Copyright © 2019 by Michael A. Brown
The Neck that Turns the Head
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. I know your
deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are
doing more than you did at first.
Nevertheless,
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 food sacrificed to idols. I have given her time to repent of her immorality,
but she is unwilling. So I will cast her
on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her
suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I am he
who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your
deeds. Now I say to the rest of you in
Thyatira, to you who do not hold to her teaching and have not learned Satan’s
so-called deep secrets (I will not impose any other burden on you): Only hold
on to what you have until I come.
To him
who overcomes and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the
nations – ‘He will rule them with an iron sceptre; he will dash them to pieces
like pottery’ – just as I have received authority from my Father. I will also give him the morning star. He who has an ear, let him hear what the
Spirit says to the churches.” (Rev.
2:18-29)
WHEN the ancient Greek armies found that the city of Troy was impregnable
and that they could not defeat its army, they chose a strategy of deception and
stealth. No doubt we all know the story
and how it ended. They took the city
from within using their famous purpose-built, giant, wooden horse statue within
which some of their elite soldiers were hidden and which the Trojans
unwittingly took within their city gates, leading to their destruction.
At one time, a well-known missionary
society used a strap-line to emphasize just how powerfully God can use women in
ministry and to encourage them into a life of missionary service: “When God
looks for a man to do a job, he finds a woman.”
So there are many well-known examples of women whom God used in the
Bible, including Deborah (Judges ch.4), Hannah (1 Sam. 1:1 – 2:11), Huldah (2
Chr. 34:22-28), Queen Esther (see the book of Esther), Anna (Luke 2:36-38) and
Priscilla (Acts 18:2-3).
Similarly, there are many examples of
women who were used powerfully by God and who are recorded in the annals of
Christian ministry and global missions. Names
that come to mind might include Amy Carmichael, Carrie Judd Montgomery,
Catherine Booth, Ruth Paxson, Aimee Semple McPherson and Kathryn Kuhlman, to name
just a few from the many.
However, if this is true of God himself
(and it certainly is!), then it would be foolish of us not to recognize that it
can also be true of Satan as well. If he
cannot destroy a church from the outside, then he will adopt a strategy that he
hopes will open the way for him to work from within. And if he cannot then destroy it from within,
he will try at least to render it ineffective. And if he thinks that using a man would not
suit his purpose, then he too will use a woman. In the case of this church in Thyatira he did
just that: he used a woman as a Trojan horse.
In Roman-Greek times, it was a common
thing for women to work as priestesses and function as oracles in the cults of
the day. Furthermore, the phenomenon of Montanism in the middle of the second
century AD in nearby Phrygia illustrates the way in which women can sometimes
be used to bring false prophetic leadership and teaching to the life of a group
of God’s people. We do not know the real
name of this woman in Thyatira, of course. She is referred to in this letter simply as ‘Jezebel’
in order to draw out the spiritual connection with the real, historical Jezebel
(the notorious and evil wife of king Ahab) through whom Satan worked to almost
destroy the prophetic word within Israel (1 Ki. 16:31-32; 18:4,13; 21:25-26; 2
Ki. 9:22).
There are several examples in the word of
God which serve to illustrate the influence that it is possible for women to
have upon men. For example, just think
about the influence of Eve upon Adam, of Delilah upon Samson, of Jezebel upon
Ahab, of Bathsheba upon David, or of Solomon’s desire for many women, and the
resultant spiritually destructive consequences from which the nation never really
recovered.
This woman in Thyatira was a deeply
immoral individual who apparently seems to have had some kind of ‘charismatic’
prophetic gift (or so some people in the church thought!). She wormed her way into the life of this
church by feigning faith and masquerading as a self-appointed prophetess, and
eventually her false teaching gained the ear of a part of the congregation,
including some of the leaders. The
combination of a self-confident, strong-willed and domineering personality, an
apparent spiritual gifting, a well-dressed and attractive seductiveness, and
the ability not only to handle men and get her way with them, but also to
persuasively introduce what was in fact false and immoral teaching, is a very
potent mixture when it is all wrapped up in one person! Throw into that mix the temptation of perhaps
having a free, illicit sexual relationship with her as well, and it is clear
why she was such a formidable problem to handle!
Satan’s
strategy
Spiritual warfare is a reality the fact of
which Christians and church communities need to come to terms with and face. It is, and can be, a clear and present danger
to anyone who follows Christ. Satan has many different strategies up his sleeve
with which to attack or hinder believers and church congregations. He may try to hinder believers in their
personal walk with God, or take advantage of unresolved relational problems
among believers. He may try to bring
about disunity among God’s people in order to prevent them from uniting around
a common vision and purpose.
