Book of Revelation - Ch. 2, Vs. 18-20 (04/15/2018)

the machine. Are we okay? Okay, I'm going to go ahead and start then because we are pushing the time envelope.

Last Sunday, as we studied the letter to Pergamos, we saw the result of allowing the world to infiltrate the church.

We saw the danger of false teachers and immoral conduct, problems that still face the church today.

Moreover, we saw the danger of allowing false teachers and immorality to exist within the church.

That was, in fact, the real problem with the Christians in Pergamos. Not that they were necessarily engaged in false teachers, nor in immoral conduct, but they did tolerate it.

There's not a lot that an individual Christian can do about immorality or false teaching other than to refrain from doing it and to keep it out of the church.

But if we allow false teachers and false teaching to mingle with the church, that inevitably leads to the same end as it did to Pergamos.

What happens is, heathenism becomes Christianized. Pagan temples become

Christian churches. Heathen festivals are converted into Christian ones.

Pagan priests slip into office as Christian priests. The change to the church is fatal.

The change to heathenism, just new names. We need to remember,

Satan is not only very much at home in the environment of false religion, he is, in fact, the author of it.

We're going to move from Pergamos, the church that tolerated sin, to Thyatira, the church that embraced sin.

And so I want to read a passage from Revelation 2, starting at verse 18.

But first, I think we need to stop for a moment for a prayer. Most gracious Heavenly Father, thank you for this day.

Thank you for giving us a place to come, gather together, and study your holy word.

Thank you for giving us the Holy Spirit to guide us. Thank you for giving us the scripture, the word, that we might have it to study.

Thank you for giving us the protection of a country that still tolerates your message being taught.

And keep us that way. Keep us free from interference.

But if we're not kept free from interference, keep us true to your beliefs in any case.

In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Well, that was not so much a prayer for regarding the church at Thyatira, more like one at Smyrna.

And it's my fear that we may be moving into an era where our churches are more like the

Smyrna churches than they are Thyatira or Pergamos. But that's just me.

It's already happening to our country. That is correct.

The churches thought they were all the Philadelphia churches. They all wanted to be the Philadelphia churches.

How many of you guys came up by, is it Northside? North Lake? Northwood?

And everybody's path is still blocked? The road is still closed? So we may have people late on that account.

I don't know. Well, I didn't know. I was kind of panicked because I thought

I was running a little bit late. And so I went a different way than I normally go. And there it was, the road was blocked.

I said, wow, now what? Okay, Revelation chapter 2 verse 18.

And to the angel of the church in Thyatira write, these things saith the

Son of God who hath his eyes likened to a flame of fire and his feet are like fine brass.

I know thy works and charity and service and faith and patience and thy works.

The last to be more than the first. Notwithstanding, I have a few things against thee because thou sufferest that late woman

Jezebel which calleth herself a priestess to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication and to beat things sacrificed to idols.

And I gave her space to repent of her fornication and she repented not. Behold, I will cast her into a bed and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation except they repent of their deeds.

And I will kill her children with death and all the churches shall know that I am he which searches the reins and the heart.

And I will give unto every one of you according to your works and unto you

I say and into the rest in Thyatira as many as have not this doctrine and which have not known the depths of Satan as they speak.

I will put upon you no other burden but that which you have already hold fast until I come.

And he that overcometh and keepeth my works unto the end to him

I will give power over the nations. And he shall rule them with a rod of iron as the vessel of a potter shall they be broken into shivers even as I received of my father.

And I will give him the morning star. He that hath an ear to hear let him hear what the

Spirit hath said to the churches. That's the longest letter to any of the churches written in John and it's written to probably the most insignificant church in terms of at least the size of the city.

But that doesn't really matter. Whereas in the church in Pergamos allowed the world to come in, the church in Thyatira embraced the world as well as the sin it brought.

Now Jesus has called his church to be holy and to maintain purity by dealing with sin in its midst.

In fact, the very first instruction Jesus gave to the churches dealt with confronting sin.

Go to Matthew chapter 18 verse 15. I'm going to pick up about in the middle of verse 15.

If thy brother shall trespass against thee go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone.

If he shall hear thee thou hast gained thy brother. But if he will not hear thee then take with thee one or two more that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.

