Monday, July 11, 2022

Revelation 2 (II) Seven Churches: Ephesus

We are picking up from where we left off in Revelation 2 (I). You’ll see how the first letter we're going to study – the letter to the church of Ephesus - sets the pattern for the rest. Now let’s turn to Chapter 2 Verse 1 and take a look at how these letters work:

Rev. 2:1 “To the angel of the church of Ephesus, write: The one who holds the seven stars in his right hand, the one who walks among the seven golden lampstands says this:

Rev. 2:2 ‘I know your deeds and your toil and perseverance, and that you cannot tolerate evil men, and you put to test those who call themselves apostles, and they're not, and you found them to be false; 

Rev. 2:3 and you have perseverance and have endured for My name’s sake, and have not grown weary. 

Rev 2:4.’But I have this against you, that you have left your first love. 

Rev. 2:5 ‘Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I'm coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place - unless you repent. 

Rev. 2:6 “Yet this you do have, that you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. Rev. 2:7 ‘He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God.” 

As mentioned previously, these letters are highly structured, that is, they're all written in a very similar form and that structure repeats. And it's what makes the study of these letters actually a little easier because we can make these comparisons. They're all going to have the names of a city. They're all going to begin with salutation. Jesus is going to offer things like commendations, condemnations, exhortations, promises and warnings. And He's going to offer a promise at the end. So if you take each of these letters apart according to that structure and you examine them all from the three perspectives you’ve learned previously, you start to see what Jesus is saying to the church.

And we're going to do that here. We're always going to start with a literal historic and we will look at the universal and timeless. And what we are doing is that we are really trying to understand the perspective of prophetic, eschatological interpretation. We start with the name, and each of these cities’ names has a meaning in its original language, and the meaning of these names turns out to be prophetic for what goes on in the city. 

Ephesus was a port city in the Mediterranean on the coast. Its name means “desirable” or “desired”. And it's one of the chief seaports in the Roman Empire that connected east and West. Lots of goods would flow through coming from the West, from Rome, and they would come to that port, get off the ship and then be brought on land from there to the east, to Constantinople and beyond. And that tremendous flow of goods through this port helped make the city very wealthy, for obvious reasons. Seaport brings not just goods. They bring ships, ships bring sailors, sailors have certain desires. They bring travelers with them and so on and so you can imagine the kind of industry that would grow up in a city of that type. They had lots of prostitution. They had lots of bars. They had lots of restaurants and hotels and all the things you need for travelers. They were also a city that had lots of temples, for false gods and the chief one being Artemis or Diana. It's one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

And in the midst of this hustling, bustling city, you have one of the largest and most influential churches in the first century. It was a church that counted men like Paul and John and Timothy as leaders in that place, at different times in history. It's a church that features prominently in Acts. It's got a letter to it, in the epistles. Timothy was ministering there in the letters Paul wrote to Timothy. There is probably no other city in the New Testament that shows up as commonly as Ephesus does.

In the letter, Jesus addresses Himself to the church as the one with the seven stars in His right hand who walks among the seven golden lampstands. Now where did you hear that before? Obviously, in Chapter 1. That's one of the patterns you're supposed to notice. Each of the seven letters takes some aspect of the description of Christ in Chapter 1 and uses it in the salutation to the church. Now why? Because in each case, there'll be something about that salutation that's appropriate to that church. Something about their situation needed to be reminded of that detail of Jesus. And in this case, He assigns the symbols of stars and lampstands to the Church of Ephesus and from your study previously, you should remember what that imagery means.

Stars, we were told, are angels, the seven angels of the churches and the lampstands represent churches themselves. But here again, 7 – remember that it means 100%. So we're talking about all the angels over all the churches, And why are they in the picture with Jesus? What's the sense you get of Jesus holding them and walking among them? It's a picture of authority. Obviously, having something in your hand means you control it. The angels work for Jesus, like everyone. And the one walking around is the one in charge. And that’s the idea - Jesus in charge of His church. There's something about this church that needs to know that. It’s a not-so-subtle reminder to Ephesus that Jesus is in charge. And as we go deeper in the letter that becomes clear.

