Seductive Licentiousness; Revelation
2:14
Grace is the hallmark
doctrine of biblical Christianity. You don’t fund any other religious systems
or secular philosophies talking about the concept of grace. Grace is the magnificent
truth that underlies everything in the Bible. It has been said that grace is
the sum total of the entire plan of God towards fallen mankind. But as fallen
man in his attempt to define reality on his own terms, as fallen man just seeks
to assert his own will and press his own will on God’s creation, and to define
life on creaturely terms rather than on the creator’s terms, manages to
consistently pervert and misshape the doctrine of grace. One extreme that we
have is that grace is simply defined into something that is earned, something
that is merited, something that is worked for, something requiring man to
perform up to a certain level and then we are worthy of grace. On the other
extreme we have the equal but opposite perversion of grace where grace is
frequently cheapened and diluted by trivializing and minimizing sin and its
destructiveness on all aspects of God’s creation, and especially on the
individual human being. Along with that trivializing and minimizing of sin
there is an equal trivializing and minimizing of the cost of dealing with sin.
That goes by the name of licentiousness. What so often happens when grace is
taught is that people go to the opposite extreme and say, “Well, Christ paid
for all my sins, salvation is free, so I’m free to sin because my sins are paid
for.” In that process what we have done is diminished our whole concept of what
sin is and what its consequences are, but we’ve also diminished the value of
what Christ did. When we talk about salvation being free we need to remember
that all that is being said is that salvation is free to us. Salvation wasn’t
free to God. Salvation cost God the Father God the Son. There was a price that
had to be paid for, our sins and on the cross.
These two opposing poles of
licentiousness on the one hand and legalism on the other are actually the
opposing trends of our sin nature. At the core of the sin nature we have lust
patterns which move us in numerous directions. Sometimes it moves us toward
legalism, sometimes licentiousness. At different stages of our Christian life
we are going to find that we move in different directions. At one stage you may
have been fairly licentious and at another stage you might realize that you’ve
become somewhat arrogant and legalistic. So we have these various lust patters:
approbation lust, power lust, sex lust, materialism lust, all kinds of
different lusts, and these move us in these two different directions. As we
manifest our sin nature we have personal sins in the area of weakness—sins of
the tongue, overt sins, mental attitude sins, but our sin nature also produces
human good. Human good is simply our attempt to try to impress God with our
morality. So as we emphasize one or the other we go in different directions.
When the emphasis is in the area of human good we are going to trend towards
asceticism and legalism. When we are emphasizing personal sins then we move in
the direction of licentiousness, lasciviousness, and antinomianism. All of
those are roughly synonyms. But these drive us in such subtle ways, and as
arrogance dominates the soul—and remember that arrogance is at the core of all
sin nature activity—we become blind to our own failures, our own sins, our own
trends, and we find ways to justify those.
Remember, when we talk about
the various arrogance skills we begin with talking about our self-absorption,
and we move from self-absorption to self-indulgence and from self-indulgence to
self-justification. We get so adept at self-justification and rationalization
for sin that by the time we are probably three or four years of age we are no
longer aware of the ways we are justifying and rationalizing our own sin
nature. It isn’t until the Holy Spirit and the Word of God comes along after we
become a believer that He starts dealing with us in terms of these areas of
arrogance. But the trend for most of us is that we want to justify it: it is not really sinful. Because these habit
patterns of sin for dealing with the pressures of life become second nature to
us we find ways to rationalize and justify those sin habits, those sin
patterns, in ways so that we don’t really have to deal with the sin. Actually
it is more comfortable just to go the path of least resistance and sin, and
then of course we confess it and we are back in fellowship. Then we don’t have
to go through that horrible process of trying to deal with the sin patterns in
our life. But we forget that there are always consequences.
So as we continue to look at
this third short epistle in Revelation chapter two we realize that at the core
of the problem in
In Revelation 2:14, 15 we
have the condemnation of the church at
At the core of this
condemnation are two different theological ideas that have become prevalent in
Grace versus licentiousness.
What does grace mean? Every denomination of Christianity talks about the value
of grace. You can talk to a Roman Catholic and they will tell you that they
believe in grace. However, if you are going to receive the grace of God it is
mediated through the sacraments and if you participate in the sacraments you
receive grace. Jesus merited the grace of God at the cross and so all of God’s
grace is put in a treasury of merit that we tap into as we participate in the
sacraments. Well, see what they have done is through a lot of verbiage they
have redefined grace in terms of works. You have to do something, you have to
be worthy of salvation. In many approaches to the Christian life what Jesus
Christ did on the cross wasn’t to provide you with salvation as a one hundred
per cent substitute for you, what He did on the cross simply makes you saveable.
It is potential: you are saveable if you do the right thing, if you participate
in the right rituals, if you clean up your life, if there are certain sins that
are no longer evident in your life then that salvation has been activated. But
what grace means is the unearned or unmerited favor
or blessing of God toward fallen creatures who deserve
His most severe condemnation. In other words, what grace means is you don’t get
what you deserve, you get something better. We all deserve eternal condemnation
because we are born sinners, we have the imputation of Adam’s sin and we commit
personal sin. We are under condemnation and if we got what we deserved and God
gave us what we have earned it would be eternal condemnation. Romans 6:21, “The
wages of sin is death.” The context there is not talking necessarily about
eternal condemnation, it is in the context of talking about the spiritual life,
but the principle is still true that you earn something by sin, and that is
condemnation. So all of God’s grace is based on the fact that God the Father
paid the price for sin by sending His Son to die on the cross for us. Grave,
therefore, isn’t something that is free, it is something that cost God the
Father. It cost Him His Son. John 3:16.