And if he shall neglect to hear them tell it to the church. But if he neglect to hear the church let him be unto thee as a heathen man and a publican.

That is instructions for how to deal with church discipline.

The practice of church discipline that Christ instituted is to maintain the holiness or the separation of the church from the world.

That's what holiness means. Holiness means to be separate, to be set apart, to not be part of the world.

It has two purposes. One, to call sinning believers back to righteous behavior.

There can be believers who sin. Every one of us. Well, I'm not going to speak for any of you.

I'm going to speak only for me. It doesn't take me a full 24 hours to go from a state of being just totally immersed in the scripture and immersed in what the

Lord wants me to do. It doesn't take me 24 hours to get back to doing some sin. And I rue that.

I regret that. I hate that. And I do it every day. So believers that sin is not an unusual thing.

I think most of you would admit if I question you that it's not been more than a week since any of you sinned.

And I gave you like many times a bigger time period to fail.

But we all sin. But we need to be called back to righteous behavior because we need to try to live righteously.

Now, Brother David, I've heard him say many times that if you continue to walk in the presence of the Lord, holding the

Lord's hands while you're holding his hand and he's holding yours, you can't sin. But the problem is we turn his hand loose too often.

So one practice of church discipline is bring sinning Christians back into the fold.

Back into righteous behavior. The second reason is to purge from the church the ones who stubbornly cling to their sin.

We don't do that, do we? In either case, either the believers quit sinning and live righteously or try to live righteously, or the rebelling sinners leave the church.

In either case, the purity of the church is maintained. This morning in the letter to the church at Thyatira, we're going to see the fatal change to the church that took place as a result of that loss of purity.

I want to do two verses first, and you don't need to go to either one of these. This is out of Luke 18, verse 7.

If you want to re -go there, you can. Luke 18, 7. Jesus is talking about what he shall find on the earth when he returns.

And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them?

I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless, when the

Son of God, when the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on earth?

Well, the answer to that question is he'll find some faith on the earth. We know that.

There's going to be some remaining faithful people on the church. It was more of a rhetorical statement, but the issue is, will he find much?

As we go through these letters, we're going to conclude that we may very well be not the

Church of Philadelphia, Mrs. Mitchell, but we may be the church at Laodicea. And I'm not talking about, necessarily, this small little congregation.

I hope that this small little congregation is a part of the church that is the remnant of the church that's true to the beliefs and the practice of the church.

But the church I'm talking about is the large, universal church of believers.

1 Peter 4, 16 makes another comment. Yet if any man suffer as a

Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify

God on this behalf. I was listening to the news this morning. I don't know if any of you were listening to Fox News this morning.

If you were, on Fox and Friends, they had a little blurb with Franklin Graham.

When President Bush, President Trump, announced the strike, the bombing strike, at the end of his speech, he offered like a 30 -second prayer.

Not God bless America or not God bless us, but an actual prayer for about 30 seconds.

And they asked Franklin Graham about that. And what he said was, struck me interesting in the fact

I just read this passage. I'd just been producing this. He said, it's refreshing to have a president that is not ashamed of Jesus Christ.

And you look back, there's a lot of people, as you look further and further back, that would identify themselves as a

Christian, but only if you pressured them, only if you pinned them down and made them say it. Obama wouldn't even do that.

George Bush, he wouldn't have initiated. He showed, kind of showed me that he was a

Christian, but he was ashamed that people knew it. But he said, it's refreshing to have a president that's not ashamed of Jesus Christ.

I said, wow. Anyhow, I thought I'd share that with you. Yet if any man suffer as a

Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify, let him glorify

God on this behalf. For if the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of the

Lord, for the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of the

Lord, and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?

And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and sinner appear?

That's something to be considered, something to think about. We're at a stage now where there is a great temptation to be politically correct and not to offend anybody, and therefore, we can't say that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the

Father but by Him. We can't say that because, well, there's other ways.

Okay. We are to the church at Thyatira. The meaning of the names.

Thyatira was originally a Lydian town bearing the name of Pelopia.

It then became Semiramis. You remember that word from last week. That was the wife, according to some sources, of...

I forgot his name. I can't believe that.

My brain went totally dead. The guy that built Nimrod. That was the wife of Nimrod.

Semiramis, S -E -M -I, I may be pronouncing it wrong, like semicircle,

S -E -M -I -R -A -M -I -S. Then, Euhippa.

