Finally Paul became so troubled that he turned around and said to the spirit, “In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!”  At that moment, the spirit left her (Acts 16:18).

What got Paul and Silas into the tight space of a jail in Philippi?  We’re more familiar with how they got out, or rather how God got them out—more on that during this third week of our Shelter series—but it’s worth reviewing what got them confined in the first place.

What got them into trouble was God’s extraordinary and powerful mercy—to a slave.

She’s introduced as “a slave girl.”  Then we learn that “she had a spirit” that enabled her to foretell the future.  As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that this spirit is demonic.

Then we’re told that “she earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling.”  Note the plural, owners; almost sounds like someone sold “shares” in her.  I doubt very much that she ever received a penny.  After all, she’s just a slave, a nobody.  She goes unknown, unnamed.

Except to God.

For reasons that are unclear, she follows Paul and Silas around, for several days, crying aloud, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved!” (16:17-18). Maybe the presence of the Holy Spirit compels the demonic spirit to tell the truth despite itself!

Paul is deeply troubled by this, for reasons that also go unsaid.  Perhaps, like Jesus, he didn’t like even accurate “testimony” from such a source.  Perhaps he was moved with compassion for the girl and the ways she was being victimized and exploited.  In any event, he’s finally had enough: “In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!”  And the spirit leaves.  And bad trouble for Paul and Silas begins.

It wasn’t because they proclaimed that Jesus will take you to heaven when you die.  It was because they demonstrated a different kind of power: a power that recognizes and honors those at the edges and the bottom, a power that dignifies and liberates even “nobodies” from demonic oppression, a power that lifts up the littlest, the least, the last.  A power that cost some powerful people a lot of money.

Paul and Silas got into bad trouble and were tossed into a tight space because they demonstrated that Jesus delivers people from all the tight spaces caused by our slavery to Sin, to sins, to demonic forces, to Death.  They saw that this slave girl was in a tight and confining space herself—a slave further reduced to a money-making tool in the hands of her greedy “owners.”

They saw this.  They did something about it.  They got in bad trouble.  For the best of reasons.

I wonder how the slave girl felt after that demonic spirit left her.  I wonder how her life changed as a result of encountering, and being set free, even while remaining a slave, by a power greater than that of her owners, than the economic system of her time, than the Roman Empire...

Without getting weird about it, do you see some demonic aspects to the pandemic?  If so, how might this shape your prayers this week?

How could you extend yourself to someone who’s in “trouble” this week? Observing necessary social distancing, of course!