What the Roman Colosseum and Your Phone Have in Common
Notes from the message preached by Nate Bush at New City Church in Albuquerque, NM, on August 30, 2026.
It's easy to read about ancient Rome and feel superior. They watched people die for entertainment. They worshiped their politicians. We would never. In the third of seven letters in the book of Revelation, Jesus writes to a church living in the worst city on the list — and the letter has an uncomfortable amount to say about ours.
Where Was Pergamum, and Why Does Jesus Call It Satan's Throne?
Pergamum sat in what is now western Turkey, north of Ephesus and Smyrna. All three churches trace back to the same source: Paul spent two years working out of Ephesus, and Acts 19 says the message spread through the whole region from there.
The letter opens bluntly. "I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is." - Revelation 2:13
Pergamum had earned it. The city was the first in the region granted the right to build a temple for emperor worship, back in 29 BC. By the time Revelation was written, the emperor Domitian was styling himself lord and god. Pergamum was also the seat of the Roman governor for the entire province — and this governor held what was called the right of the sword, meaning he had the legal authority to execute.
That detail matters, because of how Jesus introduces himself in this letter: as the one holding a sharp two-edged sword. He is making a direct comparison. Rome has a sword. So do I.
Who Was Antipas?
The letter names one man. Antipas, described as a faithful witness, killed in the city where Satan dwells.
We know almost nothing else about him. What we can reconstruct is that he was likely given a choice in a Roman court — say Caesar is lord, or don't — and he said the wrong thing on purpose.
This is worth sitting with if the phrase Jesus is Lord has ever sounded like harmless church language to you. In Pergamum it was a political statement. It named where your ultimate allegiance sat, and it was the kind of statement that could end you.
Jesus commends the church for this: they held onto his name and didn't deny him, even when it cost Antipas his life.
Is Evil Just Bad People, or Is Something Behind It?
The Bible's claim is that the physical world and the spiritual world are woven together — that when you watch a history unfold, you're watching two histories at once.
Nate told a story from 2009. He was pastoring in South Florida, praying up on the volcanoes west of Albuquerque, asking God whether to plant a church here. He felt directed back to Daniel 10, a passage he'd read recently.
In it, an angel tells Daniel that his prayer was heard on the very first day — but that the messenger was held up for twenty-one days by something called the prince of Persia, and needed reinforcements to get through. A prayer answered immediately, and an answer delayed by a struggle Daniel couldn't see.
That is the shape of what Paul describes in Ephesians 6, where he says the real fight isn't against flesh and blood but against rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers.
You don't need to be religious to have felt some version of this — the sense that a problem is bigger than the people involved in it. That the dysfunction in a family, or a workplace, or a country, has a momentum nobody chose and nobody can quite stop.
Why Does Your Own Body Feel Like It's Working Against You?
The same conflict shows up at close range. Scripture describes you as an embodied soul: not just a body, and not a ghost driving one around. Your body is the vehicle your self expresses itself through, and since the fall, the two are not fully cooperating.
Peter writes about the passions of the flesh waging war against the soul. Paul puts it more desperately: he finds a law at work in his body fighting against his mind, and asks who will rescue him from it.
If you have ever done something you had already decided not to do, you have felt this. Christianity does not describe that as a willpower failure. It describes it as a war.
And the promise is not that you get evacuated out of your body. Jesus is called the firstborn from the dead — the pattern for what happens to everyone else. His resurrected body walked through walls and also ate fish on a beach. It could be touched. The hope Revelation holds out is physical and spiritual at once, both of you put back together.
What Do the Games and the Algorithm Have in Common?
Domitian had a problem: he came to power with no military record and a brother whose death looked suspicious. Historian Shane Wood describes his solution as a campaign of benevolence — buying the loyalty of the army and the affection of the public with entertainment and feasting that could run for days.
The games in Pergamum were part of that. Scholar Paul Ellis catalogs some of Domitian's innovations, and they are genuinely difficult to read: matches staged for novelty and humiliation, fighters forced into the arena, and reluctant participants prodded with hot irons to check whether they were faking death. Nobody knows how many people were killed there for amusement. Thousands, at least.
We would never sit in a stadium and watch a person be degraded for a crowd's enjoyment. We would never.
The 2026 World Happiness Report devoted its central chapter, written by Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch, to social media and young people. Its findings are debated, and the report itself presents a more complicated global picture than the headlines suggested. But the direction of the evidence is hard to wave off: heavy use appears to be pulling down the wellbeing of adolescents in English-speaking countries, girls most of all.
One example the chapter draws on is close to home. In a lawsuit filed by New Mexico's attorney general, internal Snap communications from 2022 are alleged to show employees discussing roughly ten thousand user reports of sextortion per month — with an acknowledgment that the real number was almost certainly higher, because it is not the kind of thing people report. Snap has disputed the characterization.
Sextortion works by shame. It takes an image of a person made in the image of God and turns it into leverage.
We don't build colosseums. We carry them. Whatever your feed hands you, some of it is built on stripping people of dignity for the entertainment of strangers — and it operates at a scale Rome could not have dreamed of.
