30: World News & Prophecy - Revelation 2:13-17

[Darris McNeely] All right, we're back to our class. We left off the last one into the message to the church at Pergamos in Revelation 2. So let's go back to that and pick up the thread of the story here. We talked about Christ announcing to them that where they lived was where Satan had a throne—and where Satan then obviously lived.

And that could be a pretty scary thing—the devil himself in your neighborhood—to hear that. Keep in mind, as I mentioned in the last class, this city of Pergamum had been bequeathed to the Roman emperor or the Roman Empire upon the death of its last king. I believe it was Attalus II. Don’t hold me to the numbering there, but I think it was Attalus—A-T-T-A-L-U-S, Attalus II. It was a very wealthy province and region, and that just opened up the gold rush from the leaders in Rome coming into Asia Minor.

The city had a lot going for it. From its wealth, remember I mentioned there was a library there that rivaled the great library of Alexandria. It was also a center of medicine. So it was a hub of learning, commerce, and economics in this region. It had a temple, or a medical center, where people came to be treated. It was called the Asclepion.

Asclepion—don’t worry too much about the spelling, but phonetically it starts with an A: A-S-C-L-E-P-I-O-N. It was a medical center, but it was also a temple dedicated to the god Asclepius. Asclepius had the symbol of a serpent—a snake. Because of this association with healing, somewhere along the line in history, the medical profession adopted the sign of a snake. Have you ever seen a snake wrapped around a staff at a doctor’s office or pharmacy? That goes back to pagan antiquity and this symbol of the god Asclepius, who was the god of healing. The Asclepion was essentially the Mayo Clinic of the day.

There’s a fictional novel I read a few years ago that told the story of a wealthy man who goes up there. He has cancer—intestinal cancer—and he sets out with his servants from further south in Asia Minor to make a pilgrimage up to Pergamum, to the Asclepion, to be treated.

You can go into the ruins of the Asclepion today. Here’s what would happen: you checked yourself in, and priests—practicing the medical arts of the time—would examine you. They had potions, treatments, and various remedies. But part of their process was to put you into a room—an underground chamber. You can still see those today. You would spend the night in this chamber. During the night, if the god came to you—either in a vision or by a snake crawling over you—that was a good sign.

The next day, the priest would question you: “Did the god appear to you? Did the snake come? What was said?” From that, they would interpret a course of treatment or a medical procedure. Quite primitive, but that’s what they believed. That’s what they did at that time.

So we’ve got a snake. You know who the snake symbolizes, right? Satan. Satan lives there. You’ve got an Asclepion. You’ve got a temple to the divine emperor—Augustus and others—there. Augustus, of course, is kind of the epitome of the beast, this satanic empire of the books of Daniel and Revelation—and of history.

So keep all that in the back of your mind.

Let’s go on to the next verse here. He says in verse 14, “I have a few things against you, because you have there those who hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols, and to commit sexual immorality” (Revelation 2:14).

“Thus you also have those who hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which thing I hate” (Revelation 2:15).

We talked about that earlier—a cult, a sect of people, the Nicolaitans, who blended paganism with the truth. It’s called syncretism—this blending method that then looks like a really nice hybrid religion, but it's false. It leads people into false worship.

Then He brings in this allusion to the doctrine of Balaam and Balak, which is a story from the book of Numbers. We’ll remember it: as the children of Israel were making their way to the Promised Land—they encounter Balak, a king who is afraid of the Israelites and their numbers, fearing they’ll overcome him. He can’t do anything about it militarily, but then Balaam comes along. Balaam is a false teacher who shows Balak what to do.

Essentially, Balaam says, “Here’s their weak point: put a dancing, naked woman in front of them.” It was the pornography of the time. It led them into idolatry and sexual immorality. A lot of people died. And that’s the story of Balaam’s ass as a result of that.

Balaam's concern with being overwhelmed by the Israelite population drew him into this relationship with Balaam to show him how to entice the Israelites and weaken them into worshiping idols and immoral conduct. So it's the proverbial Achilles heel of the Israelites that then continues with them into their national story as they entertain the doctrine of Balaam and the other gods of the Canaanites that they never fully expunged from the land.

