185. Deny Christ Or Die?? (Smyrna Part 3)

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 185,

The Letter to Smyrna, part three. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast.

My name is Kendall, and I'm so glad that you are here because this is episode three of our series on the church in Smyrna.

And before we begin with that, I just want to say thank you so much for your grace and for your patience. Again, it's been a very busy season here at the

Shepherd's Church. I've got some exciting things planned for the future as far as this show is concerned.

So we've been laying the groundwork for that. More is going to be coming soon on that, but I'm glad right now to be back in the episode of Revelation.

I'm glad to be back in the city of Smyrna with you here for part three. Now this is the one, this is the episode that I've been building towards, not because the first two were a kind of warmup or anything like that, but they weren't, but every single thing that we did in those three episodes was load bearing for what we're going to talk about today.

We were laying the foundation brick by brick so that what Jesus says in the back half of this letter to the city of Smyrna doesn't just sound good, but it actually hits like it's supposed to hit.

Now, if you've not seen those first two episodes, I would say go do that first because today's content isn't really going to make sense without them, but you know, even though you could watch it, it's just not going to land in the same way.

So you're going to be hearing the punchline without hearing the setup. So like I said, go back and watch those episodes and catch up.

If you're ready with me, if you've already seen those, here is where we're at. Jesus has told the church who he is, the first and the last.

He's the one who was dead and the one who's come back to life. He has looked at their poverty and he's called them rich.

He's looked at their accusers and he's named them for exactly who they are and what they are.

The foundation for Jesus's message to the city of Smyrna has been built.

Now he tells them what is coming and he doesn't soften it either.

He doesn't promise them any kind of way around it. He looks them dead in the eye and he says it straight to them.

He says that imprisonment is coming. Suffering is coming. The real possibility of death is coming for these faithful saints in Smyrna.

And remember, these are saints who didn't even have a letter written to them that corrected them for anything.

This is probably the most faithful of the seven churches and Jesus is preparing them for some of you are going to die.

And then after laying out that diagnosis, he issues the shortest and the most demanding command in any of the seven letters.

And then what we're going to see after that is we're going to meet a man named Polycarp.

Maybe you've heard of him before. He was the bishop of the church of Smyrna. He was a man who, according to the early church tradition, may have been in the room when this letter was first read aloud.

He's the one who decades later was going to show the watching world what it actually looks like to believe what

Jesus says in this letter. His story is the reason that I've been looking forward to this episode since we started this series.

And by the time we're finished today, I think you'll understand why. So with that, let us dive in and we're going to begin with the book of Revelation, chapter 2, verses 8 through 11.

We're going to read those verses once again so that we're reminded of the context and then we're going to dive in. This is what the word says.

And so the angel of the church in Smyrna write, the first and the last who was dead and has come to life says this,

I know your tribulation and your poverty, but you are rich and the blasphemy by those who say that they are

Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. Do not fear what you're about to suffer.

Behold, the devil is about to cast some of you into prison so that you will be tested and you will have tribulation for 10 days.

Be faithful until death and I will give you the crown of life. He who has an ear to hear, let him hear what the spirit says to the churches and he who overcomes will not be hurt by the second death.

And with that, now we're going to turn to part one. Do not fear tribulation in Smyrna.

Now here's what I want you to understand about the Christians in Smyrna before Jesus says another word to them.

They knew something was coming. They didn't know exactly what it was and they didn't really know exactly when and they did not know how bad it was actually going to get or which of them specifically it was going to fall on.

What they knew was that the pressure had been building for a long time and it was organized and it was sustained and it was coming at them from multiple directions all at once in the trajectory wasn't bending towards relief.

The trade guilds were not softening their stance on it. The imperial cult wasn't packing up and going home.

The accusers weren't backing down and Rome when she finally decided to move against the community, she didn't move politely and this is all on top of the fact that Jewish persecution was already going on at unprecedented level and that kind of certainty is its own form of suffering and I want to name this directly because we have a tendency to treat fear as a kind of weakness, as something that a spiritually mature person should never wrestle with but fear in the face of threat is not wickedness.

It's what you do with that fear that can be either good, righteous or bad and evil. The Christians in Smyrna were not afraid because their faith was small.

They were afraid because they were paying attention to what was happening. They were being murdered and killed and into that real fear

Jesus speaks. He says, do not fear what you're about to suffer. Now before we go any further,

I need you to notice something about this because it's easy to read that sentence and it sounds sort of like a platitude. The kind of thing that people say when they have nothing else to say, the kind of thing when people say, don't worry, it's all going to be fine, just have faith, statements like that offered without any real substance behind them that aren't comforting, that are just a kind of verbal noise, the equivalent of saying thoughts and prayers.

And Jesus isn't doing that. He isn't just adding noise. The reason we can know that he's not just making a gong here, a noisy platitude is because of the order of what he said these things in the letter.

He told the church who he was before he told them anything else. He established that he's the first and the last and he established that time itself belongs to him.

