184. Tribulation & The Synagogue of Satan: (The Letter to Smyrna Part 2)

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 184, The Letter to Smyrna, part two. Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back to the podcast.

My name is Kendall, and I'm so glad that you are here for episode two of our deep dive into the Church of Smyrna. Last time we were together, we spent an entire episode on the city itself, and if you haven't watched that episode yet, I would strongly encourage you to go back and start there before you listen to this one because we covered a lot of ground.

We talked about Smyrna's founding mythology, the story that the city told about itself and how it had been destroyed and rebuilt, and it called that rebuilding a kind of resurrection. We talked about the trade guilds, the imperial cult, the neocoros title and what that meant, and the very specific reasons why being a Christian in that city had concrete, measurable, and unavoidable economic and social consequences.

We talked about how the church in Smyrna wasn't in conflict with its city because it was doing something provocative. It was in conflict because it was doing something faithful, and faithfulness in a city that was built upon a counterfeit gospel was all that it took for those early Christians to become an absolute target.

Jesus Speaks Into Smyrna’s Situation

Now, all of that was groundwork, and it was necessary, and it was important groundwork, but today we're gonna get into the meat of the letter to Smyrna. Today we're gonna see what Jesus himself, when he opens his mouth, what he says to the city of Smyrna, and I want you to remember that everything we covered last time is gonna be incredibly important because Jesus is not speaking into a vacuum.

He's speaking into a city with a very specific story about its death, burial, and resurrection, about its own crown and its own glory, and the way that Jesus interprets the situation of this church is actually going to be addressed directly.

He's not gonna talk around it. He's not gonna talk past it. He's gonna speak directly into their situation and their life and the things that are going on around them, and today we're going to look at what Jesus says when he looks directly at the poverty and the suffering and the tribulation and the accusers of this church, and he is going to render a verdict that completely overthrows everything that the city was falsely saying about them.

This is one of the most remarkable passages in all of the book of Revelation, so let's open it, let's read it, and let's get into it, and with that, Revelation 2, eight through 11 says this. And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write, the first and the last who is 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 they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. Do not fear what you are 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, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches, and he who overcomes will not be hurt by the second death, Revelation 2, eight through 11.

So what we see is that Jesus has introduced himself. He's told the church that he is the sovereign Lord of all history. He is the one who died and who was raised and who lives forever, and now he is going to turn and look directly at their situation, not from a distance, not in vague, generalistic terms.

He's gonna get specific, uncomfortably specific. And what he says in verse nine is one of the most remarkable statements in the entire book because in just a few words, he is going to completely overturn every visible verdict that the city of Smyrna had been rendering against this church.

This is what he says. I know your tribulation and your poverty, but you are rich, and the blasphemy of those who say that they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. And in that statement, he says three things.

He's gonna talk about tribulation, he's gonna talk about poverty, he's gonna talk about blasphemy, and each one of those statements is a concrete, specific, real-world pressure that the Christians in Smyrna were facing that we need to look at, and we're gonna look at each of those three statements one at a time, beginning with part one, I know your tribulation.

The first thing Jesus says to the church in Smyrna is, I know, I know your tribulation. Now, that word, tribulation, is a very important word, and we need to spend a little bit of time on it because in modern English, we often use it loosely to mean any kind of difficulty or hardship, but the Greek word here itself is theripsis.

So when you read the word tribulation here, you're reading the Greek word underneath it, which is theripsis, and that Greek word carries a much more specific and even physical image behind it than what you and I have been told.

You see, theripsis, tribulation, literally means pressure, like the pressure of something heavy that's being pressed down on something and crushing it. It's used to describe the crushing of a grape in a wine press, the grapes are going through tribulation, they're going through theripsis, or it's the kind of pressure of a crowd that's pushing someone in on all sides and creating massive amounts of tension and pressure, that's tribulation or theripsis.

