I Doubt You'll Recognize This Man. His Name Is ...

I doubt you’ll recognize this man. His name is Heinrich Schliemann. In 1871, Heinrich Schliemann began to fulfill a dream he’d had since his youth----he started excavating an ancient city in Turkey. He was looking for the lost city of Troy---and to the amazement of many, this retired businessman found it. Today, you can still see the ruins of its towers and its walls, which were 16 feet thick.

Schliemann desire to find the ancient city of Troy can be traced back to his fascination with the Greek stories surrounding it. One of those stories is found in Homer’s Illiad. According to Homer the Greeks besieged Troy for ten years without success. And then when the warrior Achilles was killed, many wanted to give up the fight. But the king of Ithaca, Odysseus, came up with a plan to get the Greek army into Troy. Odysseus built an immense wooden horse which supposedly looked something like this… [SLIDE OF TROGAN HORSE]. Odysseus and his warriors hid inside it. And after leaving the horse at the gates of Troy, the Greek army sailed away. The Trojans thinking the Greeks had given up and had left the horse as a gift, brought it inside the gates. [2ND TROGRAN HORSE SLIDE] That night, while the Trojans were sleeping, the Greek ships quietly returned. The soldiers in the horse slipped out and opened the city gates. The Greek army quietly entered Troy and started fires all over the city. The Trojans awoke to find their city in flames. As they tried to flee, they were killed by the waiting Greeks.

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Through the years the story of the Trojan Horse and the fall of Troy have come to represent the subversion of anything from within. Well this letter to the church at Pergamum, helps us to understand that Satan acted something like Ithaca. When Satan found that the outside attacks weren’t as effective as he’d hoped, he changed strategy. He started creating internal problems, most of which could have been avoided if the believers there had been more careful in choosing who they’d do life with. But rather than be cautious they had been careless and as a result, by the time Jesus sent this letter to them they were already learning the hard way that they should have exercised more wisdom in chosing their companions.