The Church in Ephesus

John starts off chapter 2 by directly addressing the church in Ephesus. And there’s a lot of good and a lot of bad that he has to say about the church in Ephesus.

First things first, he says the Ephesian church has withstood major attacks faithfully.

The Temple of Artemis was one of the seven wonders of the world. You may have read about it in an old history book or something like that. But the Temple of Artemis was located in Ephesus, and it was kind of like the center of ancient Roman paganism at that point in time.

The town of Ephesus was just absolutely overtaken by pagan worship, and they saw the worship of Artemis in particular, as well as the rest of the Roman gods and especially the chief foundational god of Rome, Caesar, the emperor himself, as a matter of loyalty to Rome and loyalty to Ephesus.

You could not be a patriotic citizen of Ephesus if you didn’t worship Artemis of the Ephesians.

You couldn’t be a patriotic citizen of Rome if you didn’t worship Caesar.

They referred to Caesar at that point in time in the Roman Empire as Lord and God, as Savior, as the divine bringer of peace.

These are divine titles.

You didn’t just submit to Caesar as a ruler. You worshiped Caesar as a god.

And if you didn’t, they saw you as suspect at best.

Essentially, Ephesus was kind of one of the centers of what they call the imperial cult. And what that meant was that you were under unimaginable pressure to worship both the pagan god Artemis and the pagan god Caesar, to the point that you couldn’t do almost anything unless you publicly poured out your worship on both Artemis and Caesar.

The Guild System and the Pressure to Worship Rome

Very specifically, there was something called the guild system.

Essentially what was happening with the guild system was you couldn’t be in almost any trade unless you were part of the guild.

This was not quite like a union or something like that. It’s not like, oh, you’ve got to be part of the union if you want to work at this Ford plant or something like that.

This was a different thing.

This was like you are not allowed to do business, period, if you’re not part of the guild.

You cannot be a leather tanner if you’re not part of the leather tanning guild.

You can’t be a tentmaker if you’re not part of the tentmaking guild.

You can’t be a merchant in the marketplace if you’re not part of the merchants’ guild, and so on and so forth.

And at the same time, if you’re not a member of the guild, very often people who are members of the guild will not sell to you.

So, if you need to buy a product that is sold by one of the guild members in the marketplace, you have to be part of that guild. Otherwise, they won’t provide you with any of the stuff that they are selling.

They are walling you out from buying and they’re walling you out from selling.

That’s going to be kind of important later on when we get to a certain thing where you can’t buy or sell if you don’t have it, right?

Revelation is not a puzzle that’s meant to be solved. It is a very straightforward letter written in the form of apocalyptic literature that is confusing to us, but that the seven churches would have immediately recognized and understood when they received it.

When John talks about the mark of the beast, you cannot buy or sell unless you are marked by the beast.

They would have pretty quickly understood.

He’s not saying there’s some kind of implant they’re going to put in your wrist and on your forehead that you have to scan in order to buy stuff.

They would have very quickly been like, “Oh, yeah. Okay.”

So, he’s kind of riffing on the way that if you’re not part of these guilds, you can’t do anything.

You can’t sell in the marketplace.

You can’t buy raw materials to be able to build your own business.

You’re basically walled out from the economic life of the empire.

You’re basically walled out from the public life of the empire.

And that was a problem because you couldn’t be part of the guilds without worshiping the gods of the guilds.

You literally couldn’t be a part of the guild without going to the guild feasts.

Now, what’s wrong with going to a guild feast?

It’s because those guild feasts were put on in honor of the patron gods over the guild.

So each guild had at least one or two patron gods.

It’s like this guild, it’s leather tanners, but it’s in honor of this pagan god.

This other guild over here, it’s tentmakers, but it’s in honor of this pagan god.

This guild over here, it is this thing, but it’s in honor of this pagan god.

And every single one of the guilds were in honor of the kind of chief pagan god of Rome, the emperor Caesar himself.

And so at every guild feast, one, you would have to toast to Caesar, our Lord and God, our Savior and bringer of peace.

You literally were required to worship Caesar at the guild feasts that you had to attend in order to be part of the guild.

At exactly the same time, at those guild feasts, they would literally sacrifice animals to the other pagan gods.

So, you’d make an animal sacrifice to Artemis of the Ephesians.

You’d make an animal sacrifice to this other pagan god that this guild has as kind of a patron over it.

And you would make a sacrifice to Caesar.

So if you are a Christian, you can’t be part of a guild without making a ritual sacrifice to a whole stable of false gods.

So the choice that stands in front of you as a Christian is, okay, do I go worship a bunch of false gods, including Caesar?

The early Jews and Christians in the first century often referred to both Rome itself and Caesar as what?

The beast.

So if you don’t worship the beast at the guild feast, you essentially cannot buy or sell.

You cannot be part of the economic life of the empire.

You have no power.

And on top of all of that, at those guild feasts, they typically had ritual orgies.

That sounds fake, but it’s not.

Part of how so many of these ancient pagan gods in Rome were worshiped was through ritual orgies.

They would have cult prostitutes.

These were prostitutes who were enslaved girls, usually about 13 years old.

So, this is kind of like an Epstein Island type thing.

But they would worship the pagan gods such as Artemis by having forcible sex with enslaved teenage prostitutes in honor of the gods or the goddess.

You worshiped these pagan gods and goddesses by having sex with underage girls who aren’t allowed to say no because they’re slaves.

Those were the entry fee of almost all economic life, public life, and so on and so forth in the ancient Roman Empire.

Ephesus Stands Firm Against Outside Pressure

And yet, amidst all of this intense pressure from the rest of Ephesus and the pagan government of Rome and so on and so forth, the Ephesian Christians have actually stood strong.

They’ve said no.

They’ve resisted the pressure.

They have accepted the consequences that come with faithfully saying no to the false gods of Rome and the wicked and unjust practices that come with it.

They’ve said, “If I have to be poor to be faithful, I will be poor.”

And at exactly the same time, they’ve been faithful from attacks from the inside.

We’ve already seen that Ephesus was constantly under attack from false teachers.

The false teachers wouldn’t leave the Ephesian church alone.

We saw in Acts chapter 20, Paul said false teachers are going to make their way into your churches and try to derail them. You need to be on guard for that.

First and Second Timothy, Paul says, “Hey, those false teachers I warned you about are there in your churches now, and they are leading your churches astray. You have got to get rid of them.”

He sent Timothy to go clean house and kind of start the church in Ephesus from scratch.

We see the same thing in Second Peter. It was written to a bunch of churches here in Asia Minor, the same exact region where this is.

And Peter goes on this intense diatribe about the false teachers who are there, and he pours himself into combating the false teaching that they’ve been normalizing in the church in Ephesus and throughout Asia Minor.

We see the same thing again in First, Second, and Third John.

He is writing against a group of false teachers he calls the antichrists.

So the history of Ephesus early on was just false teacher after false teacher targeting the Ephesian church.

And as a result, Ephesus has got a lot of practice fighting off false teachers and rooting out false teaching.

And that’s a good thing because there’s another group of false teachers.

John talks about a group called the Nicolaitans.

We know very little about the Nicolaitans.

But one thing that is particularly clear about them from Revelation and beyond is that the Nicolaitans seem to have been pressuring the Ephesian Christians from the inside to start participating in the guild feasts, to start joining the guilds, going to the guild feasts, and just taking the L.

It seems like the Nicolaitans were essentially teaching, listen, people keep getting killed.

People keep getting arrested.

They keep getting martyred.

They keep having everything taken away from them out of faithfulness to Jesus.

And it’s not worth it.

It seems like the Nicolaitans were teaching some version of the idea that the Ephesians should just compromise with Rome on this, that they should just start going to the guild feasts, make the worshipful offering to Caesar, just declare that he is Lord and God, that he is Savior, that he is the bringer of peace.

You could just worship Caesar on the side, but make Jesus your primary object of worship.

That you could just go and make the ritual sacrifice to Artemis of the Ephesians and the other pagan gods that the guilds are devoted to, and you can just sort of worship them on the side just as a way of getting by, but then make Jesus the primary object of your worship.

And that you can just go and practice those ritual orgies and just, you know, don’t worry about it, right?

Jesus understands.

He knows this is something you just have to do.

You have no choice.

You have to go have ritual sex with a 13-year-old girl at a guild feast.

For some reason, that was the Nicolaitans.

And so many of the churches throughout Asia Minor seem to have fallen hook, line, and sinker into the lies of the Nicolaitans.

But not Ephesus.

John says, “You have resisted the Nicolaitans. You have rejected the Nicolaitans.”

And that is great.

He says, “You’ve learned from your past mistakes.”

The Ephesians have fallen for false teachers before, but they are not going to fall for false teachers again.

He says, “That is beautiful.”

Ephesus Has Lost Its First Love

But in avoiding their old error, he says they’ve drifted into a new error.