Some people might ask: “How
could this cost God anything? How can God who is totally self-sufficient lose
anything? He can’t; He can’t lose anything of His nature, but something
dramatic and unusual and unexplainable takes place during that judicial
transaction on the cross. God the Father imputed to Jesus Christ, the second
person of the Trinity to whom He has been eternally united, all the sins of
human history, so that the second person of the Trinity becomes judicially
guilty of all those sins: “He who knew no sin was made sin for us.” It is so
painful to God the Son in this judicial separation that He creams out: “My God,
My God, why have you forsaken me?” The “you” there is a singular you, it is not
a plural. So He is not talking to the Father and the Spirit, He is talking solely
to God the Father. We don’t have anything in the Scripture that talks about
what is happening on the side of God the Father at that moment. But God the Son
is experiencing all of the pain and misery that a Holy God would experience in
bearing the sin of mankind. So what is going on on
the other side of the equation? God the Father is also experiencing that same
judicial separation because He is imputing the sin to the Son, and during those
three hours it is costing God the Father. So Jesus Christ is a sacrifice, and
one of the key ideas of a sacrifice is that you are giving up something that is
valuable to yourself. And God the Father did that when He sent the second
person of the Trinity to become a human being in the act of the incarnation. So
what we see that grace is not free, it is just free to us; but it cost God the
Father something. There was a transaction that occurred in the incarnation and
hypostatic union that while it doesn’t change deity at its very ontological
core (in terms of His essence, so it doesn’t violate immutability) what happens
in the incarnation is that the second person of the Trinity adds to Himself
true humanity, and there is this unity of the second person of the Trinity with
humanity that goes on forever and ever and ever. That will never change.
Something happens in the throne room of God after that. There is now the
humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ that is present in the councils of the
Trinity. This is something that shook heaven in some sense. So grace is such a
powerful concept when we understand what it cost God, and that sin was such an
egregious breech of the entire creation that the only possible solution was for
Jesus Christ, the second person of the trinity, to enter into human history and
go through this inexpressible pain and misery in this judicial punishment. We
can’t minimize the consequences of sin. When we realize that it was just that
innocuous act of Adam eating a piece of fruit in disobedience to God that
brought all this pain, misery and suffering into human history we realize how
complex the consequences of sin are.
When we confess our sin there
is a restoration to fellowship but it doesn’t mean that the consequences are
removed, though sometimes they are. Many times God in His grace ameliorates the
consequences for our sins, so that He constantly deals with us in grace. But
the issue is on our side we diminish the significance of sin because we don’t
think enough about it. So what grace means at salvation is it is free to us, it
emphasizes this payment of a price. That is part of the whole concept of
redemption: to pay a price. A price was paid that freed us from the slave
market of sin. So the picture in the New Testament is one of this payment of a price that took place on the cross.
What happens in licentiousness
is that you come along and say that either that really doesn’t matter or great,
now that was accomplished so now I can do whatever I want to do. What happens
when you adopt that attitude is it diminishes and trivializes grace. It affects
our future role in the
The condemnation: The first
statement is that there are those who hold the doctrine of Balaam. The Lord
says, “I have a few things against
you,” and that is not the best translation. Actually, it is only two. The Greek
word OLIGOS [o)logoj] which means a small number. It isn’t a large number
of problems. The word here translated “hold” is the verb KRATEO [kratew]. Here it is a participle, “those who continue
holding,” present active participle. It is an ongoing action: You consistently
adhere to the teaching/doctrine of Balaam. This is in contrast to the use of
the verb in verse 13 where in commendation the Lord Jesus Christ said: “You
hold fast to my name.” The point is that the congregation as a whole here has
taken a lax attitude toward sin so that it has created an environment in the
congregation where people think that it is okay to violate these principles of
the Word of God because, after all, we are going to be forgiven. As a result of
that the congregation is being affected by this minimization of sin.
“You have people there who
hold to the teaching of Balaam.” Teaching is the verb DIDASKO [didaskw], aorist active indicative, culminative
aorist, he “taught” in the past; “who taught Balak to
entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by
committing sexual immorality.” The
Balaam account is found in Numbers 22-25; 31:16; Deuteronomy 23. In summary,
Balaam was this Gentile prophet, a believer, from the same area of
We have to go to the New
Testament to pick up the accurate interpretation. There are three passage in the New testament that talk about Balaam:
Revelation
The actual error of Balaam is
indicated in Numbers 31:16, “They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice
and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what
happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the Lord's
people.” There it is seen that is was as a result of the counsel of Balaam that
this conspiracy developed. What the Israelites have done by going to the women
of Midian is that they have assimilated human viewpoint
into the divine viewpoint thinking that God wants
We see how seriously God
takes this kind of compromise with licentiousness. In Numbers 25 we see what
happens. First of all, when this rebellion takes place (and it is viewed as a
rebellion) Moses is told to deal with it harshly. The first thing he is told to
do is to round up all the leaders and to publicly hang them, so that everybody
gets the message—verse 4. The second consequence is that the judges of
Furthermore, the consequences
don’t end in Numbers 25. A few months later we come to the events in chapter
31. In chapter 25 we see the consequences to
In Revelation
The same thing was going on
in
The conclusion to this condemnation is that they had distorted and perverted the grace of God in order to justify these sinful actions where they were assimilating with the human viewpoint pagan culture around them in order to lessen the differences, the contrasts between their biblical viewpoint teaching and the human viewpoint teaching of the pagan crowd. We find that same pressure today, that we are constantly as believers pressured to somehow compromise with the world around us so that we don’t stand out, so that we don’t come under the rejection of the cosmic system, so that we don’t have to deal with the pressures of the hostility of a pagan world that surrounds us in everything we do from business, family, and everything else.