Next Jesus goes to a commendation of the body. He says, “I know your toil, I know your deeds. You persevere in doing the deeds that you're doing.” We don't know what these are, but whatever the work was that they were keeping busy, Jesus says,” I know you're doing it. I know you're persevering in it.” And then He says,” I can also know that you do not tolerate evil men who come calling themselves apostles, but are not”. And they would test those men, He says and they would find them to be false. So, Jesus commends them for their commitment to true authority in the church. And then finally, they persevere and endure for the sake of Christ, He says, and they do so without growing weary. So that's a good list of commendations, and certainly they seem to be a good example. And if we move now from the specific historic to something more general and universal. The application in that case is pretty straightforward.

And that is that every church should test those who come claiming authority, claiming to know the Bible. If someone comes to you today and says that they are an apostle, what would you do with that? Well, the test in Scripture of whether you were an apostle or not is that you possess supernatural power and you had the authority to write Scripture. And as such, someone who was an apostle was only appointed as such by a personal appearance of Jesus Christ.

Every man who has ever called an apostle in the Bible was made so by Jesus, personally commissioning them. And that means there was a limited number of such people made. They had specific roles. They were the New Testament prophets. They wrote the New Testament for us, and they proved their power as apostle to anyone who might question whether they truly were or not. They proved it by powers that were unique to apostolic authority.

Peter - people being healed when his shadow was cast on them. Paul - being able to be bitten by snakes and not die, heal people, raise men from the dead who fell out of the window because he was preaching too long, and so on.

The point is that those were not gifts of the body that are generally available. We don't see them commonly in the church. You're not one unless you truly are meeting all the requirements. And similarly, you're not an apostle just because you dream up the title -  you are if Jesus appeared to you and personally appointed you as one. And as far as we know, that has not happened since the first century. 

So apostles existed for a short period of church history for a good reason - to establish the Canon of the New Testament and to lead the church before that Canon was available, before the Word of God showed up in its full form to lead them. It’s no coincidence that the last living apostle also wrote the last book of the Bible. Once he had completed that work he was no longer needed either, and the apostleship ended.

But in the first century, which is, when this letter was written obviously, there were still apostles. And so there were also those walking around claiming to be one. Remember, in the second letter Paul wrote to Corinth, he chastises them for the fact that they were questioning his authority as an apostle. There is a moment in that letter where he's upset at the church because from a distance they were believing liars who were telling them that Paul wasn't actually an apostle and they were claiming to be one instead.

And Paul wrote back and said, “I don't know by what power you claim to be an apostle, but I know what power I have, and when I come to you, we'll see who has real power.” That’s a not-so-subtle threat that if they don't turn out to be a true apostle, he will have the power to put them to death, just like Peter did to Ananias and Sapphira. 

That's what a real apostle does. And that concern in the early church is paramount. You have people who claim to be an apostle and are not, and they're telling you that they can tell you what Scripture says when they don't know it. And that's why God made that power the power to do miracles because he didn't want the early church fooled. So He says to them, “I'm glad you're testing these guys as you should. That's why I gave the Apostle special power so that you would have a test to apply. And you could know what the truth was.”

And we really shouldn't be worried about apostles today because such powers are not available in the church. If somebody says they're an apostle, ask him to do something like raise someone from the dead. That’s the test. That’s what this church should have been doing. Show me something that tells me that you are an apostle, because that's the power that God gave apostles.

So, in the time of the first century, you had people trying to deceive the church. You had churches like Ephesus that were careful and attentive to teachers. We don't have the same situation, but we have the same requirement, that is, you don't just take your teaching from any yahoos who say they can teach you. They should be able to demonstrate that they know what they're doing and they test them against the Scriptures. That's what Jesus commends the church of Ephesus for.

Notice in verse 6, jumping down there for a second, He also commends them for hating the deeds of the Nicolaitans. Now scholars debate a little on what this means. Nicolaitans comes from a Greek word that means “victory over the people”, “judgment over the people”, “victory over the people”. What it suggests to us is a group of people calling themselves Nicolaitans, who were looking for some way to “conquer the congregation” and some believe that that gave rise to a heresy of a ruling class versus the regular class. Or what we would say today ‘Clergy vs Laity’. That is the heresy.  

