Pergamum - The Challenge of Values

2,200 years ago, the people living in China had a problem. There were fierce barbarian tribes living along the northern border of their kingdom. From time to time, these barbarians would raid them, plunder their goods, and carry off their women and children.

So the people of China decided to take some steps to provide for their security. They set about to build a wall along the border to keep the barbarians out.

It took them 200 years to build it—it was a long border! They made it anywhere from 15 to 39 ft. high. In some places, it was up to 32 ft. thick. It had a 13 foot wide road running along the top of it. But the really amazing thing about this wall was it’s length: It was 6,200 miles long! And it’s still there today, 2,200 years later.

The Great Wall of China is the greatest feat of engineering and building in history. It is the only man-made structure visible from outer space.

The Chinese people were justly proud of their Great Wall when it was finished in 200 BC. It was too high to climb over, too thick to break down, and too long to go around. It turned China into a fortress and the people rested behind their massive wall certain that they would be secure for centuries.

Only problem was that in the first 100 years of the Wall’s existence, China was invaded not once, not twice, but three times.

What went wrong? Was the wall a failure? Not really. Not once did the barbarians climb over it, break through it, or go around it. No, they got past the wall because of human nature.

In that wall were several gates. Each was guarded by soldiers of the Emperor. The barbarians simply bribed the gatekeepers, and then they walked right through the gates.

The fatal flaw in the Chinese strategy was that they built great structural integrity into their wall, but they forgot to build personal integrity into the people who were manning it.

And that serves as somewhat of a parallel to the situation of the church we want to look at today. We have been studying the letters to the seven churches of the book of Revelation in an attempt to see what lessons might be there for us. Today we come to the third church—the church at Pergamum. As usual, we need to go back to the city of Pergamum to see if we can understand the environment in which this church was located.

These seven cities were all located in the Roman province of Asia—what is now western Turkey. And each city had a unique character. Ephesus was something like Toronto—it was the largest city and the center of business and trade and finance in the region. Smyrna was like Vancouver—it was the most beautiful city in the region, and it became a haven for artists and writers. Pergamum was like Ottawa, because it was the capital of the Roman administration in Asia. It was a city of politicians, bureaucrats, and government workers.

There wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about its physical location, but it had a long and interesting cultural history. Before the Romans took over, the Kingdom of Pergamum was ruled over by a king named Eumenes. Now Eumenes was a very learned man. He loved books and scrolls. And he dreamed of building a library that would be the greatest library in the world.

Now at that time the city of Alexandria in Egypt boasted the greatest library in the world. So here’s what Eumenes decided to do. He arranged a secret deal with the head librarian of Alexandria—a man named Aristophanes—to come and be his head librarian in Pergamum. I don’t know what the deal entailed—perhaps a long-term contract, with a no trade clause, and performance bonuses. At any rate, Aristophanes moved to Pergamum to head up the library there. He became their franchise player!

Well, when the king of the Ptolemaic empire (of which Alexandria was a part) got wind of this—that King Eumenes had stolen his head librarian—he was outraged. So what he did was to slap a trade embargo on papyrus. Papyrus is a plant that grows along the banks of the Nile River in Egypt. For thousands of years, the Egyptians had been taking the stem of this plant, which looks like a bulrush, cutting it open, spreading out the pith and drying it to form sheets of a paperlike material which you could then write on. Egypt had the corner on the papyrus market.

So Pergamum now had the head librarian, but they weren’t going to be getting any more paper on which to write books to put on the shelves of their library. So the scribes of Pergamum came up with a solution. They learned that if you took the skins of animals and dried them and bleached them, you could come up with a perfectly good substitute for paper—something called vellum. And this vellum became known as “Pergamum sheets”, or in Latin, “Pergamene charta”, which has come into English as our word “parchment”.

Pergamum was not only a center of books and learning, it was a center of medicine as well. It was the headquarters of the cult of Asklepios, the god of healing. There was a great temple of Asklepios in the city and all the sick for miles around came there to be healed. This temple became something like a hospital, because the priests of Asklepios became quite adept at applying herbal remedies and other techniques to relieve people’s suffering.

The cult of Asklepios has much to do with the beginnings of modern medicine. In fact, the great ancient physician Galen was born in Pergamum and served as a priest of Asklepios. The symbol for Asklepios was a snake. The god Asklepios was depicted as holding a staff with a snake coiled around it. And this symbol is sometimes still used as a symbol for the medical profession.

At any rate, Pergamum was a learned city, a powerful city, and a thoroughly pagan city. Let’s see what the Lord has to say to his church there.

To the angel of the church in Pergamum write: These are the words of him who has the sharp, double-edged sword. I know where you live—where Satan has his throne. Yet you remain true to my name. You did not renounce your faith in me, even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was put to death in your city—where Satan lives.

Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: You have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by committing sexual immorality. Likewise you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans.

Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.

