Revelation 2: 1-25
Jesus walks among the seven churches to keep them awake; to keep them from a slumber of self-delusion. As He casts His penetrating gaze upon the church in Thyatira, He signifies (“eyes of flaming fire”) that He is there to bring to light that which is behind the churches actions and behavior: Here is what He sees.
Thyatira is a very active church. It has love, which naturally expresses itself as service; it has faith, which naturally manifests as perseverance and patience. And the results, in terms of works, are increasingly impressive and helpful. However, Thyatira’s activities are tainted by a bad influence that is motivating most of those in the church.
Thyatira isn’t suffering from outside pressure, as in Roman persecution and/or Jewish antagonizers. Instead, the problem is one of internal persuasion. The church has a teacher who calls herself a prophetess. She is claiming direct revelation from God. Jesus calls her Jezebel.
It’s not certain if this is the woman’s actual name. If it’s not, the symbolism of the name is certainly appropriate. For the original Jezebel, wife of the Old Testament king, Ahab, some 900 hundred years earlier, corrupted Israel’s faith by the worship of the god Baal (1 Kings 16: 31-33). In Thyatira’s case, this Jezebel is corrupting the faith by giving permission that it’s okay to join and participate in the trade unions’ feasts and festivals. By joining these unions and their social parties, one could get ahead in business and commerce.
The problem, though, with the feasts and festivals was drunkenness; food sacrificed to pagan gods; and accompanying sexual immorality. Jezebel’s teaching, then, is the same as that of the Nicolaitans and Baalamites in Ephesus and Pergamum. Because she taught compromise with the world’s standards, it’s entirely possible that she could have been a Nicolaitan.
This upset Jesus. He revealed to her that her teaching was wrong, and He gave her time to repent. She wouldn’t, so He warned that great affliction would come upon her and her followers (“those who commit spiritual adultery with her”). The affliction would also apply to those followers ( meaning “her children”) throughout the generations. All her children who followed her seductive teaching would be killed.
The condition that allowed for Jezebel’s influence was this. Whereas the Ephesus church was cold and legalistic, lacking love; the Thyatira church was the opposite. It emphasized love and the gospel, and operated from that premise, but it did so at the expense of obedience. Only a few in the church (“the remaining ones;” a remnant) maintained the proper balance. They were the ones who didn’t engage in and experience the depths of Satan’s deception (“the deep things of Satan”) that was the false teaching of Jezebel.
Symbolically and historically, the Thyatira church’s teaching and conduct can be applied to the church age that covered the 6th to the 16th century. This was the period known as the Dark Ages. During that time, most people didn’t have access to a Bible. And to make matters worse, the few Bibles that were available were chained to library walls and were written in Latin so that the common person couldn’t read it. That enabled the institutional church – the Catholic church, which had compromised with paganism – to teach doctrine that was contrary to the Bible and the simplicity of the gospel. The masses were taught that works were the means of salvation. Incidentally, this is what led to the Protestant Reformation movement towards the end of the period.
An interesting aside is that this period is also known as the Middle Ages. In the Bible’s list of the seven churches, Thyatira is the middle church.