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Acts 19:20-38

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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.”
28All the men there heard Demetrius say that, and then they were very angry with Paul. They started to shout, “Artemis is very great. She is the god of us Ephesus mob.”
29A lot of the other people in the town heard them shouting and they went and joined those men and started shouting too. They got angry with Paul, and they grabbed the 2 men from Macedonia that used to go around with Paul. Their names were Gaius and Aristarchus. They dragged those 2 men to the sports oval of that town.
30Paul wanted to go there too, to talk to the people, but the other Christians wouldn’t let him do that.
31There were some government officials of that country that were friends of Paul. They heard that those people went wild, so they sent him a message to tell him strongly, “Don’t go to that sports oval. It’s too dangerous. They might kill you.”
32That big mob of people were a bit mixed up. Some of them shouted one thing, and some of them shouted something else. But most of them didn’t even know what the meeting was about.
33One of the Jews there was called Alexander. Some people there pushed him to the front so that he could talk to the crowd of people. So Alexander held up his hand, to get the mob to be quiet.
34But some people knew that Alexander was a Jew, and that the Jews didn’t show respect to Artemis, so they shouted, “Artemis is very great. She is the god of us Ephesus mob.” Then the whole mob kept on shouting like that for about 2 hours.
35Then the town clerk got the mob to stop shouting, and he said to them, “Listen, Ephesus people, everyone knows that we Ephesus people look after the special house for Artemis, the great woman god. And everyone knows that we look after the statue of her that fell down from the sky.
36Nobody can say that these things are not true. So you have to be quiet now. Don’t do anything that will make trouble for us.
37Why did you bring these 2 men here? They didn’t do anything bad. They didn’t go into the special houses for our gods and take things from there. And they didn’t say anything bad about our woman god.
38If Demetrius and his mates want to blame anyone about anything bad, they have to do it the right way. They have to go to the judges in the courts. If anybody wants to blame somebody else, those judges are ready to listen. That’s their job.

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