Letters of Jesus Part 4 - Pergamon

as letter so here is the letter addressed to the messenger of the church in Pergamum this is a message from the one whose tongue is like a sharp sword cutting both ways I know all about where you have to live with that satanic throne towering above you yet you have held firmly to my name and did not disown me even when my faithful witness Antipas paid for his loyalty with his life martyred before your very eyes in the house of Satan nevertheless there are a few things I'm not happy about some of you have fallen into Balaam's trap he was the man who taught Balak how to entice the children of Israel into sin by getting them into pagan idolatry and sexual immorality as well as this some of you are embracing the false teaching of the Nicolaitans all these had better repent of their ways quickly or I shall declare war on them with the sword in my mouth that everyone who hears these letters read take heed to what the Spirit is communicating to all seven churches anyone who overcomes these dangers will be compensated with some hidden food from heaven and a new name engraved on a white stone a secret name known only to its holder now when you get to Pergamum the surprise is to find that it's really two cities separated by about four or five hundred meters vertically there is the lower town of Pergamum now called the asclepion and then the upper town the acropolis that word acropolis is made up of two words Accra which means summit and palace which means City so the grey were very fond of building cities on summits as Athens was indeed one of these seven is called little Athens for that reason so we have the Pergamon town on the summit and then this steep hill there's only a little winding road up to the top and you come right down into the valley and there on the plain is the other city of Pergamum let me start down at the bottom one it was the capital city for three hundred years first of the at a--let's and then later of the Romans the last at allayed King left it in his will to Rome and it became the capital city of Asia so the Roman governor lived here not in Ephesus even though Ephesus was a more important city now the Lower City centers around a huge hospital and the main concern of the Lower City was health and to this day it's fascinating to go around there's a temple of Asclepius the god of healing hence the name of the lower town asclepion and his title was savior because he could save people from their diseases and so we have this temple of Health and arounded a hospital with wards and baths spring water coming up in these baths where you could bathe and one of the most fascinating features was a long tunnel with holes in the roof and the tunnel lead from the baths through to the wards in the hospital apparently what used to happen was as the sick people were struggling along the tunnel or were wheeled along it priests of Asclepius would shout down through the hole you're healed you're healed and as they went along the tunnel they heard this voice from coming down through a hole in the roof you're healed and treating inside it was the ancient lords and the symbol of the goddess libyan is a serpent and you'll find it on the Royal Army Medical Corps badge to this day and that serpent was the symbol of the god of healing it was a very central and indulgent place a place of luxury epicurean is the word that's used most if you know anything about that meaning but they've sought health because it was wealthy health is the most important thing what is wealth if you haven't got your health and wherever you find people more and more concerned about Wealth's you'll find people more and more concerned about health the two things go together have you noticed the incredible increase in the interest in health in our country the last 20 years the incredible number of health stores opening and health foods when people are making money they're concerned about health for obvious reasons because if you lose your health you can do nothing with your money so health and wealth tend to go together well now all that's done in the bottom but as you walk around the bottom town you are very conscious that towering above you is this Acropolis it almost seems to be falling on top of you far more impressive than say edinburgh castle it's this joshiya mountain and you can see on the top of it that it's covered with ruin some very spectacular ruins and it's with the top that we're concerned it really is one of the most spectacular visits we made it was an optional extra on arch over but I was so glad that everybody went on it because it really is spectacular but menacing and on the top there are three temples for three - Greek gods and one - a Roman Emperor the three Greek gods are acini Dionysius who's the god of wine and this whole area is full of vineyards and the other and the most important one Zeus now the Temple of Zeus was the most impressive of all of them the others are quite small but the Temple of Zeus was 90 feet square and 20 feet high on top of its base but it had a podium a kind of base with steps up the front I'm going to show you a picture in a moment well at first let me show you a photograph taken at the top this is on top of the Acropolis in the steep hillside there's a very steep theater but right on the top you have some of these temples you had the second most largest library in the world