189. The Man Jesus Will Not Forget | Pergamum Part 2

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 189, The Letter to Pergamum, part two. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast.

My name is Kendall, and I'm so glad that you are here today because today we step back into the city of Pergamum, into part two of our three-part journey through this letter, through the church in Pergamum.

And I have been itching all week to get back into this letter because everything we did last week was just scaffolding. Today we're actually going to climb up and start building and laying bricks. Now, if you missed episode one, here's the 90-second recap.

We didn't even crack open the book last week. We didn't even open up the letter. We spent the entire hour just looking at the city, and we stood at the front of the Acropolis, and we craned our necks up in the vertical wall of all of the paganism there, and we traced the rise of Pergamum and its history through the Adelaide dynasty from a Greek officer who was named Philotyrus, who was sitting on a pile of stolen treasure in the late fourth century B .C., and we traced it all the way down to Attalus III, who died in 133 B .C. and left his entire kingdom to Rome in his will, which was kind of like a man leaving his mansion to a bank.

Didn't make a lot of sense, but he did it, and he did it as an act of loyalty to Rome. He didn't have an heir to give it to, so he did that. Now, after that, we walked past the great altar of Zeus and the enormous throne-shaped slab of marble whose frieze shows the gods of Olympus stomping the serpent-legged giants of the earth into the dirt, and then we saw the temple of Athena.

She's called the victory bringer, the goddess the kings thanked every single time that they came home with bloodstains on their swords, and then we passed through the theater of Dionysus, and we caught the scent of the wine-soaked religion of debauchery and the immorality and all packed up into one seamless package, kind of like the way a streaming service bundles every vice that you could ever want into a convenient bundle.

Well, we saw it. And then we also climbed down the Asclepion, and we felt the live serpent sliding through the dark while desperate pilgrims slept on the floor, waiting for the snake god to crawl into their dreams and heal them.

And then, finally, we ended at the temple of Caesar Augustus, the very first temple that was ever built to a living emperor in the entire province of Asia, and it was dedicated to Caesar Augustus in 29 BC because Pergamum was the chief city of emperor worship in the ancient world.

It was the city that taught an entire province how to look a man in the eyes and call him a god. That was the world to which the church of Pergamum was living in. That was the city. That was the air that this little church was breathing every single time that they walked out their front door.

And today, at last, we're going to walk through the door of the letter. Today we're going to meet a man named Antipas, and today we're going to feel the weight of the sword that Christ carries in his mouth, and today we're going to line up the suspects of who is actually the throne of Satan, and we're going to ask which one Jesus places his finger upon as the culprit of that title, and today we're going to ask a question with some teeth in it because we're going to ask, what does it mean to actually hold fast to the name of Jesus in a city that has memorized the name of every single pagan god in the catalog except the one true God who can actually heal and who is actually real?

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And with that, let us read the passage one more time and then let us walk together into the city of Pergamum. This is Revelation 2, 12 through 17, and this is what it says. And to the angel of the church in Pergamum, write, the one who has the sharp two-edged sword says this, 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 when he was killed among you, where Satan dwells.

But I have a few things against you because you have there some who hold to the teachings 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.

So you also have some who in the same way hold to the teachings of the Nicolaitans. Therefore, repent or else I'm coming to you quickly and I will make war against them with the sword of my mouth. He who has an ear to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches and 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, Revelation 2, 12 -17. And today we're going to be working through that.

We're going to be working through just two verses of that actually, verses 12 and verses 13. We're going to be looking at the self-description of Christ. How does he describe himself? We're going to be looking at the throne of Satan.

Who is that? What does that even mean? What does it mean that the throne of Satan is in the city of Pergamum? That's crazy. Let's figure it out. And then we're also going to be looking at what does it mean to hold to the name.

The refusing to deny the faith and we're going to look at the death of this man named Antipas and that's what we're going to be covering today. And we begin where every letter in Revelation begins. We begin with Jesus the King and that's going to lead us to part one, the sword that Christ carries.

Every single one of the seven letters opens the exact same way. Jesus introduces himself before he says anything else and he doesn't lead with the church's problem. He does not lead with the diagnosis and he does not lead with the rebuke or with the commendation.

He leads with his own name tag. And that's not just stylistic on Jesus's part. That's a theological decision that Jesus has made to give them his name first before he gives them anything else because the whole weight of everything that follows depends on the church knowing who is on the other end of the phone.

