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 with asking, what does the letter to the church in Thyatira in the book of Revelation tell us about what the mark of the beast might be? We are going to encounter the mark of the beast much later in subsequent chapters of Revelation, and that's usually the chapters that most people run right to.

But we have answers to many of the questions concerning issues like who is the beast and what is the seven-year tribulation and these kinds of things. These are answered oftentimes for us very much earlier in the book if we will just sit down and patiently read the apocalypse for what it is. And so I want to challenge you with this. And first of all, let's know what we're talking about here with the actual letter. Let's go ahead and read from chapter 2 of Revelation, beginning at verse 18, if you wanted to follow along.

We are reading from the apocalypse, the book of Revelation, chapter 2, beginning at verse 18, the letter to the church in Thyatira. To the angel of the church in Thyatira, write, these are the words of the Son of God, whose eyes are like blazing fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze. I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are now doing more than you did at first. Nevertheless, I have this against you. You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess.

By her teaching, the misdeeds, by her teaching, excuse me, she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.

Now I say to the rest of you in Thyatira, to you who do not hold to her teaching and have not learned Satan's so-called deep secrets, and I will not impose any other burden on you. Only hold on to what you have until I come. To him who overcomes and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations. He will rule them with an iron scepter. He will dash them to pieces like pottery.

Just as I have received authority from my father, I will also give him the morning star. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. Ah, there is the letter to the church in Thyatira. And we are picking up then at about verse 20, which has some condemnations. We have seen that most of the letters to these seven churches of Asia have both commendation and condemnation.

We saw last week the commendation that the church in Thyatira received from our Lord, because in this ancient city in Asia, we saw, and this is important for understanding the Mark of the Beast, that the trade and craft guilds of the ancient world, they were very strong, stronger than any union town in the United States. Oh, unions generally govern how you work and perhaps how you vote, but those craft and trade guilds of the ancient world also controlled what you worshipped, who you worshipped, what you worshipped, and how you lived your social life.

Usually when you walk out of the Union Hall in America, your social life picks up with whatever you want to do. But in the ancient world, the social life, if you belong to a trade guild, whether you were a craftsman in metals or in baking or in purple dye, as Lydia was in the book of Acts, all of these crafts and trades of the ancient world, owed their fealty, owed their allegiance to a particular pagan god oftentimes, most of the time, all the time we can say, and that you had particular rites and ceremonies depending on the god that you worshipped.

And oftentimes you ate food that was dedicated to them on their altars, and they were not particularly morally refined in any way, shape, or form. So oftentimes there were sexual practices in these guilds as well, and to these things then the Christians in Thyatira were subject because Thyatira was famous for its trade guilds and craft guilds and the pagan practices. And as well, we saw last week that pagan temples were strewn all over Thyatira. They were proud of the particular one dedicated to the emperor. We saw this unfold, didn't we?

The ancient city of Thyatira in Asia, the trade and craft guilds were strong. They worshipped pagan gods, and they practiced sexual immorality as part of their culture, which of course was verboten, was forbidden to recently converted Christians. And we saw indeed how the church in Thyatira was commended by our Lord for its resistance to these things. We saw in verses 18 and 19 that although you live in a pagan union town, you embody six sterling qualities that shine out in the utter moral darkness of Thyatira, right? We saw this.

Indeed, our Lord commended them for their works, for their love, for their faith, for their service, for their patient endurance, and for their growth and maturation. That's the idea of your latter works exceed the first. So we saw this then, did we not? In the life of the church of Thyatira, it's a commendation, but there was also condemnation under which they came. In verses 20 to 25, we see the threat to them.

And we saw in verses 20 to 25, the point being made that because you live in a pagan union town, you are liable to the pressures of compromise, which undermine everything good that you do, right? God is telling them that although they have all of these sterling attributes, the thing that I have against you militates so strongly against you that it threatens all the rest of what you do and are. Oh, my, my, my. And that, of course, was religious tolerance. That phrase encapsulates everything we mean negative by it, right?

And literally, he says, you treat those in a loose fashion. That is, that loose woman, Jezebel, right? This they have against you. You tolerate that woman, Jezebel. And Jezebel, of course, at that time was a metaphor.