The idea that there are special holy people among us that we have to work through if we want to get to God - that is heresy. And so, in the early church, apparently there was this group that wanted to establish clergy-like positions, much in keeping with what pharisaic Judaism has done for centuries in Judaism. This idea that there are special people we have to go through. Yes, we have leaders, and you should respect leaders. They have authority for a reason and they should have your support. The Bible says it's not profitable to us to make life hard on our leaders, but they're no better than us in any other sense. They're not specially gifted, necessarily. They're just another member of the body doing in their gifts what we will do in our gift. 

So He hated those who would propose such separation in the Body. And in learning a lesson from that, Jesus notes, they have accomplished their deeds consistently, they don't grow weary. These people have a testimony of persevering even after years. And the Bible says that endurance is a key ingredient to two things: spiritual maturity and eternal reward. James says in 5:11: 

James 5:11 We count those blessed who endured. You have heard of the endurance of Job and have seen the outcome of the Lord's dealings, that the Lord is full of compassion and is merciful.

Remember Job?  Imagine if Job has not been willing to endure chapters 2 through wherever it was before he finally got restored – if he’s given up halfway, the second half of Job doesn't get written. Enduring is how we bring ourselves to where God's trying to bring us in maturity and blessing. And then Hebrews 10: 35 says:

Heb. 10:35 Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. 

Heb. 10:36 For you have need endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised. 

To give up in the call that God has put on your life in serving Him means forfeiting potentially the reward that you were working toward. Don't give up, run the race to the end.

So Ephesus is an example to us of discernment against false teaching, unity when it comes to the idea of Clergy and Laity, and endurance when it comes to serving Christ.

But it's not all perfect. Let's flip this coin over because Jesus has critiques here and in one of the most iconic and perhaps chilling statements that you find certainly in this book, may be in the New Testament, Jesus says they left their first love.

A statement most of us have probably heard somebody say at one point or another. Now clearly, it's easy to define what the first love of the church is. The first love of the church is Jesus.  What other loves would come above Jesus in a believer's heart? What could be your first love other than Jesus? It's what brings you to faith in the first place. So we know what the first love is. 

But that then causes us to wonder. How can that be true for this church? How can a church that persevered in His name and fought for the truth of His word and it was concerned about the unity of the Body - how can we say they lost their first love? How can that even happen?

The letter gives us a couple of clues, for how that happened in this case. And it begins with the description. Remember, the description in each case is relevant to that particular church, and in this case, He reminded them of who rules His church and that He ministers to His church by means of angels under His authority, and He guards the church as He walks around it and so on.

Now look at what you just discovered in this letter, and it's a bit of an odd dichotomy. You have, on the one hand, a church that's very resistant to false leaders and very resistant to those who want to put a new layer of leadership in the Body, a clergy distinction. There they're anti-clergy, they’re anti-false leaders, anti- false apostles. Yet at the same time, they don't want Jesus leading them. Isn’t that interesting? He has to remind them there is somebody in charge. 

They left their first love in the sense that a teenager turns from obedience to defiance. They moved from depending upon and appreciating a parent's care and support to chafing under that parent's authority. They've left their first love in the sense that they’ve forgotten the early days of that relationship, and they've begun to take that relationship for granted.

And a second clue to support this conclusion is found in the remedy - the remedy that Jesus wants to give this church in verse 5. He tells them to remember where they have fallen, and do the deeds they did at first. Now ‘to remember where you have fallen’ means to think about the mis-steps that have brought you to this bad place and repent of those past mistakes. And the call to repent here would mean specifically, try a different path, go back to where you got this wrong and start again on a better path. That's what He's saying. 

And it's especially interesting when you remember what He's just commended them for, when He said they have deeds, they were active, they were persevering. But now what you're hearing is the activity wasn't the right activity. It wasn't motivated by love of Christ. In other words, somewhere along the way, what was going on in the church of Ephesus, was a community of people who had lost sight of why Christ put His church on the earth in the first place and about what church was all about. They left their first love. 