He established that history answers to him. He established that Rome does not own the ending of the story, no matter what the streets of Smyrna look like on any given

Tuesday. He established that he was dead and that he has come to life, that death is territory that he has personally entered into and personally exit out of and defeated and put at his feet.

He has rendered his own verdict on their poverty before he ever issued a single command.

He has built the foundation up underneath the church of Smyrna to tell them that he is

Lord over all. And all of that context came before this sentence, every word of it was placed there on purpose by a

Lord, by a savior, by a king, by a high priest who loves his people.

So when he says, do not fear, he isn't speaking into the vacuum, he isn't issuing a command that has no affection behind it or some kind of like platitude that you would read on a

Hallmark card. He's not saying that. When he says, do not fear, he's saying, do not fear because I am the first and the last and the empire threatening you doesn't control time and space and doesn't determine beginnings and endings.

I do. He's saying, do not fear because I was dead and I now live and death is not the final word on over anything.

He's saying, do not fear because I've already told you what your situation actually is. And it's not what it looks like to you from the street.

This command is only as strong as the foundation that it rests upon and the foundation that it's resting upon is

Christ. That's why Jesus spent the entire first half of this letter building that foundation before he said this.

And that's not an accident. That's pastoral. Jesus is being like a shepherd here for the sheep that he loves and he's doing exactly what he knows that they need.

But here's what makes this particular command unlike any other. Do not fear that has ever been uttered in human history.

And I want you to sit with it because this is one of the most important things in this entire series on the book of Smyrna.

Every human being who has ever said, do not fear to someone walking into suffering has said it from a safe distance.

They've not been through what they're, what the person that they're talking to is going through.

They can't guarantee the outcome because they don't know the future. They're offering comfort from a position of not actually knowing what is on the other side.

So when parents say to children, fear not, they're not really able to guarantee that that fear isn't rational.

When commanders say to soldiers, fear not, they can't actually guarantee that they're going to have the victory.

They can have hopes, they can have dreams, they can even have calculated understandings that we're likely to win.

Coaches in the middle of a halftime speech can have confidence that we're probably going to win based off the score and based off how we're playing, but they don't know for sure.

Friends can say it to friends and sometimes that helps. But there's always a gap that exists when humans say, do not fear to other humans.

The gap between the one offering the comfort and the one who actually has to walk through the fire, the comforter stays, the sufferer goes.

And nobody on the safe side of that gap can actually speak with full authority about what the hard situation their friend or their loved one or their teammate or whatever else is getting ready to go through is actually going to end up like.

But Jesus doesn't have that gap, does he? He's not speaking from a safe distance.

He's not offering comfort from a position of not understanding the depth of the suffering that they're about to face.

Because the one who is telling the church in Smyrna not to fear suffering and death is the one who has personally endured the greatest suffering and death, and he walked out of it victorious on the other side, still holding the keys to life.

He's not asking them to go somewhere he's never been. He's been there.

He's speaking from the other side of the very thing that he is calling them to walk through. He's been where he's calling them to go.

He's calling them to walk through it like he did. And that changes the entire weight of what

Jesus is saying when he says, do not fear what you are about to suffer, because that is said by a crucified and a risen

Christ. And it is categorically different from every other do not fear that has ever been spoken before.

It is not encouragement from a distant Savior. It is a testimony from a Savior who has personal experience with the greatest suffering and death.

It is the one person in the history of the universe who's earned the right and the authority to actually say, do not fear what you're about to suffer.

Notice that he doesn't say, do not fear what you are suffering. He says, do not fear what you are about to suffer, which means that what is coming is even worse than what they were already enduring.

And Jesus isn't pretending otherwise. He's acknowledging the escalation directly, and then he's issuing the command to fear not anyway, which means that the foundation that he's been building must be strong enough to hold not only under their present hardships that they're going through, but it also has to be strong enough that it can deal with the fact that their circumstances are not going to improve.

They are going to get worse. And that foundation is strong enough because that foundation is

Christ. Jesus can say to them, do not fear right now. And even what you're about to suffer, even though it's worse, even though it's harder, even though it's bigger, even though it's greater, even though it's more painful, even though some of you may die.

He can say that because the foundation of that statement is built on him. He has been there, he was raised, he has conquered death, and he's asking them to walk through that same pattern with him.

And that leads us to part two, 10 days with the devil in prison.

Now Jesus tells them what is coming, and before he says anything else, he does something that would have stopped the original audience cold if they were paying attention at all.

They had a pulse. He names the real agent behind the persecution. He says, behold, the devil is about to cast some of you into prison.

He's saying it's not Rome, actually it's probably going to be Roman hands and Roman handcuffs and Roman prison cells.

He's saying that it's not their accusers in the city, it's not the city of Smyrna with all of its guilds and its temples and its priests and its shrines and its imperial fanfare.

He's saying that it's not even the Jews. Up underneath all of that, it's the devil.

And understand why that sentence lands the way that it does and why it is not terrifying, but it is actually one of the most clarifying and ultimately stabilizing things that Jesus could have possibly said to them.

You need to understand something about when this letter was written and what was actually happening in the spiritual world surrounding the upcoming fall of Jerusalem.

