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. 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, 8 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, 8 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 seem 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 BDAG, 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 gonna be cursed and that one day they're gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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.

It'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, in 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 thelipsis, 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 thelipsis, 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 thelipsis.

What he's talking about is the real concrete suffering, the real pressure that Christians in a real city, in 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 thelipsis, 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.

The lips, this 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.

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.

None of 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 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, in 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.

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 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.

The people of Israel will be invaded, exiled, they will starve to death in famine, their city will be destroyed and set on fire, the people will be scattered, and not less, mothers will become so mad in their starvation that they will even eat their own children.

This is what Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26 promise to the

Jews if they persist in covenant rebellion, that they will be broken in a way that is barely recognizable, they will be cut out of the covenant in such a ferocious way that they will have no more claim to the covenant again.

It doesn't mean that they can't be saved, but it does mean that the only way that they will be saved is not through Moses, not through temple, not through sacrifices, but through Christ and Christ alone.

You see, God was not vague about this. He told Israel exactly what covenant betrayal was gonna cost them.

In writing, he told them before they ever entered into the land, before they ever took possession of the promises or the inheritance or any of that, before any of the punishments were ever meted out,

God told them what was going to happen if they did not hold up their end of the covenant.

And these were covenant consequences that Israel agreed to when they signed the covenant by saying, yes, we agree.

In the same way that if a bank comes and repossesses your car, they're enacting the consequences of the covenant that you signed on the dotted line,

God is coming. The book of Revelation is telling us that God is coming to bring the consequences upon these

Jewish people who signed their signature on the dotted line.

And now after a thousand years of covenant breaking behavior, God is going to hold them accountable and he is going to pour out the full measure of curses upon their head.

That backdrop in the book of Revelation is essential for understanding everything that happens and everything that follows.

Because by the first century, those covenant curses were literally standing right at the door. That's why

James could say that the judge is standing right at the door, why? Because the judge is going to pronounce the verdict, the covenant curses on them, that's

James five. Now, here is the theological spine of the whole question.

What does it actually mean to be a Jew? Because when Jesus says, I know those who say that they're

Jews, but they're not Jews, they're actually the synagogue of Satan, Jesus is operating under a definition of what he believes a true

Jew is. Because Jesus's verdict is saying, they say they're

Jews, but they're not. When he says that the only meaningful reality in Jesus's mind is that there is a way to be a real

Jew and a way to be a false Jew. There is a meaningful definition of what a real Jew is and how this community had failed to meet it.

And that definition is not ethnic, it's not circumcision, it's not even covenantal, it never was.

And here is the most important thing that you have to understand. Ethnic racial

Judaism or being a Jew biologically was never what made someone a

Jew, never. You think about the examples in the Old Testament, Rahab, not a

Jew, becomes a part of the people of Israel. Caleb, not a Jew, becomes a part of the people of Israel. Uriah, not a

Jew, becomes a part of the people of Israel. Over and over and over again, the people who left

Egypt, the Egyptians who saw the power of God and left and came with Israel, not Jews, not by blood, they weren't descended of Abraham and yet they were descended of Abraham by faith.

This is not a New Testament revision on an Old Testament reality.

This is what the Old Testament itself is saying, that Moses himself, the law giver, the mediator in the

Sinaitic covenant, the man that the first century Jewish leadership almost propped up as a demigod, when he's saying to Israel in Deuteronomy 10, 16, he's saying, circumcise your hearts, therefore do not be stiff necked any longer.

Moses is telling them that, yeah, you're circumcised to the flesh and you think you're Jews, but you're not because you're not circumcised in your heart.

In Deuteronomy 30, verse six, Moses promises them that a day is coming when the

Lord God is going to circumcise their hearts and the hearts of their descendants after them so that they may love him with all of their heart and with all of their soul and that they may live because it's not enough to have a biological connection to Abraham.

