References

Story of Antipas of Pergamum

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Helpful Resources:

Bible Hub: use this resource site to discover the original Greek and Hebrew for the words in the Bible.

PrayerMate App: this is a fantastic app to keep yourself organized and faithful in prayer, and it also has free downloadable devotionals.

Episode Transcript:

You are listening to Grace and Mercy podcast. This podcast is for people, you and me, who want to know the grace of God and how it changes the way we interact with the world. I’m your host, author Darlene Böcek, and in this 29th episode, we are going to find out what the Book of Philippians has to say about grace. We’re going to do this episode a little differently. Normally, I go word by word to find the occasions of that word in the book.

 

This time we’re going to go chapter by chapter and to discuss sequentially what the Book of Philippians says about grace. There are four chapters in the book of Philippians, and what I noticed is that the words are clustered. The words for grace are clustered. So we’re going to take a look at that sequentially. In the Book of Philippians, we realize that Paul developed the Christian concept of grace for us to understand.

 

We didn’t see a lot of the word grace in the Gospels because Paul was and we know the word, what the word grace means because of how Paul developed it and applied it in practical terms for the Christian life.

 

So we’re going to start with chapter one. Chapter one. And as expected, the very first verses has the word grace. “Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus, who are at Philip, Pie, would be overseers and deacons. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Okay, we see the word carries right there at the beginning.

 

Remember that charis is the Lord’s favor, his freely extended favor, giving himself away to people. He’s leaning toward his people. So grace to you and peace. We always see this expression, grace and peace.

 

And this podcast is called Grace and Mercy podcast. We are –in the plans–we are going to look through the word mercy. After we’re done with Revelation, we’re going to go back through and take a look at how mercy is used in the Bible. But here we have the word grace, irena, the name Irene comes from peace, grace, you and peace. Charis and irena. “Charis kai erene” means grace and peace.. This was a greeting. You remember that Jesus, when he appeared to the disciples after the Resurrection, he said Shalom, right? So the shalom is in the Christian greeting. Grace is added to that shalom, which is that important in Christianity. The grace that is coming down, this charisma machine that we’ve been talking about coming down, the grace coming down and going out to others and going back up to God is part of the greeting.

 

It became part of the greeting, so much a part of the greeting that in the Middle East, yes, they still do selam here in Turkey, shalom is used in the kind of like an aloha in Hawaii, which is just a loaded term. But grace has gone through the Latin speaking world into words like gracias. And in the greeting here that we see grace to you. The second occurrence of one of the grace terms is in Philippians where we have eucharisteo. Remember, that means thanking God.

 

Thanking. And the verses three, it says immediately after he says grace to you and peace from God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God in all my remembrance of you always, in every prayer of mine for you all, making my prayer with joy. So here we have thanking my God and making my prayer with joy. And those are the word eucharisteo, which means giving thanks or good grace.

 

Eu is a prefix for good, charis is grace, good grace. And then dives right into kara, which is joy and grace recognized. And for new listeners, this word chara / chairo, about grace recognized was used ironically in the Gospels. Most of the time it’s used as a reaction to seeing the grace of God. And one time it was ironically used in the book of Matthew

 

When it shows the Pharisees, of the temple where they rejoiced that Judas had offered to give Jesus to them. And of course the irony comes back upon us because we do rejoice that he gave himself. The irony is that it actually was a favor from God, right? He gave himself all the verses that he gave himself. He gave himself, he gave himself.

 

And so Judas had surrendered Jesus to the Pharisees, and yet it was Christ giving Himself. So we do rejoice, even though it was an ironic use of it. It is the crux of our salvation as that Christ gave Himself. So chara chairo, joy, rejoice is chairo and chara is the noun of joy. Grace recognized.

 

Verse four. Okay, then we have verse 18 two times and the word is chairo. The one I was just talking about, verse 18 says, “What then? Only in that every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed. And in that I rejoice.

 

Yes, and I will rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance.” So he’s talking here in the context of people who are preaching Christ out of bad motives. And he says, “Whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed. And in that I rejoice and I will rejoice.” So both of those, one right after the other, is the verb of rejoice.

 

Or to delight in God’s grace, to experience God’s grace and be consciously glad for his grace.

 

So if you want, I have some BOOKMARKS on my website, graceandmercypodcast.com. If you want to download a bookmark that you can put in your Bible and take a look at these words and to remember these words whenever you are reading your Bible. Okay, next occurrence is chapter one, verse 25. chara, chapter one, verse 25. “Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith, so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus because of my coming to you again.”

 

So this joy and the faith in the context of this, Paul is saying that he’s going to be he had just said to live as Christ, to die his gain. I am living my life because if I come to you, the result will be your joy. So he is putting himself into this Charisma Machine that we call… The functioning of the Church is the charisma machine. The functioning of grace in the world is the Church. You see, grace comes down, changes our lives, we react with thanksgiving and joy and giving grace to other people.

 

And so Paul recognizes here that he wants to remain and continue with them for their progress and joy in the faith, for the grace that will be coming to them. The chara, the grace recognized last occurrence couple verses later, verse 29 says this for it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him, but also suffer for his sake. Where is the word grace? There it’s the word charitzomai, which is properly to extend favor, freely give favor, to grant forgiveness and pardon favor that cancels to do something pleasant or agreeable to one to do a favor to or to gratify. And where did we see that?

 

It says, “For to you it has been granted…” Wait a second, didn’t it just talk about some bad things going on? So let’s look at the verse again. “For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him, but also suffer for his sake.” So hold your horses. What is this kind of thing that’s been granted that we suffer for his sake, “not only believe in him, but suffer for his sake”?

