Tolerating Disobedience Rev 2:18-29
We must love what God loves and hate what God hates. God is not tolerate of everything. He does not tolerate sin. When the apostles preached, they did not herald the news God likes you just the way you are They heralded the news that God sent his son to die for sinners just like you. And he can make you just like Jesus is. We are never called in the NT to be tolerant of the things that Jesus is intolerant of. The church needs to care for everyone, but compromise nothing (DeYoung)
Environment we encounter v. 20 But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols. In Thyatira the dye industry was important. Lydia was from their (Acts 16:14). She was probably the instrument of first carrying the Gospel to her native town.. (Coffman) Thyatira was home to many local industries including bakers, painters, tanners, potters, coppersmiths, along with all of the trade guilds which formed to support these industries. To belong to one of these particular trades also meant belonging to the appropriate guild associated with that trade. But belonging to one of these guilds, often times meant participating in pagan feasts, various temple rituals including prostitution, and fertility rites. If you were a Christian and happened to be a coppersmith, in order to get work you had to join the local coppersmith guild. But the coppersmith guild may have identified itself with a pagan deity in order to invoke that deities’ blessing upon the local coppersmith industry. Guild meetings were probably held in the temples devoted to that deity. Guild members may have been encouraged to participate in all kinds of ungodly behavior to honor the pagan deity to whom the guild was devoted. And there were people within this church who saw nothing wrong with Christians participating in such activities (Riddlebarger)
Example we are to emulate v. 19
Practices 19 "'I know your works, your love and faith and service and patient endurance, Notice the two traits that are intertwined in the development of our Christian walk. Faith and love are the roots that bring forth the fruit of service and endurance. So these roots; need cultivating. A Christian’s love to Jesus Christ will not grow of itself any more than his faith will. When our love for Christ dwindles and our faith in Christ diminishes we no longer want to serve him or endure for him. Unless we make a conscience by prayer, by reading of the Scriptures, by subjecting ourselves to the influences provided for the purpose in His word, of strengthening our faith and warming our love, both will dwindle and become fruitless, bearing nothing but leaves of barren though glittering profession. You need to cultivate faith and love just as much as to cultivate any other faculty or any other habit. Neglected, they are sure to die. If they are not cultivated, then their results of ‘service’ {or ‘ministry’} and patience ‘are sure to become less and less. So, faith and love, are the roots; their vitality determines the strength and abundance of the fruit that is borne. And unless you dig about them and take care of them, they are sure to die in the unkindly soil of our poor rocky hearts, so let us see to it that we make an honest habit of cultivating that which is their producing cause love to Jesus Christ and faith in Him. (Riddlebarger)
Progress 19 and that your latter works exceed the first. The great and special commendation which Christ gives to this church: greatly she is commended for her charity to Christians in distress; for her service in ministering to them, and in comforting of them; for her faith and constant adherence to the profession of Christianity; and for her patience under persecutions for the gospel's sake; but her special and peculiar commendation was this, that her last works were more than her first; that is, her last works were better, did exceed and excel the first. Ephesus was best at first, and worst at last; but Thyatira's last works were best. It is a blessed thing when Christians grow in goodness, increase in faith and holiness, when their last days are their best days; their last works, and their last fruit, their best, their fairest fruit. (Burkitt) They were making progress; they had been acting more and more in accordance with the nature and claims of the their profession. This is a most honorable commendation, and one which every Christian should seek. Christianity is designed to be progressive; and while we should seek to live in such a manner always that we may have the commendation of the Savior, we should regard it as a thing to be greatly desired that we may be approved as making advances in knowledge and holiness; (Barnes) A life of continual progress, in which each ‘to-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant,’ is the ideal after which every Christian man, by his profession, is bound to aim. And we should lay this upon our hearts, and let it work to drive us with unwearied and ever-growing earnestness towards likeness to the Master whom we say we love and serve. A continuous progress towards and in all good of every sort is the very law of the Christian life. The fruit tree does not begin to bear for a year or two, and when it does come the crop is neither in size nor in abundance anything to compare with that which is borne afterwards. In the same way, for the Christian course, continual progress and an ever-widening area of the life conquered for and filled with Christ, manifestly ought to be the goal. ‘Forgetting the things that are behind, reaching forth toward the things that are before, we press toward the mark.’ (Phil 3:13). Every metaphor about the life of the Christian carries the same lesson. Is it a building? Then brick by brick it rises. Is it a tree? Then year by year it spreads a broader shadow, and its leafy crown reaches nearer heaven. Is it a body? Then from childhood to youth, and youth to manhood, it grows. Christianity is growth, continual, all-embracing, and unending. What is the ordinary history of the multitudes of professing Christians? They are “converted” then a year or two, or perhaps a month or two, or perhaps a week or two, or perhaps a day or two, of profound earnestness, of joyful consecration, of willing obedience - and then back swarm the old ties, and habits, and friends. Many professing Christians are cases of arrested development. Are there not multitudes of so-called Christians like that? Those who have not grown a bit for years, whose deeds yesterday were just the same as their deeds today, and so on through a long, dreary, past perspective of unprogressive life, the old sins cropping up with the old power and venom, the old weak leaks in the dyke bursting out again every winter, and at each flood, after all tinkering and mending, the old faults as rampant as ever, the new life as feeble, fluttering, spasmodic, uncertain. They grow, if at all, by fits and starts, after the fashion, say, of a tree that every winter goes to sleep and only grows for a little while in the summer time. Or they do not grow even as regularly as that, but there will come sometimes an hour or two of growth, and then long dreary tracts in which there is no progress at all, either in understanding of Christian doctrine or in the application of Christian principles; no increase of conformity to Jesus, no increase of grasping hold of His love, no clearer or more fixed and penetrating contemplation of the unseen realities, than there used to be long, long ago. How many of us are babes in Christ when we have grey hairs upon our heads, and when for the time we ought to be teachers have need that one should teach us again which be the first principles of the oracles of God? (Heb 5:11-14) If Jesus Christ came into most of our fellowships nowadays He would not, and could not, say what He said to these poor people at Thyatira, I know thy last works are more than thy first.’ Well, then, let us remember that if He cannot say that, He has to say the opposite. Let us learn the lesson that either to-day is better than yesterday or it is worse. If a man on a bicycle stands still, he tumbles. The condition of keeping upright is to go onwards. And so, if Christian people are not daily getting better, they are daily getting worse. And this will be the end of it, the demon that was cast out will go back to his house, which he finds ‘swept and garnished’ indeed, but ‘empty,’ because there is no all-filling principle of love to Jesus Christ living in it. He finds it empty. (Matt 14:43-45). Nature abhors a vacuum; Either we are getting more Christlike or we are daily getting less so. Just as here, The Master should see in us a continuous growth towards Himself, by looking to Him as the source of all the work that we do for Him. And when we have passed from the contemplation of our deeds as ours and come to look upon all that we do of right and truth and beauty as Christ working in us, then there is a certainty of our work increasing in nobility and in extent. The more we lose ourselves and feel ourselves to be but instruments in Christ’s hands, the more shall we seek to fill our lives with serving him; the more shall we be able to adorn Him with all beauty of growing likeness to Him who is their source. We come to no point in our lives when we can slack off in the earnestness of our endeavor to make more and more of Christ’s fullness our own. But to the very last moment of life there is a possibility of still larger victories, and the corresponding possibility of defeat. ‘Forgetting the things that are behind, and reaching forth unto the things that are before,’ must be our motto till the last. We must ever have shining far before us the unattained heights which it may yet be possible for our feet to tread. We must never let habit stiffen us in any one attitude of obedience, nor past failures set a bound to our anticipations of what it is possible for us to become in the future. By long discipline and careful pruning, ‘we must press toward the mark for the prize of the higher calling of God in Jesus Christ,’ And in old age, when others fade, We fruit still forth shall bring. (MacLaren)
Error we are to escape v. 20-23