They must have faith. They must have the faith and the belief of Abraham if they're gonna be saved. The heart, not the flesh, was what made someone a

Jew. The inward reality, not the outward symbol, was what made someone a

Jew. The substance that the symbol always pointed to is what made someone a

Jew. Moses knew it and he said it plainly, which means that the first century Jewish leaders who were clinging to circumcision and their temple and their priesthood and their sacrifices and their feasts and all of the

Old Testament trappings were rejecting what it meant to be a true

Jew and they were rejecting the Messiah who is the only person who can ever tell you what a true

Jew is because a true Jew is one who belongs to him, not to Moses, not to the temple, not to the ceremonial law, but to him.

They were betraying him. Those first century Jews who rejected him, crucified him, and was killing his bride, the church, are the ones who were standing opposed to Jesus who is the only one who can tell you whether you're a true

Jew or not because it's only through his Holy Spirit circumcising your dead heart of flesh that makes you into a true

Jew. The Apostle Paul himself, who's a Jewish man, who was trained at the most

Ivy League schools in the Jewish times, draws directly upon Moses when he makes the argument with a kind of surgical precision in Romans 2, 28 through 29.

He says, a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly nor is circumcision merely outward and physical.

No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly and circumcision is circumcision of the heart by the

Spirit. In Romans 9, he drives the point even further home by saying, not all who are descended from Israel are

Israel. He uses the word Israel there twice in two entirely different ways.

Not all who are biologically descended from this genetic people called Israel are true spiritual

Israel. That's what Paul is saying. And those two words in Paul, especially in Romans 9, 6, don't mean the same thing.

Israel of the flesh and Israel of the Spirit are not the same. There is an Israel of ethnic descent.

They still exist today. But there also is an Israel who have covenant standing with God, covenant identity, covenant relationship with God, and they're not automatically the same community and they never were.

Paul's not overturning Moses. He's vindicating Moses against the people who claim to follow him in the first century.

And that's not a New Testament novelty. The Hebrew prophet said the exact same thing before. Paul, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, they all spent enormous amounts of energy, effort, and ink confronting exactly this gap between what it means to be a true

Jew and a false one. The gap between having the right ancestry and actually belonging to this

God who was your ancestor's God. The prophetic tradition is unanimous.

Covenant identity is constituted by faithfulness to God, not by bloodline, not by ipso facto genetic standing, but by faithfulness and covenant standing.

Now, here's where the argument goes even deeper than merely saying that ethnicity was never the point because it wasn't.

But we have to understand something clearly. The Mosaic system was not a mistake. The Mosaic system was not primitive superstition making way for the better.

Yeah, it was making way for the better, but it wasn't primitive. It wasn't meaningless. It wasn't an inferior system whenever it existed.

The temple was not a religious error that God tolerated until he came up with something better.

The priesthood was not a detour. God ordained every single element of the Mosaic system, the altar, the blood, the high priest, the tabernacle, the temple, the day of atonement, the

Passover, the lamb, the bread, the presents, the lamp stand, the curtains, all of it. He ordained all of it.

The holy place and the most holy place. He ordained all of it. Every one of those things were real and were purposeful and were instituted by God himself.

So therefore the Mosaic economy was magnificent and intricate and God designed until it ran its course because it always existed to point forward gloriously so to the thing that was going to replace it.

It was never the telos. It was never the end point in redemptive history. It always anticipated a substance that had not yet arrived yet.

It always was a rehearsal of a future gospel and a future reality that was coming.

The sacrifices pointed at something, the final sacrifice. The priesthood pointed at something, the greater true high priest.

The Passover lamb pointed to something, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The temple pointed to something which is

Jesus, the true temple who was raised on the third day and brings us into being a part of that temple that he is the foundation and the cornerstone of.

Every element of the Mosaic system was a finger that was pointed deliberately at Christ.

That was always its purpose. The entire economy of the entire Old Testament system was magnificent and it was

God -breathed but it was pointing to something. And when that thing that it was pointing to arrived, when the fulfillment came, when

Jesus stood in the temple courts as the true temple, and when he opened the scroll of Isaiah as what that was pointing to, and he said, today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing, when he offered himself as the final and perfect sacrifice on the cross by which no other sacrifice would ever have to be repeated again, when his death tore the curtain of the temple and breaking down the wall, a partition that stood between the

Jews and Greeks and male and female, slave and free, when the types had found their fulfillment in the substance, when the shadows had found the reality in the one that was casting them, the dress rehearsal was over and the real event had begun.

