188.. What Is Satan's Throne? | Pergamum Part 1

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 188, The Letter to Pergamum, part one. Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back to the broadcast.

My name is Kendall, and I'm so glad that you're here, and I'm glad to be back after a wonderful vacation where I was able to go down to Virginia, spend some time with my family, spend a lot of time at the swimming pool and all that stuff.

So I'm glad to be back. And today we're going to begin a brand new three-part series on one of the most spiritually dangerous and historically loaded and theologically explosive cities in the entire New Testament, a city perched on a thousand-foot Acropolis like a God looking down on the world below, a city that was filled with temples to Zeus and Athena and Dionysus and Asclepius, a city that was the first in the entire Roman province of Asia to build a temple to the Caesar and worship a man as if he were a God, a city where the most famous altar in the ancient world rose halfway up the mountainside in the shape of a throne, a city where one of Christ's faithful witnesses had already been martyred for refusing to bow down to the imperial cult.

And in the middle of all of that, somehow against every cultural and political force pressing against them, a small congregation of Christians had managed to plant a church, to plant a little lampstand.

And they were trying to hold fast to the name of Jesus inside of a city that worshiped almost every other name under heaven. They were trying to confess one Lord inside of a city that was saturated with idols of a thousand different varieties.

They were trying to live as citizens of the kingdom of heaven inside a city that was, in the most literal way possible, a picture of hell. And then in the midst of all of that, on a small little rock island in the Aegean Sea, the risen Christ dictated a letter to the Apostle John that was going to be sent to this exact little local church.

And it wasn't a generic letter at all, and it was not a vague sort of halftime pep talk. It wasn't a motivation conference where all of the speakers are going to challenge you to believe in yourself and live your best life now.

This was a surgical, targeted, sniper-like cruise missile that locates this congregation in the actual city, names their actual martyr, exposes their real-life compromises, and threatens actual judgment and promises if they were to follow Christ.

So the letter is recorded for us in Revelation 2, 12 -17, and it's the letter to the church in Pergamum. Now, I'm going to be honest with you, because of all of the seven cities in Revelation, Pergamum is probably the one that modern Christians know the least.

Because Ephesus we know about from Paul and the book of Ephesians, Smyrna we know from Polycarp, and four wonderful podcast episodes, a show called The Prodcast, which if you missed you can go back and watch, they're really great I've heard, but those are probably familiar to you.

Laodicea we know because of every disgruntled youth pastor in America has at some point alluded to Jesus vomiting the students that he's talking to out of his mouth, as he threatened to do with the Nazarene congregants in Laodicea.

But what about Pergamum? Who are they and what was their deal? Well, as you can see from the text that I'm about to read, the only information that we have in the entire Bible on this peculiar little city is that it was called Satan's throne.

There's a reference to Balaam, there's hidden manna and a white stone with a secret name written on it, which could not be a more odd collection of statements about a people. And because we lack a lot of the biblical data on the city, we don't really understand the city and because we don't understand the city, we miss much of what's actually in the letter and because that we miss what Jesus is actually saying to this struggling little church.

Now, that is what I hope to fix in this series. And perhaps you're thinking, Kendall, there's only six verses in the entire Bible, then how are you going to do a three-part series, especially with episodes like an hour long?

How are you going to do that? Well, you probably don't yet know me. The very first sermon I ever preached as a lead pastor was 55 minutes on Jude 1a. Yeah, that literally means the first half of Jude 1, not even a full verse.

So I'm kind of prone to that kind of thing and I hope you're here for it. But I would also say that the expansion of this content, six verses into three large episodes, is not superfluous. And I say that because there is data from secular historians who were alive when Revelation was written that fill in so much of the details that we don't know about this city from the Bible that is going to help us and aid us in our quest of understanding what the Lord is actually saying.

And we also have the entire witness of Scripture and the allusions to the Old Testament that are found in this little epistolatory letter to Pergamum that is going to shed light on who they were and why Jesus' letter to them was so scathing.

So over the next three episodes, we're going to walk back into the ancient city of Pergamum together. We're going to climb the Acropolis. We're going to stand in front of the Altar of Zeus. We're going to step down into the Asclepion and listen to the hiss of the serpents in the dark.