Alexandria University having the first but here the second largest library in the world it's on top you can still see the library today where they kept all the parchments and books but here were these temples and in particular the temple of zeus you can only see today a square where it was and two or three trees that have been plundered to mark its location because the entire temple of zeus has been moved stone by stone to east berlin and if ever you go to berlin go to what used to be east berlin to a building called the Pergamon and the temple of zeus has been redirected inside that museum it's a vast building because it's a vast temple and this is the temple of zeus you can come and look at the picture later if you want the size of it you can just see a man standing there at the top of the steps I stood down here and looked up it is overwhelming and it is the shape of a large armchair if you can imagine a kind of u-shaped temple with two arms coming out either side and an altar was kept here in the middle which was always burning it was never allowed to go out so from below the in an overwhelming Hill covered with temples and libraries and theaters there was at the front facing the Lowertown this gigantic armchair of a temple of zeus from which there was a constant column of smoke rising to the sky must have been absolutely overwhelming the sight of it actually the turks are trying to get it back to redirect it there and the christians of berlin have been and prayed in this place that turkey would get it back they don't want it in berlin but it seems that when Jesus talks about Satan's seat or Satan's throne you have it here in the templates use this gigantic armchair with a smoke rising black smoke and the people way down below in the valley that's all they can see as they look up and this is where Satan actually had his residence his permanent residence in those days on earth was here he would visit other parts of the earth he would go to and fro in the earth but this is where he lived this was his throne the capital of his kingdom it had been a capital of earthly Kings for 300 years but it was now the capital of the kingdom of this world Jesus did say that this was Satan's Kingdom he actually used the word in Matthew 12 how can a kingdom divided against itself stand he said but he talks about this world being Satan's kingdom ruled by him he is the ruler of this world the Prince of this world and the god of this world and frankly when you see this Acropolis towering up above you almost falling over on you well you can feel menaced in quite a degree it raised the interesting question where is Satan's throne today because I'm quite sure he's moved it from there but where is he residing now I got one or two thoughts about that but they're purely speculative so I'm not going to share them the library had 200,000 hand copied books and in fact the word parchment was invented here because it's short for Pergamon charter and so this was a place of learning and culture now I want you to realize this when I took the party run in March I said now look you come hopefully it's hoping to see the seven churches of Asia well you want because there are no churches now except in Smyrna but I said I want you to see what they were up against i won to get the impression of the powerful culture with a little church meeting in a house down in the Lower Town looking up to this Satan's throne above them I mean they could have been thoroughly demoralized to say the least but they're living under the shadow of Satan's headquarters a little group of believers meeting in a house which is going to win and when you see the culture the sheer architecture some of these temples and the bill it was superb it really it leaves modern buildings standing and considering that for example the architraves here each weighed 24 tons and were lifted in a day before cranes and put on top of pillars how they managed it just from engineering we had with us a civil engineer who builds dams and bridges and he was looking at these buildings in wonder now you see it's so impressive the culture was so strong and impressive and yet all of it was riddled with idolatry and immorality the temple of augustus was first built here just 25 years before jesus headquarters of the imperial cult and so what i want to say is there's that at Pergamum religion politics and culture were completely intertwined it was all tied up together you couldn't follow culture without following the religion the libraries next door of the template it's when religion and politics and culture become one in what we call a totalitarian form that you really have a problem for a new group of Christians starting up well I've read the letter to you and the address to the church we know nothing of the church outside this letter we can only assume so let's look at it look first at what he says about himself he only says one thing there's a sword in my mouth now we need to see in a sense a picture of Roman swords to understand this a Roman soldier had one of two kinds of sword the normal sort of a Roman soldier was a long thin blade such as we still associate today with the sword for personal fencing and that sword was suitable when one soldier was facing one soldier of the enemy forces and he fought him with that sword but they had another sword quite different if I can draw it for you in the air it was