Satan is in the system. That's the claim. Not that governments are evil — Paul calls government one of God's good gifts in Romans 13 — but that any system offering power as a drug can be picked up and used.
What Was Jesus Actually Correcting in This Church?
Notice the word some. Some of you hold to the teaching of Balaam. Some hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Not all. Jesus is careful about this, and we usually aren't.
Balaam was an Old Testament prophet-for-hire who couldn't curse Israel directly, so he advised a different route: send temptation instead. Israel was drawn into idolatry through sexual compromise. It worked where a frontal attack hadn't.
The Nicolaitans were the theological version of the same problem. Ellis describes them as teaching grace as a permission slip — that you could participate in pagan worship and its sexual ethic and God wouldn't mind. Ephesus had rejected this teaching. Pergamum had let it in.
The order matters. The theology came second. People wanted something, then built a framework to justify wanting it.
Does Bad Behavior by Christians Disprove Christianity?
This gets used as an argument constantly: if Christianity were true, Christians wouldn't act like that — therefore it isn't.
Nate's response was to run the logic on his own family. His Uncle Darrell once lit a firecracker in his mouth and blew his teeth out. He later lit one in his fist to prove he could keep it closed. If your family were smart, your uncle wouldn't have done that. Therefore your family is dumb.
The conclusion may or may not be true, but the argument doesn't establish it. Some people in Pergamum had been exploited by false teachers. Peter warned that this would happen. It says something real about those people. It doesn't settle whether Jesus rose from the dead.
What Are You Actually Worshiping?
Pergamum's skyline held temples to Zeus, Athena, and Dionysus, plus the imperial cult off to the side. Those weren't random. They were desires with buildings attached.
Zeus — power and control. Is that the altar you serve at?
Athena — wisdom and strategy. Is being the smartest person in the room your security?
Dionysus — pleasure and drink. Are your closest advisors named Johnny, Jack, and Jim?
The imperial cult — politics. Have you started treating an election like a salvation?
You probably don't think of yourself as worshiping anything. Most people in Pergamum didn't think they had a problem either.
What Does a Two-Edged Sword Have to Do With the Truth?
Jesus tells the ones who've compromised to repent, and says that if they don't, he'll come and make war with the sword of his mouth.
That sounds violent until you catch the contrast. The Roman governor's sword took life. Jesus's sword is his word — described in Hebrews as living and active, cutting deep enough to separate soul from spirit and expose what a person actually thinks and wants.
Rome cut to kill. Jesus cuts to heal.
If you come to his word honestly, it will not leave you flattered. It will show you things about yourself you'd rather not see. That's the point. Nobody gets healed by a doctor who won't name the problem.
What Is the Hidden Manna?
The letter ends with two promises, and the first one is food.
Manna was what God sent when the Israelites were wandering with nothing to eat — bread that showed up daily and couldn't be stockpiled. You had to trust it would come again tomorrow.
When Jesus was in the wilderness himself, fasting, the tempter told him to turn stones into bread. He answered with a line from Deuteronomy 8: people don't live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. That passage is about the manna — God let his people go hungry, then fed them, so they would learn where their life actually came from.
Two things worth noticing. Jesus, under pressure, answered with scripture he already knew by heart. That's a practical model, not a poetic one. And he later applied the manna image to himself: I am the bread of life. The thing that sustains you when there's nothing else.
What's Written on the White Stone?
The second promise is stranger. A white stone, with a new name on it that nobody knows except the person who receives it.
Read six commentaries and you'll get six explanations. Nate's read is that white stones functioned as invitations — you'd receive one with your name on it, and it got you into the party. Except this one carries a name only you and God know.
Here is why that lands. An enormous amount of a life gets spent trying to answer two questions: who am I, and where do I fit? Everything in Pergamum was offering an answer. Power. Wisdom. Pleasure. Politics. The temples were just those answers with buildings attached, and the modern versions don't need buildings.
The promise is that one day you get handed a stone with a name on it, and when you hear it you'll think: yes. That's me. That's the one.
Paul says it plainly — anyone in Christ is a new creation, the old gone and the new arrived. Revelation says the same thing about the whole world at the very end of the book. A restored physical world and a restored spiritual one, finally in the same place.
You may not know who you are. The claim of this letter is that God does.
Every one of these seven letters opens the same way. I know. I know where you live. I know what you've held onto. I know what you've let slide. It is not surveillance and it is not a performance review. It's the opening line of someone who wants to be known back.
Life Application
This week, take an honest look at your feed. Not a purge, not a dramatic gesture — just fifteen minutes of paying attention to what it's handing you and what it's doing to the way you see people. Notice how much of it depends on someone being humiliated. Then decide what stays.
Ask yourself these questions as you reflect on this message:
Where in my life have I built a justification for something I already wanted?
What am I actually organizing my life around — power, comfort, being right, politics, something else?
When have I watched something degrading and felt nothing?
Is there a truth about myself I've been avoiding because I know it would cut?
Whose answer am I currently living by for the question of who I am?
