Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript
## Acts 16:13-40

Sermon scripture is found in Acts 16:13-40. We read here the account of the conversion of Lydia and the deliverance of a demon-possessed woman. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Acts 16:13-40.

And on the Sabbath we went out of the city by a riverside where prayer was wont to be made. And we sat down and spake unto the women which resorted there. And a certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple of the city of Thyatira, which worshiped God, heard us, whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul.

And when she was baptized and her household, she besought us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house and abide there.” And she constrained us. And it came to pass, as we went to prayer, a certain damsel possessed with the spirit of divination met us, which brought her masters much gain by soothsaying, saying, “The same followed Paul and us and cried, ‘These men are the servants of the most high God, which show unto us the way of salvation.’ And this did she many days.

But Paul, being grieved, turned and said to the spirit, “I command thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And he came out the same hour. 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 and brought them to the magistrates, saying, “These men being Jews, do exceedingly trouble our city, and teach customs which are not lawful for us to receive, neither to observe, being Romans.” And the multitude rose up together against them.

And the magistrates rent off their clothes and commanded to beat them. And when they had laid many stripes upon them, they cast them into prison, charging the jailer to keep them safely, who, having received such a charge, thrust them into the inner prison, and made their feet fast in the stocks. And at midnight, Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises unto God, and the prisoners heard them. And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken.

Yet immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s bonds were loosed. And the keeper of the prison, awaking out of his sleep, and seeing the prison doors opened, he drew out his sword and would have killed himself, supposing that the prisoners had been fled. But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, “Do thyself no harm, for we are all here.” Then he called for a light and sprang in and came trembling and fell down before Paul and Silas and brought them out and said, “Sir, what must I do to be saved?” And they said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” And they spake unto him the word of the Lord and to all that were in his house.

And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their stripes, and was baptized, he and all his, straightway. And when he had brought them into his house, he set meat before them and rejoiced, believing in God with all his house. And when it was day, the magistrates sent the sergeants, saying, “Let those men go.” And the keeper of the prison told this, saying to Paul, “The magistrates have sent to let you go.

Now therefore, depart and go in peace.” But Paul said unto them, “They have beaten us openly, uncondemned, being Romans, and have cast us into prison. And now do they thrust us out privily? Nay, verily, but let them come themselves and fetch us out.” And the sergeants told these words unto the magistrates, and they feared when they heard that they were Romans, and they came and besought them, and brought them out, and desired them to depart out of the city.

And they went out of the prison and entered into the house of Lydia. When they had seen the brethren, they comforted them and departed.

Let us pray.

Father, we thank you for your word. We pray now, Lord God, that your indwelling spirit in our hearts, there on the basis of the work of Jesus Christ, may reveal to us more fully what that work entails and what it has accomplished historically and what it shall indeed accomplish in our lifetimes. Help us, Lord God, then to have our hearts, minds, and hands opened, that we might hear, understand, and walk in obedience to the word of your scriptures. To that end, we pray your Holy Spirit’s blessing upon us in Jesus’ name. Amen.

—

There were many of you who commented positively on last week’s sermon. I’m glad that it provided a degree of encouragement to you and a structure for hopefully how to live your lives, both marching with joy, waltzing toward New Jerusalem. And in a way, this is really sort of a continuation of that. The Sabbath is preeminently a day of both discipline and joy.

The Sabbath is a day, and it’s my belief that the occurrences we read of in our text today occurred on the Sabbath. We know that explicitly of the conversion of Lydia, and in the story of the woman possessed by the spirit of divination, we agree that the encounter happened as they were on their way to prayer. And I believe that’s a reference to the formal worship. So I believe that also happened on the Sabbath. They were arrested on that same day, cast into prison after being beaten. And then at midnight—and this may well have been, and again, we don’t know this for certain, but it may well have been the cusp of the transition between the Old Testament Sabbath and the New Testament Sabbath. In other words, when we read that on the Sabbath they went and spoke to Lydia, that undoubtedly was the Jewish Sabbath.

She was a proselyte. And so as they went to prayer, the worship service was probably continuing on the Jewish Sabbath as well. We’re in this period of transition from the Jewish Sabbath to the Christian Sabbath. And so indeed at midnight of the one Sabbath, at the opening of the next day, we see the release of Paul from prison, but more importantly the greater release of the jailer from the bondage to sin and death.

And so I think that this gives us a picture of the Sabbath. And the Sabbath gives us a picture of many blessings, as we’ll see as we go through this text.

