To the Church in Pergamum

Revelation 2:12-17

Theme

Living in the city of Satan. This week’s lessons teach us the danger of compromise.

Scripture

12"To the angel of the church in Pergamum write:

These are the words of him who has the sharp, double-edged sword. 13I 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.

14Nevertheless, 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. 15Likewise you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans. 16Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.

17He 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."

–Revelation 2:12-17

Lesson

I was reading a book edited by Os Guinness and David Seel, titled No God But God, and I came across an interesting sentence. The authors were writing about the difficulty Christians have trying to live as Christians in our antagonistic secular world, discussing the tensions involved, when suddenly they suggested as an obvious solution (certainly with humor), "We need only to lose our first love or compromise His authority for the tension to disappear."1 It struck me at once that having abandoned the believer’s first love was the weakness of the church in Ephesus, while the danger of compromising the authority of Christ and his gospel was the peril faced by the church in Pergamum.

Those are two essential items: love for Christ and truth! Both are necessary, and the loss of either is soon fatal for the Church.

Pergamum lay about sixty-five miles north of Smyrna along the valley of the Caicus River and about fifteen miles inland. It would have been the next place a postal clerk might come to on a circuit of the seven Asian cities. Pergamum was an ancient city. It was the seat of the Roman government in Asia and had the second largest library in the world, second only to the famous library of Alexandria in Egypt, containing 200,000 volumes.

There is an interesting story connected with this library. About four hundred years before this, the king of Pergamum tried to entice the famous librarian of Alexandria, whose name was Aristophanes (the same name as the great comic dramatist of Athens), to leave Egypt and come to Pergamum with the goal of making his library the more important of the two. The king of Egypt was so outraged at the attempt to seduce his chief scholar that he imprisoned Aristophanes and placed an embargo on the export of papyrus to Pergamum. Since papyrus was the material everyone used to make books, this was a serious setback for the upstart city. However, the scholars of Pergamum discovered that they could use animal skins, or parchment, to make books in place of papyrus. In fact, although the innovation did not catch on for several hundred years, parchment actually proved to be a superior material. But here is the interesting thing. It is Pergamum that gave us the word parchment, for the new material was called he pergamos charta ("the Pergamos sheet"), which was contracted in English to "parchment."

Pergamum must have been a terrible place for Christians to try to be Christians. The city had come to prominence after the death of Alexander the Great, when it became the capital of the Attalid kingdom, and its last king was Attalus III, who died in 133 b.c., leaving his territory to Rome. Therefore, Roman influence was strong. The first temple of the imperial cult to be constructed anywhere was constructed in Pergamum in 29 b.c. in honor of the goddess of Rome (Roma) and the then-ruling emperor, who was Augustus. By the time John wrote Revelation there was no city in Asia in which the worship of Caesar was stronger and therefore no place where Christians were in more immediate danger for refusing to sacrifice to the emperor and confess that "Caesar is Lord." Antipas, the first known martyr of the Asian churches, was killed in Pergamum, presumably for failing to do just that (v. 13). Many commentators think this is the reason John refers to Pergamum as the place "where Satan lives" (v. 13) and "has his throne" (v. 12).

But there may be other reasons too. The city was concentrated on a huge rocky hill about a thousand feet high, overlooking the surrounding valley, and on the top of this hill there was an enormous and much revered altar to Zeus Soter ("Zeus the Savior"). The altar was ninety feet square, and was surrounded by a twenty-foot-high frieze now located in the Pergamum museum in Berlin. I saw it in 1966. It commemorates a victory of Attalus I over the marauding Gauls in 241 b.c. and shows the gods of Greece defeating a race of barbarian giants. The altar surrounded by the frieze protruded from the upper face of the hill like a gigantic throne, and sacrifices were burned there continuously, twenty-four hours a day, by a constantly rotating team of pagan priests. Some think it was this throne-like altar, and not merely the danger of Caesar worship, that caused John to call Pergamum the place "where Satan has his throne."

The city was also filled with temples–three to the emperor, and more to Dionysius, Athena, Demeter, and other gods. It was a medical center. Galen, the second-most famous physician of the ancient world (second only to Hippocrates), was a native of Pergamum and studied there. The god of healing was Aesculapius. He had his temple too, and he was worshiped under the figure of a serpent, a well-known biblical symbol for Satan (Gen. 3:1; Rev. 12:9). When we put these features together, we can see how appropriate it was for Jesus to call Pergamum the place "where Satan lives" (v. 13).

Yet here was a church, a body of believers who had come to know and love Jesus Christ and who had remained true to Christ’s name. It was a good church, for it had not renounced its faith even in days of persecution. The aorist tense of the verb renounce ("you did not renounce") points to a specific past crisis, perhaps the one in which Antipas was killed. He is the only martyr of any of the seven churches who is specifically identified ("Antipas, my faithful witness, who was put to death in your city," v. 14), but his death highlights the danger with which the Christians in Pergamum especially lived.

1#Os Guinness and David Seel, editors, No God But God (Chicago: Moody Press, 1992), pp. 214, 215.

Study Questions

• What was the peril faced by the church in Pergamum?

• Why was Pergamum such a dangerous place for Christians?

• What are some likely reasons that John called Pergamum the city of Satan?

Key Point

Love for Christ and truth: both are necessary, and the loss of either is soon fatal for the Church.

This daily devotional study is from the Bible teaching of Dr. James Boice on the broadcast The Bible Study Hour. You may order the audio version of his studies here.