Thyatira: The Compromising Church
Relative truth has become increasingly popular in our culture, as people seek to replace objective truth with their own feelings, emotions, and opinions. This is never clearer than when people attempt to deny the truth of their own genetic code. Someone born with “XX” or “XY” chromosomes—a concrete scientific fact—can still claim that their gender is different than their DNA, and our culture bows to their preference.
For our culture at large today, the only absolute truth they accept is that there is no absolute truth. They seem to ignore this glaring contradiction!
Whenever I encounter someone who believes in relative truth, I try to steer the conversation toward mathematics. After all, I would have had a much easier time graduating high school if my 12th grade algebra teacher had accepted all my answers to test questions as “Stephen Davey believes this is correct, therefore it is correct.” Unfortunately, my teacher believed otherwise.
As Jesus turns His attention to another first century church, the church in Thyatira, He is going to confront their attitude toward sin. The Christians in Thyatira needed to return to some absolute truths.
But as He has written in every letter, Jesus begins with a commendation. This is what you might call a “compliment sandwich.” Jesus begins with praise, puts necessary criticism in the middle, and then ends each letter with an encouraging promise for the future.
First, Jesus commends this church for their works, their love, their faith, their service, and then their endurance. This is quite an impressive list! A church that strives to love each other, live out their faith, devote themselves to good works, spiritual service and endures to the end is a godly church indeed.
But even the most impressive church needs improvement, because every church is made up of flawed, sinful individuals. With that in mind, Jesus writes to this church:
“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” (Revelation 2:20).
Just like the previous letter to Pergamum, this letter to Thyatira focuses on the church’s tolerance of sin in its midst.
To help understand this rebuke, you need to know that Thyatira was an industrial city in the Roman Empire, and unlike other cities its size, Thyatira had guilds for all the different craftsmen. We would call them labor unions today.
Each guild had their own god or goddess assigned to them, and they held regular feasts—guild parties— that always included food sacrificed to their god. A guild festival also typically included sexual immorality with temple prostitutes.
This created pressure on church members who were also members of these guilds. If they joined a guild, they would have to participate—to some level—as loyal members of the union. If they quit their guild, they would be unable to find work.
According to this letter, Jesus identifies a woman in the church, whom He names Jezebel, and exposes what’s taking place. Evidently, Jezebel claimed prophetic stature as a spokeswoman for God. She was teaching and influencing members of the church that it was perfectly fine for Christians to engage in these sinful guild practices.
According to the rebuke of Jesus, this church should have dealt in discipline with “Jezebel,” but instead they continued to give her a platform. Jesus warns these believers, and us today, of the dangers of refusing to deal with sin.
By refusing to deal with sin, the church provides an audience for false teaching.
The letter continues in verse 20: “Jezebel, who … is teaching and seducing my servants.” In other words, this church is not just allowing this woman to remain a member in good standing, they are allowing her to teach sinfulness in church. She is literally standing before the assembly and saying, “It is okay to eat meat sacrificed to idols and it is okay to engage in sexual immorality while still being a Christian, if it means you get to keep your job in the community.”
Now, I think it would be hard to find many pastors saying something that blatantly immoral today, although there are some. But this letter delivers an important reminder to hold pastors and teachers accountable to God’s Word. Someone who explicitly promotes sinfulness, or even participates in it, is walking themselves and their church on a path toward ruin. Flee any preacher who publicly allows, tolerates, or encourages any sin.
By refusing to deal with sin, the church was allowing an unrepentant sinner to influence the lives of others.
Beloved, church discipline may be hard, it may be uncomfortable, but it is vitally necessary. In Revelation 2:21, Jesus says, “I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality.” This follows the appropriate progression of church discipline. The response to a sinning believer is not to immediately remove them from the assembly. The first step is to call them to repentance and walk with them toward the goal of restoration.
But if repentance doesn’t occur, the church must remove them for two reasons. First, to prevent them from influencing other believers to join them in their sin, as “Jezebel” is doing. Jesus says she is not only teaching them but “seducing” them toward sexual immorality and pagan worship.
Second, unrepentant sinners must be removed to set an example to the body that unrepentant sin of any kind cannot be ignored. Now don’t misunderstand: every Christian sins every day. But a church member who refuses to admit their sin, who cherishes it and flaunts it before others, becomes a danger to the church, the gospel and the name of Christ.
By refusing to deal with sin, the church endangers the lives of weaker believers.
Even if the leaders in the church at Thyatira were not engaging in the behavior that “Jezebel” was promoting, they were putting the flock at risk on so many levels. If the elders of a church shirk their responsibility to protect the flock, great harm will follow.
Jesus warns this church that “… those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation, unless they repent of her works” (Revelation 2:22).
By not condemning her teaching, the leadership at Thyatira implicitly allowed newer, more impressionable believers to follow her wicked teaching. Now Jesus says that these weaker believers are on a path toward destruction, and the leadership is partially guilty for their sins! By not taking a stand on the absolute truth of God’s Word, the elders in Thyatira enabled their congregation to sin.
This letter provides two timeless warnings for Christians and churches in every generation. First, big sins can happen in little churches. Whether you attend a megachurch or a tiny church, no church is immune to the lure of compromising in the face of immorality. Stay alert, both personally and corporately, for the sake of your testimony and the ministry of the church.
Here’s the second warning: the effects of one person’s sin can destroy the effectiveness of an entire church. Even though the church at Thyatira was getting so much right—love, works, faith, service, endurance—the effects of this one woman’s sinful promotion of evil prompted a letter from Jesus Himself. They had so much going for them as a church, but this significant matter of sin would soon erase their ministry’s reputation.
In the kindness of the Lord, instead of kicking this church to the curb, He sent them a letter. He’s sending that same letter to you and me today.
Add a Comment