He says they have lost their first love.

What is he talking about when he says that they have lost their first love?

Well, I think he is actually still talking about the same thing he was talking about.

First, he talked about the way that their resistance against the Nicolaitans is rooted in good faithfulness to the message of truth.

And now he is talking about the way that their good resistance against the Nicolaitans is also rooted in something that’s not so faithful.

It’s also rooted in a kind of callousness.

It’s rooted in a kind of paranoia.

It’s rooted in a kind of disdain for others.

We see this happen a lot today with people who run like discernment ministries that are meant to expose false teachers.

You see a lot of people who start off with good, well-intentioned ministries aimed at exposing false teachers.

But eventually what happens is that they start to see false teaching under every rock.

They start to see false teaching around every corner.

They start to see false teaching in absolutely everything.

And they become hyper-suspicious of everybody and just assume that everybody is a false teacher until they get clear proof otherwise.

They are rightly passionate about doctrinal faithfulness, doctrinal purity, but in the process they have lost their love for people.

They’ve lost their love for one another and they’ve lost their love for outsiders.

They’ve lost their love for lost people.

They’ve lost their love for people who are mistaken about some things.

They’ve lost their love for absolutely anybody who doesn’t perfectly tick all of their doctrinal boxes.

They become a cold people.

They’ve become so defensive that they don’t actually have any Christlike love for any of the people around them.

And the result is that their church is actually on the verge of falling apart.

Your church can fall apart because you fall into false teaching.

And it can fall apart because you’ve become so paranoid about false teaching that you are incapable of actually being a community.

That is why the liberal church is dying, right?

You look at like the Episcopal Church, you look at the United Methodist Church, you look at so many of the denominations that are going liberal that are just walking away from truth entirely.

They are dying.

And the fundamentalist church is dying because they keep eating themselves.

The independent fundamental Baptist church in your neighborhood has like three people, and two of them won’t talk to each other because they disagree over whether you should restrict the Lord’s Supper just to practicing Christians.

Or you should restrict the Lord’s Supper just to practicing Christians who go to your own church.

Or you should restrict the Lord’s Supper just to practicing Christians who go to your own church and also tithe.

Or you should restrict the Lord’s Supper just to practicing Christians who go to your own church and tithe and have been baptized at least four separate times just to make absolutely sure that it sticks.

There’s no such thing as close enough for them.

There’s no such thing as doctrinally similar enough for them.

Everything has to be a battlefield.

Everything has to be a war ground.

This passion to root out false teaching, this passion to preserve the truth has actually become unhinged so that they’re no longer preserving the truth.

All they’re doing is foaming at the mouth and starting endless forever wars in their own pews.

Ephesus has become like that.

“I Will Remove Your Lampstand”

And so Jesus warns them.

He says, “If you continue on this path, I’m going to remove your lampstand.”

Now, it’s important to understand that’s actually not a threat.

That’s a warning.

The image of the lampstand is an Old Testament image, and it describes the way that God’s people are meant to be like a light-bearing people.

God’s people shine the light of God out into the surrounding community.

When Jesus says, “If they keep on this path, He will remove their lampstand,” what He’s saying is actually really simple.

He’s saying, “Hey, you guys aren’t bearing My light. You guys are not shining My light. You guys are just strangling each other to death over tiny, minute doctrinal things because your good passion to root out false teaching has turned into a nonstop battleground.”

So your church is actually enveloped in a kind of darkness that looks like light.

And so Jesus says through John, listen, I am the One who walks among the lampstands.

In other words, I am present with you.

I am intimately aware of everything that is going on with you.

Everything about your life.

I am near to you.

And because I am near to you, that ought to stir up your love.

That should stir up your love not only for Me, but for My people.

That should stir up your love for each other.

That should stir up your love for outsiders.

He says, “You’ve forgotten that I am near to you. And you need to relearn My nearness to you, My intimacy with you, so that you can learn how to be near one another. You can learn how to be intimate toward one another. You can learn to be loving towards one another and towards others in the same way that I am loving towards you.”

This is in exactly the same way, I am the One who holds the seven stars.

That image of the stars is an image from the Old Testament.

Sometimes it means like a human ruler.

Sometimes it means like an angelic representative of some sort.

We’ve seen in the New Testament that there’s something going on in some way.

Churches are—I don’t even know what the word I’m looking for is—but it’s like there are angels over each church in some sense.

We don’t know how that works.

We don’t know exactly what it means.

But whatever the case, Jesus holds the seven stars.

So either He holds the human rulers, like the human leaders over each of these churches, or He holds the angelic representatives over these churches.

Whatever the case, the point is the same.

He’s saying, “I hold the destiny of your church in My hands. I hold the leadership of your church in My hands. I am the One who’s carrying your church. I am the One who is directing your church. I am the One who will push your church into the future further along the path.”

And that means that your confidence should come from Me, not from your ability to police everybody’s doctrine so aggressively that nothing that is even slightly wrong can ever possibly get through.

He says, “Your paranoia, doctrinal extremism that’s moved you to push everybody away and constantly divide and just fall apart as a church more and more and more comes from the fact that you don’t trust Me. You trust in yourself.”

The result is that your relationships among one another and with people outside the church have decayed radically.

The solution to that is remembering your relationship with Me.

I am the God who walks with you, and therefore you can relearn how to walk with one another.

The Tree of Life

And He says, “If you will internalize this, if you will listen to My voice, if you will take what I am saying and walk forward into the future with it, then I will let you eat from the tree of life.”

This is a metaphor.

He’s not saying, “I’m going to give you some heavenly produce from a special tree.”

That is not the point.

The point has to do with what the tree of life represents.

When did humanity have the tree of life?

We had the tree of life when we were in the Garden of Eden.

What was special about the Garden of Eden?

It was not that it was a pretty garden.

What was special about the Garden of Eden was that we were in God’s presence fully, immediately, with absolutely nothing standing between us.

We had His unmitigated presence, His unmediated presence.

When He says to the one who overcomes, to the one who is victorious, “I will allow them to eat from the tree of life,” the point that He is saying is, “I will allow you to experience the fullness of My presence.”

He says, right now I am the God who walks with you, who walks among the lampstands, who carries the stars of your lampstand.

But you still aren’t experiencing the absolute fullness of My presence.

The day is coming when you will be fully present with Me.

The coldness of your hearts right now will be warmed by the warmth of My unmitigated presence.

In other words, the solution to your relational decay is to walk with Me again.

You will remember your first love as you walk with Me again.

Begin to see Me once again as your love, not just as a kind of representative of the doctrine that you are sworn to defend.

That’s the church in Ephesus.

The Church in Smyrna

Smyrna has a very similar situation to Ephesus, but they have responded very differently to that situation.

Ephesus was under extreme pressure by the pagans in Rome.

Smyrna was under extreme pressure by the militant Jewish groups that were in some of the synagogues in Asia Minor.

The Smyrna church has been withstanding attacks not only by the city of Smyrna itself, because Smyrna was fiercely loyal to Rome.

And just like in Ephesus, in Smyrna, if you refused to refer to Caesar as your Lord and God, your Savior, your bringer of peace, and give him your worship, they saw that as treason.

Smyrna was actually the first town in Asia Minor that built a temple to Rome itself.

They treated Rome as a goddess over them that they worshiped.

So they worshiped the emperor of Rome as Lord and God, Savior, bringer of peace, and they worshiped Rome itself.

They worshiped the empire as a goddess over them, and they worshiped the stable of pagan gods who were popular in Smyrna.

So on the one hand, Smyrna is under attack.

The church in Smyrna is being constantly pressured by Rome to worship Caesar, worship Rome, and worship the gods of Smyrna.

And at exactly the same time, they are under unbelievably horrific attacks from militant synagogues.

The “Synagogue of Satan”

Now, not all the synagogues in the first century were militant.

So many of the synagogues were actually predominantly made up of Christians.

So many of the synagogues converted almost en masse to become followers of Jesus.

But there were also synagogues that responded exactly the opposite way.

That responded with resistance.

That responded by rejecting and opposing Jesus and by becoming vicious persecutors of every Jew who did.

And there are specific local groups of Jews in Smyrna who actively persecuted the Christians.

And specifically they denounced the Christians in Smyrna to the Roman government.

They made up false stories about the church in Smyrna.

They told the Roman government that the church in Smyrna was made up of revolutionaries.

They told the Roman government that the church in Smyrna was made up of insurrectionists.

That the church in Smyrna was made up of people who wanted to dethrone Caesar and instead raise up a new king that they call Jesus.

They were accusing them of sedition.

And as a result, the government of Smyrna persecuted the Christians in Smyrna even harder than they did before.

And as a result, John says, “These people claim to be Jews, but they are not. They are a synagogue of Satan.”

Now, when he says that, he’s not saying that Jews in general are a synagogue of Satan.

He’s not saying that synagogues in general are synagogues of Satan.

