Acts 16:19Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

Love of gain everywhere causes evil. O Greek inhumanity! They wished to leave the girl possessed by a demon so that they themselves might grow rich.

“When her masters saw that the hope of their gain was gone.” Everywhere money is the cause of evil. For the sake of enrichment, the masters of the girl wanted her to be possessed by a demon. Look: they do not even wish to know the demon. They are wholly swallowed up by their one passion, love of money.

The masters of the healed maidservant, who had formerly brought them no small income, felt their loss and became embittered against Paul and Silas. They seized them and dragged them to the marketplace before the authorities. They declared them to be Jews, disturbers of the people’s peace, and accused them of the strictly forbidden introduction of a foreign religion and customs. These customs, they said, were contrary to the existing order and offensive to a Roman subject. The masters of the healed woman, guided by their own calculations, spoke about Paul and Silas in an entirely different way from what the soothsayer herself had said. Like the demon, they too covered their malice with a plausible concern for the honor of the city.

As soon as the demon went out of that slave woman, the sorceries also ceased, because she herself did not practice magic, but the demon practiced magic through her. Therefore her masters, seeing that they had lost the hope of receiving those profits which their slave brought them through her sorcery, were inflamed with anger and revenge. Perhaps they also hoped that, if they killed the Apostles, their slave would again tell fortunes for them. They seized Paul and Silas as the authors of that deed and brought them to the marketplace. There, according to the custom of that time, the rulers sat and judged the people.

A certain maidservant had within herself a spirit of darkness, through which she foretold the future and revealed hidden things. Following the apostles, she said in the hearing of the people: behold, servants of God; they preach to you the way of salvation. It is not known what moved her to do this, or rather, the spirit that dwelt in her. Was he afraid of being cast out of the soothsayer, and therefore wished beforehand to dispose Paul favorably toward her? Or did he think it improper to be silent about such men, as a spirit to whom they had to be known? In any case, he repeated such statements many times, although by this he seemed to harm himself. But the apostles were as far from accepting such testimony in their favor as the Savior was.

The work of Gospel preaching began successfully here. A wealthy woman named Lydia soon turned to faith in Christ and offered the preachers her house as a place to stay. But the expulsion of a divining spirit from a servant girl brought upon Paul and Silas the hatred of her masters, who profited from her divinations. They seized the preacher-wonderworkers and dragged them to the marketplace before the authorities. The authorities gave them many blows and, without trial, threw them into prison (verses 13-23).

Seeing that the hope had vanished, and so forth: seeing their servant in an ordinary state of soul and body, and probably becoming convinced over some time that her divinations had ended, they saw that the hope of income from her had disappeared. Her masters seized Paul and Silas, the two chief workers in the preaching of the new faith. Luke and Timothy were not attacked. They dragged them to the marketplace, where judicial cases were sometimes examined, before the authorities, a general designation for the city magistrates.

The repeated, unsolicited, and worthless testimony of the soothsayer concerning the apostles was the immediate cause of the expulsion from her of the spirit of malice. He was plainly showing that he wished to do something evil to the apostles under the guise of praise, as is so usual in all deceptions. But what obedience the demon showed when, firmly and decisively, he was commanded in the person of Jesus Christ to be silent! “Even the demons are subject to us” (Lk 10:17), the apostles had said earlier to Jesus Christ Himself. The same is seen here. At the same time, this also reveals what else unclean demons use most to seduce people, namely avarice. “Love of gain everywhere causes evil.