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Revelation (Part 5)

Revelation 2:12–29

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the End Times from Revelation 2:12–29


“To the angel of the church in Pergamum write …” I commented on the angel last week. I won’t go into that again. “These are the words of him who has the sharp, double-edged sword. I know where you live, where Satan has his throne. Yet you remain true to my name. You did not renounce your faith in me, even in the days of Antipas, my faithful martus.… “My faithful witness. “… who was put to death in your city, where Satan lives.

Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: You have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by committing sexual immorality. Likewise, you also have those who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans.

Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.”

Well, I will say more about the political makeup of Pergamum a little later, but I should say at least this now: Pergamum had been the government seat of what came to be Asia Minor. It was the royal center of the ancient Attalid dynasty. When Rome took it over about 134 or 133 BC, the first part of Asia (as I said last week), to be taken over by Rome, they moved the center of power to Ephesus.

But just as if you suddenly moved the central federal government of this country out of DC and stuck it in Chicago or someplace, there’s no doubt that Washington would have a certain mentality about it for generations to come. Do you see? Pergamum had a certain mentality about it for generations to come. It was a government town, in terms of its outlook, its stance, and often tried to prove its loyalty to the state.

“Where Satan has his throne” has been interpreted two or three ways. It was a center of emperor worship. It may simply mean that, but there was also a temple to Asclepius there. I’ll show you the ruins of it in due course, and Asclepius was the god of healing and of a number of other things. Have you ever noticed the symbol of the American Cancer Society? What’s the symbol of the cancer society? What is it?

There’s a staff with a snake around it. That was the symbol of Asclepius. He was the god of healing, this serpent, but from a Christian point of view, where everybody was worshiping a serpent, what would that look like? Now I’m not suggesting you don’t give money to the cancer society. It just doesn’t mean anything today. It’s got no pagan connotations today.

It’s ancient symbolism to us, but in the first century inevitably the popularity of Asclepius was bound up with the Devil himself, the Serpent, going about as a roaring lion sometimes or deceiving, if it’s possible, the very elect, and later on, in chapter 12, he’s called “that great serpent.”

That might be what’s meant there. There are two or three possibilities. I’ll come to them in due course. Whatever it is, it has at some point in the recent past aroused enough trouble for Christians that they faced already one outbreak of persecution which had gotten to at least one death.

“My faithful witness Antipas …” Now, words change meaning with time. You know that, of course. Words change meaning with time. Consider the word fundamentalist. At the turn of the century, a fundamentalist was a Christian who held that there were certain fundamentals to the faith without which one wasn’t a Christian. In fact, a group of Christians put together a series of small books called The Fundamentals, and whether you called yourself an evangelical or a fundamentalist, you could use either. It was a content-oriented term.

That is to say, it was not connected with hatred or bigotry or anything. It was a content term, as opposed to the liberals or modernists … that’s what they called themselves, modernists … who kept decreasing the amount of content in the term. The people who said that there were certain fundamentals to the faith without which you no longer have Christianity were fundamentalists. That’s the way the term was coined.

You identified fundamentalists and evangelicals equivalently all the way down to 1957, believe it or not. It began to divide a little earlier, but in 1957 you had the huge split over the Billy Graham Crusade in New York. Some of the fundamentalists, some of the evangelicals who called themselves fundamentalists, were very upset that Graham was having Catholic priests on the platform and praying, and others thought that it was appropriate, or at least not so offensive that they couldn’t put up with it.

So they split on it. The more conservative group went off one way and the less conservative group went off the other way. Now after that point you could be an evangelical or a fundamentalist, but not both. There was a division. The fundamentalist side became more sociologically conservative, more culturally conservative, on all kinds of points.

Before that, believe it or not, you had people like McIntire (I don’t know if you’ve even heard of him now) and a whole lot of other people who would only call themselves fundamentalists, who were also in there with Billy Graham and all the rest. It was all one big package fighting one thing, namely modernism, you see, but now it divided into two groups.

