The Sermons to the Seven Churches: The Church of Idolatrous Toleration (2)

Ezekiel 36:6-7          Numbers 24:15-19           Revelation 2:18-29        Matthew 28:18-20

The Sermons to the Seven Churches: The Church of Idolatrous Toleration (2)  

We often speak about external factors that harm the church, but all too often it is the members themselves that wound the flock most deeply. There are several true stories of pastors and ministry-leaders and church members whose actions or teachings caused real damage to individuals or the church community.

One of the most extreme and tragic examples is Jim Jones. Jones led the Peoples Temple and in 1978 orchestrated what is generally regarded as a mass murder-suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, in which over 900 people died. This tragedy shows us how charismatic leadership, unchecked power, manipulation, isolation, deception, and false teaching can devastate a “church” community.

Barry Minkow was a pastor who admitted to embezzling more than US $3 million from his former church, Community Bible Church in San Diego. He diverted church funds, forged checks, and set up unauthorized accounts. 

Another tragic example of the destructive power of false teaching is the story of David Brandt Berg, founder of the ‘Children of God’ movement. Berg began as a preacher but drifted from Scripture, claiming to receive new revelations that placed him above accountability. He taught his followers to abandon the mainstream church, the Bible’s moral boundaries, and even used twisted ‘spiritual’ reasoning to justify sexual sin. What started as a call to radical discipleship became a movement marked by manipulation, sexual abuse, and heartbreak. 

Stories like these remind us that whenever a believer replaces God’s Word with something else, the results are always the same—confusion, corruption, and great harm to God’s people. 

In the sermon addressed to Thyatira, Jesus first commended the church for not only maintaining their good works of love and faith in service and endurance, but, he said,  they were now doing even more! Sounds like a vibrant, growing church, doesn’t it? 

And yet Jesus had a complaint against them. “But I have this against you,” he said, “that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols.

Now, there are two things we need to look at before we deal with what was happening in Thyatira. The first has to do with the role of prophetess. Now, we have several female prophets in both Old and New Testaments.

Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron was called a prophetess in Exodus 15:20–21 and it is interesting to see that in Micah 6:4 she was recognised as a leader alongside Moses and Aaron. 

Then in Judges 4:4–5 we read: “Now Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel at that time. She used to sit under the palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the people of Israel came up to her for judgment. (See also Judges 5) So, hers was a combined civic, military, and spiritual leadership. 

Then (and I think this woman is probably the most interesting Old Testament prophetess) there was Huldah (See 2 Kings 22:14–20; 2 Chronicles 34:22–28). While they were repairing the Temple during the reign of Josiah, Hilkiah the High Priest found the Book of the Law of the Lord given to Moses. He then sent a messenger to the King, who tore his clothes when he realise that they were not living according to the God’s Law. So then he commanded Hilkiah and other high-ranking officials to go and inquire of the Lord concerning the words of the book that had been found. And where did the High Priest and these other officials go? Yes, they went to Huldah the prophetess. So, her prophetic authority was recognised by both priest and king and her reply sparked national reform. Interesting, no?

Then there’s Noadiah, a false prophetess, who worked with Tobiah and Sanballat against the returnees from Exile (Nehemiah 6:14). This story shows us that not all the women who claimed prophetic status were genuine.

Isaiah’s Wife is also interesting because it may be that she was called a prophetess because of her husband’s role which would make her title an honorary one, or she was called a prophetess because she shared Isaiah’s prophetic calling. (Isaiah 8:3)

Then there are the unnamed “Daughters of Jerusalem” mentioned in Ezekiel 13:17–23 that prophesied out of their own heart, in other words they were false prophets, and they were judged by God for their deceitful visions.

Now, moving on into the New Testament period we have Anna who in Luke 2:36–38 was said to have been a prophetess. She recognised the infant Jesus as the promised Messiah and proclaimed him to those waiting for redemption. So, in a sense Anna serves as the bridge between Old and New Testaments as she represents the faithful remnant of Israel awaiting the Messiah who had now come.

Then we have the four unmarried daughters of Philip mentioned in Acts 21:8 that gives us a not so clear glimpse into the prophetic ministry of the early church.

