In the Word

Pastor Mike Warren: We were trying to shorten up the song service. We have communion this morning. Don't let me forget; some of you wave at me if I do. As we're going through the seven churches, there's a lot to be said. As we come to the third of these churches, Pergamus, this morning, what we're going to see is this is one of the conditions. Each one of these churches represents a time in human history, but this particular church begins the time when some of these conditions will be in the modern church at the coming of Jesus Christ.

Let's turn there to Revelation chapter two, verse 12. Let's pray. Father, we thank you this morning for your word. Lord, we thank you that these are the epistles that you wrote. John dictated them, but this is what you have to say to the church age. This is what you have to say to every believer. Each one of these seven epistles can be applied to each believer's life at any given time. They can be applied to each church age at any given time, although they do represent the overall history of the church from its inception to the time you come and remove it.

What we need this morning, especially when we come to the church of Pergamus, because it's so prevalent today, is what we're seeing as you write to this church. Unfortunately and tragically, it is alive and well today. What we need, Father, in these final moments is to be like Antipas, your faithful servant. That will cost us something. To be religious costs nothing. To walk with almighty God in an intimate personal relationship will cost us everything.

As Paul said, the sufferings of this present life, and I found it to be true, are not worthy to be compared with the glory that waits for us on the other side. Father, just speak to our hearts, souls, and spirits this morning. Challenge us, we pray, in the mighty name of Jesus we ask. And all God's kids would say, Amen.

As we come to verse 12, we read, "And unto the angel." Every one of these is addressed to the leadership of that church. Angel is messenger, the pastor, the elders, those that have been charged, commissioned, and entrusted with the oversight, spiritually speaking, of the body of Christ. The Lord has set up under-shepherds, and it's our job to feed God's sheep because when the Chief Shepherd comes, we're going to have to give an account.

James says we who stand in the pulpit, we who challenge God's people through the feeding of his word and through the work of his spirit, we're going to receive the harder or more harsh judgment because we have the capacity, if we don't teach the whole word of God, to deceive you. It's not just teaching false doctrine; we're definitely challenged not to do that. But you can just teach part of the truth and lead people to believe something that is a lie to be true.

As he is addressing these seven churches, this is Jesus speaking. John is taking dictation and writing these things down to send it to these seven churches, which follow a postal route starting with Ephesus. We saw a couple weeks ago that it represented from the inception of the church to the end of the first century. At the end of that, Jesus says, "I have this one thing against you, that you are cooling in your relationship. You've left your first love."

The cure for that always is repent. Go back, remember from where you have fallen, do your first works over again, fall all over again in love with Jesus. He's going to help you out because when we move into the second of those churches, we found out that persecution came. For 200 years, the church was persecuted. The Roman government through ten emperors, under the penalty of death, you serve Jesus. It was a very tough time.

Historians of the day tell us during that time that probably over 100,000 Christians were publicly martyred for their faith. Probably as many as six million were killed just because they were Christians, but some were taken into the arena and publicly martyred. We're coming out of that time now into about 300 AD. This time of the church of Pergamus literally went from 300 AD to probably about 1150. It's the Dark Ages.

It's the time when the Roman Catholic Church came into power and brought in idolatry. If you're here this morning and you think you're safe because you're a Protestant, just fasten your seatbelt. God has some things to say about that too. I want you to know this morning that we're not Roman Catholic, and we're not Protestants either. A Protestant comes from the word "protestant," and it was the Catholic priests who protested where the Catholic Church was going, started the Reformation, and wrote the five solas.

How many know what the five solas are? Let me just give them to you real quickly. It's Sola Scriptura. Let's get back to God's word as the final authority, not an organization, not men, not the church. It's the word of God that is the final authority. The second thing is Solus Christus. It is Christ and Christ alone that saves. Salvation is not placed in an organization; it's not placed in a religion; it certainly wasn't placed in the Roman Catholic Church.

If you didn't do what they said you ought to do, they would withhold from you communion because they believed that literally communion, transubstantiation, became the body and blood of Jesus. If they withheld that from you and excommunicated you, then they had the right to keep you out of heaven. This is the stuff that came in during Constantine. This is the time of history we're going to be studying.

