Our scripture reading this evening is taken from the book of the Revelation chapter 2 reading from verse 12. Revelation chapter 2 from verse 12. The revelation is Christ's message to his church. and it opens following the introduction with these seven notes really to seven churches churches that are like any other church churches in various situations to have nothing but problems to have as far as God is concerned nothing wrong with them and the remainder are bit of a mixture so Revelation chapter 2 from verse 12 and to the angel of the church in Pergamos write these things says he who has the sharp two-edged sword I know your works and where you dwell where Satan's throne is and you hold fast to my name and did not deny my faith even in the days in which Antipath was my fatal martyr who was killed among you where Satan dwells but I have a few things against you, because you have there those who hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit sexual immorality. Thus you also have those who hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which thing I hate. Repent or else I will come to you quickly, 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 to eat, and I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written, which no one knows except him who receives it. And to the angel of the church in Thyatira write, These things says the Son of God, who has eyes like a flame of fire, and feet like fine brass. I know your works, love, service, faith, and your patience, and as for your works, the last are more than the first. Nevertheless, I have a few things against you, because you allow that woman Jezebel, the cause herself of prophetess, to teach and seduce my servants to commit sexual immorality, and to eat things sacrificed to idols. And I gave her time to repent of her sexual immorality, and she did not repent. Indeed, I will cast her into a sick bed, those who commit adultery with her into great tribulation unless they repent of their deeds. I will kill her children with death, and all the churches shall know that I am he who searches the minds and hearts, and I will give to each one of you according to your works. Now to you I say, and to the rest in Thyatira, as many as do not have this doctrine, who have not known the depths of Satan, as they say, I will put on you no other burden, but hold fast what you have till I come. And he who overcomes and keeps my works until the end, to him I will give power over the nations. He shall rule them with a rod of iron. They shall be dashed to pieces like the potter's vessels. as I also received from my Father. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says. I will give him the Morning Star. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. May God bless the reading of His Holy Word. We've seen that these notes are sent to actual churches and are different lengths, some are longer, some are short. This is the longest of them all and it is sent to the church in the smallest city. Thyatira is not a big place. It wasn't one of these great cities like Pergamos or like Ephesus. It was a fairly small place. It was located in a strategic location between two valleys and it was used as a major trading hub and it was noted for its production of fine dyed cloth. Of course the first appearance, the first mention of Thyatira in scripture is found in the book of Acts, Acts chapter 16 and Lydia Lydia came from Thyatira and her trade was related to the city's background. So of course this took place at Philippi Acts 16-14. Now a certain woman named Lydia heard us. She was a seller of purple from the city of Thyatira who worshipped God. The Lord opened her heart to heed the things spoken by Paul. She was the first convert there in Philippi. And wasn't from Philippi, she was from Thyatira. And it may very well be that the church in Thyatira then owed its existence under guard to her coming home with her family. Mentioned that she was baptised along with her household. She had a household. Now because she was the head of the household, she would have been a widow, otherwise a husband would be the head of the household in that culture, but she would have had slaves, maybe children, and they would have formed the nucleus of that church when it was founded. And the Lord introduces himself to the church, again as he goes through these churches he draws attention to some aspect of the description given of him in Revelation chapter 1. And here he emphasizes, first of all, that he is the Son of God. These things says the Son of God. He emphasizes his majesty, his power, his importance. That he is not merely a messenger, he is the Son of God himself. And then he speaks of his attributes here first of all his eyes like a flame of fire and secondly his feet like fine brass his eyes like a flame of fire that speaks of a piercing vision he sees all secondly his feet are like fine brass and feet in the Bible speak of movement of course and it's the idea that he is able to swiftly come to the church that he goes about, he is not merely fixed in one location, he goes about the world. He emphasizes his majesty, his power, his knowledge, and then he tells them, I know your works. And he begins, as he does in all the cases that there's something to commend about the church, with something to commend. I know your works, love, service, faith, and your patience. And here we have this, a contrast if you will, with Ephesus. Ephesus, yes, had their labour, their patience, And yet, verse 4, I have this against you that you have left your first love. But they had, at Thyatira, they had love first of all. And the greatest of these is love. Without love, the Apostle Paul says, all Christian service is fundamentally empty. where there is no love and that love first of all is the love of God, love toward God which then spreads itself as love for the brethren and then further love for those outside the church but without love