You need to go back, actually for us, you need to go forward to Revelation chapter 12 to get some clarity here.

Because in that chapter, John sees a vision of Satan being cast out of heaven. Now this vision in Revelation 12 is not chronologically after Revelation 2.

Actually it goes all the way back to the birth of Christ. So it's looking backward in time, then it goes to the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, and it goes to the ascension of Christ, and then it goes to a war in heaven where Satan is being cast out of heaven for the final time.

Remember, he was cast out of heaven in the beginning, spiritually speaking, because of his rebellion against God, but he still had access to heaven.

He still was able to go up and accuse the saints. We read that in the book of Job. But now

Satan is being cast out forever, not just spiritually, but physically as well. He's being thrown down to the earth at the moment of Christ's ascension.

Jesus goes up, and Satan comes down, and the voice from heaven announces with sobering clarity, woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you, and he's filled with fury because he knows that his time is short.

That event, Satan's expulsion from heaven, his total and full expulsion from heaven where he can no longer stand before God, no longer accuse the saints, he's no longer welcome in Jesus's heavenly temple because Jesus cleansed it with his own blood.

He purified heaven. We have a new heaven now from Revelation onward, and that event happened approximately in A .D.

30 when Jesus rose from the grave, went to heaven, and cast Satan out of heaven once and for all, and then

Jesus sits down on his throne to rule. So now, this letter to Smyrna was written approximately

A .D. 65, so do the math. By the time Jesus is dictating these words to John, Satan has been on earth in his last stand, his final act of fury for roughly 35 years, which means that the clock is running out, the rabid dog is becoming more violent as he nears his end.

Because of what Revelation reveals and what the first century church understood with a sobering clarity that modern readers can't even imagine,

Satan's time on earth was not indefinite. It was not open -ended.

It had a terminal point. It had a final judgment that was coming, and Satan knew it, and the fury driving the persecution of the church in this season was not the fury of a conqueror who was pressing his advantage, it was the fury of a condemned prisoner who was about to see his prison cell door swinging closed for the final time.

This is the context where Jesus says the devil is about to cast some of you into prison. About to.

That little phrase is doing more work than it actually appears to do, because the same urgency, the same compressed, imminent, about -to -happen energy applies to both directions of this sentence.

Simultaneously, Satan is about to cast some of you into prison, and also Satan himself is about to be cast into prison, from which he will never emerge again to persecute the saints.

So I want you to let that land for a moment, because the irony is not very subtle and is not accidental.

The one doing the imprisoning is the one who is about to be put in prison.

The one throwing the church into Roman cells is the one walking towards the lake of fire.

The accuser who has spent 35 years on earth in furious, concentrated, escalating assault against the people of God, orchestrating their suffering, leveraging their accusers, working through the machinery of the

Roman engine and the synagogue and the guild systems and the temple, is in his final sprint.

Not because he's winning, because he can see the end coming and he knows he cannot stop it, and he is in his frantic final death rattle before he's put away.

What looks from the street like Satan at the height of his power is

Satan at the end of his rope, in the same way that when you catch a fish and it writhes and it jumps and it bounces all over the boat in intense movements, unlike it was in the water.

It's not because that it's winning, it's because that it's suffocating and it's about to give up and die.

This is what was happening to Satan. The persecution that he was bringing was intensifying, not because he was being triumphant.

It was intensifying because he's desperate. A cornered animal is always more dangerous than one who is free.

Not more powerful, but more dangerous. And the difference between those two matter, because dangerous means that it can hurt you.

Powerful means it can determine the outcome. Satan in these final years before the fall of Jerusalem is maximally dangerous and yet utterly powerless to change the verdict that is bearing down on him.

He can throw the church into prison, but he cannot stop the resurrection. He can orchestrate their suffering, but he cannot rewrite the end of the story.

He is swinging as hard as he can with as many haymakers as he can, more than he's ever swung in human history and ever will swing again.

And that is bringing him closer to the moment, to the final moment where the first and the last closes the door on him forever.

So why does Jesus name Satan? Why pull back the curtain on the spiritual machinery behind all of this, the persecution?

Because naming Satan does something very specific in this passage and very important to the fear that Jesus has just commanded his church not to have.

It exposes its limits. Here's what Scripture actually teaches about Satan that popular culture almost never gets right.

Satan is not an independent force in competition with God. He's not the yin to God's yang.

He's not the equal and opposite force on the evil side. It's not that he's in competition with God as some dark counterpart who might win, might lose, and nobody really knows which way the fight is going to go.

That's a kind of dualistic picture of reality, and it's not what the Bible teaches anywhere, not in a single passage.

Satan is a created being. He's a powerful being, and he's a malevolent being.

He's one that should not be underestimated, but he is a created being nonetheless who operates within strict limits that are set by the

Creator and cannot exceed them without divine permission in the same way that the ocean cannot exceed its limits unless God himself allows it.

So the clearest picture of all of this in Scripture is the book of Job. As I said earlier, Satan cannot touch

Job without God's permission. He cannot go one inch beyond what God allows. He is not God's rival.

