I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.  

Today, I am reading and commenting on Acts 19-20

We do not know what led Demetrius the silversmith to set in motion the events which led to the riot in Ephesus.  The context suggests that he was alarmed by events which followed Believers realizing that sorcery and incantations were incompatible with following Jesus.  I see two scenarios.  In one of them, Demetrius witnessed large numbers of Believers burning their spell books and realized that as more and more people become Believers, fewer and fewer would be buying the shrines he sold.  In the other scenario, Demetrius observed that he was losing customers and realized this was because they were becoming believers.

In either case, he gathered together the craftsmen to whom he subcontracted work and told them that Paul was bad for business.  Realizing that that those not in his business were unlikely to be concerned with his loss of profits, he made this an insult to Artemis, and thus to the city.  As a result, he was able to stir people up against Christianity.  Or to be more precise, he stirred people up, but most of them had no idea what they were protesting about.  We learn a lot about mobs here.  First, often times those who get a mob started do so for reasons different than those which they talk about.  Second, once a mob gets started people join in without knowing what it is all about.