A Mixed Church
A MIXED CHURCH
REVELATION 2:18-29
If our thinking is on the wrong track, our behavior will be wrong too.
The church in Thyatira was a strange mixture. On the one hand it excelled that in Ephesus in its Christian life and labor (2:19, see 2:2-3), because their mounting scale showed that their love had not grown cold (see 2:4). Had Lydia (Acts 16:14) perhaps returned home? On the other hand it had gone further than any of the other churches in yielding to the immoral Gnostic teaching around (2:20).
“Jezebel” was evidently one of those women with pronounced psychic powers who have a strange influence on otherwise levelheaded Christians. The name given her—it is hardly likely to have been her real one—links her with Ahab’s wife, a woman who showed sufficient respect for the God of Israel to let her children’s names include his and who no doubt attended her husband’s worship of Jehovah, but whose real religion was the gross nature worship of Tyre with its deification of sex. In Ephesus and Pergamum it is a syncretistic corruption of Christianity that is condemned, but here the adoption of another religion—“adultery’ (2:22)—which would involve suffering and death for its propagators and followers.
It is impossible to be sure whether “the deep things of Satan” (2:24) refers to “Jezebel’s” teaching or to some other form of Gnostic aberration. There are those who delight in penetrating beyond the veiled hints in the Bible about the powers of evil that surround us. At best their teaching deflects our attention from Jesus Christ, at worst it defiles heart and mind. There is normally spiritual pride behind it. Have you noticed that the Old Testament never describes the pagan religions that surrounded and influenced Israel? Not evil but its remedy should be our interest.
Those who conquer in the situation of Thyatira are those whose heart and mind are satisfied and filled with their Lord. So their reward is that they live in the hope of the coming dawn (2:28; 22:16), and that they share in their Lord’s rule (2:26-27).
The picture of the rod of iron is taken from Psalm 2:9. We must choose whether we are to be shepherded and defended by the Lord’s rod (Psalm 23:4) or broken in pieces by it.