He is, and this is a hard thing to say, but it's super important for what you need to understand is what the text actually teaches.

He is an instrument. He is a hostile, malevolent instrument whose every move is bounded by a sovereign

God that he cannot escape and he cannot override and he cannot overpower. So when Jesus says that the devil is about to cast some of you into prison, he is not saying, and there's nothing that I can do about it.

He's saying, I know exactly who is behind this, and I'm telling you so that you understand your situation correctly because there is an enormous difference between those two pictures.

He's saying, if you think your imprisonment is from Rome, acting randomly and autonomously with unlimited power and there's no end in sight, well, that would be terrifying.

But if you understand that it's coming actually from a cornered and a condemned adversary operating under divine permission with very clear divine limits in the final desperate phase of a war that he's already lost, well, then that's something that you could face with courage because you know your savior wins.

It's not because the prison cell is going to somehow become comfortable, but it is because the one who is orchestrating your suffering, the devil, is not the one who's running the universe and those are not the same office, not even close.

Satan's leash has always been short and in these final years before his judgment, it is shorter than it has ever been.

He may strike, but he may not devour. He may accuse, but he may not condemn. He may imprison, but he may not define.

He is doing everything that he can with what he has left, which is less than the church in Smyrna realizes and far less than it appears to be from where they are standing on the ground.

Yeah, he's about to throw some of them into prison and he's about to be thrown into his own eternal grave forever.

The symmetry of that is not accidental. If you study Revelation 12 and you see that Satan has just a little time left on the earth and that was in AD 30, then you study

Revelation 20 where it says that Satan gathered the armies of the nations around the beautiful city,

Jerusalem, fire fell from heaven and destroyed the beautiful city, Jerusalem. We know that happened in AD 70.

Then what you have is Satan in a final 40 year standoff with God in a war he cannot win in his final acts of rebellion before he is cast into the lake of fire.

Again that symmetry with Revelation 2, 12 and 20 is not accidental.

It is the judgment of the first and the last upon God's enemy,

Satan, and it's written into the very history and the structure of history itself. The persecutor becoming the prisoner, the accuser receiving the sentence, the one who has spent 35 years unleashing woe upon the earth is about to receive the woe that was waiting for him since the very beginning.

Now this is why Jesus tells them to fear not. Some of you are going to be thrown in prison.

The devil is going to be behind it. Fear not. And this is why he says, so that you will be tested.

He doesn't say that you're going to be punished meaninglessly, that you're going to be punished with no meaning, no purpose, no value.

He says you're going to be put in prison. You're going to suffer. Your suffering is going to have meaning and that meaning is going to be because you're going to be tested, not punished, tested.

And those two words mean different things. They point in very opposite directions. Punishment looks backward at the crime that you've committed.

Jesus already said that this church has no fault, that he's correcting. Punishment then is a response to something wrong that has already been done.

That's not this church. Testing looks forward. It's designed to reveal and to demonstrate something that's already there.

And this is one of the most important distinctions in the entire letter because there is a reflex that many

Christians carry that's usually absorbed without even realizing what they're absorbing that goes like this.

If I'm suffering, then I must have done something wrong. This is why the people looked at the blind man and they said, how did he sin?

And Jesus said, neither he nor his parents sin. Jesus is creating a category there and here that not all suffering is because you've sinned.

Yet we've all sinned. We've all fallen short of a holy God and the glory of God. We've all sinned.

The penalty of sin is death, but Christ paid that penalty for his believers. So in that way, suffering therefore is not always punishment for sin for the believer.

Yet your circumstances can be painful and there can be a category where failure and sin has caused it.

And sometimes that reflex is right to think that way. But sometimes hardship is not the consequence of bad decisions.

Sometimes like Smyrna, it's actually because they're righteous and they're being purified by a fire that is not destroying them, but making them more pure and more beautiful.

See, Smyrna proves that suffering isn't always because you've sinned. Jesus doesn't rebuke the church.

Not once, not at all. Not a single syllable of correction is uttered in this letter of the seven churches that receive letters in Revelation.

Only two of them receive zero criticism, Smyrna and Philadelphia. So what we're talking about here is not a wandering church that is being disciplined back onto the straight and narrow path.

This is a church who's walking exactly where Jesus called them to walk. And the furnace that is bearing down on them is not punishment for their failure.

It is the furnace that is actually going to produce in them genuine gold. The furnace doesn't create the gold, but it does reveal the gold.

It takes all of the dross and all of the metals and things that aren't beautiful and aren't precious and aren't sacred, and it burns away everything that is not real gold so that what remains can be seen for what it actually is.

It actually makes the gold nugget more golden than it actually was before because it was mixed with dirt and impurities and everything else.

The furnace reveals what is there, purifies what is there, and makes what is there even more beautiful.

So what is this furnace? It's the church standing alone, being persecuted by the watching world, by the principalities and the powers who were convinced that this church's loyalty to Christ would dissolve at the pointing of a gun.

And Smyrna is being put in the furnace of these afflictions, not because Jesus doubts them or is angry with them, but because he loves them and he wants them purified.

