WOLFL-2024-05
Transcript
I am going to talk really fast because I have to finish last hour and start the new one.
We were waiting in line, and I was the driver. I watched the program for four hours and in the fifth hour I got up to the front line and what you just heard happened at noon. Do you hear that bell? They had a bell at the border. The Moroccan soldiers all wear dark blue outfits, they have the…, you’ve probably seen like the French Foreign Legion, that’s the time period they’re frozen in, with that red on their hat, and they had their rifles on their arms. All of a sudden, I pulled up, I knew what everybody did, they opened the door, they handed the passports, and they started emptying the car.
I had the passports in my hand, and I went like this to push open the door, and it wouldn’t open. I pushed harder, and it wouldn’t open. I looked out the window, and Mr. Blue Suit wearing the gun had his knee like this against my door. He was wanting me not to open the door, because it was noon, and the guards changed. And he saw the trailer and the car, it was like doing two jobs, not one, and whoever starts it has to finish it, so he was going to miss eating. He was holding my door shut. Watching the door and all of a sudden out walks the new set of guards with their guns and their hats and their blue things and that guard that was marching out looked at this big eight passenger van and this big trailer behind it and I was still inside and he walked up and he said, Americans. He knew English. Americans. Saw my eight passports. I was holding them for the missions team. That’s what everyone did.
The other guy put his knee down and the other guy put his knee up and he said… and he didn’t even let us get out of the car and we drove in, to Morocco, with 6,000. Now do you understand how dangerous this moment was? The name and address of every Arab speaking Muslim country person was on, everybody’s name, 6,000 people interested in Christianity were in that trailer. That’s why we were scared to death. We thought probably some of those people would get killed. When they go to their house and go, why do you have a Bible coming from Transworld Radio to your house? Are you not faithful to Islam? You understand what I mean? It was very dangerous. The Lord got us in the country, but we still had 6,000 Bibles in a Muslim country where they incarcerate people that smuggle, and we were smuggling contraband. Bibles are against the law.
Yes, sir. [Student asked: What was the plan if that didn’t happen?] We were going to go to jail and all those people were going to get caught, because Transworld Radio could not figure out any other way. This guy said, this praying man in Fes said I will distribute them if you get them to me. But here’s the kicker. Now you guys, now this is fascinating. This was in 1978, so what, 46 years ago and I was, 19, turning 20. The mission would not tell us where Mr. Praying man lived, other than the city which was Fes, FES. That’s a city of Morocco on the map today. Half a million people. They said, if God gets you through the border, God will help you find him. I said, come on, I’m driving. Where do I drive? They said, drive to Fes and you’ll find him.
I said, really? Now, I’m not charismatic. I don’t see angels. I don’t hear voices. I read the Bible. I hear the voice of God. There are people that say angels or God told me something that are Christians. That’s never happened to me and God’s never told me anything that’s not in His Word. I was the driver. We miraculously got through the border, and I said, what do we do next? And one of the other team members says I know for sure that, Fes was in front of us, they said I know we should go this way. There was like a three way road, so I went this way. Next person after a little while said, boy, I really know that we should go that way.
One by one, seven people in the car kept saying, go this way, turn right, go left. I did, I was a good driver. All of a sudden I started looking, we were getting into the center of Fes. Now, if you know anything about Northern Africa, they’re frozen in the time of Christ. There are still donkeys with sticks on them, and they’re dragging… There are people wearing the biblical outfits that look like one big passion play, or a big Easter service or something. Or the shepherds of Bethlehem, they all look that way, and they’re all around wearing their robes and clothes and everything else. The road is getting narrower and narrower, and here I am in this eight passenger van with a trailer and I said, I cannot turn around. We pulled into the main, it’s called the souk, it’s the downtown marketplace, and there was the mosque. The central mosque of Fes, right there.
I said, I have no glimmers of what to do, I’m going to park, and we should all pray that the Lord will show us what to do. I pulled over to the edge, parked, I said let’s pray, we all bowed our head. As soon as I bowed my head, [blaring out the call to prayer] you know the call to prayer thing, you ever heard how loud it is? The muezzin, whatever they call it, the man that does it from the microphone and everybody started piling in. What they do when they hear that? All the faithful Muslims run to the mosque. They go just like this. It’s just like a river of people. Everyone stops what they’re doing. It’s like getting to class in time. They all go. We were, as we were praying, I peeked, we were like in a river. Most of them were the black burkas or whatever they call them. It’s just like a river of black and white going around. The men and women going around. Some of them were crawling over the trailer hitch, because I was parked right in front of the mosque. We’re all praying.