He’s saying this specific local group of Jews in this specific militant synagogue.

They are a synagogue of Satan.

They’re acting as instruments of Satan, right down to the point that they are falsely accusing the church in Smyrna.

Satan is the accuser.

And the militant synagogue is accusing the church in Smyrna of sedition and insurrection, which is triggering all this persecution.

The “Ten Days” of Suffering

And John says these attacks are going to continue.

And he says these attacks are actually going to get worse.

He says these attacks are going to heat up even more for ten days.

Now, that is a very specific Old Testament reference.

A lot of what happens when we get into the book of Revelation is people don’t do their homework, right?

Preachers and teachers don’t even try to look into what John may have been talking about when these things come up, and they just sort of make stuff up.

And so, a lot of people get to this and they say that ten days, the persecution, there will be persecution for ten days and then they’ll be removed from that persecution.

That’s talking about the rapture.

No, it’s not.

I am not going to tackle whether or not the rapture is true or not, whether or not it is consistent with God’s Word or not.

However, the rapture is not in the Bible.

The Bible does not teach the concept of rapture.

It is literally not in Scripture.

The concept of a rapture came from a girl in the 1800s. She was part of a group that was very, very heavy into dreams and visions. And she had a dream or vision of the rapture, so to speak.

And when she had that dream and vision, she shared it in like a revival meeting, and it became really popular and influential and so on and so forth.

And it was just kind of off to the races.

The concept of the rapture did not come from Scripture itself.

It came from the dream of this teenage girl in Scotland in the 1800s.

But that does not mean the rapture isn’t real.

It absolutely could be real.

Because that dream or vision that she had might have been a real dream or vision from the Lord.

And so if this teenage girl from Scotland’s dream of the rapture was a vision from God, then yeah, okay, cool, good, rapture.

Awesome.

However, it’s really important we don’t read the rapture into the Bible because the Bible never teaches anything even remotely like the concept of the rapture.

It’s actually not here.

So, if this isn’t talking about the seven years of tribulation and the rapture, what is it talking about?

Well, Daniel chapter 1 and a whole bunch of other ancient Near Eastern texts use this term, the ten days, as a kind of catch-all symbol, a kind of image, a metaphor for a period of like refining or a period of like testing.

So like refining gold or refining metal.

You know, you test metal.

A blacksmith tests gold.

He’s not saying he tests to see if it’s good enough.

He’s saying, you know, he like refines it.

He hammers out the impurities and stuff like that.

They would constantly use the ten days as kind of like an example of just a hypothetical period in which you are being refined under pressure.

And so in this letter, John is saying, you’re going to be persecuted beyond even what you’ve already experienced.

And it’s going to be unbelievably severe.

It’s going to be one of those ten days like Daniel talks about, like so many other ancient Eastern texts talk about.

It’s going to be a period of profoundly difficult refining.

It says, “Be prepared to suffer, but it won’t be forever.”

This is not a never-ending period of suffering.

This is ten days of suffering.

Remain faithful amidst the ten days of suffering, even if it ultimately ends in your own death.

Jesus Is the First and the Last

And Jesus says, “You can do this because I am watching over you through it.”

Jesus reminds them that He is the first and the last.

He is before all things and He is after all things.

Jesus is all the way back from eternity past and all the way forward into eternity future.

In other words, He controls history.

He says, “Rome can persecute you, but Rome is not in control. Rome’s persecution is ultimately a tool in My hands that I am repurposing to grow you, bless you, and refine you.”

Jesus says, “I am the One who died and came to life.”

He says, “I passed through death just like you may pass through death.”

He says, “I emerged victorious over death, and if you pass through death like I did, you will also be victorious over death.”

He says, “You might die during this ten days of intense persecution. But I have defeated death and I will undo your death. I will overcome your death. I will reverse your death.”

You may die a kind of death, but you will not die the true death that awaits My enemies.

He says, “There is only one true death, and that is the second death, and that second death is reserved for My enemies.”

You will never taste it.

Your death isn’t truly a death.

He says, “Here’s who the second death awaits: Rome. Rome will be swallowed up in the second death. And those militant synagogues will be swallowed up in the second death.”

He says, “I have the power to cast body and soul into the second death, and I have the power to grant eternal life, and you have been granted eternal life because you do not have to worry about what Rome does to you or what the synagogues do to you because I will undo every last bit of it.”

That is the church in Smyrna.

The Church in Pergamum

Pergamum is an interesting case.

The church in Pergamum has withstood attacks from the center of the imperial cult in Asia Minor.

Just like Ephesus, Pergamum was another one of the kind of imperial cult centers.

You actually see some really incredible things—and by incredible, I mean terrible—in Pergamum.

Pergamum was where the Great Altar of Zeus was located.

They also had a temple to Roma and Augustus.

And they would use those temples for loyalty tests, loyalty oaths.

You would declare your loyalty to the Roman Empire by worshiping the goddess Roma.

You would declare your loyalty to Rome by worshiping Augustus, the former emperor, as a god.

Once again, you would say, “Hail Caesar Augustus, Lord and God, Savior and bringer of peace.”

At the same time, there was a thriving cult around a false god called Asclepius.

Asclepius was a serpent-shaped god.

We could go on and on and on.

Between Ephesus and Pergamum, this was the center of ancient Roman paganism.

And as a result, Jesus calls it where Satan has his throne.

Faithful Where Satan Has His Throne

And as the church in Pergamum goes about its life together there, where Satan has his throne in the center of pagan worship in the Roman Empire, what’s happened is that the Pergamum government has killed so many of the Christians in Pergamum.

The church in Pergamum has consistently refused to worship Caesar as a god.

Refused to worship Asclepius.

Refused to worship the Roman Empire personified in the temple goddess Roma.

Refused to worship Zeus at the Great Altar in Pergamum.

And as a result, their disloyalty to Rome has been punished in the form of arrests, in the form of confiscations.

They’ve had their land taken, their goods taken, their businesses taken, and so on and so forth.

And in the form of torture and even death.

They’ve been martyred.

Especially, John mentions a man named Antipas.

He was probably a leader of the church in Pergamum at some point, but he was ultimately arrested, tortured, and then killed as a warning shot to the rest of the Christians in Pergamum.

They were under this intense pressure to conform to the idolatrous, unjust, and wicked ways of the Roman Empire.

And amidst all of this, they’ve been faithful up until now.

Because after so long of watching Antipas martyred for his faithfulness, and then another one martyred for their faithfulness, and then another one martyred for her faithfulness, again and again and again, after watching friend after friend, brother in Christ after brother in Christ, family member after family member get taken by Rome and separated from their head, eventually you start to waver.

Ninety-nine percent of people are eventually going to break under the weight of that.

And that is exactly what is happening in Pergamum.

Probably as a result of all of this persecution, all of this suffering, all of this pain, all of this loss, what eventually happens is that they start to listen to the Nicolaitans.

They start to listen to a group that John calls essentially the Balaamites.

Whether it’s the Balaamites or the Nicolaitans or, as we’re going to see in another one of the churches later, the Jezebelites, these are three different terms that all seem to kind of be referring to the same problem.

And that is false teachers have grown up in these churches.

They’ve infiltrated these churches, and they have been teaching, just like they tried to but failed to at Ephesus, they have been teaching, hey, just compromise with Rome.

Just do what Rome wants.

Just worship Rome’s idols on the side.

Jesus can be your main God, but just worship the idols on His side, okay?

And then Rome will leave you alone.

Just make a sacrifice to Caesar, and then Rome will leave you alone.

Just go to the guild feast.

Just have sex with a 13-year-old enslaved pagan cult prostitute girl.

And then Rome will get off your back.

You can serve Jesus as your main thing, and then just do this on the side.

He’ll understand.

But John says that is not how it works.

The Balaamites and Nicolaitans

He says these false teachers are exactly like Balaam.

Balaam was an Old Testament false prophet.

And Balaam specifically led Israel to start throwing feasts in honor of the pagan gods of the surrounding nations.

Does that sound familiar?

Balaam specifically got the Israelites to start practicing really horrific forms of sexual sin as worship rituals for the pagan fertility gods of the surrounding nations.

He specifically got the Israelites and the Judahites to start worshiping pagan gods, blending the worship of Yahweh with false worship of false gods.

In exactly the same way today, the Nicolaitans that John is talking about, they’ve infiltrated the church in Pergamum, and they’ve started to convince some of the Pergamum Christians to start participating in the pagan guild feasts, to start making those sacrifices to the pagan gods of Pergamum, to start worshiping Caesar at those pagan guild feasts in Pergamum, to start participating in the ritual orgies with underage cult prostitutes at the guild feasts in Pergamum, to start declaring that Caesar is Lord and God and Savior and bringer of peace as a way of protecting themselves from persecution.

The One With the Sharp Double-Edged Sword

Amidst all of this, Jesus reminds them, “I am the One who has the sharp double-edged sword.”