So when the New Testament uses this word to describe suffering, it's not talking about a very bad day, it's not talking about a season that's somewhere in the distant future, it's not even talking about a feeling of discouragement, it's talking about sustained, grinding, and unrelenting pressure, the kind that doesn't let up easily, the kind that presses you from multiple directions simultaneously, and the kind that eventually wears you down over time.

Now, unless this seemed like a claim resting on a casual word study, the preeminent lexicons of the New Testament, these are the lexicons that are the go-to sources for the meaning of Greek words, actually have something to say about this word as well.

For instance, the bedag, which is widely considered the standard Greek English lexicon, defines theripsis as pressing down or pressure. And when applied to human experience as a trouble that inflicts distress and oppression and affliction and tribulation.

The launida lexicon, which is organized by semantic domains, defines this word as trouble involving direct suffering. The Dictionary of Biblical Languages renders it similarly, trouble, distress, oppression, tribulation.

Not one of these authoritative sources, lexicons, defines theripsis as a specific eschatological event at some point in the future that's gonna be a global catastrophe. That is made up in the unanimous judgment of the finest Greek scholarship available to us today.

This is a general term about intense suffering and pressure, which is exactly how it functions throughout the New Testament. And exactly what Jesus is talking about when he says that, hey, Smyrna, hey, church, I know your pressure.

I know the tension you're going through. I know the persecution you're going through. I know your theripsis. And because of that, we need to pause here for a moment and say something very, very bluntly and directly.

Because this word theripsis is one of the most abused and misunderstood words in the entirety of eschatological studies, especially in the popular Bible shaman prophecy cult that we see alive and well today.

If you spent any time at all in Christianity, especially in certain Christian circles, then you've almost certainly heard the word tribulation used in a very different and completely unrecognizable way that the Christians would have heard it in Smyrna.

You've probably heard of the phrase the great tribulation, which is a staple of a particular approach to Bible prophecy called futurism, which assumes that everything in the book of Revelation must have some dramatic future event attached to it, waiting to be unleashed at the end of human history in a period of unprecedented global catastrophe led by an antichrist over a one-world government and all of that.

All of that's fiction. All of that is very imaginative, creative even, fiction that's been infused into this word that is not there. It's just not there. It's not there according to the preeminent Greek scholars.

It's not there in the context. It's literally there only in the imagination of some people who have a very non-exegetical way of reading the Bible. The great tribulation is a specific future event from John's perspective, but it's not describing a seven-year period of worldwide suffering and divine wrath and cosmic chaos that's still in our future today.

I mean, that kind of thing gets its own movies, definitely B-rated movies for sure, but it gets its own books. It gets its own budgets. It sells best-selling novels like the Left Behind series or the late Great Planet Earth.

It generates enormous amount of speculation, even among our senators like Ted Cruz and other government officials like Mike Huckabee, who think that Israel somehow is still the promised chosen people.

And if we don't go with them, then we're going to be cursed and that one day they're going to have their temple back. They read into this word, the ellipsis, tribulation, and they import into tribulation all of their fanciful understandings of their futuristic dreams.

And none of it is biblical, none of it. You've been told that probably a hundred times by a thousand different pastors, and yet none of it is biblical. It's all a fiction underneath the word that doesn't mean that.

And if your theology can't even be sustained by the definition of a word, if your theology doesn't comport with the grammar of the passage, then it's made up, which is exactly what I've been using the broadcast to try to expose now for three years, that this whole idea of a dispensational doom and gloom, one day future rapture dispensation, great tribulation, all of that is fiction.

This word's not about current events. This word is not about future political figures. This is not about a one world government with a one world global currency. It's not about an antichrist. This is not even trying to point out that we're in a time period right now that is leading up to the quote unquote great tribulation, which is the beginning of the end of the world and all of that.

All of that is riddled with error because the ellipsis simply means pressure or suffering. It doesn't mean future pressure, future suffering, future cataclysmic event. It just means pressure. It means suffering.

