Thursday, July 14, 2022

Revelation 2 (IV) Seven Churches: Pergamum and Thyatira

Picking up from Smyrna, we’re now in the time period of AD 313, represented by Pergamum. Revelation Chapter 2 verse 12: 

Rev.2:12 And the angel to the Church of Pergamum write: ‘The One who has the sharp two -edged sword says this:

Rev.2:13 I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is; and you hold fast My name, and did not deny My faith even in the days of Antipas, My witness, My faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells. 

Rev.2:14 But I have a few things against you, because you have there some who hold the teaching of Balaam, who kept teaching Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols, and to commit acts of immorality. 

Rev.2:15 ‘So you also have some who in the same way hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans. 

Rev.2:16 ‘Therefore repent; or else I am coming to you quickly, and I will make war against them with the sword of My mouth. 

Rev.2:17 ‘He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.’

The name Pergamum comes from two Greek words, pergos and gamos. And Pergos means a tower or a citadel or a powerful fortress. And Gamos means matrimony, marriage, and sexual union. So the two words together could roughly be translated “married to a powerful institution or fortress”. Pergamum was a powerful city in its day - it had been for many centuries - and it was the seat of authority for the Roman province. 

The governor of Asia lived in this city, and as governor, he held something called the “right of the sword”. Under Roman law, that meant that he had the authority to decide when to apply capital punishment against a criminal. So he could decide who lived and died in criminal matters. 

The city was a preeminent center of artistic and intellectual power in the region. It had a library that rivaled the one in Alexandria. It was steeped in Hellenistic or Greek culture. It included many pagan temples and monuments and featured an altar to the god, Zeus, and Zeus is the father of Dionysus. And they also had an Augustan temple that was famous for being the centre for cult worship. 

They had a school of medicine. That school of medicine was founded in the fourth century BC, and it was famous as a place of healing. So they didn't just train doctors, people came there to be healed. 

The imagery that Christ uses to describe Himself to this church is that of the one with the two-edged sword. Now, two-edged swords is a phrase of that day that had a very specific meaning. It was a sword that was used almost exclusively to execute criminals, as in the “right of the sword”. So as such, it became a representation of the seat of government. The government and its ability to put people to death was a big part of Roman society. And having a two-edged sword was a way of saying, “I have the power of government to take your life.” Paul says in Romans 13: 4:

Rom.13:4 for [Government] is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; ” 

- referring to the power of the government to take lives. 

So when Jesus describes Himself to this church in this way - the one with a two-edged sword coming out of His mouth - it's a way of saying, “I’m the one who judges. I’m the one who corrects.” And the church, therefore, must be making some serious mistakes because Jesus is basically threatening to bring justice to them. But first, before He gets into that, He acknowledges they've done some good things also. Verse 13, He says: “I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is.”

The city was dominated, as we said, by pagan worship.  So it was in a very evil setting in that regard, but in particular, the city was home to a satanic cult that worshipped a snake idol , and that snake idol, being a picture of Satan from the Bible, may be what Jesus is referring to here. 

So spiritually speaking, they're working in a very dark, very challenging place. And yet, in spite of that, He says they're standing firm in the face of persecution. And then He cites this example of a man named Antipas, His witness. That name means against all. And it could mean that this is a guy who was a witness against the pagan ungodliness of the city, against Satan’s worship. And as a result, he was martyred in that city. Despite his martyrdom, it looks like the church was willing to stand firm in their confession. That's all very good. But that's where the good news ends for this church. 

Now He goes on to His complaints against them in verse 14. He says some of that church were holding to the teaching of Balaam, and He mentions Balaam’s history here as the one who worked with Balak back in Numbers. The person is not necessarily a literal character in Pergamum. Jesus makes the point of this being a Balaam like the one of Balak. 

In the story of Numbers 22, Balaam was a prophet of God, a true believer if we would say it that way today. And yet as a believer and a prophet of God, he was also a corrupt and greedy man. And when one of Israel's enemies, the king named Balak, offered this greedy prophet money in order to curse Israel, the prophet agreed to that deal. And as he tries to carry out this plan, the Lord prevents Balaam from speaking the curses that he tried to speak against Israel. 