Because if you don't know who you're speaking to, then you don't know how to listen. And in Pergamum, the church needed to know before a single word of diagnosis landed exactly which king had decided to dictate them a letter.

Listen to how he introduces himself. He says, the one who has the sharp two edged sword says this. Now that title is not pulled out of the hat. Jesus is actually reacting to and reaching back into the opening vision of Revelation.

The chapter in chapter one in verse 16, where John sees the risen Christ standing among the seven lampstands, robe to the floor, eyes like fire, feet like bronze, pulled glowing from the furnace. And then his voice is like the sound of a flooding, roaring river.

Seven stars are in his right hand and out of his mouth comes a sharp two edged sword. That's the portrait. That's the king. And out of every image that he could have grabbed from that vision, every title that he could have led with, he reaches back into his own mouth and pulls out the two edged sword.

And he gives it to them. He says, I'm the one who has the two edged sword. Why does he do that? Why does he pull that particular image instead of the floodwaters coming out of his mouth through the eyes as bright as fire?

Why does he pull the sword? Well, because in the city of Pergamum of all the cities on the map, the sword is the title that would have landed with the most surgical precision. And to feel why you actually have to know what the word means, because the Greek word for sword is ramphaia.

And that's not just a standard sidearm of the Roman legionary. That's not a common sword. The common sword was the machaira, a short stabbing blade that would have worked really well in hand to hand combat.

That was the working knife of the empire. Well, the ramphaia is a different kind of animal altogether as far as swords go. It is a great, broad bladed, long handled sword. And it was not built to simply poke someone.

It was built to cleave. If the machaira is the soldier's sort of pocket knife or hand sword, the ramphaia is the executioner's axe with extra long reach. It's the blade that splits a man like firewood in half.

And that word has biblical precedent as well, because in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, the word ramphaia is the flaming sword that God plants at the gate of Eden in the hands of the cherubim that's going back and forth with flaming sword.

It's ramphaia in Genesis 3. It's the sword of judgment also in the prophets. It's the sword in the mouth of the servant of God in Isaiah 49 .2, where he says he made my mouth like a sharp sword. It's the sword of Isaiah 11 .4, where the Messiah strikes the earth with the rod of his mouth and kills the wicked with the breath of his lips.

It's the sword of Hebrews 4 .12, where the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged ramphaia sword, slicing down to the seam where the soul and the spirit meet, judging the thoughts and the intentions of the hearts of men.

So the sword is kind of like a verdict that's coming from the king. It's a sword of divine judgment. It is a sword of divine speech with an edge onto it. It's weaponized for judgment. It's weaponized for cleaving and for separation and for dividing and for execution.

And notice where it comes from. It doesn't come from his hand. It doesn't come from his arm. It doesn't come from... It comes from his mouth, because Christ does not conquer the way that Rome conquers.

Christ doesn't need to draw a weapon. He clears his throat. He said, let there be light, and there was light. He said, let it be, and atoms sprung into being as well as cosmoses. So when he says, repent to the church, the church repents.

When he says, come, and a corpse sits up, it does. When he says, judgment, an entire empire that looks eternal starts crumbling at its foundations. Rome is conquering by steel. Christ conquers by sentences.

Now, hold that picture in your mind and let it sit down next to the city of Pergamum, because the Roman governor of Asia, the pro-council who sat in Pergamum, held something that the Romans called the ius gladi, the right of the sword.

The Roman pro-council in the city of Pergamum, which was one of the most important people in the city, held this title, held this responsibility, held this right that was called by Rome the ius gladi, which meant the right of the sword.

The pro-council had the right of the sword in this city, which meant the legal authority to execute Roman citizens, which was rare in the Roman empire. If you were a Roman citizen, you were almost immune to capital punishment, except in Pergamum.

In the chair where that Roman pro-council sat was the pro-councilor bench, which was right here in this particular city. This was the one address, the one zip code in the entire Asia Minor province where Rome could lawfully end your life, even if you were a Roman citizen.

Pergamum was, in the most literal sense, the death row of Asia. It was the supreme court of Asia. It was the city that held the sword. And the Christians lived here in the shadow of that blade every single day.

And they knew that if the wrong magistrate decided to make an example of them, if the wrong governor felt like enforcing the imperial cult with a little bit of zeal, if the wrong neighbor whispered the wrong name in the wrong ear over the wrong dinner table within the Roman sword could come down on their throat by morning.

