Revelation 2:18-29
July 27, 2025
“And
to the angel of the church in Thyatira write: These are the words of the Son of
God, who has eyes like a flame of fire and whose feet are like burnished
bronze:
“I
know your works: your love, faith, service, and endurance. I know that your
latest works are greater than the first. But I
have this against you: you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a
prophet and is teaching and beguiling my servants to engage in sexual immorality and
to eat food sacrificed to idols. I gave her time
to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality. Beware,
I am throwing her on a bed, and those who commit adultery with her I am
throwing into great distress, unless they repent of her doings, and
I will strike her children dead. And all the churches will know that I am the
one who searches minds and hearts, and I will give to each of you as your works
deserve. But to the rest of you in Thyatira, who
do not hold this teaching, who have not learned what some call ‘the deep things
of Satan,’ to you I say, I do not lay on you any other burden; only
hold fast to what you have until I come. To
everyone who conquers and continues to do my works to the end,
I will give authority over the nations,
to rule them with an iron scepter,
as when clay pots are shattered—
“even
as I also received authority from my Father. To the one who conquers I will
also give the morning star. Let anyone who has
an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.
*********************************************
In
case you missed it, there was some excitement at a Coldplay concert in
Connecticut last week. Chris Martin, the
band’s lead, was scanning around the audience with his phone, which was tied
into the overhead screen, like the kiss-cam at a baseball game. The lens landed on a cute, middle-aged couple
who were cuddling and swaying with the music.
When the video appeared on the screen, that stopped in no time. The woman tried to cover her face with her
hands and she turned her back while the man pulled his arms away and tried to
duck down out of sight.
Neither the man’s wife
nor the Board of Directors at the company where he was CEO and she was head of
human resources had anything good to say about it the next day. But later in the week someone did, and that
was Helen Schulman, who writes a column on ethics for the New York Times. She said,
“I had thought that the toxic sludge of shamelessness …
had wiped out the old-fashioned notion World Health Organization declared the
disease eliminated in the United States in the year 2000. I never thought I’d be glad to see shame as a
concept, at least, brought back from the dead.”[1]
She’s kind of tongue-in-cheek about it, but her point
is right on target. Three cheers for
embarrassment! It goes beyond mere
propriety. Their reaction reveals a
sense of right and wrong that hasn’t totally evaporated into an atmosphere of
shamelessness. No matter what the media
may project or the spirit of the age may claim, there are recognizable limits.
Rarely do we see the broken
boundary come to light this dramatically, on the screen at a concert, but the
participants’ reaction, and the reaction of the crowd and of the band, too,
point out that fidelity matters. Not
overstepping the lines within business or sports or education or church
matters. And how we address their
violation matters, too.
One
of the big challenges that is built into Christian faith is to live with the
proper balance between the awareness that God is merciful and kind and that
there is no sin that is so heinous that it cannot be forgiven, that there is no
person who is beyond redemption; and yet there is the simultaneous awareness
that there is truly such a thing as sin, whose effects go far beyond any
particular instance as to poison the world.
There need to be consequences or there will be worse consequences. Following a long list of rules does not set
us right with God, but we need clear-cut rules to prevent total chaos from
overwhelming every relationship.
God’s grace and
understanding is there to help us when we fail to meet standards. He knows us far better than we know ourselves,
and spots our shortcomings even when we are too close to see them. I John 2:1-2 says,
“My little children, I am writing these
things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an
advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and
he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for
the sins of the whole world.”
What gets in the way of God’s forgiveness isn’t sin
but the very real temptation to look at our wrongdoing and faults and say, “So
what?”
It
sounds like things were getting out of hand in Thyatira.
“I have this against you: you tolerate
that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet and is teaching and beguiling
my servants to engage in sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to
idols. I gave her time to repent, but she refuses
to repent of her sexual immorality.”
Across the centuries, anytime that somebody calls
someone else a Jezebel, that’s usually a way of saying, “She has a lot of
influence, and she uses it for no good.”
Usually there’s also an element of “…and she’s a real floozy!” but
that’s really secondary. It’s leading
people to do whatever they please without consideration of pleasing God that
lies at the heart of a kind of spiritual destructiveness.
We can be thankful for
those moments when a sense of shame does kick in. If that’s what holds someone back from sin,
hurray. It would be better arising from love
of God, but even so whatever holds someone back from sin is something to be
thankful for.
In our national life,
there was a time when Senator Joseph McCarthy was using fear of the Soviets to
control the government. He was attacking
people left and right (okay, mostly left) as being Communists and accusing them
of all sorts of crimes and corruption on the thinnest of suspicions, and was
ruining careers and lives. Then he went
for the Army. The story of what happened
next is told this way on the U.S. Senate web page:
“The army hired Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to make its
case. At a session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch's
attorneys had ties to a Communist organization. As an amazed television
audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately
ended McCarthy's career: ‘Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really
gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.’ When McCarthy tried to continue his
attack, Welch angrily interrupted, ‘Let us not assassinate this lad further,
senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?’”[2]
It was the beginning of the end of that ugly period.
Sometimes
it takes someone like the prophet John, writing from exile to a group he knew
and cared for deeply, to say, “Hold on a minute! Is this what you think God made you for? When Jesus set you free from sin, was it so
that you could run headlong back into it?”
Look,
human beings are a mess. All of us,
without exception. But God’s Holy Spirit
is there to step in. I can hear echoes
of what God offers in one of the songs that I expect might have been on the
playlist at that Coldplay concert last week.
It’s called, “Fix You”:
“When you try your best, but you don't succeed
When you get what you want, but not what you need
When you feel so tired, but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse
And
the tears come streamin' down your face
When you lose somethin' you can't replace
When you love someone, but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?
Lights
will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you
And
high up above or down below
When you're too in love to let it show
But
if you never try, you'll never know
Just what you're worth
Lights
will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you”
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