Paul says the greatest service is nothing it's unimportant but I know your works love the greatest of these is love and having love there is something there of enormous eternal value. Love, service. Love leads to service. Love leads to ministry, if you will. It's an alternative way to translate this word, service. And it simply means doing things for other people. That within the church, people were helping one another. That they were helping their neighbours. their service, their faith. They had this deep trust, reliance on God, in Christ. And again, that's absolutely vital in the church. You have faith, hope, and love. You have love, first of all. Here you have faith. They believed. And without faith it is impossible to please God. But by faith, The saints do great works. They have faith and they have patience. Patience, again, is enormously important and is related intimately with hope. The third of those three great virtues of the Apostle Paul commends. They have love, they have faith, they have patience, which is founded in hope. And patience is such a vital virtue. So virtue is almost forgotten in our culture because we live in a culture of instant gratification. We live in a culture now where people expect to be able to watch what they please when they please. You know most of us here I think we can remember when when came to the television you had four channels and I remember the great excitement when the fifth channel appeared, and then we found that it was just a snowstorm on the TV set, because the signal wasn't very good in our area. And today, it's not just, oh well, let's look at the TV listings, it's well, Netflix, you can watch what you like, streaming services. Patience is a virtue, however. Not everything is instant Patience is necessary in the Christian life. Because we develop and we look forward. We know that God will do his work in his time. He has his timetable. And patience means that we keep on keeping on. even when we don't see, perhaps, the results that we would like. So, they have their patience. And as for your works, the last are more than the first. This is a church that, in some sense, is growing. Things are improving. It's the opposite, again, of Ephesus. Ephesus' problem was that they needed to go back and do the first works. But here, the last works are more than the first. So everything seems to be going swimmingly and yet there is a problem. And the problem is that they have been infiltrated. The devil has his fifth columnists. You see, we see with Pergamos, they have this issue, they had stood firm in persecution, verse 13, you hold fast to my faith and did not deny my faith even the days in which Antipas was my faithful martyr who was killed among you where Satan dwells. And yet they suffered an infiltration. And here we have an infiltrator. I have a few things against you because you allow that woman Jezebel. Now Jezebel is undoubtedly here the name that God is giving her. This is a code name if you will. And names are important in the Bible, because in the Bible, in Hebrew thought, the name represents the thing. So when we speak, when God says, do not take my name in vain, He's speaking not just about how we use the name of God, but He's talking about how we think of God, and how we speak of God. Because God's name stands for who He is. And here this woman who says that she is a prophetess is called Jezebel, after Ahab's wife in 1 Kings. Now Jezebel was a princess of Tyre, of course the historical Jezebel, she was a princess of Tyre, she was a worshipper of Baal, her father was the priest of Baal, and when she came into Israel as the Queen, she set herself against God. She was an enemy of God. She sought to slay the prophets, she pursued Elijah, she loathed Elijah, and she sought to destroy the worship of God and to have the people worship her gods to have them become pagans. And so when God calls, when the Lord Jesus Christ calls this woman Jezebel, he's saying that this woman who says she's a prophetess, now what that means of course is that she claimed to be receiving messages from God. In that first century before the Bible was completed, God had prophets. There were prophets in the churches. There were people like Agabus, or Philip had his daughters who prophesied. and these people were given messages from God direct revelation and this woman was claiming to be a prophetess but she was no prophetess of God instead she was like Jezebel she was a deadly enemy of the true God and of his people And here the church at Thyatira is essentially being called out for lacking discernment. They are being excessively tolerant, allowing this woman in the church. Now it's simply a matter of fact in the churches that every so often somebody will come in with their own ideas. And somebody will come and say something along the lines of, God told me. That's how the Mormons got started. That's how Jehovah's Witnesses got started. That's how the cults get started. Someone comes along and says, I have a message. Now they may do it as Joseph Smith did and straight up say, God spoke to me. Or they may come along and they will have some eccentric interpretation of a biblical text. and they come in and they sound as though they are Christians. They talk the right talk until you listen more carefully and you realise they're using the words differently from the way that the Bible actually uses them. And Jezebel was another manifestation of what was obviously the big problem at the time, which was antinomianism. We've seen that the Nicolaitans were antinomians, they were people who said it doesn't matter how you behave as a Christian. And Jezebel, we read that she called herself a prophetess and she was teaching and she was seducing and of course this is not necessarily literal seduction in that sense, but seduce my servants, commit sexual immorality, eat things, sacrifice to idols. Because we must remember the cultural situation here. First