It was into that city, to those people, that Jesus opens his letter with this. The one who has the sharp two-edged sword says this. Do you hear what Jesus is doing? He is preaching at the city. He's preaching back at the city.

You think, Pergamum, that you have the sword that belongs to Caesar. You think that you have a sword that can actually do anything. You think it belongs to the pro-council. You think that Rome owns the blade in this town.

Well, let me introduce myself. Jesus is saying, I am the one who carries the real sword. I am the one who can split you in half. Rome's sword can open your throat, but mine will actually render verdict on your eternal soul.

Rome's sword ever touched. Rome's blade stopped at the skin. Jesus is saying, not mine. Rome could kill the body. Jesus is saying, I judge the body and the soul together. Caesar's sword was iron, which means that it rusts.

Jesus's sword is eschatological, and it never dulls and never dims. That is verse 12, and it gets sharper because in Pergamum, the sword is not only a comfort to the persecuted, it is a warning to the compromiser.

I want you to look at how the letter ends down in verse 16. Repent, or else I am coming to you quickly, and I will make war against them with the sword in my mouth, which means the same sword. It was the same word, same Romphaea, and instead of being pointed at those who are attacking Christians in the city of Pergamum who thought that they had the sword, Jesus says, no, no, no, I'm the one who has the sword.

I'm the one who's going to be able to execute those eternally. Same thing that Jesus said, don't fear the one who can harm the body, fear the one who can throw you into hell. He's talking about God. That same sword that Jesus promises will be pointed at the city of Pergamum will also be pointed in the other direction if the Christians in this city turn from him to idols.

You see, at the start of the letter, the blade hangs over the persecuting empire, but by the end of the letter, the blade has turned and it's actually pointed at the false teachers who are existing inside of the congregation of Christians.

And that is the structural genius of this entire letter to the city of Pergamum. The sword has two edges for two reasons, because it cuts both ways. One edge faces outward at the people who are trying to destroy the church from the streets, outward to Rome.

The other edge faces inward at the people who are trying to rot the church from within. One blade, two edges, and there's no safe side if you're against Christ. You can be against Christ militarily, like Rome, you're not safe.

You can be against Christ religiously, a wolf in the middle of sheep inside of the church, you're not safe. And this is exactly why the title fits Pergamum so well, like a glove even, because Pergamum is about to be handed two diagnoses in one letter by Jesus.

They're going to have persecution from the outside in the death of Antimus, and compromise on the inside in the doctrine of Balaam. And Jesus walks in carrying the one weapon that handles both of those errors, the two-edged sword that's coming out of his mouth.

You can't dodge the sword by joining with the persecutors, and you can't dodge the sword by cutting a deal with the compromisers. And this is exactly one place, there's one place to stand where the blade is not coming at you, and that is with Christ.

That is with Him. There's no neutral ground in Pergamum. There's no neutral ground. You're either going to be on the side of the ones who are fighting against the church, the persecutors are going to be against the side of the compromisers, but neither of those are actually going to be safe because they're going to be cut by Christ, destroyed by Christ.

The only way to be safe is to be with Christ. That is what the King speaks. That is what the King says to this people in the city of Pergamum. And now I want us to see what Jesus says about where they are actually living, and we're going to do that in part two, I Know Where You Dwell.

Now the first thing out of Jesus's mouth after the introduction is not a rebuke. It's not a diagnosis. It's not a compliment. It's something deeper, and it's far more pastoral than any of that. He says, I know where you dwell.

I want you to sit down in that for a second, because the first words that the risen Christ speaks to the persecuted, pressured, grieving, white-knuckled little congregation who are needing some kind of encouragement, they're needing to know that Jesus is with them, they need to know that.

The first words are I. The Greek verb there is oida, which is a standard word for knowing, but it carries real weight in Revelation, because Jesus uses this exact verb to open five of the seven letters.

I know your works. I know your tribulation. I know where you dwell. I know your love and faith and service. I know your deeds. What Jesus is saying is that he sees his churches. He understands their actual situation, not the version that might show up in the travel brochure, because he's not absent.

He's omnipresent. He's not blind. He's not phoning in from a safe distance. He's not piping in from some kind of video feed. In every age, in every place, and everywhere, he is the king who sees. As he said to Hagar, or as Hagar said back to him, you are the God who sees.

