Message Notes on Thyatira
This letter is the central letter of the seven, and as such it draws together the various issues and sets them before us. It comes from the One with fiery eyes, penetrating everything; from the Son of God, who rules over all things (note Daniel 10).
Quick Review -
Revelation of Jesus
Book - a Prophecy in the form of a Letter
This letter begins with seven short epistles from Christ to seven churches that represent the whole church for all time.
Those seven letters form the seedbed for the whole book
What they faced then is what the Church always faces - opposition from the enemy in the form of state-sponsored and religious violence, economic excommunication, social marginalization, subversive false teaching, and a lukewarm, compromised heart in regard to the prevailing culture.
Thyatira was a prosperous manufacturing and trading town but was otherwise a lesser place than the other towns to which the letters of Rev. 2 and 3 were sent. It was not a seat of government, nor was it a center of imperial worship. Scholars observe that the longest and the most difficult of the seven letters is addressed to the least known, least important, and least remarkable of the cities.
We know there were a number of trade guilds or business associations in Thyatira. Mentioned in inscriptions from the period are woolworkers, linen-workers, dyers, leather-workers, tanners, potters, bakers, slave-dealers, and so on. Lydia, the first of Paul’s converts in Philippi, was from Thyatira, and was perhaps the Philippi representative of a Purple Cloth guild from her hometown. In any case, most people involved in Thyatira's economic activity would have belonged to one or another of these guilds or trade associations.
What is important about that is that these guilds regularly held feasts that were religious in nature – each guild had its patron god or goddess and the worship of this figure would have been part of the feast – and this created the problem for Christians.
Such meals often ended in sexually licentious behavior - and that posed a second problem.
Could Christians participate in such occasions or did they have to remain perpetual outsiders, cut off from the economic life and prosperity of the city?
As we have already seen, Christians gave different answers to those questions. The temptation was great because, in a society where participation in certain practices was a criterion for acceptance and full membership in the community, the Christian faced isolation and economic hardship if he refused to take part.
At the center of the letters is a question: How does the Church relate to the world?
The Church always faces three possible mistaken answers -
1.. Domination
We will fight the prevailing culture and conquer it politically, judicially, and legislatively; it seeks to build a base of power.
2. Imitation
We cannot win the world to Christ without the Church being like the world to welcome it. We share the world’s values and use these as vehicles of truth. It seeks to build bridges of commonality.
(No! We have a message the world least wants but most needs!)
3. Isolation
We must evacuate the sinking ship, grabbing whatever we can from the wreck to build sacred communities free from infection as the world collapses under the weight of its own lawlessness. It seeks to build shelters and air-tight, secure reservations, hermetically sealed homogeneous cul-de-sacs of the holy who’ve forgotten they’re on mission.
Each of the first three has a kernel of truthful impulse but fails to embrace what's essential to the mission's health.
Christ will come to rule the world, but we don’t “build the kingdom” through politics. Individual Christians should be involved in politics and civil government, but it is not the Church’s mission. Christians have responsibilities within the city of man, but our ultimate citizenship is in the City of God.
We must be comprehensible to the world to communicate with the world. But negating essential differences or softening hard truths fails to recognize the call of Christ to follow him in a life that contradicts the age.
Institutional and societal collapses indeed occur, and we must preserve what is true and beautiful when they do. Yet preserving by isolating negates the mission to reach out and the grace of welcome while failing to recognize that the threatening evil we seek to flee from is deeply embedded within us. At best, it is a temporary solution that should then steel us for the mission before us. We preserve holiness only when we remain on mission, because a church without a mission is an unfaithful church.
The answer -
Incarnation! In the world but not of the world
Insulation! Protect the proper interior culture from the destructive exterior culture
In Thyatira, Christ seeks to shore up the Church for a right relationship of effective witness to his holy love in their society. How does Jesus seek to insulate the church for effective witness?
I. Commend
A growing faith, hope, and love showing itself in service. - v.19
II. Confront - Tolerance of a poison that will destroy them if they don’t deal with it. - v.20-23
Jezebel: wasn't merely an idolater herself. As Ahab's wife, she actively imported Baal and Asherah worship into Israel as state religion, put the prophets of the Lord to death, and put 450 prophets of Baal on Israel's own payroll (1 Kings 16:31–33; 18:4, 19). Naboth's vineyard episode (1 Kings 21): the same figure weaponizing legal and religious cover to seize what wasn't hers; that’s corruption and idolatry working hand in hand, not as separate problems. Her end? Thrown from a window at Jehu's command and left for the dogs to eat, in exact fulfillment of Elijah's word against her (2 Kings 9:30–37)
Here’s her teaching: Idols are not a danger - you can be in the world and act like the world, and worship what the world worships, and it won’t make any difference
Forgotten that FAITH has FRUIT!
Legalism is a terrible danger, but so is antinomianism. BOTH oppose the gospel.
Tolerance is a danger when intolerance is the only solution. “Morality, like art, consists in drawing a line somewhere!” - Mark Twain.
The problem in Thyatira wasn’t supremely the presence and false teaching of Jezebel, but the church’s failure to address it and take action. Their laizzez-faire attitude to poison was going to destroy them from the inside o
III. Commission - Hold Fast! - v.24-29
Capt. Henry Dempsey hanging on
Henry Dempsey, a commuter pilot on a 1987 Maine-to-Boston flight, was sucked out through an improperly latched rear door and found still clinging to the plane's exterior ladder when it landed; rescuers reportedly had to pry his hands loose.
The Reward of the wicked is death. The Reward of the righteous is Christ himself.
V.28: at the end of Revelation (22:16) the Lord Jesus describes himself as the “bright Morning Star.”
Thomas Aquinas’s vision - everything I’ve written is straw - December 6, 1273; he died in March, 1274
Who/What is your Summum Bonum?
If it is Christ, you may endure great sorrow and hardship, or make great sacrifices, but your soul will be satisfied
If it is anyone or anything but Christ, you may have great pleasures and happiness, but your soul will be empty.
Love Divine, all loves excelling (Charles Wesley)
1. Love divine, all loves excelling,
Joy of Heav'n to Earth come down,
Fix in us thy humble dwelling,
All thy faithful mercies crown;
Jesus, thou art all compassion,
Pure, unbounded love thou art;
Visit us with thy salvation,
Enter ev'ry trembling heart.
2. Breathe, O breathe thy loving Spirit
Into ev'ry troubled breast;
Let us all in thee inherit,
Let us find thy promised rest;
Take away our love of sinning;
Alpha and Omega be;
End of faith as its beginning,
Set our hearts at liberty.
Come, Almighty to deliver;
Let us all thy grace receive;
Suddenly return, and never,
Never more thy temples leave.
Thee we would be always blessing,
Serve thee as thy host above,
Pray, and praise thee without ceasing,
Glory in thy perfect love.
4. Finish, then, thy new creation;
Pure and spotless let us be;
Let us see thy great salvation
Perfectly restored in thee;
Changed from glory into glory
Till in Heav'n we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise!
Psalm 139 - “Search me…”
Karl Popper -
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.