The temptation to compromise has never gone away. It has always been present in the lives of God’s people. In our day, we face the challenge to compromise with our culture in order to keep peace but beyond that, some Christians have given in to the spirit of compromise and have brought that spirit into the church with them. Thus, we face temptations from without (persecution) and from within (compromise). It was the same situation with the churches of Christ in Asia Minor in the first century, Christians to whom John writes Revelation.
Chapter two includes four letters, to the churches in Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, and Thyatira. One lesson we should take from this chapter (and chapter three) is that these are real Christians, with families, who have to put food on their table and want some kind of peaceful life.
In those days, you largely made a living by using your hands – making pottery, metalworks, leather, carpentry. Trade guilds existed to provide opportunities to sell, trade, buy, or learn your craft better. The guilds were all associated with pagan gods and included at least yearly banquets in honor of those gods in which members would offer sacrifices. To refuse to participate in a guild was tantamount to economic suicide. To be a member of a guild would bring strong pressure to conform and compromise.
There was a group identified in the letter of Ephesians as “Nicolaitans.” We do not know much about them. Perhaps they were doing the same thing as “Balak” in the letter to Pergamum: putting a “stumbling block before the sons of Israel to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit acts of immorality” (2:14). This is also the same doctrine, apparently, that “Jezebel” was teaching in the church at Thyatira (2:20). Under the guise of spiritual liberty, some Christians were arguing that you could be faithful to Christ and eat the meat sacrificed to idols and commit immorality (which affected the flesh but not the spirit; see also 1 Cor. 6:12-20). No. You cannot.
The Ephesian Christians had done well in “hating” the deeds of the Nicolaitans. But in turning their minds away from this false teaching, they had also turned their hearts away from sharing the Gospel (2:4). The temptation for faithful Christians in a pagan society is to assume nobody wants to hear the Gospel and thus, we stop evangelizing. Christ warned the Ephesian Christians that if they didn’t repent of that cold-heartedness, as the High Priest who walked among the lamp stands (2:1), He would remove their lamp stand (2:5).
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The church in Pergamum had already suffered the martyrdom of one of their own (Antipas, 2:13). He was a “faithful witness” just as Jesus was (cf. 1:5). The whole church needed to emulate his example. Those who were compromising the faith (2:14-15) needed to repent. Jesus’ word is a sharp sword (2:12, 16) and He would execute judgment on the compromisers if they continued compromising the faith.
Likewise, the Christians in Thyatira were tolerating the teachings of “Jezebel.” If they did not repent of their toleration, God would thrust Jezebel on her deathbed and kill her children (2:22-23). Not all the Christians were so influenced and Christ could distinguish in His judgment between those faithful and the compromisers (2:24). Why? Because He had “eyes like a flame of fire and feet like burnished bronze” (2:18).
The church in Smyrna is the only one that was not being impacted in some way by false teaching. They were, however, being impacted by their spiritual cousins, the Jews, who were making their own compromises with the pagan society (2:9). It seems there were Christians in Smyrna who were being affected economically by their choices. They were being “tested” (2:10) but that testing would last only for a short time (“ten days”). If they could remain faithful ten days, they would reign with Christ for a long time (“a thousand years”; 20:4).
The message of hope from these four letters is that if Christians “overcome” (used in 2:7, 11, 17, and 26), Christ has a trove of treasures ready to distribute: eating of the tree of life (2:7), freedom from the second death (2:11), spiritual manna, a white stone signifying innocence, and a new name (2:17) as well as authority to rule with Christ and a new, eternal, day (2:28). That is the message of Revelation 2 that gives us hope today.
–Paul Holland