And that story, which you get into as you go through, and there's an enticement there. There's this desire to have something different, a little bit better, a little bit more glitzy. The fires on the hillside—I always think about wherever in Israel a little Israelite village was of people trying to do everything right—but they had a pagan community on a hill a few miles away. And the pagans would light their fires and make their music and do their dancing as a part of all of their ritual form.

And here you're a 19, 20-year-old Israelite boy down, you know, and you're hearing that, or you know what's going on up there, and it's Saturday night. Hey, let's go to town. Let's go see what's going on. And they get caught into that, which is the story of the Old Testament. I kind of imagine it. I always imagine it in some way like that.

The people of Pergamum were in the midst of all of this. This was a part of their civic life—these temples and everything here—that was always a constant temptation for them to be drawn into idolatry. And you have there, again, what we're going to see in Thyatira and all the others—other temples to various gods and goddesses who were the patrons of the trades. And we'll talk about that. I'll save that for Thyatira because it fits more what was going on there. But if you didn't make a sacrifice, then you couldn't get work.

That's the rub. And this is what a member had to engage with. And it comes down to, again, just a bread and butter issue of you're being separate from the culture and you're going to remain faithful to it. And they had a unique situation in Pergamus here where they had these same enticements, and they had this cult of Nicolaitans going on here, and they had to resist it. But they also had working this place that was unique called Satan's throne.

Well, in verse 16, Christ says, "Repent, or else I will come to you quickly and will fight against them with the sword of My mouth" (Revelation 2:16). So there we go back to that sword. And we're going to see this same idea of the sword in Revelation 19 with a return of Christ. But when that happens, that's going to slay everything in its path. And Jesus is saying, repent. And that's a common message to the church, then and now. Repent. Change. Repent now, avoid the rush later. Repent while you can.

This is what is going on here. And you don't want this sword coming out of Christ's mouth to be used against you. "He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes I will give some of the hidden manna to eat" (Revelation 2:17). Again, the same phrase to every one of the churches. It's Christ's message. "To him who overcomes I will give some of the hidden manna to eat. And I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written which no one knows except him who receives it" (Revelation 2:17).

So a new name. We all know about name changes throughout the Bible. Jacob had his name changed to Israel, Abram to Abraham, Saul to Paul. And a name change signifies responsibility or designation or really who you are when that happens. And Christ is saying here to the church—and really at Pergamos but also to all of His church at all time—that if you overcome, "I will give you the hidden manna" (Revelation 2:17).

A reference through manna here again—what is the hidden manna? Well, manna is the bread of life. We know that God fed the Israelites by on their years of wandering there. And that comes down when we read John 6. We see that Christ Himself is the true bread of life who Himself, you know, we could say is hidden from the world—the true Christ in that sense. But by overcoming through the life of Christ in us, we are given of the hidden manna—the life of Christ in us. I think that's the best way that I lean toward understanding what is being said here as far as an application to us today: that the life of Christ in us, the secret center of our life, is another way to understand that.

With the receipt of God's Spirit—Christ in us, the hope of salvation, the hope of glory—that is what empowers us to live. And it's hidden from the world. And yet God has given it to us through His grace.

Now the white stone with a new name is an interesting one there. As a ritual or as a part of the custom, when you would go into a banquet in the Roman world, you had given to you an invitation that would have been, in some cases, actually the invitation written on a stone. Okay? And that would be your invitation.

So this one would be considered—looking at it—as an invitation to God's family, to the Kingdom, with a name written on it that no one knows except him who receives it. And a personalized invitation. This reward spoken to the church at Pergamos brings it down to a very personal reward that we expect from God. And that could be a change of a name. Certainly a change to a spirit body and a spirit eternal life is what we are promised. And what that name will be will indicate who we are before God.

And so this is part of the imagery that is part of Scripture, and I think helps us to appreciate exactly what we are dealing with here in this way. And so as we look at this, now I want one more thing I want to refer to here—and this could have come, and certainly would have been in the back of their mind—the idea of a name change. If they're looking at one of the temples in Pergamos, there was a temple to the emperor Augustus shown here in the statue.

Now Augustus, as I've explained at other times, was not his original name.

What was his original name? Anybody remember?

[Audience member] Octavian.