About 300 BC, Seleucius I converted the city into a frontier fortress to guard the way to Pergamos.

Pergamos was a more important city. And he renamed it

Thyatira because just about that time, he was informed that he had a daughter.

And the word Thyatira comes from the Greek Thygator, which means daughter.

Okay. That's the name. And that's kind of the background of this name. And it fits well that Semiramis was involved in that name.

And to the church, and to the angel of the church of Thyatira, write this. These things saith the

Son of God, who hath eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine brass.

Notice how the Lord addresses himself. If you recall, we've noted before that he addresses himself a different way to each of the churches.

To the church that lost her first love. That would be Ephesus, right?

He identifies himself as the one in charge of all churches and the one that all churches must love.

That was the message of, to Ephesus, that Ephesus had lost her first love, that he should be the source of their, the object of their love.

To the suffering church, the persecuted church, the church at Smyrna, he identified himself as the conqueror of death.

Nothing that they can do to you is outside of my power, because I am the conqueror of death.

To the infiltrated church, the church in Pergamos, he addresses himself as the

Word of God, to whom all things must align. And here in Thyatira, the adulterous church, he addresses himself as the

Son of God. Now, this is the only place in Revelation that Jesus introduces himself as the

Son of God. Now, some scholars, and I'm not necessarily sure about this, believe that this church prophetically represents the time from 600

AD to about 1500 AD. If that's the case, it is a time that we refer to in the textbooks as the

Dark Ages. Remember studying the Dark Ages in your history books?

What happened in this time? Well, the church in Rome took the Bible away from the people and said only they could interpret it.

It was a time when the Mother of God and the Queen of Heaven were exalted above Jesus.

That's how Semiramis fits in. She was known as the

Queen of Heaven. That's how Mary, the mother of Jesus, fits in.

She was exalted higher than Jesus himself. It was a time when the church told the people that they must pray to Mary, the mother of Jesus, to get to God.

Notwithstanding, the Scripture tells us, but they weren't allowed to read the Scripture. If they had been allowed to read the

Scripture, it would not have been in a language that they understood. Had they been able to read the

Scripture, it would have said in 1 Timothy 2 .5, for there is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man

Jesus Christ. That's the way. That's the only way that we can get to him.

So is it any wonder that the Lord would address himself to this bunch as the

Son of God? The Son of God emphasizes Christ's deity, stressing the truth that Jesus and Christ are of one essence.

We talked about this a little bit at breakfast the other morning about the

Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit all being of one essence.

And I couldn't resist doing a little rabbit trail here. So let's go to John 5 .18.

And we'll see what the Pharisees thought about the equality of Jesus and God.

I'm not going to read all of the preceding story, but just the conclusion. Therefore, the

Jews sought the more to kill him, because he had not only broke the

Sabbath, but he also said that God was his Father, making himself equal to God.

So when Jesus refers to himself in this letter as the Son of God, that is a severe change in wording from how he had been describing himself in the earlier portion of the letters.

In chapter 1, how did Jesus describe himself? Look at chapter 1 in Revelation, chapter 1, verse 13.

And we'll see how Jesus described himself in the letter prior to this. And in the midst of the seven candlesticks, that's in the middle of the churches, was one likened to what?

The Son of Man, clothed in a garment down to the foot, girded about the pipes with a golden girdle.

That title emphasizes his identification with the believers as their merciful high priest.

It offers encouragement and comfort to the persecuted Christians.

In Hebrews 2, Paul talks about Jesus. And he says,

Well, verily, he took not on him the nature of angels, but he took on him the seed of Abraham, wherefore, in all things it behooved him to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people.

For in that he had himself suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted.

The Son of Man views Christ in his ability to sympathize with the needs, trials, and temptations of his church.

Not here, not in this passage. How does he identify himself? The Son of God.

The emphasis is not on his humility, but on his deity. Because his approach to the church at Thyatira is not as a sympathetic high priest, but as a divine judge.

It is judgment, not comfort, that is in store for this church. And I couldn't leave with at least one last comment concerning the triune nature of God.

This is the passage we talked about at breakfast. John 14, verse 15.

If you love me, keep my commandments, and I pray to the Father that he will give you another comforter.