of all, this is the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire could be very, very permissive, certainly in this period in the first century. Could be a very permissive place. The Roman theatre was quite frankly disgusting. There's a reason why the church fathers also don't go to the theatre and it wasn't that they just didn't approve of plays, it was that the Roman theatre was filthy. It was depraved in the extreme. This was a culture in which the gladiatorial games were a massive source of entertainment. people killing each other. This was a society in which the general expectation was that any wealthy man would view his wife as being there to have children and his mistress as there to have fun with. It was expected that wealthy men would be committing adultery. It was expected that the poor would just be doing what they wanted with who they wanted, how they wanted. And so what Jezebel's doing, she's not going into a culture where morality, where Christian morality is normal. She's in a culture where it's abnormal. And she's telling people, you don't have to be seen as strange. You don't have to step back from this depraved culture. You can join in. Thyatira was a major trading post, and excavations there have discovered evidence of a multitude of trade guilds. And the guilds were effectively, they were somewhat like, shall we say, trade unions. They had their own halls, but of course they had temples. They were pagans. And so much surrounding the trade guilds was surrounded with pagan worship. and wild parties and orgies and so if you were a trader you would be challenged by people who would be saying well why don't you come to the big guild banquet well the answer was that the big guild banquet was in honor of whatever god was the patron of the guild And after the big guild banquet, they would be bringing in the prostitutes. Because that's what happened in the Roman Empire at the time. And if you didn't participate, you would be pretty much forced out of the guild. You'd certainly be viewed with a certain amount of opposition. And Jezebel says, well, you don't have to be marginalised like this. You can join in. And that's the seduction here. And the big thing we have in our modern culture with this is when it comes to homosexuality, same-sex marriage, transgenderism. These things are coming and what they do is they challenge God's created order. In the beginning God made them male and female. intersex condition is just that it is a birth defect it's because our DNA and such like are messed up but God made men and women and we know the difference and so much homosexuality transgender is all about confusing male and female mixing things up and one of the great tests today is what you say about these things The shibboleth. Trans women are women. That is to say that a man in a wig and bad lipstick is a woman because he says he is. And as Christians we cannot go along with this. We go along instead with the created order as God has made it. But Jezebel comes along and says no you can compromise. It doesn't matter. But of course it matters. The problem that the Church of Thyatira had was they were too tolerant of these things. And the thing about people like Jezebel is they talk about being tolerated until they're in charge. And when they're in charge, then everyone must do as they tell them. That's the danger. but we are instead to listen to God because God and the Lord Jesus Christ is the head of the church and so the Lord Jesus Christ then having mentioned the dangers he brings in his action points first of all what he is going to do I will cast her into a sick bed she has been so involved with the bed of love and defiling it that she now will be cast into a sick bed. And this is almost certainly literal. This is that this false prophetess is going to be smitten with an illness. God does that sometimes with false teachers. He strikes them down in some way. And he does that. First of all, sometimes it's his way of bringing them to repentance. but most of the time it's his way of warning those who may be drawn away after her. Those who commit adultery with her, these are the people who have compromised, who have in the church and yet they've gone her way but they haven't completely committed to her and they will be cast into great tribulation and isn't that the irony here that one of the reasons she's saying what she's saying is you won't suffer so much if you follow me and Christ says no they will suffer more because they follow her God never never says to his people who were faithful to him that you will suffer more than if you were unfaithful. Oh absolutely, they were suffering. Those who enter the kingdom must do so through great tribulation. But those who waver and go into by-path meadow and fall into sin, they suffer more. Because they must suffer in this life in some sense the penalty for the wrong that they have done. Because if they're Christians they won't suffer that penalty after they die. There's no purgatory. But there is a price to be paid by the unfaithful Christian in this life. And it will happen. Unless they repent of their deeds. turn around, come back. But then, there are those who are her children, those who are complete converts to Jezebelism. They're not Christians at all. They never were. They're people who are her followers. It's like you might have a situation, something's happened, you have a Christian who for a while is drawn astray by a false teacher, maybe even something like the Mormons in the early days, Joseph Smith, but then comes back to see the truth. But then you've got those who just carry on with Smith to the end. And they're her children. And he says, I will kill her children with death. Now, that sounds a strange thing to say in English, but of course, in Hebrew, that's just a way of, in Hebrew thought, it's a way of intensifying the phrase, I will kill them with death. And although Revelation is