The Sabbath is a day of waltzing, though. The Sabbath is a day of discipline. The Sabbath is not, as some might think of it, a day of sloth—a day simply of physical rest. Rather, the rest is cessation from the normal labors of the six days of our week, that we might come together in a special sense in the Lord’s day, the Sabbath of the Lord, the Christian Sabbath. And we might walk through the structure he has given us for this day, and might do so joyously, and we might waltz on the Lord’s day.

Indeed, the early church fathers frequently referred to worship as a holy dance before God, our maker and redeemer. I have in times past provided orders of worship the week before so that families could read them and prepare themselves for the liturgy of the day. It’s a good thing to do. I’ll try to get back into the habit of providing at least a few copies of the order of worship a week ahead of time so that you may practice your dance steps. You may practice your portion of the liturgy of the church on the Lord’s day, on the Christian Sabbath.

The Sabbath is a day of worship, and that worship is both discipline and it is joy. The Sabbath is also a day of cessation from normal labors. It’s discipline not to have to purchase things on the Sabbath. Every Sunday morning as I get dressed and I transfer the contents of my pants that I wore on Saturday to the contents of the pants that I wear on Sunday, I self-consciously take the two checkbooks that I normally carry throughout the week—my own and the church’s checkbook—and set them aside on my dresser on a counter. And it’s one of the disciplines and routines that I’ve gone through to remind myself of the transition we make into the Lord’s day, the Christian Sabbath, the cessation from commercial endeavors.

So it is discipline, which includes a degree of discipline. And I must say that in the last ten or twelve years, there’s probably been two or three days in which we weren’t disciplined enough on the day of preparation, Saturday. We failed to get enough gas in our car and were forced to get gas on the Lord’s day and make a financial transaction. But we’ve tried diligently to discipline ourselves not to have to do that. And that is a discipline, but it’s also with joy because it means that all those concerns and anxieties about work and commercial transactions are removed from us. And so we rest in the cessation of those sorts of labors.

We recreate together, as we believe the Old Testament saints did in the three times a year when they went up to Jerusalem. And there’s a degree of discipline in that, but there’s also a degree of joy as we fellowship and recreate with the people of God. And so the Sabbath day is a day of discipline but also of joy, and the worship service itself, as I’ve said, also includes these aspects. It is a waltz before the presence of God that prepares us to waltz the rest of the days of our life.

I think that on the Sabbath, and particularly during worship, we see the same common elements that are described on your outline indicating from this text. And if you don’t believe that the second two things here occurred on the Sabbath, that’s okay. But we know that the Sabbath is indeed involved with the proclamation of those sorts of things. You know that the Sabbath is a picture of open hearts—God’s sovereign grace opening our hearts to hear the message of the scriptures, come to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ—and open homes. He invites us to his home on the Lord’s day. And then we invite each other, frequently in this church at least, to our homes on the Lord’s day as a model of hospitality.

And so the Sabbath is a picture of open hearts, sovereignly open by God, and open homes as well. The Sabbath is also a picture of the casting out of demons of individuals and also cultural demons. The demon-possessed woman here is a picture of what was going on in the Roman Empire at this time. A spirit of divination, a demon, was possessing this woman. And the Sabbath is a day in which demons are cast out. Our Lord frequently cast out such demons on the Sabbath as a picture that the Sabbath is, rather, a year of release—a picture of the Jubilee and release from all restraints, and certainly the casting out of the bondage of demons.

But that also produces in our text today an antithesis, a reaction, an enmity that God has judicially placed between the two seeds that inhabit this earth is brought out as well and focused upon as a result of the salvific work of the Savior on the Lord’s day. And so the Sabbath is a reminder that we are in a pleasant place—God has prepared a table for us—but it is indeed in the midst of our enemies, culturally right now. And those enemies become agitated as we do our work successfully.

And then third, the Sabbath is of course a day of release from bondage—prison, death (a picture of death, sin and death)—released from bondage. And the greater release from bondage, not simply of Paul from the prison, but rather the Philippian jailer released from the bondage of his sins. “What shall I do? What must I do to be saved?” And Paul tells them very clearly and simply. And so the Sabbath is a picture of that.

