An idol is anything we desire more than God, love more than God, or fear more than God. That, all too often, is what we would see if we looked in a mirror. Times such as these are God-given opportunities to shed ourselves of the excess baggage of our sinful narcissism so that we can fix our gaze on Christ who is more beautiful than all our comprehension.

And God was doing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched his skin were carried away to the sick, and their diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them. Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.” Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this. But the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?” And the man in whom was the evil spirit leaped on them, mastered all of them and overpowered them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. And this became known to all the residents of Ephesus, both Jews and Greeks. And fear fell upon them all, and the name of the Lord Jesus was extolled. Also many of those who were now believers came, confessing and divulging their practices. And a number of those who had practiced magic arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all. And they counted the value of them and found it came to fifty thousand pieces of silver. So the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily. (Acts 19:11-20)

Who is this God?

The story gives us leads. It takes place in the city, Ephesus, near the shores of the Aegean Sea. It is a rich, cosmopolitan, multicultural place with a large Jewish minority. Most people, however, are pagans and proud of it. People compete over their devotion. Locals bragged, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!” That was only a hint of the city’s devotion. There were a host of deities that competed for popular devotion. There was a pecking order with Diana (Artemis in Greek) at the top, celebrated in a temple that dwarfed the Parthenon, with ranks of lesser gods, spirits, demons under her.

All of the sacrifice and incense can be misleading. We get the impression that these people considered the gods and the world they represented the most important things in their lives. That has everything backward. People did not worship deities or spirits, they bribed them to get happy lives in return. If the god was too strong to push around, you bribed her to get her on your side. Lesser spirits could, however, be bullied if you had the right leverage. That was what Luke was telling us. He described a community of people who wanted life to work for them.

They got experts to help them do that. We call them exorcists. If we take a closer look at this, we can see what the people thought of their gods. The gods had to be feared but they could be managed. Gods were capricious. You never knew if they were for or against you. Offerings helped get them on your side. When speaking of the gods or spirits, the point was to make them work for your good. The Greco-Roman world was all about human flourishing. Religion, in all of its forms, existed to order society. The unseen world was always treated as a reality, whether it’s observance was genuine or just a polite fiction, the point was the peace of the polis.

Acts 19 describes Paul performing miracles, to include healing, in the name of the Lord Jesus. Some exorcists, piggybacking on Jesus and Paul’s reputation and success command an evil spirit in their name to obey the exorcists’ command. It does not go well as we see. Rather than obeying the exorcists, he gives them a mauling and strips the clothing from their backs, before they run for their lives.

The performance of Paul and his connection to Jesus, now risen from the grave as we see earlier in Luke and Acts, describes the enthusiasm related to the many miracles performed in Ephesus, things that were seen in public. Thus far, all we know is that this Jesus and his servant Paul perform miracles. In other words, they are seen to do things not things normally accomplished by most of us. Paul heals people in Jesus’ name for instance. There is more, however.

If that is all we are told, we could characterize both men as healers, something the exorcists, the Sons of Sceva, claimed for themselves. But Luke gives us more to work with. Not only does Paul succeed in Jesus’ name, but the Sons of Sceva don’t. The reasons for that are easy to see. Sceva is not a name found on any of the high priests’ roles. If he is physically related to a high priest, he is misleading about his credentials.

You can fool a lot of people but you can’t fool an evil spirit who knows the Son of God the hard way, in the heavens. Rev. 12:7-11. describes the scene. The hosts of heaven fought Satan and his minions and threw the latter down to earth where they attempt to convict humans of crimes already paid for by Jesus. The evil spirit took a beating at the hands of Jesus and his army and never forgot that lesson.  When the exorcists tried to bully him in the name of Jesus and Paul, the spirit knew a fake when he heard one.

This time the evil spirit gave the beating. He reminds me of two brothers I know. Both were amazingly gifted athletes and martial artists, wrestlers, judo masters, etc. Their dad was one too. When I asked him what the difference was between them, he noted greater power in one and greater speed and cunning in the other. Either could beat us. That is the point. Evil can always beat us if we enter the ring alone.

The point we cannot afford to miss is that fakes are fakes. They are as fulfilling as a bowl of plastic fruit. They may be full of themselves but they are empty of life. There is no life-giving power in them. Their bag of tricks has a bottom. Their authority is counterfeit. When they see Jesus face to face at the final judgment, he will do exactly what the evil spirit did. Who are you? I have never known you? This is my heavenly home, and you do not belong here.

If we face evil in Christ we are not alone. We are greater than any army. Satan cannot grapple with us without taking a beating at the hands of Christ who fills us.

Luke in Acts goes on to say, that the drubbing of the frauds, following closely on the heels of the miracles and genuine healings combined to induce fear and faith. People who meet Christ for real are forever changed. His Spirit breathes into them. Christ himself fills them. How does anyone live with business as usual when that happens? We see two great realities, facts greater than any other. We see ourselves as we really are and we see Christ in all of his majesty as he really is.

We often attempt to relativize “fear” as reverence or awe, but I think this is a wasted effort on our part. “Fear” as it is described is visceral more than it is intellectual. It is the appropriate response of any created being made in God’s own image when he or she runs straight into God. It is more than shocking. When I was a kid, I got into fights all of the time. I simply counted my opponents and sized up the situation. Then I jumped into battle. When we turn the corner and run into God with our eyes open, we experience fear at the most basic of levels. We know instantly that it is no contest. Our fakery is exposed and we get stripped of all of our sins and our virtues.