[Darris McNeely] Octavian. After Octavian, who was the adopted son of Julius Caesar, saved Rome through years of civil war after the assassination of his father Julius Caesar, he then restores order and peace to Rome. That's the true founding of the Roman Empire. The Senate and the people of Rome give him the name Augustus. Augustus is a name that was held within the chief priests of the Roman cult of pagans, and it's a name of a god or a divine deity. They put that upon Octavian, and from that point on, he is known as Augustus.

And this begins the cult of emperor worship that then grows to what we're facing here in the timing of the church message. And so Octavian had a name change. And so Christ says to the church in the message of Pergamos, "I'm going to give you a new name, a new name" (Revelation 2:17). And just as Octavian’s new name of Augustus signified the fact that he was the savior of Rome—and I keep emphasizing that—we will see that in Acts 13 especially, when we read Paul's message and sermon in Acts 13 in a city of Antioch in Pisidia.

He's going to say some things that talk about this idea of Augustus being the savior, but was a false savior. And this cult of him, because he saved Rome, they gave him this name.

Well, so there’s a play on that, and Christ is bringing that imagery into this message to the people here, and especially in the city of Pergamos.

Now, I’m going to go back to this idea of the throne of Satan and where he dwells and what that could mean and what we can learn from this. This is, to me, one of the fascinating things to understand about the city of Pergamos and why it is just fascinating.

This is a scale model in a museum in Berlin, Germany of the altar to Zeus—the altar to Zeus. And you can see the big steps that are leading up into it, and you would go through a columned portico into an area behind there. There would have been an altar back there. But Zeus is the chief god of the Roman deities—the equivalent of Jupiter. Zeus, the Greek god; Jupiter, the Roman god. But it’s the same person, different name. And this being a part of the Greek Empire, it was called the altar to Zeus.

Now, the chief of the pagan gods—okay, that gets up pretty close to Satan himself. We know from 1 Corinthians 10 that the worship of idols is to worship demons. So whatever idol, whatever god or goddess you were worshiping in the pagan world—or even today—the Bible tells us you’re worshiping a demon that is behind that image.

And if it’s the top god—Zeus—who’s the top demon behind the one other than Satan, this was a temple that stood right there in the city of Pergamum. Now, this is what’s left of it. And it’s in the same museum in Berlin. It’s actually called the Pergamum Museum. It’s named after the city.

All right, and this is what’s left of that temple. I’ve been there. I took this picture and this one here. You see the steps leading up to it. And so when you look at this as the scale model of what it looked like in antiquity, this is all that’s left of it.

What happened sometime in the late 1800s in the area of Pergamum—there in Turkey—the locals were tearing all this stuff apart, these temples, and these marble and stone remnants of these ancient temples. They were burning them to get lime out of them, get other elements out of them, so they had building materials. They didn’t care what it was. They were Muslim.

Well, here comes a German engineer working through the area. And he finds out what they’re doing and he stops. They’re burning this piece of antiquity. And he gets them to stop and he goes to the Ottoman caliph in Istanbul and basically negotiates the right to buy it and to take all what is left to Germany. And they reconstruct it there, and they build this whole museum around it—this one piece. That’s why it’s called the Pergamum Museum. It’s been under reconstruction and renovation for the last number of years, and they say it’s going to go for a while.

But if you ever get to Berlin, you want to see this. It is my candidate for the throne of Satan and what Jesus is referring to. Now scholars talk about this back and forth. Many believe that’s what it is—this is what Christ is referring to. Others say, “Well, it could be the Asclepion”—the temple and the healing center to the god Asclepion. Demons? Yeah. Okay. Satanic? Yes.

Some say that it’s the temple to this guy—to Augustus and the other Roman emperors there, which there are remnants of it. And yeah, that’s plausible too.

But I think it’s this. And I think it’s this because of what’s on it.

You will see around the façade here, there are some images—and these are original. Let me give you a close-up of it.

This is what was around this altar of Zeus: these images of a titanic struggle between the gods.

It's really what it is. It's right out of Greek mythology. And it's the idea of the heavenly gods led by Zeus who are warring with some earthly gods or semi-gods who are the offspring of Uranus and somebody else. And there's this great titanic battle going on between the gods of Olympus and these earthly gods. And it's what's depicted here. They've got Zeus in there. They've got his wife. They've got Apollo and all kinds of images. And if you're looking at this particular picture, you see the guy that's being put upon by the woman here has got a serpent’s body below him.

