THYATIRA:
THE CHURCH THAT TOLERATED TOO MUCH
A lay minister at one of my former churches once said to me, “I love you, but I don’t like you.” How would you respond to that statement? What I believe he meant was, according to Christ’s command, he knew he had to love me as a brother in the Lord, but he otherwise tolerated me as his pastor.
As I studied the word “tolerate” this week I came to understand that the word has evolved over time. How we understand the call to be tolerant of others means different things. How I understood this lay minister’s feelings about me was akin to how I tolerate being in a dentist’s chair. I hate the sound of the drill and the feeling when the freezing doesn’t work, but I will tolerate both for the sake of the outcome.
Canadians have made tolerance a virtue in all spheres of life. To tolerate another person and their ideas means, ideally, that I disagree with you but still respect you. This can be a good thing. We have to tolerate being under the governance of a political party we didn’t vote for, or we have anarchy. We are persistently reminded at sporting events to be “inclusive” – meaning to tolerate those who have a different lifestyle than we do. Tolerance has a place in life.
However, tolerance can be pushed too far. The truth is nobody is wholly tolerant. The more you believe in tolerance, the less you can tolerate the intolerant. Consequently, tolerance can be used to justify oneself and condemn others. This is the pressure on the 21st century Canadian church: We are being counseled by society to be more tolerant of others suggesting that the evangelical church is in fact, intolerant.
The church does need to be tolerant of people of all walks of life. But when Christians begin to tolerate in the church of Jesus Christ what God calls “sin,” tolerance has gone too far. This is the message to the church at Thyatira, the church that tolerated too much: Jesus will not tolerate a church that does not address sin in its ranks.
What Jesus saw in Thyatira (Rev. 2:18-19)
We don’t know much about the church in Thyatira other than that it is the least significant of the seven cities. It had several guilds, was on a well-travelled highway in the empire, and was loyal to Rome. That’s it.
The rest we have to pick out of the text. There is a similarity between Thyatira and Pergamum and a contrast with Ephesus. The Ephesians were big on doctrine but had forgotten the importance of love. Thyatira, on the other hand, was abounding in love but had lost their sensitivity to bad teaching. Or they tolerated those who taught false doctrine.
What Jesus says about himself in each letter is always illuminating as it says so much concerning the church in question. To Thyatira he identifies himself this way: “The words of the Son of God (the only place where Jesus calls himself “the Son of God”), who has eyes like a flame of fire, and whose feet are like burnished bronze,” (18:b).
As the Son of God, he has “eyes like blazing fire,” or “eyes that can pierce the facades, the disguises, the postures and pretensions of his people and get right to the heart of what they are doing. He has feet like burnished bronze (brass) which can trample sin under foot and severely punish that which is wrong. (“The Church That Embraces Jezebel (Thyatira) - SermonCentral”) Quite a picture of Jesus. Not meek and mild, but rather zealous for the purity of his church. (see 21-23)
This is the Jesus that says, “I know…” He is not far off on some celestial throne way up in the clouds; he rules right here. He knows what’s happening in his church. “I know your works, your love and faith and service and patient endurance, and that your latter works exceed the first,” (19). They were doing great things in the name of Jesus, to be sure. Their “latter works” set them apart from Ephesus where the church needed to go back to the beginning and learn love again. Not Thyatira, they were growing, they were popular, their seats were filled, they were serving the Lord…
But…
“Why are you tolerating Jezebel?” (2:20-23)
I like the word “but’ in scripture; it means something big is coming. It can be terrifying, and it can be really good. In this passage you get both. Here’s the first:
“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,” (20).
Evidently there was a woman in the church at Thyatira who was a very dominant personality. Jesus calls her Jezebel, but that’s not her real name. Jezebel speaks more to her character. Why Jezebel?
According to 1 Kings 16, Jezebel was the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians, who married Ahab, king of Israel. She was an influencer; she convinced Ahab and all of Israel to combine the worship of Yahweh with the worship of Baal. Because of this syncretism, it was said of her husband that he did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger more than all the kings of Israel that came before him.
Jezebel was a sly and wicked woman. She had her neighbor Naboth killed so that she could confiscate his vineyard for her husband. She sought the death of all the prophets of Israel and almost succeeded in killing Elijah.
Although Jezebel had been dead for a thousand years, Jesus saw the “spirit of Jezebel” in this teacher in Thyatira. Some scholars speculate who she was: a host of a house-church, a pastor’s wife, a local fortune teller. We don’t know.
What we do know is that she was accused of teaching two things: sexual permissiveness (blurring the lines of what the Bible teaches on sex), and eating meat sacrificed to idols. The two are somewhat connected.
We have talked about guilds in a previous sermon. These were trade unions for carpentry, tanners, and the like. Belonging to a guild often meant meeting certain expectations. One of them was worshiping the gods of Rome. And part of that worship was having sex with idol prostitutes. Jezebel may have taught that Christians live two separate lives: the private faith life and the public or civic life. What one does in the one does not affect the other. She may have taught that “hey, we are under grace. Sexual sin is not sin anymore. Grace covers that.”