If you're in a play, the dress rehearsal is unbelievably important. Everyone takes it seriously but the dress rehearsal is only in preparation for the show, the main event, the signpost, if you will, that's pointing at the thing.

And what Jesus did when he came is he put the dress rehearsal away and now it's time for the show. He put the signpost away because you've arrived at the destination.

At that moment when Jesus came, the only right and the only faithful response to the entire

Mosaic economy was to say that was beautiful but now we set it down.

Not because it was wrong in its time but because now it had been fully fulfilled and fully realized in the person to whom every single element of it was always pointing and that is the problem with the first century

Jews because they did not do that. Instead, they clung to the signpost and they refused the destination that Christ was bringing.

They continued the dress rehearsal without ever stepping onto the stage and enjoying the finished show and they even crucified the director of the entire story and put him on a

Roman cross. They took the system that God designed to point to the

Messiah and they used it to justify themselves in executing that Messiah.

And in doing so, they didn't preserve any holiness. They didn't preserve their covenant standing.

They didn't even rescue Moses. They didn't preserve the Mosaic covenant. God came to them like a life raft saying this covenant's passing away.

Jump on to the raft of salvation called Christ and they said, no, we would rather sink.

And in sinking, they hollowed out everything the Mosaic covenant was pointing to. They hollowed out the sacrificial system by rejecting the final sacrifice.

They hollowed out the priesthood by crucifying the great high priest and they participated in a grotesque inversion of what the

Mosaic covenant was always about. It always pointed to Jesus and when the Jesus it pointed to came, they murdered him.

And they said, no, give us Moses. And that temple that rejected the one to whom it always pointed, the place on earth where God truly dwells with man, a temple that was rejected by his own people is the reason why they lost their temple, their priesthood, their sacrificial system and all of their monuments to their idolatry.

When the substance arrived and it was refused by the Jews, the types don't remain neutral anymore.

They were good until Christ came. And now like milk that was set out on the counter was good.

But if it sits out too long, it curdles. In the same way, the Old Testament economy was curdling in their own hands because the one to which it pointed came and its expiration sticker was passed.

They became what Paul calls in Galatians, a yoke of slavery and what

Jesus more directly called a mechanism in the hands of the adversary.

Jesus called them children of Satan, not because the Mosaic covenant was bad, but because when he came, holding to it was satanic.

That is the devolution of the Jews that Jesus names in Revelation 2. A synagogue, which is a house of worship.

But when the one whom all the worship was pointed to is rejected by that house, the worship no longer remains acceptable to God.

It becomes something that praises Satan. The father that the house is pointing at changes after Jesus comes.

Before, you could go to the synagogue and worship Yahweh. Now that Jesus has come, and instead of worshiping him, you cling to the synagogue.

Now the synagogue is not oriented towards God anymore. It's oriented towards Satan. The building keeps its name,

Synagogue, Synagogue. The rituals continue the same. The Torah is still read.

The prayers are still offered. But the content has been evacuated.

And the direction is now pointed somewhere hostile. And it became a synagogue of Satan, and not just some morally neutral religious posture.

It is a synagogue that had taken on the apparatus of covenant religion, but turned against the covenant fulfillment.

And in doing so, it became an instrument in the hands of God's covenant enemy,

Satan. When the Messiah arrived, the one to whom every promise and every prophetic word and every

Passover lamb and every day of atonement had been pointing, the question of true

Israel came to its decisive and irreversible crescendo. To receive

Jesus was to be true Israel. To reject him was to become the synagogue of Satan.

And Jesus was not gentle in naming it. Again, in John eight, he tells them that they think

Abraham was their father. They're claiming some kind of covenant and lineage pedigree. They're claiming to be

God's people because they fall in Abraham's lineage. And yet Jesus is saying, I tell you plainly that your father is the devil, and that you're the one who does your father's desires, the devil.

Jesus isn't speaking metaphorically or rhetorically or even hyperbolically to score some kind of debate point.