And it's used throughout the New Testament to describe the normal everyday experience of Christians who are living faithfully in a hostile world. It describes tribulation that is happening in the first century, not that's gonna be happening in the 21st and beyond.

Jesus tells his disciples, for instance, in John 16, that in this world, you will have the ellipsis, tribulation, trouble, pressure, tension. Jesus tells that to his disciples standing in front of him.

And they most certainly did. They were thrown in prison. They were beaten. They were martyred. They were abused. Jesus told them in this life, you're going to have tribulation. And they did. Paul tells the churches that he planted that it's only through much tribulation, through much the ellipsis that we must enter into the kingdom of God, which is certainly true because the early Christian church was persecuted tremendously before the downfall of the Mosaic world, the destruction of the temple, the ending of the priesthood and the feast and the sacrificial system and all of that.

And when God fully established the kingdom of God on earth was when all of the Mosaic economy was put away. Paul's saying that we're going to have to go through a lot of suffering before that happens.

And he was right. See, the word describes what it's going to cost a Christian to be a Christian in a first century world that has not fully submitted to the lordship of Christ, but is an active hostility, an open rebellion to the kingship of Christ.

It's not a technical term for a future apocalyptic disaster. It's a description of the first century church and their normal experience in that generation. So when revelation uses the ellipsis, including the phrase, the great the ellipsis that appears later in the book, it's describing events that were from the vantage point of the first century people who were going through it, imminently going through it, not 2000 years later.

Imagine John writing a vision to people who were suffering, going through an actual the ellipsis, but he intended to tell them about a the ellipsis in the future. Hey, I know you're suffering, but don't worry about that because somebody someday is going to suffer worse than you.

Imagine going to a counselor and saying, doc, I am really suffering. Oh, don't worry, somebody else is worse off than you.

What?

Yeah, take this pill, go home and call me tomorrow. Like that doesn't make any sense. The book of Revelation is talking to a specific people going through a specific the ellipsis, tribulation. And John even says that he's a fellow partaker in that tribulation.

We'll talk about it in a moment. But the book of Revelation opens with Jesus telling John about things which must soon take place, about things that by which the time is near. And the book closes in the same way with the same soon, near and quickly formula.

The beginning of the book and the end of the book are saying that this book is about things that are gonna soon take place. The time is near, I'm coming quickly. The book is talking about first century events.

And it says that in the beginning of the book and the end of the book, which means all of the middle of the book is about things which must soon happen because the time is near and he's gonna come quickly.

The book is bookended by these timeframe structures you can't avoid. So why is it that people in the middle of the book rip out words like this and say, it must be about the future? That's foolishness.

The tribulation that Revelation is concerned with is a tribulation that the church in general and the church in Smyrna particularly was experiencing at the hands of Jews and Romans who were applying sustained, grinding, organized pressure on that living people who were under imperial rule, which was causing them to suffer intensely.

And those sufferings were intensifying dramatically as the years were coming up on the destruction of Jerusalem. So when John wrote all the way to the destruction of Jerusalem, those pressures, those thalipsis, those tribulations were increasing.

We know that is true historically, that those tribulations would continue to increase all the way up until the moment of the destruction of the Jewish temple, which signified the end of the old covenant world and the beginning of the new covenant world that is being ruled by and led by Jesus Christ.

And again, I said this earlier, the most decisive evidence against the word tribulation, meaning something future at the end of human history is what John, the author of the book, says himself. In Revelation chapter one, verse nine, John says in a single word that I, John, your brother, am a fellow partaker in the tribulation and kingdom and perseverance, which are in Jesus.

And I was on the Isle of Patmos. Notice what John doesn't say. John doesn't say that he's writing to warn them about a tribulation that is thousands of years away. He says that I'm a fellow partaker in the tribulation.

I'm suffering the tribulation. I'm walking through the tribulation. I'm with you in the tribulation. Present tense, first person standing shoulder to shoulder right with the church in Smyrna and Philadelphia and Thyatira and Pergamum and all of them.