And here, the object of the knowing is striking, because he doesn't actually say I know your works the way he did five other times. He says I know where you dwell, because in Pergamum, the location is the first fact that you need to deal with on the chart.

The city itself is the first thing that you have to understand about this church, because you cannot actually talk about what they did right or what they got wrong until you reckon with where they did it.

That's important with the city of Pergamum. Christ refuses to even grade their faithfulness without first reading the conditions of the exam, which is where they live, which is pastoral genius. Because if you skip that step, you will misread everything that comes after it in the book of, or in the letter to Pergamum.

I want you to think about it like this. A good doctor reads the chart before he comes in and reads you your diagnosis of high cholesterol, for instance. A good general walks the ground before he draws up the battle plan.

A good shepherd, a good pastor knows the pasture, knows the flock, knows the cliffs and the valleys and the hidden wolves before he opens his mouth to pasture and shepherd those sheep. If I walked into your church tomorrow and started swinging at specific sins without first even knowing you and acknowledging where you live and what pressures and what cultural moment that you're in, the temptations that are bearing down on you, a particular people, my rebuke would feel haughty and weightless.

It would feel like it had no gravity and it had no teeth. It would feel like criticism that was coming from a man who flew in for the afternoon as flying out before dark. The best pastors, the best shepherds know this in their bones.

You have to understand where people are before you can lead them where they need to go. You have to feel where they're at in the room before you raise your voice in it. And that's exactly what Jesus is doing here.

Before one syllable of correction is uttered, he says, I see the city. I see the Acropolis. I see the altars. I see the temple. I see the smoke curling out of that place where the snakes are in the Asclepion.

I see the festival processions clogging the streets. I see the trade guild dinners where they're expecting you to raise a glass to the patron God before the meat is even served. I see what Rome is doing to you.

I see what the priests are doing to you. I see what the magistrates are doing to you. I see all of it. I see where you live. And only then, only after that, does he add the next phrase in, I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is.

And we're going to spend the next section on that moniker, on that throne, because it derives its own conversation. And it's really important, but we're not going to do that here. Before we get there, I want you to catch the order because the order is actually really important.

Christ acknowledges the city and where they live before he actually names the spiritual reality that is underneath all of it. He sees them in their first century context first, and then he tells them the truth about that context.

He sees the geography before he renders the verdict on that geography. He's not blind to where they live, and he's not soft about it either. Both are true in the same breath. That is the pastor every church is desperate for.

One who can see the actual conditions of the people clearly and still tell them the truth about those conditions. One who knows the city is dangerous and stays in it with the sheep anyway. One who will not retreat into the abstraction and will not call evil good.

The kind of shepherd who walks in, looks the room dead in the eye and says, I see exactly where you are. I know you. And now let me tell you what's really going on and happening here underneath the surface.

That is what Christ is doing in verse 13. Before Antipas, before a word of commendation, before a single concern about Balaam or the Nicolaitans, or even where is the throne of Satan, before any of that, he's already handed this church the most comforting thing that he could have ever possibly said.

And that is, I know where you dwell. I see you. I see you. I'm not in the dark about your situation. I've not gone quiet on your city. I've not left you alone with your context and left you to your own devices.

I have been on these streets with you the entire time, which means everything that he's about to say, every rebuke, every commendation, every threat, every promise is coming from a Lord who actually understands what's going on on the ground level.

He's not pronouncing judgment from a balcony somewhere. He's not like Zeus and hurling lightning bolts at you from his comfortable, lazy boy on Mount Olympus. He's pronouncing it from the perfect knowledge of being on the ground, someone who has been walking in the alleys of Pergamum alongside his people, walking with them the entire way.

And that is the Christ of Revelation 2 .13, the Lord who sees his people, the Lord who knows his people, the Lord who loves his people because he knows where they dwell. And then he calls it the throne of Satan, which we're going to look at now in part three, five suspects and one throne.

Jesus says, I know where you dwell, dot, dot, dot, and you dwell where Satan's throne is. That's one of the most astounding sentences in the entire New Testament. It ranks right up there with what he said to Smyrna, calling the Jews there the synagogue of Satan.

It's the only place in all of scripture where a real city on a real map in the real Mediterranean region gets tagged as the location of Satan's throne. Not one of the hideouts for Satan, not a place that he just happens to visit every now and then, not a summer home for the Lord of darkness.

No, his throne. The entire seat of his authority, the center of his rule, the chair where the dragon does his governing. And for 2000 years, scholars and pastors alike, and even ordinary believers have been speculating over the same question.