Then you could buy indulgences. If you wanted to have an adulterous affair with your neighbor, you could go to the Roman Catholic Church, you could pay a certain amount of money, and then you could go have that indulgence. Christ and Christ alone saves. Sola Fide, which means faith and faith alone. We are saved by grace through faith. Sola Gratia is grace. Soli Deo Gloria: to God be the glory, great things he has done.

I just want to tell you this morning, if you came out of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope is not the final authority. What he says does not become the word of God. All of the idols that he brought in, God will judge. This is where we're at. If you are clapping your hands saying, "I'm glad I'm a Protestant," he's got some things to say about you too. He's got some things to say about any person that doesn't walk in a perfect relationship with him.

He says unto the angel of the church in Pergamus. The very title of this particular church means mixed marriage. "Perg" has a negative connotation to it. "Gamos" means to be married, to be married to something that's not right. From this word "perg," we also get the idea of a citadel. If you go to Pergamus, as I did, when you come out of the planes, you see this massive mountain that just comes up out of the planes and goes way up almost into the sky. On the very top of it, it's flat.

Up there was the temple to Zeus. You have to understand at this time in the Roman Empire, Pergamus was the center of all pagan worship. All of the main gods, their idols were there. As you have to take this tram up this hill, you get to the top, and literally, you can survey for as far as your eye can see. At the top of that, there is this structure. I have pictures of it. You can look up Pergamus. There's this structure that looks like a throne, and just below it is this amphitheater.

In a few moments, he's going to say that's where Satan's throne is. During the time of Constantine, he brings in the state religion and all of the idols. As far as Pergamus goes, this mixed marriage, the idol to Zeus, the temple to Zeus was there. Zeus is considered the father of all gods. Who is our father? When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he said pray like this: "Our Father."

We're going to see what paganism, what idolatry, and what compromise do. It's always a substitute. The whole term "Antichrist" doesn't mean so much against Christ, but "instead of" Christ. Satan wants to always offer to us an alternative other than what is real and true. In Pergamus, you had the false father, Zeus. But the main idol worship there was Asclepius. Asclepius was the goddess of healing and life.

Who is our healer? Who is our great physician? Who gives us life? Who's healed us from our trespasses and our sins? They had this goddess Asclepius whose temple was there. If you got sick, they would bring you and lay you in the temple, and the temple was filled with snakes. How would you like to worship that? If they laid you in that temple overnight, you would sleep there. If a snake crawled over the top of you, it was guaranteed that you were healed.

So the worship of the goddess Asclepius was there. Not only that, Dionysus was there, the god of drugs and alcohol. There were three temples to the worship of Caesar there in Pergamus. It was a city completely given to idolatry, mixed marriage. We're going to see this morning that when Constantine was seeking to become the next Roman emperor, in 312 AD at a certain battle, because he knows it's not going to go well for him, he looks up, and historians tell us that he has a vision.

We don't know if he really had a vision or if he feigned to have a vision, but he looks into the sky in this vision and says he hears these words: "In hoc signo vinces." It means "in this sign" or "by this name" conquer, and he sees a cross. At that moment, whether he truly was or feigned to be, he said he became a Christian when he heard those words, "In hoc signo vinces. In this sign, conquer."

He made at that moment what was the Catholic Church. Every one of you is Catholic. Catholic just means universal. It's an oxymoron to say Roman Catholic because you're saying that it's in Rome, but it's universal. We are Catholic. But they took the Catholic Church, those who were following Jesus Christ, who had an intimate relationship, who were willing to lay down their lives for the cause of Christ, who would not compromise the truth.

Those who stood firm even when they were being fed to lions, even though they were being martyred in the arenas, even though they were being hunted down and executed, they would not deny his name nor his faith. All of a sudden, as Constantine has this vision and says, "Conquer in this name" or "in this sign," he feigns coming to Christ. He now makes the church the state religion. He called it the Roman Catholic Church.

He brought in this priest who wears the frog hat. That's demonic. When you look at the Catholic Church and they're wearing the frog hat, that's to Dagon. They bring this priest in whose name is Damasus. He has all of the soldiers ride to a river, and he declares them to be baptized. If they just took the wafer and drank the cup, they were saved. With that came in all of the false teaching that we see today.

There are a few things that I want to discuss because this entered in the third century under Constantine. Today, we celebrate and we're going to be celebrating in a few months the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We're going to be celebrating, not Easter. Easter comes from the pagan celebration, Astarte, where they're celebrating a false mother and a false child. We're going to see that in a few moments that comes from Mystery Babylon.