The church in that case had become about something other than Jesus and the Gospel. That's what it has to mean, because He says they're busy, so it's not about not actively doing things, it's not about laziness, it is not about activity and some general sense. And He says they endured so they're certainly committed. And it says that they care about the name of Christ and about Scripture. These are not apostate Christians. It's why they did the work that matters.

No, Jesus is talking about one of the greatest threats to the mission of the church and it's self-satisfied Christianity. Being self-satisfied means finding satisfaction in the life you have, rather than in the life Jesus desires that you would have, while carrying the identity of Christian. A self-satisfied Christian is not necessarily someone who doesn't come to church or doesn't get involved in ministry. Remember Ephesus, they were doing lots of deeds. It's not about staying home, it's not about being disconnected from the church. A self-satisfied Christian has forgotten Jesus is in charge, both of the church and of your life. 

So you know you're this person, if you come to church every week, sit in the same pew, say hello to the same people, shake the same hands every time they do the greeting in the middle of the service, sing the same songs, recite the same prayers, hear the same vague motivational sermon and forget it just as fast as you heard it, give the same amount of money, etc. It's comfortable. It asks nothing of you, it's under your control. And you've left your first love. You have forgotten why you do this thing called ‘church’. Churches that leave their first love, are churches that start clinics or hospitals or schools. And at the time they may have done that, they did it because they wanted to reach the lost through some other means, perhaps., But in time it just becomes about healing physical wounds or teaching earthly knowledge, and they forget the mission. 

This happens in a million different ways but always has the same root cause – people becoming self-satisfied, leaving their first love and finding something about this world they’d rather control and enjoy than letting Christ direct their steps.

Because on an individual level, we forget why we're a Christian. You might find Bible classes or small groups that never read the Bible or talk about it. Or men’s and women’s groups that fill their calendars with potlucks and never talk about Jesus, much less doing anything. It's the mission of sharing Jesus with the world that is the reason we get together in the first place and that's our first love. And anything else you're doing in church either feeds your ability to do that better, or it's probably a waste of time. 

Granted, there's fellowship that makes you a better evangelist. There's prayer that makes you a better evangelist. We’re not saying that the activity is singular. We’re saying the purpose is singular. Jesus says to think back where they have fallen.  And for all of us if we're in this situation, we ought to think when it all just become routine for us. When did it just become “It's Sunday and I have to attend Church” If that's where you are, shake it up. Do something different. Go back to where you started. Figure out what went wrong and go somewhere better because you only got so much time and He's coming back. Don't waste any more. 

And if you're busy and it's been a long time since Jesus has been controlling your calendar or setting your priorities, or if you have a paid position in church and it's just become the job and the paycheck, if you walk as a Christian on automatic pilot, Jesus says, as He did to that church, ‘I have that against you.’

Remember, He runs the church, and since you're a member of the body, He runs your life, too. And if you're not following Him, if you're not listening to Him, He's going to tell you, ‘Go back!’ and that's His point here.

The thing is, if you follow Christ even half-heartedly, it's going to be the from trial to trial, from triumph to triumph kind of adventure. It's never boring. It's never routine. Because He will not let you become self-satisfied, because if you do, you’d stop growing.

So if that's not your experience in Christ, go back, start where it went bad and try a different path. And He is so serious about this concern that He tells His church - notice verse 5 - there will be a penalty if they fail to heed His call to repent. He says, ‘I'm coming to you and I'm going to remove your lampstand out of its place unless you repent.’

Now we know what the stand means - it is the symbol of the church itself. And since the church in this case was the city of Ephesus, what His threat essentially means is bringing both the church and the city to an end, so that there couldn't be a church there anymore. 

Back in first Corinthians, Chapter 2: 1 Paul says this: 

1 Cor. 2:1 “And when I came to you, brethren, and I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God.

1 Cor. 2:2 For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.” 

That could be, I think, a mantra for somebody who is struggling with self-satisfaction. Go back to the point where you can say to yourself, ‘I know nothing except Jesus and Him crucified. I don't care about all the other stuff’. If you can get back to that point, you're probably making progress.