And then he sets the boundary that Satan cannot cross. He says, you will have tribulation for 10 days.

The phrase has generated a lot of discussion over the years. Some scholars try to map 10 days onto specific historical periods, 10 days equals 10 years of persecution under Diocletian.

Some people try to say that it means that. Some people say that 10 actually refers to 10 specific emperors who were going to persecute the church.

And all of these attempts are creative, but they don't really hold up well under scrutiny.

The numbers don't work cleanly when you try to map something onto this 10. Now there could be a good explanation for it, but I think actually the better explanation for all of this is that 10 days is a finite number for a faithful community who is refusing to compromise with an imperial culture.

In the same way that Daniel and his friends asked for 10 days to be tested to see if the bread and water would make them more healthy than the king's portion that was given to the rest of the servants.

Ten days of testing for Daniel and his friends in a similar way that the church of Smyrna is going to go through 10 days of historical punishment and pain and suffering.

But what Jesus is telling them is that this period is finite.

It is bounded. It has an end, and they will be shown to be purified through it, set apart like Daniel and his friends by it, and set into positions of authority to rule over a world now where Satan has been thrown in prison.

So it has an end. In the symbolic vocabulary of Scripture and revelation in a book that operates under very symbolic numbers, 10 carries the sense of completion, a completed unit, a full measure, not an expanding measure that might grow indefinitely, but a complete and already determined amount of time with a beginning and an end that are both already known to God and set before His people before the first blow ever falls.

I want you to think about what that means. For a church sitting in the shadow of Roman courts, Romans prisons,

Jewish persecution, the most devastating dimension of sustained suffering is often not the intensity of it, but it's the potential infinity of it.

If you knew that your suffering was going to go on lasting forever, then it would be infinitely more painful for you.

If you had no idea when your suffering was going to end, it would be more painful for you. But if you knew that your suffering was going to be finished in a definite period of time, then you could go on suffering with hope because you know that the suffering is going to stop.

The uncertainty about the duration is its own form of torment. It's one of the primary mechanisms that makes sustained persecution so crushing because you don't know when it's going to be over.

The not knowing whether this is the beginning of the end or just the beginning of a very long middle is agonizing.

So Jesus removes the uncertainty, not by giving them a specific calendar date, but by giving them something more durable than a calendar date, by giving them a theological certainty that their suffering has a time horizon, that it's been counted by God, that it's been measured, and that it will end.

The God who said it's beginning has already determined it's ending, and that ending is as certain as everything else that the first and the last has ever determined.

The one who spoke the cosmos into existence, the one who by the word of his power holds all things in being, has determined that their suffering will have an expiration sticker.

He has named the coming suffering directly, honestly, without minimizing it or softening it, but he's also identified the real agent behind it, not

Rome, not the Jews, but Satan, and he has shown them that their suffering and their punishment or their testing is not condemnation, but it's genuine purifying of their genuine faith, and he set a boundary around it that's complete and cannot be crossed.

Every element of what would otherwise be a purely terrifying situation now has to be reinterpreted under the lens of what

Jesus is saying. We don't deny that the suffering that they went through is real or that it wasn't costly, but by showing that it is actually beneath the feet of Jesus, what we're showing is we're showing the one who governs it, the one who's giving it, the one who determined its beginning and its end is working out the good and all things for those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

That's what Jesus is doing to Smyrna. Jesus floods every corner of their darkness within this message with light.

The suffering has a cause. It's purifying them. That's why James can say, count it all joy when you experience trials of various kinds knowing that it purifies you.

That's why Paul could say, I consider these present sufferings not even worthy of being compared to the glory that's going to be revealed to us on the day of Christ.

Your suffering, Smyrna, is doing something and accomplishing something for you because Jesus is the one who's actually governing over it, the one who set limits on it.

There's not one square inch in all of the experience of the human dimension or in any sphere of reality that Christ does not, as Abraham Kuyper once said, say mine.

He has all authority in heaven and on earth. He is the governor of all things. That is why when he says, do not fear, it's not a platitude.

It's the most reasonable, grounded, coherent response available to a situation that must bow the knee to him.

The one who is about to throw them into prison is about to be thrown in his own prison and the one who holds the keys to both life, death,

Hades, and every prison that's ever existed is the one who just told them to not be afraid and because he said it, they need to believe it and they did.

And that, my friends, leads us to part three, faithful until death.

Now we've arrived at the command. Everything Jesus has said in this letter, every title, every verdict, every reinterpretation of every pressure bearing down on this church has been load bearing.

It was all foundation. This is what the foundation was holding up. This is what it was leading to.

Jesus says, be faithful until death. Four words, the shortest command in any of the seven letters and possibly the most demanding thing that anyone has ever asked anyone in human history to ever do.

Be faithful until death, even though you're going to go through massive pains and trials and persecutions.

Now, before we go any further, we have to be precise about what Jesus is saying when he's not saying, when he's saying, be faithful until death, because the exact wording actually matters enormously.

He does not say, be faithful so that you can avoid death.

