06-24-12 PLAYING IT LOOSE

Our study of the seven churches

in Revelation chapters 2 and 3

has brought us Church #3,

the Church at Pergamum.

For those of you

who are keeping track of the single phrase titles I have been offering

to each of the sections we move through,

let me back up just one step

and give you the title to the section

we studied last week,

the church at Smyrna.

In fact,

let me give you the titles

from the beginning of chapter 2.

Rev. 2:1-7 was addressed to the church at Ephesus, and our title for that section was:

DOCTRINE IS KING.

You will remember

that was the church in which

the Christians had replaced their love for Christ

for a love for TRUTH,

for ideas,

for doctrinal systems.

Then, last week we looked at

the only church to which Christ

offered no word or correction,

the church at Smyrna.

His comments to Smyrna are found in Rev. 2:8-11,

and we’re going to call that section FAITHFULNESS.

Now, this morning we are going to move on to the third church,

the church at Pergamum,

and we’ll call this section from Rev. 2:12-17 PLAYING IT LOOSE.

Pergamum was one of the most prominent cities of 1^st Century Asia Minor.

It was an important cultural religious center for a wide variety of pagan cults

including cults to Athena,

to Dionysus,

and to Zeus.

The city itself has long since ceased to exist,

and today there is just a small village called Bergama

located below the ruins of the old city.

The Lord begins His comments to Pergamum

with words of encouragement

and praise:

Rev. 2:12-13

"And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write:

The One who has the sharp two-edged sword says this: '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.

To the Roman world

Pergamum 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 liked 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 any kind of occult practices,

or superstitions,

or even the super-hero cartoons on TV -

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 or her own concept of God

in whatever way seems right to them,

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 the history of the human race

is satanic in origin,

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 13^th 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?

Neither do I.

No one knows who he was.

He’s 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. 5:6-11 Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, casting all your anxiety upon Him, because He cares for you. Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. 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. 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. 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. 2:14-15 '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. '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

had 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.

From my point of view

such men and women are heros.

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.