Letter to the Church in Thyatira
Reading Rev 1:9-11 & 2:18-29
Unlike the three cities we have already looked at Thyatira was a pretty nondescript sort of place. It was a lot smaller and a lot more insignificant than the others. All it really had in it's favour was that it prospered as a trading centre. It had no fantastic buildings, no huge temples to the gods and no real political status.
It was an army town with a Roman garrison stationed there and was on the main road through that part of Asia, which we now know as modern Turkey.
There was one thing which the city of Thyatira was particularly well known for, and that was the manufacture and sale of purple cloth.
Purple dye was very expensive and normally only royalty and the very wealthy would be able to afford to buy cloth dyed with it. The dye came from a tiny snail like creature called a murex which was only found along this part of the coast and was quite rare.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote that each snail was worth twenty times its weight in gold.
We have no idea at all how the Church in this town came into being.
There is a story which we can read in Acts 16 about a woman called Lydia.
She came from the city of Thyatira and was a seller of purple cloth. She was one of the first converts when the apostle Paul founded the Church in Philippi. A suggestion is that after her conversion, Lydia decided to go back to her home town to tell the people the good news and so started the Church. We do know that by the time the book of Revelation was written, Thyatira had a large and prosperous congregation..
In this letter in verse 19 Jesus speaks of it in the warmest terms
"I know your deeds, your love and faith your service and perseverance"
He also goes on to say that the Church is now doing more in the way of service and deeds than they had ever done before. The Church in Thyatira seems to have been blessed with a humble ministry that showed faith, hope and love.
The Church at Thyatira seemed to have understood that the Christian life is a life of continuing growth. Christian growth is seen in many different ways in the Bible. Sometimes it is seen as the gradual maturing of a human being from infancy to adulthood.
At other times it is seen as the increasing fruitfulness of a grape vine. I liken it to riding a bike. As long as you keep moving forward you are OK. If you slow down you start to wobble and if you stop you fall off.
All of these things show us that it is vital for our Christian lives that we keep moving forward, that we keep growing.
Is our Christian life really like that?
Most of us will remember that we began well but we started to slow down a little at some point. Some of us will even remember times that we have stopped moving forward completely and started moving backwards, backsliding as it's commonly known.
The New Testament speaks to us today about growth in faith and love, in knowledge and holiness. The Christians in Thyatira were also growing, growing in love and faith and in service and perseverance.
But in verse 20 Jesus says to them
"despite all of these good things that you are doing I have this against you.
You tolerate that woman Jezebel who calls herself a prophetess. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of foods sacrificed to idols.
In that healthy church a disease had been allowed to spread without being stopped.
The Church at Thyatira had been commended by Jesus for it's love and faith, service and endurance, but holiness is not included among it's qualities. It had allowed one of its female members to preach an outrageous message and it seems that they had made no attempt to stop her.
Her name probably wasn’t Jezebel but reflected back to the story in 1 Kings where king Ahab of Israel married Jezebel who was the daughter of the king of the Sidonians. As a result of this Ahab started to worship Ba’al and Jezebel started to kill off the prophets of God.
There were temple prostitutes, both male and female, associated with the worship of Baal. It was Jezebel who spread that degraded worship among the ten tribes of Israel until it became one of the popular religions of the day.
This type of immorality is what was being encouraged by this prophetess in Thyatira. They did nothing to try to stop her and many in the church were following her teachings.
Thyatira had love but they tolerated an evil, self styled prophetess.
There is a group in America who send out young girls to sleep with men as an evangelistic tool. They use this as a means to get the men into Church and so they believe their behaviour is therefore justified.
The Bible tells us that this sort of behaviour is sin! There is no excuse for believing otherwise. It's sin and we know that sin is abhorrent to God. So the whole Church is to blame for allowing this to happen, for allowing this false teaching.
The whole church would be held responsible for not following Biblical principles of discipline among it's members. The Bible tells us very clearly in several places in the New Testament that we should be a special people, a holy people, set apart for God.
1 Thessalonians 4:3 says
It is God's will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; :that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honourable,
Ephesians 1:4 tells us
For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.
and there are many other verses with the same message.
But of course we know that if it's God's will for us to be holy then Satan is bound to try to stop us. If the devil can't destroy the Church through persecution and heresy he will certainly try to corrupt it with evil.
