Acts 16:11-24

Lydia’s Conversion in Philippi
11 From Troas we put out to sea and sailed straight for Samothrace, and the next day we went on to Neapolis. 12 From there we traveled to Philippi, a Roman colony and the leading city of that district[a] of Macedonia. And we stayed there several days.
13 On the Sabbath we went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. 14 One of those listening was a woman from the city of Thyatira named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. She was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. 15 When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. “If you consider me a believer in the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my house.” And she persuaded us.

Paul and Silas in Prison
16 Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a female slave who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. 17 She followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.” 18 She kept this up for many days. Finally Paul became so annoyed that he turned around and said to the spirit, “In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!” At that moment the spirit left her.
19 When her owners realized that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities. 20 They brought them before the magistrates and said, “These men are Jews, and are throwing our city into an uproar 21 by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice.”

22 The crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas, and the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten with rods. 23 After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison, and the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully. 24 When he received these orders, he put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.



Dig Deeper
The state in which I live has gone through a tremendous amount of conflict and political intrigue in the last year. It all began, believe it or not, with a seemingly simple law from the new governor that public employees begin to contribute more to their retirement funds and health care plans due to the fact that the state was on the verge of financial insolvency. There have been cost-saving measures before both suggested and real but never had they received a response like this one got. The union leadership in our state went crazy and began to fight against these measures violently. They whipped their supporters into a frenzy and they basically took over the capitol building for weeks with coloful and rowdy protests. Politicians who supported them even spirited themselves out of the state and hid out so that the legislature could not be called into session to pass the bills.

What was intriguing about the fierce nature of the opposition was why it was so intense. Everyone agreed that the state was broke and something had to be done. Part of the proposal was that these unions would not be able to negotiate these areas in their contracts so that the cutbacks in state funding couldn’t just be averted in future contract negotiations. Many claimed that this was the problem, but most states and the federal employees don’t have these same negotiation rights so it would seem unlikely that this was the real cause. Slowly the real problem became apparent as to why the unions were so violently opposed to these seemingly common-sense measures. Part of the law proposed by the governor included the stipulation that employees could no longer be forced to be a part of a union at their workplace or have union dues taken from their paychecks automatically. They would have to choose to pay their dues and be part of their union. Now people can have different political opinions and that’s fine. In fact the point of this is not at all to be political. The reality here seemed to be, though, that the true cause of the violent opposition was that little stipulation which would all but wipe out the power of public sector unions. Whether you support them or oppose them, that was the real issue. If you mess with people’s money, you will get a fight but mess with their power and position and you will have a fight to the death on your hands.

As Paul and his companions went around ancient Asia, Turkey, and Greece preaching the gospel they knew that they were going to face opposition at nearly every turn but every now and then they would come directly into confrontation with the power source of a city or region. If you messed with that, the powers-that-be understood the danger to them and they would come out fighting fiercely. The punch-back can be brutal and Paul was about to experience that in a big way.

When they arrived in Philippi, things started out well. You couldn’t just go into most cities in the ancient world, especially Roman colonies like Philippi and walk up and down the street preaching whatever you wanted. That could be quite dangerous . Things would go much better to have some sort of place from which to preach, a base of operations so to speak. That’s at least one of the reasons that Paul would typically go to a synagogue in a city first and start preaching there. But Philippi apparently had no synagogue. There were so few Jews in Philippi that all Paul could find was a group of Jewish women who would gather together to pray regularly. Jews could not and would not start a synagogue without at least ten men, so these faithful women were doing the best that they could under the circumstances with what seems to have been a lack of the necessary number of men. So Paul found this place and began to preach to the women.

Special attention is paid to a woman who came from Thyatira in the region of Lydia which is likely why she was called Lydia. She was a merchant in purple cloth which meant that, to put it in today’s terms, you would not find her items at the local Wal-Mart. This was high end merchandise and it implies that Lydia was probably a rather wealthy and influential business woman, despite that fact that she was almost surely either unmarried or a widow.