And finally, the Sabbath is a picture of the triumph of the Lord Jesus Christ over all things. As we sing these psalms year by year in this church and hopefully decade by decade, and as we recite the Psalms antiphonally, we cannot help but be amazed at how many times the picture of suffering is there, and also the picture of victory as well. And today was no exception in our Sabbath day reading from the Psalms. What we sang indeed, we shall—the church shall—Jesus Christ will through the church tread upon adders, tread upon Satan himself, and tread upon those kingdoms that are built in opposition to the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. In this case, we see victory over the Roman Empire. We’re at Philippi. Remember that Philippi is the opening gateway now into Europe. This is the beginning of the progression of the gospel now from Greece to Rome. Philippi is a miniature Rome, and the conquering, the conversion of these typical elements of Philippian society given for us in this text, is pictured the conversion of the whole Roman Empire. That’s my belief. As we open up into the Roman Empire, we see a picture of what will happen, as surely as Jericho was a picture of the conquest of Canaan.

So these conversions amongst different people, different elements of society in the opening stages of Philippian biblical history, as a picture of the conversion of the Roman Empire—and those things as well—are pictured for us in the Lord’s day, the Sabbath. So it is a discipline the Sabbath is, but it is a discipline that brings with great joy as we understand these messages.

Let’s go over them again then in somewhat more detail and pausing to reflect upon these things.

—

First, we have the Sabbath and Lydia, given for us in the first few verses of this text, verses 13 through 15. God sovereignly opens a heart, and as well Lydia then opens a home in response to God’s work in her heart as she has changed and evidences the saving faith that God has brought her to through her demonstration of Christian hospitality.

As I said, these stories are marked with time markers. At the beginning of each of these three accounts, we have time markers. And here we have that it was on the Sabbath as they went to a riverside where prayer was wont to be made. We have no synagogue in Philippi. Philippi was a Roman territory, as I said, and Calvin writes that it was illegal to have synagogue services in the Roman Empire. It was certainly illegal for them to press the distinctives of their faith, as we’ll see and comment upon a little later in the text.

But in any event, Paul here goes where prayers wont to be made. You see, it was Paul’s custom to engage himself in the discipline and the joy of Sabbath observance. That should be our custom as well—a discipline and a joy to us. That’s what Paul did here. And in the providence of God, he goes to this river where prayers wont to be made. And he comes across a woman there.

And this woman was named Lydia. She was a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira, some distance from Philippi, which worshiped God. Thyatira was known for its dyers—sellers of purple cloth. Purple being a dye really related to a very expensive dye obtained through sea animals of different types. And this dye was extracted drop by drop and very expensively obtained. So we have every reason to believe that Lydia was a merchant in such things and was in Philippi applying her trade so to speak.

Her home remained in Thyatira, but she was here in Philippi for a period of time while she engaged in commercial endeavors. This was a woman who apparently is quite well-to-do and was indeed a merchant prince, as one commentator refers to it. Thyatira, as I said, was known for its dying capabilities. And in the historical accounts of this time, there was a craft or a guild of men and women who would be experts in dying articles of clothing and then selling them—different types of tapestries, etc. Well, that’s who this woman was, and she was there and she was a god-fearer as well.

We were told she was a proselyte, in other words, to the Jewish faith. Remember, on the day of Pentecost, nearly all nations of the earth are represented there, and so there was a witness of the Jewish faith certainly in this period of time. There may well have been other men who came into the Roman Empire before Paul did, bringing the gospel. But God wants us to think of this as the opening stages of Philippian biblical history.

Well, Paul speaks the word of God to Lydia, and God sovereignly, it says, opens her heart. We read in verse 14, “whose heart the Lord opened.” And it’s very important we don’t neglect that fact. We have here one of the first of what I think will be three very important lessons in this text that the church of Jesus Christ in the 20th century, and certainly in America, needs to hear again and again.

We stand on the verge a couple of weeks here of having a reformation party again and of celebrating the great truths of the Reformation. But we stand in a historical context in which this great truth—the sovereignty of God, specifically in salvation but not limited to that—in which this great reformed truth, the sovereignty of God, has been washed away. It is almost gotten to the point where a church that preaches a sovereign, electing, predestining God in terms of salvation and everything else is looked upon as a cult by most of the church, because most of the church in America today are Arminian. They believe that it’s man’s choice, not God’s election, that determines who comes to salvation.

And so we have a great need to understand this truth, to rejoice in the discipline of this truth, and to speak forth this truth into the Christian culture in which we live. God sovereignly opens the heart of Lydia. Lydia is dead in her trespasses and sins prior to God’s regenerating work. Dead people cannot bring themselves to life. Neither can Lydia. She is dependent upon the grace of God shown to her.