Worldliness is whatever makes sin look normal and righteousness look strange (DeYoung) As good as Thyatira was, she needed to be better. She was remiss and negligent in her duty of reproving, censuring, excommunicating vile seducers, like Jezebel, who in the OT enticed Ahab to worship Baal, (1 Kgs 16:29-33) as this woman, (whosoever she was,) calling herself a prophetess, and teaching the lawfulness of fornication, and eating things offered to idols.(Burkitt) Jesus commends the Ephesians for persevering in sound doctrine. But Jesus also rebukes the Ephesian church for losing their first love–their love for the brethren. The church in Thyatira has the opposite problem. Indeed, Jesus commends the congregation in Thyatira because of their love for their brethren–so much so, says Jesus, that their love for their fellow Christians has actually increased over time. But Jesus also rebukes this church for tolerating false teaching within their midst. The Christians of Thyatira are loving, but they are not discerning. If Satan cannot conquer Christ’s church through the sheer power of the Beast, he will attempt to do so through the introduction of destructive false teaching, as seduction by the harlot, whose end is ruin (Rev 18). (Riddlebarger) It were as though Jesus were saying to this church, “I love your love, but hate your tolerance.” (Johnson)
Allowance of Falsehood v. 20 But I have this against you, that you tolerate Gk eao to allow or permit - their tolerance was not love. They were over tolerant of false belief that lead to false behavior In this church at Thyatira, as we will see, the evils of idolatry and sexual immorality were not only accepted and tolerated, they were even advocated. This church had gone so far as not just to allow sin, but even to encourage it. There is a flow in that progression. When love is left behind, compromise follows and leads to toleration of sin. When you love your Lord less, you love the world more, and it infiltrates your life and you tolerate sin. (Mac Arthur)
Adherence to Falsehood v 20 seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols. Sexual immorality was one of the chief sins of the pagans and here it was worthy of death not by the government or the civil authorities, but by Jesus himself (DeYoung) Gk porneo to act the harlot, to indulge in unlawful lusts for either sex
Abiding in Falsehood v 21 I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality. she refuses . . . those who commit adultery with her
Jesus Christ warns us not to tolerate people in our midst who claim to reveal secret things, but who then attempt to lead us into making unholy compromises with the paganism around us. As followers of Jesus Christ we can never make peace with paganism, nor with the teaching of non-Christian religions, whether it be to get a job or because of a desire to participate in cultural and civic activities. (Riddlebarger)
Exhortation we are to employ
Repentance for the Fallen 22 Behold, I will throw her onto a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation, unless they repent of her works, great is the sin, folly, and danger, of deferring and putting off the duty of repentance, when God gives time and space enough to perform it. Great is the sin, because it is a mocking of God's patience, a contempt of his authority, a presuming on his goodness, and a defiance of his displeasure. Great is the folly, as well as the sin of it, because we put it off to the most improper and unfitting season, and because we hereby make the work more hard and difficult, in what season whatsoever we set about it; and the longer we delay our repentance, the more work shall we make for repentance. Great is the danger because it puts a person upon a mighty hazard; he runs a desperate venture, not knowing whether he shall live an hour longer; How severely God threatens Jezebel here, and in her all sinners, to whom he gives space for repentance. Behold here how great and immeasurable the patience of God is towards the greatest, the vilest, and the worst sinner; they have space for repentance, they have invitations to repent, they have judgments threatened to prevent their final impenitence: but if they prove incorrigible and unreclaimable, nothing is to be expected but approaching ruin: I will kill her children with death; that is, such as are seduced by her suffer with her, if judgments threatened be not by repentance prevented. The end and design of Christ in bringing upon vile sinners these exemplary punishment is to declare his omniscience, power, and justice: All the churches shall know that I am he that searches the hearts: that is, all the churches in and about Thyatira, says Christ, shall know that I not only observe outward acts, but take notice of the secret counsels, motions, and designs, of men's hearts, and will judge every man according to his works: (Burkitt)
Resolve for the Faithful 24 But to the rest of you in Thyatira, 25 Only hold fast what you have until I come. Gk krateo – strength, to hold tight or fast, not discard or let go
to keep carefully and faithfully. To get a frim grip on.
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Encouragement we are to embrace
Authority v 26 I will give authority over the nations, Psalm 2:9
Affection Morning Star 28 And I will give him the morning star. The star the morning one.” In Rev 22:16 Christ is the bright morning star. The victor will have Christ himself
So Jesus is saying, If you’re among the faithful, I will give you the kingdom, I will give you myself, the King. That is to say all that I have – the kingdom and the King. (MacArthur)
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