Pergamum on the hill viewed form the main street in the Aesulapeum.
Pergamum was the capital city of the province of Asia in the ancient Roman Empire. After the break-up of Alexander the Great's empire, the King of Pergamum, in his will, be-queathed the city to Rome. The people of the city were happy enough to fulfil his wish; they entered the Roman Empire by spontaneous choice, not by compulsion.
Pergamum could not rival either Ephesus or Smyrna in its volume of trade, but it laid claim to some distinction.
It held one of the most famous libraries in the world, for one thing, numbering some 200,000 volumes of parchment. It was in Pergamum, in fact, that parchment was invented. and the very word 'parchment' derives from the Latin 'Pergamena Charta' - or 'paper of Pergamum.' The other great rival library in Alexandria used papyrus, but its manufacture in Egypt was a government monopoly. Pergamum was forced to invent something else, and turned to the skin of animals. Ironically enough, Cleopatra later took Pergamum's library away, by permission of Mark Antony, and added it to the one in Alexandria!
But more important for our purpose, it stood out above the other six cities mentioned as the Cathedral city, as it were, of pagan worship; and here we may follow up one or two clues that will help us to see why John described it as "the place where Satan's throne is."
Here, first, was the centre of the worship of Aesculapias. Aesculapias was the god of healing. The temple had its medical wards, its medical schools, and it attracted sufferers from all over the Roman Empire. It was like an ancient Lourdes. The god's characteristic name was 'saviour,' and to the Christian, for whom there was but one Saviour, the title was abhor-rent. More significantly still, the emblem of Aesculapias was the serpent. It is still to be seen on the cap badge of the Royal Army Medical Corps, or on the lapel of a Royal Air Force nursing orderly. The temple of this god was infested with tame snakes. If you wanted healing there, you were allowed to sleep the night in the temple, and the touch of a snake as it glided over you was held to heal; its touch was regarded as the touch of the god himself. But to the Christian, a god whose incarnation took the form of a snake could only be that "old serpent the devil and Satan."
Again, there was the worship of Zeus. His altar stood on a hill 1,000 feet high, which rose behind the town. Eight hundred feet up, a ledge jutted out from the mountain, and on it stood the altar of Zeus, 90 feet square and 20 feet high. All day long this altar smoked with the smoke of endless sacrifices. It dominated the city, like a pillar of cloud by day and a col-umn of fire by night. Could this be the origin of the phrase, "Satan's throne," this thing looking like a great seat mounted above the city?
Yet again, Emperor worship in Pergamum was as intense as in Smyrna. Add to this the worship of Bacchus the god of wine, and of Dionysus whose worship involved obscenities impossible to describe, is it any wonder that John called the place "Satan's throne"? Here the highest capacity in mankind, the capacity to worship, was degraded into corruption. The city reeked with the stench of its heathenism; evil hung in its streets like a clammy fog.
Praise, first.
To the church in Pergamum, Christ her risen Lord says, "I know where thou dwellest."
There are two words for dwell in the Greek language. One describes the short stay that a traveller makes, the other indicates settled and permanent residence, and this is the word used here. What Jesus is saying to His church is, "You are living in a city where the influence and the power of Satan are rampant - and you have to go on living there. There is no escape. You can't pack your bags, and move off some place else where it's easier to be a Christian. In Pergamum you are, and in Pergamum you stay. Life has set you where Satan's seat is. It is there you must live as a Christian."
It is no part of our Christian duty to run away from a difficult and dangerous situation.
Kipling has a poem entitled "Mulholland's Contract." Mulholland was a cattle-man on a cattle boat. His place was in the hold where the cattle were carried. There came a terrific storm at sea; the cattle broke loose; in their terror they were stampeding and trampling everywhere, and it seemed certain that Mulholland would be killed beneath their flailing hooves. So he made a contract with God.
"If He got me to
port alive I would exalt His name,
An' praise 'Is Holy Majesty till further orders came."
Miraculously, Mulholland was preserved. When he reached shore alive, he was ready to fulfil his part of the contract. His idea was to quit the cattle boats, and preach religion, "handsome an' out of the wet." But God's word came to him,
"I never puts on
my ministers no more than they can bear,
So back you go to the cattle boats, an' preach my gospel
there."
Mulholland must not seek an easier sphere in which to be a Christian; he must be a Christian exactly where God had put him.
If you are looking for a change of circumstances before you hope to be a real Christian, you are looking for the wrong thing.
1. They held fast to His Name
Jesus goes on to commend these Christians in Pergamum who have no future to look forward to except being Christians in Pergamum, because they had held fast to His Name. The Name implies the character of him who bears it - His whole nature. These folk, in simple terms, had never lost their grip on Christ. There was much in the city deliberately calculated to prise them loose from Christ, but they had held on.
They had not denied the faith. The tense of the verb 'denied' points to a definite action completed in the past. It means that there must have been some definite hour of crisis in which the Christians of Pergamum had remained staunch and true.
This, obviously, was the "time of Antipas, my faithful witness." We do not know a great deal about him. One legend has it that he was killed by being roasted to death inside a brass bull. It seems fairly certain that he was the first Christian martyr in Asia Minor. The church in Asia must have felt a great shock under the impact of this first murder in their ranks. We are always prone to take up the attitude, when we hear of disasters elsewhere, "It can't hap-pen here." Then it happened there. Antipas, who had worshipped with them last Lord's day, was nothing but cinders in that brass coffin.