Here in Thyatira we can discern another of
his schemes, vis. to influence (or even take over) the spiritual
leadership of a church in some way with the intention of diverting that church
away from God’s intended purpose into what is simply a human (and therefore
carnal) direction, whether through false teaching, wrong practice or un-dealt
with sin, and thereby frustrate God’s purpose for that church. Remember Korah? Along with a large group of other men, he
attempted to usurp the spiritual leadership of God’s people. If he had succeeded, then no doubt he would
have led the people away from God’s intended purpose for them and taken them back
to Egypt, to become slaves of Pharaoh all over again (Num. ch.16).
Although Jezebel was not the first to
introduce idolatry and its related spiritism into the life of Israel, yet she
did more harm to the nation’s spiritual life than any other of its leaders. Under her reign and influence, the northern
kingdom reached a very low point in its spiritual history.
We can discern this kind of strategy on a
number of occasions in the New Testament epistles. Bringing about sexual immorality in church
life was one of Satan’s key strategies to divert the early first-generation
churches away from God’s intended purpose for them. It seems to have been a besetting sin in quite
a few churches and is also referred to in the brief letters to Ephesus and
Pergamum (2:6,14-15). This is
undoubtedly because immorality was so rampant in Roman-Greek culture and
because sexual practices were traditionally part of the festivities of many of
the pagan cults of that day. So it
should come as little or no surprise when we read that people were tempted to
introduce and/or to tolerate sexual sin in the life of these early churches. In their thinking, why would this new
religion of Christianity be any different to the cults?
So Jude tells us that certain men had
secretly slipped into some churches, changing the message of the grace of God
into a license for immorality (Jude vv.4,8,10-13), and the apostle Peter
relates the same thing (2 Peter 2:1-2,10-15,18-19). Similarly, the apostle Paul rebuked the
believers in Corinth, lamenting the immorality that they were tolerating in
their own church. He reminded them that
God’s purpose for the Church was for her to be presented to Christ as a pure
virgin (1 Cor. ch.5, 6:12-20; 2 Cor. 11:2-3, 12:21), instead of churches becoming
defiled from within because of immorality!
The ultimate danger in
tolerating and allowing carnal human nature to have its way in the church is
that the church is destroyed spiritually and becomes a habitation and
possession of the enemy.
Gaining the ear of other people in a
church (and in particular that of the leaders) means potentially having
influence within the life of that church, and this woman knew that. This Trojan horse appears to have been
unwittingly received into the life of the church, allowed to exercise her ‘spiritual
gift’ and teach the church, and therefore also to influence the leadership, all
seemingly without much discernment. And having gained influence with the
leaders, she then proceeded through her teaching and prophesying to deceive and
dominate a group of believers in the church, including some of its leaders. These leaders certainly didn’t ‘test all
things’ did they? (cf. 1 Thess. 5:21). Almost by default therefore, she became a
de-facto leader.
This situation in the church in Thyatira
was different to that in Pergamum. As
bad as it was to have syncretism and its associated immorality being advocated
by a small group of people within a church (as in Pergamum), here in Thyatira
not only was it in the church, it was also being advocated and affirmed by the
free use of a false ‘charismatic’ gift through a self-appointed leader while
the elders looked on and did nothing.
So she became the proverbial neck that
turned the collective head of this church. Just as the dominating influence of the
historical Jezebel rendered king Ahab weak and powerless, so this woman seems
to have dominated, manipulated, deceived and disarmed these church leaders,
rendering them weak and ineffective. She emasculated their spiritual and moral
strength, using illicit sex to enslave some of these married men to herself.
The Greek word moicheuo (used in 2:22
and meaning ‘adultery’) is different to the word porneuo (used in 2:20-21
and meaning ‘fornication’). So, if it is
correct to assume that the use of the word ‘servants’ in 2:20 refers to some of
the leaders of this church rather than simply to believers, then it seems that
not only was she teaching believers that there was no problem in taking part in
the sexual excesses of the local pagan festivities (on the part of those who
were members of trade-guilds), she was also seducing some of the church’s
leaders into illicit adulterous relationships with herself. And whatever other ‘new revelation’ she was
bringing in her teaching, it did not square with God’s word. Jesus dismissed it as being of satanic origin
(2:24).
There does not seem to have been very much
mutual accountability between these leaders, does there? Like blinded fools, they fell for it and ended
up swallowing Satan’s deceptive bait wholesale, allowing this woman to dominate
them and becoming dependent on her. It
was she who wore the trousers in this church behind the scenes. They tolerated her, they were afraid of her,
and none of them seems to have had the guts to stand up to her and challenge
what was going on. They – and the other
believers who did not agree with it – simply left her to carry on what she was
doing and teaching (2:20).
