The Sun God

Buried beneath the district of Akhisar in modern-day Turkey is the ancient city of Thyatira. Its pagan locals worshiped Tyrimnas, a Lydian moniker for Apollo, the Greek god of the sun. In Greek mythology, Apollo is the son of Zeus, the god above all other gods. So, to put it another way, Apollo was the son of the “most high” god.

It was to Thyatira that Christ introduced Himself as “the Son of God.” Apollo was a mere imposter, a fake, as there is only “the Sun of Righteousness” (Malachi 4:2), Jesus Christ. It is Jesus who is described with “eyes like a flame of fire” and “feet like fine brass”; it is He who shall “destroy with the brightness of His coming” (2 Thessalonians 2:8).

In its prophetic application, Thyatira represents the Christian church from ad 538 to ad 1798, a period well-known to students of Bible prophecy. This was the era of the church’s greatest tribulation, when deception, fraud, and slander were paraded as religion, when the Roman Catholic Church “grew up to the host of heaven … and … cast down some of the host and some of the stars to the ground, and trampled them. … He cast truth down to the ground. He did all this and prospered” (Daniel 8:10, 12). This was the Dark Ages of the 1,260-day prophecy (Daniel 7:23–25; Revelation 13:5), when the light of God’s Word was hidden from the people.

But even through this most terrible of tribulations, there were still those who raised the Christian standard of “love, service, faith, and … patience.” And in the very last years of the Dark Ages—“the last … more than the first”—the light of the Protestant Reformation began to dawn, uncovering God’s truths for all the world to see with their own eyes.

To all those who remain faithful, Christ also gives this promise: His “word is a lamp to [our] feet and a light to [our] path” (Psalm 119:105). We must follow His light out of the darkness.

Glorious Savior, in times of confusion, of persecution, of utter hopelessness, may I search for Your light and follow Your footsteps to the path of righteousness.

For Further Study: Psalm 84:11; Proverbs 4:18; John 8:12

Key Bible Texts

And unto the angel of the church in Thyatira write; These things saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine brass; (Revelation 2:18 KJV)