I’m a fan of the late Dr. Michael Heiser. If you want to spend four hours listening to an exquisite exposition comparing the early and late dates of the Exodus, he’s your guy. What he’s probably best known for is his study of the spiritual world-view of the biblical authors, which is the kind of thinking that leads me to posts like this.

Acts 16 has a particularly interesting story.

16:16 Now as we were going to the place of prayer, a slave girl met us who had a spirit that enabled her to foretell the future by supernatural means. She brought her owners a great profit by fortune-telling. 16:17 She followed behind Paul and us and kept crying out, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are proclaiming to you the way of salvation.” 16:18 She continued to do this for many days. But Paul became greatly annoyed, and turned and said to the spirit, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her!” And it came out of her at once. 16:19 But when her owners saw their hope of profit was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities.

A few things catch my attention about this passage.

  1. There are all sorts of examples of demon oppression in Matthew, Mark, Luke and Acts (though notably almost none elsewhere). The language here is different. This isn’t described as a demon or an unclean spirit. Instead, it’s a spirit of divination. In Greek it’s a spirit of Python, which as a programmer I just find hilarious.

  2. This spirit doesn’t torment the girl. It seems to do nothing at all to harm her. In fact, the spirit doesn’t seem to do anything objectionable! Paul really is a servant of the most-high God proclaiming the way of salvation! At a glance, this girl/spirit is helping!

  3. Paul doesn’t drive out the spirit on sight. He waits days, and finally only drives it out because it annoys him enough.

  4. This spirit has enough people convinced that it can tell the future that the girls' enslavers are making a profit. How? Does it just put on a good show? Or can this thing actually tell the future? Or maybe somewhere in between, it doesn’t know the future, but it knows things the girl couldn’t otherwise know, like how demons would recognize Jesus on sight.

I suggest that this spirit is an example of something not found elsewhere in scripture: a neutral spirit. It isn’t working directly for God, but it also isn’t trying to be a force of chaos and death by harming people. Maybe it wants to serve God but doesn’t know how to do it well, maybe it has some other tiny agenda. But it’s just hanging out in this girl and making her life… interesting.

Now, this girl can’t be running around all day not making a profit. Her enslavers wouldn’t let that go on. And we note that Paul driving out that spirit isn’t an obvious solution to his annoyance; the girl can still run around proclaiming exactly what she has been! Yet she apparently stops when her profitability is removed. Presumably this spirit is calling out Paul as a servant of God because that will somehow make money, and when the money stops, so does the proclamation.

I suggest this group is using Paul as a draw for larger audiences. The spirit’s declarations bring people to Paul, and the bigger the crowd, the more people are going to want to pay for a foretelling from the girl. If the enslavers think Paul is a huckster like they are, then they might just see this as synergy between their two “acts.” In short, they’re making a profit off Paul’s spread of the gospel. And there’s no way Paul will put up with that for long.