This is Jesus praying for the church and the people that remain after he's going to be crucified.

That he may abide with you forever. Even the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him, but ye know him.

For he dwelleth with you and shall be in you. The Greek is such a powerful and precise language that it conveys much more than does

English. Consider the part of this phrase, another. In the

Greek, the word another is the word allos.

A -L -L -O -S. It means another of the same kind.

Like if I break my pencil, I'm writing, and I break the lead in my pencil. Or if I'm writing in a pen, and I'm writing in black ink, and I run out of ink, and I say,

I'm going to get another pencil. I say, I'm going to get another pencil. I'm not going to get a pencil of a different kind so that it writes with a different shade of gray.

I'm not going to get a red pencil so that my writing continues in a different color. I'm going to get another pencil of the same kind.

We kind of have to figure that out with the problem ahead of the people. But in the

Greek, it tells us which kind. A one just like the other one. That's the another here is one just like the other one.

There is a word for another one of a different kind. That is heteros. In science, we talk about heterogeneous mixtures.

Mixtures of two things that are not alike. Like if you mix salt and water, it all dissolves and it becomes of one kind.

But if you mix sand and water and stir it up, the sand is still sand and the water is still water, and it doesn't dissolve.

It's quickly. Hetero means of another kind.

He could have said another kind or the same kind, but he chose to say another kind. The language demands that the

Holy Spirit, I'm sorry, the language demands that the

Holy Spirit is of the same essence as Jesus. And there are in other passages where we know that Jesus is the same essence of as God.

We just read a passage there earlier. I'm not going to read this one.

So if Jesus is of the same essence of the

Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is the same essence of Jesus and Jesus is the same essence of God, then the

Holy Spirit is of the same essence of God. And so they're all of one essence, all of one kind, different kinds of the same thing.

So now we get to the commendation and there are things to be said positive about this church, which is quite unlike what we'll see about the next church.

I know thy works and charity and service and faith and thy patience and thy works and the last to be more than the first.

The first two words I want to look at are works and charity.

If you look up the word charity, you'll find it to be agape, which is

God's kind of love. It's not brotherly love.

It's not eros, sexual love.

It's God -like love. That's what charity is. Compare just a minute this church to Ephesus.

What did they have in common? What is this church commended for that the church at Ephesus was also commended for?

Their works. Ephesus was commended for their works.

Thyatira is commended for their works. Thyatira is commended for their agape love.

What about Ephesus? That is in criticism for them.

They had left their first love. They lost their first love. They were criticized for having lost the love.

So that's a big difference. In some ways this group had a greater set of commendations than Ephesus, which was only commended for their works and their adherence to doctrine.

They're also commended for service, faith, patience.

If you list them out, there are five positives. And then he says one other thing at the very end that I thought was really interesting.

And the last to be more than the first. What does that mean? They're all important, but I think what it's dealing with is the works that you're doing, the love that you have, the service, the faith, the patience.

They're all getting better. You're getting more works, more charity, more service, more faith, more patience.

The last more than the first. Five positives and they're all improving.

He does. And that leaves to a difficult count. Some of the references that I looked at listed six things, but they listed works twice.

Some of them listed four things. John MacArthur broke it into four things. And I'm going to just kind of read a little passage that John MacArthur wrote.

He said, first, the believers at Thyatira were showing love for God and for one another, although their love was apparently fragile since there was not a strong foundation of unified sound doctrine.

Now that would be a issue, the sound doctrine that the church of Ephesus would be strong in, that the church of Thyatira would be weak in.

In some ways, Thyatira was strong where Ephesus was weak. In fact, it is the first of the seven churches to be commended for its love.

Now I didn't realize that until I read this article by MacArthur. The first church to be commended for love was

Thyatira. Second, Christ commended them for their faith, which is better translated fidelity or faithfulness.

The true Christians in Thyatira were dependable, reliable, and consistent. Out of faith grew service and perseverance.

So he put service and perseverance into one block. Those who love will express that love through meeting the needs of others.

Those who are faithful will steadfastly persevere in the faith.

Not only did the Thyatira Christians possess these virtues, but also their deeds of late were greater in number than at first.

So they're getting better. Their loving service was becoming more consistent.

Their faithful perseverance growing stronger. They were growing in grace, maturing in their

Christian life, and advancing the cause of Christ. For that behavior, they were to be commended.

