Texts:  Rev 2:18-29, 2 Peter 2:1-12                                                                                    4^th Lent Midweek

Jezebel

            In the name of the Son of God, who has eyes like fire and feet like burnished bronze, dear friends in Christ:

            Last week, in our continuing series of meditations on the letters to the churches of Asia, we heard what the Lord Jesus had to say to the Christian congregation at Pergamum.  In their favor, the Lord gave them high marks for their steadfast courage in the face of violent persecution.  Even under severe threats of punishment, they refused to renounce their faith in the Lord. Some of them were even martyred – choosing death over the opportunity to deny Jesus and live.  These we know received the victor’s crown of eternal life, and served as faithful examples for their fellows – as they do for all of us even today.

            But there were also problems at Pergamum.  It seems that some members of the congregation had fallen under the influence of two particularly pernicious false teachings referred to in the letter by Jesus as “the doctrines of Balaam and the Nicolaitans”.  In short, these two errors worked together to suggest to the members that God’s Law did not have to be obeyed, that sin was no longer a big deal, and that from a Christian point of view, it was perfectly all right to engage in any number of immoral behaviors.  Thus, some people were despising the cross of Christ and the Lord who suffered so much to save them from sin – and not to give them a license to continue in it.  These the Lord called to repent, promising his complete forgiveness for those who would turn back to the truth of his way.

            Well, tonight we go the church in the city of Thyatira, a congregation that also suffered from problems of false teachings being present in their midst; but first a little about the city and its peculiar situation.  Thyatira was about twenty miles southeast of Pergamum, and was an important trade center.  In particular, the city was known for the production of fine fabrics and a certain highly sought after purple dye.  Obviously the two went together quite well; and just to give you an idea, no matter where you went in the Roman world, if you said that someone was clothed in Thyatiran purple, you were saying that they were sitting in the lap of luxury and didn’t mind showing it off.  So business thrived at Thyatira, so much so it seems, that unlike their neighbors in the last couple cities we’ve examined, the pagan citizens here didn’t have time to pay much attention to their gods – I mean, after all, who needs religion when everything is going well?  There were only a few rather small temples in the city, and even those were for relatively minor characters in the Greek pantheon.  And the cult of the worship of Roman emperors, so popular at Smyrna and Pergamum, didn’t even seem to catch on here at all.

Addressing the Christian church at Thyatira, Jesus calls himself the one who has “eyes like fire and feet like burnished bronze”. His feet of burnished bronze would indicate holiness and strength and hardness – perhaps for stamping out evil. The burning eyes suggest that he is able to see into the hearts of men for purposes of judgment, and perhaps for purification.  But with these burning eyes, the Lord is able to detect certain good points in this church.  He sees them as an active congregation, translating the Gospel of grace into works of love and service.  In general, the people in the Roman world were always surprised and amazed at how the Christians cared for others – especially those whom their society traditionally cast out:  the poor, sick, old, disfigured, and physically and mentally impaired.  And so the loving actions of the church would have stood out even more clearly in a dog-eat-dog business town like Thyatira. Jesus commends them for their loving work, and says that these outstanding evidences of their faith had grown stronger over time.

But, as I said before, not all was well in the church.  Jesus sharply criticizes them for tolerating in their midst a self-proclaimed prophetess whom he calls “Jezebel”.  It’s very likely that this is not her real name.  Jezebel, you may recall, was a notoriously wicked woman mentioned in the Old Testament.  Jesus probably uses her name here much like we do when we refer to any especially evil woman as a Jezebel – though he probably also means that there’s a direct correlation in the actions of the two characters.

The original Jezebel lived about 800 years before the time of Christ.  She was the daughter of the king of Sidon, a small but very wealthy kingdom that neighbored the northern kingdom of Israel.  The king of Israel at the time was Ahab: a politically shrewd but morally spineless man.  Though he was a believer in the one true God, he was pretty wishy-washy in his convictions. He was willing to bend whichever way the wind was blowing if it seemed to be to his advantage.  Anyway, Ahab managed to secure the hand of Jezebel in marriage; and for him it was a political triumph to marry the daughter of his wealthy neighbor.  It allowed him to forge a strong alliance with the kingdom of Sidon, which, he thought, would guarantee a bright future of peace and prosperity for his nation.

