to have changed the local economy. People were openly walking away from the polytheism so common among pagans to the point the temple traffic and trinket trade was suffering. One of the biggest supporters of this trade, named Demetrius, felt his livelihood threatened and called an ad hoc meeting of his friends. Mentioning the financial losses, and pushing lots of emotional buttons, he persuaded them to raise a lynching party and go after Paul.

It quickly turned into a riot. The leaders managed to locate two of Paul's friends from Macedonia, Gaius and Aristarchus. They dragged these two at the head of a mob into the local outdoor theater. Paul would have done his best to rescue his friends by making himself the target of the crowd's wrath, but some local Roman officials who better understood the situation would not allow him to take that risk.

The whole city was in an uproar. As they crowded into the theater, most had no idea what was going on. The local Jews realized that their community was threatened by this, and convinced a spokesman named Alexander to attempt to address the crowd. As soon as the crowd recognized who he was, it stirred them to even stronger emotions regarding their sacred temple and worship of Diana. As they began shouting her greatness, the chant caught on and kept going for a couple of hours.

Apparently the only man the crowd respected, the city clerk, was able to get them to listen. He gave them a stern warning that the whole city was very close to provoking a police action from the Roman soldiers stationed near the city. Not one person there could have justified all this noise and violence. There were plenty of valid ways to handle any complaints without that. He noted that the accused men hadn't actually done anything illegal. So the clerk rebuked Demetrius and his pals and dismissed the crowd. The threat to the gospel was significantly weakened that day.

From here on out, the church in Ephesus began to rise as the primary hub for Christians and their faith, and the center of a vast mission outreach. A few decades later, it become one of the few safe refuge cities for those of Jesus' faith among His extended family who fled Palestine, including His cousin John and probably His mother.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

The purpose of Luke's narrative was not to recount all the details of Paul's ministry, but to show that he never caused trouble. In the case of Athens, when the audience lost interest in his teaching, he moved on. Corinth was roughly 50 miles west of Athens, and he could have easily walked or taken passage on a ship to the eastern port opposite Corinth. Again, I cannot do any better than my previous commentary on this chapter.

We learn from Paul's own letters that Silas and Timothy came to him at Athens and warned him he could not return to Berea. Timothy returned there, but Silas went on to Philippi, while Paul decided to do some work in Corinth. This was the seat of the Roman government for the region of Achaia (southern Greece), and a major trade center, sitting astride the narrow neck of land separating two small seas. A lot of freight came across this place to avoid a long sailing voyage around Achaia. This was also home to the Temple of Aphrodite, with her thousand temple prostitutes. The city was the most prominent symbol of debauchery, and entirely cosmopolitan.

Paul was hardly the only one spreading the gospel message. In Corinth he met two Christian Jews from Rome, Priscilla and Acquila. They had left Italy on the orders of Emperor Claudius, decreed in about 49 AD because the Jews in Rome kept rioting over teaching and preaching about Jesus "Chrestus" -- so all Jews had to leave. These two were engaged in the same business trade Paul had learned, since rabbis were not permitted to draw pay from rabbinical duties. They worked in leather and heavy fabrics during the week, and Paul would teach in the synagogue on the Sabbath. When Silas and Timothy joined him again, Paul felt driven to press the gospel message more directly and full time. This caused a reaction in the synagogue, so he symbolically turned them over to Satan. Instead, he began preaching next door at the home of Justus. When the synagogue ruler, Crispus, was converted with his household, it must have rankled the Jewish community. But Paul was encouraged by a vision, being told by God that there were many yet in the city He intended to call.

Thus, Paul broke with his habit of short stays, and remained a year and a half. Sometime around the summer of 51 AD, a new proconsul rotated into office in the city, by the name of Gallio. The Jews decided to bring their case against Paul. Their religion was officially tolerated, and they claimed Paul was inciting an attack on this religion that the law protected. Gallio was brother to the famous philosopher, Seneca, and no fool. He saw right through this as an internal matter between Jews, and none of his concern. We find the locals did not easily tolerate the Jews. As soon as they saw this curt dismissal, with troops driving them from Gallio's open-air judgment seat, the locals began beating the new leader of the synagogue, Sosthenes. While technically a breach of peace, Gallio acted as if nothing happened, in part to underline his own distaste for Jews.

Paul stayed even longer in the city. Eventually, it was time to go. On the eastern coast was the port city of Cenchreae, the other end of the famous wagon track across the isthmus. There Paul went to a Jewish ritual barber to shave his head. This signaled the completion of a Nazarite vow, showing that Paul still took his Jewish practices seriously. Priscilla and Acquila came with him as they sailed to Ephesus, where the two took up residence, preparing to amplify Paul's mission by witnessing there. Paul appeared briefly in the synagogue, where his message was well received. But when they asked him to stay, he declined because of a commitment to be in Jerusalem for some feast. He promised to return sometime, if God willed. Then he sailed for Caesarea, on the coast of Palestine. He made the feast in Jerusalem and spent some time with the church there. Then he returned to Antioch with his mission report. While church scholars make much of breaking Paul's work into specific journeys, Luke simply notes briefly Paul later went back north and west to the first churches he planted.

Now more than two decades after the Ascension of Christ, there were still a large number of devout Jews who did not hear about the sacrifice of the Lamb of God. They knew only the revival of John the Baptist, the call to repentance, the return of genuine Old Testament faith, and some of the teaching of Jesus. Among these was a very sharp fellow named Apollos, from Alexandria, Egypt. He arrived in Ephesus during this time frame, and very powerfully witnessed in the synagogue there of this revival of true Hebraic faith. Paul's friends, Priscilla and Acquila heard this man, and met with him privately to share the rest of the story, how Jesus died and became the final sacrifice for all sins. With this new message, Apollos felt called to preach in Achaia, and was given letters of introduction to the Christians there. With their warm welcome, he stood up among the Jews, and in a very public debate, proved their sin in rejecting Jesus as the Messiah.