That's a pretty good list of good things, especially in light of the fact that the things that you're doing are getting better.

And if the letter had left off there, you'd been proud to be a Thyatira. Probably even more proud than you would have been to have been a member of the church at Ephesus or Pergamos.

But that's not the end. Notwithstanding, that's always a bad word.

I have a few things against thee. Because thou sufferest that vile...

I'm sorry, I put a word in. Thou sufferest that woman Jezebel.

Now, I stopped in the middle of this sentence. I know everybody knows Jezebel. The woman

Jezebel he's talking about here is not the Jezebel of the Old Testament, of course. I mean, that's like hundreds of years later.

The Old Testament Jezebel was a vile woman. So much so that marrying her was listed first among King Ahab's evil deeds.

Now, King Ahab was a bad king. And if you'll turn to 1

Kings chapter 16 verse 30, it's going to talk about King Ahab, and it's going to talk about some of the things that he did.

1 Kings chapter 16, beginning at verse 30.

Just to get you set off on the right path. And Ahab, the son of Omri, did evil in the sight of the

Lord above all that were before him.

So of all the kings that were before him, he did the most evil in the sight of the Lord, Ahab.

And it came to pass, as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, that he took to wife

Jezebel. The very first thing it lists is the wife Jezebel, the daughter of Ephbal, king of the

Zinians, who served Baal and worshipped him.

And he reared up an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he had built in Samaria.

So he built a temple for Baal, and he put up an altar in that temple.

And Ahab made a grove. And Ahab did more to provoke the

Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him.

So that's Ahab. And of all the things that he listed, the very first thing he listed was he took the wife of Jezebel.

He took to wife Jezebel. So that's got to be a pretty big thing.

That's right. She came to a bad end. Yes. So back to Revelation.

Notwithstanding, I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest this woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and seduce my servants, to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.

You've got some problems here. First of all, you have...

Come right on in. Welcome. We're glad to have you show up any time.

We're about to wind up this lesson, but you are just in time for a much more important and enlightening message from Brother David.

John MacArthur said this. One might speculate that she espoused the philosophical dualism so prevalent in contemporary

Greek philosophy. When brought into the church, that teaching held that the spirit of good...

I messed up. Contemporary Greek philosophy, which taught this.

Spirit is good and flesh is evil. That's what they taught. Since God is only interested in spirit, it doesn't matter what one does with his body.

That's what they taught. Since God is only interested in the spirit, it doesn't matter what you do with your body.

God doesn't care about that anyhow. Thus, according to Jezebel, it didn't matter if Christians committed acts of immorality or ate things sacrificed to idols.

She may have also taken the antinomian view of God's grace, arguing that it didn't matter if Christians sinned, because if they did,

Christ, God, would graciously forgive them. She also may have encouraged

Christians to experience the deep things of Satan, so they could better witness to the unsaved.

Now, where have you heard that before? In the churches, where the pastor, and it's more often the youth ministers, get together with the teenagers, and they go to the bar after the church and drink, in order that they might reach some in there.

That if you participate in bad things, then you can more usefully witness to the unsaved.

Okay, here's what we know. Here's what we know for certain. Whatever her specific content of her false teaching was, it led the majority of the members of the church of Phyratyra to stray from truth and righteousness.

And that's probably what you can say about the person that decides to go and participate in drinking at the bar in order to win the other drunks.

It just doesn't happen. He just acts as a bad influence.

He loses his purpose, his position within the community of believers.

Now, I am right on the edge of my allotted time, so I'm going to give you a few seconds if you've got any questions or comments to make, and then we will.

Well, of course, I would say they shouldn't be following you to start with, but you are correct in what you're saying.

If you can't tell the difference between a Christian and a non -Christian, then the non -Christian certainly can't be a witness.

I stopped in the middle of the sentence, but I can't remember what

I was going to say so I guess it wasn't important. Anything else? Most gracious Heavenly Father, thank you for this day and thank you for all of the blessings that you have given us.

Thank you for the protection, the hedge that you have created around your church, and thank you for letting us know that even though we may go through times of persecution, we may go through good times and bad times, that the one thing that we are sure will always be present is your presence and that you will guide us and protect us and take us where you want us to go.