Now fundamentalism became associated not only with evangelical doctrine, which term tended to go with evangelicals, but also with a certain kind of negative sense, at least some perceived it that way, and more defined by what they were against in some ways. It was more of a fighting stance. Now if you thought that the fight was important and good, then you were for it, and if you thought it was bad then you were against it, but that’s the way the terms broke down.

Twenty-five years later, there are still some people who use the terms that way, but nobody in the secular media does. The terms have gone through another shift, and unless you perceive that, you’re very foolish to use the term fundamentalist at all today. Today, fundamentalist has no doctrinal content whatsoever. None. Nil. Zero. Nada. Nothing.

Now it means you’re some kind of religious nutter to the right on whatever spectrum you choose, filled with a lot of hatred and bigotry, so that you can be a Hindu fundamentalist or a Muslim fundamentalist or a Jehovah’s Witness fundamentalist, but fundamentalism is bad by definition. So if you go into a group and start saying, “Yes, well I’m a fundamentalist,” and what you mean is, “I hold there are fundamentals of the faith,” what they hear is, “I hate you!” Which is not quite what you had in mind.

So for most parts of this country, fundamentalism is not something to be associated with. There are some conservative parts of the country where that’s not the case anymore, where the badge is still worn with a certain kind of flair, but not for most parts of the country. All that is to say that words change according to locale, according to history, words change their meaning, and sometimes you have to change what words you use to define yourself or to define the faith, not because the faith has changed, but because the words have changed.

So it is with the word that we use today, martyr. Martyr. It’s the Greek word martus, which basically simply means witness. That’s all it means. In all usage before this usage, it never means anything more than witness, either witness in a court or witness in a general sense of giving testimony, but now there were so many Christians that from this time on who began to witness by giving their life, that the word martus came to mean martyr. That is, someone who gives his life for a cause, who bears witness by offering his or her life. Do you see?

This is one the transition passages, right here. You could perfectly well render it. I’m sure that’s the way most people read it when it was first written, “Even in the days of Antipus, my faithful witness, who was put to death.” That’s what the NIV has. That’s good, but because he bore witness by being put to death, he’s a martyr. Do you see?

Now in fact that word, too, has undergone another shift in more recent times in English. Nowadays a martyr often means somebody who feels sorry for himself or herself, doesn’t it? “Oh, don’t be a martyr.” Which has got nothing to do with high principles or anything; it has to do with self-pity, so that word, too, undergoes another change, and then it’s hard to speak of great martyrs for Christ. Great people who went around feeling sorry for themselves for Christ? Which isn’t quite what you had in mind.

So that is what has gone on. There has been an outbreak in the city of persecution. A lot of people have suffered, and in one case at least it’s been all the way to death. Now you might say, “This is quite a remarkable church. I mean, this is the sort of church that would get written up in Sunday school papers, written up in such a way that would bring tears to your eyes. These Christians are willing to suffer for their faith. They’re no slouches.”

Yet even so, Christ says, “I’ve got something against you.” What is it? “A few things,” he says. Basically what he has against this church, although it’s divided down into several subcategories, is the church has not been disciplined in what it allows in the realm of teaching. Do you see that? The church has not been disciplined in what it allows in the realm of teaching.

In particular, you have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam. Now we’ll look at Balaam in a moment. You also have some Nicolaitans there. They hold to that teaching. We don’t know much about the Nicolaitans and what they held. It’s a bit of a guess. It might be some kind of Gnostic heresy, I don’t know, but they were mentioned back in chapter 2, verse 6, but there the Ephesian church had this in their favor. “You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.”

The Pergamum church has this against them, that they don’t hate the practices of the Nicolaitans. This is not saying that the church ought to open up a barrage of persecution against some other group. That’s not the point. The point is, rather, that this church is allowing this other group inside the church as church. In other words, it’s an undisciplined church from the point of view of teaching.