You see the tail kind of winding out there to the left. Look at this one.

Here's another section just to zero in on. This is another guy being bitten or eaten, chomped on by a lion. Okay. All right. What does Peter say in 1 Peter about a lion?

Who does he connect a lion to? Remember? Satan. Yeah, "goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour" (1 Peter 5:8). You already know the snake connection. Here's a close-up of another part of that, of a snake head. This is what was all over this temple, this altar to Zeus. It was a unique building in all of the ancient world, all of the ancient world. They've not found anything like it. It was unique in its construction and its position. It sat on the edge of this hill that you see here. And I don't have the picture. Well, there's a cop, some trees right there.

My right up there, there are some trees right there. That's the site of the ancient temple.

And it sat looking out over, you know, several hundred feet above the plain below.

And you can see for miles there. Now, you go back to this image right here, and you can well imagine that as a seat with arms and a great demonic figure sitting there.

When Jesus says, "the seat of Satan" (Revelation 2:13), if I were in the church there hearing that, I would have thought about this. Again, other scholars think about it. I think this is where it is. What I think is being portrayed on this altar here is the struggle, the rebellion of Satan—as Ezekiel and Isaiah describe to us—against the angels of God. We'll read in Revelation 12 where "Satan with his tail draws a third of the angels into this rebellion" (Revelation 12:4).

We understand to be a pre-Adamic, way back in, you know, a time when Satan rebelled and drew a third with him. I think that's what's being portrayed on here. That is my opinion.

Others, you know, speculate about that as well, other scholars. But I think you are looking at Satan’s inspirational depiction of when he rebelled against God in the city of Pergamum, in this altar. And again, I go back. I talked about this King Adonis who willed his city and kingdom to Rome. And, you know, fast forward into the first century—or into the late 19th century—this German engineer coming across the remnants of these pieces and taking them to Berlin to build this, to reconstruct it, at least in partial reconstruction.

And they build an altar around it. This, you know, it opens sometime, I think, in the, you know, maybe 10—you know, early 1900s.

It’s a showpiece. Well, here’s what happens. In the 1930s in Germany, a man named Adolf Hitler comes to power. And he creates the Third Reich. He creates the Nazi National Socialist Empire, revives Germany, this cult of Nazism and this cult based on his personality. And he reorganizes Germany, does a lot of good things. Everybody loves him at first. But then he turns into this megalomaniacal dictator and he starts World War II. He starts gobbling up all the countries of Europe and throws the world into this great cataclysm called World War II.

But around Hitler and his brown-shirted Nazis—and you’ve seen all the pictures through all the movies and all of, you know, it’s still a fascination for us today, all these years later.

What Hitler did in the 1930s, as he was rebuilding Germany—literally buildings and making it an empire that was going to last a thousand years—he had an architect, a man by the name of Albert Speer.

And Albert Speer was the architect that Hitler employed to build his cities—Berlin and other places. Albert Speer went into the Pergamon Museum, and he knew about this altar and Zeus and the whole story. He makes his sketches. He puts his plans together. And they go down to the city of Nuremberg in Germany, and they build on a large parade ground a facsimile—or a replica thereof—of this altar of Zeus in Nuremberg, Germany.

And this is what it looked like, the façade, at least the front part of it. You see the steps and the similarities. And out in front of that, every year Hitler would have his brown shirts and his people come in. They would have a big, big rally. It was their Feast of Tabernacles. It was usually in August. And if you’ve ever seen the pictures, the old newsreels of that, Hitler had a photographer that he loved. Her name was Leni Riefenstahl.

And she made a documentary about everything, but she also documented these pageants that he would put on. And if you saw the... well, you can find it on the web. I forgot the exact name of that film that she did, but look up Leni—L-E-N-I—Riefenstahl and Hitler, and you’ll find it.

This was all, you know, it was basically destroyed when the Allies came in. This is what it looks like today. This is what’s left of it. Still a façade. Hitler would address everybody from right up in there and stand there. So you see pictures of Hitler in these nighttime scenes and, you know, shouting and speaking in Nuremberg at these rallies. That’s where he stood right there. And hundreds of thousands out in front of him.