There were also women who prophesied in Corinth mentioned in 1 Corinthians 11:5 who seem to have been Spirit-empowered women who participated vocally in worship through prayer and prophecy. It is instructive to note that Paul assumed their active role in the services, so his instruction concerned order and decorum, not prohibition.

There are also other women in the New Testament who were not explicitly called prophetesses, but whose words and actions were prophetic in nature, like Mary, the mother of Jesus who in Luke 1:46–55 prophesied of God’s redemption, and Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, who in Luke 1:41–45 was said to have been filled with the Holy Spirit before declaring prophetically that Mary’s child was the Lord.

Peter indirectly hints at the role of the women at Pentecost in Acts 2:17–18 by quoting from Joel 2:28–29: “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit.”

So, the role of prophetess, both godly and ungodly, in both Old and New Testaments was not unusual and so we can conclude that the problem with this person called Jezebel was not her gender. I think that the clue to understanding what was wrong with her can be found when we examine the infamous person she is named after. 

And that is the second thing we need to look at: who is this Jezebel and what exactly was she doing?

Now you can read about the Jezebel of the Old Testament in 1 Kings 16–2 Kings 9. She was the daughter of Ethbaal, king of Sidon and priest of the Phoenician god Baal (1 Kings 16:31). Through her marriage to King Ahab of Israel, she became queen and effectively introduced and institutionalised Baal worship within the northern kingdom. 

So, she was not merely a foreign consort but an evangelist of idolatry, intent on replacing Israel’s covenantal faith with the Canaanite fertility cults. She promoted Baal, the storm and fertility god, and Asherah, a Canaanite mother and fertility goddess associated with sacred trees and groves, thereby encouraging sexual rites, temple prostitution, and syncretism, the mixture of paganism with true faith. She also orchestrated the slaughter of the prophets of the Lord (1 Kings 18:4, 13), establishing instead her own cadre of 450 prophets of Baal and 400 of Asherah.

Now, in the Naboth incident (1 Kings 21), Jezebel encouraged King Ahab to abuse his royal power. When Naboth refused to sell his ancestral vineyard, she forged letters in Ahab’s name, engineered false charges of blasphemy, and had Naboth executed, demonstrating her diabolical fusion of political manipulation, false religion, and bloodshed.

So, the Jezebel of the Old Testament represents the corruption of covenantal loyalty through spiritual compromise and moral perversion. Her rule was marked by deception, manipulation, and the pursuit of power at the expense of truth. Ultimately, her death (recorded in 2 Kings 9:30–37) fulfilled prophetic judgment: she was thrown from a window, trampled by horses, and eaten by dogs—symbolic of divine retribution for defilement and pride.

So, how does the Jezebel of the Old Testament help us understand Jesus’ words in Revelation 2:18–29? As we have seen, Jesus condemned a woman symbolically named “Jezebel”, who called herself a prophetess and who taught and seduced the believers in Thyatira to commit sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols.

Now there are two possibilities regarding her identity: it is possible that she was a real individual or that she symbolically represented a faction in the church and was therefore not a single leader but a group, but either way by promoting moral and doctrinal compromise with pagan guild practices, the faction or the woman was teaching the believers to compromise. 

The Old Testament Jezebel promoted idolatry and immorality in Israel, and this New Testament Jezebel promoted idolatry and immorality in the church. The Old Testament Jezebel murdered the prophets of the Lord whereas the New Testament Jezebel led members of the church into spiritual death. Both manipulated power through deceit, both refused to repent, both mocked divine authority (Rev. 2:21), and both would be cast down and destroyed by divine judgment (Rev. 2:22).

So, in summary: both Jezebels embodied corrupt influence within a covenant community, both seduced God’s people away from purity and faithfulness through false teaching and moral compromise, both represented the spirit of idolatry and manipulation, often cloaked in religious language or authority, and, in both cases, their end was divine judgment, illustrating God’s intolerance of syncretism and his zeal for holiness among his people.

So the fault of this prophetess was not that she was teaching the members of the church but rather that she was teaching the members of the church to compromise…she was misleading the people into sexual immorality and the eating of foods sacrificed to idols. 

