[Video of Texas Stadium implosion]
At 7:07 a.m. CDT on April 11, 2010, 11-year-old Casey Rogers, who won an essay contest for the job, pressed the button that began the process of demolishing Texas Stadium. Although the stadium had survived continuous onslaughts from the elements over its nearly 40 year life, it was brought down from the inside by over 2,700 pounds of carefully placed explosives. In a sense, that implosion is a pretty good picture of the church that we’ll look at this morning – the church at Pergamum. Go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Revelation 2 and I’ll begin reading in verse 12:
12 “And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write: ‘The words of him who has the sharp two-edged sword.
13 “‘I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is. Yet you hold fast my name, and you did not deny my faith even in the days of Antipas my faithful witness, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells. 14 But I have a few things against you: you have some there who hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, so that they might eat food sacrificed to idols and practice sexual immorality. 15 So also you have some who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans. 16 Therefore repent. If not, I will come to you soon and war against them with the sword of my mouth. 17 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it.’
We’ll use the common outline that the messages to all seven churches share as the basis for examining this message to the church at Pergamum.
1. Church - Pergamum
The city of Pergamum was situated about 50 miles north of Smyrna and about 100 miles north of Ephesus. It was built at the base of a coned shaped hill about 10 miles inland from the Aegean Sea. The city was famous for its library, which contained 200,000 parchment scrolls, which were later given to the library in Alexandria as a gift from Anthony to Cleopatra.
During John’s time, Pergamum had become the center of Caesar worship for the entire province of Asia. In addition to the temples to the Roman emperors a whole host of pagan temples and altars had been built on the hill which rose 1,000 feet above the city.
Among them were two prominent temples. The first was the temple to Zeus, the greatest of the Greek gods. The second, which is even more relevant to the message to the church in Pergamum, was a temple to Asklepios, the god of healing, who was designated as “soter” or “savior”. The symbol for Asklepios was the serpent and snakes were even used in the healing process there. People flocked there from the surrounding areas in order to receive the healing touch of one of these snakes.
Just as we saw with Smyrna, we really don’t know much at all about the church in Pergamum. It is not mentioned elsewhere in the New Testament. Although we can’t be sure, it was most likely established as an outreach of the church at Ephesus during Paul’s time there.
2. Christ
…him who has the sharp two-edged sword.
This is certainly an appropriate description of Jesus for the church at Pergamum for several reasons. First, we know that the symbol of the city was the sword, because Pergamum was one of the few cities that had been give the “right of the sword” by Rome and thus had the ability to carry out capital punishment on its own.
As we saw in the vision of Jesus in chapter 1, the sword which comes out of the mouth of Jesus is also a picture of judgment. We’ll see this same sword again in Revelation 19 as it is used by Jesus to smite the nations. This is quite a contrast to the reassuring picture of Himself that Jesus gave to the church at Smyrna when He described Himself as the first and the last and the one who became dead and was now alive. There is a clue here that there is a serious problem in the church at Pergamum that is going to require Jesus to deal with it in a severe manner.
3. Commendation
Last week, we saw that the church in Smyrna was being slandered by a group of Jews that Jesus called the “synagogue of Satan”. But in some respects, the situation in Pergamum must have been even worse. Jesus describes Pergamum as the place where Satan’s throne is and as the place where Satan dwells.
As we’ve already seen in part, Pergamum was the center for ideas that blinded people to the truth. Satan clearly controlled the politics, the religion, and even the medical practices of the city and, as the “deceiver” was using everything at his disposal to attack the Christ followers there. But in spite of this intense pressure, the church there was holding up remarkably well. So Jesus commends the church for…
• Holding fast against overt pressure from the outside
Yet you hold fast my name, and you did not deny my faith even in the days of Antipas my faithful witness, who was killed among you…
The Christ followers there in Pergamum must have faced a situation similar to that in Smyrna. They had refused to burn incense at the temple to the Roman emperor and proclaim him as “lord”. As a result, they were unable to obtain the resulting certificate of citizenship which exposed them to great persecution, including the inability to engage in commerce.