Now in the New Testament, Peter and Jude both refer back to Balaam, using a phrase “the way of Balaam” to refer to any believer who trades faithfulness to God and His Word for money. So anyone who follows after the way of Balaam is someone who places stumbling blocks before the people of God because of their greedy motives. They get enriched by their greedy style of false preaching. The error of Balaam, the Bible says, is loving money so much that you turn to a form of spiritual prostitution.

In Pergamum, these Balaams, whoever they were, were teaching the church - according to what Jesus says here - to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit acts of sexual immorality. Jesus says those teachings were stumbling blocks before His people, and it's really easy to see how that would happen. Because whenever someone tells us it's okay to do something that we’d like to do, that's not usually something we'll argue against very strongly. So when a teacher in a church were to tell us that God is okay with us engaging in sexual immorality or doing something else that we shouldn't do, we like that, especially if we respect the person or think they seem to know what they're talking about.

We like it so much, in fact, that we will typically move our attention to that person and away from anyone who would tell us otherwise. And the Bible calls that tickling ears. Tickling is something that if you did it to a child, for example, they would laugh. But as soon as you stop, they stop laughing. So in that sense, their laughter is counterfeit joy. It’s stimulated from the outside; it's not coming from the inside. So tickling of ears means I've stimulated you from the outside to approximate the feeling that you should get when you're stimulated on the inside spiritually by good teaching. And like a lot of other mindless activities, it's the kind of teaching that you forget the moment you walk outside the door. That's if you're lucky. If you're not so lucky, you might actually believe it, and live by it.

So this tickling of ears always revolves around these same three behaviors below that Jesus gave us: 

First, a shepherd who cares more about his or her earthly comfort than they do about your eternal future. Number two, a teaching that they give that encourages believers to follow after their lusts. And then, thirdly, a congregation that is more interested in satisfying the desires of the flesh than receiving spiritual blessing in eternity. 

You get those three combinations together, and you have a false movement in the church that grows like wildfire. Notice in verse 14, the Lord says there are ‘some’ in the church who hold to this pattern of false teaching. And that’s somewhat encouraging. It would suggest that not all have taken over in this false teaching. Some, He says, are going after Balaam. And He adds, some are going after the Nicolaitans. 

Now remember we talked about this group in our study of the letter of Ephesus. This is a group of people who were teaching that the church should begin to observe distinctions between members of the church, and in that way, they wanted to establish orders within the church - orders of priests, orders of other clergy - creating these separate groups of people who were held in higher regard and seen as having special distinction or special authority. And that's a corrupting, unbiblical view of the body. That's where you get the idea that only some believers are priests, when the Bible says all believers are priests.

Overtime, that teaching, both the teaching of Balaam and the teaching of the Nicolaitans, distanced the believers from Jesus, corrupting and stumbling them, and getting them to think God was behind it, that God approves of it. And as the church moves farther and farther from Scripture and into those fleshly practices, eventually, Jesus, with His hands on the wheel, is not going to ignore it. And so He steers the church back.

He says, in verse 16, the church is either going to repent or He's going to come and make war with them with the sword of His mouth. That would suggest - based on what a double-edged sword is used for - cutting off the church. He's not talking about literally killing individuals per se. He's speaking to the church, much like He did with Ephesus, “I'll take your lamp stand.” To this church, similarly, He's saying, “If this doesn't get fixed, I've got a sword here, I'm just going to cut this church off.”

And it seems this time it’s even more specific than that given the nature of the problem. The nature of the problem is in the leadership. So when He talks about cutting off the church, it’s possible that that's directed at the leadership primarily - cutting off the head, cutting off the leadership of the church. 

Finally, the Lord says to the believers in the church that there is no cause for personal alarm. No matter how corrupted the church gets, no matter what they do in response, the individual believer is an overcomer, He says at the end, and that person will receive hidden manna and a white stone with a new name.

