“Playing Around with the Devil”
Revelation 2:18-29
The
church in Thyatira was in pretty good shape.
Unlike many of their Christian brothers and sisters in the Christians
there were not being persecuted. Free
from the dangers of persecution the church was thriving. Of it our risen Lord said, “I know your works – your love, faith,
service, and patient endurance. I know
that your last works are greater than the first.”
This church wasn’t running on automatic pilot or resting on its laurels. By and large, the members of that
congregation weren’t taking the promises of Christ for granted. There was for the most part no backsliding;
for the majority of the congregation there was only movement forward. To borrow from a paraphrase of verse 19, they
were getting better at Christian living every day.
This
was an impressive congregation, a pretty healthy bunch of Christians. But like the proverbial barrel of apples,
there was some rotten fruit stinking up the place. A prophetess wannabe referred to as Jezebel
was causing some major problems. Like
her Old Testament namesake she was brazenly leading God’s people astray. Because of her church members were drifting
into apostasy, the worship of false gods.
In
the words of the Old Testament prophets, whose words in Hebrew are sometimes
overly sanitized in our English translations, they had gone a-whoring after the
gods of the surrounding culture. They
were guilty of the worst kind of fornication and adultery, giving to other gods
what rightly belonged only to the Lord Jesus Christ. As was often the case in those ancient pagan
rites their spiritual fornication often involved sexual immorality and other
forms of physical overindulgence.
What
made the situation even worse was their belief in Jezebel’s lies that they
could participate in such behavior and still be good Christians. Like so many Christians of that time and
place they had been seduced into following the libertine Gnosticism that was so
rampant.
To
review: this Gnosticism was a heresy that not only denied the full humanity of
Jesus – that denied the Incarnation of God in human form, but also deemed the
physical human body to be of no worth.
Only the soul mattered. What one
did with or to one’s body was of no consequence whatsoever. Its lesson
was, “Go
where you want to go. Do what you want
to do. Eat to the point of gluttony,
even if the food you eat is inappropriate for faithful Christians. Drink to the point of drunkenness. Be merry, have a good time, indulge yourself
in any way you wish. God doesn’t care.”
O
but God does care. God cares a lot. Apostasy and immorality are not part of the
divine plan. They are definitely not
normative Christian behaviors. To
profess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior while denying his full humanity is an
oxy-moron. Overly indulging one’s body
in any way, be it with food, drugs, sex, or whatever, is in no way compatible
with a Christian life.
And
no way means no way, none. A little bit
of sin is still sin. Worshiping false
gods, whatever they might be, absolutely breaks the First Commandment. “You
shall have no other gods before me,” means exactly what God says it
does.
The
excuse being used by those long-ago backsliders was that they had to do such
things in order to make a living. One
could not ply one’s trade in Thyatira without belonging to the appropriate
craftsman’s guild. On the surface that
was no big deal. It was somewhat akin to
joining a modern trade union or professional organization.
However,
these guilds held their business and social gatherings in temples where pagan
gods were worshiped. Dinners often had
main courses made from food sacrificed to the god particular to that temple. More often than not, these meetings and
social gatherings turned riotous. Folks
made gluttons of themselves, drank themselves into a stupor, and indulged in illicit
sexual practices. In this case going
along in order to get along involved both apostasy and immorality, both
spiritual and physical fornication.
But
that false prophetess named Jezebel was teaching that such behavior was
okay. From her perspective one’s Monday
through Saturday behavior was totally divorced from one’s Sunday worship. As long as folks crossed their fingers, it
was okay to pretend to worship pagan gods or eat meat sacrificed to idols. From Jezebel’s perspective Christians in
Thyatira could have it both ways.
According to her they could follow Jesus and still do whatever it was they
needed to do, no matter how sinful, in order to keep a job or maintain a
profitable business.
To
which our risen Lord said, “No! You can’t do that. Jezebel is leading you down a primrose path
toward destruction. She’s teaching and
practicing a cross-denying, self-indulging religion. Claiming to have some profound knowledge that
no one else has, she’s got you playing around with the Devil. Stop it!
And as for the rest of you, stop aiding and abetting these
idolaters. Warn them. Discipline them. Excommunicate them. Deal with this perversion of piety that has
infected the church.”
About Jezebel and her followers he had these words, as read from a
modern paraphrase, “I gave her a chance
to change her ways, but she has no intention of giving up a career in the
god-business. I’m about to lay her low,
along with her partners, as they play their sex-and-religion games. The bastard offspring of their idol-whoring I
will kill. Then every church will know
that appearances don’t impress me. I
x-ray every motive and make sure you get what’s coming to you.”
There were, of course, some Christians in Thyatira who were having no
part of Jezebel’s spiritual garbage.
They were scornful of her teachings and practices, considering them to
be outrageously false and dangerous. Jesus
urged them to continue holding on to the truth, promising that their lives
would get no more difficult than they already were. His further promise to everyone who remained
steadfast until the end was that they would share fully in the coming reign of
God. Christ would be their eternal
possession.
What does all this have to do with us?
What lessons do we need to take away from the reading of our Lord’s
letter to the church in Thyatira? For
one thing we need to be reminded that some things never change. A lot of the so-called new age spiritual
practices are nothing more than old heresies dressed up in new clothes. There always have been and always will be
people who think they have some special knowledge that the rest of their
brothers and sisters in the Lord are not fortunate enough to possess.
They forget what an old African-American pastor once said, “T’ain’t every spirit the Holy Spirit.” Not every thought or feeling that comes
into our hearts and minds is of God. Some
of them, especially some of the more flashy and warm-fuzzy ones, originate in
Hell. They may seem brilliant, but are
greatly lacking in wisdom and substance.
They may make us feel oh-so-good about ourselves. But beneath all that ooey-gooey emotional
stuff they stir up there usually lurks something corrosive and
destructive. They may appear to be means
to the end of justice, but there is no justice apart from righteousness. And nothing righteous has ever come from the
Devil.
Many of the Christians in Nazi Germany were deluded into following the
neo-pagan philosophies of Adolph Hitler.
We know how that ended. They
danced with the Devil and unleashed Hell on Earth. Good Christian people in Europe and
Today there are Christian people, who in the name of equal rights, the
right to privacy, and justice, are sanctioning a whole new generation of sinfulness.
They’re trying to lead us down that same
old primrose path. That bad old
libertine Gnosticism rides again, convincing people that they’re on to
something profound when all they’re really doing is playing around with the Devil. Amen.