Thyatira: The Compromising Church

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 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 striker he 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 (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 potter"--just as I have received authority from my Father. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. (Rev. 2:18-29)

Jesus has a lot to say to the church in Thyatira. And honestly, a lot of it sounds pretty scary. He's pretty fired up about some of the things that are going on in Thyatira. He commends them for their love and faith. They're not doing everything wrong by any means. But there are some ways in which they aren't living up to what Christ has called them to be. Namely, they're compromising with the culture around them.

An important background fact about Thyatira is that trade guilds played a special role in that city. Basically, a trade guild was an organization of workers in a specific trade, kind of like a union today. The commercial life of Thyatira was built on these trade guilds. If you weren't part of the guild, it was hard, if not impossible, to make a living.
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This presented a problem for the Christians in Thyatira. As with most things in the ancient Roman world, the trade guilds were intertwined with idol worship. The guilds paid homage to certain patron gods. Thus, to be part of the guild, you had to go along with the idolatry, including its sex-charged worship through temple prostitution. (It's a good thing that unions today just make you sign a piece of paper and pay dues.)

It seems like the church in Thyatira was compromising with the everyday reality of idolatry around them. They were being influenced by "Jezebel"--a reference to perhaps the most despicable figure from the Old Testament. Jezebel was the queen of Israel and the wife of Ahab. Her claim to fame was in propagating the spread of idolatry throughout the kingdom, which eventually led to its annihilation at the hands of the Assyrians. And in this letter, the Christians in Thyatira are being tempted to compromise and be drawn away after idolatry and sexual immorality, just as the Israelites had been drawn away after Jezebel and her gods. To do otherwise was financial and social suicide. Surely God wouldn't blame them for caving in a little, right?

But God's reaction to such compromise isn't very cheerful reading. There's talk of a bed of suffering, intense suffering, and children struck dead. Not the kind of things that you would put on a banner and hang up in your church's sanctuary.

In his book Revelation's Rhapsody, Robert Lowery writes that in Revelation, we can see two dangers that the Asian churches faced. Two ways that Satan tried to get them to stumble. The first is persecution, which is a common theme throughout the book. We've already looked at that in the letter to Smyrna. But Satan's other tactic, and probably the more dangerous one, is cultural seduction. He wants to get the churches to conform to the world around them. That's what we see happening in Thyatira, and that's probably the more relevant threat to the American church today.

Christians should look different from the rest of the world. There's is a lot of talk in the church today about how we can be more relevant. And that's an important talk to have. We need creative and engaging ways to relate to the world around us. We shouldn't be afraid to change methods and styles so that our message can be heard. But let's not let go of holiness. Relevance doesn't mean we conform to sinful culture. If we don't that, we become the opposite of what we want to become. We become irrelevant because there is no longer anything that distinguishes us from anyone else. To the world, a message that doesn't change us isn't really worth listening to.

The call of Jesus in this letter is the same as we find in several of the others letters in Revelation 2-3: Repent. Turn around. Stop compromising. In Revelation 1:6, we are called a "kingdom and priests"--a description that God had used before of the nation of Israel (Exod. 19:6). As the church, we are God's holy people. We don't look like everyone else. We're aliens and sojourners. So let's dedicate ourselves to the holy lives we've been called to.