That leads to a second thing. We, like the Ephesians, must repent of ourselves, repent of our sinful dispositions, repent of anything that gets in the way of our running with Christ. I started reading a little gem written by R.C Sproul, Saved for What? He wisely reminded people who identify with Christ, not only what they get saved to, a very popular sermon topic, but also what they are saved from. He reminded readers of an Old Testament passage not often quoted by churches that like to promote healthy self-acceptance, a flourishing life in the here and now. It was pretty jarring. Here it is:

The great day of the LORD is near,
near and hastening fast;
the sound of the day of the LORD is bitter;
the mighty man cries aloud there.
A day of wrath is that day,
a day of distress and anguish,
a day of ruin and devastation,
a day of darkness and gloom, ‘
a day of clouds and thick darkness,
a day of trumpet blast and battle cry
against the fortified cities
and against the lofty battlements.
I will bring distress on mankind,
so that they shall walk like the blind,
because they have sinned against the LORD;
their blood shall be poured out like dust,
and their flesh like dung.
Neither their silver nor their gold
shall be able to deliver them
on the day of the wrath of the LORD.
In the fire of his jealousy, ‘
all the earth shall be consumed;
for a full and sudden end
he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth. (Zeph. 1:14-18)

We are saved, it is true, from the grip of Satan, but more importantly, we are saved from the wrath of a righteous God. The life in Christ is not a kind of spiritual amnesia. When we live in union with Christ, we become increasingly sensitive to the sin that led to the cross. We recognize our own sin, begin to loath it. It burdens us. We are desperate to divest ourselves of it. This is the life of repentance. It is not pessimism. It is not self-flagellation. Repentance is a gift. It reminds us that God really saved us from our sin and continually works in us to unearth the sins we keep buried. These, of course, torment us, but the grace of a righteous God who loves us by not tolerating our sin produces transformed life that bathes us in joy.   When we lose sight of this, the grace of a holy God who continuously shows us our sin to cleanse us of it, salvation becomes nothing more than human flourishing. Some people look at donuts and others see the holes. I am the latter. I notice that, year by year, repentance disappears from our pulpits.

Grace changes meaning from human flourishing that uses God as a means to human happiness as an end to lives devoted to God the source and end of our happiness. So much preaching reduces Christ to being the means to another end, our happiness. What if we already have what we want? What if we are content? When COVID struck, we rediscovered misery, but we felt no connection between our unhappiness and any deficiency in our relationships to God. Lest there be any misunderstanding, I am not suggesting a straight-line connection between any particular, personal sins and a global pandemic. I am saying, however, that few if any of us saw the onset of the disease as an opportunity to reflect on the state of our relationship to Christ. How could we? We were already obsessing about our own health, the danger posed by others, the impingement of our freedom, etc.

Did we consider the larger issues? We live in the grip of a therapeutic age and evangelical churches too often resemble health spas rather than surgeries for sin-sick patients. We are self-satisfied. We are proud. We are content that we are loved without giving much thought to our sinful self-centeredness. COVID did not bring out our sacrificial love. A lot of churches became battlegrounds. Many shrank. Now that we seem past the worst of it, we rush to put it behind us. We are just fine. We work so very hard to be cheerful. The order of the day is ““be upbeat”. We double down on what we were before we closed down and hibernated.

Were we really that ok? Did we stop needing a savior? Sproul compares our complacency over our sins to someone who doesn’t need a fireman because his house isn’t on fire. We no longer fear God, neither himself or his judgment. We fear dying and the pain on the way down, but that is as far as it goes. We resent the reminder that we even need mercy. Sproul illustrates our problem by comparing false and true Old Testament prophets. False prophets stuck with a message of happiness and joy. True prophets were a pain in the neck. They had the unwelcome habit of proclaiming the day of the Lord as judgment. Why? Because they did not know grace and the one who brings it? No. They knew it better than most of us. The difference between them and us is that they kept God, in his fullness, in view. We don’t.

We want grace, all the time. We don’t want repentance and the holiness it produces. Impenitence gets papered over as we rush to acceptance. But God, the God of all holy love is not in it. Bread and circuses are closer to our hearts. We need to rediscover the fear of God that cones with the life of God. Every now and then, we conservative Calvinists mention fear, but it often dies Flew’s “death of a thousand qualifications”. We describe the fear of God as “reverence” or “respect”. Not even close! Isaiah knew what the fear of the Lord looked and felt like.

And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (Isa 6:5)

Sproul comments on this: “It seems that every person who encounters the living God in Scripture suddenly loses his self-composure and experiences a severe identity crisis.” How can anyone ever go back to business as usual when they experience the presence of God? The only way we manage it is by discounting the seriousness of our sin. We push it out of view, a relic of the past.

When we put our faith in Jesus, God cloaks us with the garments of Jesus, and the garments of Christ’s righteousness are never, ever the target of God’s wrath. But we never put the cart before the horse. When we do, we underestimate our sin and we take God so lightly. If we stand for anything, we stand for cheap dollar store grace.

But it seems to have made no impact on them whatsoever. It’s exactly, Jesus said, what Isaiah foretold: “You will keep on hearing, but will not understand; you will keep on seeing, but will not perceive; for the heart of this people has become dull” (Matt. 13:14–15; see also Isa. 6:9–10). (Thad Barnum)

We fear COVID or Russia more than God.

We worship nothing more than our health and dread death.

An idol is anything we desire more than God, love more than God, or fear more than God. That, all too often, is what we would see if we looked in a mirror. Times such as these are God-given opportunities to shed ourselves of the excess baggage of our sinful narcissism so that we can fix our gaze on Christ who is more beautiful than all our comprehension.

Bill Nikides is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and serves as a church planting strategist with Reformed Evangelistic Fellowship.