Chapter 2: The Seven Letters- Revelation 2:1-29; Revelation 3:1-22

About one-eighth of the book of Revelation is taken up with these seven messages. The true student of God's word learns to give most attention to what God most emphasizes. Therefore we beg the reader not to pass lightly over these seven solemn messages from the Lord Himself concerning our own days, nor to be in undue haste to get over into the distinctly prophetic and more spectacular part of The Revelation, beginning at chapter four.

Some one truly says, "There is always a tendency in the human heart to become occupied with the dispensation in which we are not."

The things that are, the messages to the churches, search us out in a most peculiar way. "Most interpreters pass over this portion of the book slightly." (Alford)

"In his latter days, Bengel strongly recommended to those about him careful meditation in these messages to the churches. He said, ‘Scarcely anything is so fitted to affect and purify us.'" (Hengstenberg)

I. Ephesus-First Love Left

THE ADDRESS: These things saith he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, he that walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks.

This address is general, including all churches: for it was at Ephesus that believers were by Paul entirely separated from connection with Judaism (Acts 19:8; Acts 19:10). Moreover, Christ is seen judicially walking about (Greek, peripateo) among them.

Ephesus had a great beginning! (Read Acts 19:1-41.) Paul, and Timothy, and all truth (Acts 20:20; 1 Timothy 1:3).

But now the Lord must declare to her, her present state in His eyes.

CONDITION KNOWN: I know thy works. This word, "I know" is repeated seven times, once to each church. It is inexpressibly solemn, and we cannot avoid the truth that the Lord is directly cognizant of every detail about every assembly of His on earth.

COMMENDATION: Now, there was much to commend in Ephesus. It would be a flawless church in the eyes of many! Thy toil and patience. They were a working church, and they went steadily on. Patience is mentioned twice: in connection, first, with service; and second, with suffering. Thou canst not bear evil men. There was holiness there-a precious character! To permit men known to be bad to be in fellowship or even in office, is common today, but is treachery to Christ-whom the Church represents. Further, it is deadly wrong instead of kindness, to the unsaved and evil, to have them in "fellowship." Some day they will curse you for such unfaithfulness!

Didst try them that call themselves apostles, and they are not, and didst find them false. "Ministerial courtesy" had no place at Ephesus! Plain scripture tests are given. The saints have "an anointing from the Holy One." They may know, if they will, false teachers, those who are "abiding not in the teaching of Christ." We are not to receive them into our house, and we are to give them no greeting (2 John 1:10); much less are we to suffer them to preach and teach in our assemblies. Ephesus had both the discernment and the spiritual energy to reject those whom she "found false."

Thou hast patience and didst bear for My name's sake, and hast not grown weary. To suffer steadily is harder than to serve sturdily. Not growing weary was certainly a mark of vigorous life.

CONDEMNATION: But I have against thee, that thou didst leave thy first love. Note, the word is "leave" not "lose." To love lies in the power of the will, otherwise it would not be commanded. Now the love of Christ and the Church is that of bridegroom and bride. You cannot judge by what you see in the lukewarm churches today of the intense devotion to Christ's Person into which such assemblies as Ephesus were brought by the Holy Ghost. You may see it in the martyr days, sometimes today on the mission field, and in supremely devoted souls like Samuel Rutherford, Fletcher of Madeley, Madame Guyon, Brainerd, Payson, McCheyne, and Cookman. We regard such cases of devotion as unusual; no, we should say they are normal. Christ has immeasurable love, and that continually, for every redeemed one; and love yearns for love.

Consider newly-married people. Their life is one continuous story of affection-delight in one another. Service is not service, but gladness, for such a bride. Two New England girls worked in a textile factory. Mary went away on a visit of several months. Returning, and meeting her friend on the street, she asked her,

"Maggie, are you working at the same old factory?" "I'm not working at all," burst out Maggie: "I'm married!"

Doubtless such a one was busier with her housework than ever she had been at the factory! But she toiled unconscious of the work as such-it was for him. She parted from him with an embrace as he went to work in the morning, and she prepared the evening meal ever looking out at door or window for his coming. As he neared home, she went to meet him. All her labor was a mere circumstance, swallowed up in her devotion to her husband.

But days, weeks, months pass, and she becomes occupied with the details of her housekeeping, of her own life. She prepares just as good meals, keeps the house in as good, perhaps even better, order; but she has gradually changed her habit of watching for her husband at night, or going eagerly to meet him. She calls, "Goodbye" from somewhere upstairs in the morning, instead of holding him fast every moment she can.