Now, just a quick word about eating foods sacrificed to idols. Because this was a pagan culture, most, if not all, of the food sold in the marketplace had been offered to a pagan god. So, how did Christians deal with this problem since they were not supposed to eat food offered to idols (Acts 15:29)? 

In 1 Corinthians 8-10 Paul argued that eating food bought in the marketplace that had been sacrificed to idols was permissible because believers pronounced a blessing in the Name of Jesus over it prior to eating it. However, it was only permissible as long as it did not offend or cause another believer to stumble.

But, and here we need to understand the distinction, he absolutely forbade the eating of idol food in an idol temple.  

Why? Well because participation in the cultic meals hosted in pagan temples or buildings of trade guilds would a) give the impression that the worshipping of idols was acceptable to Christians and b) would expose the believer to some form of sexual immorality because these cultic meals nearly always included sexual rites. 

And this is what seems to have been the case here in Thyatira.

And so, because of her false teaching, this self-acclaimed prophetess and her followers or perhaps her co-teachers (here called her children) would be judged by God, cast onto a bed of suffering, perhaps an allusion to the bed people would recline on in the pagan banqueting halls, and struck dead, which is perhaps an allusion to the slaying of all of King Ahab and Jezebel’s children (70 princes) because of her sins. 

Harsh? Well, not when you think that her teaching was leading to the eternal spiritual death of many. Besides, as with Pharaoh during the Exodus, the purpose of this sever judgement was so that all would know that God alone is the Lord and that he knows all and will judge all.

So much for Jezebel and her followers or co-teachers.

But the complaint against the believers in the church of Thyatira who had not succumbed to Jezebel’s allurements was that they tolerated her and because of their lack of watchfulness, some in the church had apparently been led astray by her false teachings. So the main complaint Jesus levelled against the church was they did nothing about it and, as the old proverb has it, “He who is silent is taken to agree.” 

Ezekiel 33:6 says: “But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman's hand.” Silence is complicity.

So to these believers who had, on the one hand, not compromised and yet, on the other hand, had compromised because they tolerated evil teaching in the church, Jesus asked for them to hold on to their faith and to persevere. To those who prevailed, who fought the good fight and who finished the race, (Greek: Nike) Jesus would give the right to rule with him over the nations. 

As I said in the previous sermon, this is a quote from Psalm 2, but it may also allude to the command given to the church to make disciples of the nations in Matthew 28:18-20 which comes right after Jesus said all authority in both heaven and earth had been given to him. The fact that the one who has all authority is with the church as they make disciples of the nations, could be viewed as co-rulership over the nations.

But then he also said that he would also give them the morning star. In the Old Testament, the morning star symbolized glory, either a false glory such as with the Babylonian king who sought glory but fell from it (Isaiah 14:12), or the glory of the heavenly beings (Job 38:7), but in this case, I think it most likely refers to the glory of the Messiah mentioned (most reluctantly) in the prophecy of Balaam in Numbers 24:17-19. “I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near: a star shall come out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel; it shall crush the forehead of Moab and break down all the sons of Sheth…and one from Judah shall exercise dominion.”

This is no doubt what Peter meant when he said in his second epistle: “And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts…” And I think this is what Jesus meant here in this sermon to Thyatira because he later said in Revelation 22:16 “I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.” So those who overcome not only share the authority of Jesus and his rule over the nations, but they are also with him even to the end of the age and beyond because he gives himself to them.

Now, today, of course, we may not be tempted to participate in rituals and meals served in idol temples, unless we live in some Far Eastern countries, but we too are often tempted to bow to less obvious contemporary gods such as the sexual issues of our day, the love of money, materialism, especially the prosperity gospel, nationalism, and, perhaps the worst of them all, narcissism or self-centredness. You see, not all idols start off as bad things…often they are good things turned into ultimate things. 

So we must ask the question…is there something that has become more important to me than God? Am I pursuing something with the passion and devotion and commitment that ought to be reserved for God alone? Am I bowing to a less obvious contemporary god?

Or…and this is perhaps more to the point of Jesus’ sermon to the believers in Thyatira…am I tolerating those who teach that compromise is acceptable? 

Shall we pray?

© Johannes W H van der Bijl 2025.