spade-shaped if any of you ever saw a knife on a farm then that's exactly the shape it was Spade shaped like that with a kind of rib of strengthening down the middle so it had a line down the middle but it was shaped like that and then the handle came up and then divided into two and was a double handle and you held it with both hands and it was heavy and what you did is you swung it from side to side like this and once owed you could keep 50 soldiers away with the two-edged sword because the weight of it and the sharpness of it would take an arm off as soon as it hit it and so one soldier with this heavy thing just going like that could keep a whole crowd down or if they came near could just many soldiers it was a very powerful it was a mass weapon as distinct from the single sword and when you looked at it the shape reminded you of the tongue was exactly tongue shaped with the line down the middle got it and the word of God is like a sharp two-edged sword and therefore it can it can slay many people at once that's the picture it's a crowd weapon and it pierces Paul says it cuts right through to the marrow right through the spirit it this heavy blade coming at you boy you kept out of its way you can imagine to just go right through to the bone and further to the marrow now that's the picture here and it comes from chapter one we're in the vision of Christ he saw this two-edged sword sticking out of his mouth so powerful is the word of Christ to destroy or to cut right through to the depths of your being in fact at the end of Revelation it says that at the Battle of Armageddon Christ doesn't even fight he slays the entire army with a word with the sword of his mouth he killed a fig tree with that sword and it was dead the next morning a word from Christ is that powerful now that's all he says but I'm afraid he's going to use that sword on the church here I know where you live he says and the word is for permanent accommodation not temporary in other words they had no chance of moving away from any Christians who if they found themselves under the shadow of Satan's throne I would say let's let's move let's get a house somewhere else amazing how many churches today make this excuse I get it wet almost wherever I go in England it's a hard place there's a lot of Satan worship around here as if that excuses their failure I always think of was it CH Spurgeon's poem someone to live within the sound of church or Chapel Bell I'd rather run a rescue shop within a yard of Hell but here they were living right on the doorstep of Hell but they had to stay there that no choice are moving I know where you have to live permanently I know you've got to stay there and yet he doesn't allow them to excuse what's wrong in the church because of that that's very striking he's sympathetic but he doesn't overlook what's wrong Jesus is firm he is sympathetic he knows what we have to put up with but he doesn't excuse compromise the lovely balance in that Satan is not omnipresent he has agents everywhere but he can only be in one place at once and this was his place a high place I find that people are like heights actually and what I say now it's going to compromise me I love getting up into a mountain looking down I like an Angels view of a place but the devil also likes that he took Jesus up into a high place high mountain that's the mountain above Jericho and from the top in Jesus day you could see ten different kingdoms and through them Satan was saying I own the whole lot and I'll let you have it if you let me be king he was actually offering Jesus the post of Antichrist and had Jesus accepted it we would now be talking about Jesus as Antichrist rather than Jesus Christ that's a thought isn't it and Jesus didn't argue when Satan said they're all mine that's very striking he didn't say they're not they belong to my father he acknowledged that the father has allowed Satan to be the king of this world and this is where they had to live now there is a proven here there's a lot that's good in the church let's look at what's good first of all you've remained true to my name the one name that he's referring to is the name Jesus interesting that people are not nearly so sensitive about the word Lord or the word Christ it's the name Jesus that's upset people it is the name in which this power it's that name in which there's healing it's that name the devil's fear and fly it's not the name Christ Christ isn't a name anyway and Lord isn't a name but Jesus is and somehow Satan hates people using that name and of course the Creed of the early church was Jesus is Lord but they were having to say Caesar is Lord but they said no Jesus is they didn't say Christ is they didn't say the Lord is they said Jesus is they use the human name and they had remained true to the name and face of opposition then he says you didn't deny me the tense of the verb deny they're sorry about the technicalities but it's called the errors tense in Greek which refers to a single occasion now what single occasion could it mean I think it must have been the first lawdy day when everybody was supposed to say caesar's lord it refers to one occasion when their faith as an entire church was tested whether they would deny christ let me remind you that jesus once said if you deny me before men I will have to deny you before my father it's one of the most serious things he said and he said