We are first century believers going through the tribulation. And I, John, am a fellow partaker with you in the tribulation. John is not anticipating some future global catastrophe. He's already in it and his readers are already in it.

It's not on the vast far horizon. It's the weight that all of them were being pressed on then. And John's own self-description as a co-participant in the tribulation at the very opening of the book is the most single straightforward argument against reading the book as a future event.

The man who wrote Revelation didn't think that he was writing about something that was gonna unfold thousands of years into the future. He thought he was writing to people who were in it with him, right alongside of him, right then, right there in the first century.

Now, there's one more dimension that is worth adding here because it speaks directly to what the church in Smyrna needed to hear. The pattern of tribulation, the pattern of philipsis in the Bible is not future oriented by a long multi-thousand year gap.

Actually, the word philipsis always infers near term suffering that is going to lead to some kind of redemption. It's woven into the very architecture of the Bible. For instance, in the Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Old Testament, the word philipsis is applied in the book of Exodus.

And how is it applied? Well, it's applied to the pressure that Israel was suffering under Pharaoh, which did not ease, but continued to get worse until their dramatic liberation. The philipsis increased.

The closer that deliverance came, the heavy the pressure became. So when Moses first stood before Pharaoh and he said, let my people go, the immediate result of the philipsis was not that it was relieved, but it was greater.

They had harder quotas. They had no straw to use. The same number of bricks were required, but they had no help. They had no aid. The pressure was mounting. What looked like an abandonment of God from the outside was in fact the final compression before the breaking and bursting open of freedom.

The philipsis, the tribulation in Exodus was not a sign that God had forgotten his people. It was a condition in which God was preparing to display his own power and glory. And crucially, the people doing the crushing, although they seemed like they were winning, could not escape the judgment that was coming.

The trap was set and Pharaoh's season of apparent impunity was brief and temporal. What he thought was his triumph was an ending at the bottom of the Red Sea. And in the same way, the early church, including the believers in Smyrna, were living inside of this exact same pattern.

The pressure was real. The danger was real. It looked like the Romans and the Jews were getting away with it. And in fact, the pressure itself was mounting. And the Christians in those cities, especially Smyrna, were saying, is God with us?

Is God abandoning us? Is this pressure, this tribulation that we're going through going to be the end of us? And that's where the hope comes because the one who said that he was the first and the last, the one who said that he is the one who had died and came back to life, he knew something that the empire did not know.

And that is that the sustained pressure campaign, the thalypsus, the tribulation that was being applied to the people of God was not there to produce its collapse, but was there to produce its victory.

Like a wine press always produces something good, right? It doesn't destroy the grape as the pressure is increasing. It actually releases everything that was inside of the grape that made it glorious, that made it into something beautiful.

The evolution of the grape via the wine press into wine is the exact same pressure that the early church is going through. They are the grape being pressed and being crushed, becoming new creation wine, whereby they would minister to the nations and give them the very hope of the gospel.

The thalypsus, the tribulation that was bearing down on the people of Smyrna was not the end to their story. It was the condition under which the power of the risen Christ would be most visibly displayed in them and through them.

And therefore the great tribulation of prophecy cults, the future seven year global catastrophe, the Antichrist with the one world government, the rapture, the left behind nonsense, none of that is in this text.

None of that is what Jesus is talking about when he says, I know your tribulation, I know your thalypsus. What he's talking about is the real concrete suffering, the real pressure that Christians in a real city and the real century we're going through and treating that like it's a code word for something else, for a future global apocalypse is not only bad exegesis, but it's to spit in the face of your brothers and sisters in Christ who lived through these tribulations in the city of Smyrna and to say, what you went through doesn't matter.

Jesus didn't actually see you. He didn't actually know you in your tribulation. He's seeing us and knowing us in our made up tribulation. It turns their suffering into a prop for a speculative timeline that would have meant absolutely nothing to the people who originally received this letter.

