Archive for the 'Revelation' Category

The Sixth Mark: Mission (Revelation 3:7-13)

Monday, June 23rd, 2008
Mission is the sixth mark of the church (Rev. 3:7-13).
 
Before Jesus Christ ascended into heaven, he gave his disciples what we now call the Great Commission: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:18–20). This commission consists of three elements: the fact of Christ’s authority, the command to make disciples, and the promise of Christ’s presence.
 
We see the same three elements at work in the letter to the church in Philadelphia.
 
Fact: “The words of the holy one, the true one, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens.” Jesus Christ is God’s key master, who opens doors of opportunity for his mission-minded followers.
 
Command: “Behold, I have set before you an open door which no one is able to shut.” Although Jesus Christ has the power to shut doors of opportunity in such a way that no one can open them, he does not use that power in his churches. Rather, he only opens doors so that we might “go” and “make disciples.”
 
The church in Philadelphia was providentially prepared to walk through such an open door. John Stott comments: “Philadelphia was situated in a broad and fertile valley which commanded the trade routes in all directions. Sir William Ramsay wrote that the intention of the city’s founder had been to make it a centre for the spread of Greek language and civilization. ‘It was a missionary city from the beginning.’ So it may be that Christ was intending that what Philadelphia had been for Greek culture, it was now to be for the spread of the gospel.”[1]
 
Promise: “I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world, to try those who dwell on the earth.” A missionary church never seeks out conflict with others, but conflict comes to it nevertheless. Wherever the church shares the good news of God’s love, powerful interests oppose it. At the church in Pergamum, that powerful interest was the Roman imperial cult and the ius gladii (“power of the sword”) that enforced it. At the churches in Smyrna and Philadelphia, that powerful interest was the Jewish synagogue, which Jesus refers to as “the synagogue of Satan.”
 
I read those four words with trepidation. Looking backward from Auschwitz at the relationship of Jews and Christians, I see how Gentile Christians used such descriptions to hatefully, wrongfully, and unjustly persecute Jews down the centuries. Such persecution was, is, and always will be a sin. But to understand these words in their historical setting we must remember that Jesus Christ, the letter writer, is a Jew, as is John, his amanuensis. Also, in the first century when Revelation was written, Judaism was a large community of faith but Christianity a small one. Auschwitz is an awful reminder that for centuries Christians persecuted Jews. Philadelphia is a small reminder that for a brief time, persecution flowed in the opposite direction.
 
But if we understand the mission of the church rightly, we will see that persuasion, not persecution, is the way the church of Jesus Christ should accomplish its mission. Christ has set before us an open door to tell others of his love for them. Sometimes, such evangelism will result in conflict. Knowing that Jesus Christ is with us, let us go through the door anyway.
 
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[1] John Stott, The Incomparable Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 180.

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The Fifth Mark: Sincerity (Revelation 3:1-6)

Friday, June 20th, 2008
Sincerity—also known as authenticity—is the fifth mark of the church (Rev. 3:1-6).
 
Its opposite is hypocrisy, which derives from a Greek word for actor. Just as an actor dons a costume and assumes a character for the stage, so a hypocrite dons a public persona that is at variance with his private self. The church in Sardis was a hypocritical church: “I know your works,” Jesus says. “You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead.”
 
Several years ago, I read an article praising hypocrisy in The New Republic. The author did not voice a full-throated praise of that vice—he was not a fool!—but he gave it two cheers. Why? For the simple and common sensical reason that hypocrisy is socially useful. It is better to live next to a hypocritical saint than a sincere sinner, after all. However vicious he may be in private, the former does nothing in public to shock the neighbors or frighten the horses. In an age such as ours that equates authenticity with being rude, crude, and lewd, a little hypocrisy could go a long way.
 
Nevertheless, despite its social utility, hypocrisy is spiritually deadening. God created our inner and outer selves to match. So, who we are and who others perceive us to be should be the same. But it takes much energy—spiritual, moral, and psychological—to maintain integrity from the inside out. Hypocrisy allows us to spend less energy on the inner self while spending the same amount of energy on the outer self. We keep up appearances, but inside, we are weakening from a lack of resources.
 
Interestingly, the larger the gap between our inner and outer selves becomes, the greater our commitment to legalism grows. Legalism is a merely external morality, an ethic only of rules. It is well suited for hypocrites, who are concerned with appearances but do not have the interior strength to obey God’s commandments from the heart. So, in Matthew 23, we find Jesus deriding the Pharisees for their hypocrisy and their legalism. The two fit hand in glove. Jesus advises us to follow the Pharisees’ rules, which, as external norms of behavior, are well and good, but not the Pharisees’ example, which is rotten to the core. They “clean the outside of the cup and the plate,” Jesus says, “but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence” (verse 25).
 
The remedy for hypocrisy is repentance. “Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die,” Jesus counsels the Sardinian Christians, “for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. Remember, then,” he goes on to say, “what you received and heard. Keep it and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you.”
 
We need not choose between hypocritical sainthood and sincere sinfulness. A third option is available: sincere sainthood. But we must choose it today.
 
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The Fourth Mark: Holiness (Rev. 2:18-29)

Thursday, June 19th, 2008
The fourth mark of the church is holiness (Rev. 2:18-29).
 
