Dear Smyrna

On September 30, 2026, 50-year-old Christa Pike was led into a windowed room at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, where she was to be executed by lethal injection for the brutal 1995 murder of her fellow student Colleen Slemmer.

By 7:41 pm, she had been administered her first round of the lethal drug pentobarbital. Five minutes later, she was surprisingly still alive. State protocol called for a second dose, which she was administered. Five minutes later, her heart was still beating.

Christa was brought to hospital that night, where she spent days unconscious in critical care. On Tuesday, October 6, she awoke and her first words were “Where am I?” and “Who are you?”

On Friday, October 2, while Christa Pike was still unconscious in her hospital bed, a pilot, first officer, and two medical personnel joined two passengers on an air ambulance flight from Bermuda destined to Boston. Early Saturday morning, air traffic control lost contact with the plane. On Sunday at 6:45 pm, many hours after finding debris associated with the missing plane, the United States Coast Guard called off the search and all six people aboard were presumed dead.

Christa went into that little room in the prison not expecting to come out alive. Those six people probably boarded that plane fully expecting that they would land safely.

I open with these two stories this morning to remind us of the reality of death. We need to be reminded of that in a culture where death is experienced often in entertainment but in which our daily lives are way more insulated from death than most people’s have been for most of history.

So when we read about Jesus dying on the cross, or people dying for Jesus, we can sometimes forget what that actually means. We can sometimes forget how real this all is. We are going to hear some spectacular things about life and death in today’s passage and they won’t seem spectacular to us if we do not remember how real and awful death is.

About Smyrna

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Last week we began to look at these seven direct messages from Jesus to the seven churches in Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey. The first of these messages was to the church in Ephesus, where they were doing many things well but had forsaken their first love, and where they were called to remember and repent and do the works they did at first.

Today, we move up the road to Smyrna. And I thought it might be helpful to just get a visual of these seven churches and where they are located. Here’s the general idea:

Here is a slightly more zoomed-in version, showing us all of the province of Asia, which today is western Turkey:

And here’s where we can see all seven churches and their names:

You’ll remember they were on a postal route and you can kind of see how the dots would be connected. And there in the sea is Patmos.

I find this visual helpful for a few reasons, one of which is reminding me of the very different world in which the Christians in these seven churches lived. And yet, at the same time, these were our brothers and sisters in Christ. And as we’ll see, the issues they faced, though they had different clothing, were the same basic issues we’re facing today.

Unlike Ephesus, Smyrna isn’t mentioned in the rest of the Bible. What we see here in Revelation is it. But from ancient history we know that Smyrna, just up the road from Ephesus, was another city steeped in the religion of Rome.

200 years before Jesus was born, Smyrna was the first city in Asia Minor to build a temple to the goddess Roma, who represented the city of Rome. A few years before Jesus died, Smyrna beat out ten other cities for the right to build a temple to Emperor Tiberius, which gave them a huge amount of prestige.

So this was, like, their thing. The Roman politician Cicero said that Smyrna was “the city of our most faithful and ancient allies” (Cicero, Phil. 11.5). Smyrna loved Rome. They loved being a part of the Roman Empire. They literally worshipped Rome and the Roman emperor.

Who Jesus Is (v. 8)

And that’s what makes Jesus’ introduction so significant. Listen to how Jesus introduces himself to his church in this city: “The words of the first and the last, who died and came to life” (Revelation 2:8).

Sounds familiar, right? For the first five of these messages, Jesus introduces himself with language from the opening vision that John saw. In that vision, when John fell at Jesus’ feet, Jesus said to him, in 1:17-18, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.”

We saw, back then, that this language of “the first and the last” comes from Isaiah’s prophecy where God proclaims his supremacy over all other gods. “Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: ‘I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. Who is like me? Let him proclaim it…’” (Isaiah 44:6-7a).

Get it? Who is like me? Roma? Caesar Augustus? Not a chance. Jesus is the first and the last—the absolutely unique one who shares in the very identity of Yahweh and who has no competitors and who never will have any competitors.

And He is the one who died and came to life. Notice how, just like in Jesus’ words from the vision, death is placed at the beginning, not the end. It starts with death, and ends with life. Jesus’ death was not the end of His life, unlike how we usually think of death. He died, but that’s in the past. Life had the last word.