We're going to meet a faithful believer who was named Antipas. And we're going to understand exactly why Jesus calls this city Satan's throne, which is a crazy nickname to be given if you're a city. And we're going to expose the doctrine of Balaam that came from a people called the Nicolaitans.

And we're going to unpack the hidden manna and the white stone comments in their first century and covenant context. And what we're going to see by the end of this series is that everything in the letter to the city of Pergamum is intentional.

Jesus isn't speaking some kind of weird vagaries, but he's naming specific details that are going wrong inside this church and admonishing the people in this church to repent, which will be insightful for us to consider as well.

Thus, today in part one, we're going to be setting the stage with a background on the city. But before we dive in, I want to give a huge shout out to our new channel partners, Wrath and Grace Studios.

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So check out their stuff. Now, speaking of the kingdom, I just want to ask you something directly. If you have ever been encouraged or strengthened or blessed by this show, if you have grown in your understanding of eschatology or the book of Revelation, if you used to be a dispy downer and now you're all jazzed up about the victory of Jesus, then I would ask you to prayerfully consider becoming a channel member here on YouTube.

Memberships are how this show actually continues going. It's how I produce this show. It's how I pay for or pay back the Shepherd's Church for things like a camera and lights and a teleprompter and soundboard and other items like that that I could not actually do this show without.

These memberships are helping me to continue to produce this kind of God-glorifying content to help me hire people like Wrath and Grace to help and to partner with them. It helps us make Christ-exalting, God-hopeful content every single week and reach more people with it, spread the victory of Jesus far and wide, and those memberships will be the reason that we can do that and a whole lot more of that in the future.

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So I'm so thankful for you, thankful for all that you have done to help. And now with that said, we need to walk into the city of Pergamum together, and we're going to do that by reading Revelation 2, 12 through 17.

This is what the text 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 one who 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 Balaam to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat things, sacrifice 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 through 17.

And with that, let us begin by climbing the mountain of Pergamum. And we will do that in part one, the counterfeit city on top of a hill. Now, before you can hear the letter, you have to understand what was going on in the city because every single image that Jesus uses from this letter, from the sword to the throne to the manna to the stone, is all being drawn from a city that was already preaching its own counterfeit gospel every single day through its architecture, its religion, its politics, and its public life.

If you would have lived in those days and you were visiting Pergamum, you would be visiting a city in the region of Mysia in what is now modern-day western Turkey, which is about 15 miles inland from the Aegean Sea, and was roughly 70 miles north of Smyrna.

Unlike Ephesus or Smyrna, this was not a port city. This was an inland city, and it was not a trading hub that was built on water where boats could come in and out, but it was an inland citadel. In fact, the very name Pergamum in Greek comes from the common noun that simply means a fortified high place.

It's the same word that Homer uses for the citadel of Troy. The city was named that way because it was physically that way. It was a fortress literally on top of a mountain. It was a high place. It was a throne that looked like it was carved straight out of the earth, sitting on top of the hill, and what a hill it actually was.

The Acropolis of Pergamum, which simply means the highest point in the city, rose roughly 1 ,000 feet above the surrounding Caicos River Valley, which meant that it was not like the charming little Swiss villages that were perched at the bottom of the Alps.

This was a city that was on top of a vertical wall of rock, thrusting itself up out of the plain like a closed fist that was raised up to the sky from every single direction. The moment that you came within sight of the city, the Acropolis would dominate everything.

It pulled the eyes upward. It demanded that you would crane your neck. It announced before you had even taken a single step towards its gates that whoever lived up there was the one who ruled down here.

Now, let's suppose for a second that you're an ancient mailman and your job is to deliver the letter. You're delivering the letter that Jesus has written, and first you go to Ephesus and then you go to Smyrna.

Now you've arrived at the third city on a mail carrier's postal route, and you're going to deliver that letter. You had to begin climbing up into the city. One of the things you would notice is that Pergamum was laid out not like a flat city like many Greek cities.

It was terraced, which is sort of like Minas Tirith in the Lord of the Rings. The whole city was laid out in layered tiers that eventually worked its way all the way up to the Acropolis or the high point.

At the very top of the mountain, at the upper Acropolis, stood the royal palaces, the temple of Athena, the great library, and the steepest theater in the entire ancient world was cut into the hillside at an almost 80 degree angle, which I want you to stop and think if you remember high school geometry, like 90 degrees is straight up.