Now what is this doctrine of Balaam that is here mentioned? “You have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by committing sexual immorality.” Do you remember the account of Balaam in the Old Testament?

According to the Old Testament, Balaam was hired by Balak to curse the people of the Jews in their wilderness wanderings. Balak was afraid that these Jews were going to come in and take over the land, so Balaam was known as some kind of prophet, and he was offered a lot of money to come in and curse them in hopes that that would put some sort of plague on them and they would be destroyed.

Balaam wants to go, because the money is quite considerable. Preachers have been known to take on posts for money, so Balaam, you see, is going, and God warns him. He says, “Listen, you don’t go.” Eventually God lets him go, but, “If you go, you only say what I tell you to say.” So Balaam looks over this valley of Jews everywhere, hundreds of thousands of them.

Balak says, “All right. You name your price. The gold is yours, just give them a good curse.” Balaam seeks the face of God, and he comes out with an oracle full of praise and benediction for the Jews, which does not please Balak too much. Balak ups the ante, “Listen, I’ll give you even more money. Come and take a look at them from this angle.” Well, eventually Balaam really does not curse them, but we’re told several chapters later what he does do is despicable.

He doesn’t overtly curse them in the name of the Lord. He doesn’t call down judgments upon them. What he does is say, “Balak, listen. I’m a prophet of God. I can’t curse them if God doesn’t curse them. I can’t. It’s not magic. I mean, if God hasn’t pronounced curse upon them, my curses aren’t going to do any good in any case.

I can’t pronounce a curse on them when God hasn’t pronounced a curse on them, but I’ll tell you what to do. If you’ve got problems with these people, what you do is be friendly to them. Send in your most charming young women. Send in your handsomest young men. Head for intermarriage. Head for compromised religion. Offer them opportunities to serve in your pagan temples.

Make sure you get involved in their worship. Mix it all up, because the fact of the matter is, their God is a jealous God, and if those people get involved in all this kind of stuff, you see, you won’t have to worry about a curse falling down upon them. God will be so angry with them he’ll judge them himself.”

That’s what happened, and eventually Balaam was destroyed. That’s part of Old Testament history that the first-century readers would have understood, so what’s going on here? “You have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols, by committing sexual immorality.” Do you see?

What is almost certainly going on here, therefore, is some teaching voice in the church, maybe a segment of the church, openly advocating less discipline within the church and much more compromise with alien teaching from outside, until eventually God’s wrath is threatening the whole church. Now clearly it is possible not to contend for the faith but to be contentious about the faith. There can be a kind of fighting fundamentalism that is extremely narrow, that is extremely hate-filled.

Yes, all that’s possible, but it’s also possible, in the name of love, in the name of truth, in the name of Jesus’ example, to be so airy-fairy in our commitment to what the Bible actually says about salvation or about truth or heaven and how you get there or who Jesus is that at the end of the day you can have all kinds of people with a teaching voice in the church who are, in fact, corrupting the church.

Here the church is rebuked for not holding its teaching voices to account. That’s remarkable. Nor is it the only place in the New Testament where that takes place. Think of what Paul says, for example, to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians, chapters 10–13. He says, “If you don’t get rid of those false apostles, when I come will there be trouble. You haven’t seen anything yet. You’re responsible for getting rid of them. If you don’t, when I come I will get rid of them.”

You have these similar sorts of concerns, for example, in 2 John. The church is responsible for holding its teaching officers to biblical faithfulness. The cost of not doing so is simply too high. Verse 16, “Repent, otherwise I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.” Now what that means is not quite clear. He could come with some prophetic word from others that would divide the church and cause all kinds of splits as the thing is cleaned up again or it could be some word of judgment or denunciation or catastrophe.

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes …” Now here in this context overcoming means continuing in what you’re doing that’s good, but also overcoming in this laxity over doctrine. Isn’t that clear? “I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it known only to him who receives it.”

I think that there you are picking up some symbolism that was well known in the town that I’ll show you on the slides, and I think that will make sense of the whole package. I’ll reserve it for the slides at this point. Questions about this church?