So Jezebel became Ahab’s queen in his capital city of Samaria.  The trouble was that she was an avid worshipper of the Canaanite god Baal. And when she came for the wedding, she brought with her a few wagons full of idols of Baal and his various consorts, along with some 400 of the idols’ prophets.  To please his new wife, Ahab had several temples built for Baal, along with the sacred groves that were used for his unholy, and shall we say “sexually explicit” worship.  Ahab even directed the placement of one the Baal idols right in the temple of the true God in the city of Samaria.  Naturally, official sanction of these false gods at the highest levels of national authority led to widespread adoption of Canaanite religion in Israel.  And at first, it was kind of a “both and” sort of deal.  You could worship the Lord, or Baal, or both of them together if you wished.  No problem. Later, however (and it didn’t take long), the worship of the true God was actively discouraged.  Under Jezebel’s direction, the prophets of the Lord were persecuted, driven out, and some were killed.  Elijah was the last one, and even he had to go into hiding for several years.  And that’s the way it usually goes with false gods and false doctrines when they are introduced into a place where the Lord alone is recognized and worshipped: first the adherents of false religion want just a place.  “Just be tolerant of us.  We’re small and insignificant, and we won’t bother you a bit.”  Then, some time later, they expect equality.  “Hey, ours is a valid faith.  We’re just as good as you.  You don’t think you’ve got a monopoly on the truth, do you?”  And finally, in the end, they demand total dominance.  “Look: we’re in charge here.  Join us, get out, or suffer the consequences.”

This, it seems, was the rising threat to the church at Thyatira.  They had a problem with false doctrine, but their situation was a lot more critical than that at Pergamum.  There the false teaching was held by several members of the congregation, but the leaders of the church were not teaching it.  It was more like a cancer or gangrene in the body, as it were.  It needed to be cut out.  The mistaken people needed to be shown their errors and taught what was right – and if they refused to change, they needed to be expelled from the congregation. But Thyatira had a far more dangerous situation:  this Jezebel prophetess was actively pushing her false teachings.  She was presenting herself with an air of authority, claiming that her new insights were given to her by God.  And unfortunately, the congregation and its leaders were tolerating her and allowing her to continue unchallenged.  The leaders, who should have known better, were spineless like King Ahab.  They were willing to put up with her false teaching for the sake of worldly peace in the church.  They didn’t want to offend anyone.  Meanwhile, many in the congregation were happily soaking up her doctrines – doctrines the Lord Jesus calls “Satan’s so-called deep secrets”.  So it’s pretty clear what he thought of them.

The situation was critical.  In response to it, the Lord says that he himself would solve the problem.  He says that he had given her time to repent. Apparently some faithful Christians had confronted her with the truth, likely several times; but she remained entrenched in her errors.  Therefore the Lord says he would inflict a debilitating illness on her – “cast her on a bed of suffering”, he says; though it’s not altogether clear if we are to understand this as a literal physical illness, or perhaps as a spiritual form of suffering.  In any case, those who committed adultery with her – that is those mature Christians who allowed themselves to be seduced by her false teachings – would also be made to suffer similarly.  And “her children”, those who were thoroughly born and raised in her deceptions and lies, the Lord says he would strike dead.  And again it’s not clear if he means that they would physically fall over dead – or if he means that they would die spiritually, that is, lose the Christian faith altogether; but either way the ultimate results are the same.

 And from all this it’s evident that the Lord is jealously watchful of precisely what is being taught in the church that bears his name.  He takes a dim view of those who claim to speak for him, but come up with doctrines born in their own imaginations.   He will not tolerate the mixing of his truth with Satan’s lies. And his judgments don’t fall on just those who do the false teaching, but also on those who know the truth and fail to censure a false prophet in their midst, and on those too who are led astray.

