The Compromised Church; Revelation
2:18-20
We are now in the fourth of
the seven letters to the churches in
In each of these letters
there is the commission followed by a reference to the Lord Jesus Christ, and
nearly all of these indicate some attribute and some element that was pictured
in that initial vision that John had when he was on
Revelation 2:18, “To the
angel of the church in Thyatira write: These are the words of the Son of God,
whose eyes are like blazing fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze.” The
angel of the church, as we have studied before, is like a heavenly court
officer. This particular angel has a responsibility to the Supreme Court of
heaven to record the operation of the integrity of the Lord Jesus Christ as he
works out His justice within these various congregations. So it is going to be
a record in the heavenly court of how these churches responded to the
condemnations and the commendations of these evaluation reports. It is
addressed to the angel of the church because the role of the angel, as we see
throughout the whole book of Revelation, is to record information and to execute
judgment on mankind. That fits the role of the angels. That is why AGGELOS [a)ggeloj] is
never used anywhere of a pastor-teacher. We then have a threefold description
relating to the character of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is called the Son of God,
He has eyes like a flame of fire, and His feet are like fine brass.
Thyatira is located about 50
miles to the south east of our last location which was
The point that Jesus made in
John 15 is that if we are going to advance in the spiritual life it means that
we have to abide in Christ. That means staying in fellowship—maximum amount of
time in fellowship. The great principle of grace is that you don’t have to feel
guilty about sin, there is complete and total forgiveness
because Christ paid for the sin. The great principle of grace is that, yes, we
are going to sin and we are going to continue to commit the same sins over and
over again, and there is always recovery, there is always forgiveness, God
always meets us where we are, and it doesn’t matter how much we fail or how
many times we commit the sin there is always forgiveness, always recovery. But
that doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences. It doesn’t means that we didn’t
waste time in terms of our own spiritual advance and spiritual growth. This has
always been the struggle among Christians through the ages: how do you balance
a gracious attitude towards spiritual failure with the reality that you have
certain mandates in Scripture to stay in fellowship. So we have to learn that
we have to be gracious without become licentious or antinomian on the one hand,
and we have to maintain strict standards for our own life without becoming
legalistic in the other direction. So there always seems to be this push-pull
in the Christian life and we can only take care of our own Christian life, we
can’t look across at somebody else. We each have to go through this and we can
only do it through the teaching ministry of God the Holy Spirit.
This was a major trade center and one of their products was a purple dye. It was a
different purple dye from what was usually available. It was made from a
certain root and that made it a much less expensive cloth that the purples dye
that came out of
What we see in the background
study of Thyatira is that they had a situation that is increasingly common
through the circumstances that we find in the modern 20th century church. That
is, the struggle to live the Christian life in the midst of a hostile
surrounding culture, a culture that is officially hostile to Christianity and a
culture that is socially hostile to Christianity. Their solution to the
external pressure was to compromise, and they had compromised very deeply. There
were those in the congregation who were positive and who had advanced in their
spiritual lives and who have been very successful, but there were also those
who have held to that same pernicious doctrine we have run across already, the
doctrine of the Nicolaitans which was a form of antinomianism
and licentiousness. In this particular section it says that there were some who
had taken or knew the deep things of Satan. We are not exactly sure what that
is but it certainly indicates absorbed and assimilated some profoundly false
doctrine and this was acceptable to the rest of the congregation. This is what
you always get in paganism, the destruction of any kind of absolutes. This is
why there is such a battle over origins in our schools and the study of
creation vs. evolution vs. intelligent design. There is always this conflict
because the unbeliever doesn’t want to come face to face with the fact that
there is a God to whom they will be accountable. That is the bottom line. The
unbeliever knows in the depths of his soul that God exists, and he knows that
he is going to be held accountable. He has rejected God and he continues to
suppress the truth by means of unrighteousness in order to avoid coming face to
face with his own mortality and accountability, and the more he suppresses the
more hostile he is to anyone who comes along and says there is absolute truth.
And as our culture has slipped it anchor from its Judeo-Christian heritage we
are adrift upon the sea of relativity, which is always what paganism produces. So
we live in a world that has little understanding or tolerance of someone who is
standing firmly for moral absolutes. What we have is the pseudo concept of
tolerance which really means approval. We have to be tolerant of homosexuals, we have to be tolerant of different religions,
which means we have to approve them. Of course, we can approve everything
except biblical Christianity. If you are trying to hold to one truth, that
there is only one absolute truth, one God who has revealed himself in the Bible
and ultimately through the Lord Jesus Christ who died on the cross as a
substitute for our sins, then you are anathema, the enemy. More and more we are
running into this in our culture where Christians are the
bad guys.
Just as this impacts us today,
and most of us come out of the morass of moral relativism, we struggle with
that. We get bombarded with the things we watch on television, the ideas we
read in the media, from our peers in the work place. We are pressured to show
approval of everybody’s lifestyle no matter what it involves. The attitude that
we should have is not that we approve it but we tolerate it. We are not going
to judge the homosexual we work with any more than I am going to judge the
liars and the thieves and the lazy and irresponsible people and all the other sinners
we work with, including ourselves. But that doesn’t mean that we are going to
whitewash anybody’s particular sinful behaviour and say that it is good. That
is what many of these groups want, for us to just validate their sin.