What was this woman, this Jezebel, actually teaching?
Well she first of all claimed divine revelation. She claimed that the words she was speaking came directly from God. Teachers like Jezebel and others such as the ones who had bothered the Church in Ephesus, were convinced that they were delving into secret mysteries known only to them.
They boasted that only they had a private relationship with God that was not available to others. They saw themselves as a sort of spiritual aristocracy, the favoured elite. They would brag that they had searched out the deep truths of God.
They believed that all matter, including the human body, was evil, that only the spirit was good and could be saved. If this was true then the sins of the flesh could be freely indulged in without damaging the spirit in any way.
This was known as Gnosticism and caused a lot of trouble for many years in the early church. There is no aristocracy among Christians. There is no elite that God speaks to in special secretive ways.
In God’s eyes all Christians are equal. The difference is that Satan's deep secrets lead to eternal damnation while the deep things of God lead to eternal salvation.
So Jesus Christ calls on the followers of Jezebel in Thyatira to repent. In fact Jesus says that they have already had the opportunity to recognise their sin and turn away from it, but they refused!
Verse 21 tells us "I have given her time to repent of her immorality but she is unwilling"
We know that our God is patient, that He doesn't want anyone to perish, that He wants all to be saved, to come to Him in repentance.
He has given Jezebel the opportunity and she has decided that she doesn't want it. So Jesus pronounces the judgement of God on Jezebel.
The punishment appears to fit her crime.
The place where most of her wickedness seems to have taken place will be the place of her judgement. Her bed will become a bed of suffering. The pleasures of sin will become the pains of affliction and all of her followers who are too weak to repent and turn to Christ will suffer intensely. The entire group of her followers will be brought to an end and even killed if necessary.
It's quite likely that this is exactly what happened to Jezebel and her followers.
The message comes over loud and clear.
Repent or face the consequences.
But there were some in the Church who had not followed her teaching. There were some who had never tried to find out these deep secrets.
In other words there was a Godly remnant in Thyatira. A group of people who had not defiled themselves with the sin that she taught. All Christ tells us is that, if we find ourselves living in this sort of situation we should just hold fast to what we already have. The good solid teaching that we know is truth.
The letter ends in much the same way as the others. It ends with promises from God to those who are able to overcome.
An overcomer is defined here as a person who is able to keep to the moral law of Christ, a person who does the will of God to the end. To those who can achieve this He makes two great promises:-
1st. I will give him authority over the nations, He will rule them with an iron sceptre and he will dash them to pieces like pottery
2nd I will also give them the morning star.
In the first the Christians are promised power over their enemies. Psalms 2:7 says this, talking of Christ:-
I will proclaim the decree of the LORD: He said to me, "You are my Son; today I have become your Father. 8:Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. :You will rule them with an iron sceptre; you will dash them to pieces like pottery."
In the second Jesus promises to give them the morning star.
In Revelation 22:16 Jesus is described as the bright morning star. If this is the case then Christ is promising to give Himself to those who overcome.
An alternative is that the morning star is the planet Venus. For the Romans this star means victory and sovereignty. Roman generals built temples to Venus and all of Caesar's armies had it inscribed on their standards or flags.
If this is the correct interpretation then Jesus is promising them that they will have victory and will share with Him in ruling the world.
Where does all of this leave us today. Do we have false prophets and teachers who are trying to lead us astray? We certainly do!!
There are many false cults and groups even in this country who have perverted and twisted scripture to suit their own ends.
There are individuals who are part of accepted Church life who teach false doctrine.
It is our Christian duty to read and know the Scriptures. To be sure that the things we are being taught are truly the word of God, and to take action against any in the Church who would try to lead us astray. Whatever I teach you should not be accepted simply because I have college training.
It’s the responsibility of each and every Christian to read and study the Bible, and if we are taught anything which we feel goes against Scripture then we should question it.
We should be encouraged to read Christian books and particularly books which make the Bible easier to understand. This is our responsibility, each one of us. I wonder this morning how many of you can really say that you do these things.
Make sure that you keep moving forward in your Christian lives. Make sure that you don’t start wobbling or even going backwards.
Because you will fall off!!