Now this was Ephesus; and this was the departure from first love: while Christ, the Bridegroom, has love in all its freshness, and will evermore have, for the Church. It was Ephesus, leaving that devoted pouring out of response to His love that grieved His very heart!

This is the beginning of that decline which ends in Laodicea, and Laodicea's awful state: "I have need of nothing," yet loathsome, in poverty, wretchedness, misery, blindness, nakedness! Men that question the very virgin birth, and the deity of Christ, and His physical resurrection, are suffered today! The "Christian religion" has taken the place of personal devotion to the Bridegroom.

LOVING COUNSEL: Remember therefore whence thou art fallen, and repent.

"Fallen"! With all their earnestness and activity, the leaving of their first intense love made them a fallen assembly! "Remember-repent-do first works!" Recalling, even with severe effort and anguish, our moments of greatest devotion to our Lord, the hours when we felt most deeply His tender love, and our own response-to remember such times-this is our first task. Thus His love, His goodness, will lead us to repentance. Repentance is not mere sorrow (though godly sorrow works repentance- 2 Corinthians 7:10); but repentance is a changed state of soul. It is "the judgment we have passed, in God's presence, under grace, upon ourselves and all we have done and have been." In this case especially it will be "the goodness of God that leadeth us to repentance." Christ's unvarying, undiminished affection for us, even through our coldness and neglect, will break us up. If not, nothing will!

And do the first works. Instantly let us say, this is not a call to "Christian service" or "renewed activity." Ephesus had toil, patience, intolerance toward evil, patience in suffering,-everything. But the "first works" are the goings forth of affection to Christ, freely, devotedly, as in our first love. It is the story of the bride of the Song of Solomon (Song of Solomon 5:2-16). Her slowness caused His withdrawal, and it caused her much trouble; but it brought her at last to cry, "My beloved is the chiefest among ten thousand; he is altogether lovely!" "First works" with her, were, finding again Him whom her soul loved! Most Christians-yes, real Christians-let Christ go, when He "makes as if He would go further." This, those walking to Emmaus did not: "They constrained him, saying, Abide with us." And He went in with them. In Laodicea we shall find Him standing without. Astonishing! Outside of the Church when His place is in their midst!

PROPHESIED ACTION: I come to thee, and will move thy candlestick out of its place, except thou repent. The words "I come to thee," correspond to the judicial, personal visit of the Lord to Sodom ere its destruction (Genesis 18:1-33). These words do not signify operations by the Spirit, but an act of Christ, who is head over all things to the Church, and who is judging over each assembly. The fatal visit would not be recognized by the church, but it would definitely occur. After the Judge's visit there would be no more assembly there in Christ's eyes. The Spirit would be withdrawn, and darkness and desolation follow. So it happened at Ephesus, and, alas, to how many thousands of other careless "Christian" assemblies in the centuries since! No longer a lampstand!

This "coming" is not His coming again at the rapture, to receive His own; but His special, necessary, judicial action toward an assembly persisting, after much light, and blessing, in neglect of Himself. Alas, the lampstand removed! The priceless privilege of setting forth such a Christ before a dying world, gone forever. I have before me a picture of the Ephesus of today-a ruined archway, a Moslem dwelling, and a forbidding castle, ‘midst desolate hills. No lampstand for Christ where once Paul labored three years, night and day with tears!

But this thou hast, that thou hatest the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. What Nicolaitanism was, let us consider under Pergamum, the third church. We only stop to note the tender consideration of Christ: He cannot refrain from noting Ephesus' common feeling with Him in the matter of a certain terrible evil. "This thou hast": if we have the least jealousy of love for our blessed Lord, He notes it. Let this comfort us.