If you know your Bible at all, Jezebel is a metaphor for all that was corrupt in Israel before the conquest. In lamenting the fate of the righteous, Isaiah alludes to her in this way. He says, the children of Jezebel indeed, but you draw near sons of the sorceress, offspring of the adulterer and the loose woman. Indeed, John is employing that very language from Isaiah. Jezebel was the queen of Israel over her husband Ahab, that weak, willed son of David who married a Sidonian woman, right?

And she is the one who burns with lust among the oaks under every green tree who slaughter your children in the valleys under the clefts of the rocks. That is, the worship of Baal into which she led Israel. Immorality and idolatry would characterize Israel and Judah ever after. And ever since, Jezebel has become synonymous with deceit and debauchery and decadence. It is heavy artillery, if you will, that our Lord breaks out to get the attention of his saints in Thyatira.

And apparently, Jezebel is a nickname for an actual woman in the congregation who is teaching and seducing in the same manner as Jezebel taught Israel to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols, unquote, from our letter to Thyatira. Now, sometimes we forget that these kinds of corruptions have to be taught as well as beguiled.

The sense is that there is a prophetess within the congregation, as there are in many congregations all across the world, women who are claiming to be prophetesses within the congregation who is acting the Jezebel, beguiling and instructing in a systematic fashion, some at least, in the congregation to compromise themselves. Be wary of any woman in your congregation, O Church of Christ, who claims to be a prophetess, a modern-day prophetess. Be wary of such people. And once more, we see now a third circumstance in the churches where precisely the same thing is occurring. We've seen it previously in two previous churches.

That is, that food is sacrificed to idols and that sexual immorality is being practiced. But under a variety of faces and authorities, too. We saw in Ephesus, for example, the doctrine of one Nicholas. And we saw this from the church father of Victorinus, who saw this firsthand right in the day it was being committed. The doctrine of one Nicholas was being brought in from the outside.

The same thing, idol worship and sexual immorality, but being brought in from the outside in the church at Ephesus. And then we saw in the church at Pergamum, a cluster of believers within the church who are corrupting you in the same manner that Balaam corrupted Israel at Peor, that is to worship idols and practice sexual immorality. But it was bubbling up from within the congregation. And now we see in Thyatira, a woman prophetess, so-called, that is a Jezebel, who is leading you astray in the same manner as Jezebel led Israel astray, that is to worship idols, eat food sacrificed to idols, and practice sexual immorality.

These things recurring in all three of these congregations under different headings. The face of the beast, we see here, the face of the beast may be different in each case, but it is still the beast. You want the beast, dear listener? You don't have to wait till chapter 13. Learn this.

You are meant to absorb this before going, running off to later chapters in the apocalypse to find out where, whether 666 is Henry Kissinger or Barack Obama or Donald Trump. You have intimations of Antichrist right in front of your face here in these opening letters of the apocalypse. And we see the consistent threat to the church, and that is tolerance. In order to survive in this pagan environment, and we live in a pagan environment ourselves, the modern day church does, in order to survive in this pagan environment, we have to make some, well, we have to make some adjustments. We have to make some compromises.

Well, if you lived in ancient Thyatira, you lived in ancient Ephesus, we saw that as well there, almost any ancient city across the land of Asia or across the Roman Empire for that matter. This is empire-wide. I encourage you to consult Robin Lane Fox's book, Pagans and Christians, where he accounts for, across the opening centuries of the early church, the transition from a pagan world to a Christian world, and the Christians battled mightily against pagan culture, and pagan culture was rife throughout the ancient cities of the world.

You couldn't throw a stone in Thyatira without hitting a pagan temple of some kind or a pagan guild or craft center, where indeed, if you were a shoemaker for existence, for example, excuse me, if you were a shoemaker, then you had your culture set, you had your society, your fellowship already established with other cobblers, and you would then have to worship the god of the cobblers, you would have to eat their food dedicated to that god, and then you would have to participate in the societal and cultural practices, which were oftentimes immoral. And if you didn't, you are a marked man, you are a marked person.