What Jesus Knows (v. 9)

Next, following the pattern, Jesus tells the church what He knows about them. “I know your tribulation,” he says. This is the second time we’ve met this word in Revelation. Back in 1:9 we heard that John was their brother and partner in the tribulation that was in Christ Jesus.

And here Jesus says that He knows their tribulation. He knows the affliction and the distress and the suffering that they are going through for His sake.

See, in a city that worshipped Rome, if you didn’t worship Rome, you weren’t tolerated very well. Persecution was real. And one of the very practical ways you would suffer was financially, which is why it isn’t a huge surprise to see “tribulation and poverty” stacked back-to-back.

It’s hard for us to understand how the economy worked back then, but basically, if you were a tradesperson, the way that you made things work was to join the local trade guild for whatever your trade was. We see the silversmith trade guild in Acts 19.

Joining the guild—this group of tradespeople—was how you made connections and gained customers and built a reputation. It was like social media is today—it was hard to make a go of it as a business without it. But the thing is, each trade guild had its own patron god or goddess. As the guild would come together, they would sacrifice an animal to the god or goddess and then the meat would be supper.

And so that put early Christians in a really hard spot. Eating meat sold in the market that may once have been offered to an idol is one thing, but it was quite another thing to join a business club that required regular banquets offered in honour of that god or goddess.

And what that meant, for faithful Christians, is that loyalty to Jesus resulted in a measure of economic isolation. It made them outsiders to the business community. It meant choosing to not gain easy access to the wealth of Smyrna, a city that was doing pretty good at that time in history.

Which is very likely a big part of why tribulation flows right into poverty. Poverty was a strong word that doesn’t mean they’re struggling to make ends meet. No, they were really poor. And all because of their faith.

But I love this little aside after the word poverty—”but you are rich.” See, material poverty, here in this life, is not a true measure of how rich we are. “Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him?” (James 2:5). Romans 8:17 tells us we are heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ!

After this brief life is over, Christians are going to be very, very rich forever. Until then, the Christians in Smyrna were poor.

So Jesus knows their tribulation and their poverty. Finally, Jesus points to knowing “the slander of those who say that they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan” (v. 9).

This verse opens up a can of worms that we need to explore for a moment, because it’s easy to misunderstand and very important that we don’t. The church in Smyrna was being slandered by people who said that they were Jews, but weren’t.

Who would that be? Who, in the first century, was lining up pretending to be Jewish when really they weren’t of Jewish ethnicity?

There’s no evidence this was happening. The Jews had their own persecution and struggles they experienced. There was little reason to imagine outsiders pretending to be Jewish, and so it’s almost certain that these are Jews by birth who participated in the local synagogue.

And the fact that they were slandering the church in Smyrna suggests that the church in Smyrna had at least some Jewish members. We see in the New Testament that the unbelieving Jews got really worked up when their fellow Jews placed their faith in Jesus as Messiah.

Judaism had some protection from the Roman Empire, and it’s likely that the slander described here is the Jewish synagogue attenders telling Rome that these Christians, worshipping Jesus of Nazareth, weren’t actually Jews and shouldn’t actually be exempted from worshipping the Roman gods or the Roman emperor. We don’t know for sure, but that’s the likely kind of thing going on based on what we know about the setting in Asia at this time.

And here, Jesus says that those unbelieving Jews are the ones who aren’t actually Jews. And if that sounds jarring, this is just in line with what we see in the rest of the New Testament: now that Jesus has come, being a child of Abraham, being a part of the people of God, yes, even being a Jew, is not a matter of physical descent or physical characteristics but of faith in Jesus.

Romans 2:28-29: “For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God.”

Jesus was the offspring of Abraham, and it is those of faith who are offspring of Abraham, according to Galatians 3:29. By rejecting Jesus as the Messiah, these Jewish people had cut themselves off from their own Abrahamic heritage.

In John chapter 8, Jesus is at a feast in Jerusalem and a group of Pharisees say to Jesus, “”‘Abraham is our father.’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did” (John 8:39). And then a little bit later, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires” (John 8:44).

