DECODING JEZEBEL (Part 1 of 2)

Revelation 2:20-23.

Unless in religious sexual rites, where one person might service multiple partners, adultery is typically an act between two people, a male and a female.  Of the woman in out text, however, her crime involved multiple partners: “them [plural] that commit adultery with her [singular].”   If she is female, we can understand that the others were males.  What kind of a woman was this?

If the sin had been just an instance; if it had been just one case of adultery, we could excuse it as a ‘mistake,’ the actors having been overtaken by a ‘weakness.’  In the case of Jezebel, it was repeated transgressions with multiple men.  Could all those instances of adultery have been ‘mistakes’?

Judgment was coming upon her and upon her partners, even though those men had been victims of her seductions.  That they were lured did not excuse them, and it was not going to avert their judgment.  Blaming their sin upon another was not going to exonerate the sinner.  What kind of woman was this, who brought trouble upon multiple men, and even her children?

What was it about this woman that attracted so many men – married men, for that matter?  The case against Jezebel was adultery, which meant illicit relationship between two people, each one married to their respective spouse.   That meant that Jezebel herself was someone’s wife, and those men she seduced into sinning with her were other women’s husbands. What was it in Jezebel that made the bond of their existing marriages not strong enough to restrain those men?  What was it in Jezebel that did not make the bond with her own husband strong enough to restrain her escapades?

Jezebel’s victims were not just one; they were plural.  Servants of God tumbling into fornication, and other men, so many married men, falling for her, one after the other!  What in her made her so compelling, so irresistible?  Was it entirely natural beauty, or was there something more, something mystical, that made men powerless against her?

Her victims were not senseless and jobless youths.  They were men, married men; men who had undertaken responsibilities at home and abroad; men who were leaders of their families and businesses; notable men.  How did such strong men fall cheaply for her – not one, not two, not three, one after the other?

Who was Jezebel’s husband?  We shall find out.  What did she do to him that he could not restrain her?  What propelled her along that dark path?  A weakness?  A depravity?  An insatiable libido?  A dark agenda?  Given her lofty religious profile, was there something deeper than mere intimate relationships?  Was she just after sex or after the souls of those men she slayed, silenced, castrated on the altar of her secret beds?  Was there something spiritual about the physical things she did with them?  Was it occult initiations?

If there was something spiritual about Jezebel, if the power behind her attractions was spiritual, then she may not even have been very beautiful, after all.  Yet, despite her ugliness in character and probably in looks, she seemed irresistible to not a few men.  If the source of her compelling attractions was demonic, then the men she felled were spiritual casualties rather than victims of their moral recklessness; they were the casualties of spiritual manipulation rather than of a woman’s natural attractions.  That closely recalls Samson, who was essentially a victim of Delilah’s spiritual force rather than of her natural attractions.  The Philistines knew it and confessed so in their common songs, that Samson was the victim of their half-fish, half-man marine deity, Dagon, whose tool Delilah merely was (Judges 16:23-24).  Sometimes men think that they are being attracted to a woman, not realising that the powers compelling them are not entirely natural.  Same for women lured by strange men that are merely the physical expressions of invisible forces.

The Old Testament archetype, Jezebel the wife of King Ahab, was described as a woman of “whoredoms” and “witchcrafts” (1 Kings 9:22).  Note that both nouns are in the plural: “whoredoms” and “witchcrafts.”  In other words, her whoredom or harlotry had branches, grades, series, kinds; and her witchcraft was the same: white witchcraft, black witchcraft, Sidonian witchcraft, Samaritan witchcraft, Babylonish witchcraft, church witchcraft; witchcraft for money, witchcraft for power, witchcraft for attracting men, witchcraft that subjugated her husband and other men to herself – witchcrafts-sss … “her witchcrafts are so many” (1 Kings 9:22).

Witchcraft is a kind of religion.  In the church at Thyatira, the New Testament Jezebel’s witchcraft took an ecclesiastical cover.  It wore a cassock and a collar.  It concealed itself under the self-proclaimed title of Prophetess.  It taught in the church.  In that refined context, it took a Christianised form: a church name, a church title, a ‘Christian’ approach.  It modified its rites and rituals, giving them a more appealing ‘Christian’ form, which put simple folks off their guards, making them vulnerable to Jezebel’s predations.  Christianity became a convenient religious cover.

The Old Testament Jezebel was the daughter of a priest, and herself was a next-generation priestess.  Ancestral and hereditary priesthood it was.  Her father was Eth-Baal, which means “with Baal” – what a name!  He was priest-king of Tyre and Sidon, over 900 years before Christ (1 Kings 1:31).  Those ancient roots spoke in Jezebel.

