Revelation 2:18-29 – Don’t Believe Everything You Believe
We live in a deceptive world. Things aren’t the way that they appear to be. This is one of the things that makes it hard for us to be faithful to Jesus. If everything really was the way that it seems to be, life would be so much easier for us. We could just take everything at face value, and act accordingly. But as the saying goes, you can’t believe everything you read. In the same way, you can’t believe everything you see, or hear, or experience. You can’t believe everything you believe. Part of being a disciple is questioning and examining everything. We need to test the spirits, as John wrote elsewhere (1 John 4:1), to see if they really come from God or not. The story of Joshua 9 is instructive: the Israelites fell for their own version of a Trojan horse and accepted a trick that the Gibeonites played on them to avoid destruction.
That’s not the way that we want to live. We just want things to be simple. “Give us some straightforward rules and direct explanations for us to accept. Why does everything have to be so complicated?” Things are complicated for two reasons. First, that’s the way God created the world. We marvel at the complexity of everything from the tiny cell to the immense galaxy. It’s one of the hallmarks of God’s creativity. So, if God set us in a complex world, why should we settle for what’s simple? That’s why he gave us sharp and inquiring minds: to be curious, to ask questions, to figure things out. Those simple puzzles that preschoolers play with are great for them, but adults can’t be bothered. God pushes us along in the same way. Second, the world isn’t straightforward because there are people and powers at work that are trying to undermine or destroy God’s good creation. We need to recognize who and what they are. It’s like a soldier on the battlefield, getting ready to cross a field in enemy territory. Wouldn’t it be easiest and simplest just to run straight across it and take cover as quickly as you can on the other side? Maybe, but a wise soldier knows that the enemy may have planted landmines in that field. Doing things the simplest and easiest way can get you killed.
There is an appeal to religious leaders who tell you just to accept whatever they say. There’s something nice about simple explanations of the Christian faith. That way you don’t have to think for yourself. You don’t have to worry about getting confused. You don’t argue about nit-picky aspects of theology. Simple unambiguous faith is a good place to start, as people are being introduced to Christianity. But it’s not where you stay. You start with simple puzzles with big pieces when you’re a toddler, but if you’re still playing with them in college, you’re not developing the way God wants you to. But because we like the simple and straightforward, there are leaders who are happy to supply it to us. That’s the appeal of fundamentalism, regardless of which religion you find it in. “Just tell us a few simple main principles for us to follow. Don’t confuse us.” One of the dangers of fundamentalism, beyond the failure to appreciate the complexity of human life and faith, is that there’s an inherent trust in the leader who’s telling you what to believe. Nobody’s perfect. So any religious leader who tells you just to trust the simple story they’re telling you isn’t going to get it right. It might be close, or it might be horribly far off the mark.
We see the same thing in politics. Here, we call them “sound bites.” Our elected officials need to balance an amazing number of different factors into each decision they make, and where they need to be working on multiple situations, each of which is very important, all at the same time. But we tend to base our selection of them on simple slogans (“Change we can believe in” or “Country first”), or on what we think of ten second blurb that gets squeezed into the evening news.
At some level, we know this isn’t the way things really are. We might not like it, but we know that we need to take just about everything with a grain of salt. People can twist or select the facts to make them say whatever they want. In the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie, the pirate captain tricked the woman into accepting the rules of “parley” by distorting the obvious intentions of the rules into something completely different (sorry; it’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie, so I don’t remember the details). But it’s something we see in real life all the time. We know that the politicians aren’t really going to do what they promise. We know that sales offer that seems too good to be true has a catch in it somewhere. We know that things aren’t as simple as they appear. And we know that we can’t trust everything that we see or hear, or that we’ve been told in the past. That, by the way, is the basis for scientific inquiry. It’s an attempt to see if the things that we’ve been told in the past by people we trust is really true. It’s a way to test things to see if they really operate the way that we think they do.
My PhD dissertation focuses on Jesus’ message of Mark 13, in which he describes what the world is really like, from a spiritual perspective, and what the future is going to be. Throughout his speech, he keeps telling the disciples to watch, to beware, to be alert, and to understand. In fact, that’s the whole point to the discourse (although there’s a lot of other very important things we can learn from it as well). Be sharp, because things aren’t what they seem to be. We don’t always recognize the way that God is at work around us and within us. The bad things may not be as bad as we think that they are. And what seems to be good and godly may actually be demonic and destructive.
Paul told the Corinthians pretty much the same thing: there are false and deceptive teachers all around us, pretending to be leading us in Christ’s way, while they’re actually moving us the other way (2 Peter 2 and Jude say a lot about it too). In the eleventh chapter of his second letter to them, Paul said that not only do false teachers appear to messengers from God, but that “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” Wouldn’t it be so much easier if the devil always appeared to be as horrible and evil and disgusting as he really is? But he doesn’t, because he’s cunning enough to know that doesn’t work. So he comes to us in a way that makes us think that he’s good and wonderful, holy and healthy. It’s only after we take the bait that we realize the trouble we’re in. The same thing is true for temptation: the urge to do something wrong. It will hurt us, or others, or God, or the world. If we realized the extent of the damage that sin causes, we’d never engage in it. But it always looks good at the beginning.