Now, sadly, some people throughout history have taken these words, or the words of Revelation 2:9 here, in a very anti-Semitic way. They have said that the Jewish people, as a whole, are children of the devil in a unique way compared to everybody else. But that is to misread the Bible.

If we go back to Genesis 3:15, God said to Satan that He would put enmity between him and the woman, between his offspring and hers. From that point on, all of humanity is divided into two categories: Eve’s children, or the Serpent’s children.

The Serpent’s children includes anybody who is opposed to God and his works in the world. Which is why, when the most religious of Jewish leaders come to John the Baptist, he calls them a brood of vipers—baby snakes (Matt 3:7). This is why Jesus called the Pharisees children of the devil. And this is why Jesus refers to these Smyrnaean Jews as not actually being Jews but being a synagogue of Satan.

Anyone who lifts up their heel against the Messiah or His people, even if they’re physical descendants of Abraham, has shown what side they’re on.

And if we are rattled by this, we should remember just how strong the Jewish prophets themselves could be in their denunciations of the peoples of Israel in their day. Think of Isaiah comparing Jerusalem to Sodom and Gomorrah, for example (Isa 1:10-11). The New Testament is not sharper than the Old Testament. The Jewish prophets said in so many ways, over and over again, that it’s not enough to have Abraham’s DNA in you. It was always about covenant faithfulness to Abraham’s God.

And so these Jewish people in Smyrna who were slandering the Christians, like how Jesus and Paul were slandered—Jesus says, they aren’t actually a part of my people. That synagogue they meet in doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to Satan.

And one of the points here is not so much to cast shade on these unbelievers, though it does that—one of the points here is to reinforce that these believers in Jesus, despite their tribulation and poverty and slander, really do belong to Jesus. They are His people. They are known by Him.

He knows them.

Do Not Fear (v. 10-11)

And so, they should not fear. That’s what Jesus gives them next: an encouragement bundled with a warning of what’s coming next. “Do not fear what you are about to suffer.”

What do you mean, what we’re about to suffer? Aren’t we already suffering? Yes, but it’s going to get worse. “Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison.” That’s interesting, isn’t it? Following Jesus is going to cause some of these people to be thrown into prison.

Of course, that’s not how it’s going to look on the outside. The fine and upright citizens of Smyrna, including the good people who attended the synagogue, might have said that these new Jesus followers were upsetting the local traditions. Dishonouring the Roman emperor. Threatening Smyrna’s special status. They had to be put into prison to protect the peace.

The bad guys never think that they’re the bad guys. They think that the good guys are the bad guys.

But Jesus knows what’s going on. Satan hates the bride of Christ, and using people as his pawns, he’s going to throw some of the Smyrnaean Christians into prison.

Just so we keep this in mind, prisons have always been rough places, but in this time in history, they were far worse than most examples we have today. You didn’t get taken care of. You might not get fed if people from the outside didn’t bring you food.

So this is going to be really hard. But there’s a purpose for it. There’s something deeper going on than just Satan pulling strings.

Jesus says that there’s a purpose here—”that you may be tested,” right there in verse 10. Tested? How? A part of the clue comes in the rest of the phrase—“and for ten days you will have tribulation.”

Remember how numbers are often infused with symbolic meaning in Revelation? And remember how so much of Revelation draws on the Old Testament? Here’s a spot where the two come together.

Daniel 1 tells about Daniel and his three friends in the court of King Nebuchadnezzar, and Daniel’s refusal to “defile himself with the king’s food” (Dan 1:8). See, the Jewish people had been given strict food laws that were designed to set them apart from the peoples around them. To make them distinct. And Daniel, even though he’s in a foreign land working for a pagan king, is not willing to compromise. He is going to be loyal to Israel’s God.

So he goes to his supervisor and asks for an exception to the diet. The supervisor says that he’s worried that their health is going to suffer if they don’t eat all of the king’s food.

And Daniel says, verse 12, ““Test your servants for ten days; let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink” (Daniel 1:12). A test. A limited test. A test that, yes, would prove their loyalty to their God, but a test that would prove that their God would take care of them.

Remember how at the end of the ten days they were in better health than anybody else, and afterwards they were allowed to eat their special diet and refuse the king’s food.