Male: Where do the wheat and tares growing together come into play, from one of the parables of Jesus, of course, Matthew 13 and Mark 4?

Don Carson: It is often said that the church is a corpus mixtum, is the expression, a mixed body, because it’s going to have wheat and tares all the way to the end, but that’s not what that parable says. It says the field is the world. You see, many Jews thought that when Messiah came, that would be the end, just as we hold that when Jesus comes again that’s going to be the end, regardless of the details of your eschatology.

But here was Jesus coming along saying, “The kingdom has dawned, but it isn’t consummated.” So in this field, the kingdom is making advance. It’s sowing its wheat. The Enemy is sowing tares. You’ve got Christ doing good things and Antichrist already doing bad things, even if there are antichrists still to come.

There Jesus says, “Let both grow until the end.” From the dawning of the kingdom to the consummation, throughout the world, both will grow. In fact, something we’re going to be dealing with a little later when we get to chapters 12–14.… Some people have a whole Christian scenario of how the world’s getting better and better and better under the impact of the gospel. It’s called postmillennialism.

Others say the world is going to get worse and worse and worse and worse. There’s going to be more and more persecution. They quote passages from the Pastorals, for example, “Evil men and seducers will wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.” We’ll look at some of those passages later, but if I’m not mistaken, what the Bible teaches is there will be a great deal of both. “Let both grow until the end.” That’s what Jesus says. Wheat and tares, both.

The last 150 years have seen the most marvelous advance of the gospel in missions ever … better than the previous 1800 years combined. The last 150 years have seen more Christian martyrs than the previous 1800 years combined, and although I’m neither a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, let me tell you what’s going to happen.

Until Jesus comes back there will be wonderful advances of the gospel, perhaps beyond anything we’ve seen yet, and more bitter persecution than we’ve seen yet. “Let both grow until the end.” I think that’s what the passage means, not that we have the right to defend a corpus mixtum in the church.

Male: That’s what I want to know. Where do you draw the line in the air between the church and the world?

Don: Yeah, that’s right. Well, in terms of that parable it doesn’t address what takes place in the church. From the point of view of that parable, the church is only the wheat. You see, the field is the world, it says. It doesn’t say the field is the church. It says the field is the world. Yes.

Male: If this letter is to the elders in the church at Ephesus, if they are the ones who are doing the teaching, then are they being asked to police themselves? To whom is this letter finally addressed? Who’s reading it?

Don: Well if you recall, formally speaking it’s addressed to the angel of the church at Ephesus, because in the heavenly courts, you see, it’s operating in terms of the angel, apparently, who is primarily responsible for that particular church. The way it’s addressed at the public level, it is in the plural, “all of you people,” the church as a whole, and then it’s individualized at the end. “He who hears … he who overcomes.”

It says nothing about, “This is restricted primarily to the elders.” So there is a responsibility for the elders to look after the teaching. That’s correct in the New Testament. There’s also a responsibility of the church to check out the elders. Now if that’s messy from the point of view of a workplace flowchart, nevertheless, one understands why it’s got to be.

There are some people who think that church government is like IBM. It’s all from the top and it works down. There are other people who think that it’s more or less like the American Constitution, “We the people.” And not only we the people but we the person. “I can tell a pastor how high to jump.” So you’ve got these sorts of models in which all the power either flows from the bottom, from us, the people, or from the.… We don’t believe in the pope; we have a pope in every church, in some of the independent churches, you see.

Then all the power flows from the top or from this wonderful thing called the board. Well in the New Testament it just isn’t as neat as that, is it? On the one hand, clearly in the Pastorals and elsewhere you have elders charged with the primary responsibility of discipline, of teaching, and so on, and many passages tell the churches to honor those who have the rule over you. It means in the churches, because they have watch over your souls, so you want their job to be done with delight, and so on.