Through this woman, Satan managed to bring
his evil influence right into the heart of this church community, just as
Jezebel had brought such degrading evil to the very throne of Israel and
through this position to the whole nation. Satan was using this woman to try to conquer and
control this church spiritually from the inside, just as he had used Jezebel to
bring Israel to such a low point in their spiritual history. I wonder just how much of the adultery that
was going on, was kept hidden until the Lord exposed it in this letter?
The need
for godly spiritual leadership and authority
The underlying themes which run through
this whole letter are those of spiritual leadership and authority. This woman is seen as wrongly exercising a
counterfeit spiritual authority, while the church leaders stood by and did
nothing to stop it, just as Jezebel ruled through her weak husband Ahab. The Lord Jesus presents himself as the risen
and exalted Messiah, the Son of God, the morning star who will rule the nations
(2:18,26-28; cf. Rev. 22:16, Ps. 2:6-9), in contrast to the local patron god
Apollo (son of Zeus) whom many local people would have worshipped. The believers of the church (including the
leaders) are exhorted to overcome this particular problem which is plaguing the
life of their church, and to understand that they are a people who are being
prepared to one day rule along with Christ in his kingdom. Church life and spiritual leadership are seen
by God as a training ground and preparation for ruling with Christ (2:26-28).
Although the overt emphasis is mainly on
this woman ‘Jezebel,’ it is clear that the leaders of this church were
tolerating in its life (or even implicated personally in) immorality, adultery
and participation in the local pagan feasts associated with idol worship, none
of which they should have been tolerating. The Lord commended many aspects of the
corporate life of this church. In fact,
he commends more in this church than he does in any of the other six (2:19). So in many ways this was a good church. It was active, growing and successful, which
is why Satan had targeted it. Successful
churches will always be attacked in some way by Satan. He was able to affect this church’s life
through this woman to the point that he did, because the church’s leaders did not act to address the problems she
was causing and deal with it all, just as the leaders and believers in
Corinth did not deal with the immoral man in their midst until Paul exhorted
them to grasp that particular nettle (cf. 1 Cor. ch.5).
This good and active church had been
morally corrupted from within, its leadership had been undermined by this
woman, the believers were effectively split into two groups (those who followed
her teachings, and those who didn’t, 2:24), and nobody in the church was
willing to stand up and confront these issues.
So the church was left in a precarious position, and its future as an
effective and fruitful community for God was in jeopardy.
When it comes to the issue of moral
standards, the surrounding society will always pressurize us and gravitate
towards sexual immorality, and will justify this with false teaching. Some believers within a church may succumb to
this pressure, swallow such false teaching and then start propagating it
themselves. However, overcoming in the
Christian life means dealing with (and avoiding) immorality in particular. Compromising with this always brings
enslavement, spiritual defeat and bondage.
Spiritual warfare is very real and it can affect the internal life and
witness of a church community. We as
Christian believers need to recognize this, and to learn to resist our
spiritual enemy and not compromise with false teaching.
Spiritual leadership was a fraught issue
in many of the fledging Christian communities during the first century AD, and
the apostle Paul devoted much space in his three pastoral epistles[1] to dealing with the crucial issue of
Christian leaders and leadership within local churches.
Christian leaders need to be prayerful men
and women who fear God and have developed proven spiritual character. They need to have strong foundations in the
faith and know what it is to walk closely with God. As well as exercising their spiritual gifts in
ministry and giving oversight to the church community, they must also
understand that their primary call is to do their best to disciple Christian
believers in the word and ways of God as parents in the faith. They need to be people who in wisdom and
sensitivity, and with love, courage and grace, are ready to rise up and deal
with issues affecting church life.
We need leaders who are men and women of
the Spirit, who have spiritual discernment, who will seek and follow the Lord
steadfastly, and who will not baulk at dealing with sinful individuals, and
with false and deceptive teachings and practices in the life of the church. Leaders need to be prepared to root up the
weeds which grow from time to time in church life, lest they spread and take
over the whole garden, as it were.
The church leaders in Thyatira were
evidently not men of such quality and calibre. Yet the authority of the ruling and reigning
Son of God who is the head of the church and who was in their midst (2:27), was
and is far greater than the satanic spirit that was empowering this woman, and
the Lord could deal with it. But they
did not recognize this fact.