He says there is the double-edged sword coming from the mouth of King Jesus.

He is once again using a very specific image.

On the one hand, that image is an Old Testament image, but in exactly the same way, that image would also have resonated with something very specific in the culture of Pergamum.

And that was the sword of Rome.

Pergamum was the center of what you could call Rome’s wielding of the sword.

The sword was a term that they used at that point in time that referred to the power of the state to kill.

It was Rome’s power over life and death.

Rome had the power to kill you.

They had the authority to kill you.

They had the right to kill you.

The empire held your life in its hands.

They called that the sword.

So when they executed somebody, they called it wielding the sword.

When they waged war, they called it wielding the sword.

And on and on and on.

And Pergamum was the town that they carried out so much of their execution, so much of their sword work.

And so if you lived in Pergamum, you lived in kind of the capital of the sword.

And every time the government of Rome or the government of Pergamum put someone to death for following Jesus, refusing to worship Caesar, refusing to worship the pagan gods of Rome, they called it wielding the sword.

Jesus says, “Here’s the thing. I’m the One with the real sword.”

He says the true sword that has power over life and death is My authoritative word.

He says if I say die, they die.

If I say to Caesar, drop dead, he drops dead.

If I say to the Roman Empire, crumble to the dust, it crumbles to the dust.

The true sword is the sword of My word.

And He says, “My word is going to judge the Roman Empire for all of its idolatry, for all of its injustice, for all of its wickedness, for all of its bloodshed and conquest.”

He says, “You’re afraid of the wrong sword.”

You are worshiping the false gods of Rome in order to get out of being struck down by its sword.

But you should be afraid of My sword.

All Rome can do with its flimsy human sword is take away your life.

But I can cast you forever into the pit of hell with the sword of My mouth.

The White Stone, the New Name, and the Hidden Manna

But He says, “You don’t need to be afraid because what I want to give you is not a sword strike. What I want to give you is hidden manna, a white stone, and a new name.”

He says, “Rome has named you as a traitor. Rome has named you as treasonous. Rome has named you as an enemy, and as a result they have been striking you down with their sword.”

But I give you a new name.

The name I give you is victor.

The name that I give you is My child.

The name that I give you is the people of God who are safe forever.

Even if you are struck down in this life, you are safer than safe.

And the example that He uses is He gives them a white stone.

That’s a very specific historical thing that, again, is confusing to us, but it’s not a puzzle.

They would have immediately known exactly what He was talking about because in ancient Rome, Rome gave out white stones as admission tickets to events.

They gave them out as legal acquittal.

You won your legal case.

If there was a case against you and you proved your innocence, they would give you a white stone.

And that white stone represented that you had been formally acquitted.

You had been formally declared to be innocent.

White stones were kind of like a symbol of favor.

If you were a powerful figure in Rome, you could give white stones to your favored people, your favored servants, and so on and so forth.

White stones were used as kind of a way of identifying yourself as well.

And so when He says, “I will give you a white stone,” what He’s saying is Rome has cast you as an object of disfavor, but I have cast you as an object of favor.

Rome has barred you out from the life of the empire, but I am drawing you into the life of My eternal kingdom.

Rome has put you on the other side of its wall, but I have brought down the wall and brought you into My presence.

Rome has called you guilty, but I have called you innocent.

He says, I am undoing everything Rome has done to you.

All the threats Rome is waging against you, I am putting away forever.

And three, He uses the example of hidden manna.

This is again a direct reference to the Old Testament.

The Israelites were wandering through the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land, and they were in danger of starving.

But the Lord provided for them with manna that rained from heaven.

He provided them with food.

He sustained them.

He protected them.

He kept them alive.

He was carrying them through the wilderness so they wouldn’t starve to death and die.

It was His provision during the trial of the wilderness years.

And in the same way, He’s saying, “I will provide for you during this trial, during this period of intense suffering and persecution.”

He says, “I will protect and provide for you in the same way I protected and provided for the Israelites in the wilderness with the manna that rained from heaven.”

That is the church in Pergamum.

The Church in Thyatira

The Thyatira church faced attacks from the pagan guild system just like Ephesus, just like Pergamum.

They were in a city that was dominated by textile guilds.

They were dominated by dye guilds.

They would dye fabrics and other stuff like that.

They were dominated by leatherworking guilds.

They were dominated by metalworking guilds.

There were artisan guilds and so on and so forth.

And just like all those other cities, they would regularly have these guild feasts in honor of the pagan gods that were associated with each guild.

And just like the other cities, you could not make it in Thyatira if you weren’t part of the guild.

And you could not be part of the guild if you didn’t take part in the guild feast.

So it was economically necessary from a human standpoint.

But if you went to the guild feasts, you had to participate in that same ritual worship of the pagan gods, ritual worship of Caesar as a god, ritual worship of the Roman Empire as a goddess, and ritual orgies involving underage cult prostitutes who were enslaved.

And so the crossroads that the church in Thyatira faced was either join the pagan worship and the wickedness of these feasts or lose your livelihood.

And just like in Pergamum, the result was that a number of the Christians in the Thyatira church started to listen to false teachers.

Very specifically, they started listening to—we don’t know if this is one false teacher or if John is talking about a group of false teachers and just using Jezebel as kind of an image of this group.

We don’t know.

It doesn’t matter.

But they started listening to these false teachers, the Jezebel.

The Jezebelites and the “Deep Secrets”

The Jezebelites seem to be exactly the same as the Balaamites.

They seem to be exactly the same as the Nicolaitans.

The Jezebelites are teaching exactly the same type of things.

John compares them to Jezebel because in the Old Testament, Queen Jezebel led Israel to start worshiping the false god Baal.

And in the same way, this false teacher or group of false teachers in Thyatira that John refers to as Jezebel, they are apparently teaching, hey, just go to the guild feast.

Just join the guild.

Just worship Caesar.

Just participate in the pagan rituals.

Just participate in the pagan orgies.

Just sleep with the cult prostitutes.

Just do it on the side.

Jesus can be your main God.

But just do this on the side so that Rome won’t persecute you.

Just accommodate pagan Rome.

Just accommodate pagan Thyatira.

Just accommodate the pagan guilds.

Just compromise with the pagans who are pressuring you.

And at exactly the same time, it seems like Jezebel or the Jezebelites were teaching a kind of weird superstition.

They were teaching a kind of weird mystical thing.

They were teaching “deep secrets.”

Now that is an important term because that is the same kind of term that we see a lot of early mystery religions, a lot of first- and second-century kind of proto-Gnostic groups use, the term that we’re translating to “deep secrets” here.

Essentially, they taught that God has revealed special spiritual secrets to certain special people.

That you can ascend to a higher spiritual plane if you can crack some special code.

If you can find the right collection of numbers, if you can figure out the right combination of people from the Old Testament genealogies and other stuff like that, you can attain these angelic visions.

There are spiritual beings that will come and reveal themselves to you, and they’ll tell you special secrets, and they’ll give you special powers and special pleasures and special rewards and stuff like that.

They’re replacing the relatively simple and straightforward truths of the gospel with this weird superstitious nonsense.

John says, “Do not listen to Jezebel or the Jezebelites because anyone who follows after these Jezebel-type false teachers are going to face the same end that Jezebel herself faced in the Old Testament.”

He says the Lord will strike her children dead.

He’s not saying that God is literally going to kill people in the church right now.

But what he’s talking about is her spiritual followers will be destroyed alongside the world, alongside the darkness, alongside the brokenness, the fallenness, the devil and the forces of darkness.

In the end, they will be judged alongside them, condemned alongside them, because her spiritual children are choosing to live as enemies of King Jesus along with her.

Jesus Is the True Son of God

And so Jesus reminds them, “I am the Son of God.”

He actually says that for a very specific reason.

It’s not just to remind them of the obvious.

It’s because there in Thyatira, alongside Asclepius, alongside Roma and so on and so forth, one of the chief gods in Thyatira was the god Apollo.

And the god Apollo, very much like Caesar himself, was referred to as the son of God.

And so you would worship the false god Apollo by calling him the son of God.

And you would worship the false god King Caesar by calling him the son of God.

Jesus is reminding them, “No, there is only one Son of God, and He’s Me.”

He’s saying, “The true Son of God is speaking to you right now. And He is watching you with His eyes of fire.”

He says Jesus has the eyes like fire, which again was an Old Testament image of God’s omniscience.

The way that God sees everything clearly.

He sees everything truly.

He knows all things.

He has all knowledge.

He is all-knowing.

And that means that He knows you from the inside.

He knows you without all of your illusions.

He knows you better than you know yourself.

He understands you better than you understand yourself.

He sees the sin that drives you, including the desire to avoid persecution that is so off the rails that you are willing to betray the true God, worship a false idol, worship a megalomaniac human named Caesar, and go sleep with a teenager in order to worship a false god so they’ll stop confiscating your property, throwing you in jail, and killing your family.