All of which speaks for the absolute need for every Christian congregation (and denomination) to judge the doctrine of its teachers in light of God’s Word, and for those who are teachers to be watchful and constructively critical of each other.  This is especially difficult these days because we live in a society very much like first century Thyatira:  one focused on business and pleasure, and subject to the myth of relativism – that popular notion that there is no such thing as absolute truth; or if there is, there’s no way to know it for sure.  Part of it too is that very often we don’t want to bother to try to find the truth, because we don’t want to have to deal with the implications.  It’s easier to be wishy-washy like Ahab, and just go with the flow.  “Doctrine divides”, we are told, and division is bad; therefore it must be that doctrine is bad – so let’s ignore or get rid of those who insist that it is important.

And it’s true that division is bad.  It’s the sad result of sin.  But that’s the problem:  we are all divided from God on account of our sin.  That’s exactly why we need doctrine because it’s what divides truth from error – the Gospel of Jesus Christ that saves from Satan’s lies that damn. Ultimately, doctrine – the content of what is taught in the church – divides life from death.  And when Jesus comes in judgment he’s going to do the dividing:  those who believe in his true Gospel will live, and those who don’t will perish in hell. So we in the church should make correct doctrine our top priority.  It’s amazing to me that we would all agree that a person who goes around murdering people is a terrible sinner who should be stopped – but we don’t get nearly as worked up over a false prophet in the church who murders souls.

What do I mean?  Let me give you a couple “in house” examples.  Take the case of an LCMS pastor named Paul Bretscher.  (Yes, I’m naming names!)  He started his ministry in the early sixties, and he made no secret of the fact that he denied pretty much all of the fundamental articles of the Christian faith.  He doesn’t believe in the divinity of Christ, the authority or truthfulness of the Bible, or the atonement for sin that Jesus made for us on the cross.  And yet he served for forty years as a pastor in our own church body.  Only after he retired about two years ago did he publish a book called Christianity’s Unknown Gospel.  In it he explains what he’s taught all along:  that for two thousand years the Christian church has totally misunderstood who Jesus was and what he taught, but thank goodness, now he, Paul Bretscher, was setting things straight.  Apparently he alone understands the “deep secrets”.  In view of the book, the authorities who long overlooked his heresies were finally forced to remove him (reluctantly) from the roster of LCMS pastors. But the question is how many people have in the interim had their souls destroyed by his fabrications?

Or again, in our Synod there are some 200 or more pastors who participate in the modern charismatic movement and who are actively teaching the false doctrines associated with it.  But whenever the Synod meets in convention, we never deal with the issue.  Though resolutions are submitted to confront these errors, they are shot down or die in committee because as a group we simply don’t want to have an argument about doctrine.  The majority don’t want to see any division on account of it.  The same will likely be true of the Synod’s current crisis with those among its teachers and leaders who are actively pushing for changing our understanding of issues that deal with church fellowship.  Some of these seem willing to sacrifice just about any cherished truth of God if it means we that we will then be able hold hands and pray to the “the great spirit in the sky” with somebody we couldn’t before. It’s tragic:  as a synod we are losing our conviction that doctrine is vital for the life of the church.

But we need to bring this closer to home still.  The letter to the church at Thyatira speaks to each of us individually. Every one of us has the responsibility to know the truth of God’s Word and to judge what is being taught in light of it so that we can recognize and reject the false prophets that the Bible says will certainly arise among us.  Jesus and his apostles opposed false doctrine with sharp words when they encountered it.  They didn’t avoid confrontation; but they argued from God’s Word to show the truth. We need to be prepared to do the same – which means that we need to be constantly studying and growing in God’s Word so that we will be equipped to do just that.  In this way will be able to hold on to the saving truth that he has entrusted to us until he comes to divide his sheep from the goats.

“To him who overcomes and does my will to the end”, Jesus says, “I will give authority over the nations.”  It suggests an ongoing battle to keep the faith.   Satan isn’t giving up the fight, so neither can we.  But we know that by God’s grace, he has given us everything we need to win:  his truth to hold on to, and his Holy Spirit to give us the strength and faith to hold it. Thus holding fast to his Word, we can be sure that we will overcome, and so be given the right to sit with Christ on his throne and rule with him forever.  All praise, glory, and thanks be to him alone.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!