 

It says the continuation of the verse, “engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have.” Remember he had just a few verses earlier said “to live is Christ to die as gain.” And remember that strange verse that we see we “rejoice in our suffering,” right? The concept of rejoicing in our suffering.

 

(By the way, that is Jarvis making his presence known here. Jarvis is our African gray parrot. So if you hear some clanking or some strange sounds, that is not my stomach grumbling, that is our parrot, Jarvis.)

 

So back to this concept of suffering and rejoicing and suffering. What role does suffering have, now? I just heard a story this morning and it’s strange that it took this many years for me to hear the story, and I will not belabor  the point. But it is a really sad story occurred really close to us. Our friends are visiting us here in Izmir and they went to Pergamum today. So they were doing some research about Pergamum. Now, in Pergamum, you remember Revelation Two talks about, says… “For I know thy works and where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is, and thou holdest fast my name and has not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth. So, Antipas, they were researching about this Antipas guy who tradition holds was killed there and also is referred to in Revelation, was killed there as a martyr.

 

And the traditional account says that he was martyred during the reign of Nero by being burned in a bull-shaped altar. So he was burned alive in a metal altar shaped like a bull where his sounds would be echoed out as he was dying. So he was killed that way. And why do I bring that up in this amazing podcast we’re doing studying the Bible? Well, how is it that we have these stories?

 

Why do we have these stories of death and martyrdom? I thought this is a positive thing. That Charisma Machine is great. It’s thanksgiving, good things coming down, it’s good things going out. It’s positive, joy, thanks, giving, helping.

 

And then we have this thing that’s called grace being given. Grace that “given to us not just to believe in him, but also to suffer for his sake.”

 

The long and short of it is we maybe won’t know the full answer of why God plans for Christians to suffer. But one of the things that we do see out of it, that I’ve seen here in Izmir, in Turkey, is when we see people we love suffering for suffering injustice just because of their faith in Christ.

 

It makes us indignant and it makes our roots shoot down our feet, in a sense, our stability, our roots shoot straight down, and we stand taller. Years ago, there was a killing here. In 2007, a friend of my husband and two people working with him in Malatya were killed by some extremists. They were slaughtered terribly. And when that happened, we saw an interesting thing happen with our young fledgling church.

 

We saw people flee the church. They left. They could not stand the idea of there after us. And then we had another group of people who stood stronger, and they said, Here I am. You know, they were bolder, and we’re not going anywhere.

 

You can’t scare us away. And we saw this we’ve seen this as a persecuted church of the world. We’ve seen that persecution either blows away the chaff, in a sense, or scares them away for a while, or it builds people’s strength. So actually, there’s an expression that says the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Well, what we’ve seen here in the sense, it’s like the oil of this Charisma Machine.

 

Ultimately, any of us could die at any day from any number of sicknesses or diseases. Not all of them are pleasant. We could die from a car accident or from cancer. Some cancers are more painful and longer lasting, or we could die from a stroke, or we can have some sort of an ailment where we are in a coma for years. We don’t know how we are going to die, but we know for a fact we will die.

 

And one of those ways of death is in God’s wisdom, is through suffering for the name of Christ. So we’re all going to have to die, and some of us will die that way. In the early church, it was so noble, it was so honorable, in a sense, to be chosen to die as a martyr that people were kind of rushing to be identified as Christians because it was an honor. And we can’t really understand that in this day and age as much because we kind of shy away from well, I mean, humans shy away from pain, don’t they? But we as humans, we don’t like the idea of death.

 

We want to live. We want to live with our families, and we want to live in our nice houses with our pets and our cappuccinos, we like leisure. But alongside of leisure, there is this thing of suffering and God sometimes ordains suffering for us for a season in all of this. This is part of the charisma machine where it says directly that it is granted to us for the sake of Christ, that we suffer for his sake. And that word for “granted to us” is how God shows himself gracious.

 

The definition charizomai universally to show one self gracious, kind and benevolent. So let that work its way into your mind that the suffering for the sake of Christ is a way that he shows himself. Benevolence I think there’s another way of seeing it.

 

When a person chooses to persecute a Christian because of the Charisma Machine, because this is all about kindness and goodness and generosity and thanksgiving and joy. And when they choose to hurt that, it actually shows… Goodness shines more and evil shines more. Right? We see evil clearly in those moments. We see hatred clearly because what they’re stopping is a good thing, right?

 

All right, I think we’re going to stop there for episode 29. We will continue next time with the continuation of Philippians in episode 30. Let’s pray.

 

Heavenly Father, I thank you for the story of Antipas. We didn’t know him, but he was a brother in the faith, and by living out the Christian life, he was targeted as an enemy of the world.

 

And we feel for him, and we don’t like the idea of a scary death like that. But we know that our love for you is so strong that if you grant it that we should suffer for you, we will at the same time be given the strength and the grace to be able to face that difficulty. And even as we face the smaller difficulties of sickness or harassment or just troubles all around us, we ask that you would give us the same kind of grace to suffer well and to be rejoicing in our suffering. Pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.

 

This has been Grace and Mercy podcast with author Darlene Böcek and you can find the show notes for this episode, including links and a chart that shows all the uses of the word grace in the book of Philippians at graceandmercypodcast.com. Would love to get a review on iTunes or Spotify. If you wouldn’t mind, please go there and enter what you think about this podcast.

 

It’d be really encouraging to me and it would motivate me to keep moving forward on this podcast. Alright, take care.

 

See you next time. Bye bye.