June 21 2026
Revelation 2:18-29
As I have said a few times for, my children have found an outlet for their creativity in helping with Little Theater. My, daughter, Sarah, has taken her love for theater one step further and for the last five years she has been the director of the musicals for New Phila High school. She has done a terrific job in this endeavor and she has earned the respect of the kids at New Phila. Now for someone who has zero knowledge about anything theatrical, I am fascinated when she talks about what it takes to put on a performance. One of the biggest decisions she has is to select a play that suits the talents that she has to work with. Yet, she also must remember that the musical she is doing is going to be shown at a school. So, while some plays might be well suited for the kids she has on any particular year, it still must be suitable for a high school audience. This means she has to screen the scripts she is looking at for things such as language some of which might get her in hot water with the school administration. Now me, being so naïve about all of this, I wondered to her aloud as to why she couldn’t just substitute say some politically correct language for the language which is offensive. What she told me when I asked such a question is that a director is never allowed to alter the script that a playwright has written, because first there are copy-write laws which prohibit making any changes and also, if you begin changing the script you are misrepresenting the playwrights original intent. Yes, the language may be offensive but perhaps the playwright had a reason why he had included such a word. So even though these kids who are selected to be part of her musical are very creative young people, they nonetheless, must restrict themselves to say and sing only what the script tells them. The primary rule in theater is that you must stick to the script.
Now what many followers of Jesus do not realize is that when we place our faith in Jesus, we become part of a group of performers who are, in effect, enacting a script written by God. In church circles, we call this our witness. You see, as we live our lives before the watching eyes of the world, we are to be living a very different way of life, as different say, as a musical performed on a stage is very different from the way all of us live our lives. Now in a very similar way that a high school theater group must not veer from the script that they are given, so too as those who witness to a life with God, we too must stick to the script we are given. Now, the basic shape of the script is found in places like 1 John 4:7, where we are told, “Friends, let us love one another because love is from God and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The person who does not love does not know God because God is love.’ So this is pretty straight forward, isn’t it? If we say that we know God, if we say that he is the director of this play we call life, then we will get busy loving each other. Now there is only one little problem and that is, just how do we define this thing called love. You see, we cannot do as some have done, and come to God with our preconceived notions about love. If one does this then when they read that God is love, they believe that God must love others according to how they define love. No, love has its beginnings in God, so the way that God defines love is the script we must follow. Well, as we continue reading, we discover just how it is that God defines love. In verse nine of this fourth chapter we are told, “In this is love not that we have loved God but rather that God loved us and sent his Son to be the very means for ridding us of our sin.” And then, John concludes, by saying, “If God loves us with a love such as this then it is through this same love that we should love each other.” So love is defined by what God has done for us upon the cross where we are given the means to rid ourselves of sin. It was on the cross that Jesus, the very Son of God, set aside his honor and glory, so that he might be humiliated and dishonored in the eyes of the world. The Father did this so that through the suffering and death of Jesus we might know of our true honor in the eyes of God. Paul, in the first chapter of the first letter of Corinthians, speaks of this honor in three terms which relate to the God in three persons. Our Heavenly Father became for us our kindred redeemer, paying the price of his own dear Son in order to deliver us from our slavery to sin. Through our redemption we came to know our true worth to God, that we are indeed worth the very life of his Son. The Son, in turn, offered us mercy instead of judgment taking upon himself the judgment meant for us all so that we might have the honor of coming before our Heavenly Father as his righteous people. And the Holy Spirit declares we are holy as he is holy when he comes and dwells in us. So now we can know ourselves as being worthy to be called a Temple of the living God.
So the love of God is a love which causes us to be willing to set aside our honor in the eyes of the world because know we have found a greater honor in the eyes of the God. The honor we have in the eyes of the world is called pride, this desire we have to be able to boast and brag about our ability to satisfy all of the desires of our flesh and our power to seize ahold of all that catches our eye. Only as the honor of God replaces our desire for pride can we be truly rid of our sin. You see, we cannot truly understand the terrible nature of our sin until we have experienced the tremendous gift God in his grace has given to us. Only as we first know of how God , in his love, was willing to set aside his honor all so that we might understand the great honor we have in his eyes, can we begin to live with the understanding that all people have been given this same great honor in the eyes of God. Only then will we be ready to honor those around us through doing the very same actions Jesus has done for us, serving them in love, suffering with them and for them, and having a heart willing to sacrifice in order that they might find life.