The
warning of coming discipline
So the Lord himself stepped in to deal
with the problem by bringing a prophetic word to this church through this
letter, putting his finger on the problem and exposing it. He searches our hearts and minds, and so he
knows us deep within (2:23). He knew
what the motives of this woman’s heart were, and he knew what evil spirit was
working through her to try to take over and destroy this community of God’s
people.
Jesus loves his church too much not to
exhort us to live in the fear of God and to deal with sin, and to warn us of
the consequences of not dealing with it. He wants a bride who is pure and clean, and he
wanted this church to be able to carry on faithfully, successfully and
fruitfully into its future (2:25-26).
Regardless of the problems which any given
local church may have in its midst, there is no reason why it cannot deal with
and recover from these problems, and become fruitful once again in the future.
Jesus still loved this church deeply and
he still had a future for it. He was
willing and able to deal with this problem, if the people in the church (both
leaders and believers) would repent from their weakness of tolerating what
should not be tolerated, and would overcome their fear and bite the bullet on
this issue. If they would stand up for
God’s truth and continue in faithfulness (2:25), then he would deal with those
who were sinning.
So we see both the goodness and the severity
of God (cf. Rom. 11:22). Just as he
remained faithful and continued sending his prophetic word to sinful Israel,
even during the evil reign of Jezebel, he stayed faithful to this community of
early Christian believers, exhorting them to repent and to overcome. Humanly speaking, these kinds of sin might seem
so repulsive that we would want to distance ourselves from such a church. However, it is not an attitude of negative,
Pharisaic intolerance and hard judgementalism that we should give place to when
facing and dealing with immorality. Although we need to recognise its destructive
effects, and therefore the need for repentance from it, we do also need to give
time for repentance to take place. The
Lord himself displayed an attitude of grace involving firm warning and
exhortation to repentance, before bringing measures of discipline.
So he did not simply abandon this church
and walk away, and neither did he threaten judgement upon the church community
as a whole because of the sins of a group of people among them. Instead, he persevered and in grace warned
them, giving those who were sinning – and even this woman! – time to repent of
what they were doing (2:21-22). Despite
the problems and sin that this woman had in her life, there was something that
was and is far more dreadful, and that is the fact of eternal judgement. We always need to remember this when dealing
with sin in people’s lives. In
his deep grace and love, God did not want even this evil woman to suffer the
dreadful eternal consequences of unrepentant sin, and so he persevered in
exhorting her to repent. The
blood of Jesus Christ can cleanse even the deepest-dyed sins of human nature,
including the worst forms of sexual immorality, if people are willing to repent
and receive him (Isa. 1:18).
However, this woman’s heart seems to have
remained impervious to correction, and she stubbornly refused to repent or
change her ways and live in the fear of God (2:21), just as her historical
predecessor never repented from her own sin either, bringing judgement on both
herself and her children (cf. 1 Ki. 21:20-23; 2 Ki. chs.1,9). Both of these women ignored and refused to
heed God’s warning. The Lord had given
her time to repent, so she was certainly aware of what the church taught and
that her immorality was wrong in God’s sight, but she was not willing (2:21). She simply refused to change her ways, hence
the severity of God’s discipline.
Although he gives people time to repent,
he will not ultimately tolerate sexual immorality in the church. It destroys both people’s lives and the
church itself. It brings
untold grief, shame and brokenness to people’s lives, and deep hurt and
disillusionment to God’s people. Furthermore, the sinful actions of one person
or of a small group can affect the corporate reputation of the church as a
whole in the surrounding community. As
far as sexual morality is concerned, God’s standards for Christian living are
clear in the Scriptures, so, in order to safeguard the wider spiritual health
and the ongoing life of the church community, God dealt with this unrepentant
sin.
He told them that he would bring a measure
of discipline to bear, in order to get the message across clearly to both her
and those who were committing adultery with her (2:22-23). Regardless of a person’s personal profession
of faith, the unwillingness to repent from sexual immorality is a sin which
brings about God’s judgement and closes the door to heaven (1 Cor.
6:9-11, Heb. 13:4). However, to be made to suffer
temporal discipline, in the hope of bringing about genuine repentance from
personal sin, is still much better than to suffer the dreadful finality of
eternal separation from God. If verbal warnings and exhortation will not
bring about repentance, then suffering might. God repays us according to our deeds (2:23).
The discipline, when it came, would be
applied to the individuals concerned, not to the whole community of the
church. The church itself would survive.
The severity of what would happen to
both her and her children (and to those men involved in adultery with her)
would send a clear message to everyone, and would awaken them to the fact that
as believers they needed to live in the fear of the living God, in the hope
that they would repent and that the church’s future would thereby be secured.
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BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by
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