So if you are thinking about watching a play or maybe even a concert with seating at a venue that was laid out at an 80 degree angle, I want you to imagine the anxiety that you would feel as you were climbing up or climbing down, thinking, what happens if I trip in a place like this?

It would have been crazy, probably would have gotten hurt, probably would have broken your neck, but I digress. Now, just below the summit, set on its own broad terrace beneath the temple of Athena stood the massive altar of Zeus and this was a structure all of its own.

It was lifted high on a kind of stepped podium and it was crowned with a colonnade and from the plain far below, it looked for all the world like a great throne that was carved into the side of the mountain.

It was thrown shaped even because Zeus is the king of the gods. Now below the altar came the middle city with its Agora, which is just means ancient marketplace and along with its enormous three tiered gymnasium and its sanctuary of Demeter, yeah, another idol.

Finally, furthest down in the city to the plains below sprawled the lower city and beyond it its famous healing sanctuary of Asclepius, which joined to the upper city by a long covered colonnade that the people called the sacred way or the sacred path or the sacred road.

Now, in other words, the city itself presented a kind of vertical architectural theology to live in Pergamum, especially in the lower city where most of the housing was, was to live every single day, literally under the shadow of the pagan Pantheon and all of the different altars that are there, Zeus and Athena, Demeter, Dionysus.

So that as you ascended the city, like you were walking up into the heavens, you would draw nearer and nearer to the gods. That was the kind of message that was being given. As you go up, you're going up into the gods.

This is also where the well-to-do and the most powerful people in the city lived. They lived up with the gods, which kind of a great statement, if you ask me. So to visit them, one would need to literally climb some of the highest points in the region in order to get up to them.

And the moment that you finally reach the top, looking back over all of the plain, you would have understood exactly why the kings wanted to live up there. It was imposing. It was unassailable. The view itself made it prime real estate.

Like, for instance, if you try to buy real estate in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Wyoming is one of the cheapest states to buy real estate, except for Jackson Hole, except for that area of the Grand Tetons, because it's high value commodity real estate.

Well, the same thing here in Pergamon. And it also gave you a strategic advantage living up on top of the mountain because you could see the enemy coming from a long way before he could ever see you. This fact alone made the city unreachable in the ancient world and unimpeachable, unassailable, unbreakable.

Now, I want you to picture just for a moment what it must have felt like to be a Christian in this particular city, to wake up every morning, your little house in the lower city and step outside and to see towering above you the entire architectural pantheon of paganism.

Athena's temple was gleaning at the summit. The altar of Zeus was glittering halfway down the mountain. The theater of Dionysus carved into the slope. The Asclepion below, full of literal serpents that pilgrims and priests would come regularly to seek healing from.

And on top of all of that was the ever present reminder that the very coins in your pocket would have been stamped with the most beloved God of them all in the city of Pergamon. And who is that most beloved God?

It was Caesar Augustus. So that every single guild meeting that you attended, every public festival that you attended, every civic moment, every time that you spent money in your life in that city, you would have been conducting your business under the all seeing eye of the gods with the Caesar being chief among them.

Now, in the middle of a culture that was so steeped in rampant paganism, you were trying to say the very controversial thing. Jesus is Lord. And the reason it was controversial is because that's the exact phrase that Caesar took for himself.

Caesar is Lord. Augustus Caesar said that his father, adopted father, Julius Caesar, was a god. So he said, I'm the son of God and I am Lord. And that's sort of the propaganda. Jesus comes into the world saying, no, I'm the true son of God.

I am the true Lord. So to say Jesus is Lord in that city would have been dangerous. It would have been like asking someone to point a gun at you. It would have outed you and made you detestable to the city and to its townsfolk.

That's the city of Pergamum. That is where this church was trying to plant a lampstand. And that is the city that Jesus is going to speak directly to with his third letter out of seven, which leads us to part two, a dead man's silver.

Now, before we walk into all of the temples and the religious substructure, we have to understand how this city actually got here. Who in the world would want to build a city on top of a mountain? What possessed a people to put a sprawling metropolis on top of this great hill in the middle of seemingly nowhere?

Because Pergamum did not become the religious capital of Asia Minor by sheer accident. The city actually had a story and the story shaped its identity and its pride and it's ultimately its obsession with idolatry.

