How to read this page

An Intertextuality Pair — one connection between two passages, shown as linked verse cards: the Later text and the Earlier text it quotes, alludes to or echoes. The Significance essay explains why the link matters and where it points in Christ.

Reference Type— how explicit the link is: Quotation, Allusion, or Echo
Connection Method(s)— how it carries meaning: e.g. Typology, Promise-Fulfillment, Analogy, Longitudinal Theme
Found via— where the connection was identified, e.g. the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge or an Anchor-Text Network

Graph View — tap the constellation icon in the top bar to see this page's connections as a web of light: gold points are passages, and the coloured threads are the connection types. Click any type in the graph's own legend to filter it in or out, and use the expand control for the full-screen night sky.

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Intertextuality Pair

Acts 19:27 → Isaiah 40:17

Echo

Later text

Acts 19:27BSB

There is danger not only that our business will fall into disrepute, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be discredited and her majesty deposed—she who is worshiped by all the province of Asia and the whole world.”

Earlier text

Isaiah 40:17BSB

All the nations are as nothing before Him; He regards them as nothingness and emptiness.

Walk the Square · a single-voice walk of this pair around the Clowney square13:39

Significance

Demetrius warns that if Paul's preaching prevails, "the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be discredited and her majesty deposed" (Acts 19:27). The irony is that his pagan fear unwittingly speaks Isaiah's truth: before the living God "all the nations are as nothing... He regards them as nothingness and emptiness" (Isaiah 40:17) — and how much more their idols. What Demetrius dreads as loss, Isaiah proclaims as reality: the gods of the nations are already nothing, and the gospel merely unveils it. The one true God, incomparable and enthroned above the earth, reduces every rival to the nothing it always was, so that Ephesus might turn from a silver goddess to the living Christ before whom every idol falls.

Found via: G.K. Beale & D.A. Carson (eds.), Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (2007)
Reference Type: Echo
Connection Method(s): Contrast; Longitudinal Theme (the nothingness of idols before the incomparable God, Isaiah 40:17-20 to Acts 14:15; 17:29; 19:26)