Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. And today, I want to challenge you to think through the issue of the mark of the beast and the letter to Ephesus in the book of Revelation. Oh, we have very early on. We don't have to wait till the later chapters of the book of Revelation to find out what the mark of the beast was because the letter to the Ephesians gives us an indication of what exactly that might be for the early church in the very first century.

The mark of the beast is not just coming in the latter days. The mark of the beast was already there in the Roman Empire during the time of the apostle John when he wrote the book of Revelation. So we're going to begin to unpack that plus much, much more as we look then to chapter 2 and the letter to the Ephesians in the book of Revelation. But first, let me remind you of the Lincoln Day banquet that's coming up. It's going to be April 13th, and it's going to be held at the Melaleuca Corporate Headquarters.

And I'm excited because one of my favorite people, David Barton, is going to be the special guest speaker. And his topic for the Lincoln Day banquet, sponsored by the Bonneville County Republican Party, his topic for the Lincoln Day banquet is God and the Constitution. Oh, it's going to be good. This man knows of what he speaks. He has been a student of the Constitution and a teacher of the Constitution for decades.

He is the founder and president of Wall Builders, a national pro-family organization. And it teaches, and David is so expert at this, at teaching America's forgotten history, forgotten heroes, and a lot of different books. I used him personally, he and his materials, in my homeschooling of our own children. So I have been a fan of David Barton's for years. And I just encourage you to plan on setting aside Saturday night, April 13, the Lincoln Day banquet at Melaleuca Corporate Headquarters, and call ahead then for tickets.

And you can call then at 435-494-1192 to get tickets then to this banquet. And it's going to be good. They're also going to have a gun giveaway. I'll be there for that. They're going to have a sign on auction and a raffle, too.

So make sure and join us for a Lincoln Day banquet. I'll be giving the invocation and the benediction as well. So I'll be participating as well. I just look forward to this time learning even more about God and the special guest speaker at Barton. Well, let's get back then to our study of the book of Revelation.

And we're going to be looking now then at the second half of the letter. We looked last week at the commendation our Lord had for the church at Ephesus. And we're going to be looking at the condemnation this week that our Lord has for the church at Ephesus. He has both commendation and condemnation for this church. And we're going to find that most of the churches to which the seven letters were composed have both commendation and condemnation.

And the church at Ephesus was one of those churches. Now, we saw in commendation last week that the Lord recognized their works, right? Your works, your toil, your patient endurance. And he also commended them for their discernment of truth and false authority. And then he also commended them for their indefatigable witness to his name, right?

Well, today, he also chastens them. He has some criticisms. Let's cover those now. Now, first of all, then in Ephesus, in commendation, know that I see your forgotten heart of love towards me in the church. Oh, he does.

He chastens them because they have forgotten your first love, right? You have forgotten your first love. Well, did you ever wake up and say, why am I doing this, right? Whatever it is you may be doing, just even a day-to-day, a day-to-day labors, just getting up and going to work and coming back home and some dinner and going to sleep and getting up and doing the same thing the next day. Why am I doing this?

Maybe it's a job, a career, a calling that you loved at first and you were so excited to go to, but now swinging that hammer, tapping that keyboard, wheeling that carving knife, just doesn't cut it anymore. As many lovers and husbands and wives lose the romance they once had and they call it quits. You know, there's an old song by B.B. King called, The Thrill is Gone. Well, we have an expression in our own culture too, going through the motions, right?

We all know what this feels like. The Ephesians, in many respects, were going through the motions. They had lost their first love. Our Lord chastens them for, verses 4 and 5. The trouble is, this cannot be sustained indefinitely, can it?

Just going through the motions, right? No fire, there's no faith, there's no love, there's no labor. Pretty soon, that's the way it ends up being, isn't it? Well, Christianity is a religion of the heart and the spirit, isn't it? Well, I remember a lecture by one of my favorite authors, a man named R.G.

Rushduni. He has an excellent lecture contrasting Christianity with Islam. Islam is very much a loveless religion of works because Islam teaches that you can never know God personally because God is so far above all things. He's so transcendent that he cannot be known per se. The only way a Muslim knows Allah is through the Koran.

