Revelation 2:20

Revelation 2:20. What is praiseworthy in the church has been spoken of. The Lord now passes to that in which it failed. Again a division into four parts meets us: (1) That thou sufferest thy wife Jezebel. We adopt this reading as every way preferable to the reading, ‘that woman Jezebel,' given in both the Authorised and Revised Versions. The external evidence in its favour is at least equal to that for the common reading. The internal is much superior; and it is almost impossible to doubt that the misinterpretation which supposed the ‘Angel' to be the Bishop of the church, and which therefore recoiled from the idea that the Bishop's wife could have been a person of the kind here described, formed the chief reason why it was set aside for that commonly adopted. Let us have distinctly impressed upon us that the ‘Angel' of Thyatira is the church of that city, and let us remember that the peculiar aggravation of the sin of Ahab in the Old Testament was that ‘he did sell himself to work wickedness in the sight of the Lord, whom Jezebel his wife stirred up' (1 Kings 21:25); and we shall at once feel how much more in keeping with the force and vigour of the whole Apocalypse, as well as of the present passage, is the reading ‘thy wife' than the reading ‘that woman.' The very head and front of the church's sin was, not that it merely tolerated false teaching and sinful practices in its midst, but that it had allied itself with them. Many, no doubt, had remained pure (Revelation 2:24), but the church as a whole was guilty. The Jezebel of the Old Testament, whose story lies at the bottom of the apostle's language, was a heathen both by birth and training; and Ahab's marriage with her was the first instance of the marriage with a heathen princess of a king of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Thus had Thyatira sinned, had entered for the sake of worldly honour into alliance with the world, and was still continuing the sinful tie. The sentence, ‘thou sufferest thy wife Jezebel,' it must be noticed, is complete in itself, ‘thou toleratest,' ‘thou lettest alone' (comp. John 11:48; John 12:7; and for the story of Jezebel, 1 Kings 16:18; 1 Kings 16:19; 1 Kings 16:21; 2 Kings 9). Most commentators admit that the name Jezebel is to be understood symbolically; but they are not agreed whether, as so used, it refers to a single person, a false female teacher, or a heretical party within the church. The latter opinion is by much the more probable of the two, although we have before us not so much a regularly constituted party, as separate persons who were themselves addicted to the sins described, and who were endeavouring at the same time to seduce others. In Jeremiah 4:30 we have a similar description of the degeneracy of the Church. The persons thus pointed at were, it must be further noticed, within the Church. They had drawn their erroneous views and sinful practices, it is true, from heathenism, as Jezebel was the daughter of a heathen king, but they were not themselves heathen. They were professing members of the Christian community, for this Jezebel calleth herself a prophetess, not a false prophetess, but one with a divine commission. (2) And she teacheth, etc. The sins into which the persons alluded to sought to betray the church are now mentioned. They are the sins already spoken of in the case of Pergamos; yet there is at the same time an important distinction. At Pergamos the evil came from an outward source, Balaam; at Thyatira from an inward source, Jezebel. The former was a Gentile Prophet; the latter was the wife of the King of Israel. Mark the progress.