He doesn't say, be faithful so that you can avoid suffering and pain.

He doesn't say, be faithful and I'm going to protect you from dying. He doesn't say, be faithful until things get better or be faithful until the persecution eases up or be faithful until Rome has a sudden change of heart.

He says, be faithful until death. The word until is doing a tremendous amount of work in this sentence.

It is setting a terminal point of faithfulness and the terminal point is not rescue.

The terminal point is not relief. It is not the end of the persecution. The terminal point is death itself.

Jesus is telling this church that faithfulness may cost them everything, not their comfort. They've already lost that.

Not their economic stability, already gone. Not their social standing in the city, already been stripped away.

Their lives, Jesus is looking at and he's saying that with full honesty to some people who may be called upon to give their very lives for him and his command is to them to be faithful all the way to the point of death.

Don't stop short of that. Don't run the race all the way into the last 10 yards and then give up.

Don't negotiate a compromise at the last minute to save your skin. Do not renounce

Jesus when the sword is to your throat or when the fire is getting ready to be lit and you're the candle.

Be faithful until death. Now that's an extraordinary thing to ask of human beings and the only reason that it's not monstrous, the only reason that it's coherent and it's even right and even beautiful rather than cruel is because of everything that precedes in this letter, which is exactly why

Jesus built the foundation that he did before he issued the command because faithfulness unto death only makes sense if death is not the end of the story.

And Jesus already told this church that he is the one who was dead and he's the one who's came back to life.

He's the one who's already established that he's the one who is issuing the command and he's the one who's personally been through the throes of death and personally emerged victorious on the other side.

He's not asking them to walk into darkness alone. He's asking them to follow him down a path that he's already walked through death, past death, into victory, onto the other side of death and into indestructible life.

This is not a demand from a comfortable distance away from a deity who doesn't care.

This is an invitation from the incarnated Lord who was scarred and risen, who can say with full authority,

I know where this road goes, trust me, follow me. Now we're sitting in the 21st century.

We're listening to all of this through headphones and it's easy to get the wrong idea.

I think we owe it to the church in Smyrna to actually reckon with what this command would have meant in their world and in their time because Roman execution was public and it was designed to shame you across multiple different mediums and platforms.

It was always in front of a crowd because the point was never just to end your life, but to end it in the most humiliating way possible.

The point was to send a message to every person watching, burning, wild animals, crucifixion.

The method varied. They could kill you through setting you on fire, feeding you to lions or nailing you to a

Roman cross. But the message was always the same. This is what defiance will cost you.

This is what going against the will and the power of Rome means to you. Now go home and decide whether or not your convictions are going to be worth that.

And for most people, the calculation was simple. They said the little words.

They made the little gesture. They offered their pinch of incense to Caesar's image. It cost you very little.

It gains you a whole lot, except your integrity and you'd get to live.

That was the offer that was on the table for every Christian in Smyrna who was hauled in front of the

Roman authorities and they were asked to renounce Christ and affirm Caesar.

And they weren't even asked to renounce Christ entirely. They were just told to renounce him as the explicit

Lord over all. See in Roman eyes, you can believe in whatever local deity you wanted to so long as you believed in their pantheon as well, especially with Caesar at the top of the hierarchy.

So the compromise was for you to deny that Jesus was the way, the truth, and the life and that there was no way to God except through him.

And that compromise was always available to you if you would just do what

Rome said. But Jesus is telling his church, do not go down that road.

Be faithful until death. Be faithful even if they put the gun to your head.

Be faithful even if they say you just have to do this one little thing to check this one little box and then it'll all be over.

Be faithful even there. Now here's where we have to make a move that is absolutely central to the theology of Revelation because on the surface, by every visible and common sense standard, a

Christian being executed by Rome looked like a defeat. The empire won, the church lost, the body is dead, the voice is silenced.

Rome had demonstrated her power again and again and again and again and resistance was actually futility.

And now everyone watching is going to think twice before they step out on line again. That was the point. That was the propaganda. That was the message.

That was the billboard. Don't mess with us or this is what happens. That's how

Rome understood martyrdom. That it is a message that Rome intended to send with every public execution.

And that understanding is completely and fundamentally and permanently wrong.

Rome's power was coercive. It did work by threat, by the credible promise that disobedience was going to be punished with suffering and death.

Coercive power depends upon two things, however. It depends upon the ability to deliver the threatened consequence that you're promising and the capacity to make that consequence frightening enough that people would actually choose compliance over resistance.

Now you take away either of those and the whole system collapses. Rome could deliver on her threats.

The executions were real. The deaths were real. Nobody was questioning that. But here is what the resurrection of Jesus does to the entire

Roman system. It destroys the power of the threat by destroying the power of the death that they are offering because now that death is no longer the final word.

If death were the end, if the executed Christian simply ceases to exist at the moment of execution, then

Rome's threat is credible and it's absolutely effective and compliance would be the only rationale.

But if Jesus is genuinely who he says he is, if he genuinely died and genuinely rose and genuinely lives, if the resurrection is real and the crown of life is real and the second death really has no power over those who are faithful, then death is not the end.