There are many passages like that, Hebrews 13, and passages in the Pastorals, and so on. On the other hand, there are also these other passages, like this one, like 2 Corinthians and elsewhere, like 2 John, where the church as a whole is told to turf the blighters out, and I suspect the reason why there is something of this tension is because either side can go wrong.

We’ve all seen churches where the leadership at the top has been corrupt, haven’t we? But occasionally you get churches with very godly leaders that have gone really amuck, and it costs the elders years of their lives to clean out those churches. It takes them four or five years of sleepless nights and pain and tears. Somebody’s got to do it, though, or you lose the whole thing.

Either side can go wrong, so it’s a bit messy. I think it’s a bit messy because neither the IBM model nor the democratic model will do. I hold to congregational government, in the sense that at the end of the Jesus still says, when there are disputes and this sort of thing, to tell it to the church. When you have the discipline kind of situation in 1 Corinthians, chapter 5, for example, “When the whole church is gathered together and the spirit of Christ is powerfully present among you, then you take certain disciplinary actions.”

Yes, I do hold to a congregational form of government, but congregational form of government does not mean direct, unrepresentative democracy in which each person, regardless of how old in the Lord, or how mature in the Lord, or how spiritual, or how godly or ungodly, who has made any profession of faith and has been baptized, now has exactly the same clout as anybody else. It might be good politics in civil government, but it’s not the church works. Is that fair? Messy. If you want to argue back, do. I won’t be offended.

Male: I was just wondering if the way it’s worded here at the end, the responsibility falls on those that are somehow responsible to get the teachers out or put them in or double-check them, and it seems that would be the elders, and most of the churches at that time, there probably was maybe one senior pastor, or maybe there were several elders. I don’t know.

Don: Yeah. How do you know? In fact, in the early church, as far as the evidence has come down to us, it’s very messy, partly because many churches, especially if they were larger churches, never met in a single building. For example, in a place like Ephesus where there were a lot of Christians, and where there was enough pagan influence that they sort of couldn’t take over the Coliseum and call 25,000 Christians together for a public prayer meeting or something, they would meet in house groups.

It may be that you would have had an elder for each house group. It may be like that, but the whole thing as a whole is called the church in Ephesus. It’s a remarkable fact that in the New Testament, church in the singular is always related to a whole city. It’s the churches of Judea, but the church in Ephesus, the church in Jerusalem, the church in Rome, however many congregations there must have been, because there were no denominational splits in those days, and there were many, many house churches.

You may have had one elder in each house church, more or less like one pastor in each of our small churches. I don’t know. There just isn’t enough evidence to nail it all down. Now it is clear, you’re right so far as this is concerned, that clearly there are some people in the church that have more responsibility for keeping the teaching clear than others.

A brand new baby convert does not have as much responsibility for keeping the teaching clear as somebody who’s been a saint, and walked with God for 10 years, and is sitting on the elders’ board. Clearly, but on the other hand, you might have had some people on the elders’ board who were part of the problem.

You don’t know, and there is a sense in which every Christian is to take the Word of God and say, “Hey, isn’t this what the Word is saying? Aren’t you saying something contrary to what the Word is saying?” Isn’t every Christian supposed to be concerned about truth? So it doesn’t say. There’s nothing in the text that specifies, “I am now only speaking to the elders’ board, and everybody else should keep their mouth shut.”

It doesn’t say that. It just says, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches. He who overcomes, I will give such and such.” You get this individualizing. The thing is addressed to the whole church, but then every individual in the church must hear what the Spirit is saying to that church.

Male: After all is said and done, whatever abilities God had given you, certainly that meant you were responsible for that.

Don: Sure. Of course. Now it doesn’t mean, therefore, that we each set ourselves up as a kind of individual person check, you know. “I think my pastor’s 98 percent pure, but that 2 percent I’m really going to get him for.” I mean, obviously you can take almost anything that the Bible says and turn it into a bit of a joke by running with it all the way to the wall.