So what’s the significance of Jesus using this same language, telling the Smyrnaean Christians that they will be tested for ten days? For one, “ten days” means that it is numbered. It will not go on indefinitely. Satan is on a short leash, and the Lord has given him strict limits on how much he can hurt God’s people.

Second, the “tested for ten days” recalls the situation of Daniel 1, and helps these Christians understand the story that they are in. Like Daniel and his friends, they are being tested. Despite being surrounded by luxury and riches, will they be faithful to their God—even if it costs them?

And will they trust their God to take care of them, even though it doesn’t make human sense?

That seems to be the point of what Jesus says next: “Be faithful unto death.” Be faithful with no exceptions, even if it costs you your life.

Even if you know that there’s a sword coming your way if you don’t recant. Even if you know you’re going to leave behind a family that will miss you desperately. Even if all you’re being asked to do is burn a pinch of incense to the Emperor.

Be faithful unto death.

This happened, by the way. Two generations or so after Revelation was written, Polycarp, the elderly bishop of Smyrna, was told to curse Christ or die. He answered, “Fourscore and six years have I been His servant, and He hath done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”¹The Martyrdom of Polycarp 9.3, trans. J. B. Lightfoot, in The Apostolic Fathers. And he was tied to a stake and burned and finally killed with a dagger.

But then what? That wasn’t the end, right? What came next? What came after the ten days, whether that’s ten calendar days or a symbolic, fixed period of time of suffering? What happens when they pass the test?

“I will give you the crown of life.” This is the reward at the end of their test. This is why they aren’t supposed to fear, even though tribulation is coming.

Just like Jesus, their death is not the ending. It’s the beginning. Again, we see how this church’s future is connected to the person of Christ and how He introduced Himself. Their future will be His future. What’s waiting for them is not just death. On the other side of death, the victor’s crown. That’s the usual sense of this word for “crown” here. Stephanos. A crown given to victors.

“Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him” (James 1:12).

And the crown is life. Eternal life. Not being hurt by the second death, as verse 11 goes on to say. The first death is when our bodies die. The second death is when we face God’s final condemnation. Those who are faithful, even unto death, will receive from Jesus the crown of eternal life.

That’s why they’re rich. They’ve got a crown coming for them!

So, listen. Verse 11: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death.’” (Revelation 2:11).

The one who conquers. What does it mean for the Christians in Smyrna to conquer?

It means something different than it did for the Christians in Ephesus. For the Christians in Ephesus, “conquering” meant turning—repenting, changing their ways, doing what they had done at the beginning.

For the Christians in Smyrna, “conquering” means not changing a thing. Staying the course—staying faithful. Not flinching away from absolute, unconditional loyalty to Jesus even if that puts you on a collision course with death.

And the promise, again, is that the one who conquers won’t be hurt by the second death. We all get hurt by the first death. But because Jesus is the first and the last, because he died and came to life, we don’t need to fear the second death.

For This Church Today

So, what does it mean for us to hear what the Spirit says to the churches? What is the Spirit saying to us from this message to Smyrna today?

And it’s really simple: be faithful unto death, and Jesus will give us the crown of life. That’s the message! But here are three overlapping ways that we might need to hear that message applied to our lives and situations today.

1. Reject the Prosperity Gospel

Number one, we need to reject the prosperity gospel. The prosperity gospel is the message, proclaimed in explicit and implicit ways around our world today, that if we are good Christians, we’ll be healthy and rich and beautiful.

And the prosperity preachers would have written this message to Smyrna so differently. “I know your tribulation and your poverty and the slander coming against you, and what’s wrong with you people? Where’s your faith? Why aren’t you enjoying God’s favour? What are you doing wrong? You need to embrace abundance! God wants to enlarge your tent and fill up your storehouses. Get a prosperity mindset!”

But Jesus says nothing of the sort. Smyrna is one of two churches that gets zero rebuke from Jesus. Their tribulation was not a sign that they were doing anything wrong. In fact, the opposite. Their suffering was a sign that they were doing it all right. And Jesus tells them to stay the course, even though it’s going to get worse.

