“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.” (Rev.2:13)
“After this I looked and there before me was a door standing open in heaven …and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it.” (Rev.4:1-2)
I am currently on sabbatical leave from my church and experiencing the rare opportunity to sit in a pew rather than a pulpit for a season. I’m enjoying the evening series at Hamilton Baptist Church where Simon Fraser and Jonathan Davie have been preaching themes from the letters to the seven churches in the Book of Revelation. Last Sunday Simon coined a wonderful phrase describing the experience of the church at Pergamum as: “A church with the same postcode as Satan that was still shining with the gospel.”
The first part of that sentence graphically captures the common experience of so many of God’s people at this time. We increasingly find ourselves sharing our once-peaceful postcodes with evil. Perhaps the racism, bigotry, polarisation, divisiveness, hatred, violence, and mistrust were always there under the surface but now they seem to be rampant and ascendant in so many communities. And that’s where the second part of Simon’s sentence becomes so precious. The church at Pergamum lived “where Satan has his throne” (Rev.2:13) and yet they were “still shining with the gospel.” They hadn’t given up. They hadn’t moved out. They hadn’t been absorbed. They hadn’t compromised. They hadn’t faded into insignificance. They hadn’t hidden away. They hadn’t kept their heads down or looked away.
The church at Pergamum challenges us to hold fast and to keep “shining with the gospel”: to look above and beyond Satan’s throne to the One enthroned in heaven (Rev.4:1-2). At some point, did Antipas ask himself was it worth it to challenge the evil in his own postcode? He paid the ultimate price but gained the ultimate prize and those at Pergamum with ears to hear and eyes to see, who had their gaze fixed on a higher throne (Rev.4:1-2), might have caught a glimpse of a familiar face in the crowd before that higher throne (Rev.7:9-17).
May we too find the courage to “shine with the gospel” where we live.