Not two minutes into our prayer, on my window, [tap, tap, tap] and I looked up and there’s the biggest white tooth smile you’ve ever seen. That was the praying man of Morocco. He said, I was on my knees. He said, I live in… do you see that window up there? He said, that’s my window right there. Second floor. He said, I pray on my knees because I told the Lord, the only way you guys could deliver is come during the call to prayer. Because he said, every devout Muslim is inside that mosque right now and they’re on their face and they have their head on the carpet, on the ground, and they’re praying and doing all that. He said I was on my knees saying, God, they’ve got to come during the call to prayer. He said and I looked out the window and he said, this Gigantic European van pulled up and parked in front of my house. He said let’s get busy.
During their call to prayer, He said I can only take three thousand of them, I’m sorry. I said, oh I have six. He said, you have to mail the rest. He said, I don’t have enough, I didn’t know how many there were. We carried 3, 000 address Bibles up to his apartment. He said, goodbye, help me turn around. We drove away, and we spent the next two weeks buying every stamp we could find, at every post office. I’ve covered the whole country of Morocco, and bought every stamp they would have. We found every post office box. Do you know how little post office boxes are? And we would jam them full of Bibles till we had mailed 3,000 Bibles.
You know what I learned from that? That one man risked his life because… Did you know, if he would have been caught with 3,000 Bibles on his living room floor where we dumped them, I don’t know what they would have done to him, but he became the one that, now if you’ve heard during this Arab Spring, there are so many people that have come to Christ, and they’ve left, and they tell about their home churches. When all that happened, all the people floated. Do you all remember this floating across the Mediterranean thing? And all of them are in Europe now? Did you know many of them are Christians? They had come to Christ and were living for Christ in the Muslim world. What they did, it’s fascinating, the stories they tell us. I work with a seminary in Jordan now, it’s called the Jordanian Evangelical Theological Seminary and I was on the board there and many of the students say, they came to Christ with their head on the carpet at the mosque, doing the prayers. Did you know they talk to each other during the prayers? It’s just… they all chant this stuff and do it, but they’re really, it’s like the Roman Catholic mass. They’ve done it a thousand times and they know it by heart. They talk to each other and one of them would say, hey, have you ever read the Bible? And they said, no, I’ve never read the Bible. What are you doing reading the Bible? We read the Bible. Did you know we have…, and they’re through all their motions, they’re talking to each other on their carpets, and they invite people after prayer time to come to their house and they have Bible studies. They’re actually Moslems that are leading people to Christ, bringing them from the mosque to their house, starting churches in their homes all over Syria and Iraq and Lebanon and Jordan and Egypt.
I could tell you stories all day about students I’ve taught from Egypt that are church planters in Egypt. It’s one of the largest Moslem countries next to Indonesia. It’s the largest Arab speaking Moslem country of all. God is at work. Because there’s some of these Ephesians, first love, do whatever God wants me to do. Why I’m saying that is, did you know, it’s amazing every time Bonnie and I come here to think what God has offered to you, that you could do for Him? If you’ll just magnify Christ in your life instead of yourself, and consecrate your life, and say, I don’t want sin and say, I want God’s Word through me, to just be unleashed, there’s no limit to what God can do with your life. And when you start doing that, be ready for persecution.
Okay, so this next one, we’re going to chapter 2, verse 8, Hope despite persecution and suffering. This is the message that Jesus gave these churches and the church He’s giving it to is that one, Sardis. By the way, Sardis, I mean Smyrna, not Sardis. Smyrna is the Greek word for myrrh. You all know this word. The Wisemen brought, the coming to Christ birth Wisemen, brought gifts which were gold, frankincense, and smyrna. That’s the Greek word. smyrna. We say it in English, just we take the S off. We say myrrh. Myrrh is a unique resin that grows from these desert trees, and they take their machetes in the desert, and they go whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, and cut the bark all the way up. They just, they deface the tree. Instantly, the tree tries to heal itself, and it exudes and puts out this resin that hardens and it covers the wounds. When they break that off, that’s myrrh. That myrrh is produced by the injuring of the bark of a tree. This, it’s interesting that Jesus picked a church that was named myrrh, the injured resin that comes out from injured tree branches to talk about persecution.