First, Jesus reminds them of who he is. He is the one who has the sharp, double-edged sword. This image would be of particular significance to a city full of Roman bureaucrats. Because in the Roman empire, there were two kinds of officials; those who had the power of the sword—the power to enact capital punishment—and those who didn’t. So Jesus is saying that he has the power of the sword, and that sword is the Word of God. It judges the thoughts and motives of men.

Secondly, Jesus reviews their situation. He says: I know where you live—where Satan has his throne. These Christians were living under the very shadow of the power of the Roman Empire. This was the capital city of Roman Asia. This was the center of Emperor worship. This was a hotbed of pagan religion.

And yet, Jesus commends them for remaining true to his name. And they didn’t crack even when one of them, Antipas, was put to death for being a Christian. Evidently, persecution against Christians had broken out here in Pergamum as well as in Smyrna as we saw last week.

Now we don’t know much about this man named Antipas. Jesus calls him “my faithful witness” and the word witness is the Greek word from which we get our word “martyr”. Ancient church tradition has it that Antipas was killed by being roasted alive inside a brazen bull. I’ll leave it to you to imagine what that must have looked like.

So the situation the church was facing was that there was dangerous hostility toward them, but they hadn’t caved in. They hadn’t renounced the name of Jesus, even in the face of this pressure. So far, so good.

But…Jesus has a stern rebuke for them in v. 14-15:

What is he talking about? Well, in order to understand you have to go back to the Old Testament to the book of Numbers chapter 22. When the Israelites were on the way through the wilderness to the Promised Land, they came to the land of Moab. The king of the Moabites was a man named Balak. Balak was terrified when he woke up one morning to see all these Israelites camped on his doorstep. He had heard that if anyone got in their way, the Israelites would simply destroy them. They had already done that to the Amorites.

So Balak’s got a big problem! What’s he going to do? He decides to send for a man named Balaam—who is a seer, a sorcerer—and he wants Balaam to put a curse, or a hex, on the Israelites. At first, Balaam wants to have nothing to do with this because God tells him not to mess with His chosen people. But King Balak is insistent, and he offers Balaam so much money that the seer just can’t bring himself to turn him down.

So he goes to curse the Israelites. But every time he opens his mouth to utter the curse, out comes a blessing instead! He does this four times, and every time he does it, King Balak becomes more enraged. By the fourth time, Balak is tearing his hair out. It’s really funny, actually. You can read about it in Numbers 22-25. In the end, Balaam never is able to pronounce a curse on Israel. So he goes home in humiliation without a penny for his trouble.

Big victory for Israel, right? They’ve withstood this spiritual threat, right? Wrong.

In the next few chapters of Numbers, you find out that the men of Israel begin to intermarry with the Moabite and Midianite women. They begin to adopt the pagan culture and practices of the Moabites. They still identify themselves as Israelites, but they are acting more and more like pagans. This brings great disgrace, spiritual failure, and weakness to God’s people—and ultimately judgment.

But it isn’t until Numbers ch. 31:16 that you find out why this happened. There we read that Balaam—having failed to curse Israel—simply advised the Moabites and Midianites to culturally assimilate the Israelites in order to turn them away from the Lord. Intermarry with them. Get them to accept your traditions. Persuade them to look at life as you do; to adopt your lifestyle. And that will work better than cursing them.

Remember the Great Wall of China? What Satan couldn’t accomplish by a direct frontal assault against the people of God, he accomplished by simply marching through their gates; by slowly eroding their values. And Balaam was his agent in doing so. That’s why, through the rest of the Bible, the name of Balaam becomes synonymous with spiritual compromise, with the erosion of godly values in God’s people.

And Jesus says: “That’s what happening in Pergamum. You have people there in your church who are following the teaching of Balaam. (He’s not talking about a doctrinal system, he’s talking about a way of life.) You are not overtly denying Christ, but you are gradually being pulled away spiritually as your values shift from godly values to the prevailing values of your culture.

(He mentions the Nicolaitans in v. 15. That was a group that believed that the spirit didn’t have anything to do with the body, so it didn’t matter how you lived in the body: it wouldn’t affect your spirit. And that led to all sorts of immoral behaviour.)

So here’s the challenge for the church at Pergamum. It’s the challenge of values. And that’s a challenge for the church in North America today. Because we live in a culture which imparts to us some very powerful messages in some very powerful ways.

Every day we wake up, we are bombarded with messages from our culture—with a way of looking at life which is often diametrically opposed to the way God would want us to think. And the problem is that these messages become so much a part of our daily life that we hardly know we are being influenced by them. We’re like the Israelites who have married Midianite women; they’re in our house every day.

A few years ago, a Christian sociologist named George Barna wrote a book entitled “The Frog in the Kettle”. Barna’s thesis in that book was that the evangelical Christian church in North America is a lot like a frog in a kettle. If you put a frog in a kettle of boiling water, he’ll immediately jump out. But if you put a frog in a kettle of lukewarm water; the frog likes it—swims around and thinks it’s pretty comfortable. So he stays there.