But Christianity is a religion of the heart where the Lord himself dwells within us in the power of the Holy Spirit. We can know our Savior. We can love our Savior because he loves us and he opens up those doors of communication. First by saving us, forgiving us of our sins so that we have access to him. And then when the Holy Spirit enters our heart, then he reveals, the Holy Spirit reveals Jesus to us and brings us to the Father.

We have that great Trinitarian interaction between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It's intimate. It's personal. And we not only have our first love then when we meet Jesus, as the church in Ephesus did, but we also have a lasting continuous love because of Holy Spirit dwelling within us, Christ being with us, we being in Christ. And these are the things that the church in Ephesus was beginning to lose.

Their hearts were beginning to cool towards the Lord. And he is warning them here that they must return to that first love that they had for. Christ renews and fills our heart, doesn't he? And love is the enduring attribute of our faith. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, if I give away all I have, if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. So now faith, hope and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love, Paul says. Oh, and the church in Ephesus was doing all those things, right? Prophetic powers that they were suffering, being persecuted, being burned, delivering up their bodies to be burned. But our Lord warns them because they did not have the love they had at first, right?

Implicit in doing works is love for the object of works. Our Lord says in a parable in Matthew 25, for I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me.

I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me. There is nothing colder than loveless works, brothers and sisters. May have been objects of loveless works or we may have been loveless workers ourselves and there's nothing colder than loveless works. And the Lord will call them out on the last day too.

He says in Matthew chapter 7 in the Sermon on the Mount, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day, many will say to me, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and cast out demons in your name and do many mighty works in your name? That's indeed the church in Ephesus was doing, right? But they were loveless works. And then I will declare to them, our Lord says in the Sermon on the Mount, I never knew you.

Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness, unquote. Oh, the Ephesians were dangerously close to this ultimate rebuke, such that their lampstand would be removed, he threatens them. That is, the church would disappear, as did the church there eventually, as did the entire city in Ephesus. Eventually, because they were situated, the city of Ephesus itself was situated at the mouth of the Kaster River into then the sea. And the Kaster River brought down a lot of silt every year and filled in the harbor eventually, after decades and decades of this action.

And the entire town then was removed, if you will. But long before that, the lampstand of the church of Ephesus was removed. But that condemnation, even then, the condemnation of losing their first love is a qualified, too. It is qualified by our Lord, because he goes on to tell them that one mitigating caveat is their hatred of the works of the Nicolaitans, the Nicolaitans. And here we come to an insight into what it means to bear the mark of the beast, because the church in Ephesus, by standing against the teachings of the Nicolaitans, were receiving, then refused to receive the mark of the beast.

John is saying, once more, John is laying down a marker for the rest of the book here, when he says, one thing you have in your favor is that you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, like I do. And idolatry and immorality seems to come in threes in these matters. Now, I'm previewing for you, because in the rest of the letters, we have the Nicolaitans, the followers of Balaam, and those who follow Jezebel. They have different labels and sinning styles, if you will, but they do the same things, as indicated here in our text. We're in chapter 2, verses 1 through 7.

And here we see that they practice sexual immorality and eat food sacrificed to idols. This is going to be the consistent theme and motif, whether we're looking at the Nicolaitans here, the followers of Balaam, a little later, and then those who follow Jezebel. Further on into these, they have different names and different sinning styles, if you will, but they all practice sexual immorality and they eat food sacrificed to idols, as our text says. Now, the exact nature of the Nicolaitans is lost in the mists of obscurity, exact teachings and origin, but we do have an indication from the church father, Victorinus.

He attributes, he's about the late second and early third centuries. The church father, Victorinus, attributes the origins of the Nicolaitans to, as he puts it, false and troublesome men who as ministers under the name of Nicholas made for themselves a heresy, unquote. And our best guess is that he was the head of an artisan guild. Now, here's where the artisan guilds come in as a mark of the beast. What's the connection between the ancient artisan guilds, you may say, and the mark of the beast?

I thought that was going to be a chip under our skin or our palms, or maybe barcodes that are tattooed under our foreheads or our hands, right? That's usually the general analysis of what it means, the modern analysis of what it means to have the mark of the beast anyway. Well, the mark of the beast is much older than Hal Lindsey. The mark of the beast was existent in the very first century in the church in Ephesus, and we'll unpack this for you as we go through, but the artisan guilds had much to do with it. The ancient artisan guilds, they weren't like the unions we have now.