Part of the worship of this pagan goddess and her son, which comes from Mystery Babylon, was celebrating fertility through the rabbit and the resurrection of her son who feigned to be dead, gored by a bull, and then brought back to life again by the coloring of eggs. Does that look like anything to you? It's pagan. The church should have nothing to do with it. We celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Christmas: why do you think we celebrate the birth of Jesus on December the 25th? Certainly, the shepherds would not have been out in the field in the middle of winter. Most scholars trying to track back the time of Jesus' birth, it would have been sometime in June or July. We got to be when we went to Israel out there in Bethlehem in those fields where the shepherds would have seen and heard the angels coming and announcing the birth of Christ.

But as Constantine now makes the church the state religion, he marries it to paganism. First to Astarte, which we call Easter, and he associates this pagan celebration with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Then when we come to Christmas, these are the two main things, it was a pagan celebration. It was Sol Invictus, which they were celebrating that the sun was now rising again and it had not been conquered. It was a celebration of worshipping the sun, and that celebration, that pagan festival happened on December the 25th.

When we celebrate December the 25th, we're celebrating the birth of our Lord and Savior. We don't celebrate it. They would put Yule logs in the fire to celebrate that. They would go cut evergreen trees down and bring them into their home to celebrate that. It's of pagan origin, brought in under Constantine. Idols and saints that ain't were brought in.

One of the most tragic of these false doctrines brought in during this period in the Roman Catholic Church is they said, "Now the persecution has ended, so that must have been the tribulation." They brought in the false teaching of amillennialism, which says there is no millennial reign of Christ; it's all past, and we're living in the kingdom age. People stopped seeking the return of Jesus, the blessed hope.

I could go on all this morning and next Sunday and the Sunday after that talking to you about the false teaching that came in during this time. Please, do not be offended if you're a Roman Catholic. If you are here, you're not a Roman Catholic. Later when we offend the Protestants, don't get offended either. The church has always been under attack. Satan is always trying to offer something that is counter to Christ.

He's telling them, "Listen, this church at Pergamus, this mixed marriage, you have married to things that you should never be married to. You have allowed things to come into the church that should never be allowed to come into the church. Because of the ending of persecution and now you think that you're living in a time of ease, and Constantine now has ended all Christian persecution and declared the church to be the state religion, the Roman Catholic Church, and all of this paganism has come into the church, you're okay with it because you're not suffering. We should never be okay with that."

We should call it out on every hand. Jesus is coming back for a pure church. He's coming back for a church that's watching and waiting. He's coming back for a church that is clean, that has clean hands and a pure heart. He's coming back for a church that worships him and him alone. That's why out of this time period toward the end came the reformers, the covenanters. Sola Scriptura, we have to get back to the scripture.

Sola Gratia, it's by grace and grace alone are you saved. Sola Fide, it is faith and faith alone through that grace that saves. To God be the glory. The true church, the church he's coming back for, has always been that way. He says to the angel, to the messenger, to the pastor, to the elders of the church that now has mixed marriage, it's married to the world: "Write these things saith he which has the sharp sword of two edges."

In Hebrews, we understand what this is: this is the word of God. He says the word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword. It pierces beyond the physical, it pierces beyond the emotional, it pierces beyond the intellectual, and it goes into the heart of man. It pierces into the heart. What he's saying is, "Listen," and again, it's one of those things where every time he addresses the church, he addresses something that's wrong with the church, and he uses part of his description from chapter one to address it.

Here he's saying, "Listen, the word of God is not sharp anymore in this time. It's not cutting anymore. It's not dividing anymore. You have allowed things to come in that should never come in." True Christianity separates us from the world. It doesn't invite the world in. We're seeing today, even in our time, there is this movement to make the church acceptable to the world. They call it the seeker-sensitive movement.

We should become so like the world that the world understands us; we should be culturally relevant. The scriptures have never been culturally relevant. The scriptures have always forced a division. The word of God always divides. We hear things in churches today like, "We don't study doctrine here because doctrine divides." You bet it does. It separates the sheep from the goats; it separates the wheat from the tares; it separates the lost from the saved. It is a sharp two-edged sword. It does divide.