The Christians in Thyatira, the fifth of the seven churches that John wrote to, were too gullible for their own good. There was a prominent leader in their church (probably a woman, since John calls her by the name of one of the most wicked women in Jewish history) who was leading people astray. She was pretending to speak for Christ, presenting his message to the people. Jesus told John that she was leading them into idolatry and sexual immorality. Sound familiar? that’s what was going on in Pergamum as well. In the Old Testament, adultery and idolatry were often closely associated with each other. Hosea’s life was a living parable of this. And Ezekiel offered some shockingly graphic descriptions of it. So there’s at least a chance that the Thyatirans weren’t sleeping around like maniacs; that may be a representation of their unfaithfulness to God by worshiping other gods in addition to the Lord.
There’s a good chance that the teachings of “Jezebel” were a version of Gnosticism: the belief that there is arcane secret spiritual knowledge which will save you from the ugly messiness of the physical world if you acquire it. Gnosticism had begun as its own form of belief but tried to latch on to Christianity; the “Gospel of Thomas” is an adaptation of Christ’s life and teachings to make him look like a Gnostic guru. Since “Jezebel” offered “deep secrets” to her followers, she may have been a Gnostic as well.
Jesus, in contrast, is the one with blazing eyes who can search out and destroy falsehood. As we saw in Chapter Two, this description of Jesus shows that he’s the one with insight and understanding. And he is the one with power and authority, even when appearances may lead us to think that he’s not. The answer to the struggle for insight to discern error and deception is not just to rely on our own suspicions and cynicism (although to some degree that can be helpful). But as Proverbs 3 puts it, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”
What does that mean? It means committing yourself to a lifetime of discernment. Exactly where is God leading me? What truths is he offering to me? How can I learn them? What are the dangers to avoid? There are times that we’ll get them wrong. At times our mistakes may be tragic. But if we trust that he truly is the one who has authority over the nations, and over our lives, even our mistakes will not undo his will. He will take our errors and direct them to his purposes, if we continue to do our level best not to settle for what other people tell us, and not to just follow our own “gut,” but to seek his will. That’s what Scripture is for. That’s what prayerful reflection is for. That’s what the church is for. Each of these are means by which we can discern God’s truth in a world of deception. We can misinterpret Scripture. We can fool ourselves about how God speaks to us through prayer. Churches can mess up. But if we continue to be diligent in our discernment, we will fall for Jezebel’s tricks less and less.
That’s not the way that we want to live. We just want things to be simple. “Give us some straightforward rules and direct explanations for us to accept. Why does everything have to be so complicated?” Things are complicated for two reasons. First, that’s the way God created the world. We marvel at the complexity of everything from the tiny cell to the immense galaxy. It’s one of the hallmarks of God’s creativity. So, if God set us in a complex world, why should we settle for what’s simple? That’s why he gave us sharp and inquiring minds: to be curious, to ask questions, to figure things out. Those simple puzzles that preschoolers play with are great for them, but adults can’t be bothered. God pushes us along in the same way. Second, the world isn’t straightforward because there are people and powers at work that are trying to undermine or destroy God’s good creation. We need to recognize who and what they are. It’s like a soldier on the battlefield, getting ready to cross a field in enemy territory. Wouldn’t it be easiest and simplest just to run straight across it and take cover as quickly as you can on the other side? Maybe, but a wise soldier knows that the enemy may have planted landmines in that field. Doing things the simplest and easiest way can get you killed.
There is an appeal to religious leaders who tell you just to accept whatever they say. There’s something nice about simple explanations of the Christian faith. That way you don’t have to think for yourself. You don’t have to worry about getting confused. You don’t argue about nit-picky aspects of theology. Simple unambiguous faith is a good place to start, as people are being introduced to Christianity. But it’s not where you stay. You start with simple puzzles with big pieces when you’re a toddler, but if you’re still playing with them in college, you’re not developing the way God wants you to. But because we like the simple and straightforward, there are leaders who are happy to supply it to us. That’s the appeal of fundamentalism, regardless of which religion you find it in. “Just tell us a few simple main principles for us to follow. Don’t confuse us.” One of the dangers of fundamentalism, beyond the failure to appreciate the complexity of human life and faith, is that there’s an inherent trust in the leader who’s telling you what to believe. Nobody’s perfect. So any religious leader who tells you just to trust the simple story they’re telling you isn’t going to get it right. It might be close, or it might be horribly far off the mark.
