2:18 The next major city to the east of Pergamum on the Roman highway through Asia was Thyatira. Known throughout the ancient world as a city of merchants and trade guilds, its local gods were dedicated to the city’s economic well-being. Unlike Pergamum, which was a center of civil religion in Asia, the idolatry in Thyatira was materialism, whose power is measured by society’s robust commerce. Perhaps this explains the extensive use of “tools of trade” as symbols for Christ’s lordship over humanity’s spiritual and material existence (cf. Col. 1:15–20).

The address recovers two more elements of John’s commissioning vision, which depicted Christ as a “son of man” whose eyes are like blazing fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze. John’s Christ reinterprets the earlier “a son of man” …