Acts 16:17

Acts 16:17. And cried, saying, These men are servants of the most high God. This testimony on the part of the evil spirit which possessed the unhappy slave-girl to the work and power of Christ and His servants, Paul and Silas, was by no means an unusual incident in the early days of Christianity. On several occasions, during the public ministry of the Lord Jesus, had these ‘devils' borne loud and public testimony to His majesty and power; they had not only obeyed His voice, and freed their poor victims from their presence, but had, apparently of their own free will, borne witness to the veiled glory of the unknown Teacher, declaring now that He was the Holy One of God, and at another time the Son of God. It is observable that neither Christ nor His servants would ever accept this testimony from demons. On several occasions it is expressly recorded how the Master silenced these evil spirits in the hour of their acknowledgment of His majesty (see, for instance, Mark 3:12; Luke 4:34-35; Luke 4:41).

In like manner we read how Paul here, being grieved or troubled at the demon's perpetual acknowledgment of his Divine mission, in his Master's name silenced and expelled the spirit which had made its home in the poor slave of Philippi. A curious question, however, suggests itself, how it was Paul suffered the demon, after he was aware of its presence, so long to remain tormenting the girl? Bengel's explanation is singular. He concludes that the spirit did not belong to the worst order of spirits, otherwise Paul's indignation had been more quickly stirred up. But the true explanation seems to be, that there was something in the unhappy possessed one herself which prevented an earlier deliverance. There is but little doubt that these fearful soul-maladies which, in the days of Christ and His servant Paul, apparently raged in strangely-aggravated forms, were often due, in the first instance, to some terrible sin the hapless victim had indulged in. Demoniacal possession, however, seems, in some instances, to have been inherited; ‘The sins of the father were visited on the children.' Is this heritage of evil an unknown thing among us now?

We know nothing of the circumstances of the possession of this slave of Philippi. There was something doubtless connected with it, which stayed Paul from an earlier exercise of his exorcising power. The words of the narrative seem to suggest that in the end the expulsion of the spirit was determined upon rather to silence the unwelcome testimony of a demon than to benefit the sufferer. In her case, the remittal of the punishment, if it were a punishment, possibly might have been not a blessing. It is, however, more than probable that, during ‘the many days,' some of the solemn, beautiful words of Christ uttered or explained by Paul penetrated the poor darkened soul of this unhappy one, and awoke in her some sense of her lost and degraded condition. Then she perhaps cried for help, and received it. The whole question of ‘possession by evil spirits,' insanity in its varied forms, epilepsy, and other kindred maladies, and their connection with sin, is as yet very little understood.