Unless you think that pastors are divinely inspired and incapable of error, it’s even possible now and then that they’ll make mistakes, in which case the problem is not whether they make mistakes but rather after they’ve shipped water if they learn how to bail.

I don’t mind if a man ships water so long as he learns how to bail. It’s where he ships water and doesn’t know it … he’s prepared to sink the whole ship defending his policies … that you’ve got to get rid of him. All right? Well, let me be a little quicker with Thyatira and get some pictures up here.

“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.” Again, the words coming out of chapter 1. “I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are now doing more than you did at first.” Isn’t that astonishing?

This is a hot church. Look at it: deeds, love, and faith. Not only so, but not just sort of in a touchy-feely sense. Real service, and on top of all of that, they’re sticking at it. Perseverance. They’re doing more now than they used to do. This isn’t first-flush Christianity. You know? Cash it and bash it. No, no. It’s nothing like that. This is persevering sort of Christianity.

“Nevertheless,” Christ says. “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.’

He who overcomes and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations. He will rule them with an iron scepter. 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.”

Now again, one must make some judgments about exactly who this woman Jezebel is, what she is being accused of. Jezebel, of course, again is an Old Testament figure, and it helps to know something about who she was. She was Ahab’s wife, and she was a corker. She was obviously the power behind the throne in many ways, and she was almost a paragon of wickedness.

She hated Elijah, tried to have him killed more than once, and was absolutely and totally and utterly determined to bring pagan worship into the covenant community of Israel, and Ahab was not only wicked, he was weak. He was a stupid, pitying, crybaby. Do you recall, for example, when he wants Naboth’s vineyard? He curls up in a little ball and faces the wall and whines, “I can’t have it. Here I am the king and I can’t have it!”

Jezebel says, “Oh, for goodness’ sake. I’ll get it for you.” She arranges Naboth’s murder and gets the vineyard. At least she had chutzpah, you know. Ahab didn’t even have chutzpah, but she was extremely wicked, and what she was determined to do was bring in idolatry and compromise into the covenant community.

So what is this woman doing here? Well, she calls herself a prophetess. That is, she’s claiming to be speaking for God in some ways. “By her teaching, she leads my servants into sexual immorality.” We’ll look at the sacrifice to idols in a moment. “I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. I will make those who commit adultery with her …” Now was this real adultery?

It’s possible. It’s just possible, because there were some temples in the ancient world that were fertility rite temples. That is to say, where the whole idea was for men and women to go and sleep with the priests and priestesses there in the hope that the gods behind the fertility rites would also copulate and bring blessing upon the land.

Yeah, there were some religions like that, fertility cults, but they were more common in an earlier period. They weren’t all that common here. There’s another factor to be borne in mind, it seems to me, and it’s very important. It has a bearing on how the book turns out a little later. Already you’ve probably begun to perceive that even where there are not Old Testament quotations.… You know, “Thus says the Lord. This happened in order to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah, saying …” There aren’t Old Testament quotations like that.

Already you’re spotting these allusions to the Old Testament like Balaam, like Jezebel, and later on the book just is surcharged with these things, just allusion, after allusion, after allusion to the Old Testament. It is the major New Testament book that cites the Old Testament the least and alludes to it the most often, and as a result, the more you know your Old Testament, the more you start picking up these allusions and the bits and pieces fit together.

Now, one of the images that you get in the Old Testament, then, is what comes to be called spiritual adultery. Just as the relationship between Yahweh and the covenant community is seen as a parallel to the relationship between a husband and his wife, so also in the New Testament the relationship between Christ and the church, Ephesians 5, is seen as having as a fundamental type of this archetype the relationship between a husband and wife.

Thus you have a passage like this. You know, “Love your wives as Christ loved the church.” You read through Ephesians, chapter 5, verses 21 and following, you go back and forth and you think, “Oh yes, here he’s talking about the church. Oh no, no, he’s talking about the husband and wife, and oh, there he’s talking about …” He’s flipping back and forth. You’re not even quite sure half the time which one he’s talking about.