We are being tested right now. Veloyce's car is having trouble and I'm not sure I can fix it. I seem to recall we were already praying for another, but now it's a little more urgent. She can drive some, but we have to be careful. I'm not happy with the idea we will have to use credit, but I'm not going to see her walking to work. Pray with us.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Luke returns to the third person, so he may have stayed for a time in Philippi. After leaving a very strongly established church in Philippi, the trio -- Paul, Silas and Timothy -- traveled along the Egnation Way to the next important city. They knew that if they could establish the gospel in major centers, the message itself would spread out into the countryside. They stopped in Thessalonica and, as usual, spent time in the local synagogue.

It was the pattern by now: Some would embrace the gospel, more Gentiles than Jews. And it's the loss of Gentile contributors that stung the synagogues most. So they would hire some local thugs to create drama and Paul, at least, had to flee. All three of them left Thessalonica and got off the beaten path, stopping at a town name Beroea (Veria today). This bunch were more inclined to study the written Scriptures and generally received the message, until Jews from Thessalonica tracked down our trio and provoked another uproar there.

This time Paul was escorted alone to the coast and put on a boat to Athens. Silas and Timothy stayed a while longer to get the church established, and waited until they found out where Paul ended up. It was a substantial voyage around the eastern Greek islands down to Athens. Upon disembarking, Paul sent his escort back with word to his companions to join him. At this point I'll finish by replaying what I wrote in my commentary on Acts.

While Paul's escort made its way back with the message for his companions, he wandered Athens.

While a city very self-conscious of its ancient grand heritage, Athens was no longer a seat of government under Rome, just an ancient university town. The world's scholars still came, seeking philosophical and religious knowledge. Paul hadn't really planned to exert much effort there because the city just wasn't that important. Still, he spoke in the synagogue, and in the open market with anyone else who showed an interest. Of particular discomfort to Paul was the plethora of deities whose altars and shrines were thickly dotted around the place. Legend has it that when catastrophe struck, the residents would simply set loose a flock of sacrificial sheep in hopes that somehow the gods who were upset would draw one or more victims to their altars. When a sheep was found near no particular altar, a new one was erected to "The Unknown God". There were several of these around the city.

With his advanced education, Paul fit right in with the intellectual atmosphere. The current fashionable schools were Epicurean and Stoic. The local education council decided to test him for certification, since his subject matter was new to them. Here we see in stark relief just how much of a barrier Hellenistic intellectual assumptions were to the gospel. The Epicureans asserted that the gods hardly cared about human affairs, and surely there was no afterlife. Man could, at best, try to enjoy life in grand style, though not in raw hedonism. The Stoics felt man had a duty to live by natural law, and tended to rather strict ethical conduct. Both were afflicted with the foundations of Plato and Aristotle, making no allowance for anything they could not see or theorize from reason.

Paul was willing to outline his gospel message. He began by making note of the local religious culture, and selected the altars to the Unknown God as his anchor point. From there he outlined the basic claims: Jehovah is Creator and Sustainer of all life. All mankind came from His hand, and He is directly involved in natural and human affairs. However, He permitted humans to wander a bit with religion. Here and there one could find glimpses of the truth, Paul noting a smattering of accurate ideas in pagan philosophy and religion. However, He had finally revealed Himself with the intention of calling all men to an accurate knowledge of Him, who was too transcendent for man-made idols or temples, but a spiritual being far apart from His Creation. The final revelation was a particular Man apart, who was so marked by His resurrection from the dead.

At that point, Paul had stepped outside the acceptable ideas of Greek philosophical assumptions. They had no place for the notion of mere mortal bodies being resurrected. Anything tangible and real was of necessity inferior. In their world, there was no place for a belief in a human spirit, an eternal soul that could be contained in flesh. The educators politely tabled the notion of granting Paul a license to teach, while some of them sarcastically dismissed his ideas. There were a few who embraced his teaching, among them a Dionysius and a Damaris. We have no record of any church ever existing in Athens during this time.

On the one hand, everyone can see that we are in a period of rapid change and political turmoil. On the other hand, it's too easy to lose track of reality and panic over things that aren't so easily changed. I keep trying to warn that "economic collapse" does not mean you won't be able to buy food. It means some foods will be hard to get, but stuff produced locally will still be available to some degree. You won't starve unless you are too poor to have Internet access that allows you to read this.

For example, one issue the panic-vendors are selling is the collapse in the value of the US dollar on the world market. Keep in mind that consumer price inflation is fully intentional; it's part of the management of our economy through banking and so forth. If you know enough about standard economics teaching, then you might be in a position to understand just how messed up the West is in terms of economics in the first place. Michael Hudson addresses the economics we have all been taught, but points out the flaws.

But it's highly unlikely the US dollar will simply disappear from the market. There is too much value tied up in all the dollars out there in the world. Yes, holding dollars will expose other countries to US political leverage, but that leverage is not absolute. The value of the dollar will fall, but it won't be displaced by something else overnight. It takes time to move whole economies away from the dollar.

It will be rough, but not impossible. Our Lord knows how to handle these things.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

It's one of three topics covered in this blog post from Toby Rogers. In essence, the experiment shows that people tend to conform socially against their own better judgment. It's connected to the ugly Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Of course, the whole point for us is that faith makes us socially nonconformist. Faith demands you take the risk of standing out from the crowd when tested.