Acts 16:16-17

This passage is all about words. The same words can have different meanings to different people. When this happens, miscommunication happens. The slave girl featured in this event was spirit-filled. Christians believe being spirit-filled is a good thing, but only as long as the spirit is the Holy Spirit. The NIV translation tells us that she had a spirit by which she predicted the future (it does not say her predictions came true). A literal translation says she had “the spirit of a Python.” Pythons were associated with the Greek god Apollo. Apollo’s most famous temple, at Delphi, had a priestess known as a Pythoness, and her oracles were famous.

The slave girl began to follow them shouting “These men are servants of the Most High God…” At first, we think she is shouting the truth, after all “Most High God” is a name given by the Hebrews to God. To them it means that God is above everything. Greek-speaking Jews would have used the same identical words that the slave girl was using. However, Greeks would understand the words to mean something much different. They understood the words to refer to the highest or most powerful of all the many gods that they worshipped. They used this term to refer to Zeus.

The slave girl was also shouting, “These men are… telling you ‘the’ or ‘a’ way to be saved.” In the written Greek, the article is not clear. The gentiles hearing the girl speak would have understood her to be saying “a way to be saved,” but Believers would understand her to be saying, “…the way to be saved.”

Modern Christians reading the girl’s words understand her to be shouting the truth. The Greeks and Gentiles gathered around Paul would have been hearing her shout a lie. God is not a high god among many; He is the only God. Jesus is not a way among many ways; Jesus is the only way to salvation. Words are powerful tools. Christians, handle power tools with care.