So this is the script we perform before a watching world when we say that we know God. So it goes without saying then, that people will come to know the intent of what God desires for all people through watching how we love one another. This love is, as Paul describes it in the fifth chapter of Ephesians, is simply this, “Be subject to one another in honor of Christ.” When we know that Christ subjected himself to the suffering and humiliation of the cross then we are now to be those who are willing to serve others, willing to suffer with them, and if need be, we are to be willing to sacrificing our desires all so that Christ might be honored and glorified.
Now Paul goes on to describe just what this ideal way of loving each other might look like when we enact this way of loving in our relationships. The first of these relationships is marriage, the sacred union between man and wife. Now when our modern ears hear Paul say that wives are to be subject themselves to their husbands as the church serves Christ, everyone begins to yell about domination of women at the hands of men. But what is often forgotten is that Paul goes on to say that men are to love their wives like Christ loved the church. Can we really forget that Christ on the cross, served his bride the church, by serving her to the utmost, by suffering terribly for her so that she might know his love, and was ultimately willing to offer up his own life so that his church might have life? So a husband is to lead his family by doing acts of service, to lead his family through his willingness to suffer for them, and by providing his family an example of one willing to sacrifice all for them. Through the husbands leading then his wife is to join him in this life of mutual service, suffering and sacrifice. And this life together is always done to bring honor and glory to Christ who first lived this life for us.
Well, what must also be understood is the reason why Paul describes a marriage in terms of Christ and his church. You see, it is true that God desires that those who know him demonstrate in all of our human relationships the serving love of the cross. But what God also desires us to know is that the relationship of marriage holds a special place in our witness to the world. You see, God desires that through the act of marriage the world might know the great love God has for his creation and how he longs to be united with her. This is the longing of God, that his great love for his creation as shown to humanity at the cross, might result in heaven and earth being united. The result is that from this union will come forth life, a new unique life where created life is now alive with the very power of heaven. This is the life which the world witnesses in the resurrected life of Jesus who is the firstborn from the dead. This is the hope and longing of God. So anytime a man and woman unite in this act of marriage that honors God, the world beholds the mystery found in the union between Christ, the Son of God and his church.
Now it should become obvious, that when we lay out God’s ideal situation for marriage, that this understanding is probably pretty rare, even in churches who say they believe in marriage. The reason for this is that most marriages don’t have their beginning at the cross. When it comes to most people, God believing or not, the place where marriage is said to begin is with the wisdom of the world. This wisdom is laid out for us in the second chapter of the first letter of John. There we are told that the wisdom of the world is built on the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes and the pride of life. We have a desire to be with someone because they catch our eye and if we are able to convince her we that we would make a great pair then this would give us something to brag about. If we are honest, this sounds more like most marriages than the one Paul describes. We shouldn’t feel too bad if this is better description for us of marriage because even the people of God, the people of Israel, followed this same pattern. I mean, why else would Jesus bring this way of marriage up in his core teachings, in the fifth chapter of Matthew, if he wasn’t aware that God’s own people followed the wisdom of the world when it comes to marriage. Jesus plainly tells us that whoever looks at a woman and sets his heart to have her as her own is setting himself up for failure. And if we understand how wrong it is for someone to tie their need for pride to the performance of their wife, I believe we can begin to understand why Jesus is so opposed to divorce. You see, even the men of Israel wanted a way to preserve their pride whenever their wife did something that brought shame to him. This is why they demanded an easy way to dump her and go find another wife that they could brag about.