These are great symbols. They encourage the believer because hidden manna was intended to contrast with meat sacrificed to idols, part of the immorality that they're engaged in. So while the church might be convinced by false teachers to chase after the desires of the flesh, if the believer in his or her soul knew that that was wrong and withheld, there was manna awaiting for them.

And then secondly, the white stone. This one is of particular interest, given the nature of what was going on in that city. Remember, there's a school of medicine in Pergamum. When patients came to that school of medicine to be treated, based on the Greek history of the time, there was a ritual of coming in the front door of this medical center. As you came in, you were going to worship, and then you received whatever the treatment was. And then as you come out the back of this building, there was a collection of white stones and you would pick one up and you would write your name on it and you'd write what you've been healed of, and then these stones were left as a testimony in this long line.

Now, you might ask, how do you know you've been healed? You just got the treatment two seconds earlier. But never mind about that. We want the next guy walking in to see the long line of stones.  

Jesus says to this church, “I'm going to give you a stone, and you're going to write your name on this stone, and it's going to be a lasting memorial to your spiritual healing, all the way to eternity.” Here, again, it’s “I've got better things for you than they do. Don't get wrapped up in what the world's trying to give you.”

Now, how does this letter compare to the third period of the church? Well, this church begins, as we know, after the second one, which is the church of persecution. So if this is a church that is different from the church of persecution, we should naturally ask what stopped the persecution so as to allow a new period to start? What event stopped persecution in the church?

And there's a very clear one in history, and it corresponds to AD 313. That’s when Emperor Constantine experienced a vision on the battlefield. And as a result of his vision, he declared that Christianity would be the official religion of the Roman Empire and at that moment, persecution stopped, in 313. 

In that moment, the church was interestingly married to a powerful institution, Pergamum. And persecution stopped, but new problems quickly emerged for the church. Since Constantine ordered the church to be a state religion, what that meant was everyone had to participate in the church. Every Roman citizen immediately became Christian by order of Caesar, and every child was immediately considered Christian. 

So infant baptism began in AD 313, and mass conversions were the order of the day. How many of those forced converts were truly believers in Jesus Christ? We can't know, but we can be certain that many were not. 

Instantly what the church did was open its doors to millions of Romans who brought pagan practices and doctrines into that institution. They brought unbiblical ideas like temple priests, and statues of idols that you would pray to, infant baptism, and various other mystical influences. 

And in those times, those influences of Roman pagan culture began to crowd out biblical influences. So the church is still there, and the gospel was still being preached to some degree. But now that message was competing with pagan voices. Constantine and the rest of the Roman authorities became the Balaams, as it were, by which Satan could now set stumbling blocks before all those believers. 

And the Roman political authority began to infiltrate the church and create a perfect environment for distinctions and rank to ultimately emerged, the Nicolaitan’s heresy, in other words. And because every Roman citizen was automatically considered Christian, the institution became largely unbelieving, in terms of its constitution.

And as hundreds of thousands of pagans assembled in the church, what you get out of that is worship of idols, cult practices and heresy. And Jesus says He is coming with a sword to end it. And end it, He did, because that church had married the Roman Empire. But Jesus isn't going to end the church, obviously. The church has more history left to go.

So what did Jesus end instead?

The Roman empire.

The western side of the Roman Empire was overrun by German hordes, and as a result, fractured into provincial areas controlled by church leaders.

So that was the Church of Constantine, beginning around 313 and going until about 600 AD which leads us to the end of the Roman Empire. So Jesus brought an end to the institutional government side of the church so as to cut it free from this constant infiltration of pagan influences coming out of Roman society, effectively putting an end to Roman society in its truest form. 

We move now to the next letter.  Revelation 2:18:

Rev.2:18 “And to the angel of the church in Thyatira write: The son of God, who has eyes like a flame of fire, and in His feet are like burnished bronze, says this: 

Rev.2:19 I know your deeds, and your love and faith and service and perseverance, and that your deeds of late are greater than at first. 