This is the church that we find most embodies what we saw happening during the time of persecution. If you were flying in today to Izmir, that’s what it’s called today. Smyrna is Izmir in Turkey today. If you’re flying in, the circle, you see that kind of green in the middle of this gigantic city. Izmir is the second largest city in Turkey after Istanbul. If you flew there and looked out your window, you’d see the part from the Bible. That circle is the forum, the marketplace, it’s the center of town in the biblical times. The message, if you were thinking about Smyrna and reading your Bible while you flew in there, is how does God want us to respond to fear and pain and struggles? Because if you’re going to do what Mr. Praying Man in Morocco did, or the guy I’m going to tell you about today in this class from Romania, it will probably cost you something. Nowadays, if you stand up for Christ you can be trolled, and I forget all the things they do to you online, where they doxx you, I don’t even know what doxxing is, but they do it, and you just become villainous and people make fun of you. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about literal, physical punching and harm, and near death. Which is what many people are experiencing.
Number one, only Jesus understands all our struggles. Now, we’re not covering Hebrews, but Hebrews is all about that. Hebrews 2, it says that He’s acquainted with all our griefs and sorrows and the word sympathy in English comes from the Greek word with feeling. Sym means with, patheo is to feel. A sympathetic person feels with you. Jesus is the most sympathetic, look what He says. To the angel of the church of Myrrh or Smyrna, write, these things says the First and the Last. Now look how He introduces Himself. Who was dead and came to life. Jesus said, I was dead and alive. They were facing fatal persecutions. Jesus knows what we’re going through. What’s amazing is, in each of these letters, when He gives this name, remember I told you they all have the same format. The city, then Jesus introduces Himself. When you look at that introduction, it exactly meshes with where the church was. Jesus says, hey, I’ve gone through what you’re going through.
He says it in verse 9. I know your works, and there’s that word we saw in chapter 1, tribulation. Remember, squashing. I know you’re being squashed, and your poverty, but you’re rich. Now you talk about poverty, did you know in the Roman Empire you would pay a price to be a Christian? When we worked in the communist countries, it was very clear in the communist countries until the wall fell, if you were a Christian from a Christian family, your children could not go to college. They had to be laborers, the government said. They could not become a professional, they could not become a teacher, they could not be a professor, they could not be an entertainer. They didn’t want Christians rising up to roles of influence. Becoming a Christian was a death sentence to the future careers of your children, and you, but your children too. Do you understand how dangerous that would be? How would you like your parents to be faced with, if I’m going to be a Christian, you can’t go to any university, you can’t have any professional job, you are going to just do…, in the communist world, they were ditch diggers. A ditch digger? You ever dug a ditch? You just work all the time. You’re in a pit. You’re throwing dirt out. They were the ones that worked in the sewer plants. They were the ones that worked, shoveling coal into the basements. That’s the jobs of the Christians in the communist world. Not doctors, not lawyers, not musicians, not professors, not business people sitting behind desks, and having coffee. Laborers. But it wasn’t just for you. It was your children. It became generational poverty. That’s why the church was so strong.
When we would visit behind the Iron Curtain and deliver Bibles, you had to be to church at 7am. That’s when communion was. When I would go to church in Poland, in Hungary, in Romania, church started at seven. People did not have cars. They started walking at six to get to church. You guys think it’s bad to come to eight o’clock class? Rain or shine, winter, fall, whatever, they walk through the weather. They walk to church. Communion was at seven. The first preaching service started at eight. They would have four of us. I was never the only speaker. There would be four preachers, in a row, an hour long. Then they broke for lunch, and then they had another one. That was Sunday. They all walked home. They were poor, and they had nothing but Christ. Are you ready for that? Because we’re not far from it.
In America, right now, the debate is going on in the Supreme Court. Cases have been filed because the Bank of America debanked Christian ministries. What will happen when the Bank of America and Wells Fargo and Chase Manhattan and, I’m not sure what your big bank in Florida is, but when they debank you, do you know what debank means? They close your account, they give you a check, and where do you cash it? You don’t have a bank account. What they’re doing is they’re putting pressure on Christian ministry. Someone has filed a case and it’s going before the Supreme Court because this Christian ministry was debanked. Not one, I think about several hundred. It’s starting in America, the pressure that they were going through.
Not only that, but look at this. I know the blasphemy, they were verbally abused. They weren’t just persecuted and harmed. They were also verbally abused.
Let’s look at the history of this. Starting with Nero, he’s the one that got Peter and Paul and killed them. Then Domitian, he exiled John. Followed by Trajan, who by the way, Trajan started hunting down Christians province by province. He’s the one I told you that pushed them off the cliffs. Marcus Aurelius, Septimus Severus, these were the persecuting Roman emperors. Decius, Valerian, Aurelian, and then the worst one was Diocletian. Diocletian is unique among all the Roman emperors because Diocletian was an engineer. He did more for the Roman Empire than any other emperor. He fixed the water system, he fixed the road system, he fixed the aqueducts. He’s the one that got the public buildings all functioning the way they were. He made, so they had proper exits, they had proper water, they had proper sanitary. They weren’t having all the plagues they were having. He was brilliant. He was a civil engineer general. He looked at everything methodical. When he inherited the emperorship, he was told by his advisors, the biggest problem in the empire are the Christians. He said, then we’ll deal with the Christians. He said, I have a three part plan. He said, this is how you deal with Christianity.