What exactly is Jesus pointing at? Where is the throne of Satan in the city of Pergamum? Because this is not a trivia fact for the back of cereal boxes or something you would learn in Sunday school. The answer actually is quite difficult and it shapes how you read the entire letter.

Church history over time has floated basically five different answers to this question. Who is the throne of Satan? Five suspects have been lined up for us to pick from, and I want to walk through that lineup so that you can understand who they are and so that you can figure out who the murder suspect is.

The first suspect in the lineup, number one, is the altar of Zeus, the great altar of Zeus. And we spent time on that last week because that altar was colossal. It dominated the landscape of the Acropolis.

It was literally shaped like a throne, which if you're going to call a city Satan's throne, and there's already a giant throne there, it kind of makes sense. And from the valley floor, it actually looked like a giant marble choir carved into the side of the mountain with the frieze carved into the stone around the base with the Olympian gods grinding the serpent-legged giants into dirt, which is exactly the kind of cosmic counterfeit a Christian reader would file under dragon and seed and serpent and throne.

And older commentators like Adam Clark and William Barclay actually said that, yes, this is the throne of Satan. It's the altar of Zeus. And at a minimum, it is a strong possibility. Now, suspect two is the cult of Asclepius.

It's the healing serpent god, the one who is called Savior and Lord, the so-called Soter of Pergamum, which means Savior of Pergamum. His symbol was the snake. His sanctuary was a crawling cave filled with live snakes and pilgrims who came from across the empire to sleep on the floor with the serpents and to collect their healing in a dream.

Now, for a book that flat out named Satan as the ancient serpent in chapter 12 and chapter 20, a serpent savior running a clinic in town that's going to heal people and take attention away from Christ is a real natural counterfeit that looks like a good candidate for this throne of Satan.

Colin Hemmer, in his major study on the seven churches, argued that the Asclepion is the primary referent that Jesus is getting at, and he's got a strong argument. Suspect number three is the imperial cult.

Pergamum was the first city in the entire province of Asia to build a temple to a living Caesar. By the time that John writes, it had been the headquarters of emperor worship for almost 100 years. And the imperial cult was the glue of the empire.

It was the political civic religion that held the entire apparatus together. And refusing to play ball with the Caesar worship was not just eccentric, it was called treason. And throughout the book of Revelation, the throne of Satan and the throne of the beast keep showing up together, which, as we will learn in the future, the throne of the beast is Rome.

Throne of Satan showing up with the throne of the beast could let you know that there's some kind of correlation there. Revelation 13 .2 says it outright. The dragon hands his throne to the beast. The throne of Satan gets handed to the beast, who is Rome.

So when you look at it that way, it could be the imperial system of Rome that is the throne of Satan. So when Jesus says that Pergamum, Pergamum is where Satan's throne is, the most natural reading is that inside of the framework of Pergamum and of Revelation itself, he's pointing to the imperial cult as where Satan rules.

That's the third option, and it's a good option as well. Suspect number four is the pro-councilor bench in the city. It's Pergamum and their leadership, where the seat of the Roman provincial government laid in all of Asia Minor and even throughout the empire.

The governor here held the right of the sword over the people so that he could actually execute Roman citizens. We talked about that before. The judicial chair called the Bema seat, where capital sentences were handed down, sat inside of this very city.

And given that Christ just introduced himself in verse 12 as the one who carries the true sword, it would be politically and poetically interesting. If verse 13 identified the throne of Satan as where Jesus's counterfeit sword, Satan's sword, actually existed, especially since Antipas was most likely killed by some form of legal action against the pro-council or by the pro-council, whether it was mob violence or rubber stamped by the magistrate or outright execution by the pro-council.

It was done in a kind of legal way in a city that allowed for Roman citizens to be murdered. Antipas is a very common name among Roman people, not among Jews. So Antipas was a Roman citizen who was converted to Christ, murdered in the city where it was allowed to kill Roman citizens.

So Jesus might be saying that the sword in Pergamum, the right to murder Roman citizens by execution, is the throne of Satan because it is going against, it is the Antichrist version of Jesus's sword.

It's the sword of Pergamum. That's number four. Number five is what I would call the cumulative reading. This is a view that many people have had throughout the 2000 years of church history. It's a view that the throne is not a single building or entity, but it's the entire integrated religious and political ecosystem of the city of Pergamum.