It's the threshold of eternity. It's the final breath that leads you into everlasting life.

And a threat that can only take you to the threshold and it crosses you over into indestructible life is not in the final analysis a very effective threat.

That's why Paul could say, to live as Christ and at his gain. You can kill me. You can shoot me. You can cut my throat.

You can let my blood bleed out everywhere. You can set me on fire. You can throw me in a lions. All you're doing is taking me back home.

That's why the Christians didn't fear. That's why they could be faithful until death because martyrdom brings them into a better and deeper and fuller and more perfect life.

And death is not the final answer. Martyrdom in the logic of revelation is not the church's defeat.

It is her weapon. It's her superpower. Let me say it again because it's one of the most counterintuitive but most important ideas in the entire

New Testament. Martyrdom is what happens when the church is faithful.

It's not what happens when the church loses. Martyrdom is how the church wins.

Because the martyr's death exposes the fundamental lie at the heart of every empire's claim.

Every empire, Rome and every empire before her and every empire after her, justifies its power by claiming to be the source of life, of prosperity, of security, of flourishing.

And then compliance is framed as a kind of pathway to life. Resistance is framed as a kind of pathway to death.

The whole system runs upon that logic. But the Christian martyr short circuits that logic entirely.

Because by choosing death over compliance, by demonstrating that there's something worth more than the life that the empire is threatening to take, the martyr publicly declares that the empire's offer is actually the one that's fraudulent.

You, Rome, are not the source of life. You, Washington, D .C., are not the source of life.

You don't control what matters most. Your greatest threat is not great enough to purchase my allegiance.

And the reason that it's not great enough is that I and you, if you're in Christ, you belong to the one who has already defeated death and the one who has the power over death and the one who, when he has you in his hand, no one else can take you out.

Every faithful martyr is a public theological statement of that very fact.

Every execution that produces faithfulness rather than renunciation is an advertisement for the kingdom of God.

Every person who watches a Christian die rather than deny their Lord and Savior and walks away asking himself, what does this person know that I don't know?

That person has been evangelized in the most visceral and the most powerful way than even the likes of Charles Spurgeon could not preach.

Rome executes to silence its victims, but God uses the execution to speak, to preach.

Rome kills in order to demonstrate her power, but yet God uses the death of the martyrs to demonstrate how powerless

Rome really is over the things that really matter. The sword can take a life, but it cannot take a verdict, and the verdict is issued by the one who is the first and is the last, the one who is the alpha and the omega, the one who is the creator of all.

He's the one who's spoken this thing over these believers in Smyrna, and because of that, they will be preserved no matter who stands against them.

Jesus' verdict is the only verdict that will still be standing when every earthly courtroom has closed its doors and the sands of every empire have ran out.

And we know this is true because roughly 80 years after this letter was written, a man in the city of Smyrna proved it.

His name was Polycarp. He was the bishop there, the lead pastor and the elder of the church of Smyrna.

And according to early church tradition, Polycarp had personally known the apostle

John, the author of Revelation. And if that is true and the evidence for it is reasonably strong, then

Polycarp may have been in the room when the letter was first read aloud to the church in Smyrna.

He may have heard these words with his own ears the very first time they were uttered. He had spent decades living under the weight of them, being formed by them, allowing them to slowly and to deeply shape his understanding of who he was and what faithfulness was going to demand of him in around 155

AD. Roughly 85 years after Revelation was written, the situation in Smyrna escalated.

Polycarp by that point was an old man. Probably in his mid 80s, the Roman authorities were arresting

Christians again. And the crowd in the city was calling for Polycarp specifically.

The pro council, the Roman official with the power of the execution, had Polycarp, the old man, the bishop, the lead pastor of Smyrna, had him brought in.

And what happened next was recorded by eyewitnesses and it's preserved in a document called The Martyrdom of Polycarp, which

I would recommend that you read. It's one of the earliest accounts of a Christian martyrdom outside of the New Testament itself.

And it's worth knowing in some detail because it is in this letter that the pro council urged

Polycarp to save himself. The path that he was offering him was simple, swear by the genius of Caesar, say the words, make the gesture, renounce the

Christians, or at least publicly distance yourself enough to satisfy the crowd and the authorities.

And you get to Polycarp, go home, you get to live. He was 86 years old.

He'd served faithfully for decades. Nobody on earth would have blamed an old man for making a pragmatic decision in the final chapter of his life.

But Polycarp refused. And his response, as recorded by the witnesses, is astounding.

He says, 86 years, I have served Christ and he has done me no wrong.

How can I blaspheme my king who saved me? The pro council threatened him with fire.

Polycarp told him that his fire actually couldn't burn the thing that Polycarp had.

His fire would burn for an hour, but then it would go out. But that there was another fire, the eternal fire of judgment that the pro council should be more worried about than the fire that he could burn the old man with.

Yeah, they burned him. And the account records that the Jewish community in Smyrna, exactly as described in Revelation 2, the synagogue of Satan was present and they actively pressed for his execution until it happens.