He's saying that you are not children of the living God. This is the son of God rendering a covenant verdict on the people who rejected the covenant substance that all the types and shadows pointed to.

They claimed the name of Israel while refusing to believe in Jesus.

And in doing so, they did not just commit a theological error. They blasphemed the

Holy Spirit and they were cut out of the covenant forever. The language from John 8 is a direct antecedent to the language in Revelation 2, synagogue of Satan, children of the devil.

They're saying the same things. So in that way in Revelation 2,

Jesus is not inventing a new category. He's applying the same verdict that he rendered when he stood in front of his disciples and said, these

Jews are children of Satan. Not all Jews at all times and in all places are children of Satan.

They're not always and forever permanently stained and cursed. He's saying these Jews, these first century

Jews, these Jews who claim Jewish covenant identity, clinging to their temple when the true temple had come.

Those Jews, the ones who were persecuting his people is who he called the synagogue of Satan.

It's who he said was serving their father, the devil. And you have to understand that because there's a lot of people online, even today, who are saying that the

Jews are always and forever the synagogue of Satan. Listen, the

Jews have absolutely nothing significant and special about them today. The first century

Jews who were in covenant standing with God and who rejected Jesus Christ, they were the synagogue of Satan. They were specially devoted to destruction.

The Jews today have nothing special about them. They're just like every other

Gentile. They're like Buddhist. They're like atheist. They're like Taoist and Shintoist.

They're like secular humanist. They're like every other unbeliever. They say that they're true

Israel, but they're not. They're just unbelievers. And if they die in their sin, they will go to hell.

They're not the synagogue of Satan. The first century Jews were.

And the first century Jews were going to be punished alongside of Satan for their rebellion.

And we'll get to that when we get to Revelation 20. But now I want to bring in Revelation 12 for a moment because this is where the cosmological dimension of all of this conflict becomes unmistakable because in Revelation 12,

Satan is cast down from heaven to the earth. He was cast out of heaven originally, but he still had access. The book of Job tells us that he goes up to heaven and he accuses the saints.

Revelation 12 says that after Jesus ascends to heaven, Satan has no more access to heaven ever again.

He can no longer come there and accuse the saints ever again. And it says, woe to the earth because the accuser of the brethren has been thrown down.

And what does he do? Satan comes and he takes the Jews who rejected

Jesus Christ. And he uses them to make war on the true people of God, the church.

The synagogue of Satan, the first century Jews are used as a tool by Satan in his last and final moments, in his last and final stand.

They're used by him to make war with the people of God. This is

Genesis 3 .15 playing out in its final and most terrifying form. The seed of the serpent is going after the seed of the woman and the instrument through which

Satan prosecutes that war in the first century is exactly what Jesus describes in Revelation 2, in Revelation 12, and in Revelation 20.

And in a future episode, I'm gonna make the case and I'm gonna make it as strongly as I can that both

Satan and the first century Jews were destroyed in AD 70 by covenantal fiat by God.

I'm gonna make that case in a future episode. But for now, I want you to recognize that in Revelation 12,

Satan was cast down to the earth. Satan used the Jews to persecute

Jesus's bride. And by doing that, by partnering and allying with Satan instead of Jesus, the

Jews gained the title from Jesus's own lips that they are the synagogue of Satan.

That was the verdict that the Jewish community in the first century had to own because the creator of the universe said that was them.

They are, in the framework of Revelation, active participants in Satan's war against the

Messiah and his people. And they are the terrestrial expression of a cosmic conflict that's been playing out across every page of the

Bible. This is the war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent.

Jesus says the Jews became the seed of the serpent. And along with the serpent, they were crushed in the first century.

Now, before we conclude this section, we also have to bring in what happened in Jerusalem so that we can understand the curse motif perfectly and so that we don't follow any kind of truly anti -Semitic things that are being propagated on the internet, that the

Jews are always cursed, that the Jews are always Satanic, that underneath every rock is a

Jew. We have to protect ourself from that because that is not what the Bible says. The Bible says that that particular generation was under the curse of God.