The other issue was barbecue. Seriously. When a man made a sacrifice at a pagan temple, he brought meat. The priest offered a portion of the meat to the idol, kept some himself, and grilled the rest for the worshiper. He did one of two things: One, he called his friends to the temple to have a feast of ribs and steaks, or two, he brought it home to eat it with family and friends.
The problem for the Christian was this: Can you eat the meat in the temple or anywhere else when it has been dedicated to idols? Since most meat was butchered at temples, it may mean going meatless. But it’s very clear in Acts 15:29, that if the Gentiles wanted to be part of the Christian church, they had to avoid eating that meat. Jezebel said, “don’t worry about it,” while the pastors quietly disagreed with her.
Why was this woman being tolerated in the church? Was she too powerful as a church leader? Were the leaders afraid of a church split? Did they think that by showing grace she might eventually change or go away? Is that grace?
They tolerated her for some reason. Thomas Helmbock reflects the current attitude concerning our “truths.” He said, “…every individual’s beliefs, values, lifestyle, and perception of truth claims are equal…There is no hierarchy of truth. "Your beliefs and my beliefs are equal, and all truth is relative.”" (“Proverbs 14:15 - The Simple Man | Faith Ministries Resources”)
What we get out that is the spirit of Jezebel:
“No one has the right to tell me what’s right or wrong.”
“It’s wrong to impose your beliefs on someone else”
“I have the right to do whatever I want if I’m not hurting anyone”
“You can have your opinion - I have mine.”
Many people believe this. But it’s not enough for some folks. It is not enough to affirm another person’s rights; to be truly tolerant, you must now give your approval, endorsement, and support to their beliefs and behaviors. The United Nations Declaration on Principles of Tolerance says it “involves the rejection of dogmatism and absolutism.” Which is a self-defeating statement if you think about it.
This is the spirit of Jezebel. Why does the church tolerate this spirit in its midst?
Hold on to the Truth of Jesus (2:24-25)
The second “but” is a relief, a note of hope. “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 what you have until I come.”
Jezebel promoted an open-mindedness style of ethics. Her morals were arms-wide-open to the point of “anything goes. Jesus doesn’t mind.” But there were some in the church that didn’t buy it. Call them prudes, prigs, or bigots, call them what you want. They were not going to tolerate her teaching.
Jesus says, “good.” Hold on to what you have. Hold on to Jesus and the truth. We can tolerate a lot of things in the church – cultural, idiosyncrasies (personal quirks), even liturgical (how we worship) – but truth is not relative.
Jesus said something that clashes against the mantra of the inclusivism of our age. It’s very exclusive. It’s not tolerant by any means. It makes you unpopular if you share it with others. What is it? Jesus said this, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” (John 14:6). That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “hold fast to what you have.” On the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand. The life of Jesus is the standard by which I am going to be measured. He is the foundation of the local church and the materials we build with here at RFC must match the foundation or Jesus will start over. He will tear us down and begin again. (see vv. 21-23).
The truth that we have learned through Jesus teaches us true tolerance. John Stott talked about three kinds of tolerance:
First, there is legal tolerance: fighting for the equal rights before the law of all ethnic and religious minorities. Christians should lead the way in this.
Second, there is social tolerance: We need to go out of our way to make friends with people of all faiths, since they are God’s creation who bear his image.
Third, there is intellectual tolerance: And here is the problem – This tolerance asks us to cultivate a mind so broad and open as to accommodate all views and reject none. This is to forget what GK Chesterton said, “the purpose of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” "To open the mind so wide as to keep nothing in it or out of it is not a virtue; it is the vice of the feebleminded." (“The Tolerant Society – Oh, really? – Oxford House Research”)
Do we hear what the Spirit is saying? (2:26-29)
What is the Spirit saying to RFC? We need love AND truth.
If we take the doctrine-loving Ephesus and the love-and-faith-and service of Thyatira, we come closer to being the church that Jesus wants us to be.
We talk a lot about being family here at RFC, about loving each other. That’s good. We want to have open arms for each of you coming into this fellowship. Love characterizes this faith community very well. There is room for growth in this area though. I hear people talking about the warts and blemishes of others at times. Love builds up; it doesn’t tear down. We all have places we fall short and need to grow. The challenge of loving each other better is met when we ask ourselves, “How can I help you grow?” The simple answer is this: Encouraging words.
Love without truth leads to permissiveness. For the sake of love, we allow sin or a false understanding of God to go unaddressed. We need truth. We are guardians of the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Stott said, “Tolerance is not a spiritual gift; it is the distinguishing mark of postmodernism; and sadly, it has permeated the very fibre of Christianity.”
We must not tolerate Jezebel. There is a place for intolerance: intolerance of moral and spiritual relativism where we call good evil and evil good; intolerance of misrepresenting God’s character; intolerance of spiritual abuse; intolerance of anything that dehumanizes others or devalues their freedoms and rights.
If we hold fast to the truth of Jesus Christ, we will conquer the spirit of this age, the spirit of Jezebel, and Jesus will give us “authority over the nations” and we “will rule them with an iron rod and smash them like clay pots” and we will “have the same authority (Jesus) received from (his) Father.”
Only hold on to the way and the truth and the life. Hold on to Jesus.
AMEN
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