The two are seen as very integrally bound up for all kinds of reasons, but that is also tied to Old Testament structure of thought. Think of Hosea. Do you remember the prophecy of Hosea? Hosea’s bitter marriage, in which his wife becomes a whore, and so on, becomes a whole lesson for the prophet that is equivalent to the way God is feeling about the way the people of God have become a whore.

The language is purple. “You go whoring after this slut. You’re just a cheap bit of trash from the dump. You go after anybody. Anybody will sleep with you. You actually pay them to sleep with you.” The language is purple, and thus you get out of this the imagery of spiritual adultery. “You’re not faithful in this area. You’re not faithful in that area.” Where there are fertility cults around, you can see how the two could, in fact, coalesce sometimes, too. Later on we’ll see that this same imagery is being picked up again in chapter 14, verse 5.

Well, in fact it comes out again right at the end of the book. I’ve started to edit a new series of books, now, that we’re calling New Studies in Biblical Theology, and they’re not long, 160–190 pages, designed to be good biblical theology, with more technical footnotes, but the text itself more accessible.

One of the authors I’ve signed up for this series is Ray Ortlund, who teaches Old Testament at Trinity, and we’ll probably call the book simply, Whoredom. Isn’t that a great title? Whoredom. And you see, there is a sense in which that is one of the things we’ve lost today. That is, the sense of odium, the sense of betrayal, the sense of evil in breaking your covenant fidelity to God.

That’s the way it’s perceived in the old covenant, and that language, I think, is being picked up here. I don’t know if there is a fertility cult here. I don’t know if there’s real physical adultery. I doubt it, because you see, when it goes on to those who are faithful, verse 24, “Now I say to the rest of you in Thyatira who do not hold to her teaching …” It’s a teaching issue. “… and have not learned Satan’s so-called ‘deep secrets.’ ”

Oh, boy. I’m not quite sure what is going on here. It could be, though, that you’ve got this prophetess giving deeper teachings, but they’re really from Satan. She calls them deep teachings, and John calls them “Satan’s deep teachings.” There are some people who are always giving you some special inside tracks on how to be spiritual, but they can lead you astray.

Shall I give you some examples? Now Carson quits explaining Scripture and goes to meddling, but you know, it’s easy to condemn yesterday’s heresies. The problem is not yesterday’s heresies; it’s today’s heresies, isn’t it? Any idiot can be discerning with 20/20 hindsight. The problem is how to be discerning in your own day, so that on the one hand you’re not some sort of narrow, right-wing, knee-jerk reactionary who’s always saying no to everything. Everything that comes along, “No! No! No!”

Then you’re indistinguishable from a traditionalist. You like it just because it’s old. On the other hand, there are people who come along and they’re so open they let in every kind of poison around, and they call it faithfulness and love for Jesus and spirituality. In fact, they’re so open they’re empty-headed, and they can do a tremendous amount of damage.

How to get this one right. Methodologically, the only way you even begin to get it right is to read the Bible, read the Bible, read the Bible, and read the Bible. We’re a generation that is not a great generation of Bible readers. We proof-text the Bible now and then, but we haven’t steeped our minds in Scripture so that we’ve learned to think God’s thoughts after him.

That leaves us far more vulnerable than a generation of inveterate Bible readers. Besides, you can read good theology in the past, and how Christians have struggled with some of these things in other times, and so on. There are lots of other things to read, too, but whatever else you read, you must read, reread, and reread the Bible.

Let me stick my neck out with one. Three or four months ago I was in Papua, New Guinea, speaking to about 600 missionaries or so. Part of it was technical stuff for Bible translators, and some of it was just exposition of Scripture, and in the course of expounding Scripture, you expound Scripture for enough nights, and eventually you step on some toes, even if you don’t mean to, but you do.

So since I was being farmed out to various places for meals sometimes, I got to this one couple’s place, and they were trying ever so hard to be polite, but basically I stepped on their toes, and they were a bit miffed. When it came right down to why they were miffed, it’s because I had said something about re-imagining techniques to become more spiritual.

