©1998 Larry Huntsperger
Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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1/25/98
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Playing It Loose Pt. 2
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Rev. 2:12-17
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Rev. 2:12 ¶ "And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write: ¶ The One who has the sharp two-edged sword says this:
Rev. 2:13 ¶ 'I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is; and you hold fast My name, and did not deny My faith even in the days of Antipas, My witness, My faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.
Rev. 2:14 'But I have a few things against you, because you have there some who hold the teaching of Balaam, who kept teaching Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit acts of immorality.
Rev. 2:15 'So you also have some who in the same way hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans.
Rev. 2:16 'Therefore repent; or else I am coming to you quickly, and I will make war against them with the sword of My mouth.
Rev. 2:17 ' He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.'
We started our study
of Christ's comments to the church at Pergamum last week,
but we didn't get any farther
than the first phrase in which Christ
describes Himself as,
"The One who has the sharp two-edged sword..."
This morning I want us to look at
the rest of the Lord's message
to this church.
We gave this section a title last week.
We called it, "Playing It Loose".
The Lord begins His comments
with a strong word of affirmation.
He says, Rev. 2:13 ¶ 'I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is; and you hold fast My name, and did not deny My faith even in the days of Antipas, My witness, My faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.
This is one of those verses
that does such an excellent job
of showing us once again
how different things are
from what we THINK they are.
I mentioned last week that
Pergamum was one of the most prominent cities of 1st Century Asia Minor.
To the Roman world
it was viewed as an important cultural religious center
because it gave great prominence
to a wide variety of pagan cults
including cults to Athena,
to Dionysus,
and to Zeus.
Athena was the mythical Greek goddess of wisdom,
Dionysus was the Greek god of wine,
and Zeus, of course, was the mythical Greek god who was suppose to be the head of the pack,
the "god" of all the other gods.
Now, obviously, these mythical Greek gods were no more real 1900 years ago
than they are today.
These cults were simply
business as usual
in the world of Religion -
carefully crafted systems,
offering the people what they wanted.
Some people were making money
off of these cults,
some just like the immorality
and the drunkenness
that accompanied some aspects
of the cult rituals,
and some, no doubt, were genuinely deceived.
But the modern American mind
would very likely respond
to what was going on in Pergamum 1900 years ago
in the same way most people respond
to Buddhism,
or Hinduism,
or Mormonism,
or the New Age religions
or the little "ZEUS" kids cartoons
on Saturday morning TV of today-
they would see it as no big deal.
If that's what you like,
it that's what you're into, so what?
The national anthem of Trinidad
has one line in it that always fascinated me.
Talking about the Nation of Trinidad and Tobago,
the national anthem says,
"Where every creed and race
finds an equal place,
and my God bless our country."
The first time I heard that
it struck me what a perfect expression
of natural human thinking
that sentence is.
It just seems so right that
if we create a world in which
every religious creed
is accepted and welcomed
and each person is encouraged
to pursue his own concept of God
in whatever way seems right to him,
then surely God will bless us
for our open-minded attitudes.
But look at the way God Himself
describes this church
located in the center of all these other religions:
He says,
Rev. 2:13 ¶ 'I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is;...
Christ described this center of false religions
as Satan's throne.
And in so doing He confronts us
with the way things really are.
There is only one God,
one Being who created all things,
who revealed Himself to His creation
in the Person of Jesus Christ.
Every other religion throughout human history
is satanic in origin,
designed by Satan to blind us to the truth.
There is nothing good,
or great,
or godly about the compassionate tolerance
of false religious systems.
True, the best way to defeat them
is through the clear presentation
of the truth of Jesus Christ,
but we must make no mistake -
they are where satan's throne is.
And the second bit of reality therapy
that I see coming out of that 13th verse
is in that commendation where Christ says,
... you... did not deny My faith even in the days of Antipas, My witness, My faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.
Do you know who Antipas was?
Me either.
No one knows who he was.
He is not mentioned anywhere else in Scripture.
We have no record of him in secular history.
From the world's point of view
he was an obscure,
insignificant nobody.
But look at the way God talks about
this nobody.
Look at the way Christ honors him
and upholds him as a person
of tremendous value and significance.
God calls him, "My witness",
God calls him "My faithful one".
Do you think your right choices
don't really matter much?
Do you think your faithfulness to your God
really goes unnoticed?
I want you to see here
the way things really are.
Right now our newspapers
and our news broadcasts,
and our media bombard us with an endless stream of little people,
people with pretty faces
or lots of money
or positions of power,
people that our world tells us
are "important people" doing "important things".
But its all temporary,
just games we human beings play
to try to make ourselves feel better,
and feel important,
and feel in control of our lives
and our world.
The time is coming
when the games will end
and God Himself will take His faithful ones
and honor them before all creation,
a time when, as Paul puts it so well in
I Cor. 4:5,
"...the Lord comes who will both bring to light the things hidden in the darkness and disclose the motives of men's hearts; and then each man's praise will come to him from God."
We have no idea who Antipas was.
But we have a very clear idea
how God viewed him,
and how God honored him before the entire world.
And through this fellow believer
we also have a perfect picture
of how God relates to all those right choices we make,
choices that no one else knows about,
choices we thought made no difference at all.