Number one, he said, you destroy all the places they meet. Where do they meet? In homes. Destroy the homes where the Christians are meeting. Wow, would you volunteer to have a Bible study at your house if you knew the Roman Empire is going to destroy your house? One of my students in Egypt, Mafti was his name. He was a church planter in Egypt. Do you know what they do in Egypt, today? Today, in 2024, if they find a Christian church in a home, they burn the house down. They destroy the house. This is not archaic. Today, in Egypt, Christians meeting in homes, the home they meet in. It doesn’t matter if it was just a one-time meeting, they destroy the home. I asked Mafti, I said, he was at JETS in the seminary in Amman, and I said, Wow, what do you do? He says, oh, we’ve already planned it in the church. He said, what we do is, we rotate between all the church members, and as soon as they find out where we are, they burn the home. All the other church members have a list, and the ones that are ready for another family to move in with them, they just moved that day. They don’t burn it with the people in. They let you take your junk, your stuff out. Then they burn your home. They just move in with another family in the church. Today this kind of persecution is going on. We just don’t have it. He said we’ll destroy the house.
Number two, we’ll either kill or imprison the pastors. Diocletian destroyed every…, there is no known meeting place that’s still standing from before Diocletian’s time. No church. Known of in any part of the Roman Empire. Number two, kill or imprison the pastor.
Now here’s the one that all of you have felt. He destroyed every complete copy of the Bible. Did you know there’s not one complete manuscript of the Bible left that predates him? He did it. Every copy is destroyed. Now do you remember what I told you yesterday about how in the communist countries when they got a Bible, the first thing they did is they tore out all 66 books and passed them out? That’s what the church did. They took their church manuscript and divided it up. Did you know today there are 25+ thousand pieces of those manuscripts? Those are called the fragments. They tore the whole Bibles up into little pieces, books, spread them out between the church people, and today scholars find all of these pieces, and we have complete manuscripts, but none of them are actually the ones that used to be together because he destroyed all the together ones. He did that, and did that, and I told you what happened. He was building on what Nero had done, what Domitian did with John.
Diocletian, that’s his face. Bonnie and I were standing, taking our class through the baths of Diocletian in Rome, and he’s got a big statue of himself. I looked in his face, and I thought, he’s the man that brought Christianity the closest to extinction. Under him, it almost happened that he shut it down. But what happened, the church historians tell us, the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church. I told you what happened, as his legionnaires… There’s one of them, his name is Demetrius, was a legionnaire, in the city of Thessalonica, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, that city. He was called by the governor to go to a group of Christians, he gathered the Christians to bring them to be executed, and the entire way they weren’t screaming, they weren’t moaning, they weren’t dragging, like the oil protesters they have to bodily drag them off the road. No, they came willingly, and they said, this is the day that we are going home. We’re going home today. We know it’s going to be painful, but we’re going home. And he said, we’re killing you. They said, uh huh. They, on the way to death in Thessalonica, they shared the Gospel with Demetrius. Today, if you go to Thessalonica, there’s a St. Demetrius Church. It’s built over the spot where Demetrius was bringing them to their execution and delivered them to the governor and told the governor he was joining them. He was executed that day with the people he captured, the Christians. He became quintessential. He became the example of what was going on across the empire. Poor Diocletian said he was losing his best military men because they joined the Christians, and they died with the Christians.
He did what no other Roman emperor did. All the rest of them either were assassinated, died of dissipation from their wild living, or were murdered or killed on the battlefield. Do you know what Diocletian did? He retired. He just said, I quit. I can’t defeat the Christians. He quit. He moved to where Game of Thrones is filmed, that Dubrovnik or whatever it’s called, that’s his house. And even though I’ve never seen Game of Thrones, that’s what’s ruined the city. You can’t take groups there anymore. Everybody that watches that movie or whatever it is goes there.
What we see is, we, because we’re Christians, Jesus promised what would happen. He said, if the world hates you, it hated Me before I hated you. If you were of the world, they would love you, but you’re not of the world, and I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. You understand? Do you know why Christians in America aren’t hated as much as Christians in other places? Because we’re, it’s not clear who we are. Remember, Gallup and Barna, the pollsters, can’t find a difference between the Christians and the unsaved people. Christians lie as much, steal as much, get divorced as much, and live together before marriage as unsaved. I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about the supposed hundred and whatever million Christians are in America. But basically, we should get ready because hard times are on the horizon.