We have to deal with this
issue that is manifest in our churches and that is the issue of compromise with
the culture around us. A couple of examples. One is in
the Pentecostal church. Pentecostalism has compromised with the worldview of
mysticism. It is a form that is saying that God is directly communicating to me,
speaking to me through various revelatory gifts apart from the Word of God and
may even contradict the Word of God. We also have compromises with legalism in
the form of lordship salvation which is permeating so many churches today. Many
people don’t know what it means by that term, but basically what lordship
salvation teaches is that if you claim to believe that Jesus Christ died for
your sins and then you reject Him or you continue a lifestyle of sin after
that, then maybe it wasn’t true faith and you weren’t really saved to begin
with. It is an assault of the grace of God, just another form of legalism and
attempts to control local congregations. We also have the false doctrines of amillennialism, covenant theology, replacement theology,
the influx of postmodernism into seminaries an into
just the thinking of pew-sitting Christians. All of those are areas that seem
to pressure us to compromise with the culture around us.
The church at
So the challenge to us is to
maintain our biblical orthodoxy, both in terms of our academics and
intellectual thinking and also in terms of our practical life,
that we are living consistent with what we say we believe.
This is addressed to the
church in Thyatira and it makes a threefold reference to the Lord Jesus Christ
as he appeared in Revelation chapter one. That term “Son of God” is a new term,
it wasn’t used in chapter one. This is the only place ion the book of
Revelation where we find the title Son of God. Second, He has eyes like a flame
of fire; third, he has feet like fine brass. What does it mean that He is the
Son of God? This is based on a Hebrew idiom, that of you had certain
characteristics in your life then you would be said to be the son of that characteristic.
It is an adjectival expression. It is not talking about ancestry, parentage, it is talking about the fact that you are
expressing the characteristic of the noun. So when it says that Jesus is the
Son of God it is saying that Jesus is God. When it says he is the Son of Man it
is emphasizing His humanity. Son of God originated from the very lips of the
Lord Jesus Christ; He claimed to be the Son of God. Those around Him indicated
that He was the Son of God, and He is assumed to be and declared to be the Son
of God throughout the New Testament. The phrase “Son of God,” which emphasizes
His deity, is used forty-five times in the New Testament. But it is used only
this one time in Revelation. It is used in John 1:34 by John the Baptist when
he announces to the crowds who this individual was that he had baptized. Also
one of the disciples, Nathanael, when he first meets
Jesus: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God.” Notice that he immediately equates this
with the Davidic covenant, that he is the King of Israel. John 3:18, we have
the promise that is either stated by Jesus or by John: “Whoever believes in him
is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because
he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” Notice something.
Look at one part of the verse. What is the condition to avoid judgment? Belief. Are there any good works in there? No. Any ritual in there? No. It just says, “Whoever believes is
not condemned/judged.” What is the condition for
condemnation? Not believing. Cf. John 11:27, “Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I
believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the
world.” Notice: She connects the Old Testament concept of Messiah to the term Son
of God. Romans 1:4, “and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with
power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our
Lord.” What this verse and the next verse we will look at Acts 13:33, are, are references to the declaration of Jesus as “My begotten
Son” in Psalm 2:7, which is quoted in Hebrews 1:5. It is a statement of the
deity of Christ and His Sonship. Acts 13:33, Paul is talking: “he [God] has
fulfilled for us, their children, by raising up Jesus.
As it is written in the second Psalm: “‘You are my
Son; today I have become your Father.’” The context of Psalm two is talking
about the Davidic sonship, but it also indicates divine sonship, that He is the
Son of God. He is also the human son of David, and we see that also in Psalm
two because in verse 6 we read: “I have installed my King on
Psalm 2:8, God says: “Ask of
me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your
possession.” That is this pause we are in right now during the church age. Jesus
is seated at the right hand of God the Father in session and he is asking the
Father. That hasn’t happened yet, it happens at the second coming. Psalm 2:9, “You
will rule them with an iron scepter; you will dash
them to pieces like pottery.” What is going top happen when Jesus returns? He
is going to execute a rod of iron operation in order to bring all of mankind
under submission to His authority. Psalm 2:10ff, “Therefore, you kings [leaders of the Gentile nations], be wise; be warned,
you rulers of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son,
lest he be angry and you be destroyed in your way, for his wrath can flare up
in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”
We looked at Psalm 2:9 with
reference to the rod of iron. Now look at what happens at the end of this particular
evaluation report on the church at Thyatira. Look at Revelation 2:26, “To him
who overcomes and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the
nations— …”This is the promise to the overcomer, the
victorious believer. Where did “I will give authority over the nations” come
from” Psalm 2:8. Revelation
So the challenge for us is to
recognize who Jesus Christ is and to let that impact the way we live, the way
we advance in the Christian life.