Feet Like Burnished Bronze

He says, “I am the One with feet like burnished bronze.”

Bronze in the ancient Near East was associated with purity, with stability, and so on and so forth.

Thyatira itself was famous for bronze smithing alongside the other trades that we talked about a little bit earlier.

And so they would have been very familiar with bronze.

And yet they used bronze to build their idols and other things like that.

And yet Jesus says, “I am the God whose feet are like burnished bronze. I am the God of absolute purity. I am the God of absolute stability. I am the God who is immovable, who is unshakable. And I am working to make you immovable and unshakable. I am working to purify you.”

He says, I’m here to purify you from your compromise with Rome.

The Morning Star

And so He makes them a promise.

He says, “For the one who overcomes, I will give the morning star.”

Now, if you fast forward to Revelation chapter 22, you see that Jesus Himself is the morning star.

But morning star was a common term that they would use to kind of refer to glory, that they would refer to like victory, to greatness and so on and so forth.

So, they would refer to a lot of different things as a morning star.

But this says Jesus is the morning star.

A lot of things are glorious, but Jesus is glory itself.

A lot of things are beautiful, but Jesus is beauty itself.

A lot of things are great, but Jesus is greatness itself.

He says, “I will give you Myself.”

He says, you’re so scared that the Roman Empire is going to take the things you care about from you.

But even if they take everything from you, if you have Me, you have the morning star.

You have the glory you crave.

You have the greatness you crave.

You have the beauty that you crave.

You have what you are looking for in all those things that Rome can take from you.

If you have Me, you already have it.

Authority Over the Nations

And He says to the one who overcomes, to the one who is victorious, “I will give authority over the nations.”

He is drawing from an image from Psalm 2 here.

Psalm 2 describes the reign of the Messiah.

It describes the Messiah taking hold of the throne of this world so that He can rule with justice and crush the forces of darkness.

It talks about the Messiah’s authority over the nations.

But Jesus says, listen, I am that Messiah from Psalm 2.

I am the One who has authority over the nations.

And look, right now the nations are persecuting you.

Right now, the nations are pressuring you to worship them, to worship their false gods, to worship their megalomaniac human kings with god complexes.

But you remain with Me.

The tables will be turned.

It won’t be Rome ruling over you with an iron fist.

It’ll be you ruling with Me over Rome with an iron fist.

He says, “Hold on. Don’t give up.”

He says, “Keep following My kingly voice, and I will carry you through all of this suffering into the glory that surpasses all things.”

That is the church in Thyatira.

The Church in Sardis

The church in Sardis is different because they haven’t withstood anything.

They haven’t been put into the pressure cooker.

They haven’t been placed under intense pressure.

They haven’t been persecuted.

They haven’t been attacked.

They haven’t been rejected and despised and nearly destroyed because they never put up any resistance.

Jesus says through John that they’re defined on the outside by a kind of life. They have a reputation for being alive, but they’re actually dead.

If you look at them from the outside, there’s a whole lot of busyness that you could see.

Externally, it looks like there’s a lot going on.

They apparently in some sense have a good name among other churches.

We don’t know exactly why, but maybe they’re large, right?

Maybe there’s a lot of house churches in the network in Sardis.

Maybe they appeared successful.

Maybe they’ve had a lot of converts in some sense.

And yet, if you look on the inside, they’re characterized not by life, but by death.

They’re characterized not by spiritual vitality, but by spiritual collapse.

Soiled Garments

What kind of spiritual collapse are they defined by?

I think John actually tells us exactly what type.

He compares them to soiled garments.

Now, once again, he’s using a very common image that they would have been familiar with at that point in time.

He’s using the image of soiled garments, which the Old Testament sometimes uses as an image of this just deep, radical sinfulness.

The Lord says, “I will take away your soiled garments and I will give you new, fresh, clean garments. I will take away your old sinful nature, your old pattern of rebellion, and I will give you a new nature. I will give you a new pattern. I will not only wipe away your sin, but I will make you into an obedient, faithful people.”

It’s soiled garments versus clean garments.

He says that the overwhelming majority of the people in the church in Sardis are people with soiled garments.

These are people who have radically rebelled against God’s will and God’s ways.

These are people who have radically abandoned everything about what God wants for them and from them.

These are people who are walking the opposite direction of God’s good desire for them.

How did they end up there?

He doesn’t tell us exactly how, but I think given the context of the book of Revelation, given the context of the other six churches that we see, I think most likely we’re talking about moral compromise.

How did they end up living constantly in rebellion against the Lord?

I think they compromised with Rome.

They assimilated into the wicked culture of Rome.

They assimilated into the broken ways of the Roman Empire.

They have abandoned their Christian witness.

Why?

To avoid persecution.

They’re just going to the guild feasts.

They’re just worshiping the false gods of Rome.

They’re just worshiping the emperor.

They’re just taking part in the pagan rituals, the pagan orgies, and so on and so forth.

They are just throwing their lot in with the wickedness and injustice of pagan Rome to avoid persecution and suffering.

And so he says only a tiny few of them are faithful.

There’s just a few that don’t have soiled garments.

He doesn’t even mention the Nicolaitans, the Balaamites, the Jezebelites because the devil didn’t have to sow Nicolaitans, Balaamites, Jezebelites.

He didn’t have to sow false teachers there because they just embraced false teaching completely unprompted.

And so Sardis is a church that isn’t being persecuted because there’s no need for the devil to lay persecution on them.

There’s no need for the beast to put his hand down on them.

There’s no need for Babylon to put the screws to the church in Sardis.

There’s nothing for Rome to persecute them for because they have no real witness, no real faithfulness.

They are spiritually dead.

The Seven Spirits of God

And so to this spiritually dead church in Sardis, Jesus reminds them, “I am the One who holds the seven spirits of God.”

This is not saying that there are literally seven spirits of God, that there are seven different Holy Spirits.

In the ancient Near East they simply were not as literalistic in the way that they talked as we are today.

So many of our problems with interpreting the Bible is that we are modern Westerners, and we live in the most literalistic culture that has ever existed in all of human history on record up to this point.

We have a very hard time with metaphor.

We have a very hard time with figurative language.

We have a very hard time with symbolism and so on and so forth.

And so we just default to assuming that everything is meant to be taken literally unless it’s abundantly clear, inescapable, that it is supposed to be taken as kind of like a metaphor or a figure of speech or something like that.

And yet when he says this, he’s not saying there literally are seven spirits of God.

What he’s doing is, the number seven is typically kind of representative of fullness.

Now there could still be seven things, right?

There are in fact literally seven churches.

John is writing to seven literal churches.

They are not a metaphor.

But the number seven often was representative of completeness.

And so he’s talking about the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

They would sometimes use this term, the seven spirits of God, essentially just kind of to describe the Holy Spirit coming in His fullness.

It’s like we have the seven spirits of God.

It’s very similar to when we see in the New Testament, it talks about, you know, pray for a double portion of the Holy Spirit.

How can you get a double portion of the Holy Spirit?

You either have the Holy Spirit or you don’t, right?

It’s talking about your experience of the Spirit.

If you’re praying for a double portion of the Holy Spirit, what you’re really praying for is that the Lord will open you up to receive the Spirit, to experience the Spirit in a fuller and deeper and richer way than you were even able to before, than you had the capacity to before, than you were maybe unconsciously willing to before.

You’re asking the Lord to open you up twice as much to the Spirit’s work and power and influence.

In a very similar way, when it talks about the seven spirits of God, it is a figure of speech.

It’s a saying.

He’s saying, “I hold the fullness of the Holy Spirit.”

What does that have to do with the church in Sardis’ problem?

Well, it’s very simple.

They are in the situation they are in because they lack the Spirit’s life.

They have immediately capitulated and compromised with Rome because they don’t have the Spirit carrying and empowering them to resist.

They’ve immediately collaborated with pagan Rome.

They’ve immediately just jumped ship to avoid persecution because the Spirit’s not there to make them faithful.

They have cowardishly bent over backwards to avoid being arrested or tortured or persecuted for their faith because they don’t have the Spirit to make them brave.

They need the fullness of the Holy Spirit that King Jesus offers to them.

They need to reach out and take it from His hand that is extended towards them.

Jesus Holds the Seven Stars

And they can if they want to.

Jesus says, “I am the One who holds the seven stars.”

This is an image of the churches and their leaders in a sense.

Now, we don’t know if that means the human leaders of the church or if it means, in some strange way, the angels, the celestial beings, the spiritual entities that the Lord has in some way assigned to the churches.

We don’t know how all this works.

Paul talks about it in some of his letters.

John alludes to it here.

But God’s Word never fully explains it.

So we just can’t do like a big-time deep dive that just says, okay, this is this, this is this, this is this.