It’s interesting that the name of this church is ‘desired’ or ‘desirable’, because that was their chief problem: they lacked a desire for Jesus. Instead, they found desire for other things, it appears. So we should ask the question: what did they do with this? What happened? Did they repent?

Well, we can only assume not. Because by the beginning of the second century, this city was in steep decline. For reasons that no one is quite clear on, the harbor just started to silt up. This is the harbor that has been there for a long, long, long time. But out of nowhere, it started developing silt washed in by the Mediterranean, and as the silt was deposited into the harbor, it formed land. And so over time, the city that used to be on the water ended up being a long way from the water, to the point where it was no longer a harbor, and no longer a port, and it lost its main source of income. If you go to Ephesus today and visit the ruins, you’re miles from the Mediterranean Sea.

If God wants to stop your church, He can do it. He'll change the geography in order to put a church out of business if He needs to. Jesus promised He would bring an end to that lampstand and He did.

And then He ends with a piece of encouragement. He says, ‘Nonetheless, no matter what may happen to the church in any one place, that is, your church might go away, the land may change, no matter, your personal relationship with Jesus does not change’. 

You notice verse 7, He says it's a call to all believers (those who have ears to hear), that's what He means. To all believers, He says, the Spirit affirms we will eat of the tree of life.

That's another pattern in all these letters. They always end with an encouragement to the believer, no matter how bad that church is, and no matter what they do with this call to repent. To the individual believer, there is no condemnation from Christ Jesus. No matter what else may go wrong on earth or in the church, your eternal future in Christ is secure, and in that eternal future you will receive all that you have been promised. And so in each of the seven letters, He will make some reference to some detail about the eternal realm. Here He does about the Tree of Life in Paradise. We'll talk about that more in Chapter 22. 

So, that's what we've done with the first letter. Let's just do a quick recap. We have a letter now that we've looked at from the literal, historical perspective. We looked at it from the universal, timeless perspective, that is, we applied it to ourselves. And we've looked at it now from the prophetic perspective.

But we still have one question left to answer, and that is, how does this church represent the first period of the church age?

First, it is easy to say that this church represents the first age because it's the first letter, so we know where it would start - start at the outset of the church. When did the church begin? Scripture says that the official start of the church was Pentecost. Why? Because the definition of a ‘Christian’, according to Paul in Romans Chapter 8, is anyone who has the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

And that is the biblical definition of a Christian. It is the one who has the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which comes as a matter of your confession of faith. To be born again by faith in Jesus is to receive the Holy Spirit because it is the Spirit of God who gives you that rebirth. It's all one moment.

But what we're saying is this: just because you sit in a church doesn't make you a Christian. No more than sitting in your garage makes you a car.

So there are people who think they're Christian because they associate with Christians or because they participate in ‘Christian’ activities but they've not believed or received the Gospel - they have not been born again by the Spirit of God - and though we can't tell who is who, necessarily, God knows what he does.

And there is a Spirit in those who believe, and there is not the Spirit of God in those who don't believe. And so the church had a moment in which the Spirit of God began to indwell in us, and that was Pentecost.

And that became the moment when a believer was a member of the church, as opposed to, for example, John the Baptist, as just an example. He was a believer, but he died before Pentecost, so he never had the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the way you and I do. He was not part of the church. He was just an Old Testament saint, or, technically, kind of a New Testament saint, but not part of the church. 

The church is those who have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. By definition that started at Pentecost. So that was the start of the church. This letter would be telling us about how the early church got started following that moment, giving us an overview.

And what do we know about the early church? What we know from Acts Chapter 2 is that the early church was fully aware of their first love and very much attentive to Him. We read in Acts chapter 2 about how they were continually devoting themselves to the apostles teaching and to prayer. And they had a feeling of a sense of awe. And they were selling all their possessions and giving the money to those in need in the church. There was harmony, they were continually in one mind in the temple, breaking bread from house to house, just doing things that were filling their day. And this was all they were doing every day for a while, really engaging with their first love. 