You know, the Reformation, if there is one thing the Reformation was, it was the reassertion of the sovereignty of God. That’s what the Reformation was all about. The three great literary works to come out of the Reformation were Luther’s *Bondage of the Will*, a repudiation of the concept of free will as it was then taught; Calvin’s *Institutes of the Christian Religion*, again, a strong assertion of Calvinism, the sovereignty of God in all things; and then finally, in the Anglican Church, the *Book of Common Prayer*, explicitly Calvinistic, preaching again the great early truths of the church of the sovereignty of God. God. The Reformation was the reassertion of a sovereign God as opposed to a sovereign church in that particular time frame. And hopefully God is affecting such a reformation again in America.

I want to dwell on this a little bit. I want to read a few verses here about the election of God of believers. I know we’ve talked about this truth, but it’s so important to understand it and to give God the glory for this when we come across texts such as we have here that he sovereignly opens the heart of Lydia.

We read in Isaiah 44:20 of the man that has the deceived heart. “A deceived heart hath turned him aside. This is what all men are in their unregenerate state. He cannot deliver his soul, nor say, ‘Is there not a lie in my right hand?’” That’s the picture of fallen man. He has a deceived heart that has turned him aside. He cannot save his soul.

Jeremiah 13:23. “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? No. Indeed. Nor can the sinning heart—the heart darkened by sin, born in rebellion to God and practicing rebellion from the earliest days of its life. That heart cannot change itself. Only God can sovereignly do that.

In John 6, as Jesus is talking to the men that would not believe in him, he says that “this is the Father’s will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me, I should lose nothing but should raise it up again at the last day.” Who are the ones that Christ raises up the last day? Not the ones that choose ultimately for Jesus, but rather the ones that the Father has given to the Son. God’s initiating the work of election and the work of salvation in people’s hearts.

In verse 40 of that same text, “This is the will of him that sent me, that everyone which seeth his son and believeth on him may have everlasting life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” The Father sovereignly has given you to the Son, and as a result of the Father’s opening your heart, you have believed upon the Lord Jesus Christ, and you now have everlasting life.

Later in that text, in verse 65 of John 6, he said, “Therefore said I unto you that no man can come unto me except it were given unto him of my Father.” How much clearer could our Savior be? We will not come to the Savior unless the Father acts on us first and gives it to us that we might be given to the Savior.

Romans 8:7 says, “The carnal mind is enmity against God. It is not subject to the law of God. Neither indeed can it be.” You were born with a carnal mind, and prior to your regeneration, you were carnal in your mind. You were hatred against God, enmity against God. And so was Lydia prior to God’s opening her heart and having her believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Titus 3:3. “We ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving diverse lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. But after that the kindness and love of God our Savior toward man appear, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost.”

Titus says—as the Heidelberg Catechism says—that we are prone by nature to hate God and our neighbor. The requirement of God is to love God and our neighbor. But we are prone by nature to hate—not simply to have, you know, neutrality toward God and neutrality toward our neighbor, as so many would posit today in our culture. We are positively given to the hatred of God. “The carnal mind is enmity against God.” Hatred against him and against his neighbor. And so were we.

But then the kindness and love of God our Savior has appeared—not by works of righteousness which we do to merit salvation, but rather according to his mercy, undeserved favor on our parts. He saves us by the washing of regeneration, renewal of the Holy Ghost.

Romans 9:16. “So that it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but God that showeth mercy.” Clearly, the great truths of election are given here.

Back to John 6:44. “No man can come to me except the Father which hath sent me draw him, and I will raise him up at the last day.” That word “draw” has the connotations of pulling, kicking and screaming. Our opposition to God, our hatred of God is overcome by God’s grace. It’s not overcome by our somehow deciding to choose for God. God opens the heart of Lydia. He opens the heart of all men and women that come to the Savior. He draws us kicking and screaming toward himself, because in ourselves, we hate God and do not want to be in his presence.

Now, this is a radical truth, but it is true. But there’s another side to this drawing as well. I don’t want us to think of this somehow that God brings us into this bondage and slavish relationship. Because the scriptures tell us, by way of analogy in the Song of Solomon, that this drawing is into a love relationship with God and into a covenantal relationship with him that is a great source of joy to us. There’s a discipline to it, but there’s joy.

And in the Song of Solomon 1:4, “Draw me, we will run after thee. The king hath brought me into his chambers. We will be glad and rejoice in thee. We will remember thy love more than wine. The upright love thee.”

If we understand that God has drawn us to himself, we understand that he has done that as a loving husband draws his wife to himself. That’s the analogy in the Song of Solomon. And we should remember that love of God more than wine. And of course, the wine in communion is given to us as an expression of the joy that should accompany our understanding of the relationship we’ve been brought into through the work of our Savior.