It had come then. The first impulse to panic must have been very strong. But they held fast, It is high praise - high praise indeed.
It is interesting that the word for 'witness' and the word for 'martyr' are the same. At first, the word simply meant one who says, "This is true, and I know it." But within a short time, so many such 'witnesses' paid for their testimony with their life, that the content of the word changed completely; from being a colourless word from the courts, it became a word that throbbed with meaning - with pain and glory. To witness for Christ must often mean to suffer for Christ. But because Antipas kept faith - Jesus gave to him nothing less than his own title. In Rev. l:5, Jesus Himself is called "the faithful witness," and that is the very title he gives to Antipas. To suffer with Christ is in the end to share His glory. There is no other way indeed to do so.
ii Then Blame
But now the tone of the letter changes. "Yet I have this against you - some of your number cling to the teaching of Balaam, he who taught Balak how to entice the children of Israel into eating meat sacrificed to idols, and into sexual immorality."
The story of Balaam in Scripture established him as the prototype of all false prophets. The point of what John is saying here is not that the Christians in Pergamum were actually guilty of idolatry and fornication, but that they held a doctrine which excused these things. As these people believed, so they would all too soon behave. A false creed leads to false conduct. And if that happened, all the brave faithfulness of Antipas would count for nothing.
It matters what we believe.
It is just here that the description of Christ as the One Who holds the sharp two-edged sword in His mouth is so much to the point. It is the sword that divides the false from the true - the symbol of judgment. A delicate distinction is made in the letter between those who hold this false doctrine, and the rest who merely tolerate its presence in their ranks. The church as a whole had not committed herself to these heresies, but she had made comfortable room for them. Their churchmanship was broad. One is reminded of Rupert Brooke's poem in which God is likened to a great Fish, "under Whose Almighty fin, the littlest fish may enter in." There was room here, shelter here, for all sorts.
These Balaamites and
Nicolaitans - both of whom were for a wise compromise - were not
perhaps such nasty, vulgar types, as the letter might lead us to
think. Pretty well the only meat you could buy in Pergamum was meat
that had first been offered to idols. The thing really was rather
perfunctory. The normal citizen would take his animal to the pagan
altar, and a very small part of it, sometimes only its whiskers, was
burnt there. The priest took his cut, and the worshipper went away
with most of the sacrifice safely tucked under his arm. He would
either sell it in the open market, or take it home and make a
barbecue with it to which he would invite his friends, or to a
business lunch to which he would invite his clients. This is the way
business deals were done in Pergamum. It was as common then to have
your meal in the temple as it is to-day to have it in a
restaurant.
Should a Christian accept these invitations?
Paul had said to the Corinthians, "Don't worry overmuch. But if it
troubles your host, then respect his conscience and abstain." But of
course in Pergamum it was different, for here, the feasts were not
innocent meals. Almost always they ended in debauchery.
But then debauchery itself was normal in that society. Men and women
took sex with the same freedom, thoughtlessness and prodigality that
they took food. It needs an effort on our part to remember that
chastity was the one completely new virtue which Christianity
introduced into the ancient world.
The whole point is that these false teachers were urging upon their brethren a teaching that was bound in the end to undermine their commitment to a life of holiness - a compromise.
It is just this tendency to whittle down the moral stringency of their faith that bulks so large in the blame that Christ places on His churches. John was saying in effect, "You profess to worship a Lord Who died for the difference between right and wrong." This attitude of easy tolerance, which we give the comforting name of broad-mindedness (a positive virtue in the eyes of our generation) long ago sickened our Lord. It sickens Him still. He can make no terms with it at all. It renders useless the church for which He agonised. If the standard of living within the Church conforms exactly to the standards of the world outside, to what is she witnessing? Not to the truth of God.
"Repent therefore, all of you, or else I will come to them, and make war upon them with the sword of my mouth." The lot of those who teach others to sin is holy wrath.
1. To him who conquers, I will give the hidden manna
There was a Jewish belief that in the original temple, three things were stored in the holy place before God: Aaron's rod that budded, the stone tables of the ten commandments, and a golden pot of manna which the people had eaten in the desert. When the Temple was de-stroyed, the manna was said to have disappeared. One legend has it that Jeremiah had hidden it, and would produce it when the Messiah appeared. Manna was regarded as the corn of heaven, angel's food, the bread from Heaven. (Psalm 78) It would come back when the age of the Messiah dawned. The point is that those who on this earth refused to eat the meat that had been sacrificed to idols would in the world to come eat the bread of God. They might have to give up earthly pleasures, but heavenly joys would be theirs.
2. The meaning of the white stone is very sweet and tender
Two men, friends about to part, would divide a white stone between them, and each would carry the half upon which his friend had inscribed his name. Perhaps they would never meet again. But each would pass on his half of the stone to his son, and thence to his son's son, until one day, two men would discover that they possessed the complementary halves of the same white stone. At once a friendship would be created on the strength of a firm affec-tion long ago.
The white stone of unending friendship - my name written on His half, His Name written on mine.
The central lesson of the study is a solemn one. The Church of Jesus Christ must not tolerate within her borders those who lower the standards of truth's demands. The test of doctrine is purity of conduct and character. Truth never excuses sin. Do you say, "I have the truth as it is in Jesus?" Then look to yourself. The seal of the Master is a white stone, and on each half an inscription; on one side the words are graven "The Lord knoweth them that are His." On the other, "Let him that names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity." (II Tim. 2:19)
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