The Old Testament Jezebel could call a national fast, if it suited her private agenda.  Those public religious acts were not because she sought after the God of Israel (1 Kings 21:8-10).  She was a schemer, and religion was one of her tools.  The New Testament Jezebel was the same.  She took upon herself a title, which gave her a convenient platform for her schemes.  She called herself a Prophetess.  She did not fear the God whose title she bore, the God from whose altar she plotted the downfall of others in sacrifice upon her clandestine altar.

Jezebel was a very spiritual woman, but her spirituality was of a dubious kind.  She was a great teacher, but the fruit or impact of her ministry on the lives of those who gave her their ears and their heart was that they become bolder sinners, with scriptures for backing their errors.  Whoever thought differently was being ‘conservative,’ ‘old fashioned,’ and not ‘deep’ enough in the word of God.

Jezebel showed great gifts, without the fruit of the Spirit.  She had charisma but not character.  Whom you found in her congregation were not mere men.  Some were even credible “servants” of God.  They ‘submitted’ to her in their numbers: “servants,” not “servant.”  They were so given to her that they couldn’t see (or they ignored) the red flags: any anointed minister whose anointing or influence induces people to sin, emboldens people to sin, multiplies sinners, was to be avoided, but they stayed, captivated by her lordly tables of polluted food, to which the eaters had drawn too close to have discernment anymore (Revelation 2:20; 1 Kings 18:19; 22:6).

Jezebel’s was a ministry of witchcraft with the title of God, in the house of God.  Nobody who followed her and remained the same.  They got ‘connections’ to the throne, to the altar, to the Bishop of the church, but it cost them connections to the God of heaven.  Worse still, it was attracting divine judgment to their future.  They were never to know, too numbed with food and illicit sex to discern.

If Jezebel taught her hearers to eat things sacrificed to idols, if she induced the worshippers of God into idolatry, took away the fear of God from them, blurred the lines between the holy and the profane, and made them partakers of the table of devils, then she was herself what she taught others – an idolater, like her Old Testament counterpart who served Baal.  She was indeed a prophetess, but not of Christ.

For Jezebel to have been called a teacher, she must have had great communicative and persuasive skills, but skills inspired by the dark powers she served.  Everyone was wowed by her handling of the scriptures, but it gave her hearers boldness to sin.  Her ‘deep revelations’ gave them ‘scriptural’ bases for ungodly lifestyles.  Her ministry provided excuses for sin, not deliverance from it.  Even “servants” of God, after attending her noble conferences, had more liberty to mingle more freely with everyone, eat “things” from any table – the table of God and the table of devils.  After all, God is love, and He loves everyone.  Her congregation learned not to ‘discriminate’ against anyone, to accommodate everything.  Her teachings gave worshippers the liberty that other ‘conservative’ preachers did not allow.   Her followers got indiscriminate in their appetites.  Their lusts got fired up, and there was plenty to appease those strange fires.

Next door to Jezebel’s Thyatira church was the related church at Pargamos, which taught “the doctrine of Balaam” as well as “the doctrine of the Nicolaitans,” stating that gain was godliness, that one should get money, no matter how the money came.  Thus, they “cast a stumblingblock before the children of Israel,” and, like Jezebel, they made the people of God to “eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication” (Revelation 2:14).  Their teachings did not encourage holy living; they produced ‘radicals’ who were ready to ‘think outside the box’ and try ‘new things,’ not restricted by the ‘old laws’ and the old ways.  Those churches made the headlines in the news, and Jezebel stood out as ‘the only female’ with her title in all the New Dispensation!  She was a record breaker!  She loved the limelight.

Jezebel was not what she professed.  She was a hypocrite, a liar, a contradiction.  Her name meant chaste, which meant righteousness in word and deed, sexual purity, spotlessness.  Her name meant that she was virtuous and faithful.  Unfortunately, she was everything but chaste.  She took a name that she was not. She bore a name that said she was alive, whereas she was dead (Revelation 3:1).  She gave an outside impression of what she was not inside.  She called herself a prophetess of God when she was the agent of Satan in the house of God.  She was an idolator embedded in the sanctuary of God.  She gave the impression that she was calling people unto God when her agenda was to draw them away from God; to drive them into idolatry; to bring upon them the anger of the true God.  Those who judged her by her title, her name, her place around the altar of God, her outward activities, were deceived.  What she did in secret bedrooms was the opposite of what she displayed on the public pulpit.  She lived a lie in the church; a lie that only the One who saw in secret could expose.