And it is the love of God, the love of God sovereignly and mercifully shown toward his people, that draws them to himself. God in his providence and in his electing power loved Lydia. He drew her to himself, and he does so by way of opening her heart sovereignly. And again, in Jeremiah 31:3, the Lord says, “I have loved thee with an everlasting love; therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee.”

The great reformed truth of election, God’s sovereignty, and opening the hearts of men and women to hear the truth and so come to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ—that great Reformation truth is one that we must in a disciplined way pronounce these days. But it is a joyous truth. It should fill our hearts with great joy that the Father has so loved us to draw us to himself.

Lydia was drawn. God sovereignly opened Lydia’s heart. And as an evidence of this, she then opens herself up to make public profession of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And then secondly, she opens up her home as the great demonstration of Christian hospitality in the New Testament.

The evidences of Lydia’s saving faith, here given to her sovereignly on the part of God, is first her baptism, her public profession of faith. And we see here, by way of just a side note, one of many, many references, actually, in the book of Acts to household baptisms. And while Jay Alexander is correct in his commentary when he says that all men reason in a circle when they come to such texts—in other words, those who believe that baptism is covenantal and should include the children of men and women that come to belief in their adult years, and the younger children, should be baptized as well, they see in this household baptism the justification for that. Those who reject that truth say that well, then all the children of the household must have come to belief, and there were no infants in the household, because they were all baptized. And so really this doesn’t prove the case.

But however, when you see so many households added up—Cornelius, Lydia, the Philippian jailer—we’ll see more as we go through the book of Acts. It becomes harder and harder to imagine that there were no infants in those households or no young children who had not yet come to the supposed age of accountability of twelve. So there is some prima facie evidence here, I think, for covenantal baptism—that all under the covenantal authority of the one who comes to faith in Jesus Christ are indeed baptized. And so we note that in passing, but Lydia comes to baptism and her household as well as a demonstration of her public profession of faith.

But it doesn’t stop there, because Lydia then exercises Christian hospitality. We read in verse 15 that after she is baptized, she besought us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come unto my house and abide there.” And she constrained us. Lydia, whose house was probably a very nice house, being a seller of purple, extends Christian hospitality to the apostles.

And indeed, we find out by the end of this chapter that there is a church established now in Lydia’s home itself. That’s where the brethren meet. And so Lydia is a picture for us of Christian hospitality first on an individual level and secondly on a corporate level as well.

Hospitality is a Christian virtue. To the extent that hospitality has declined in our day and age, which it certainly has, so also that is an evidence of the decline of true Christian faith and spirituality.

Romans 12:13 tells us that indeed it is one of our requirements: “distribute to the necessity of saints and given to hospitality.” 1 Peter 4:9 tells us to “use hospitality one to another without grudging.” Hospitality is what we’re to extend.

You know, in a way, Lydia is a beautiful fulfillment of one of the prophecies or prophetic statements in the book of Isaiah. In Isaiah 60:9, we read, “Surely the isles shall wait for me and the ships of Tarshish first to bring thy sons from far, their silver and their gold with them unto the name to the Lord thy God, and to the Holy One of Israel, because he hath glorified thee.” Lydia was drawn with silver and gold from far, to a saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And she then applies her merchandise for the use of God’s kingdom.

Again, in Isaiah 23:18, “Her merchandise and her hire shall be holiness to the Lord. It shall not be treasured nor laid out, for her merchandise shall be for them that dwell before the Lord to eat sufficiently and for durable clothing.”

Lydia, upon her conversion, had a renewed sense of the consecration of the goods that God had given to her to be holy to the Lord and consecrated to him. And one of the ways she demonstrated that was to extend hospitality—clothing, that is shelter, and nourishment, that is food—to the apostles and then to the church developing in the city of Philippi.

So here at the very opening of the first church in the western world of which we are descendants, we have Lydia sovereignly being moved by God to salvation and evidencing that salvation with Christian hospitality.

I’m wearing my video camera titac again today. And I want you to think back on your life this last week or two, and I want to think back on my life this last week or two, and see that if God had videotaped, which he of course in a sense does—he knows all that we do. But if you had seen a videotape of your life this last week or two, how much extension of Christian hospitality have you shown? Evaluate your own belief, knowledge, and joyful response to God’s election by seeing how much you’ve extended grace to others.

Because that’s the source of Lydia’s desiring to show Christian hospitality. The royal virtue, as R.J. Rushdoony refers to it, was the demonstration that someone had been taken into the favor of the king, become part of the king’s household, and therefore demonstrates that royal virtue of being a member of the king’s household by showing grace to those outside. Because Lydia knew that she was only there by grace. And so she was willing—more than willing, desirous—of extending grace to others. She had a perfect opportunity. These men who were there knew nobody in the city, no place to stay really. And she could extend that grace to them and open up her household to them.