Peter says it so beautifully:
1 Pet. 5:6 ¶ Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time,
1 Pet. 5:7 casting all your anxiety upon Him, because He cares for you.
1 Pet. 5:8 Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
1 Pet. 5:9 But resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experiences of suffering are being accomplished by your brethren who are in the world.
1 Pet. 5:10 And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself perfect, confirm, strengthen and establish you.
1 Pet. 5:11 To Him be dominion forever and ever. Amen.
But Antipas appears to have been
the exception rather than the rule in Pergamum,
because the Lord goes on to say,
Rev. 2:14 'But I have a few things against you, because you have there some who hold the teaching of Balaam, who kept teaching Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit acts of immorality.
Rev. 2:15 'So you also have some who in the same way hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans.
Now for this to make any sense to us
we need a little background
from the Old Testament book of Numbers chapters 22-24.
Those three chapters record the actions
of an Old Testament prophet by the name of Balaam.
The children of Israel
had made their escape from their slavery in Egypt
and they were on the move
to their new home in the land God had promised them.
This mass migration of several million people
was both a thrilling and a terrifying sight
for all those who stood between them
and their final destination.
And to intensify the terror
God had given His people several tremendous military victories over some of those who stood in their way,
and the reports of those victories
and spread throughout the land.
So this king by the name of Balak
got the brilliant idea of hiring,
or more accurately bribing the prophet Balaam to put a curse on the Israelites,
so that he could then defeat them.
The account takes up 3 chapters in the book of Numbers,
an account I think you would really enjoy reading on your own.
God tells Balaam not to go with the King,
but Balaam is so enticed
by the riches he's offered
that he goes anyway.
But then, when Balaam gets there,
God forces Balaam to bless Israel
rather than to curse them.
But, even though Balaam was not allowed to curse Israel,
according to the comments found in Numbers 31:16,
he was able to provide Balak
with a plan of attack that was highly successful in undermining
the strength of the nation of Israel.
He told Balak
that, if he could get the Israelite men
to marry Midianite and Moabite women,
it would corrupt and destroy their nation from the inside out.
So, rather than trying to attack Israel,
they made friends with them,
and invited them to their pagan feasts and parties,
and displayed their young woman prominently for the young Israelite men to see.
And it worked.
Numbers chapter 25 records what happened as a result.
But here in the Lord's comments
to the church at Pergamum
He draws on this event in Israel's history and then tells His people at Pergamum
that they are getting sucked into
the same destructive lie.
When the direct frontal attack
came against the church
resulting in Antipas being martyred
they all joined hands
and stood strong.
But once the pressure was off,
and they were able to relax a bit,
perhaps in the name of reaching the community,
or blending in with the society in which they lived,
or more likely simply because it tantalized their flesh,
or because they grew weary
of always being different from those around them,
they were drifting back into the same immorality and idolatry that was destroying the pagan world around them.
And, what Satan could not accomplish
through direct attack on the church,
he was accomplishing through the slow, steady drift.
Playing it loose...
"You know, that's just the world live in."
"I'm not under the law any longer."
"God knows what I'm going through,
and He knows I need this right now."
The world we live in today
is not at all unlike the city of Pergamum
in the first century -
the place where Satan dwells.
Every one of us
has been born into that kind of society,
and when we come to Christ
we come out of that kind of society.
I have a tremendous respect
for every one of my fellow Christians
who are clinging to the hand of their Lord,
one step at a time
fighting their way out of the sin bondage and addictions of their past life,
finding their way into a growing
moral strength and stability.
We have people in our own congregation here
who, when they came to the Lord,
came with more baggage
and forces working against them
than I could ever even imagine.
And I've watched them continue to fight their way through
one step, sometimes one day at a time -
making marriages work
that I knew from a human point of view
didn't have one chance in a thousand.
Men and women of tremendous courage
and commitment
and determination.
A few months ago
in one of my talks
I called such Christians "heros",
because to me they truly are.
But I have to admit
that I also have a growing disgust
for the people in our church world today
who seem so content to play it loose,
people who seem to have conveniently blurred every moral boundary
God has established in their life,
-people who can always give a reason,
a justification,
and explanation for their actions.
But in the end they are people
who live cheap, tacky little lives
of compromised morality
and who dare to do it in the name of the Grace of God.
There are a few universal moral boundaries
that our Lord has given to every one of us,
given for our protection,
and as a vivid proof of His ownership of our lives.
There are also some places in our lives individually
where, because of our own unique weaknesses
and areas of past failures,
if we are listening,
our Lord has drawn some other lines,
places where He has said to us,
"For you, my child, this is not an option. This area is closed to you.
This will destroy you once again
if you give yourself over to it."
Let me say it as simply as I know how:
there is no place in the Christian's life
for playing it loose
with either those universal
or those personal boundaries
given to us by our God.
And then,
in keeping with His endless compassion
and love for us,
the Lord ends His comments to Pergamum
with a double promise.
Rev. 2:17 ' He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.'
I believe the promise of the hidden manna
is a reference to a kind of food
that only God can give us,
a kind of food that can only be known
to those who walk in daily dependance upon Him,
a kind of food that feeds our spirit
in a way that satisfies us deeply.
And the white stone pictures for us
our God establishing between us and Himself
a friendship based on a comradeship
and a level of intimacy like nothing else we've ever known.
What He is saying to Pergamum,
and to us is obvious:
what we are really looking for,
what we hunger for
can never be found in the world around us.
What we're longing for
will be found only in Him.