And the more that you actually understand the story of how Pergamum came to be, the more you will understand why Jesus speaks the way that he did in this letter. In the late fourth century B .C., Alexander the Great conquered the known world and then he died at the age of 32.

And in his death, he left his massive empire, which was carved up almost overnight by his four most prominent generals. So you have this massive empire broken up immediately into four smaller empires and the four greatest generals were the ones who were in charge.

Now, one of those generals was a man named Lysimachus, who took control of large portions of Asia Minor, which is the land where Pergamum and the other six cities that Jesus addresses would be located.

And Lysimachus, looking for somewhere safe to deposit his enormous wartime treasure chest, he picked this mountain where Pergamum would one day sit. The location was defensible. It was elevated. It was secure.

So he stashed roughly 9 ,000 talents of silver inside the citadel and he left a Greek officer named Philotyrus in charge of it. Which, if you're keeping score, 9 ,000 talents of silver would be worth about $250 million today.

Now, that's no small piggy bank, of course. Then in 281 BC, Lysimachus was killed in battle. The general was killed and Philotyrus, who at this point was sitting on a mountain of silver inside of an impregnable fortress, did what any ambitious Greek officer in the fourth century would have done.

He kept it. He said, this is now my money. And he used the treasure as seed money to fund an entirely new dynasty with him as its king. Now, for historical accuracy, he never actually called himself a king, but his successors did.

And from that moment forward, for the next century and a half, the city of Pergamum would be ruled for what historians now call the Attalid dynasty. And it was bought and paid for by a dead man's money.

Now, as far as it goes, the Attalid kings were a strange and a remarkable family, including Philotyrus, Eumenenes I, Attalus I, Eumenenes II, Attalus II, Attalus III, and so forth. These men were ambitious.

They were brilliant. They were ultra wealthy, and they were absolutely committed to making Pergamum a second Athens in Asia Minor. They were kind of like a redneck winning the lottery. They very quickly had the nicest mansion in town with the golden toilet, and they're trying to make everything look super fancy and swanky because of this newfound wealth, they poured their silver into the construction of temples.

They poured their silver into the world-class library. They poured their silver into the most impressive statue and altar of Zeus in the entire world, and the temple of Athena that was meant to rival the city of Athens in all of its splendor.

They patronized sculptors and philosophers and grammarians. They imported Greek culture by the boatload. They positioned themselves as the defenders of Greek civilization against the invading barbarian tribes who were pressing in from the east, especially the Galatian Celts, who had been trying to raid Asia Minor for decades.

And then in 133 BC, the last Adalid king, Attalus III, did one of the strangest things that any monarch has ever done in the history of monarchies. Attalus III died without an heir, which isn't really all that remarkable.

It's happened in history before, but what is remarkable is that in his will, because he had no heir, he bequeathed his entire kingdom, this entire mountain citadel and all of his wealth to the Republic of Rome.

Every bit of his money, every temple, every home, the whole city, it was given over to the Republic of Rome, which would soon be replaced by the Empire of Rome. Led by emperors, he gave pergamum to Rome and he just handed it over, which is astounding, and that one decision shaped everything that happened next in this city, because when Rome took possession of pergamum, they didn't treat it as a conquered territory.

They treated it like it was their inheritance. In that way, pergamum was not a defeated city that was subject to Rome. Pergamum was bought and paid for, a benefactor, one of the sweetest gifts that the Italian Republic ever received.

And when Rome organized the new Roman province of Asia, they made pergamum the capital city, which makes sense because that's what $250 million donation will actually get you. In America, you can buy a Senate race in Kentucky for the same kind of money, not like anything has ever happened like that in the year of our Lord, 2026, but the royal city of the Adelids became the seat of Roman power, bought and paid for, the capital city, and the Romans loved it.

Now, I want you to think carefully about what this meant. The same hill that once worshiped Greek kings now had to figure out how to worship Roman emperors. That was the chief issue that they had to figure out.

The same priesthood that was offering offerings to the dead Adelid kings now had to figure out how to offer incense to the living Caesars. The same machinery was already there. The royal court had already been operating in pergamum for over a century, and it didn't have to be invented from scratch.

It simply had to be redirected from worshiping the Adelid kings to worshiping the Roman emperors. The hardware was already there. Rome just needed to install a new operating system, which is why pergamum, more than any city in the entire empire, actually was already staged and ready for what came next.