Dear Smyrna, let me tell you about people in the 21st century who are going through suffering. I don't care about your suffering. I'm not talking about your pain, your trial, your thalypsus, your tribulation.

I'm not worried about you. Stop worrying about yourself for a moment so I can talk about people in the 21st century who were glorified snowflakes, who get upset when their chai latte is not made correctly.

Let me talk about their suffering because their suffering is real and yours is not.

Come on.

Thalypsus means pressure. The pressure that those Christians in Smyrna were going under is the tribulation Jesus was referring to. And it's the tribulation that they faced that Jesus saw, that he knew, and that he said they would be delivered from when the time had come and the time came in AD 70.

That's what tribulation means. That's how Jesus knows the church in Smyrna and sees them in their tribulation. It is not code word for something crazy. And that's what that theology is, something wacko.

Now with that, that's the first thing that Jesus says. The next thing that Jesus is gonna say to them, we're gonna cover in part two. I know your poverty. Now we get to the economic reality of this struggling church.

Poverty, Wealth, and Heaven’s Accounting

And this is where we need to connect back to everything that we talked about last time when we were together. Because the poverty of the Smyrna church was not accidental and it wasn't a mystery. It had a very clear and a very concrete cause.

They were being persecuted. They were living in one of the wealthiest cities in all of Asia Minor. It was a harbor. It had trade routes. It had the imperial favor of Rome. It had a position as a major commercial hub that was meant to have real money exchange.

There were real rich people who were living there. And for people who were willing to play the game and participate in the city's economic structures. And those systems, as we've discussed before, were inseparable from the idolatry of the city.

The trade guilds were controlling the access to the markets and the professional networks. And the guild memberships required that you participated in the worship of pagan gods. So for a Christian, that was a line that could not be crossed which meant that the economic consequences were unavoidable.

If you didn't worship the idols, you didn't get the job. If you didn't get the job, you didn't feed your family. That was the situation that the church of Smyrna was in. And then you layer onto that the reality of the civic life in Smyrna, the advancement in the city that required public demonstrations of loyalty to Caesar which was absolutely a religious kind of devotion.

Then a Christian could not honestly celebrate in the civic world. They couldn't work in the vocational trades. They could not participate in civic life or advancement which was largely closed off to them.

And then on top of that, there was active opposition from organized accusers who were leveraging the Roman legal mechanisms to make Christians look even worse. That was the Jews. So the results of all of this was a community that was economically marginalized, professionally hampered, socially ostracized and financially struggling.

Not because they were incompetent or they were bad workers or because they were unlucky, but because they had made a choice, Christ first. Christ or nothing. They had chosen Jesus over Caesar, faithfulness over prosperity and their bank accounts showed exactly what that choice costed them.

Their poverty was not failure. It was testimony to their faithfulness. And let that sit for a moment because it's one of the most counter-cultural sentences in the entire letter. The city of Smyrna had a theology of prosperity baked into its civic life.

The gods were blessing them. They revived them. They were dead. Now they're alive. Rome was rewarding their loyalty with wealth and status. A visible sign of the royalty of the city was the crown. And all of their writers talked about Smyrna being the crown city.

All of it was a visible sign from the powers that be and the powers in the heavens that you were approved, that you were royal. And by that accounting, the Christians in the city were a walking exhibit of divine dissatisfaction.

They were proclaiming that only Christ is the resurrected one, only Christ and him are true riches so that their gospel was antithetical to the gospel of the city of Smyrna. And it made them public enemy number one, which means that they had to live out that poverty every single day in a city that was a monument to wealth and prosperity.

And Jesus is telling them that he sees them, that he knows that they're impoverished and he names their poverty without minimizing. He doesn't say, well, you know, buck up. It's not that bad. Or look on the bright side.

Jesus acknowledges their poverty is a real thing. I've seen your poverty. But then he does something utterly extraordinary. He inserts a parenthetical statement, literally in the Greek, it's a grammatical aside that completely overturns the city's virtue and it cast even a verdict upon the city.