you didn't deny me on that occasion even though one of you died for it now this man Antipas is interesting he's the first martyr from the seven churches of Asia the first one actually to die even John himself had not yet died he was still alive he was a traitor he was in prison for it but he hadn't died yet but here the first martyr in the in the churches of Asia had already died his name whether it was his real name or not it's it's very appropriate ante means against and pass everybody so Antipas had to stand alone against everybody and as I read the situation reading between the lines with a bit of imagination on this lordy day they were all lined up and said now you must say Caesar is Lord and they refused and said no Jesus is Lord they didn't deny his name and I think the governor who resided here then said you will die if you don't say it alright we're going to choose the first person you and pointing to Antipas he makes an example of him and Antipas dies in the presence of the rest of the Christians now are you going to they all said no and I think at that point the governor said all give it up for this year when he realized that they weren't even going to do it when they saw one of their members that seems to be the situation why didn't the others die it seems if the governor on that occasion said all right wait till next year give you a year to think about it so he presumably was lenient with them when he saw that they were not going to change and that he just have to kill the lot some sort of reluctance in him to do that on that occasion that's as I read it when one of them had to die and the rest did not deny his name that's the situation even under that kind of pressure and Jesus calls Antipas my faithful witness my special and even the word witness is interesting because in Greek the word Witnesses Mart or ma RT you are and all it means is someone who gives a faithful testimony in court I swear to tell the truth in whole truth nothing but the truth that's what it means a faithful witness but the word martyr very quickly changed its meaning and when I say the word martyr you don't think of a good witness in a court case do you think of someone who dies because the cost of being faithful to the truth about Jesus became for so many in the first 200 years of the church death that the word martyr changed its meaning my faithful martyr said Jesus of Antipas well are so far so good but now unfortunately Jesus says but there are some things wrong terribly wrong with your church and he says it in a tender gentle tone I think I have a few things against you not much he'll have more against Thyatira and even more against Sardis but here it's a few things Balaam's teaching now we do know what that was you go back to the days when the children of Israel were just about to cross the Jordan in the prom into the Promised Land they were camped and they were looking over at Jericho and the hills beyond and they were waiting there till God told them to cross the Jordan and the king of Moab was determined to stop them going in and becoming a potential enemy on his doorstep and so he hired a Syrian soothsayer brought a man all the way down from Syria in the north a man who was supposed to be a good fortune teller and who could bless people and they were blessed and cursed them and they were accursed a kind of witch doctor not not a prophet of God at all and he said to this man I'll pay you to put a curse on this people I'll pay you handsomely and that appealed to Balaam which shows why he did most of his prophesying and he tried to curse them and every time he opened his mouth to curse them out came blessing the Lord bless you bless you bless you and king of Moab kept offering him more money and honors and Balaam tried so hard and he just could not curse God's people he was an ass wasn't he but he also had won and as a good talk well the Spirit of God could talk through the ass or the donkey but Balaam said I think I know how I can do it have you got some pretty girls around some more bad girls attractive young he said they won't be able to resist that get those girls to go down to the camp make friends with the boys let the girls have a feast and of course a feast involved more than food it involved pagan religion too because so often eating and pagan worship went together as they do with us not pagan worship but worship of the Lord and so that he said send the girls down to camp and you know the rest of the story the Israelites young men fell for it it's a sordid and sad story and they were into idolatry morality and therefore offended God became God's enemies instead of the people but he would look after that's the story and says Jesus it's happening all over again at Pergamum the idolatry and the immoralities got right inside my church it's getting weakened from the inside and of course I told you that there are two ways to kill a church one is from the outside but actually that way never really works in fact the more you hit a church from the outside the stronger and the more United it gets and in fact the the blood of the martyrs becomes the seed of the church the church grows under persecution the lands in this world in which there is persecution of the lenss where the church is growing at a fantastic rate China being just one example it's the churches that are not persecuted that don't grow but the other way is more