Because in 29 BC, just two years after Octavian, that's Augustus Caesar, crushed Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium and consolidated his power over the entire Mediterranean world, pergamum was granted the right to build the very first provincial temple in all of Asia that would be dedicated to the worship of a living Roman emperor.

Now, add on to this that Octavian, again, the adopted stepson of Julius Caesar, the deified dead founder of Roman imperialism, changed his name to Augustus Caesar and became the son of God in the popular mythos.

Well, you can imagine the kind of emperor worship that would have been established in this loyal city, this city that bought status, this city that was declared capital of Asia Minor. Well, they went all in on Caesar worship.

That's why the first temple to Caesar that was ever built in the province of Asia was built in the city of Pergamum. And from that moment forward, Pergamum became, in the most literal and official sense, not only the political capital of Asia Minor, but also the religious capital of Asia as well.

It was the mother city of emperor worship in the East. Now, this is the single most important historical fact that you need to understand in order to read Revelation 2 .13, because by the time that John wrote Revelation in the mid-sixties A .D., Pergamum had been the official Asian center of emperor worship for almost a hundred years.

The imperial cult had been operating there for generations. The temple of Augustus Caesar had been standing for nearly a century. The priesthood was already institutionalized, professionalized, prestigious and politically powerful.

The festivals were regular and calendared. The processions were rehearsed. The sacrifices were daily. And when a Roman emperor like Nero in the sixties A .D. looked at the imperial cult and decided that he liked the idea of being worshiped as a god in his own lifetime, we didn't have to manufacture the infrastructure.

It was already there. It was already humming. The smoke from the altars in Pergamum were already well rising into the sky. Now, every Caesar from Augustus onward had been honored as a god in the city, not in every city in the Roman Empire, but certainly in this one, which means that every guild and every magistrate and every festival and every shop and every coin all reinforced that meta-narrative that Caesar is God.

And by the time of Nero, the rest of the Roman Empire was beginning to catch up to this newfangled idea of worshiping the emperor. That is the city that we are walking into. That is the world that the church in Pergamum was trying to confess Christ is Lord in.

And now it's time for us to head back up the mountain for a moment and to look at part three, the rival servant crushers. Now, the first thing that you would have seen as you began the climb up the Acropolis of Pergamum was the great altar of Zeus, the king of the Greek pantheon of Olympic gods.

The Zeus altar of Pergamum was one of the most famous structures in the entire ancient world. It was built in the second century B .C. by Eumenides II, the great Adelaide builder king, to commensurate the dynasty's victory over the Galatian raiders, as we talked about before.

And it was a behemoth of an altar. The altar sat on a massive podium, roughly 35 meters by 33 meters across, rising about six meters above the surrounding terrace. And on top of the podium stood a colonnade altar court that enclosed the actual sacrificial altar at the center.

A broad Western staircase climbed up the platform and around the exterior of the podium, wrapped like a marble belt encircling the entire structure, ran one of the most breathtaking sculptural friezes ever produced in the ancient Mediterranean world.

Now, before I describe it, I need you to know what a frieze is. It's a strip of carved pictures that wrap around the top of a building like a long stone storybook running wall to wall as an elaborate topper on an already impressive structure.

This was one of gigantic proportions, and it was sort of the point. Standing at a hundred and thirteen meters long, which is longer than any football field and two and a half meters tall, taller than a grown man.

It was a very expensive, expansive, impressive stone carving carved right into the side of the mountain, kind of like Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. But unlike Mount Rushmore, which is just faces, I'm not trying to downplay how good it is, but this was an entire scene that was carved into the side of a mountain detailing an epic mythological battle.

The bodies were cut so deep out of the stone that they almost appeared like that they were stepping out of and off of the wall and coming at you. This would have been a towering architectural accomplishment in the time period or in any time period, much less the ancient world of Asia.

But perhaps you're wondering what the story that was depicted on the wall actually was. Well, it was the great battle of the Greek gods against the giants. The giants were the antiquity monsters. They were the children of the earth.

They were born of the great mother goddess Gaia, and they were the ancients to the ancients. They had risen up to try to throw the gods off of their thrones and to take over heaven. So this entire wall was a picture or a scene of the gods fighting back against the giants and winning.

It was the gods crushing everyone who dared to rise up against them. This was Zeus, the king of the gods, throwing lightning bolts. And there was Athena, the goddess of war, ripping the wings off of a giant that she had beaten.