So we need to understand that from every angle. We have to be careful in our scholarship so that we don't fall victim to every wind and philosophical fancy.

So in Matthew 27, 25, Matthew records one of the most sobering moments in the New Testament that will actually play into our theology of what we're seeing here, the first century

Jews were the cursed generation. Because when Pilate washes his hands of Jesus' blood and says, his blood's not on me, his blood's on you, the crowd of Jews, the

Jewish aristocracy, all of the important Jewish people who were alive and well at the time stand up in the middle of the city and they say, his blood be on us and on our children.

And they do not say his blood be on us and our children forever. They say his blood be on us and our children.

One generation. In Jewish legal and covenantal language, this is a self -maladictory oath where they are formally accepting responsibility for the death of their

Messiah and they are formally calling down covenant curses upon themself.

And these are the same curses that Jesus already told them were going to be applied to them.

Matthew 23, where Jesus announces seven covenant woes upon them, ends with his declaration that on that generation would fall all of the guilt of all of the righteous blood shed on earth, from Abel to Zechariah, son of Barakiah, who stood between the temple and the altar and was murdered by these

Jews. Jesus is not talking about a future generation when he gives seven covenant curses.

He says that generation. He says in Matthew 21, this kingdom is gonna be taken away from you and given to a people who bear its fruit.

Matthew 22, the king is gonna send his armies and set their city on fire. That's God is gonna send the

Romans to set the Jewish city of Jerusalem on fire. Then in Matthew 23, seven covenant woes are pronounced upon this particular people who's standing right in front of him.

That's why Jesus could say, I tell you the truth, all of these things are going to come on this generation in Matthew 24, 34.

So when you get to Revelation and you read it through that hermeneutic that Jesus has already told us, then what you see is the unfolding of the exact consequences that Jesus already promised them in real time.

The tribulation that Smyrna is experiencing was leading to the covenant cutting ceremony that would happen in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, where the

Jews are finally permanently and totally cut out of the covenant forever. Mosaic economy, gone.

Temple, gone. Sacrifices, gone. Priesthood, gone. All of it, gone. And Revelation anticipates and interprets all of this as definitive covenant judgment on the first century

Jews that rejected their Messiah and not on a future people at some point 2 ,000 years later.

The covenant curses of Deuteronomy have not been waiting for 2 ,000 years to be poured out on the

Jews. They were poured out in the invasion, the siege, the famine, and the destruction of the city where mothers literally roasted their own babies and ate them.

And if you don't believe me, read Josephus. He talks about it. He talks about the

Romans coming into the city and looking at the heaping piles of dead bodies. Why? Because the Jews were killing each other.

They were poisoning their own water supply. They were poisoning, they were setting on fire their own food supplies. When the

Romans finally breached the wall and they came in, the stench of death was odious and palpable.

The blood of the people was filling and puddling in the streets because they were murdering one another.

Roman soldiers saw a woman eating her child. And as an act of hospitality, she offered them to eat it with her.

And they were disgusted by it. The Romans were disgusted by the depravity that was going on in the city.

Because why? Because the covenant curses promised 1 ,500 years prior by Moses were being poured out on that generation.

And even the most hardened pagans could not stomach it without vomiting.

That is when the Jews were cut out of the covenant. That is when the synagogue of Satan was dealt with.

That is when all of the graphic covenant violence was executed that turns the reader's stomach today.

This was not a coming catastrophe in our future. It happened in theirs very soon after Jesus gave these very words.

I think Revelation was written somewhere in the 60s. And I'll prove that to you when we get further along in the book. One proof

I'll give you now. John is told to measure the temple in the book of Revelation. Wouldn't make any sense if he wrote in the 90s when there was no temple to measure.

It's not a visionary temple he's told to measure. He's told to measure it, why? Because measuring something sets it apart for destruction.

Because the Jews, the synagogue of Satan, the literal seed of the serpent, the children of the devil who were in league with the devil,

Revelation 12, were gonna be put under the greatest covenantal judgment that had ever been executed.

That's why Josephus could say that what he witnessed in the destruction of Jerusalem was the worst tragedy that's ever happened in human history.