He says, I've seen your poverty, parentheses, but you are rich. You're the rich ones. You're the ones who are wealthy. With two words in the Greek language, Jesus is overturning everything. The structure of what Jesus is doing here is amazing.

He's not simply confronting a suffering church and giving them a hallmark answer. I've seen that you're poor, but you're rich. He's issuing a counter verdict against the city that has already rendered its judgment that had prioritized wealth and prosperity.

Smyrna looked at this community of Christians and pronounced them poor because they wouldn't participate in their society. So they refused to pay them. They refused to hire them. They refused to engage with them.

They enacted poverty upon them. But Jesus is looking at that same people and saying, no, no, no, you're not poor, you're rich. And the ones who say that they are rich are actually the ones who are poor.

Jesus looks at the same community and he says, your city and whatever they've said about you is wrong. Their accounting system is broken. Their calculators are rendered useless. And mine, my accounting, my calculations are the only ones that are actually true.

Now, Jesus is not saying, don't worry. Someday you're going to be rich. Don't worry about your empty bank account. One day you're gonna have more money. And he's also not saying that your heavenly rewards are gonna make up for your earthly losses.

He's actually making a present tense declaration about the actual current status of this church before their God. Not you will be rich and not you were rich once. You are rich, present tense. Right now, you are rich.

As you sit in your economy, in your marginalized position, in your guilt excluded situation, in your imperially disapproved community, you are rich. So we need to ask the question, what does that mean?

Well, it means that the things that actually constitute wealth, the things that make something genuinely valuable, genuinely permanent, genuinely worth having are already possessed by this church and they are not what the city of Smyrna has been valuing.

They have union with the living resurrected Christ. They have forgiveness of sins. They have the Holy Spirit. They have eternal life. They have membership in the covenant family of the living God. They have access to the one who holds all of history in his powerful hands.

They have the promise of resurrection. They have none of the things that can be taxed, confiscated, revoked by a court or taken away by men with guns. Everything they have can't be taken from them by the accuser or even by the most powerful empire on earth.

What they have is permanent. What they have is real, more real than real, more real than money, more real than real estate, more real than trade guilds and good jobs and high paying salaries. What they have is what is truly accounted precious by the only accounting system that will still be running when the tale of human history is done.

Where are the wealthy people in Smyrna today? They have nothing. Where are the richest people that have ever lived in human history? They're dead. They have nothing. They turned into the same dust that the poorest man did.

I was looking up today who the richest man in human history was and it was an African prince who was worth somewhere between 500 and $700 billion in modern day equivalent currency. Where is he? He's dead.

Because his wealth could be eaten and taken by moth and rust. I read another story about a man in the Roman empire had about $200 billion in modern day currency as a punishment for his greed when he was conquered in war with an army that he paid for and raised himself which meant he was truly wealthy when he was arrested, when he was taken into custody they melted down some of his gold and they poured it down his throat and that's what killed him because he had the kind of wealth that could be taken from you which meant that he actually was poor hiding behind a ledger that made him think he actually was rich.

And then when you look at the poor Smyrnans who had no bank account, they had no money, they had no means but yet they had forgiveness of their sins and yet in a city that was built on honor and shame in the ancient world you're standing before the gods was never secure because you could never be certain that you had offered enough, performed enough, did enough and yet the religious economy of the Roman world was an economy of endless debt, endless appeasement, endless anxiety about whether you were in or whether you were out or whether you were in favor or whether you were rejected and yet these Christians had something that the wealthiest merchants in Smyrna's harbor did not have.

They had a settled account, they had sins forgiven, they had debts canceled, they had standing before Almighty God not based on what they could offer but based on what Christ alone had gained in a world that was filled with religious anxiety they had the kind of peace that was a kind of wealth that far surpassed all the riches of Rome and all the riches of Asia Minor and it was not even worth comparing with the coins in a few coffers in this city.