There was Apollo with his bow pulled back. There was Dionysus throwing himself into the fight. And down under the feet of the gods, twisting and dying, were the giants. Their legs weren't even legs. They were giant serpent snakes, coiling and writhing, beaten and crushed.

Now, here's what I want you to see about that, because this wall was not just a very elaborate, very expensive piece of decor. It was a story that the whole ancient world had been telling over a thousand times in a thousand different ways.

Look at what was actually carved there. Giants, snake legged sons of the earth, rising up against the gods, trying to drag the gods down off of their thrones. Where have you heard that story before? Well, if you go back to the very beginning in the garden, there's a serpent there who's trying to usurp the power of God.

The Hebrew word in that passage is nakash, and it's bigger than just a tiny little green garden snake that we might picture. The word there is the same word that is a fiery one, one like a seraphim who flies around the throne of God and Isaiah.

The seraphim actually get their name from a word that means serpent or burning one or shining one. So when the Bible shows you the serpent in Eden, it's not showing you a little worm in the dirt. It's showing you a shining, burning serpent like creature, a fallen one, hissing the very first rebellion that was ever spoken, rising up, taking the throne, trying to be like God.

Now you keep reading in Genesis, go to chapter six and something monstrous actually does appear. The sons of God come down and they take human wives and their children are called the Nephilim, the giants.

These are the ancients to the ancients. And here's the part that you need to hear, because when the Jews translated their own Bible into Greek, they didn't go looking for a brand new word. They grabbed the same word that every Greek person already knew, gigantes, giants, the very same word that was stamped all over the wall in Pergamum, the very same word that pointed to the very same creatures that the gods were apparently destroying.

And when Israel sent spies into the promised land, they came back trembling, saying that the land was full of gigantes, sons of Anak, the Rephaim and the Anakim. Beside them, they felt like grasshoppers.

So follow the thread. You have a serpent who rebels, giants who rise up against heaven, and that story is not only in the Bible. The Greeks carved it into the altar of Zeus. The Babylonians sang about it.

The storm got splitting the great serpent of chaos in two. Egypt told the story about their son, God, knifing the monster serpent every single night. The people of Canaan, the Canaanites, told this story about the God fighting the twisting serpent in the sea.

Far to the north, the Norsemen told this story. The gods locked in war with the giants. Everywhere you go in the ancient world, you keep tripping over the same broken pieces of the same old story, a serpent with giants, a war between heaven and earth, a rebellion against the throne of God.

And you ask yourself the question, why does everybody have the same story or at least a version of it? Well, it's because it really happened. Every nation remembered the story. Every nation had twisted the story.

They took the true account of the fall and the flood and the rebellion of the dark powers against God, and they bent it into their various different versions of the story. At Pergamum, they had bent it in the worst way of all because they made the rebel gods the heroes.

They put the serpent monster under their feet, and they called the whole bloody thing holy. But it's the same story underneath it all, as all the other ancient cultures were saying. And the Bible actually alone gives us the true history of what happened there.

All these other cultures are just echoing the Bible's account, but yet twisting it into various forms of lies. That was the scene that this rock mural was depicting, which makes it a kind of pagan billboard, a sermon that was carved into the rock, a political propaganda piece that was etched into the cold marble stone.

The Adelaide kings had defeated the Galatians, and they wanted everyone who saw the altar to understand that their military victory was like the gods of Olympus triumphing over the chaos creatures of the earth.

Just as the Adelaide kings had triumphed over the barbarians who had threatened their civilization, so the gods had triumphed over their enemies as well. So the rock mural made the kings and the gods almost interchangeable, so that if you offered incense to the gods for their great victory, then you had to also offer incense to the Adelaide kings.

They were almost kind of one in the same. That's why this piece was made. Now, I want you to pause for a moment to feel the weight of that, because in just a moment we're going to read Jesus say, I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is.

One of the very real candidates for what Jesus is referring to for the throne of Satan is this massive altar of Zeus, a massive throne-shaped mountainside monument with serpent-legged enemies of the gods carved into its base.

A monument that looked like, to anyone else approaching the city from the valley below, a serpentine throne carved into the side of the mountain that was both a picture of the glory of the ancient gods and also a picture of the glory of the Adelaide kings.