And, at least for one of the believers named Antipas, that persecution resulted in death. We know nothing about Antipas, other than what we have recorded here. But it is significant that Jesus refers to him with the same description – faithful witness – that He had used to describe Himself in Revelation 1:5.
But in spite of this tremendous pressure from those outside the church, the church in Pergamum had remained faithful to Jesus. Even in the midst of all the superstition, paganism and idolatry, they held fast to His name and they did not deny His faith. They certainly confirmed this old adage:
Trying to stamp out the gospel is like hammering a nail – the harder you hit it, the deeper it goes.
Much like the church in Ephesus, the church at Pergamum probably appeared to be quite a successful church when viewed from the outside. But Jesus, from the midst of the churches, had a different vantage point. And from His perspective, the church had some serious problems. So, as He does with five of the seven churches, Jesus has some words of…
4. Condemnation
But I have a few things against you: you have some there who hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, so that they might eat food sacrificed to idols and practice sexual immorality. 15 So also you have some who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans.
Jesus addresses two separate but related groups that were impacting the church. Let’s take a moment to look at each of these separately and then see if we can’t draw some conclusions about why Jesus had these words of condemnation.
The teaching of Balaam
We find the primary account of Balaam in Numbers 22-24. In that account, Balak, the king of Moab, tried to get Balaam to curse Israel. But God would not allow Balaam to do that, even using a talking donkey to prevent him from doing so. But apparently, Balaam, when he was unable to help Balak by cursing the Israelites, found another way to assist Balak and gain some profit for himself in the process. This verse gives us a clue about how he did that:
Behold, these, on Balaam's advice, caused the people of Israel to act treacherously against the Lord in the incident of Peor, and so the plague came among the congregation of the Lord.
Numbers 31:16 (ESV)
This verse still doesn’t allow us to figure out exactly what Balaam had done, but if we go to the account of the incident at Peor in Numbers 25, we can begin to put the pieces together:
While Israel lived in Shittim, the people began to whore with the daughters of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods. So Israel yoked himself to Baal of Peor. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel.
Numbers 25:1-3 (ESV)
When we put all this together, we find that Balaam had counseled Balak to get the people of Israel to commit sexual immorality and intermarry with the Moabites. And as a result, the Israelites were lured into the paganism and idolatry of the Moabites, which aroused God’s anger and led to the death of 24,000 Israelites at the hand of God. What Balak could not do through military might from the outside, he was able to accomplish by infiltrating Israel from the inside.
The Nicolaitans
We also saw the Nicolaitans in the message to the church in Ephesus. There Jesus had praised the church because they hated the practices of the Nicolaitans. Although there are a number of possibilities, we can’t identify this group with any degree of certainty. However, what we do know is that they were operating in the same manner as those who held to the teaching of Balaam.
Although we can’t be certain about the exact teaching of the Nicolaitans, we can get some idea about their doctrine strictly from the name of their leader, Nicolas, which actually bears some striking similarities to the name Balaam:
Balaam (Hebrew) = baal (“conqueror” or “lord”) + am (“people”)
Nicolas (Greek) = nikan (“conqueror” or “lord”) + laos (“people”)
What we find is that both groups sought to conquer the minds of the people by getting them to conform to the world around them. In other words, even though the church was holding fast in spite of pressure from the outside, they were…
• Being destroyed by covert pressure from the inside
Even though Satan hadn’t been successful in his attempts to destroy the church with outside pressure, he had been able use a few carefully placed people to attempt to implode the church from the inside. And apparently the church had either failed to recognize this danger or they knew it was there but they had failed to do anything about it. The church was experiencing two major problems that were overt symptoms of this covert pressure:
Two problems:
1) Eating food sacrificed to idols
This certainly isn’t surprising given the number of pagan temples in Pergamum. People of the city would bring an animal to the temple of their favorite deity where they would offer part of the animal as a sacrifice and then bring the rest home for dinner. So when the unbelieving friends and families of the Christ followers there would invite them over for dinner, they were faced with the decision of whether or not to partake in the meal when they knew the meat was part of a sacrifice to some pagan god.
2) Sexual immorality
Open sexual immorality was just as prevalent, or maybe even more so, than it is in our culture today. Many of the pagan religions were characterized by sexual immorality. And the church was not immune to the pressure for them to indulge in these practices.