Lydia was a God-fearer (worshipper of God) which meant that she was a Gentile that found something in the Jewish faith that went beyond the pagan religions with which she grew up. Yet she had not become a full-proselyte Jew. When Lydia heard the gospel preached she experienced an opening of her heart. Luke stressed the two-fold aspect of reconciling with God that is necessary for all who would hear his call. God must first open our blind eyes and soften our hardened hearts through his grace. This is what John Wesley referred to as prevenient grace. But God’s grace is not forced upon anyone, it is an opportunity. Given the opportunity, Lydia responded to God’s grace with obedience and humility by being baptized into the life and body of Christ (see Rom. 6:1-10; 1 Cor. 12:13).

Once she had been baptized into Christ, she was a believer and part of the family and now sought to help out her new brothers. They could use her house as a base of operations in Philippi. A new influential and important convert (in fact she was the first convert in Europe) and a place from which to work, things were starting to look up in Philippi. But the calm comes before the storm and the powers of darkness were about to amass rather quickly.

Just because they had a place to stay and work from though, did not mean that they would stop going to the prayer place, which was probably used by more than just Jews in the area. As they arrived they came upon a woman possessed by a spirit. The text is changed by most English versions to make it more accessible (in their estimation) to English readers, but the manuscripts actually read that this woman was possessed by the spirit of the Python. This meant that she was a follower of Apollo that engaged in oracles and fortune-telling. This woman was no scam artist. She was likely truly possessed by a demon spirit that gave her uncanny abilities.

Her response to Paul and his companions was reminiscent of the demonic response to Jesus who attempted to identify and name Jesus and his mission in an attempt to show superiority and dominance over him. This young woman began to follow them and scream at them. We can only imagine how annoying that would have quickly become, yet Luke doesn’t tell us why Paul let this go on for several days without any response. It is difficult to speculate but finally Paul became quite vexed and showed that this spirit did not have dominance over them at all. At the very mention of the authority of Jesus Christ, the spirit left and was gone. This woman had been healed and the situation fixed.

At least that would seem to us to be the logical conclusion to what happened. But this young slave girl had become quite a source of money, power, and prestige for her owners and Paul had unknowingly stepped into a hornet’s nest by messing with the economics and power of these people. Without the spirit of python in this girl, their position of power was under attack. But the dark demonic forces at work also knew the danger of the gospel taking foot in this town founded by retired Roman soldiers.

Paul and Silas were quickly going to bear the brunt of crossing the self-interests of the powers of darkness. They had not only threatened the economic and religious sensibilities of this deeply pagan Roman colony but there were also political undertones to all of this. How dare these Jews come in and tried to tell Romans what to do. Imagine a group of Jews declaring that they possessed some sort of freeing truth that Romans did not possess. How dare they.

They made the assumption that these were not Roman citizens and could treated as sub-standard interlopers but little did they know that Paul and Silas were both Roman citizens. Yet they did not bring this to light at this point. This is another mystery as to why they didn’t (although the reason might become more apparent in the next section) but things got ugly quickly and perhaps there was just no opportunity to do so. The magistrates ordered them stripped and beaten with rods, a punishment that was severe and swift.

One might ask at this point why Paul and Silas would endure such treatment but his answer to that mystery came in 1 Thessalonians 2:2-4: “We had previously suffered and been treated outrageously in Philippi, as you know, but with the help of our God we dared to tell you his gospel in the face of strong opposition. For the appeal we make does not spring from error or impure motives, nor are we trying to trick you. On the contrary, we speak as those approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel. We are not trying to please people but God, who tests our hearts.”

As if that wasn’t enough, they were then thrown in jail under the guard of a jailer who was under strict orders to ensure that they didn’t escape. This jailer quickly proved to be no friend of theirs as he chained them up which would have been very restrictive and kept them from lying down or moving much at all. The jailer seemed quite willing to treat them harshly and show them no mercy.

Paul and Silas had taken on the forces of darkness and had paid dearly. They had shared in the suffering of their Messiah and things seemed like they couldn’t get much worse but when the powers of evil are their most ferocious and things seem the bleakest, that’s when God often does his best work. Paul, Silas, and that jailer would all soon find that out.


Devotional Thought
When things in your life go badly as they did for Paul and Silas in Philippi where does your mindset go? Do you start to feel badly for yourself or do you get excited to see what God is about to do in your life?