deadly and that is to infiltrate the church confuse its creed and therefore lower its conduct if you can get people's behaved beliefs mixed up you'll get the behavior mixed up and that is happening on a wide scale in our church today if you can't see that then ask God to open your eyes once you start making virgin birth and bodily resurrection relative it isn't long before you'll be making chastity relative and we see it happening and it was happening here and Balaam's approach was corrupting the church at Pergamum from the inside a cancer was eating the body see somebody have said that chastity was the only totally new virtue introduced by Christianity to the ancient world the only one that they hadn't talked about before they talked about patience and all the others but not this one Greek philosophy if you read it you'll know that they justified men having wives mistresses and prostitutes they were all not only legal they were all acceptable in society and it was normal quite normal and into that world came a Christian faith that said that's not on and it got right inside Pergamum not only that but the Nicolaitans remember them from Ephesus the Ephesians hated the teaching of the Nicolaitans or rather their way of life which Jesus said I also loathe but here it wasn't just the lifestyle of the Nicolaitans they were accepting they're accepting the teaching of the Nicolaitans and teaching always lies behind bad living again I don't know what the Nicolaitans taught ibly nobody does every commentary you read is sheer guesswork it was clearly something that was not true gospel teaching two things we gather from this number one teaching influences living belief affects behavior creed shapes conduct therefore when things are going wrong in behavior look behind that for the things that went wrong in teaching first you follow me it's when the Creed suffers that character and behavior suffer somebody has said of a well-known bishop that he took the word not out of the ten commandments and put it in the Creed so instead of thou shalt not commit adultery it was thou shalt commit adultery and instead of I believe in the virgin birth it was I don't believe in the virgin birth and all he did was take the word not from one and put it in the other what a devastating indictment the second thing I want to point out is that the teaching was in fact justifying sin and it was doing so in the name of culture if there is one phrase that makes me angry today it is when I hear a preacher or a Christians Koller used the word culturally conditioned that is a phrase that is being used all over the church today and it's used like this when Paul spoke against homosexuality he was culturally conditioned was only wrong in his culture you follow me or when Jesus chose twelve men to be apostles he was culturally conditioned and if he lived in our culture he choose six men and six women that's the kind of talk in other words it's relativizing the teaching of scripture by saying scripture was the product of the culture of that day now there is an element of truth that we need to carefully distinguish in that certainly the gospel was preached to the culture of that day and for example in the culture of that day when you made a journey your faith got feet got dirty and smelly with open sandals and dusty roads so washing feet was an appropriate thing to do somebody asked me why did Jesus wash feet my hands are very simple because they were dirty but washing feet today becomes a sheer ritual especially if everybody's wash them before they got there the equivalent in our culture is washing each other's cars because that's the bit that got dirty on the way here you with me there is an element of truth but when you start saying it's all culturally conditioned you can change the Bible freely and talk about what fits our culture that's the kind of teaching that was destroying Pergamum from the inside it was compromising with the standards of the gospel and teaching that this was now right or all right well I just throw that out so teaching influences living and therefore teaching that justifies sin is very dangerous you can almost hear the teaching we mustn't be now reminded we mustn't be we mustn't be Puritans we must avoid scruples moderation rather than absence we don't want to lose contact with the unsaved he had all this kind of thing then I heard it by one of the leading national leaders Christian leaders in our country when the debate over women priests was being the hottest at Synod and this is what was said we must be credible to contemporary society now that sounds great doesn't it but it's saying we must become worldly that's the kind of phrase we've got to watch very carefully we must be credible to contemporary society I thought we must be true to the Word of God the trouble is once we want to be credible to contemporary society that sort of teaching is saying we got to be like them one thing that strikes me about Jesus is that he was one of us but he wasn't like us he was one of us except without sin not once did he compromise in order to be acceptable to people that's the kind of teaching that would be very subtle in Pergamum we must compromise with all this up the hill if we want to win them we must be credible to contemporary culture well what is Jesus advice to these people who are falling for this it's not all of them it's only some and his