This is something that the Word kind of alludes to but doesn’t define for us because it’s something we just don’t need to fully understand.

In either of the cases, whether he’s talking about holding the leadership of the church, like the human leaders of the church, or he is talking about holding the kind of angelic, celestial, spiritual entities that He’s assigned in some sense to these churches in His hands, the point is that He holds their future.

He has the steering wheel of their ships in His hand.

And He can and will bless their work, bless their direction, bless their church if they will follow after Him.

If they will seek the fullness of the Spirit, if they will open themselves back up to the Spirit’s life and the Spirit’s empowerment.

Their problem stems from problems with their leadership.

They value their reputation, but they don’t value their actual faithfulness.

And in the same way, they value their safety and security.

They value avoiding persecution, but they don’t value actually following the One they’re in danger of being persecuted out of faithfulness to.

They are willing to soil their garments in order not to get blood on their garments.

These are marks of lacking the Spirit.

But He says, “If you will reach out and you will take hold of the Spirit I have sent to you, if you will reach out and you will willingly once again give Me control over your community, your church, your body of believers, then I will do glorious things in your midst.”

White Robes

He says, number one, you have these soiled garments, but I will give you white robes.

I will wash your garments clean.

At that point in time, having a white robe or a pure white garment, that was a very difficult thing to accomplish.

It was very difficult to get your clothing or your cloth into that degree of just pristineness.

You know, back in the day, they didn’t have dry cleaning, they didn’t have washing machines, they didn’t have all those different things.

So if you had a pure white garment, it was a really unusual special thing, and they kind of associated that with victory.

Like you would give white garments to someone who was in some sense victorious, or in a lot of their kind of like public rituals at that point in time, they would give these pure white garments to people that were seen as being like very pure.

You know, they would give the white garments to like the ceremonial virgins and stuff like that.

Remember, it was a weird culture back then.

But this essentially, it’s kind of an image.

It’s something they would have associated with faithfulness, with purity, and with victory.

And the point being that if they will surrender to King Jesus, give themselves to Him again, allow Him to breathe real life into them through the Spirit, then they will share in His victory.

They will share in His purity.

They will share in His faithfulness.

He will raise them up.

He will exalt them if they will humble themselves and exalt Him rather than compromising in order to avoid suffering.

The Book of Life

And in the same way He says, “I will put you into My book of life.”

This is once again a reference to the specific problem they are having.

In the ancient Roman culture, they kept something called city rolls.

They kept public records of their citizens.

If you were in the city roll, then you had rights.

If you were not in the city roll, you had no rights.

If you were in the public record, like the public book in the Roman cities, then you couldn’t be mistreated, you couldn’t be beaten, you couldn’t be abused, you had to be given a fair trial, and so on and so forth.

But if you were erased from the book, which would happen, right?

If you were accused of treason, then you could be removed from the city rolls.

You could be removed from the book of citizens, and then Rome could do whatever it wanted to you.

It could destroy you.

And we know that Rome treated faithfulness to Jesus like treason.

And so the church in Sardis, they are afraid of being treated like traitors out of faithfulness to Jesus.

Being erased from the public city roll, erased from the book of Rome, and then persecuted relentlessly.

And as a result, they drift into fruitlessness.

They soil their garments.

They compromise with the wickedness of pagan Rome out of fear of being blotted out of Rome’s book and then suffering immensely under their thumb.

But Jesus says, “I’m the One who holds the true book. I hold the book of life.”

Rome can erase you from its city roll, but it cannot erase you from My book of life.

I am the One who determines the citizenship of My kingdom.

Rome may erase you from their book, but Rome is coming to an end.

I will write you in My book and My kingdom has no end.

I will never blot you out of My book.

That’s the church in Sardis.

The Church in Philadelphia

The church in Philadelphia is the opposite of the church of Sardis.

The church of Philadelphia has faithfully withstood all kinds of attacks, whereas the church in Sardis did not withstand anything.

There’s a lot of similarities between the church in Philadelphia and some of the previous churches because the primary attacks that we see the church in Philadelphia experiencing come from militant synagogues.

Once again in Philadelphia, there was evidently a very militant group of ethnically Jewish people.

They were part of the synagogue, but they were vicious.

They may have had significant influence over the synagogue in Philadelphia.

Plenty of the synagogues in first-century Rome were literally essentially Christian synagogues.

They were either very friendly towards Christians, very accepting of Christians.

Some of them saw Christians as a form of Jew that was just as legitimate as any other.

Some of them essentially thought, you know, it’s possible that Jesus was the Messiah in some way we don’t understand.

We’re going to let this play out.

We’re going to see what they have to say.

Stuff like that.

Other synagogues literally converted almost whole cloth and became Messianic synagogues, Christian synagogues.

But there were other synagogues that were viciously opposed to Christianity, that were viciously opposed to the Christians.

And so in places like that, often the Christians were expelled from the synagogues.

And when they were expelled from the synagogues, something very important happened because synagogues had a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of civic legal protection by Rome.

They had this kind of minuscule amount of protection.

And they were allowed just a tiny little bit of freedom, a tiny little bit of protection.

Synagogues essentially kind of brokered this deal with Rome.

They said, “Okay, well, would you be okay with it if instead of making sacrifices to Caesar, we made sacrifices to our God for Caesar?”

Essentially, we said, you know, oh God, pour out Your blessing upon Caesar, expand his power and glory, and so on and so forth, make him as strong as a god on earth rather than literally worshiping him as a god on earth.

And for a very brief period of time, Rome said okay.

Now, they didn’t stick to that.

They eventually just started wiping out the Jews later down the line.

But for a brief period of time there was a little bit of legal protection that Jews could hold to.

And for a brief time Rome just kind of considered Christians an offshoot of the Jewish faith, and as a result they had that tiny civic protection as well.

But the moment they were expelled from the synagogues, they lost those legal protections.

And Rome could do whatever they wanted to them.

They could persecute them with whatever degree of brutality they wanted.

And that is exactly what seems to have been happening in Philadelphia.

The Hour of Trial

And so there is an intense, vicious trial that’s coming on them.

It’s like what Jesus talked about just a little bit earlier when He talks about, you know, there will be this intense suffering for ten days, right?

This unusually intense form of suffering, but it’s temporary.

Jesus says because they’ve remained faithful, they’re going to be protected amidst this intense, vicious, temporary suffering that is coming on the world.

Now, this is often misunderstood.

He says, “I will keep you from the hour of trial.”

Right?

So, He says, you know, the hour of trial.

Once again, an hour, that’s a temporary amount of time.

It doesn’t mean literally there’s going to be one single hour of suffering.

The point is there’s going to be an intense but temporary period of suffering.

In the same way He said ten days of suffering doesn’t mean ten literal days.

It means an intense but temporary period of suffering.

But He says, “I will keep you from the hour of trial.”

A lot of people read that and they assume that as a reference once again to the rapture.

The rapture flat out does not come up in the book of Revelation.

It doesn’t come up at all in the Bible.

The rapture may be real, may not.

The concept of the rapture does not come from Scripture.

It comes from a dream that a teenage girl had back in the 1800s in Scotland that then kind of caught on and became popular and so on and so forth.

That dream may have been a vision from God, in which case her dream of the rapture is real.

If it was not a dream from God, if it was not a vision from God, if it was just a dream that she had and then that she kind of mistakenly interpreted as a vision from God, then the rapture may not be real, right?

But the Bible itself actually tells us nothing, literally nothing, yea or nay, about whether or not there is anything like what we today refer to as the rapture.

So what is He talking about when He says, “I will keep you from the hour of trial”?

He is not saying, “Okay, I’m going to blip you up to heaven so that you won’t suffer during this end-times special period of tribulation.”

That’s another thing that, like we talked about, the Bible actually does not teach that there’s going to be some special period of tribulation on the church, that there’s going to be a literal seven-year period.

That’s not in the Bible.

Again, that’s something that primarily comes from dreams and visions that people believe that they had.

If those were real dreams and visions from the Lord, then it’s probably true.

If they were not, then it’s probably not.

It’s just not an issue that the Bible itself deals with.

What is it talking about when He says, “I will keep you from the hour of trial”?

Well, it’s important to look at what He says.

He says, this is verse 10:

“I will keep you from the hour of trial that is going to come on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth.”

So, He says this trial is going to come on the whole world.

So already we know He’s not talking about what people today tend to think of as the seven years of tribulation, right?

That’s like seven years of special tribulation against the church poured out by the world.

So, that’s not what He’s talking about.

He’s talking about a trial that’s going to come on the whole world.

These are sufferings that God is going to bring on the entire world.

Why is He bringing these sufferings on the entire world?

He says to test the earth.

Now that word test is not like test to see if they are good or bad, to see if they are legitimate or illegitimate, whatever.

Not like a test of your faith to see if your faith is real.

What this is talking about is testing like you test metal or gold or something like that.