Christian hospitality is exercised by many people today by means of social exigency. It’s needful. It’s something you’re supposed to do. It is a duty or requirement upon you. Or maybe you have people who you like to have into your house. Charles Starr, a representative from my district, stopped by yesterday morning. He was canvassing the area, and it was easy to extend hospitality to Charles Starr because it’s an honor to have a state representative in your house, and maybe that’s sometimes why we extend hospitality—we like the guests we’re going to have in. We like the conversation they may be able to provide us with, etc. Or we may do it because it’s our turn. Somebody invited us over. Now it’s our turn to invite them over. And all these things—I don’t want to discourage you from practicing these degrees of Christian hospitality.

But I want you to go beyond that. This is the march that I’ve just described: it’s needful, it’s a duty, it’s my turn now because they invited me over. But I want you to see the joy of the exercise of Christian hospitality. Christian hospitality is the extension of community, and it’s the removal of ourselves from isolation to ourselves or our own household. And so I want you to see Christian hospitality not just as a duty but as the gracious, joyful extension of grace to other people to come into your household.

Maybe you had people in, as I did yesterday with Representative Starr. But that video camera that God uses sees through to your heart and sees whether this is just simply done by way of duty or whether you result in joy in the Christian community and fellowship that ensues. I want you to recommit yourselves, and I want to commit myself again today, to the extension of Christian hospitality. We have in the story of Lydia the great New Testament example of the extension of hospitality. And I don’t want us to go by it without being exhorted, encouraged, and positively exhorted again to extend Christian hospitality in the context of this church and the greater body of Jesus Christ as well.

I have a problem in this area. Frankly, I don’t think I have as big a problem as I used to have, but in years gone by, I sort of liked to be by myself. You know, you can kind of relax more and kind of let it all hang out at home without people around. And yet over the years, by way of duty primarily, I’ve extended Christian hospitality and come to realize more and more what a joy it is. And you know, it’s funny—at least with me, it’s always my first reaction usually: “Oh, I don’t know. We’re kind of busy and the house isn’t clean, or I’ve got work to do.” But if you finally punch through that and get people over into your house and fellowship with them, by the end of the time, you’re so happy you did that instead of just staying home and doing your normal routine.

So I want us to look at Lydia as an example to us of what God accomplishes in the life of the first western Christian, so to speak—at least the first in the way of God’s reporting of this.

Matthew Henry said that when the heart is thus open to Christ, the ear is open to his word. She also heard more instruction from the apostles as a result of God opening her heart. The lips are opened in prayer. Her house became a house of prayer. The hand is opened in charity, and the step is enlarged in all manner of gospel obedience. And so it is with us as well.

We see Lydia, as I said, as the first Christian convert in the west. She is, in a sense, the mother of the western church. You could see it that way. And the things that God expects us to remember from the account of Lydia is that he sovereignly opened her heart, and she in response opened her home by way of Christian extension of hospitality and grace, recognizing that she had received the grace of God.

The Sabbath is a day of God opening our hearts. We pray for that every Lord’s day, that he would open our hearts to hear his word, that our lives would be changed, and that we would rejoice in the hospitality we show to each other at the Lord’s feast, at the agape. That this would move from duty or discipline to us to joy to us, and the extension of hospitality into the rest of the day as well.

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The Sabbath is also a day, however, of delivery of the demon-possessed and of the revealing of the antithesis. In verses 16 and following, we read of the account of the woman, a certain damsel who has possessed the spirit of divination. And Paul sovereignly, again here, now at the command of the Lord—that is, by the Lord’s command—drives this spirit from the woman. And as a result of this, great persecution ensues.

Verse 16. “And it came to pass, as we went to prayer”—there’s the time marker again. Remember, we began Lydia’s story with “on the Sabbath.” Here, “as we went to prayer.” Now, I believe here that “prayer” here is the formal sense of the term worship. And while it could have been another day of the week, I think that there is reason to believe that this is the Sabbath. If you don’t believe that, that’s okay. Just use the Sabbath as an example of the truths that I’m going to speak of here. But I think the text is written in such a way to have us think that.

But in any event, “as they went to prayer,” as they went to worship, “a certain damsel possessed the spirit of divination met them.” Now, the word “damsel” here is “a servant.” She was a slave, so to speak, to the men that used her for profit. And she is possessed with a spirit of divination. She’s used by her masters to attain much gain to themselves by soothsaying—that is, by fortunetelling, by giving people demonic advice and counsel relative to their future.

