Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the

Reformed Church, but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church

in Lafayette, Louisiana. Now, what happened as we went to prayer that a certain slave girl, possessed with a spirit of divination,

met us who brought her master's much profit by fortune-telling.

This girl followed Paul and us and cried out saying,

These men are the servants of the Most high God who proclaimed to us the way of

salvation. And this she did for many days. So we have this, we have this girl who's a slave,

and she's possessed by a spirit. We've talked about this a couple of times before. We, of course,

you know, we think of demonic possession and we go to the Exorcist or some other movie,

you know, and that's what we think of. And so we don't understand that in the first century,

people who are possessed by spirits were seen as having a gift or a blessing from the gods.

I know that seems strange, right?

But at this time, that's how it was viewed.

Because their understanding of the gods and the other spirits was that they don't have bodies.

And so in order for a human being to interact with them, they had to have a body.

And this is how idolatry worked.

So they would make a statue.

And they believed that the spirit would go into that statue and use it as a body so that you could

communicate and interact with that God or that spirit.

Or that God or that spirit would go into a person.

So you could interact.

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