advisers only toothsome and his advices get away from this turn around repent immediately do it as quickly as possible there to get out of it themselves and to get it out of the church there to repudiate this teaching renounce it stop listening to it stop agreeing with it have nothing to do with it I would think you could walk out of a service in which teaching like that was being given and what is he's saying is if you don't deal with it I will I'm going to give you the chance to clean this up but if you don't I'll come myself and deal with them with the sword in my mouth that means almost certainly he would come with a very strong prophetic message I won't name the place because it's quite near here but there was a church in which such teaching was being given not far from here and a man who's dead now but a saintly man whom I used to visit in his old age was in that church when that teaching was given by three different preachers and he got up and he used the sword of Christ's words and he said that Jesus himself would deal with those three within three weeks they were all dead one fell under the paddle wheel of a steamer of Southend pier another was a decorator and fell from his ladder and was impaled on spiked railings and I forget what happened to the third you know in the New Testament church there was fear of the Lord Ananias and Sapphira were carried out dead simply because they told a lie about how much they put on the collection plate it says great fear came upon them all and of the rest the outside is none of them dared to come near that church it's quite a situation isn't it Jesus says if you don't deal with it I'll come and deal with it with a sword of my mouth well we need to treat these things seriously at all costs he's saying it must be stopped now he appeals in the same words and then gives the assurance to any individual who doesn't swallow this teaching and doesn't lower his standards to the individual who rejects false teachers and bad teaching he offers two things and yet they're the most puzzling and obscure rewards in all the seven letters the hidden manner in the Whitestone and believe me this the ink that has been spilled on explaining these there are about twenty explanations of one and thirty of the other if you go through all the commentaries I think the only two that I would underline our refreshment and relationship hidden manner we know that Israel was fed with manna in the wilderness and the word means what is it and every day the children said to their parents what's for supper what is it what's for breakfast what is it they got fed up with what is it and of course in Balaam's day they were still eating what is it the other side of the Jordan and then later after the men have stopped when they cross the Jordan they kept some of it and they kept it in the Ark of the Covenant hidden from sight it was there in the Holy of Holies hidden manna it disappeared before the Exile but every Jew believes that when the Messiah comes he will bring a hidden manna with him interesting jesus said I'm the bread from heaven I'm the manner I think really to be very simple it's saying this if you refuse to go to these feasts of the pagan things I'll feed you I'll nourish you I'll keep you going that's my simple explanation but you can pick the one you like best the white stone oh this acquittal when the jury voted by putting black or white stones into an urn a tick of admission to entertainment in the stadium a ticket for free food hand out of the Kings feast a symbol of a festival a happy day Pliny the Roman governor talked about white stone days a lucky charm amulet secret writing known only to the wearer oh the list is legion and again I want to be quite simple and I have to say this is pure speculation you ever seen a Welsh wooden spoon do you know what they are wooden spoons about this big and when a boy and a girl were in love the boy would carve a wooden spoon and often carve his name on it or her name and give it to her as a token of his love and I think that's what it is here it's relationship and in fact I do believe there was a practice in those days of lovers of a boy taking a white stone and carving her name on it and giving it to her especially if the name was a secret name between them you know how lovers get a secret name and you know he find out that this businessman in the City of London his wife calls in poopsie you know I don't know what your secret name is but you know how lovers have a secret name that they only use between each other and don't want anybody else to know I just get this sense look you don't go to the feast but I'll feed you you're losing all kinds of friendships but I'm your special lover that's the kind of feel I get from this promise to him who overcomes don't worry about all your losing you're getting more back from me so then from Smyrna we learned that suffering is a mark of a true church but from Pergamum separation is a mark of the true church no compromise with society a pure church that stands for good teaching and right behavior amen

Channel: David Pawson - Official

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Keywords: David Pawson, Christianity (Religion), The Bible (Religious Text), Book of Revelation (Book)

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Length: 41min 28sec (2488 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 17 2014