Rev.2:20 ‘But I have this against you, that you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, and she teaches and leads My bond-servants astray so that they commit acts of immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols. 

Rev.2:21 ’I gave her time to repent, and she does not want to repent of her immorality. 

Rev.2:22 ‘Behold, I will throw her on a bed of sickness, and those who commit adultery with her into great tribulation, unless they repent of her deeds. 

Rev.2:23 ‘And I will kill her children with pestilence, and all the churches will know that I am He who searches the minds and hearts; and I will give to each of you according to your deeds. 

Rev.2:24 ‘But I say to you, the rest who are in Thyatira, who do not hold this teaching, who have not known the deep things of Satan, as they call them- I place no other burden on you. 

Rev.2:25 ‘Nevertheless, what you have, hold fast until I come. 

Rev.2:26 ‘He who overcomes and he keeps My deeds until the end, TO HIM I WILL GIVE AUTHORITY OVER THE NATIONS; 

Rev.2:27 AND HE SHALL RULE THEM WITH A ROD OF IRON AS THE VESSELS OF THE POTTER ARE BROKEN TO PIECES, as I also have received authority from My Father;

Rev.2:28 and I will give him the morning star. 

Rev.2:29 ‘He who has an ear, let him hear what the spirit says to the churches.’” 

This is another city in Asia Minor. The name Thyatira - its meaning is a bit of a mystery. There are suggestions out there that it means unending sacrifice or perpetual sacrifice. Strong's concordance, though, suggests that it means the “odor of affliction”, which seems a more apt description, and we’ll find out why.

So Thyatira was the Roman city of its province again. It was full of pagan worship. It had a principal deity of Apollo. Apollo was said to be the son of Zeus. And he was worshipped alongside his father Apollo. So you had gods who were sons of gods in their way of seeing things.

Thyatira had more craft and trade unions than any other cities in that region. And so like Smyrna, you had the same kind of problem there. If you were Christian and you didn't want to participate in the trade union, you had trouble finding work. And during regular guild meetings, they did this meat sacrifice to idols ritual that you had to participate in and you had to eat the meat and engage in an orgy with temple prostitutes afterward. This is considered part of how you got involved in a union. It’s easy to imagine that that would be wildly popular with the Union guys, but not with the Christians. 

Looking at the letter. There’s the description of Christ taken from Chapter 1, the one that emphasizes “eyes of fire, feet glowing like bronze in a furnace” - those symbols have very consistent meaning in the scripture.  Eyes of fire means all-seeing, a piercing discernment, Jesus knows it all literally. Nothing is hidden from Him. And feet of glowing bronze represent fires of judgment, the testing of metal in fire to know if it's pure.

So you put the two together and you’ve got Jesus with perfect discernment about everything, and the authority to judge it righteously, and that suggests a not so encouraging letter for yet another church. And in fact we’re going to find that the circumstances in this church are closely connected to those in the church of Pergamum.

But let’s look at the positives first. Verse 19. Jesus says the church in Thyatira is a church known for its good works and for its love for one another. In fact, this church, interestingly, has increased in good works over time. That would suggest they're getting better organized, and are more active in the work of the church. More people are being fed, being housed, being taught. More people are receiving good ministry in some form., They work hard, they're pious.

Jesus has asked His church to do good works before men - that is part of our call as Christians. But we also know those good works cannot be divorced from the core mission of the church, which is to share the Gospel. So saving souls, through the preaching of the Gospel, that's ultimately and actually the best measure of the church's obedience. Those other things are just means to that end.

And so we preach the good news properly. But if you're going to do that, you have to know what the good news is. You are going to have to need good doctrines driving that good teaching and witnessing. And that's the problem here. You have a church here that has lost sight of that mission. And the degree of critique that follows here is quite extraordinary. This is a negative letter from verse 20 onward and it is lengthy in its condemnation, lengthier than any other group, save one. 

