The Revelation 2:18-21 | Episode # 1019

September 4, 2025

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

The Revelation 2:18-21 

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

If you would like to revisit today’s Bible study, please visit our website at https://hopealive.buzzsprout.com/ to download the transcript. 

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Transcript

This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to Hope Applying God's word to your daily life.

Hi, this is Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and have been serving as a pastor for 25 years.

I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life.

I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open up his word to you and allow you to see him and to know him and to know his will, that you might glorify him and that you might walk in faith and power each and every day,

especially today in Jesus name.

Now to the second church. And we're moving into the real.

What we would call the Middle Ages or in the church history would be the church that is finally being ruled by the church in Rome. And you do need to understand that that's important because what happened was,

is that they made all these priest kings,

and they still had. I mean, made all these priests Christian priests. And they had all these leaders of churches everywhere, and you had bishops that were leading places all over the world, whether they were Roman or not Roman.

And they would have meetings and ecumenical councils. And by the way, some of the Roman emperors were Christians. And. And they did want to get this thing right, and they did want to kind of get scripture and start proliferating it around the world.

And they. So it's not as if all the Roman emperors weren't Christian, because there were some Roman emperors who were Christian. And it wasn't that. All the priests from then on were not Christians.

They were.

Okay. Why? Because they had God's Word and they started reading it.

And what happens when you read God's Word? Well, the Holy Spirit starts working.

So it's not like. I'm not telling you, oh, this is bad, bad.

Okay.

I'm just telling you how we got there historically. And then understanding. And so what happened? Well, the church became more and more an institution.

And,

you know, the emperor likes to be in charge of things,

and he likes to be the Pontiffus Maximus.

Right. He wants to be in charge. And the best way to be in charge is have the dude that's over religion be near me.

And so for, you know, it,

all the bishops became not equal.

And one bishop became greater than all the other bishops,

and he was in Rome,

and so they gave him another name that was greater than the other bishops, and they called him Pope.

Okay,

now does that mean that all the popes are lost? No, no, I done Told you they. They had God's word too. And.

And there. There were a lot were godly, but there were a lot of them that weren't, because that was not God's way of bringing about leadership.

And anytime you do that, you might end up with a leader who you didn't want.

Make sense?

When man picks a leader, you get Saul. When God picks a leader, you get David.

That's the way it works.

And so that's how it worked here.

And it says to the angel of the church in Thyatira, right?

These things say the Son of God. Now, by the way,

Jesus is the only one in scripture who actually calls himself the Son of God.

Did y' all know that?

He is the one in scripture that calls himself the Son of God.

Now, some of the apostles call him that afterwards,

but he's the first one to call himself the Son of God. And he uses two names interchangeably, which are two Old Testament scripture names. He is the. The Son of God, not a son of God, and he is the Son of man.

Okay?

Both of those are prophetic pictures of the Messiah.

And so when we're dealing with Jesus,

when he says, these are the words of the Son of God, what he's saying is, I am speaking to you on my own authority as the Son of God.

That's a pretty powerful statement for him to make to this church.

He's saying, I'm the Son of God.

I'm the power.

I'm the authority. I'm the king. I'm the Lord.

That's what he's telling them.

Now, as your pastor, my job is to teach you to follow Jesus.

Because I'm not the leader of the whole thing.

I'm just a pastor in the church.

Jesus is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

He's the one who we worship. We don't worship people.

We don't worship human beings. We don't worship people because they've got pretty robes and they know God's word, and you don't know God's word.

Are you listening to me? We don't do that. That's not how it works.

And a good pastor teaches you God's word and allows you to learn how to worship God.

He says these things, says the Son of God, who has eyes like flaming fire. That means he's omniscient. He knows everything.

Okay? Whenever you hear eyes of fire, that's the power of the Holy Spirit to reveal all things. He is omniscient. He sees everything.

He's telling them,

I'm The Son of God. I'm omniscient and I got feet of fine brass,

which means I'm the judge.

Are y' all hearing me?

He's saying, I'm the judge.

I know.

I know your works.

Now notice what he says to remember. He's talking to the church.

And if you. If you read some books, you'll think, well, there's no way there can be a church with all this mess going on, all this paganism and all this mess.

You ain't no way this can happen. But notice what he says.

I know your works.

Agape,

love.

He's saying, they got God love.

That's not eros. That's not phileo.

That's agape.

He says, I know your works, your love,

your service.

That's the word for ministry.

It's the word we get deacon from.

It's the idea of being a minister.

So he says, I know you got God's love. I know you're doing ministry,

your faith. That's the word. Pistio. That's the. The. The word for faith in the Bible.