Then you turn the burner on under that kettle and slowly begin to raise the temperature of the water. The frog swims around blissfully unaware that he’s in any danger. You keep raising the temperature; the frog becomes more and more lethargic until finally you’ve got boiled frog. He’s dead.

And Barna said: “That’s what the church in North America is like. Our culture has profoundly changed in the past fifty years. But because we’ve accommodated ourselves to that gradual change—and because the culture has become so much a part of us—we have lost our uniqueness and we have lost the ability to have an impact on our culture. We still identify ourselves as Christians, and we still can very effectively articulate our beliefs as Christians. It’s just that we don’t act like Christians anymore.

And then he goes on the book to show how, statistically, Christians are really no different in their practice than non-Christians.

same rate of divorce in the church as in the culture
same incidence of premarital sex in the church as in the culture
same acceptance of unethical behavior in the church as in the culture
same respect for the Bible in the church as in the culture
same view of truth in the church as in the culture.

What are some of these cultural influences that warp our values?

1. Individualism - our culture worships the individual and believes that the highest good in society is the right of the individual to do whatever he pleases.

For example, the Supreme Court of Canada is currently deliberating a case which revolves around the right of an individual to possess child pornography. Fifty years ago, such a case would never be brought. But in today’s climate of individualism, society is seriously prepared to weigh the right of one individual to acquire, possess, and distribute such material against the rights of our children to be free from the threat of becoming the victims of such perversion, with all of the harm that it brings.

How does individualism affect us as Christians? It makes us place less value on the church as a community. It makes us say: Well I don’t care what my church teaches, I’m going to believe what I want to believe. It makes us say: It doesn’t really matter if I belong to a church, so long as God and I are on good personal terms with each other. It isolates us from the idea of community, with all of its responsibility and accountability. That’s what individualism does to us.

2. Materialism - our culture teaches us every single day that things can make you happy, and that if you can just get more things, you can get more happiness and meaning in life.

How does that affect us as Christians? It affects us by causing us to shift our focus away from God, who is the only source of lasting joy.

When I was in Eastern Europe ministering to Christians who were under state persecution for being followers of Jesus Christ, I thought that these people really needed our prayers. Imagine my surprise when they told me that the church in North America needed more prayer than they did. They had their eyes on Jesus because they had nothing else. But they were concerned that with all our abundance, with all our materialism, we would take our eyes off Jesus.

3. Consumerism - we learn to be great shoppers. Look for the best deal at the best price and grab it. Get the product that best meets your needs.

How does that affect us as Christians? We walk into church as though we are shoppers. How’s the product. Will this church meet my needs? If it doesn’t, I’ll go down the street to the one that does, just like I’d go to a different car dealer or furniture store.

And we start thinking about God that way. God you’ve got to meet my needs. I’ve got a grocery list here.

4. Experientialism - our culture places a very high premium on thrill value - on how something makes you feel - on pleasurable experiences. And experience becomes almost the measure of all things. We go from high to high. We live for the next high.

How does that affect us as Christians?

We tend to evaluate our Christian life on the basis of experience. Does being a Christian make me feel good? Does my church experience make me feel good? How did that service make me feel?

These are just some of the ways that our culture warps our value-system. And it does it without our even being aware of it. We’re like fish swimming in the ocean who have no idea that they’re wet.

So what does Jesus say to do about it? What is his remedy? One word - it’s in verse 16. “Repent”.

Repent is a responsibility-taking word. Its a word that assumes that I can do something about this situation—I can’t blame it on someone else, or on forces beyond my control. It’s a word that says that, having recognized we’re in the wrong place, we need to consciously decide to turn around and go the other way.

Now, practically speaking, how do you do this? What do you do about the fact that you’ve let your culture do a number on you? What do you do to recover proper Christian values? What do you do to get your Christian eyesight back?

Well, let me suggest this. You let yourself fall in love with Jesus all over again. These people at Pergamum were drifting toward cultural assimilation because they had forgotten that Jesus was all they needed. They thought that the culture was going to provide for their needs; was going to be “their ticket” to happiness and fulfillment.

Look at what Jesus says in verse 17:

To him who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.

When the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness and they had nothing to eat; God gave them manna from heaven. And Moses took some of that manna and hid it in the Ark of the Covenant. And here Jesus says: “You want to eat? Come to me. I’m the Living Bread. I’ll give you the hidden manna. There’s an endless supply for you. Your soul will never be hungry again.”

And then he mentions a white stone with a new name written on it. Sounds strange doesn’t it? Not if you know that in the 1st century, a white stone was your ticket of admission to the theater. You had a white stone, and on that stone was the name of the author of the play. And that was your admission ticket.

Jesus says: “You want to get in on life? I wrote the play. Here’s your ticket. A season’s pass to life itself.”

The values of our culture can be pretty persuasive. They can fool us into thinking that they offer real joy, real happiness, real fulfillment. But they are empty cisterns that don’t hold water.