The reason that was happening in the early churches was because there was a sense in the very beginning that Jesus was going to return pretty quickly. And, of course, at some point, as time went on, they began to understand it wasn't going to be quite that fast. And as that realization took hold, things had to change. The church had to exist in the world. They had to find a balance between looking forward to eternity with Jesus and just making a living today in the world. And their pattern in the earliest days of the church wasn't sustainable in that respect. They were enthusiastic in a way that didn't promote the mission of the church. They were kind of all huddled up in the temple waiting for Jesus. And as they figured out that wasn't the plan, they began to move out, and Jesus encouraged them to move out by persecution in Jerusalem.

During the first century, what you see in the nature of the church mirrors what we see in this letter. Generally, the church held to sound teaching because you had the apostles themselves alive and teaching and leading the church. And as a result, the church was generally resistant to false doctrine. That's why we have now the New Testament canon preserved for us in the way that it does. Because the apostles in that first century were doing their job and held us together. And it was an impressive time of work. The gospel moved from Jerusalem to every known place in the world. By the time you get to the end of the first century, it's gone to Spain, it's set up in Rome and it’s gone as far as we know in that time on earth.  

And there was a sense of perseverance against both Jewish persecution and Roman persecution. The false teachers that tried to infiltrate the church and establish biblical leadership were put down. And so all the positive things Jesus says about Ephesus held true in the first century, by and large.

But as the century progressed, and particularly toward the very end of that century, the church began to change in ways that mirror the negative comments of this letter. For example, Jewish Christians had largely died out and in their place had come Gentile Christians for the most part. And those Gentile Christians brought pagan influences, and they began to enter the church by the thousands.

And those Gentile believers were far more willing to mix with the culture than their Jewish predecessors, because Jews had always been set out from the culture and opposed to the Roman pagan way of doing things. But the Gentiles that came in were coming out of that culture. They were perfectly happy to mix, and you see some of that in the letter Paul wrote to Corinth - both in the first and the second letter - of the mixing of the two worlds and the problems it was creating. 

Many of those believers, as a result, ended up self-satisfied, busy building the church. But they did so in the way Romans built Roman society. They did it for its own sake, just to have a building, just to have a presence in the city. And what did Jesus do to shake up the self-satisfaction of the first century church? In Ephesus, what did He do?

He took away their place as a church. He took away the church's place of privilege and security in the Roman Empire where before they could be self-satisfied, eat in the temple on Friday night, go to the church service on Saturday or Sunday and repeat that every week and feel like they had found their way to God, the whole time doing very little to actually follow Him in the ways that He had expected.

Jesus shook them up. And He allowed sustained, widespread persecution to enter into the church at the end of the first century. And in doing so, He purified it. He broke it free of self-satisfaction. Look, if you're just in it for the fun and persecution breaks out, you're done with church. If you're in it because you love Jesus, you stick around. That's why persecution is so helpful to the character of the church. What remained behind was a true committed Body that suddenly remembered what it means to be a slave of Jesus and what it means to suffer for Christ. That enters into the second letter. 

The second letter picks up that point, and you know what the word Smyrna means? ‘Death’. Coincidence? We’ll see.

So Ephesus would be the first church as we just studied. And now we have to put dates to it to finish this part of the study. And we’re going to call it AD 30 to 100. Now there is no science to these dates. That's not the point of this exercise. The point is the progression. At some point, the nature of the church had changed from what was true in the very earliest days to something new and different.

What was that change? Well, roughly at the end of the first century, persecution breaks out. That's when history records that Domitian, the emperor of Rome, began systematic persecution of the church in the AD 90s. So it corresponds neatly with about 100 AD.

So what we learned is that the early church had this progression from first love to self-satisfaction, and Jesus doesn't condone that. And He shakes the church up and brings it into a period of persecution, which is the chief nature of the Church of Smyrna., And we'll come back to that in Revelation 2 (III) Seven Churches: Smyrna

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