Like a blacksmith would test precious metal.

He is refining the metal.

You are fixing a broken sword.

You are purifying a piece of bronze or gold or silver or something like that.

He is going to refine the world, purify the world through this trial, this suffering that is going to come on the world.

We’re going to see more about this later in the book of Revelation as He describes the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven bowls.

And in each of these cases, He’s describing sufferings of some sort that He is bringing on the world.

Judgments He is bringing on the world that are meant very specifically to bring repentance.

These judgments are not meant to destroy.

These judgments are meant to bring repentance.

These are not meant to destroy the world.

They’re meant to bring the world back to Him.

“I Will Keep You”

He says, “I’m going to keep you from the hour of trial.”

But actually, keep you from the hour of trial is a weird way to describe this because this phrase that He is using that describes keeping the Philadelphia church from the hour of trial doesn’t really mean that you remove somebody from a bad situation.

This is the same term that Jesus uses in John 17.

He says, “I do not ask that You take My people out of the world, but that You will keep them from the evil one, that You will protect them from the evil one.”

Now, when He says that, is He saying, “Lord, don’t let the evil one do anything to them”?

No, of course not.

The evil one does things to us all the time, right?

Is He saying, “Don’t let the evil one tempt them”?

No, of course not.

The evil one tempts us all the time.

Is He saying don’t let the evil one harm them?

No, of course not.

The evil one harms us all the time.

What is He talking about?

He’s saying empower them to withstand the evil one.

Empower them to endure the attacks of the evil one.

Empower them to overcome the attacks of the evil one.

In the same way, now He says that exact same word.

I will keep you from, protect you from, empower you against, help you to endure amidst, help you to overcome the hour of trial.

So, He’s not saying that He’s going to take them out of the sufferings that come in the hour of trial.

He’s saying He’s going to empower them to withstand and endure and overcome the sufferings that come with the hour of trial.

He says, “Because of your faithfulness, you are suffering immensely, but I am empowering you to endure and withstand that suffering. That suffering will not break you because you have Me carrying you.”

The Key of David

And so He encourages them by reminding them that He is the key of David.

He holds the key of David.

This is an image from Isaiah chapter 22.

The key of David is just kind of an Old Testament image for the authority over God’s kingdom.

They were banished from the synagogues.

And when the synagogues banished them, they believed that they were banishing them from access to God.

Those militant synagogues thought that they controlled who could access the Lord.

That they controlled who could know the Lord.

That they controlled who could be in the Lord’s presence.

So if they cast you out of the synagogue, they believed they were casting you out of the presence of God itself, that they were casting you out of any kind of relationship with God Himself.

But Jesus says, “No, I hold the key of David. I have authority over God’s kingdom, and I will put My key into the keyhole, and I will open up the door for you.”

He says, “The synagogues can exclude you from their buildings, but they cannot exclude you from God’s presence. They cannot exclude you from My kingdom.”

You have unhindered access to God.

You have unhindered access to My kingdom.

Rome cannot shut the door.

The synagogues cannot shut the door.

Satan cannot shut the door.

Only I can shut the door.

But I am not shutting the door to you.

I am opening the door for you.

He says, “What I open, no one can shut.”

He says, “I’ve opened access to God’s presence and His kingdom, and no one can shut that door on you because I am holy and true.”

I am set apart.

That is what holy means, right?

I am set apart as the One who holds power and authority over God’s kingdom.

And I am true.

I am trustworthy.

I am the trustworthy arbiter of who belongs to God, who gets to know God, who gets to be in His presence.

And I have decided you get to enjoy everything that is His.

And that means you will not be broken by the sufferings that are poured out onto you.

Pillars in God’s Temple

He says, “Instead, because of your faithfulness, I will make you a pillar in God’s temple.”

Remember, the temple was the center of the Jewish worship system.

These synagogues believed they controlled access to God because they controlled access to God’s temple in Jerusalem.

They believed therefore they were the elite people of God because they controlled the temple of God.

They were the elite people of God and everybody else was just cattle.

That they were above everyone else.

That the only way anyone else could ever experience any of God was by going through them.

But Jesus says, “No, the true temple is not that one in Jerusalem that is controlled by the militant synagogues that have cast you out.”

You are the true temple.

You are the pillars of the true temple because I dwell in you.

Because the Spirit dwells in you.

Because God Himself is not only with you, He is in you.

A New Name

And because that is true, He says:

“I will write on you the name of My God and the name of the city of My God, the new Jerusalem, which is coming down out of heaven from My God, and I will also write on you My new name.”

This is very similar to another promise He made.

He says, “I will give you a new name.”

In the ancient world, they put a lot more stock in names than we do today.

Your name was literally meant to be a reflection of your identity.

That’s why they would straight-up name people things that meant stuff, right?

Remember in the Old Testament, the prophet Hosea, he names one of his children “Not My People.”

It’s one that that child was probably actually biologically not his.

His wife was a prostitute who had run around on him.

So probably that child was literally somebody else’s child.

And so on the one hand, you know, this is “not my child” is what that name meant.

But at the same time, it was a metaphor for the way that the Israelites were rejecting their God, refusing to be the people of God.

They were living as not His people.

And so He says, Hosea, as a kind of image of that, you name this child that is probably not your child, “Not My People.”

It’s like this child, this illegitimate child, is an image, is a metaphor for the way that My people have chosen not to be My people.

We could do this all day long.

But it was a reflection of your identity and it was a reflection of who you belonged to.

You would often name children in a way that kind of reflected who they belonged to, the clan that they belonged to, the tribe they belonged to, the family they belonged to, and so on and so forth.

It reflects citizenship and on and on and on.

The point being, I will give you a new name that reflects your identity in Me, that reflects My ownership over you, that reflects your citizenship in My kingdom.

I will give you a name that reflects that you belong permanently to Me.

I will give you a name that reflects that you are part of the new Jerusalem.

The new Jerusalem is an image of God’s people, essentially.

He says, “These synagogues believe that they control who gets to be a part of My family, but I am declaring that you are part of My family, not the synagogue that cast you out.”

They believe they can control who gets to be part of My kingdom.

But I am declaring you are part of My kingdom, not the synagogue that cast you out.

They believe they can control who gets to be part of My covenant.

But I am declaring that you are part of My covenant, not the synagogue that cast you out.

You bear My name.

You bear the mark of My kingdom.

You bear My seal, My mark.

You bear the mark of the Lamb, the mark of the King, regardless of what Rome says, what the synagogue says, what Satan himself says.

That is the church in Philadelphia.

The Church in Laodicea

We are right back where we started again.

Philadelphia was a nice reprieve from all of the down notes, but the Laodicean church once again has not withstood anything.

The Laodicean church was extremely wealthy, and their wealth has distorted their hearts.

Their love has shifted away from Christ and has shifted toward their wealth and the power that wealth brings, the prestige that wealth brings, the status, the acceptance that wealth brings.

That’s why all throughout the Scriptures it says that the love of money is the root of all evil.

It doesn’t say money is the root of all evil.

It says the love of money is the root of all evil.

Why is that?

It’s because the love of money isn’t really the love of money.

It’s not the love of this green piece of paper.

It’s the love of what money brings you.

Power, prestige, status, acceptance, glory, self-exaltation.

These are the same things that ultimately drove the serpent to rebel against the Lord in the beginning.

These are the things that ultimately drove Adam and Eve to rebel against the Lord in the garden.

These are the things that drive us to rebel against the Lord every single day of our lives.

It is the draw towards self-glorification, self-exaltation.

All throughout God’s Word, we see there is a serpent, a false usurper, serpent king, the devil, who exalts and glorifies himself.

And there is a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, who humbles Himself.

The serpent from Genesis to Revelation, the serpent lifts himself up.

And from Genesis to Revelation, the Lamb humbles Himself, brings Himself down to where we are.

And yet the pull of sin constantly, every single sin, every act of disobedience, every act of rebellion against the Lord, is in some way rooted in that same thing that drives the serpent king.

The draw towards exalting ourselves, glorifying ourselves, power, prestige, status, glory.

Without explicitly saying it, maybe without even explicitly consciously thinking it, the church in Laodicea has come to see itself as self-sufficient, as in control, as not in need of God’s will or beholden to God’s ways, as in some way above even needing the Lord and therefore above belonging to the Lord.

They say, “I am rich. I need nothing.”

And eventually they’ve grown to love that richness, that wealth, the power, the prestige, status, acceptance, glory, self-exaltation that comes with it.

That has become the thing that they must keep at all costs.

They must keep wealth and the power that it brings at all costs.

They will pay any price to remain comfortable, powerful, accepted, prestigious.

And as a result, they have gradually become completely lockstep with their culture.

They are lockstep with the culture of pagan Rome.

They are lockstep with the ways of this fallen and broken world rather than the ways of King Jesus.

They’ve been essentially spiritually blinded by the power that wealth has given them.