Faith, hope, trust, believe. He says, I know you got faith.

There's some good stuff. Now I'm gonna tell you. He's saying some good stuff to them. You get. You need to get this.

He's saying. He's saying this church is. Has got it. He says, you got it.

And your patience,

boy, that's the one quality we don't want from God, right?

And I'm going to tell you. I'm going to tell you it's the one quality that is. Is essential to godliness.

If you can't be patient, you really can't be like God.

Well, the younger we are, the harder it is to be patient. Ain't it right?

He says, and as for your works,

the last are more than the first. What he's saying is you're getting better at it as far as your works are concerned. Your last or better than your first. You.

You're doing it well.

You're getting better at doing my character, right?

Seems like everything's good, right?

Bible study over, Y' all will pray and go home.

No.

Nevertheless,

I have a few things against you.

Because. Because you allow that woman, Jezebel. This is first Kings. Jezebel.

Oh. Ahab had a wife named Jezebel.

It's the worst time period in Israel's history. There's two of them. This is one of them.

Jezebel is a pagan king. Ahab married her because he wanted to make a treaty with the people from the north.

The sea people from the north, actually,

who are the remnant of.

And my mind's going blank. The.

The Carthaginians,

the Phoenicians. That's right.

He.

He marries Jezebel. And Jezebel is heavily into paganism,

the worship of Zeus and Aphrodite and all these things.

And she puts asteropoles in the high places for people to worship on the mountains of Samaria and on Mount Zion and places like that.

Okay, you go. Well, what is an astropole?

The Washington Monument.

It's a obelisk.

Y' all didn't know that, did you?

It's an astropole.

She calls herself a prophetess.

Now, this is also an allusion to something that became an important aspect of Christianity during this time period.

As the church became more institutionalized,

someone took on a higher role than she is presented in scripture is having.

Now, that doesn't mean she wasn't a good woman,

a virtuous woman chosen by God to be the bearer of Jesus Christ.

But she was by no means perfect. And she had to be redeemed by her son just like everybody else.

Are y' all listening to me?

When Jesus began his ministry, she took her brothers, one of them being James,

Jesus's physical brothers, by the way, she's not an internal virgin, okay?

Both James and Titus are his brothers.

Okay?

I may be wrong about that.

I'm wrong about it. Jude, James and Jude. I knew it was in the Bible. James and Jude are his physical brother. She took him because they thought Jesus had gone mad and came to get him.

And Jesus asked, who are my brothers and who are my. Who is my mother?

He says, those who hear the word of God and do what it says, they're my mother and brother.

So she was not perfect,

but she became the. The.

She became the preeminent person, worshiped and made a portion of the Godhead.

Now, many people in America do not see that because it's not very open in America.

But if you go anywhere else,

say,

500 miles to the south,

she is the one who's worshiped in the Philippines,

South America, Mexico, Spain.

She's the one worshiped.

Jesus is either dead on a cross or a baby.

Rarely do you ever see him being the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

That's what he's talking about, that woman Jezebel.

Well, why do we have the woman Jezebel? Well, because you had to have a woman goddess, just like you had a male goddess.

And they did.

And so the worship of Mary in her present form is that old paganism.

And I hate to say that because it hurts people's feelings,

but I'm sorry, it's true.

The Mary that's presented in scripture is not the Mary that is worshiped by the institutional Catholic Church.

She's just not.

She had a redeemer.

She's got a real personal relationship with Jesus. Let me tell you something. Nobody else has got a better relationship than with Jesus even in heaven today than Mary.

But she got there by the blood he spilled on that cross, just like you did.

He says, you allow that woman, Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, to teach and seduce my servants to commit sexual immorality,

pagan worship and eat things sacrificed to idols,

worldliness in the church.

Eating things sacrificed, idols, worldliness,

sexual immorality, paganism. Okay, you need to know that. Those are the pictures. They're all in the Old Testament, all in the New Testament. Okay?

He says, and I gave her time to repent of her sexual immorality.

Notice, he says, I'm giving them time to turn away from that practice.

Are you following me?

The next church is going to be the Reformation Church. So you need to understand that what he's saying is I'm giving them time to turn away from that pagan practice.

Okay?

Female God worship is unscriptural.

You need to get that.

All right? And a lot of women say, well, that's just. That's just sexist. No, that's just scripture.

God made women just like he made men. He redeems them the same way.

But Mary wasn't a God and she ain't a God.

He says, I gave her time to repent of her sexual immorality and she did not repent,

meaning the institutional church continued in that pagan practice and they didn't repent.

As you go today, I pray that.

The Lord will bless you and keep you, that he'll make his face to shine upon you and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.