Book of Common Prayer

(iv) To the compromising Church

^18-23 “Write this to the angel of the Church in Thyatira: ‘These are the words of the Son of God whose eyes blaze like fire and whose feet shine like the finest bronze: I know what you have done. I know of your love and your loyalty, your service and your endurance. Moreover, I know that you are doing more than you did at first. But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel who calls herself a prophetess, but who by her teaching deceives my servants into sexual immorality and eating idols’-meat. I have given her time to repent but she has shown no desire to repent of her immorality. See, now, how I throw her into bed and her lovers with her, and I will send them terrible suffering unless they repent of what she has done. As for her children, I shall strike them dead. Then all the Churches will know that I am the one who searches men’s hearts and minds, and that I will reward each one of you according to your deeds.

^24-25 But for the rest of you at Thyatira, who do not hold this teaching, and have not learned what they call ‘the deep things of Satan’, I will lay no further burden upon you, except that you hold on to what you have until I come!

^26-29 To the one who is victorious, who carries out my work to the end, I will give authority over the nations, just as I myself have received authority from my Father, and I will give him the morning star. ‘He shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the potter’s vessels shall be broken to pieces’. Let the listener hear what the Spirit says to the Churches.

^27-28 “Alas for you, you hypocritical scribes and Pharisees! You are like white-washed tombs, which look fine on the outside but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all kinds of rottenness. For you appear like good men on the outside—but inside you are a mass of pretence and wickedness.

^29-36 “What miserable frauds you are, you scribes and Pharisees! You build tombs for the prophets, and decorate monuments for good men of the past, and then say, ‘If we had lived in the times of our ancestors we should never have joined in the killing of the prophets.’ Yes, ‘your ancestors’—that shows you to be sons indeed of those who murdered the prophets. Go ahead then, and finish off what your ancestors tried to do! You serpents, you viper’s brood, how do you think you are going to avoid being condemned to the rubbish-heap? Listen to this: I am sending you prophets and wise and learned men; and some of these you will kill and crucify, others you will flog in your synagogues and hunt from town to town. So that on your hands is all the innocent blood spilt on this earth, from the blood of Abel the good to the blood of Zachariah, Barachiah’s son, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Yes, I tell you that all this will be laid at the doors of this generation.

Jesus mourns over Jerusalem, and foretells its destruction

^37-39 “Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem! You murder the prophets and stone the messengers that are sent to you. How often have I longed to gather your children round me like a bird gathering her brood together under her wing—and you would never have it. Now all you have left is your house. I tell you that you will never see me again till the day when you cry, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’”