Constantine and Compromise.
“Repent of your sin, or I will come to you suddenly and fight against them with the sword of my mouth. “Anyone with ears to hear must listen to the Spirit and understand what he is saying to the churches. To everyone who is victorious I will give some of the manna that has been hidden away in heaven. And I will give to each one a white stone, and on the stone will be engraved a new name that no one understands except the one who receives it.” – Revelation 2:16-17. NLT
The church at Pergamum is drifting into compromise, not rushing in intentionally. People don’t just get up one morning and decide to give up their relationship with God or become totally secular. When Christians become secular, (immitating the world) it is because they allowed themselves to gradually drift into it. Perhaps they are not praying, or wrestling in private prayer, as much as they used to. Maybe they are just not reading the Bible and other spiritual books the way they used to. The drift into secularism is gradual.
The problem is that compromise is rarely offensive. People slip into it without even realizing it. Compromise tends to be popular; it makes everybody happy and offends no one. But it offends God. I should probably qualify that last statement. There is a difference between conciliation and compromise. Conciliation, or reconciliation is a good thing. The results of compromise, on the other hand, are not spiritually healthy.
With compromise comes lower personal standards. People don’t naturally drift upstream, the natural drift in any church is downstream toward a lower standard and a lesser clarity in doctrine
Unless people are willing to swim against the tide through a vigorous application of Scripture, a church will inevitably move to lower standards, like Pergamum did.
What is Jesus’ solution to compromise? He leaves us in no doubt. REPENT! The Greek form of the word implies that repentance is something they need to start. The Pergamenes evidently don’t think they need to repent, but Jesus insists that the wrong kind of tolerance requires repentance. If they won’t confront the people who are destroying the church, He will come and “make war with them by means of the sword of His mouth.”
The remedy for a compromising spirit is, first of all, a firm decision. To repent is to make a total turn in your life, to renew spiritual disciplines. To repent means to stop drifting along and doing what feels good or what comes naturally. To repent is to become intentional in what you do spiritually. To make time in your life for the things God would have you to do, such as meditation, study and sharing your faith.
No matter what you’ve done or where you’ve been, it’s not too late to turn things around.
The church in Pergamum covers the period of time from 323 – 538 AD, the period when the church became accepted by the world. The word “Pergamos” comes from two Greek words, pergos, which means castle or tower, and gamos, which means marriage. Combining the two words, their significance becomes “elevation through marriage.”
Persecution of Christians ended during this period as Constantine accepted Christianity and paganism was introduced into the church. Satan has repeatedly discovered that when persecution will not work, popularity will! In the history of humankind, it has never failed. Consider the Jewish people, the time of the early church, the time of the reformation, and our own present time. Popularity has always been effective.
By 300 AD almost half of the Roman Empire was Christian. Constatine become the emperor of Rome and was favourable to Christianity. There are many fables about Constantine having a dream in which he saw a cross, meaning he was going to become Christian. There’s also a story about how he took his soldiers down to a river where he had them march through it, telling them they had all be baptized and were now Christians. However, there are no historical records of these events. Constantine wanted to make Christianity more appealing to the ‘Pagans’ so he enacted a law called the “Edict of Constantine.” This law substituted Sunday, the Pagan’s day of sun worship, for God’s Seventh-day Sabbath. “On the venerable Day of the Sun let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest and let all the workshops be closed.” (Constantine 321 AD)
History records the period of time from this point forward Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire. The church became baptised paganism.