Did he say that there's never been more bloodshed? No. Did he say that there's never been more cannibalism? No. Did he say that there's never been more violence in a war?

No. He said that it was the worst event that had ever happened in history because Josephus being a person who understood covenant was watching before his very eyes the covenant of Moses disintegrate before his very eyes and because he did not believe in Jesus, this would have looked like to him that God was permanently and forever damning all humanity because now there's no more temple.

There's no more place on earth for people to come and meet God. That's why he begged the Jews. That's why he begged those who were possessed by Satan to stop before the temple was burned to the ground.

That's why he begged and pleaded with them to no avail. And he ultimately ended up saying that they were possessed by a kind of doom and that God himself was fighting against them to destroy them.

Ignorance of what happened in AD 70 has caused so many people to think that all of the book of Revelation is about a really bad time in the future.

They don't understand how horrific and how ghastly and how grisly the details were that happened in AD 70.

I would supremely encourage you to pick up a copy of Josephus' book,

The Jewish War, and read The Devastation and then read Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26 and you will see

Josephus, not a Christian, describing the covenant downfall and curses being poured out on that generation.

These Jews in Smyrna who were persecuting the church were not just making a theological error, they were damning themselves and they were putting themselves on the wrong side of Jesus' ferocious judgment that was coming and they were bearing down on them the full force of everything that God had warned

Israel about at Sinai. They are aligned with the adversary himself and at the precise moment when the adversary's time ran out, they too were crushed.

That's why Paul says to the Roman church that God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet and that also includes those who were in league with him, the synagogue of Satan, and it all makes sense in a supersessionist framework.

If you don't know what that word means, go back and look at the four -part series that I did on supersessionism. That's what makes it the most serious and the most exegetically grounded view of them all because it describes what happened in crystal clarity, the covenant community that Jesus came to rescue is the church drawn from every tribe and nation defined not by ethnicity but defined by Christ, defined by union with Christ.

This church is not a replacement for Israel, it is the fullness of what Israel was always supposed to be,

Jew and Gentile, male and female slave and free, constituted by the new covenant in Jesus's blood, the one who came as true

Israel to replace false Israel, the one who came as the true temple to put away the old temple, who came as the true sacrifice to put away the animal sacrifices.

All of it is fulfilled in the first century and the synagogue of Satan, the one who chose the

Mosaic covenant over Christ are the ones who were put down, the ones to whom the verdict belongs.

What this passage establishes alongside of everything that we've already covered is that the Mosaic economy was finished.

It was finished, it was fulfilled, it was closed. There is no temple sacrifice left to offer because the final sacrifice has been made.

The Jews of the modern day don't get a temple again because that original temple, when it was clung to in opposition of Christ, became the greatest blasphemy of the spirit that was ever executed and Jesus said it would not be forgiven.

In that way, the Jews are not gonna get their temple back, they're not gonna get their sacrificial system back, they're not gonna get any of it back because Jesus literally replaced it with himself.

There is no high priest left but him to intercede between us and the

Father. There is no covenant left that is kept by any kind of lineage or bloodline or circumcision or temporal ritual because the new covenant has come and it's not written on stones but it's actually written on hearts.

It's not sealed in animal blood but by the blood of the Lamb, the Son, the true Son of God. All of that has superseded and fulfilled everything the old covenant was pointing to.

That's why I say that supersessionism is the only view and that's not bad news for modern day

Jewish people, it's the same news, it's the same bad news for everybody that if you are not in Christ, you are damned.

That if you are not in Jesus, if you are not in union with the Son, you will be destroyed. That's why we as the church have to stop playing footsie with Israel and stop saying that they're the chosen people and stop saying that they somehow have the special status with God.

They don't. The only status they have is damned if they don't know

Christ. So if we really loved them, we would tell them that. If we really cared about them, we would tell them that and everything other than that.

And I mean Zionism, dispensationalism, I mean pretending like they're gonna get their temple back and a red heifer's gonna be set, all of that is what's truly anti -Semitic.