Today’s passage should be a total knockout punch to the prosperity gospel. And we need to hear it. We all need to hear it, even if we don’t think we’re vulnerable to the prosperity gospel. Even if we can see through the snakey preachers on TV with their private jets and their shameless pleas for money from you.

Because in so many other subtler ways, the prosperity gospel is all around us. It’s there in the assumption that, if we do things right, things will go well for us. If we obey God, we’ll receive His blessing. If we do all the right things, our kids are going to turn out perfectly.

And it shows up in our quiet beliefs that, when things don’t go well, that’s a sign of God’s displeasure. Some people hold that in a superstitious way. If their car breaks down, they try and figure out how they sinned. More generally, it might show up in the way we look at people who aren’t doing well in life and assume they must have done something to make it happen.

One of the clearest ways it shows up is in the question, “why me?” Even many good Christians, when they suffer, ask, “Why is this happening to me?” When my mom got cancer, people said that to us. “I don’t understand why this is happening to such a wonderful family.”

What’s the unspoken assumption there? If we are good Christians, bad things shouldn’t happen to us. And Jesus’ words to Smyrna show how, actually, following Jesus will often lead us right into the middle of suffering.

I was thinking how appropriate it was for us to think about this message on Thanksgiving Sunday, a day when we are supposed to thank God for his material blessings to us. And that’s good. Every gift comes from God. We should praise God for the harvest, if we get one.

But we should also say with Habakkuk, though the fields yield no food, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, because we know about the glory that has been promised to us. We don’t think that God owes us physical bounty. We won’t compromise our faith in Jesus for the sake of worldly riches.

2. Expect Faithfulness to be Hard

And that leads us into the second overlapping truth here, which is that we should expect faithfulness to be hard.

So often we justify disobedience to Jesus’ word because things get hard. How many people have justified divorce because staying married to that person was just too hard? Or we justify staying in a job that requires us to sin because, well, we have to provide for our families, right?

Not if providing for our families means betraying Jesus. We’re his slaves, remember? We obey Him, and if that means we lose our jobs, it’s up to Him to provide for us.

Or we can think of so many lesser temptations. The way we excuse our sin because “I was just so tired” or “I was just out of patience.”

What makes us think we’ll be faithful unto death if we can’t be faithful unto these lesser things?

Expect faithfulness to Jesus to be hard. Expect it to cost you something. And expect Jesus to more than make up for it in the Age to Come.

3. Do Not Fear Death

Which leads us to our final point, that we must not fear death. So many Christians still live in the fear of death. So many Christians still freak out at sickness and age as if this life is all we’ve got. Which makes me wonder: could we face death for Jesus’ sake if we can’t even face death in the natural way that everybody does?

And in some sense I get the struggle. Ten years ago I began to have problems with my heartbeat that left me, many times, wondering if my heart was going to stop and I was going to die. Once when Angela was driving me to the hospital and my pulse was fading, I said goodbye to her.

I know how scary that was. I know how strong our survival instinct is. So as I say “we should not fear death,” I’m not handing out cheap advice.

But neither was Jesus. He knew what it was like, way more than me. He sweat drops like blood in Gethsemane begging for another way. He was faithful unto death—death on a cross.

But as He revealed these words to John, He was also tasting and experiencing the joys of eternal life. So as He calls this church to be faithful unto death, so that they might receive the crown of life, He’s not asking them to do anything that He himself hasn’t done and experienced. He’s been through it all.

If you can hear my voice this morning, the reality is you are going to die. And if you know Jesus—if you know that Jesus died to take the punishment for your sins, so that you don’t need to fear the second death of God’s judgement—if you know that, then you don’t need to fear death.

You can say, with the hymnwriters, that:

It is not death to die
To leave this weary road
And join the saints who dwell on high
Who’ve found their home with God

It is not death to close
The eyes long dimmed by tears
And wake in joy before Your throne
Delivered from our fears

It is not death to fling
Aside this earthly dust
And rise with strong and noble wing
To live among the just

It is not death to hear
The key unlock the door
That sets us free from mortal years
To praise You evermore

Oh, Jesus, conquering the grave
Your precious blood has power to save
Those who trust in You will in Your mercy find
That it is not death to die²Bob Kauflin / Henri A Cesar Malan / George Washington Bethune