Acts 19:10-27

¹⁰He kept doing that for 2 years, so a lot of people heard God’s message about Jesus. Both Jewish people and Greek people heard that message about Jesus. They came from all over that country called Asia.

¹¹And God gave Paul the power to do great things that nobody else can do.

¹²Even if sick people couldn’t come to Paul, their friends got things that Paul touched, like handkerchiefs or aprons, and they took them and put them on those sick people. Then those sick people got better, and bad spirits came out of them.

¹³There were also some Jews there that were not Christians. They went around to a lot of places, and in each place they tried to get bad spirits to come out of people. There were 7 men that were doing that. They were sons of a big boss of the Jewish ceremonies, called Sceva. They went into a house and said to a man that had a bad spirit, “I’m using the name of Jesus, the man that Paul talks about, and I’m telling you to come out of this man.”

¹⁵But the bad spirit didn’t come out. He said to those men, “I know Jesus, and I know Paul, but I don’t know you mob.”

¹⁶Then the man that had the bad spirit jumped on those 7 men and knocked all of them down, and tore their clothes off, and beat them up. They all ran out of the house to get away from him.

¹⁷All the people that lived in Ephesus heard that story about those 7 men. Jewish people heard that story, and Greek people heard it too, and they all got really frightened, and they really respected Jesus and said good things about him.

¹⁸At that time, some of the Christians in Ephesus were still doing bad things, and some of them used to sing people and curse people. They had a lot of books that showed them the way to do that bad magic. Those Christians heard about those 7 men, and then they said they were sorry for the bad things that they were doing, and they gathered up all of those books and burned them. Everybody saw them burn those books. Those books about magic cost a lot of money. They reckoned all of those books together cost about 5 million dollars.

²⁰That is the way the message about Jesus got very powerful, and a lot of people heard that message.

²¹After those things happened, Paul wanted to visit the Christians in Macedonia country and Achaia country again, and after that he wanted to go on to Jerusalem. And he said, “After I go to Jerusalem, I have to go to Rome too.”

²²He sent his helpers, Timothy and Erastus, ahead of him to Macedonia country. But Paul stayed a little while longer in Asia country.

²³Soon after that, some of the people in Ephesus tried to make a lot of trouble for the Christians, that people called the Jesus Way mob.

²⁴There was a man there called Demetrius. His job was making little statues out of silver. They were models of the special house of a woman god called Artemis. There were other men too that made those little statues. They sold them to people that respected Artemis, and they got a lot of money from that business.

²⁵Demetrius called a meeting of his workers and other men that made things for that god Artemis. Demetrius said to them, “Men, you know that we make these statues and sell them for a lot of money.

²⁶But that man Paul tells big mobs of people, ‘Don’t buy those statues. They are not gods at all.’ He talks like that here in Ephesus, and now even the people from other towns in this Asia country don’t want to buy the things we make. Paul tells people that these statues we make are not gods, and people shouldn’t show respect to them.

²⁷If people keep listening to him, we’ll soon go broke. And not only that, but people will reckon they don’t have to come to the special house of Artemis to show respect to her. People all over our Asia country and everywhere show respect to our great woman god Artemis, but soon people might not think that Artemis is great.”