You had to bear the mark of the beast, that is, everything your hands did or your head thought. And that's the idea of the mark of the beast on the forehead, the mark of the beast on the hand, is that everything you did, said, and thought had to be committed to the god of your guild, the god of your craft. And if not, you did not bear this mark of the beast, then you were excluded from society, you were excluded from a means of employment, you were excluded from your trade or craft, and you could not practice it, and you went hungry, in other words, you could not buy or sell.

This is the sense of the mark of the beast appearing here very early in these churches, whether it's Ephesus or Pergamum or Thyatira, which was a craft and guild center. Oh, and these, then Jezebels, if you will, those Balaams who were leading the church to commit adultery and to practice the practices of the guilds and the craft guilds and so forth, they were saying, you know, we got to make some adjustments. If we're going to make a living, if we're going to eat, if we're going to provide for our families, put a roof over our head, clothes on our back, we have to make some adjustments.

We have to make some compromises because if we're thrown out of the guild, if we're thrown out of our craft union, then we aren't going to be able to eat. We aren't going to be able to make a living. No gold, no grub or goodies either, right? We can offer that pinch of incense to Caesar on his altar and then recite Caesar as Lord when we go to church and confess Christ as Lord. We go out into their six-day work week and we say, Caesar is Lord.

And we can do all of this in good conscience because it's only pro forma. We don't really mean it. It's a political statement and that doesn't affect our faith. We can coexist, right? You remember that bumper sticker, coexist with all those religious symbols on it?

Well, in every chariot in Thyatira, even the Christians bore these stickers, if you will, coexist. I'm speaking metaphorically, of course. But the problem with the Jezebels, the problem with the Balaams, the problem with those who compromise with culture is that they get along to go along. They coexist with the Caesar cult. They coexist.

They go up to the temple to Zeus, which was at the pinnacle of the conical shape of the city of Thyatira. They would go up to the temple to Zeus and they would make sacrifices to him. But at least they would make the annual trek to the temple to the emperor and they would do the required a pinch of incense and offering of food or money than to the cult of Caesar. And they would get their prescript. They would get their tablet of clay stating that they indeed made that sacrifice and that they were citizens in good standing and that they had declared Caesar is Lord.

Perhaps they do it even before they went to church then on Sunday where they would then sing and proclaim Christ is Lord. What a conflict. And our Lord says he sees these things. He sees and you bear the mark of the beast and he sees it. The saints in Thyatira bore the mark of the beast because they indeed did capitulate.

They caved to the demands of the pagan cultures around them. They folded to the demands of their craft guilds and their union guilds, which had a stranglehold on their societal life, their cultural life, their religious life, and their work a day life as well. So this is what the Christians faced. And it was the Jezebels of the congregations, the so-called prophetesses of the congregations, the one particularly then in Thyatira, who was seducing the church there with compromise and encouraging them. Go ahead, bear the mark of the beast.

You want to be able to buy and sell. You want to be able to trade. Why? No guild? Then you have no gold, do you?

You have no food. You have no means of supporting yourself. No gold grubber goodies if there's no guild. Well, go ahead, offer that pinch of incense to Caesar on his altar and recite Caesar as Lord. Can you hear the hiss of the snake in all of this?

This indeed is precisely the nature of the mark of the beast. It's not some coming Henry Kissinger or Donald Trump or Putin or some other figure in the future. This was happening to the churches on the ground in Revelation. This is why the letter is addressed to them first and foremost. All these things can happen to us as well.

We can make application to ourselves today, but not in the way that futurists do it. The mark of the beast is not a thing coming in the future. The mark of the beast existed in John's day. In fact, it is an issue that every generation has had to deal with as they practice their Christian faith. Are you going to compromise it with the culture around you?

This is the sense of the mark of the beast, dear listener. It's not going to be microchips under your skin, under your forehead or in your hand. No, it's not going to be barcodes on your forehead or on your hand. No, this was all faced by the church in the first century. And we have to understand this before we ever come to applying it to our own day.

Understand what it meant in John's day. Well, this was the council of Jezebel in the congregation. This was the council of Balaam then in Thyatira and Jezebel in Thyatira, Pergamum as well, Ephesus as well. These guilds, these craft unions were very strong and had a stranglehold on the lives of Christians as well as pagans. They were encouraged to practice tolerance, tolerance.