Think about death, they lived in a city that claimed that they had resurrection but everyone died and no one rose from the dead and yet these Christians had the promise of something that no amount of money could purchase, they would have life after they died.

The promise that death was not the end, it was not the finality of the story for them that what was lost would be restored to them, that they were the ones who actually had life, that they were the ones who were gonna walk out of their tombs and that this offering to them existed only for them because they were in Christ.

By any honest accounting, that promise was worth more than everything that came through the Smyrna harbors. The city of Smyrna looked at this little piddly community and they saw poverty and they drew the natural conclusion that poverty in a city of wealth meant that the gods hated you, Rome was not blessing them, the guilds were not prospering them, the imperial system was clearly not working for them and therefore according to Smyrna's theology, the gods were not on the side of the Christians and yet Jesus looks at the same community and he sees the exact opposite, he sees the people who've traded their temporary riches for permanent storehouses of wealth, people whose hands are empty by the world's account but full by the counting of heaven, people who look like they're losing but they're actually winning.

This is one of the most important things that the book of Revelation teaches us and it runs from the beginning of the book all the way to the end of the book that there is a completely different way, radically different to be wealthy and to be rich.

The church that looks utterly defeated is the one who actually is victorious. The community that looks to be impoverished ends up being the one who is truly wealthy. Revelation therefore is fundamentally a book about seeing reality clearly in all of its beautiful irony and all of the apparent paradoxes that exist.

Those who are dead will live, those who are poor are rich, those who've been defeated actually are victorious, those who are persecuted will conquer. See, Revelation pulls back the curtain and shows us what's really happening beneath the surface.

Your eyes can't see what's really happening in the world because you and I, if we were there, we would have looked at them and we would have said, they're the losers and yet according to heaven, they're the winners.

This is why premillennialism is such a failed system and this is why premillennialism can't actually interpret the book of Revelation because they are only interpreting it with human eyes instead of using the accounting structures of heaven and looking at it from heaven's perspective to see that this tribulation and this poverty actually is conquering and wealth.

The church that can't even pay its bills possesses the richness of eternity. That's the second thing that Jesus tells them. Now, let's look at the third thing, which we're gonna talk about in part three, I Know Their Blasphemy.

The Synagogue of Satan and Covenant Judgment

Now, Jesus says he knows their tribulation, he knows their poverty and he also says that he knows the blasphemy of those who say that they are Jews and they are not, but they are a synagogue of Satan and we need to understand what Jesus means when he says this and we need to look at it very carefully because this is a judicial verdict that is delivered by the sovereign Lord of history about a specific community and the nature of the accusation, synagogue of Satan, runs all the way back into the Old Testament scriptures in a way that makes it not only understandable to the first century people, but also theologically inevitable.

To hear it properly, we have to follow those roots and we have to understand the underpinning of what synagogue of Satan means because people throw that phrase around today and they're talking about the Jews, Jews are perpetually the synagogue of Satan, but is that what Jesus is saying?

Was Jesus telling the church of Smyrna, hey, I'm just calling to put you on notice that all Jews at all time are the synagogue of Satan or is he saying something about a specific group of Jews at a specific time, at a specific moment in redemptive history and to understand that, we have to understand all of the substructure that is under it and we have to begin when God enters into covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai because he didn't do so without warning the people, he warned them that covenant unfaithfulness, that covenant disobedience was going to lead to covenant cursings.

Leviticus chapter 26 and Deuteronomy 28, for instance, contain what theologians call the covenant curses, these are the consequences that God promised was gonna fall upon Israel if they continually persisted in rebellion and continually broke the covenant with God and I would tell you and I tell, I've said this many times actually, you should pause this video and read Leviticus 26 and then you should read Deuteronomy 28 and then you should read those chapters carefully and what you will find is a list of specific judgments that are so severe that they're genuinely difficult to read.