Now, do you know what this picture is? This is the Circus Maximus. More Christians were martyred there than anywhere else, more than in the Colosseum. 250,000 to 300,000 people could fit in that thing and they would crucify them and burn them and let the animals eat them and a whole lot of other things.
But look what Jesus doesn’t say. If you read the letter to Smyrna, it’s the shortest, you know what you’ll find? Jesus doesn’t say they’re going to escape. He doesn’t say you become a Christian, you’re not going to suffer. No. In fact, He says the opposite.
Paul put it this way, all who desire to live godly in Christ will suffer persecution. If you stand up at Michigan State University to say I’m a Christian, they’ll make fun of you. If you stand up in your community and say you’re a Christian, if you share the Gospel with people, they will make fun of you. Or worse, if you’ve watched any of those Ray Comfort videos.
Now look what has happened, look at this. Do all of you remember four years ago? Do you remember COVID? Did you remember the dramatic moment when Google and Apple joined forces and what they said to help with COVID? And I don’t know if, let’s see, four years ago, you were 15, some of you. I don’t know if you noticed it, but on their own, Google and Apple used the knowledge they have of the 3 billion people that have Apple accounts and Google accounts. There are 3 billion people, they either have Gmail or Apple phones. A billion one hundred million have Apple phones, the other 1.9 million have Gmail, and some have both. Do you know what they started doing? And the first time it happened, I remember, I got a note, it said, someone in your phone’s contacts has tested positive for COVID. I went, you are reading my contacts? And you’re reading their contacts? And you know that they got COVID, and they alerted people that you need to isolate if you have been in the proximity of this carrier of COVID. Did you all know they did that? Three billion people. They cross checked.
They had a real problem because in America and in Europe, there are still HIPAA laws. You know what HIPAA is? Your medical records are supposed to be private. They couldn’t tell you the name of your friend that had COVID. It was someone in your contacts. All that did is it made all the civil liberty people furious, because someone is in my phone. That’s why Apple started that promise now. Do you know when they sell you something they say, no one knows what’s in your phone. That’s because they did allow four years ago someone to know what was in your phone. Did you know that started what we see full blown with the Anti-christ? Because you have a cell phone in your pocket, that cell tower, wherever it is from here, knows where you are. And it knows who you’re communicating with and who’s communicating with you and where they are. Before long, the Anti-christ will use that.
Throughout history, God has used the persecution of His church to advance the Gospel.
Basically, if you are going through Smyrna, if you are with Bruce or with me, and Bruce leads wonderful tours, he just got back from Egypt. If you were going through Smyrna, this is what you’d see. This is the forum. I showed you from the airplane, that green spot with the yellow around it. This is the entry to the center of Smyrna in the Roman times. The Forum is called the Agora. It’s the marketplace. That’s the word in the Bible when it says Jesus went to the marketplaces, and they put people that were sick in the marketplace. It’s the Forum. It’s the Agora. It’s the center of town.
If you were there in the time of this letter, what was going on is, the pastor of the church in the time of this letter, his name was Polycarp. We know who he is. He knew John. He was a disciple that John had witnessed to. He was now the pastor of this church. The Roman governors were putting up an image of Domitian. Domitian was the Roman Emperor, and he asked people to worship him. All they had to do to worship him was, they put his image on a table, they put a little bowl of incense by it, they put a little candle, an oil lamp burning. They lined the whole town up, all the citizens, the slaves had to stay home and work, but the citizens came. They walked through this line, and all you had to do is pick up, with your fingers, a little pinch of the incense, sprinkle it in front of the image of Domitian. It would burn a puff of smoke, and that was offering worship to him. If you would do that, a Roman legionnaire and the city clerk was standing there, and they would hand you a little slip of paper. It was called in Latin, a libelli. It was a certificate of loyalty. If you walked through there, burnt the incense, you were all set.
Now guess what? If a thousand people are standing behind you, and you’re all in line in that little tunnel of Arches, who would see what you did if you just went through the motion, got the slip, you were free. No one followed and checked your phone. You were free. If anybody came to arrest you, you just showed the certificate. You were free. You were okay. You were loyal. That’s what this church faced.
Polycarp came through the line. He was 86 years old. It’s famous. It’s recorded in Church History. His words, they wrote them down. He got up there. They said do it. He said, no. He said, 80 and 6 years I have served the Lord, Christ. I will not forsake Him now. They took him on the spot, right through there, into the square. It says the people that hated him ran with wood. They all brought their own wood. They tied him to a stake, piled the wood around him, and burned him alive. To the end, 86 year old Polycarp didn’t even struggle. He just died. They said from the fire, he said, Eighty and six years have I served the Lord, christ. I will not deny Him now. Jesus walks us through our life of trials.