We can also eat at the table of our respective guilds. We can honor the God of our profession and we can fellowship with our brothers. Remember what that little saying of the church father was? He said, you pagans, you share everything but, you share only your wives but nothing else. We, the church, share everything but our wives, right?

Well, what they were, Jezebel and what Balaam were encouraging, metaphorically speaking, the church to do was to honor the God of the profession and fellowship with their brothers, even sharing their wives. So we can coexist. After all, how are we going to buy or sell or make a living if we don't? Whence Lydia then in our New Testament reading, we have a New Testament reading where Lydia indeed would belong to the guild of purple as a merchant of purple in a strong union town like Thyatira. Of what guild would she have been?

Well, Mercury was the patron god of trade and merchants, Mercury. So she would have been worshiping Mercury, the Roman patron god, and practicing all of the debauched social and cultural practices of that guild. And she, no doubt, as a strong Christian, would step away then from that guild and not practice any further the practices of that ancient guild. But to this prophetess and her children, however, our Lord threatens judgment. He says, after having warned them before to repent, he says, you want to climb in bed with this adulterous, actual, as well as metaphorically speaking?

Well, fine. I'll make it a bed of sickness for you. In fact, some of you will die, our Lord says and threatens them. When this comes upon them, then all the churches will know what I mean when I say I have eyes like a flame of fire. That is, I search the mind and heart.

And I have feet like burnished bronze. That is, I give according to your works. And this too is providence, dear listener. But fortunately, not everyone indulges this prophetess. To them who have not learned the deep things of Satan, as he says, no other burden is required.

Hold fast until you come. He says this in verses 26 to 29, where the point is made, as you conquer in a pagan union town, you will find yourselves co-heirs with me with authority over the nations. Verses 26 to 29. Now, here we have a conjunction of conquest, which meets the rule over the nations. Conquest and rule over the nations.

Certainly, pastor, we're free to employ Chairman Mao's dictum now that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. Surely, here we can say we conquer the nations with political will through electing conservative Christians, forming political action groups, and sending in the Marines when we need to apply a little muscle. Is that what John is saying? No. Lord hasn't made that transition.

No, the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly, are they? But spiritual to the pulling down of strongholds. Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun, but spiritual power comes out of the blood of the cross, dear listener. Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun, but spiritual power comes out of the blood of the cross. And John portrays our weapons as the word of our testimony, the blood of the lamb.

But still, it must be said, we conquer. Behold, a major motif of revelation. Dominion is our destiny, dear listener. And the promise of our sharing authority over the nations, right, with our king is not for some far-off literal thousand-year millennia. No.

As we will see throughout Revelation, these promises to conquer and to rule transpire not only in eternity, but in time. Today, we are to rule currently, dear listener. But, oh, pastor, we must not soil the garments of the gospel with politics and culture. How often I hear that. Fall to roll.

Fortunately, the early church did not fall prey to this form of the gospel. Gospel crippling illusion, that is. Don't soil the garments of the gospel with politics and culture. We must just go out and save souls and wait for the rapture. Is that your theology?

It's so wrong. Can you see, for example, from the apocalypse, how the gospel has so transformed our culture and politics in our own day that we do not have to cope with the pagan snares and tribulation that our first century counterparts wrestled with? Have a little historical perspective, dear listener, because to us belongs the morning star. That is a symbol for rule and for power, dear listener. This has been Pastor David Bass.

I urge you to go out and conquer this week. The blood of the lamb empowers you. Indeed, we conquer by the word. We conquer by our worship. We do not use the weapons of the warfare of the world.

This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We worship. We take dominion. Dominion is our destiny. We take dominion in our worship on Sunday morning at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street at the corner of 4th and Boulevard.

I urge you to join us across our threshold. I'm preaching through Revelation right now, and it's been a real thrill. It's been a real period of edification for our church as we've done so. So I urge you to join us. New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church worships at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard on Sunday morning, and you can give us some feedback, get some more information perhaps at area code 208-523-0196. That's area code 208-523-0196.