How to Starve an Idol

A secular city official is shouting down a howling amphitheater, and the defense he mounts for the Apostle Paul is unexpected: these men are not hierosylos G2417. The King James translates it "robbers of churches," but the Greek is far more concrete. A hierosylos was a temple-stripper—a sacrilegious looter who slipped into sanctuaries under cover of darkness to strip silver, votive plate, and dedicated gold.

The townclerk’s legal certificate went further: the apostles had never blasphemed (blasphēmeō G987) their goddess, either Acts 19:37.

Think about what that reveals. Paul had spent more than two years walking the marble colonnades of Ephesus, living in the shadow of one of the great wonders of the ancient world. Yet after twenty-four months of public preaching, the city's highest magistrate could affirm under Roman law that the missionary had never vandalized a shrine, desecrated an altar, or hurled crude abuse at the local religion. Paul had not engaged in street-corner mockery or theatrical desecration.

How do you bring a multi-million-drachma pagan trade to its knees without swinging a hammer or hurling an insult?

Matthew Henry captured the apostolic method with precision: "It was the idol in the heart that they levelled all their force against... if they can but get that down, the idol in the temple will fall of course." God’s truth, Henry noted, requires neither man’s lie nor "man’s intemperate heat."

Paul never needed to raid the temple of Artemis because he made her irrelevant. He simply reasoned daily that gods made with human hands are no gods at all Acts 19:26. He set the beauty and majesty of the risen Christ alongside a dead block of stone, and the Ephesian imagination was captivated by reality. The silversmiths did not riot because the apostles smashed their workshops; they rioted because their shelves were gathering dust. The craftsmen went broke because the people had quietly withdrawn the worship-capital of their hearts.

Religious outrage is always tempted toward intemperate heat—yelling at the culture, mocking its foolishness, trying to force outer conformity through sheer volume. But shouting down the world's shrines is cheap work. The harder, holy work is to keep unveiling the radiant supremacy of Jesus until the false gods of our age wither from sheer neglect. Win the heart for Christ, and the temple will empty itself.