Now this particular fellow said to me, “Look, you’ve got to understand. I was brought up in an abusive home. I was sexually molested in my own family. How could I form a nice image of God as my heavenly Father when my own father was such a beast? I became a Christian, but I’ve never delighted in the love of God. My life has been an emotional mess, and I’ve taken it out on my family and on my children.”

He said, “I went to these meetings …” And this particular speaker, if I mentioned his name, some of you would know who it was. He said, “The way those of us who had faced an abusive background should be re-integrated emotionally, how we should be self-actualized, how we could experience spiritual renewal and a sense of real love from God is by re-imagining our birth all over again and remember that Jesus loves you from the beginning. So close your eyes.”

He led them through this exercise in which “Your mother, you see, is lying on the table giving birth, and you are coming out, and as you come out, there is Jesus standing by your mother’s opening womb, ready to catch you. There is Jesus catching you and cuddling you in his arms, and caressing you and cleaning you. From the beginning he’s loved you like that.”

This is all being built up, and he said, “Finally I began to cry and to weep. I realized that Jesus really did love me. I wept for a long time, the first time I’ve wept and felt really loved by God. This has turned my whole life around. I feel far more integrated, a more normal person. I’ve begun to learn how to love, feel love, be loved, and love others. You’re not going to criticize that, are you?”

Now what are you going to say? What I said to him was, “Look. If you have come to feel more loved and to be able to appreciate the love of God a little better, who am I to sit around and throw a whole lot of stones at you? I’m just profoundly grateful if it is genuinely true that you’ve got your life a little better together than you had, but let me tell you flat out, you got second best, a dangerous second best.”

He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “You could have had this same emotional catharsis by working through what the Bible says about the love of God. Meditate on Ephesians 3:14–21. The Bible doesn’t want you not to have the love of God. Paul there prays, ‘You, together with all the saints, may grasp how high and wide is the love of God, how long and deep is the love of God in Christ Jesus, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you might be filled with all the fullness of God.’ God wants you to know his love.”

In the Bible, where is the love of God supremely demonstrated? In the cross. Do you see? And if, in fact you associate your catharsis with something that the Bible doesn’t talk about, with your own re-imaginings, then you’ve divested it from Scripture and in the future you will connect it not with the gospel but with something else.

But let me tell you, the re-imagining’s teachings are coming into Christendom, to evangelicalism, on a very broad basis in the Western world, and what they are succeeding in doing.… I introduced this theme last week just briefly. I come back to it again because it is a hot one in many of our circles. What it is succeeding in doing is diverting people’s attention, finally, from the cross, from the place where God did manifest his love.

Where you find there is power, then, in your life, is not in the gospel, not in the cross, not in the atonement, not in reconciliation to God, but in your imagination. Then you are only one whisker away from whole New Age thought, in which your imagination is everything and objective space-time history is nothing. Self-fulfillment and self-actualization becomes more important than what God has done.

This is presented as deep teaching, but finally, it may turn out to be Satan’s deep teaching. See, when the Devil comes along, he’s not going to come along and say, “Hey look, here’s a great big packet of lies. Go ahead and believe it.” No, no, no. He’s going to come with a Jezebel who’s extremely dangerous who claims she’s a prophetess and gives you something deep. No.

“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 …” Just hold onto what you have. Delight in it. Be faithful in those matters. Understand this, “To him who overcomes …” Individualized again, the overcoming now involved in not being seduced by this false teaching, by someone, in this case, apparently even within the church, holding onto what is really given.

Listen, the ultimate authority is not in the various sweeps of false teaching that come over the nations. No, no, no, no, no. “I am the one who rules the nations.” Now the language is drawn in part from Psalm 2, “He will rule them with an iron scepter; he will dash them to pieces like pottery.” Yes, yes. “Just as I have received authority from my Father. I will also give him the morning star.”