And she follows Paul and the others about and cried, saying, “These men are the servants of the most high God, which show unto us the way of salvation.” All of which things were true. But Paul didn’t like this. We don’t know why Paul didn’t like it. We read in the next verse that he was grieved. There are some who say that he was grieved because the woman was possessed and controlled by a spirit, and he grieved for her. But Jay Alexander says the term actually has the implication of being worn down. He lost his patience finally with this demon following him around shouting out this stuff. He didn’t want that kind of testimony.

He didn’t want the salvation of the most high God—which was true—to be associated with demonic forces and certainly with the woman who is being exploited by her masters who owned her and would use her for great gain by this ungodly assertion of demonic power within her. So Paul didn’t like the connection that she was making between salvation, her form of salvation really, and the demonic form of salvation with the message of the most high God. That’s what others think. We don’t really know. But we do know that he did finally, at the end—this has happened continuously for a period of time, apparently, according to the text—and we do know that at one point he simply was grieved, worn down by it.

In the providence of God, he then turns and he says to the spirit, “I command thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And he came out the same hour. Wonderful deliverance of this woman here from the spirit of possession, the spirit of divination that possessed her, probably for quite some time. And we know that by doing this, Paul mimics, as it were, the Savior. We see that we could spend a lot of time talking about how these actions of the apostles of the church recorded in the book of Acts are so correlated to the works of Jesus Christ. But certainly all this should probably bear to bring to mind that Jesus cast out many demons. He would refuse to allow the demons to testify to who he was. So really, Paul is right in line with the Savior in this action. He’s doing this correctly, and he is again demonstrating the power of the gospel to remove demon possession from a particular woman.

These men who that had controlled her, however, are quite upset about this. The masters whose hope of gain is gone. They then grab ahold of Paul and Silas. They draw them now into the city, into the marketplace. They take them to the magistrates, the rulers, and they say, “These guys stole our profit away by getting this demon out of this woman.” No, they don’t say that. They don’t say that. They should have said that. That’s what they really were thinking. But look at the roots they use in verse 20.

They say, “These men being Jews, they resort to anti-Semitism. The Roman population here—they do exceedingly trouble our city. They turn our city upside down. They trouble our city. They make everything out of kilter here, they’re saying. And they teach customs which are not lawful for us to receive, neither to observe, being Romans.”

These were really terrible men. These were men who just saw a woman delivered of demon possession and could not rejoice in her freedom because their financial pocketbooks were hurt by the release of that woman. Money—the love of money—is the root of all kinds of evil. And it’s certainly given to us here as a root of great evil in the pagan world of Philippi, the Roman Empire. Money motivates these men, but they’re not truthful. They’re not truth tellers. They’re liars.

And what they do is they try to trouble the city and trouble the magistrates, getting these guys kicked out in revenge for what they’ve done to their slave girl here. They appeal to patriotism. Bob Dylan has that song. You know, they say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings. And here these scoundrels cling to the roots of patriotism. “We’re good Roman citizens, and these ungodly Jews here want to teach practices and customs which we cannot and should not observe.”

Now, they were in keeping with the Roman mindset. The Roman mindset, as I said, understood the antithesis between the Jewish faith and their system, and they forbade it. It also is an example to us, by the way, of the following: While most of the Jewish church was somewhat apostate, yet the Jews here were at least self-conscious enough to engage themselves in customs apparently that were objectionable to the city-states of Rome. How many people could say this about Christians—that Christians teach things which are unlawful for us as Americans to do? They can’t. Not because we don’t believe things that are in contradiction to what American morality is today, but because we don’t assert those things publicly and we don’t trouble the cities in which we live by and large.

And as we do, we can expect to hear these same kind of claims that “you’re being un-American in those activities, you Christians.” Well, that’s what these men said. They said, “Paul and Silas, these are bad guys because they’re not good Roman citizens. They’re Jews.” Well, they were Jews. They were Christians as well. And they were Christians before they were Roman citizens. Now, as it turns out, as the story tells us later, Paul was indeed a Roman citizen, but he doesn’t assert that here for his own reasons.

But I want us to see here the reaction to these men. This reliance upon patriotism, supposedly, as their means of defense of what they really wanted to do, which is to get their financial gain back and punish those who had taken their gain away from them. Now, this little story here, this portion of the story, and the magistrates of course then believe them. They rise up. They take Paul and Silas. They beat them and throw them into prison.