The false teachers in the church were teaching that it was okay for the people in the church to go ahead and participate in these practices and still be a committed Christ follower. From what we know from historical records and other Biblical accounts, they were probably using arguments like these:
• These idols are really nothing. They are merely wood and stone. So it’s no big deal to go ahead and eat a meal where some of the meat may have been offered to them. Paul had addressed this exact argument with the church in Corinth:
What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons.
1 Corinthians 10:19, 20 (ESV)
The point that Paul was making is that there is something more than what is just occurring on the surface. There is also a spiritual element to what they are doing in which they are actually participating with demons.
• Our bodies are merely a collection of material matter, so what you do with your body really doesn’t matter. It’s only the soul that matters, so it’s okay to just go ahead and do whatever you want with your body as long as it gives you pleasure. Sounds pretty contemporary doesn’t it? Paul also addressed that kind of thinking with the church at Corinth:
Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.”
1 Corinthians 6:15, 16 (ESV)
God doesn’t prohibit sexual immorality because he is some kind of kill-joy. After all he created sex and, when it is experienced within the bounds of the marriage between one man and one woman it is intended to give us great pleasure. But again there is much more going on than just a physical act. A sexual union also involves powerful emotional and spiritual elements that can’t be separated from the physical act.
Essentially the people in the church were trying to do exactly what we observed among the people of Judah and Israel in the Old Testament prophets. They thought they could somehow separate the secular and sacred elements of their lives. In effect they thought they could keep one foot in the church and the other in the world. But to those who thought that was possible, and to those who tolerated that mindset in the church, Jesus has just one word of…
5. Counsel
• Repent
There are really two groups that Jesus is addressing here with His command to repent.
The first group is those who were holding to the teachings of Balaam and the Nicolaitans. Jesus’ first words to the church in Pergamum were “I know where you dwell…” The Greek word for dwell here is a word that means to “settle down” or to “dwell permanently.” One of the reasons that the people in the church were susceptible to the false teaching of these groups is that they had gotten so comfortable with the world around them that they had settled in to that world and were slowly but surely assimilated into the culture around them. They had forgotten that they were to be merely strangers and aliens here on earth and that there true citizenship was in heaven.
But our citizenship is in heaven…
Philippians 3:20 (ESV)
This group certainly needed to heed the words of Paul in his letter to the Romans:
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect
Romans 12:2 (ESV)
We’ll come back to this principle in just a moment and look at it in more detail.
But there is a second group that Jesus is clearly addressing here – those who have tolerated and permitted the false teaching to remain in the church.
Once again, let’s return to Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth to see how the church at Pergamum should have dealt with these false teachers and those who followed them:
But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler - not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”
1 Corinthians 5:11-13 (ESV)
The church is responsible for judging the behavior of those who claim to be Christ followers within the church. And when that behavior is confronted and those who are practicing immorality refuse to repent and change their behavior, we are to break any association that we have with them.
Before we leave this section, let’s take a few minutes to see if we can’t develop a couple practical principles about…
How to prevent the implosion of the church:
1) Hold fast to the face value of the Bible text
In the church at Pergamum there is evidence that the church had abandoned the face value meaning of the Scriptures. In an attempt to justify their behavior, they had approached the Scriptures with the idea of molding the text to fit their behavior, rather than molding their behavior to conform to the text.
The church certainly had available ample Bible text to make it clear that they were not to eat meat offered to idols or to engage in sexual immorality. Those principles are certainly clear from a number of Old Testament passages. Not only that, but when the Jerusalem Council met in the early years of the church, the participants had prepared a letter which was circulated among the churches. By John’s time the instructions from that letter would have been well known in all the churches. This portion of that letter was particularly relevant to the church in Pergamum:
For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.