I think you all should become spiritual preppers. You ever heard of preppers? They’re the ones that have all the food and water and everything. They’re ready for the end of the world. The richer you are, the more you prep. Jesus said, make a choice to stop fearing. That’s what we need to do. Do not fear any of those things which you are about to suffer. He didn’t say you’re not going to suffer. He said, you’re going to suffer. Don’t fear them. What is the most repeated negative prohibition in the Bible? Fear. That’s the most repeated. Jesus over and over told his disciples, Fear not, fear not, fear not, fear not, fear not. Why? Because God, Paul told Timothy, has not given us a spirit of fear. Who gives us a spirit of fear? Satan. Fear is Satan’s realm. We, when we’re full of the Spirit, are bold. Don’t fear, verse 10 says.
Now it continues, verse 10, indeed the Devil is about to throw some of you into prison, and you’ll be tested, and you’ll have tribulation ten days. Be faithful until death, and I’ll give you the crown of life.
You notice the ten day part? Look at the line. Jesus reminds us he limits Satan’s harm to us. It isn’t like Satan can do any destructive thing he wants to do for the church. It’s limited by the Lord. But it doesn’t mean we don’t suffer. It just means He’s limiting it. He says, I have something better on the other side. If you’re faithful unto death, you’ll get the crown of life. There’s two kinds of deaths. There’s the quick one, martyrdom. There’s the slow, painful, dying daily. Do you know a lot of people are afraid of the painful quick one and they’re not doing very well at the other one. We’re supposed to die and be crucified with Christ daily. If we’re faithful until our death we get the crown of life. Always remember we live after the power of an endless life. Look what He says in verse 11, he who has an ear let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. He who overcomes, in other words, the born again ones are not hurt by the second death.
Why does Jesus keep saying that? Because the same thing is true that’s true today. In every church there are unsaved people. Did you know that? There are people that are going to church, Jesus said in chapter 7 of Matthew’s Gospel many will say unto me in that day, Lord, Lord, haven’t we preached, haven’t we done many mighty miracles in Your name? He says, yeah, you did, but I don’t know you.
What is salvation? John 17:3, this is life eternal, that they may know thee the only true God. Salvation is knowing God. There are people that are going through the motions in church. They know the language, they know the praise the Lord, and amens. They know all the verses, and they’re not born again. Jesus said that. I would never say that. That’s an awful thing to say. Jesus said that. That’s why He’s saying here. You better make sure you’re an overcomer. You better make sure you’re born again. You better make sure you have the new heart.
The bottom line for us to learn is, Smyrna, life is camping. We’re only here temporarily. It’s uncomfortable. It’s easier to be attacked by the bears in a tent than in your house. We are very fragile, but Heaven is our home.
Now quickly, we’re going to the next church, Pergamum. That’s Pergamos. We’re standing in the forum of Pergamos, and that’s the cardo, the main road with all the columns but look up on the hill. You see the dark spots up there on the hill? We’re going there in a minute. That’s the massive theater. Bonnie and I, it’s one of the steepest theaters. We, when we were there the last time, it’s one of those places where you have to hold the handrails. It’s like going down a ladder. Pergamos was an amazing city, but look what it says on the right. Beware of the power of unforsaken, secret sins.
That’s what was going on, that Jesus found when He walked around. That’s where Pergamos is. The question for all of us is, are you resisting sin?
Look what Jesus says to them. In verse 12. To the angel of the church in Pergamos, write, these things says He who has a sharp two edged sword. Oh, that’s quoting from somewhere. Where? That’s Hebrews 4:12-13. For the word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any, what? Two edged sword. What He’s saying is, I’m the one that has the sword in My mouth and when I speak it should be cutting in your heart and doing its work. Now He speaks, verse 13. I know your works, I know where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is. I know you hold fast to My name. Look at this, you did not deny My faith in the days of Antipas. They already had someone. Polycarp isn’t named in Smyrna. They already had a martyr in Pergamos. His name was Antipas, my faithful martyr, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.
Now, take this apart and think about all the truths you just learned. Don’t forget, Jesus knows all about our spiritual life. He’s writing to a group of people that are still associating with the church in Pergamos after one of them was dragged off and killed. Would you go back to church if the Florida state troopers came in and dragged someone out of your church and killed them? You might have a cold next week and not go to church. Do you understand what I mean? Do you understand they were still, if they heard this letter, they were gathering with the church, and the church was suffering martyrdom. Jesus knows that. He knows about our life.