Jesus says, at the beginning, “This is what I have against you. You tolerate the woman, Jezebel.” Now, the name is probably familiar. Jezebel was a Phoenician wife of a king in the northern kingdom of Israel, a king called Ahab. Ahab was a weak leader, and his wife, Jezebel, was famous for being able to persuade that weak husband and godless man to commit all manner of immorality in the northern kingdom of Israel. And so as a result, her name has become eponymous for any evil hearted, manipulative woman who leads a weak man to do her bidding.

Just like Balaam in Pergamum, Jezebel serves as a type here to refer to the kind of ungodly influence that was taking place. So you have women apparently acting in ways to corrupt the church in Thyatira. Maybe it's men who are doing it, we're not sure. And here again, people are influenced to eat meat, sacrifice to idols and engage in immorality, etc. Clearly, this is wrong. Paul had already told the church in the letter he wrote to Corinth much earlier that that’s not appropriate behavior. The Jezebel type has been given time to repent, yet she didn't want to cease her immorality, calling herself a prophetess, telling people she hears from God and that they should listen to her. 

So, like Pergamum, the church of Thyatira has been infiltrated by a false influence that's leading believers astray. But here's the difference - in Pergamum, it was Balaam, a believer, motivated by greed, leading people away by false teaching. Here in Thyatira, it is a Jezebel, an unbeliever, with an evil heart, seeking to do the enemy’s will by leading people into false teaching.

So it shows a progression. The church has moved now from having believers who are leading people astray to unbelievers who have so much influence in the church that they're now in charge of the teaching, which is the natural outgrowth of centuries of having the church be part of the union of government, so that it's now seeing generation after generation of unbelievers grow up in the church and actually becoming leaders in that church. Because it's just an institution or culture at that point. It didn’t depend on true confessions. They were in it when they were born. So the Lord says, “I've been waiting for her to repent. She won't do it.” So then He says, “My piercing judgment will come after a time of trial and testing.” 

Verse 22, Jesus says He's going to throw the false leader on a bed of sickness and all that followed with her were going to go through a tribulation until they repent. And a result of that bed of sickness is going to be that many of her children, likely referring to her followers, are going to die by pestilence.

Now in the day of this letter, you can imagine that something like this probably literally happened in the city of Thyatira.  And since this letter was circulated among all the churches just like all the other six were - that's what Jesus meant by “all the churches will know” - when this illness comes upon the church in Thyatira, people will see this and they will know He will be the one who searches the minds and hearts. It will be evidence to the rest of the church that Jesus is still running His church and He isn’t going to put up with this forever. He knows what's going on, down to a person, and He deals with it.  

By now, with that devastating judgment, Jesus now reassures them at the end that those who do not hold to this teaching, He’s not demanding anything more of them than what they are already suffering under. He says just stand firm in what they believe. And as such, He says they will have a future that they can expect, of having the rod of ruling that Jesus will share with those who serve with Him and of having the Morning Star, which is a reference to Jesus Himself. “You will have Me. You will have rule with Me in the kingdom. Don't worry, nothing that has happened to you in that church or nothing I do to that church can stop your eternal future.”  

That final assurance that we love to see at the end. 

Now, how do we relate this to the period of prophetic history that we've talked about? How does this fourth period of the church relate to history?

This letter corresponds to the period of history in which the church was dominated by the Roman Catholic institution. That institution, the Roman Catholic Church, rose out of the ashes of the Roman Empire itself.

Remember, the church period that preceded this one, Pergamum, is the period in which the church and empire were married together. They were one institution, for all intents and purposes.

But when the Roman empire began to dissolve around 600 AD, it disintegrated in a series of stages. First, the West and the East, and then over time it's kind of fractured and combined again and fractured again, as Daniel said it would.

So, Rome was the headquarters of the western side of the Roman Empire.

Constantinople, present day Istanbul, was the capital for the eastern side of the Roman Empire.

Fast forward 1500 years, and you've got what we now have in Europe and in the Middle East - this fracturing of what was left of the Roman Empire.