Acts 15:28, 29 (ESV)
But what apparently occurred in Pergamum is one of the common elements in the decline of churches throughout history that we’ve seen on Thursday nights. Instead of holding to the face value of the texts, people began to “induce” or “read into” the texts and mold the texts to their lives rather than molding their lives to the text. And that allowed them to justify practices that were clearly prohibited by God in the Bible texts. That is exactly what Paul is warning against in Romans 12. Let’s return to a verse we looked at earlier:
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect
Romans 12:2 (ESV)
Paul warned his readers not to be conformed to the world, but rather to renew their minds. And how is it that we can renew our minds? By taking the face value of the Bible texts and conforming our lives to what we find there.
2) Refuse to tolerate false teaching
Almost all the New Testament writers include warnings against false teachers and the danger of tolerating false teaching within the body of Christ. These words of Paul are particularly relevant for us:
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel - not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.
Galatians 1:6-9 (ESV)
Unfortunately, we live in a world where the tenet of tolerance has infiltrated the church. We are told that we are to tolerate all faiths and that all ways to God are equally valid. And even in the church, we often find that we are encouraged to accept all opinions about the Word of God as equally valid and acceptable, even if they conflict with the face value meaning of the Scriptures. But certainly that is not what Paul was instructing the Galatian church to do. He made it clear that if anyone was perverting the gospel, they were to be accursed – some pretty strong words.
In his book Discipleship on the Edge, Darrell W. Johnson makes this relevant observation:
The church of Jesus Christ is to be an “inclusive” community in the sense that all are welcome: Jew and Gentile, free and slave, male and female – all are welcome! But the church is not to be inclusive of all ideas, of all pre-suppositions, of all social and spiritual persuasions. All of us are welcome, but all of us are then called by the head of the church to repent, to change our minds, to submit our thinking to the thinking of Jesus Christ.
6. Challenge
Two promises to those who overcome:
Before we look at the two promises that Jesus makes to those who overcome, let me just say that we just don’t have enough in the text to fully understand exactly what Jesus is promising here. But in spite of that there has been endless speculation about what these two objects represent. For instance, there are at least twelve different explanations for the white stone that appear to be reasonable and can be supported rather well.
But I’m convinced that there is enough here for us to grasp the overall significance of what Jesus promises:
• Hidden manna
After feeding the five thousand near the Sea of Galilee, a crowd found Jesus the next day and entered into a conversation with Him. Let’s look at a portion of that dialogue, as recorded by John in his gospel:
“Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
John 6:31-33 (ESV)
I can’t help but that when Jesus referred to the hidden manna, John was reminded of this conversation where Jesus compared Himself to the manna provided by God. In his letters to both the Ephesians and the Colossians, Paul also describes Jesus as the one in whom the treasures of God have been hidden:
…God's mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
Colossians 1:2-3 (ESV)
When we put all this together, I am convinced that even though we can’t fully understand everything Jesus had in mind here, it is a picture of being in the presence of the bread of life – Jesus Himself.
• White stone with a new name
Although I have my own opinions about what the white stone might be, I’m going to just stick with the text here. The whiteness of the stone is a picture of holiness – like the white hair and clothing of Jesus that we saw in Revelation 1 and like the white robes that His followers will receive as we’ll see later in Revelation. And the stone is a picture of something lasting. So in some way this white stone represents the lasting nature of our purity that has been imparted to us through the shed blood of Jesus.
What about the new name? Again, there is much speculation about what this might be. Obviously I can’t tell you what the new name is. Although I haven’t received the white stone yet, I’m looking forward to the day when I receive mine from Jesus and find out what that new name is. But I think that there is adequate Biblical precedent to give us some clues about the nature of the new name.
We have at least three examples in Scripture where God gave someone a “new name”
o Abram became Abraham
o Jacob became Israel
o Simon became Peter
In each case, the new name given by God revealed something about God’s task for that individual. So it certainly seems reasonable that the new name we’ll receive will somehow be related to our service in the future and eternal kingdom of Jesus.
According to estimates, nearly 20,000 people observed the implosion of Texas Stadium from the stadium parking lot or from one of the nearby tailgate parties. And as a fan of whoever is playing the Dallas Cowboys, I’ll have to admit there was something quite spectacular and satisfying about the demolition of the stadium. But the implosion of a church that results from the covert pressure from within is certainly not something we want to see. So let’s do our part by holding true to the face value of the Bible text and refusing to tolerate any false teaching that would draw us away from that truth.