Did it catch your attention what was said twice? Notice that? Where Satan dwells? Is that figurative? Is that allegorical? Is that symbolic? Have you ever thought about that? Do you remember how every church, whatever Jesus says, exactly zeroes in on something in that church?
This, do you remember I told you you’d see that dark spot? We’re going to be there in a minute up by the theater. The dark spot you see there are those trees. Those trees are built around the ruins of what was called, the altar or seat of Zeus. You know who Zeus is? The king of the Greek, the Greco Roman world. Actually, it’s Jupiter in Rome, Zeus to the Greeks, but it’s the same person. One of Satan’s chief emissaries, Zeus. Okay? The Greeks and Romans built the throne. Now, Zeus supposedly lived on Mount Olympus. Mount Olympus is past, if you go to Philippi, it’s to the left on the map. It’s west of Philippi. It’s north of Athens. If you go directly from Thessalonica and Philippi north, you hit Mount Olympus. But nobody…, Bonnie and I drove to Mount Olympus when we were teaching our class over there a couple years ago. We drove up to Mount Olympus. It was very hard. In fact, it snowed while we were up there. We had to turn around and come back. It was like a blizzard in warm weather. It was terrible. It’s like going to Mount Everest, only it’s shorter. So, people didn’t get up there very much.
What they did is they built that so they could see his throne and the reason it’s not there now is, guess where it is? It’s in Berlin. Today, it’s that throne of Zeus is in Berlin. How’d it get there? Hitler brought it. See, Hitler was really into the occult, and he heard that Satan was directly associated, because Hitler knew what the Bible said. Do you notice what it says twice in this passage, where Satan’s throne is in verse 13. And then it says where Satan dwells.
Okay, here’s a lesson we need to think about. Only God the Father and Son and Spirit are omnipresent. Satan and his demons are not. Did you know, right now, Satan is only one place at a time. You ever heard someone say the devil made me do it? People say that all over the world. He did not. He’s only in one place at a time. Satan is localized. Jesus is not. Jesus is omnipresent. The Spirit is omnipresent. The Father is omnipresent. That’s one of the qualities, the systematic theological attributes of God. Satan is in one place at a time. Where did Satan have his headquarters in 95 AD? This town, Pergamos. It says it twice. It says, you are where Satan’s throne is. Now that was the altar of Zeus, but Zeus is a false god and Paul already told us in 1 Corinthians behind every idol is a demon. That was an idol to Zeus, and it wasn’t a demon behind it. Guess who was there? Satan himself actually lived in Pergamos. How would you like to live where Satan lives. Can you imagine?
Bonnie and I, when we work with church planters in Japan, we go to and it’s still like it, we go to Kyoto, the old ancestral capital of Japan, Kyoto. Do you know what they worship in Japan? The dead. They revere the dead. They worship their ancestors who have died. When you go to Kyoto, most people, it’s the most phenomenal thing, the hair will stand up on your arms. It’s like electromagnetic. The back of your neck, you feel something because there’s so many demons around those Shinto shrines where they worship the dead. They know they’re there. Do you know what they do, the Japanese? They pile pyramids of pure white salt in all the doorways. When you go, if you guys go to Kyoto, you’ll see in the doorway a pyramid of white salt. I went to the guide, and I said what is that? They said, oh, that keeps the demons inside the building. I thought, wow, isn’t that amazing? They know they’re there and they think they can stop them.
What does Satan do? He produces fear. What does the Lord say? Fear can surround you. You can live surrounded by Satan and fear, but it doesn’t control you. Look at verse 13. I know your works, where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is, but you hold fast to My name. You did not deny My faith, even in the days when Antipas was My faithful martyr, who was killed among you. We can live around horrible, fearful things, but it doesn’t have to control us.
We should always think of sin as contagious. You notice what it says? I have a few things against you. You have there those who hold the doctrine of Balaam. What did Balaam do? Balaam was called to go on the mountains and pray and curse Israel. He couldn’t curse Israel. Do you remember all that? Balaam and the talking donkey and the kings of Midian and all that stuff. They paid him to tell them how he could destroy Israel. Do you remember what he did? What happens right after Balaam goes with his loot home? A Midianitish, the women, come across the border and seduce the Israelite men and say, did you know if you come to our Baal shrine that we take all of our clothes off and lay down on the ground, and you can do whatever you want if you come with us to the Baal shrine? The men of Israel went, whoa. Right over there? Let’s go! And they went over, and some of them even took the Midianite women with them back to their tents at home. Do you remember what happened? A plague came from the Lord. God broke out in wrath and so Phinehas, the priest came with a spear and came and killed two of them that were in their tent and put the spear like an hors d’oeuvre right through both of them.