They were a much different kind of culture. They consisted of an entire culture of lifestyles and religion and worship and rituals and foods. We have from the book of Acts, for instance, Demetrius, who was the silversmith where? Where was Demetrius a silversmith? He was a silversmith in the book of Acts, right?

Indicates to us. In the city of Ephesus, the very city we're talking about now, the letter to Ephesus. And Demetrius, of course, was a silversmith who made silver shrines of Artemis, right? Queen Artemis, who was the patron deity of the city of Ephesus. And Demetrius was most likely a head of the silversmith guild in Ephesus.

And those guilds in those ancient days were not like the secular guilds and unions that we know today. No, no, no. They weren't the teamsters. These guilds were all dedicated to a pagan god who was the patron of that particular craft or trade being practiced. For instance, the Roman god Mercury was the god and patron of trade and merchants and travelers.

Most likely, Lydia, before she was converted, was an active member of this trade, the guild of trade merchants and travelers. And her patron god would have been Mercury. Probably as a pagan, paganess, trader of purple, right? She was a merchant of purple. And so her patron god would have been Mercury and she would have participated in the festivals and the holidays and the pagan meals that had been sacrificed to Mercury and all of the rituals and dedication to Mercury.

Mars, of course, was the god of war. And he was the patron god of soldiers. Minerva. Minerva was the goddess patron of wisdom. And so, consequently, she was the patron goddess in the guild of scholars and also the guild of doctors.

Minerva was also the goddess of medicine. Then we have another example of Vesta, for example. Vesta was the Roman goddess of the hearth. And thus, she was the patron of bakers and homemakers. Vesta, the patron of bakers.

And then there was another example, one last example. There are many others, but the god Vulcan, for fire, right? Vulcan. And thus, he was the patron of blacksmiths and craftsmanship. And if you were a blacksmith, you belonged to the guild of Vulcan.

You participated then in his fiery rites and rituals. And you participated in the foods that were sacrificed, the animals, perhaps, that were sacrificed to Vulcan. And if you did not belong to one of these guilds, there were many, many others. Every trade had its own guild. Every trade had its own patron god.

And if you weren't a member of the guild, you didn't work. No, you could not buy and sell or trade. You were not a member of one of these guilds. Are you beginning to see now what the mark of the beast might be? That is, you bore the mark of one of these.

And many of these guilds had their own tattoos. They had their own marks, if you will, that may have been cut into their skin as a sign of their dedication to not only their trade, but also the god of that trade and membership in a guild. One excellent book that gives us some insight into this is a book called Pagans and Christians, simply called Pagans and Christians by Robin Lane Fox. And he gives great insight into the ancient world, especially the transition between pagan culture and Christian culture. It was long and slow.

It was not sudden. It wasn't overnight. It didn't just happen when Constantine became emperor, first Christian emperor. No, on a long, slow, sometimes painful transition between a pagan culture and a Christian culture. And Robin Lane Fox's book, Pagans and Christians, does an excellent, it's a long book.

It's almost 800 pages long, but it will chronicle for you in great detail that transition between a pagan culture and a Christian culture. And he treats of this idea of the guild, too. On and on the list could go, though. Mercury, Mars, Minerva Vesta Vulcan, if you worked, right, understand this, listener, because you will not understand the mark of the beast until you understand this. If you worked, you probably belonged to a guild.

You participated in their ceremonies and their festivals and thus did what they did, right? Other members, your compatriots, your colleagues. And of course, many of these festivals and ceremonies and meals degenerated into debauchery, not only licensed with food, but licensed with sex as well. They honored who they honored. You, if you were a member of these guilds, you honored what they honored.

If you were a member of a guild, you ate what they ate. The guild was your lifeline to a living. No guild, no work. Now, you see where we're going with this, right? Buying and selling.

It wasn't chips and barcodes. It wasn't something far in the future. It was present in the life of the Ephesians at that very day. You go running off looking for great tribulations in the future, rapture, 666, marks of the beast. It was happening then and there, dear listener.

That's what frustrates me so much about you futurists out there who cast everything into the future. You miss what was going on in the first century with our brothers and sisters in the first century, then and there. They were going through these things. Now, Nicholas and consequently the Nicolaitans, they were probably countenancing full participation in these guilds without reservation, right? And this is the teaching that the apostle John is there to put a stop to.