We have to understand the expectations God has for marriage in order to figure out why this mysterious women called Jezebel is so dangerous. We hear of her in the review Jesus gives to the church at Thyatira. Thyatira is one of the seven churches that John oversees. When Jesus looks at how this church is doing, he finds that the church seems to be doing quite well for this church excels in their love of others, in their faith in God, in doing acts of service and in their patient endurance. So far, so good. But what Jesus also finds is that they tolerate that woman Jezebel. Now this name Jezebel would have been well known to the Jewish audience who received this letter. If you read the sixteenth chapter of First Kings in the Old Testament, you will find that the king of Israel, Ahab took for his wife Jezebel who was the daughter of the king of the Phoenicians.It is rather easy to figure out that the reason why Ahab entered into marriage with the daughter of a neighboring country was solely to build an alliance with them. It is obvious that Ahab was not at all interested in honoring God at all but rather he had entered into this marriage solely to boost his own ego. Now what happened when Jezebel came to Israel to reign with Ahab is that she brought along with her all of the false gods that she worshiped. Ahab being the dutiful husband even went so far as to build altars and shrines to these gods for his new bride. So it is no surprise then, that we read at the end of the sixteenth chapter of First Kings that Ahab did more to provoke God to anger than all of the kings who had come before him. Through the influence of his wife Jezebel, the whole nation of Israel began to worship her false gods, forsaking the one, true living God. What saved the nation of Israel from total destruction was that God raised up a prophet named Elijah. Elijah told Ahab that because of his wickedness there would be no rain fall on the nation of Israel for three years. This is the drastic measures God had to resort to in order to bring his people back from the evil that had been brought into Israel through Ahab’s marriage to Jezebel.
So when Jesus tell the church at Thyatira that they were tolerating that woman Jezebel, he is referring to one of the most evil and wicked periods of Israel’s history. The church at Thyatira had even gone so far to allow this evil woman who called herself a prophetess, to teach within their church. Through her teachings this one Jesus calls Jezebel, seduced those who desired to honor God through their service to instead do practices that were quite dishonorable in the eyes of God. Instead of sticking to the script and teaching about honoring God through our relationships, she instead encouraged sexual practices based on one’s fleshly desires. What happens when we do not stick to the script, this story God gives to us of how we are to honor each other through our service to one another, then we are prone to give honor to those things which do not deserve to be honored. So it is no surprise to hear that not only was their sexual immorality being practiced by members of this church but these members also were going to idol temples to eat dinner. The tragedy is that through the reluctance of the church to confront this sin of Jezebel, then she had no interest in repenting of her teaching about sexual practices based on worldly wisdom. So not only was she on the wide road to destruction but all those who had united themselves with her, what Jesus calls adultery, were also walking that wide road with her. When people listened and obeyed to Jezebel’s teaching they were like her children who were also doomed for destruction. Jesus rightly called her teachings the very depths of Satan, for he is the very one who leads people on the road that leads to destruction. While they may have thought that abandoning the script that God had written was no big deal, Jesus in no uncertain terms tells them that their actions were not hidden from his eyes. Jesus is the one who searches our hearts and minds and he knows if we truly desire to honor God in all that we say and do. We must never forget that Jesus as the Son of God, is the righteous judge whose eyes are like flames of fire that burn through the smokescreen of our sin in order to see the truth of who we really are.
As Jesus concludes his review of this church at Thyatira, he tells those who have not listened to the one called Jezebel, to use all of their strength to seize hold of what they already possess, in other words, stick to the script until Jesus returns. You see, those who do the work of serving others out of reverence to Jesus in the here and now, will be the very ones who will be given the authority to rule with Jesus in the age to come. Jesus tells them that the one prophesied about in the second Psalm, the one who will come to rule the nations with a rod of iron, is not just about him. No, this rule given to the Messiah is to be shared by those who are willing to stick to the script, no matter what the cost. As Jesus has received authority from his Father so too will he share this authority with all those who willing to honor him through their humble service to all that they meet. So let us stick to the script. Let us practice our lines, and let us keep striving to perfect our performance of our love to others. In this way our very way of life will give the honor and glory to the author of the script, the one whose name is Jesus. Amen!
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