fleeting

“When they heard this, they were furious and began shouting: ‘Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! Soon the whole city was in an uproar. The people seized Gaius and Aristarchus, Paul’s traveling companions from Macedonia, and all of them rushed into the theater together.” – Acts 19:28,29 Today, I want to continue looking at the church in Ephesus, which we began discussing yesterday. The first major act of persecution against the Ephesian believers happened at the hand of a silversmith named Demetrius. He made a good living crafting images of the goddess Artemis, and because he saw that Christians posed a threat to his business, he gathered a group of his fellow craftsmen together to incite a riot against the Apostle Paul and his traveling companions. At this, the whole region was thrown into an uproar, and a mob forced the believers into a 25,000-seat Roman theater where they tried