And our Lord stands against it. And so do the Ephesians. And so he commends them for this. So it's one of our major motifs we're going to be seeing all the way through the book of Revelation. Come out of her, right?

Touch no unclean thing. There's no compromise with the world. You can't be a member of these guilds and be a Christian at the same time, which is what the Nicolaitans were teaching. And there is reward. There is reward for obedience.

Then that brings us to verse 7. We're in Revelation chapter 2, verses 1 through 7, and we're at verse 7 now, because there we find, for encouragement, know that those who conquer will banquet upon the tree of life in a restored Edenic garden. Our Lord gives the recurring exhortation to hear with understanding. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. That's the sense of hearing with understanding.

And it's to us, because he tells us that to the one who conquers, Nekonti, we get our word Nike from this, the idea of conqueror, Victor. To the one who conquers, ah, who is the one who conquers? Just parenthetically here, who is the one who conquers, dear listener? Is it the one who wins high elective office? Oh, is it the one who finally triumphs like Constantine at the Melvin Bridge?

Is it one who becomes absolute master of the world, grinding down all his enemies? Is that who is conqueror? Huh. That is the world's vision of conqueror, isn't it? That is the one who, with Mao, says political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.

Yeah, but the Spirit tells us that spiritual power comes blood of the cross. And for Ephesus, to the one who works in the love of Christ, who patiently endures, who disciplines false teachers, the one who comes out of the world and its system, to this one reward will come. And that reward is, and these are conquerors, brothers and sisters, we are still conquerors in this very same fashion. And that reward is tailored to meet the sacrifice then of this life, even if it falls for it, right? To the Christian guild member who must leave his pagan way of life because it's inextricably bound up with idolatry, debauchery as it was.

His festivals and his steak dinners dedicated to his patron God will now be replaced by fruit from the tree of life in the paradise of God, as verse 7 tells us. Once more, we see a theme that will carry us to the end, brothers and sisters. That is the idea of life in the paradise of God, food from the paradise of God. Revelation 22 tells us, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its 12 kinds of fruits, yielding its fruit each month, the leaves of the tree, the healing, the nations, unquote. Yes, this is a major theme for us then throughout Revelation is that we conquer.

We conquer the nations as well. The nations are going to go into eternity, the text tells us. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations, not just a general designation of all kinds of people. No, but the nations as we know them now will be judged and will be in, in some sense, in eternity. And the nations will be the Lord's as well.

And we will be conquerors. As I keep telling you, dominion is our destiny. Dominion in this life, in this world, Christian, is our destiny. Even as we have seen Christ conquer throughout the centuries, have we not? We have seen Christ conquer throughout the centuries and he is making his way through the earth.

We see the mustard seed begin in ancient Palestine, right? After the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ began. All authority has been given unto me. Hell will not prevail against you and against my kingdom, right? Behold, I'm with you to the very end of the age.

And that mustard seed has grown from just the smallest of all seeds, as our Lord says, into a flourishing tree. We see Christianity as the largest denomination, the largest religion, if you will, in the entire world. It's flourishing. It's growing. Dominion is our destiny, dear believer.

To the one who conquers will be given the fruit from the tree of life in the paradise of God. Yes, and the nations will find great healing in the leaves of that tree. And we will be dominion takers. We are dominion takers now. We're not sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting for a fictional rapture before the great tribulation.

No, if you're waiting for that, you will be sadly disappointed, dear listener. We rather are dominion takers and we should be about taking dominion even now. Behold your work for the weak. And brother and sister, begin taking dominion. We take dominion not by the barrel of a gun.

No, but by the blood of the lamb. And we live and we sacrifice. Worship. We labor. We work.

We endure patiently. These are the weapons of our warfare. They're spiritual to the pulling down of strongholds. By these, we take dominion not with guns. Bam!

Brothers and sister, may that be your portion this week. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Idaho Falls. We meet for holy worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. We're going through the book of Revelation, preaching the book of Revelation. And we meet for worship, holy worship, on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. And we encourage you to join us across our threshold.

Come visit us, see who we are as a congregation. You'll find a warm welcome and you'll find an opportunity to worship in spirit. And for more information or some comments, perhaps you disagree with something I've said, shock upon shock, maybe, or perhaps you want more information about us, you can call us at area code 208-523-0196. That's area code 208-523-0196.