They even gathered wood for the fire on the Sabbath, breaking their own law in an urgency to see this man murdered, synagogue of Satan.

The conflict Jesus had named and interpreted in verse 9 had not resolved in the 85 years leading up to Polycarp's death, but it hadn't really softened either.

It hadn't moved on. It had played out with the same characters and the same dynamic that Jesus identified, the accusers present, organized, and active, exactly as he said they would be 80 years earlier.

But Polycarp did exactly what Jesus said. He died faithfully. He did not take the door.

He didn't take the escape hatch. He didn't say the words. He didn't make the gesture. He was faithful until death.

And here's the thing I want you to see about Polycarp's death that is so easy to miss if you're looking at it through the wrong lens.

By Rome's accounting, Polycarp lost. Rome executed him.

The crowd cheered. The pro -council demonstrated imperial authority. Another troublesome old

Christian had been silenced. The case was closed. But if you look at what actually happened,

Polycarp's death was witnessed by a community that immediately began preserving the account of it so that the message and the martyrdom of Polycarp was written, copied, and distributed across the churches of the entire

Roman world. People who had never been to Smyrna, who had never met Polycarp, read his story and they were formed by it.

They saw his faithfulness and it became a resource for every Christian facing pressure to compromise in any part of the

Roman world. His death became a sermon that outlasted every Roman official. Here's the point.

You don't even know the name of the Roman pro -council that executed Polycarp. Neither do

I. But we know the name of Polycarp 2 ,000 years later, or at least 1 ,920 years later.

The pro -council who sentenced him is remembered today, if he's remembered at all, as the man who killed

Polycarp. That's the only thing he's known for. Polycarp is remembered as the man who could not be killed because he would not deny

Jesus. Rome attempted to silence his voice, and yet his story traveled across the entire

Roman world and it has been spoken about ever since, for nearly 19 centuries now and counting.

The empire thought that it was erasing a threat, but it was just creating a testimony. The sword thought that it was ending an argument, and it was actually making one.

Faithful until death, and Polycarp today is more alive than ever.

That leads us to our conclusion. Polycarp did not become

Polycarp in the arena. He did not find something, that final moment that he had not been building towards for 86 full years.

He didn't surprise himself when the pro -council offered him the door, say the words and do the thing and you can go home and live.

Polycarp didn't even have to think about it. Not because he was fearless, I'm sure he experienced fear biologically, physiologically, anatomically, mentally, emotionally, physically.

The reason that he did it though, again, not because he wasn't afraid, but because he had already answered the question a thousand times before in the decades before anyone was watching in the small moments, in the quiet places, in the inconvenient ones, in the moments where the cost of faithfulness was low enough that compromising would have seemed perfectly reasonable and no one on earth would have ever blamed him for it.

He had been deciding for 86 years who his Lord was. The arena was just the moment that his decision became most visible.

And that is the thing that I want you to carry out of this episode more than anything else. Not just the theology, not just the eschatology, not just the exegesis of the book of Revelation or the cultural background of what was going on in Smyrna.

The theology matters and I hope that it's hit you in a way that it was supposed to hit you. But this, this question that Polycarp answered in the arena is the same question that you and I have to answer today.

Today, in the choices that feel too small to be significant, in the moments where the pinch of incense seems so minor, so socially reasonable, so unlikely to cost you anything that it would barely even register as a choice at all, denying

Jesus in the most micro ways possible, you got to answer the same question that Polycarp answered.

And what you do with that answer is forming you into who you are going to become when the moment comes, maybe it's already come, where you're going to have to make the decision, am

I going to follow Christ or am I going to bow to Caesar? Polycarp stood in front of a

Roman pro -council, an old man with everything left to lose and he said, 86 years

I've served Christ and he's done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me? He didn't say that in the arena.

He had been saying it his whole life. The fire just made it audible. Here's what

I want you to sit with this week. Jesus didn't close this letter with a command and then leave this church alone with it.

He closed it with two promises. And those two promises are the most devastating, the most complete, and the most total answer to everything

Rome was threatening. And everything Smyrna's mythology was falsely offering that has ever been spoken in the human language.

They answered death directly. They answered the crown directly.

They pulled the last remaining fang out of the mouth of every empire that has ever tried to use suffering to purchase allegiance from people.

And next week, we're going to be going into what those two promises are. And I want you to come ready to listen and to hear the conclusion of this episode on Smyrna because after everything that we've built across these three episodes, after Polycarp, after the arena, after the fire, after what

Jesus says next, I think it's going to land like nothing you've ever heard before. The crown is not just coming.

It was prepared before the foundation of the world for the church, exactly like this one, to be the purifying fire that made her shine for Christ.

So with that, we're going to conclude today's episode. I pray that God richly blesses you.

I pray that you're doing well. I pray that when you face your decision that you will answer in the same way

Polycarp answered him. It may not be death, but it may be embarrassment. It may be social. It may be whatever. Stand for Christ.

Do not be ashamed of Christ. Follow Christ. And we'll see you next time on the podcast. Now get out of here.