Revelation 2:20 Commentary and Bible Study

But there was a problem, and it was similar to one that has been encountered before in these letters to the churches. There was a problem of trade guilds, together with their trade gods. If you followed an occupation, a trade, you had to belong to the trade guild, and that guild was focused on the god for that particular trade or activity. If you did not go along with the feasts and the idolatry in connection with that trade god, you would be cast out of your profession. You certainly could make no progress in it; you could only be an underling at best and very poorly paid. Within these trade guilds the idolatry was tremendous, and the feasts were often immoral. Some Christians were willing to compromise to save their jobs. Not that the compromising Christians, who went along to these things, necessarily engaged in the immorality, but they condoned it by their presence.The church was tolerating a woman called here Jezebel. It is not certain that that was her real name. More likely what is meant is that the church was tolerating that Jezebel-like woman. Jezebel was that Zidonian princess who was taken as a wife by Ahab, the king of the northern kingdom of Israel. He married this pagan princess who brought Baal worship among the people. It was she who took 400 prophets of Baal and fed them in the royal palace, and it was these prophets of Baal who were challenged by Elijah on Mount Carmel. So the symbolic name of Jezebel relates her to this particular queen and the compromise that she brought in among the people of God.She claimed to be a prophetess. Prophetesses were given for various reasons in the foundation stage of the church, and some evidently were women, but they did not teach publicly. They did not rule by the word, for otherwise Scripture would be contradicting itself. Where there were prophetesses, it was a kind of private ministry that godly women were given by God. There are no instructions in the word of God for their appointment of prophetesses, so it was a temporary office. But this particular woman had never been accredited; she had appointed herself. That is what the Lord says in these words – ‘which calleth herself a prophetess.’ She was teaching and seducing, leading astray into error, ‘my servants’. Good people among the membership of the church had been misled by her and taken in by her. What was her heresy? It was to say to people that it was alright to go along with the idolatry of the trade guilds. Maybe she put it this way, ‘The idols are nothing, so you can go into those feasts with a mental reservation that you will be there and you will participate in a measure, but your mental reservation is that you do not believe in the idols. As long as you do that you will be alright.’