To leave them in their sins is to hate them. To say that they have nothing special about them, that they are dead in their trespasses like every other person on earth and that they need to repent and turn to Christ is actually the only way to love them.

And that leads us to our conclusion. Now as we step back and we look at what

Jesus has done across this single verse, that he knows their tribulation, he knows their poverty and he knows the accuser, the synagogue of Satan who's been persecuting them.

When you stand back and you look at it, it is breathtaking in its scope. A single sentence says so much.

Because in it, Jesus has looked at the community that the city of Smyrna would have regarded as absolute losers, poor and marginalized without any legal protection or standing, without civic standing at all, without guild membership, without the approval of Rome, without the approval of the imperial cult, without the approval of the local

Jewish community who had special status with Rome or the approval of any recognizable power structure in the city.

By every single metric that Smyrna used to evaluate human flourishing, the church was failing and yet Jesus looked at them and rendered a completely different verdict.

He said their poverty was actually wealth. Their suffering was actually victory. Their accusers were exposed as the frauds who they were, who were heading to destruction because they were under a father, the devil, who would be cut off and destroyed as well.

The city that valued wealth was actually the ones who were poor. The city who valued its victory would actually be the ones who were rendered in permanent defeat because the true genuine identity of rich, of victor, and of being in union with the true

God came only through Christ and not through what Smyrna could offer and not through what the synagogue of Satan could offer, only in Christ.

And in that way, Jesus opened up his mouth to this church and he didn't marginalize them and he didn't placate them.

He told them, I know what you're going through. I know it. I see it.

I understand it. The first and the last, the one who was dead and the one who came to life has seen your affliction and he's telling

Smyrna that I love you and that I'm gonna raise you up out of this. The same Jesus who walked out of the empty tomb was gonna raise up the church out of its ashes and was gonna put the

Jews and Rome who thought they were so victorious into dust and ashes.

Jesus addressed every single one of their hurts in this single sentence and only because they were standing on his foundation did they have any hope.

That is what it means for Jesus to know Smyrna, to know their suffering and their tribulation, to know their poverty and to know who it is that's accusing them and that's also what it means to know true hope because the only one who can actually define reality has said, nope, you're not poor.

You're rich. No, no, no. You're not afflicted. You're being prepared for victory. No, no, no, the synagogue of Satan, no.

They'll be destroyed because you, brothers and sisters, are the house of the living God. Rome can render whatever verdict it likes.

Smyrna can say whatever they'd like. The Jews can say whatever they like but in just a few short years, the

Jews would be gone and then in just a couple hundred years, Rome would be no more because Christ has pronounced to the city of Smyrna that he knows it, he sees them and he's working for their victory and I would remind you, brother and sister, today that you're 2 ,000 years into the victory of Christ.

What started as a small fringe movement inside of the backwaters country of Judah is now in every time zone, in every latitude and longitude, there's a church.

2 .5 billion people, you can say, well, not all of them are Christian, clearly. There's always gonna be false sons in our mix but even if only one billion of them were real, true

Christians and that's really aggressive to say that 1 .5 billion people are not true Christians out of the 2 .5

billion are false believers even if that were the case, from 12 followers of Christ to a billion people in 2 ,000 years is exponential and explosive growth.

It is victory. It started looking like poverty but it's rich. It started looking like defeat but it actually wins and the same

God who's been doing this for 2 ,000 years hasn't decided to stop. He hasn't decided to leave you in poverty.

He's given you the treasures of heaven. He hasn't decided to leave you in defeat. He's given you victory and we will overwhelmingly conquer because of him who loves us.

So I would encourage you today as you consider your life and as you consider the future to face it with confidence and courage because maybe you're being pressed.

Maybe you're in a philipsis. Maybe you're being crushed but the same

God who promised that even the crushing of grapes leads to the finest wine. In your crushing, he is leading you to victory because these present sufferings aren't even worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed in us on the day of Christ.

So brother and sister, have hope. Take courage because you serving

Christ never fails. That is part two of our look into the

Church of Smyrna and we'll come back next week and look at a third part of this church because there's more still left to say but until then,

God richly bless you and we'll see you next time on the podcast and now get out of here.