in Greek, A lot of the New Testament has these Hebraisms in them. To kill with death is to surely kill. They will certainly be slain. And what's the reason behind this? And all the churches shall know that I am he who searches the minds and the hearts. He takes these false Christians, these people who claim to be Christians, they're not. They are the followers of the false teacher. They're completely sold out to her. They're her children. And by their fate, by what happens, they are shown to be false. And the churches shall realise, shall know, I am he who searches the minds of the hearts. They might be able to fool some in the church, they can't fool the Lord Jesus. The cults can't fool the Lord Jesus. The false teachers can't fool him. And then he says, I will give to each one of you according to your works. Now this is not a negative thing, this is not I will make you suffer, but I will give you rewards according to your works, that is, you who are believers. Because the you here are the people who, yes they've perhaps been naive about Jezebel, but these are those who have love, service, faith and patience. And then he says what he's going to do for them. Now to you I say and to the rest in Thyatira, as many as do not have this doctrine, who have not known the depths of Satan as they say. And there's all those who haven't been listening to Jezebel. The depths of Satan, or the deep things of Satan, is probably a phrase that Jezebel used to say, we must know the deep things of Satan. Perhaps she said, well, in order to understand forgiveness we have to sin a lot. There have been cults who have taught that. The Ranters in the Commonwealth era, among others, say you have to sin a lot to know grace a lot. But whatever this doctrine was, they haven't known it. And he says, I will put on you no other burden. One of the great dangers when it comes to antinomianism and opposing it, is that the opposite of an error is often the opposite error. So the opposite error of antinomianism, which is you can do whatever the flesh pleases, is legalism. which involves piling upon Christians things that are not in the Bible. You have to dress a certain way. Now the Taylorite exclusive brethren, the leader handed down the decree one day that men couldn't wear tithes. And so men had to give up all their tithes, because tithes were suddenly worldly. Hadn't been last week, but now they were. The Roman Catholic Church, when it comes to its priests, it tells them they may not marry. It puts that discipline, that extra discipline upon them. Legalism, certainly a form of legalism, Like the Pharisees, it says, well, if we want to keep people from breaking God's law, then we build our own laws around God's law. And then people will be so careful that they won't be sinning because they're so afraid of breaking our extra regulations. But Jesus says, I will put on you no other burden. The only burdens he puts upon his people are the ones he already has. He doesn't say, well, because there's this danger of antinomianism, you must be super strict about all these things. He says, no. No extra burden will be given. Follow my word. Walk according to my Scriptures and I will have no other burden but hold fast what you have till I come." What you have, what did they have? They had love, service, faith and patience. Hold fast to love, the love of God in Scripture, the love that the Apostle Paul describes in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, hold fast to that love Hold fast to service and the things you're doing to help one another. Hold fast the faith, what Christ has spoken. Hold fast most of all to Christ. If you have Christ, hold fast to Him. And He who overcomes and keeps my works until the end. Every Christian, every true believer is the overcomer here. who keeps his works until the end. This is the perseverance of the saints, the fact that God's people keep on keeping on. Not always to the same degree, God's people have their falls, but they keep on keeping on until the end. And to him, he says, I will give power over the nations. Not on his own to be some sort of ruler but rather to share Christ's power because verse 27 is a quotation from Psalm 2 verse 9 he shall rule them Christ shall rule them with a rod of iron they shall be dashed to pieces like the potter's vessels and then of course it is picked up again in Revelation chapter 19 Revelation chapter 19 picks up this imagery of the Lord Jesus Christ and His rule and His power. So Revelation 19.15 out of his mouth goes a sharp sword, that with it he should strike the nations, and he himself will rule them with a rod of iron. He himself treads the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of almighty God." So it's the idea that God's people are brought into this royal family, if you will, so it is revelation chapter 1 verse 6 well from verse 5 to him who loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood and has made us kings and priests to his God and Father to him be glory and dominion forever and ever amen he has made us kings and priests he shall rule them with a rod of iron as I also receive from my father he says and I will give him the morning star What is the Morning Star? Well, fundamentally, the Morning Star is Christ himself. He is the Bright and Morning Star. As he says in Revelation 22, 16, I am the root and the offspring of David, the Bright and Morning Star. Because, fundamentally, what Christ does is he gives himself to his people. He himself is our inheritance, he is our heritage, his people. What we welcome is a who, it is to be his and to be with him forever and forever. Hold fast, he says, and he who is an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches, not to not to be naive about Satan's fifth columnists, about the infiltrators who come into the church and try and draw people away after themselves, but to stand upon the word of God and to hold fast till he comes. Amen.