We see the same thing in politics. Here, we call them “sound bites.” Our elected officials need to balance an amazing number of different factors into each decision they make, and where they need to be working on multiple situations, each of which is very important, all at the same time. But we tend to base our selection of them on simple slogans (“Change we can believe in” or “Country first”), or on what we think of ten second blurb that gets squeezed into the evening news.
At some level, we know this isn’t the way things really are. We might not like it, but we know that we need to take just about everything with a grain of salt. People can twist or select the facts to make them say whatever they want. In the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie, the pirate captain tricked the woman into accepting the rules of “parley” by distorting the obvious intentions of the rules into something completely different (sorry; it’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie, so I don’t remember the details). But it’s something we see in real life all the time. We know that the politicians aren’t really going to do what they promise. We know that sales offer that seems too good to be true has a catch in it somewhere. We know that things aren’t as simple as they appear. And we know that we can’t trust everything that we see or hear, or that we’ve been told in the past. That, by the way, is the basis for scientific inquiry. It’s an attempt to see if the things that we’ve been told in the past by people we trust is really true. It’s a way to test things to see if they really operate the way that we think they do.
My PhD dissertation focuses on Jesus’ message of Mark 13, in which he describes what the world is really like, from a spiritual perspective, and what the future is going to be. Throughout his speech, he keeps telling the disciples to watch, to beware, to be alert, and to understand. In fact, that’s the whole point to the discourse (although there’s a lot of other very important things we can learn from it as well). Be sharp, because things aren’t what they seem to be. We don’t always recognize the way that God is at work around us and within us. The bad things may not be as bad as we think that they are. And what seems to be good and godly may actually be demonic and destructive.
Paul told the Corinthians pretty much the same thing: there are false and deceptive teachers all around us, pretending to be leading us in Christ’s way, while they’re actually moving us the other way (2 Peter 2 and Jude say a lot about it too). In the eleventh chapter of his second letter to them, Paul said that not only do false teachers appear to messengers from God, but that “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” Wouldn’t it be so much easier if the devil always appeared to be as horrible and evil and disgusting as he really is? But he doesn’t, because he’s cunning enough to know that doesn’t work. So he comes to us in a way that makes us think that he’s good and wonderful, holy and healthy. It’s only after we take the bait that we realize the trouble we’re in. The same thing is true for temptation: the urge to do something wrong. It will hurt us, or others, or God, or the world. If we realized the extent of the damage that sin causes, we’d never engage in it. But it always looks good at the beginning.
The Christians in Thyatira, the fifth of the seven churches that John wrote to, were too gullible for their own good. There was a prominent leader in their church (probably a woman, since John calls her by the name of one of the most wicked women in Jewish history) who was leading people astray. She was pretending to speak for Christ, presenting his message to the people. Jesus told John that she was leading them into idolatry and sexual immorality. Sound familiar? that’s what was going on in Pergamum as well. In the Old Testament, adultery and idolatry were often closely associated with each other. Hosea’s life was a living parable of this. And Ezekiel offered some shockingly graphic descriptions of it. So there’s at least a chance that the Thyatirans weren’t sleeping around like maniacs; that may be a representation of their unfaithfulness to God by worshiping other gods in addition to the Lord.
There’s a good chance that the teachings of “Jezebel” were a version of Gnosticism: the belief that there is arcane secret spiritual knowledge which will save you from the ugly messiness of the physical world if you acquire it. Gnosticism had begun as its own form of belief but tried to latch on to Christianity; the “Gospel of Thomas” is an adaptation of Christ’s life and teachings to make him look like a Gnostic guru. Since “Jezebel” offered “deep secrets” to her followers, she may have been a Gnostic as well.
Jesus, in contrast, is the one with blazing eyes who can search out and destroy falsehood. As we saw in Chapter Two, this description of Jesus shows that he’s the one with insight and understanding. And he is the one with power and authority, even when appearances may lead us to think that he’s not. The answer to the struggle for insight to discern error and deception is not just to rely on our own suspicions and cynicism (although to some degree that can be helpful). But as Proverbs 3 puts it, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”
What does that mean? It means committing yourself to a lifetime of discernment. Exactly where is God leading me? What truths is he offering to me? How can I learn them? What are the dangers to avoid? There are times that we’ll get them wrong. At times our mistakes may be tragic. But if we trust that he truly is the one who has authority over the nations, and over our lives, even our mistakes will not undo his will. He will take our errors and direct them to his purposes, if we continue to do our level best not to settle for what other people tell us, and not to just follow our own “gut,” but to seek his will. That’s what Scripture is for. That’s what prayerful reflection is for. That’s what the church is for. Each of these are means by which we can discern God’s truth in a world of deception. We can misinterpret Scripture. We can fool ourselves about how God speaks to us through prayer. Churches can mess up. But if we continue to be diligent in our discernment, we will fall for Jezebel’s tricks less and less.
posted by Rev. Peter de Vries, Old Union Presbyterian Church @ 12:27 PM
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