Now, they may well have thought, by the way, being cast into prison that they were headed for the death penalty. That would have been probably their case. The Roman magistrates carried what were called *lictors*—an axe with a bunch of rods bound together around the axe. And in cases like this, they’d have that thing in their hand as the symbol of Roman power and authority. And when they found somebody like this that needed to be punished, they’d unwrap those rods and they would use those rods to beat them unmercifully.

And notice here it says they were beaten with many, many stripes. In Jewish law, 39, 40 stripes is the most you could give somebody. Not in Roman law. They beat them unmercifully. And then the next stage was to use the axe on them. You see, the axe is the center. And that may well have been what Paul and Silas were headed for here. But in any event, these Roman magistrates listened and responded as the crowd did as well. This is quite important.

The crowd as well is involved in this. The multitudes rise up together against them. In verse 22, in response to this false claim of a denial of patriotism that was made by these ungodly men, who are using this demon-possessed woman for their own gain. They stir up the multitudes by a false play to patriotism. And as a result of this, however, in the providence of God, what he is portraying for us is the radical antithesis that is in place between the sons of the serpent and the seed of the woman.

I want to talk about that for a couple of minutes. In as in Lydia’s case, the great truth of the Reformation is election, that the church needs to hear again. And the demonstration of that is Christian hospitality. So in the case of the demon-possessed woman and the accounts that follow, the great Reformation truth of the antithesis between the two seeds, the battle, the hatred that goes on between them that needs to be reasserted in our day and age today.

And I want to go over briefly some scriptures here on this particular area, as we did at election, and I want you to I’ll be going over these in the future as well. For those of you who wish to go through Greg Bahnsen’s apologetic work, *Preparing Us for Sharing the Faith*, an understanding of the radical antithesis—that there is no neutrality out there, that is a myth given to us in our culture—is necessary for us both to witness effectively and to live our lives effectively as well, to understand what is in store for us as we press the demands of Jesus Christ on men and women and of the Christian culture in which we live.

This antithesis—it is the denial of this antithesis that has so plagued the church of Jesus Christ. You know, there are churches, it is a regular occurrence now, where Baptist churches are taking the name Baptist out of their name. I’ve heard of Bible churches that want to take the name Bible out of the name of the church. Presbyterian churches, etc. Next, they’ll probably want to get rid of the word “church,” make them, you know, the Beaverton Community Club or something. They don’t want to give offense in the naming of these institutions. They don’t want to stress distinctives. They want to be inclusionist to all men. “We want to welcome seekers, those who may possibly be oriented to God somewhat, into our worship services, into that holy dance. It’s supposed to be a holy dance before God.”

We’re in a period in which the church is galloping headlong toward the denial of this biblical truth of antithesis and enmity that is pictured for so strongly in the text that we have just come to. So I want to spend a couple of minutes here going over this antithesis. And just so you don’t worry, we won’t do the third point today. We might touch on it briefly in closing. We’ll deal with that next week in the second portion of this sermon. So we’ll wrap up with this talk about antithesis and then some application in terms of this demon-possessed woman in our day and age and specifically to the upcoming election.

God tells us in Genesis 3, verse 15, in his declaration to the serpent, his judicial curse upon the serpent, he says as part of the curse in verse 15 of Genesis 3, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman and between thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”

God—now this is the important point I want to make, and I’m going to make many of these points based on a recent tape I listened to by Greg Bahnsen at a talk at Western Theological Seminary. This is a very important point to make. The hatred, the antithesis that exists between the two seeds, the two types of humanity that walk this earth, and it is nothing less than that in the scriptures. The scriptures posit a new humanity. And the conflict between the new humanity and the old fallen humanity is real. And it doesn’t just happen because it sort of happens. We’re told in Genesis 3:15 that God has judicially placed enmity, hatred, antithesis, between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman.

God says that history from now on will be marked by enmity between two types of people. And this is a result of God’s judicial placement of enmity. In the Hebrew text, verse 15 starts with the word “enmity,” for emphasis. It’s placed first in the order of the Hebrew words: “Enmity will I place between your seed and her seed by way of judicial pronouncement.” That’s the world in which we live. Genesis continues an understanding of what happens after that, and it contains an understanding of our world given to us.

The rest of biblical history goes on to talk about this antithesis as well. Our Savior in the New Testament said in John 8:44 to the Pharisees, “Ye are of your father the devil. What’s he talking about? You’re of the seed. You’re seed of the devil. He tells them in John 8:44. He’s telling them, remember those two humanities back there that God said he placed…”

[The transcript ends mid-sentence.]