But when it first started to fall apart, there's a power vacuum. And what filled that power vacuum? Well, there was no unifying government at that time who could step in and replace the Roman Empire as a dominant world government.

So what did step in?

The Roman Catholic Church. It became the government that linked all of these separate regions together and ruled them all.

The church went from being in bed with the powerful government to BECOMING the powerful government. 

So during Thyatira, the church is the government - for all intents and purposes - for Europe. Popes battled opponents, kings were deposed and crowned, crusades were ordered. This is when the Popes were running the show, for the most part.

The church ruled the world, except it wasn't ruling it spiritually very well. Even still, the works of the church began to expand. That is to say, it ruled politically, and its leaders made whatever compromises that they needed to, in order to consolidate and increase power.

But that expansion of the church in a formal sense meant that without a government, it took over responsibility for social services. The Roman Catholic Church was the church providing food, housing, care of all kinds for the average citizen in most places, within this realm, consistent with what Jesus said. He acknowledged their work. It did have that side to it. But conversion in that time was not a matter of faith. It was a matter of political necessity. 

Crusades forced people into the church at the point of a sword. And after centuries of unbelievers being forced into the church from birth, now you have the leadership being unbelieving, and so they're teaching deep things of Satan. Jesus says things that led believers into false practices that practically obscured the Gospel from the rank and file church.

Notably, during this period of church history, the Catholic Church introduced many spiritual heresies and immoralities that still persist today. Chief among them, justification by works rather than by faith alone, worship of idols and images, the celibacy of priests (which is that Nicolaitan heresy again), confessing sins to an intercessor rather than to Christ himself; purgatory, indulgences, penance, worship of Mary. All of that came out of this period of the church's history, reflecting what Jesus himself has said was so troubling. 

So just as the original Jezebel introduced false practices in her day by manipulating a weak leader, well, so did the church do so in this period. You had the Jezebel of Thyatira, the Catholic Church, gaining its authority first by marrying a government and then when that government got weak, it became the government to manipulate the world.

Obviously, Jesus didn't stand for this, and He wasn't going to let it stay on forever, although He gave this period of the church a long time to repent. And when you look at how it actually fell apart and how He actually executed judgement, it's going to make the hair on your back stand up.

So, as Jesus promised, the Thyatira church, which began in AD600 at the end of Pergamum, continued for a long time, about 1000 years, as He allowed time for it to repent. It was cantered in the Eastern Orthodox Church of Constantinople and the Roman Catholic Church of Rome. By the 13th century, almost near the end of this period, the effects of Jezebel had already influenced the entire Christian world and were well established and entrenched in what we now see as the Catholic Church. 

When Jesus moved to reverse it - to cut it off, as He said He would - in the late 13th century, He brought that judgment of terrible pestilence exactly as He said He would. We know it today as the black plague.

Interestingly, the black plague began in two cities, roughly at the same time. You guess right - in Constantinople and Rome.

It first appeared at the dawn of the 14th century in Constantinople, and as a result, 40% of that city died. The stench was everywhere, according to ancient reports. Just as the name Thyatira suggests - the odor of affliction.

The disease spread by cargo ships to Rome, which then became the center of the outbreak for Western Europe. By the mid 14th century, all Europe was infected, and it killed as much as 60% of Europe's population. 

And as a result, it severely weakened the Catholic Church in Europe, because priests and monks were often those pressed into service, caring for the sick. And so they often got sick themselves, and it wiped out the priesthood in Europe at that time in history.

It left the church's leadership devastated, and the fear of disease led people to shun mass out of fear that they caught the disease in the church. So attendance plummeted, and the financial hit the church took brought it almost to the end of itself. One of the lesser known effects of the black plague was that it helped give rise to the Reformation.  

As the church leadership weakened, the church’s hold over society and government weakened, and that allowed freer thinking to rise up. Ultimately, it gave Martin Luther the opportunity to challenge authority with the church.

And so we marked the end of the time of Thyatira with the fulfillment of Jesus's judgment of pestilence and with the result being the start of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. And we will look at that in Revelation 3

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