Again, wealth is not the problem.

Power is not the problem.

The problem is they’ve grown to love that, and it has gradually blinded them.

He says, “Buy from Me eye salve so that you will see,” as you’ve gone spiritually blind, as you’ve drifted further and further and further into worship of power, prestige, status, and wealth.

“I Stand at the Door and Knock”

And as a result, they have functionally kicked Jesus out of the church.

He uses this kind of sarcastic image.

He says, “I stand at the door and knock.”

You know, we use that a lot of times in like altar calls and stuff.

We say, “Jesus stands at the door and knocks. He’s asking you to let Him into your heart.”

Actually, that’s not what this verse is about.

This verse is Jesus very kind of sarcastically, very—this is a pretty ruthless jab that He’s making.

He’s saying, “Okay, you know what? I’m outside the door of your church and I’m knocking and asking you to let Me in, and you’re not letting Me in.”

He’s saying, “You have functionally kicked Me out of your church.”

You have kicked the God of the church out of the church.

You’ve kicked the King of the kingdom out of your kingdom.

You’ve kicked the Head of the family out of your family.

And that means you’re not actually a church.

You’re not actually My citizens.

You’re not actually My brothers, My sisters, My children.

And He says your life reflects this.

What “Lukewarm” Means

He says you are lukewarm.

This is another thing that is often misconstrued.

When He says you’re lukewarm, He’s not saying, “Oh, you’re just kind of like sleepwalking in your faith.”

When He says you’re lukewarm, He’s saying you have fundamentally abandoned your faith.

When He’s saying, “I wish you were either hot or cold,” He’s not saying, “I wish you were either hot, as in spiritually vital, or cold, just, you know, not even following Me at all.”

What He’s saying is, “I wish you were one of the two things that is good.”

At that point in time in Laodicea, there were basically two types of water that were useful.

Cold water was useful for drinking.

It was refreshing.

It typically came from like running springs.

So if water was cold where you found it, it was usually drinkable.

It was usually potable, at least, you know, with their stomachs at that time and the way that they had adapted.

Hot water, like from hot springs or other things like that, was useful for bathing, and it had medicinal purposes, right?

They would send you to a hot spring to heal certain ailments and stuff like that.

But if you found lukewarm water, it almost always meant it was tepid, right?

It meant it was so mineral-heavy you couldn’t really drink it, and it wasn’t really good for bathing.

If you drank it, you would vomit it out.

It was disgusting and it was unsafe.

And so hot water, He’s using this as a kind of metaphor for being spiritually serious, faithful, on fire for the Lord.

And cold water is also an image, a metaphor for being spiritually serious, faithful, on fire for the Lord.

He’s not saying either follow Me wholeheartedly or don’t follow Me at all.

He’s saying you’re not following Me at all.

Lukewarm water is a metaphor for not following Him at all.

He says, “Follow Me wholeheartedly like hot or cold water. Stop rebelling against Me like lukewarm water.”

Wealth, Safety, and Spiritual Blindness

He says, “Your life reflects the fact that you have drifted into outright spiritual rebellion because you avoid anything that could lead to trials.”

Just like Sardis, He says you avoid anything that could potentially lead to suffering, to persecution.

But that persecution would purify you like gold if you went through it.

He says you don’t pursue spiritual growth because growing spiritually could ultimately lead you to get into a place where you would be in the crosshairs of pagan Rome.

And yet spiritual growth is worth more than gold.

He says you are resigned to living impure lives.

You are resigned to living unfaithful lives because those are the kinds of lives that are safe in pagan Rome.

And yet pure lives are valuable like white garments.

You’re experiencing no victory.

And so Jesus reminds them both as a warning and as an invitation.

“I Am the Amen”

He says, “Remember, I am the Amen.”

That word amen, it’s actually not just like the period you put at the end of a prayer.

When you say amen, you’re expressing agreement.

You’re expressing like, yes, I agree with that.

You know, so if somebody is praying and you say amen after they pray, you’re saying, “Yep, I agree with what he said.”

So, actually, interestingly enough, it doesn’t really make a ton of sense for us to just say amen at the end of our own prayers.

There’s not rules.

There’s not a ritual, right?

You don’t have to say “Dear God” at the beginning.

You don’t have to say “Amen” at the end.

You can literally just say what you’re going to say to the Lord.

I mean, do whatever you want, right?

But He’s saying essentially, “I am the Amen.”

I am the voice of agreement with the Lord.

My voice and the Lord’s voice speak in unison.

I am the God you have served and worshiped from the time of Abraham all the way to now.

The Father and I speak in one voice.

The Spirit and I speak in one voice.

I am the second person of the Trinity.

So My assessments are true.

My assessments are final.

The delusions you have about yourself, the spiritual blindness that has caused you not to even register that you were living in rebellion against My will and My ways, against My kingdom, My family, My covenant—over against your delusion, I am speaking the truth to you.

He says, “I am the faithful and true witness.”

He says you are false witnesses to yourselves about yourselves.

You are lying to yourself about your spiritual condition.

You’ve convinced yourself that you are fine so long as you technically worship Me.

Theoretically worship Me.

That you can live like pagan Rome.

You can follow along their idolatry, their wickedness, and their injustice.

So long as in theory you also believe in Jesus, you’re bearing false witness to yourself about yourself.

I’m bearing true witness to you, against you, for you.

This is for your good because I am the ruler of God’s creation.

The True Ruler of Creation

He says they bask in the wealth of Rome, the commerce of Rome.

Their compromise has enabled them to participate in the wealth-creating systems of Rome.

And yet the only way they’re able to participate in that wealth-creating system of Rome is by worshiping the Roman Emperor, the Roman Empire, and the false pagan gods of Rome.

Right now, on paper, Rome rules the world.

They are an empire on which the sun never sets.

They literally rule almost the entire known world on paper.

And yet they only rule because right now the true King allows them to rule.

And so the church in Laodicea, they think we have it made because we have the favor of the empire that rules almost the entire known world.

And yet Jesus says, “I’m the One who rules the empire that seems to rule the world.”

I am the One who actually rules this world.

Not Rome.

Not the economic system they’ve created.

Not the wealth-creating systems they’ve given you access to because you play their game.

He says, “Everything you think about yourself is a lie. I alone am the true witness about you. I alone am the true ruler over you. You don’t need Rome’s favor. You need My favor.”

Sharing Christ’s Throne

And He says, if you will repent, you will share My throne.

Essentially, what He’s saying is, you know, you have rebelled against Me.

You have compromised with Rome in order to gain access to Rome’s power, but you’re forfeiting access to My power.

You’ve compromised with Rome in order to gain access to their wealth, but you’re forfeiting access to My wealth.

You’ve compromised with Rome in order to gain access to their glory, but you are forfeiting access to My glory.

The worldly power that wealth brings is cheap.

It’s fleeting.

I will give you true wealth, true power when I return.

He says, “You will find victory by rejecting the false self-sufficiency that comes with the wealth and power from Rome and instead submitting to Me.”

Because if you humble yourself before Me, I will exalt you with Me.

You will share My victory.

You will share My eternal reign.

You will share My royal authority.

You will share My glory.

That is the church in Laodicea.

Why the Seven Churches Matter for the Rest of Revelation

Here’s the very important thing that we have to understand if we want to understand the rest of the book of Revelation.

Absolutely everything in the book of Revelation is about helping Ephesus overcome the hardheartedness, the coldness, the rockiness of their hearts, the loss of their love for others.

It’s about helping Smyrna overcome the despair that comes from the relentless persecution they’ve experienced.

It’s about helping Pergamum overcome the unimaginable temptation and pressure to worship the false gods of Rome, the false god-king of Rome, the false god empire that is Rome.

It’s about helping the church in Thyatira overcome the unimaginable pull of compromising with Rome in order to avoid persecution.

It’s about helping Sardis overcome the absolute spiritual deadness that has come from its extreme fear of suffering for Jesus.

It’s about helping the church in Philadelphia overcome the extreme trauma of being rejected, opposed, and tormented by both militant synagogues and the pagan culture.

It’s about helping Laodicea overcome its spiritual blindness as it’s drifted into lukewarmness and love for this fallen and broken world’s temptations.

Every single line, paragraph, chapter of the book of Revelation is about shepherding these seven churches through the specific problem they were facing near the end of the first century under a wicked pagan empire that oppressed them, among wicked false teachers who were trying to mislead and derail them.

And once we get our heads around that, almost all of the confusion and the fear and the bizarreness and the alienation that we experience when we try to read this very strange book called Revelation starts to dissipate.

And instead we start to see Revelation as sweet rather than bitter.

It starts to become a source of strength rather than a source of fear.

I think by the end of this, if you stick with this, if you continue learning, continue studying, continue growing in your understanding, Revelation is going to become one of your favorite books in all of Scripture.

The book that you used to avoid is going to become a book that you deeply love.