It was demonic. And all of that came from Pergamon. And we understand that that Nazi, German, Italian, Reich period was this sixth revival of one of the heads that we’ll talk about again in Revelation 17. There’s every reason to believe that Satan was working and dwelling, if you will. Satan moved his throne out of Pergamon a long time ago.

I think he parked it in Rome. And I think that he had a branch office up in Berlin during this period of time.

In fact, there’s a book that I have read a few years ago and I keep referring to it. I used it in—I probably used it here. I’ve used it in a recent talk I gave over in Europe at our European conference in the Netherlands. A writer who basically wants to see Europe come back.

He wants to see a new Augustus to save the world. That’s his theory. And this guy is not a believer, but he looks at history and he sees the only empire that’s ever reinvented itself or revived itself out of the ashes is the European empires. And China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and all the others that he talks about—they can’t hold a candle to what Europe was.

And he even makes an allusion to these nighttime rallies that Hitler held in front of this reconstructed symbol of the Pergamos, of the altar of Zeus in Pergamos. And this author here—his name is Bernard-Henri Lévy—talks about the whirling demons in the sky above all of that, whirling, seeking to take bodily form. And they did. And they wreaked havoc upon the world. It’s called World War II.

And he says they’re whirling again, waiting to take a bodily form above this.

It’s an allusion to this whole scene here. When we look at what we’re told here in the story, it’s an amazing transformation that goes from what was here to what was there thousands of years later.

And when you go there today, this is what you see.

They’ve reconstructed a lot, a lot of work yet to do. But I’ll take a group over there this coming April again, and we spend a few hours walking around the ruins of the ancient city of Pergamum. You can’t go up on that spot where the altar was, but you can walk around it. They have it fenced off.

And to imagine Satan sitting there looking out over the capital of this empire at its heyday is very easy to do. And so my candidate for the seat of Satan is this altar of Zeus at Pergamum, and it teaches us something about what is to come in the time ahead of us as we look for this final revival of this beast system out of the book of Revelation.

As we go through the rest of the book and we get to chapter 13 and 17, this is the imagery to call back into it. But in Pergamos, there was concentrated at this time of the writing of the book of Revelation, every aspect of evil that had been generated within this world—and all of its symbolism, all of its temples, all of its imagery—and it was concentrated right there.

So if you were a member sitting there listening to this letter being read to you, you’d have many different places as you would have gone out from church that day and would have walked by or looked at—temples to all these gods and goddesses—to imagine where you were. And think about what that would have put upon them and what we might learn from our understanding today.

Satan’s seat has moved, but Satan is still very much alive and working his plan to thwart God. And Christ is telling us this through these messages to the church in intimate detail, in a broader expanse of history and prophecy to put us into our world today.

So I think that there’s a great deal to understand from that there, and that just is a little bit of what makes this area and this study. I think it’s an area, in connection with what I mentioned earlier about Daniel 11—the Pergamine Empire of that time—and all of what we’re told in Daniel 11. It is a story we really haven’t told in the church well enough and looked at.

That’s why when I started teaching Daniel and got to chapter 11, I realized there’s a lot here. God put all this intricate detail into the Bible for some reason, and I’m still digging it out.

And this is a part of that story as it centers upon this capital city of Pergamos during the time of the heyday of the Greek Empire, it being given to Rome, and being a place that Christ then later, at the end of the first century AD, says to the church, "this is where Satan was. You're living right in the center of it" (Revelation 2:13).

And the connection into our modern world then can give us—and should give us—a wake-up call as to the relevance of the biblical message and particularly the message of Revelation and these messages to the church to help us in our work to preach the gospel, but also in our work to overcome individually as we learn about God's way and seek eternal life, life forever with God.

I'm going to stop right there with the time we have. This gives us a few extra minutes here, but I thought I'd get into the story of the church message at Thyatira, but we'll wait. That will begin at verse 18 here of chapter 2, and we'll try to finish this in our next couple of classes. We'll talk about Thyatira, Sardis, and then Philadelphia and Laodicea.

So didn’t get quite as far as I would today, but I thought a lot of that needed to be brought out.

So we'll pick it up in the next class.