That was orchestrated by Balaam. He used sexual immorality to defile the children of God so that God killed them. Why should the Midianites kill the Israelites when God will kill them for them? That’s what, the same thing is going on here. This Balaam teacher, look what it says, continuing, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols, and to commit sexual immorality. That’s what was going on in Pergamos. Someone came into the church and said, God forgives all of our sins so it’s okay to be involved in fornication, because He’ll forgive it. You can live together before you’re married. By the way, that’s what half of all American Christian people are doing, college students are doing today, according to pollsters. They’re living together, unmarried, to see if it works. God hates that and is opposed to it.
What’s the spiritual application? Our spiritual immunity is compromised when we as believers, as God’s own people, get comfortable around what God hates. It brings His judgment. But here’s the good news, no matter how far away we get, it’s always one step back. You also, He said, have those who have the Doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which I hate. But look at verse 16, repent or else.
When I was a youth pastor, I used to always do the same thing. I’d say, this is you, and you’re sinning and walking away from God. There’s Jesus and there’s you. No matter how many steps I take away from God, how far is it back? One step. Repent. One step. A change of mind that leads to a change of behavior. When I say, no, I don’t want that I instantly am as close to Christ as I could ever have been. It’s only one step back, no matter how far we get.
Then look what Jesus says to these people that were struggling so much in Satan’s area. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says… to the Christians, I will give some of the hidden manna. All of a sudden, if you come back to Me, you’ll just love reading the Word of God. I’ll give them a white stone. What is a white stone? In Pergamos, they had special awards and when you won athletic things or civic things they gave you a little white stone. That was the code that you could get into the banquet. They still excavate these white stones, so it was an entry into something special to them. Jesus says, I’ll give them a white stone, a new name which no one knows except to him who receives it. So, you’re intimate with the Lord.
Before we go, I want to tell you about my Romanian friend. His name was Boaz. He didn’t speak English, I’ve never talked to him, but I’ve sat with him for hours. We would drive in from Germany with 1,800 Bibles in our car, and we would go to wherever. Poland, East Germany, Romania, Yugoslavia. We would have Russian Bibles. We would just run the gamut. Bulgarian Bibles. And we always had a contact that we delivered to, like the praying guy that we didn’t know in Morocco. This guy was amazing. I said, so what do we do for this guy? No address, right? They said, no address, but you’ll find him by this. Take your van, park in front of, and he gave us the name of the factory. They said, just park somewhere inside of the factory and sleep. When he gets off work, he’ll know your van because they don’t have Western cars in Romania in the seventies. He’ll come to you. We were there, we drove all night, and we were sleeping in the car and bang, bang, bang on the window. There’s that big smile. Okay. I knew it was him. He came and sat in the front seat, didn’t speak a word of English. He’d just go, [gestured] and he always would tell us where to turn. We went all over the country of Romania with him, all night long.
We would drive from when he got off work at 5 p. m., and we would drop him off at work at 8 a. m. We delivered all night long. That’s why we slept in the car. I don’t know where he slept. On the first load…, Here, I’d been following that hand, but as I was driving I noticed his hand. His hand, his fingernails were brown. They were this thick, like a quarter of an inch thick. I would look at his hands, and he would be pointing, and I looked at them. And they were brown fingernails, and thick, and really rough. He would, then when we delivered the Bibles, those rough fingernails would come, and he’d grab the Bible, and he would take them to the people.
So, when we did that for 1,800 Bibles and I went back to base and I said, hey, what’s the deal with Mr. Brown Fingernails? I didn’t ever hear him talk. They said, oh, his name is Boaz. I said, Oh. Why are his fingernails like that? They said, oh, he didn’t tell you? I said, no, he doesn’t talk English. They said, he gets caught every year he helps us. They take him into the police station, and they always do the same thing. They tie his wrist to the bench. Then the police captain takes a little block of pine, takes his jackknife, and makes little toothpick like slivers, and shoves them under his fingernails until he has wood shards out of all of his fingernails on this hand, then they do this hand. He said, then the police chief pulls out his lighter and goes, and lights them all. So, it’s like birthday candles. He said they burn underneath his fingernails. It destroys, and the body to repair that makes it thicker, and the brown is because it’s scarred. I said, wow.
The next year we went back to Romania, I parked in front of the factory, there was Mr.
Brown Fingernails, he had faith over fear. He rejoiced that he could suffer for Christ, that’s what Jesus offers.