CALL TO HEAR: He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches. This is most solemn. Evidently not all the Ephesus assembly is meant; but only those who had gotten life by hearing-hearing the voice of the Son of God (John 5:25); for "belief (faith) cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ" (Romans 10:17). [One of the most solemn studies in. the whole Bible is that concerning the hearing ear. At the end of the forty years in the wilderness Moses tells Israel that although they had seen all the mighty miracles, Jehovah had not given them, as a nation, eyes to see and ears to hear! (Deuteronomy 29:4.) Neither did they hearken in the land to God's messengers, the prophets; and Isaiah was commanded judicially to "make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see … hear … understand … turn … and be healed" (6:10). Jeremiah cries, "O foolish people, and without understanding; that have eyes, and see not: that have ears, and hear not." The Lord Jesus preached openly at first, (Matthew 4:17, with Matthew 13:3): then He turned to parables, "because seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand … for this people's heart is waxed gross (literally, ‘grown fat', from prosperity), and their ears are dull of hearing (literally, ‘hearing heavily,' that is, sluggishly and imperfectly),and their eyes they have closed" (Hebrew, "smeared over"). "This citation (from Isaiah) gives no countenance to the fatalist view of the passage, but rests the whole blame on the hard-heartedness and unreadiness of the hearers, which is of itself the cause why the very preaching of the word is a means of further darkening and condemning them" (Alford).

Jehovah said to Ezekiel (12:2), "Son of man, thou dwellest in the midst of the rebellious house, that have eyes to see, and see not, that have ears to hear, and hear not." There is nothing more awful than to be hearkening to God's words with an unopened or uncircumcised ear! Hearing without response brings the fatal delusion-the ability to forget, of James 1:22; James 1:24. "They would not give ear" is God's continual complaint through the prophets.

Our Lord even says to the disciples in the boat (Mark 8:17-18), "Do ye not yet perceive, neither understand? have ye your heart hardened? Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember?" Divine truth enters by the ear: and that act of the will which receives it, is called hearkening, which sometimes involves inclining the ear (from all else).

Now, seven times in the gospels, and eight times in The Revelation-seven times to these churches!-comes this eternally vital, open, yet private call to any opened ear: "He that hath an ear let him hear."

Know you not that the most of the readers and hearers of the book of the Revelation will not really HEAR, in the sense in which the Lord means-a personal, separating word to "sink down into their ears"?

Seiss remarks, "Fishermen and taxgatherers, by listening to Jesus, presently find themselves in apostolic thrones, and ministering as priests, and rulers of the dispensation, wide as the world and lasting as time."]

Moreover, those who can discern when the Spirit is speaking-being born of the Spirit and led by the Spirit (all God's real saints being "not in the flesh but in the Spirit," though they do not always walk by the Spirit, sad to say)-know the Spirit's voice in the Scriptures. They are not Sadducees,-"Modernists." To such, even Christ's servants, are the messages of The Revelation really addressed. These only have "an ear."[I have again and again looked the New Testament through for it, but I can find no Sadducee saved! Can you?]

In emphasizing this, let us note how to Ephesus, Smyrna, and Pergamum, "he that hath an ear" is addressed to the whole assembly; while after Jezebel is admitted as a prophetess (Thyatira), "he that hath an ear" comes still more privately, at the very end of the letter.

PROMISE TO OVERCOMER: To him that over-cometh, to him will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God. There are those who overcome, and there are those who are overcome. These latter are lost (2 Peter 2:20). They give up Christ's words (1 Corinthians 15:2, Colossians 1:23, Mark 8:38). We note two classes-and only two-in Revelation 21:7-8. The tree of life (not a symbol, but a reality) is seen in Revelation 22:2. When the first Adam sinned, we were shut out from the Garden (Genesis 3:22-24) lest we should "live forever" in this sinful state. This tree, under divine wisdom, sustained humanity in physical immortality, i.e., invulnerability to bodily dissolution. Now, in the last Adam, we already have eternal life as to our spirits (John 3:6); but we look forward to bodily immortality and incorruptibility; for redemption of the body is part of our salvation in Christ: 1 Corinthians 1:30 [One of the great proofs of the pagan ignorance of the Word of God that obtains everywhere in so-called Christendom, is the readiness of tens of thousands to listen to Eddyism, talking of "mortal mind"! The Bible never applies the word "mortal" to either spirit or soul, but to the body only. See for yourself. The Greek thneetos, mortal (liable to death), is used six times,- Romans 6:12; Romans 8:11; 1 Corinthians 15:53-54; 2 Corinthians 4:11; 2 Corinthians 5:4; and the word for immortality (not liable to death,-Greek, athanasia), three times,- 1 Corinthians 15:53-54, and 1 Timothy 6:16; and incorruptibility-Greek, aphtharsia (not possible of corruption), eight times,- Romans 2:7; 1 Corinthians 15:42; 1 Corinthians 15:50; 1 Corinthians 15:53-54; Ephesians 6:24; 2 Timothy 1:10; and Titus 2:7.]