At the church of Thyatira, there was a woman whom Jesus refers to as “Jezebel.” The name is aptly chosen, for just as the Jezebel of the Old Testament had done (1 Kings 16:29–34), this woman led God’s people astray. Specifically, she convinced some of the Thyatiran Christians “to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols.”
 
We readily understand Jesus’ condemnation of sexual immorality. Although the Old Testament often uses the language of adultery as a catchword for idolatry (e.g., Hos. 9:1), in the church of Thyatira, the sexual immorality was real. For Christians, the marriage bed alone is undefiled (Heb. 13:4).
 
But what about the eating of food sacrificed to idols? In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul argues that a Christian may eat such food unless doing so violates another person’s weaker conscience. In 1 Corinthians 10, however, he seems to reverse course, laying down an absolute prohibition: “You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons” (verse 21). The key to interpreting these two chapters correctly is the context of the eating. Is the food eaten at a pagan temple or a private home (8:10, 10:25–27)? And who else is at the table: a person with a weak conscience or a strong one (8:7, 9, 12–13; 10:28–30)?
 
At Thyatira, evidently, some Christians ate food sacrificed to idols at a pagan temple or in the context of a pagan feast. Thus, their eating was not a matter of Christian freedom but of religious infidelity. Their sexual immorality also was a matter of religious infidelity, for pagan idolatry typically included temple prostitution and other sexual rituals. No wonder, then, that Jesus refers to the prominent Thyatiran woman as Jezebel, for she influenced Israel to worship foreign gods (1 Kings 16:31–33).
 
Why would the Thyatiran Christians be tempted by such idolatry? Possibly for reasons of economic survival. According to Robert H. Mounce, “In a city whose economic life was dominated by trade guilds in which pagan religious practices had become the criteria for membership, Christian converts would be faced with the problems of compromising their stand at least enough to allow participation in a common meal dedicated to some pagan deity.”[1]
 
The antidote to religious compromise is holiness. We usually interpret holiness as a synonym of moral behavior, which it is, at least in a secondary sense. Its primary sense is “set apart,” however. In Leviticus 20:26, for example, God says to Israel: “You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.” Holiness means, first of all, that we are wholly the Lord’s and owe ultimate allegiance to him alone. Only then—as a consequence of such consecration—does holiness mean moral behavior.
 
Not all the Thyatirans had compromised themselves. Jesus speaks of their works, love, faith, service, and patient endurance. Such virtues are the fruit of setting ourselves apart for God.
 
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[1] Robert H. Mounce, The Book of Revelation, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 86.

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The Third Mark: Truth (Revelation 2:12-17)

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
The third mark of the church is truth (Rev. 2:12-17).
 
Situated on a conical hill more than a thousand feet above sea level, the city of Pergamum dominated the Caicus River valley below it. Its name, in Greek, means “citadel,” which it certainly was: a fortified city, both powerful and prestigious. The proconsul of Roman Asia resided there, exercising the ius gladii or “power of the sword” over the inhabitants of the province. The Greek gods Zeus, Athena, Dionysus, and Asklepios each had a temple there. Augustus and Trajan erected temples for the worship of deified Caesars such as themselves within the city, making Pergamum the center of the imperial cult in Roman Asia.
 
No wonder, then, that Jesus describes Pergamum as the place “where Satan’s throne is,” “where Satan dwells.” No wonder, then, that Antipas loses his life there, for martyrdom occurs whenever and wherever the church and the world collide. And no wonder, finally, that Christ reminds the Pergameme Christians that he “has the sharp two-edged sword,” “the sword of my mouth.”
 
That sword is the ius gladii of Jesus Christ, the mark of his office and the instrument of his power. Describing Christ at his Second Coming, John writes: “From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron” (Rev. 19:15). It is, of course, the word of God, “piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). It is also the Christian’s only offensive weapon (Eph. 6:17).
 
Such a weapon comes in handy at Pergamum, both for opposing the proconsul’s unjust power and the imperial cult’s untrue religion. We Christians always need to be reminded that what we see with our eyes is not the only reality. The citadel of Pergamum is not the City of God. The proconsul’s ius gladii is a wet paper knife compared to Christ’s two-edged sword. And the thrones of the Greek gods and Roman emperors are not God’s Throne.
 
Unfortunately, some of the Christians at Pergamum had become overwhelmed by the obvious power of the proconsul and the imperial cult. They had listened to the eternally bad advice of Balaam (Num. 31:16, 25:1–5). They had compromised their faith and begun to participate in the pagan cults of gods and emperors. They ate “food sacrificed to idols” and practiced “sexual immorality”—the sacraments of Pergameme idolatry. Jesus Christ praises the Christians of Pergamum who had remained faithful to him, but warns those who had not: “Therefore, repent,” he says. “If not, I will come to you soon and war against them with the sword of my mouth.
 
The sword of Christ, the word of God, protects us from the delusion of the “citadel.” We must always speak Christ’s simple truth to the world’s obvious power, calling all people to hear and heed the word of God. For in it lies their salvation—and ours.
 
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The Second Mark: Suffering Revleation 2:8-11)

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
The first mark of the church is love. The second is suffering.
 
Please do not misunderstand me. Christians are not masochists. We do not fetishize suffering or go looking for martyrdom. But if two thousand years of Christian history are a reliable guide, martyrdom may come looking for us.
 
I freely concede that persecution and martyrdom are far from the minds of most American Christians. For all the religiously conservative complaints about secular humanist domination of the media, the fact is that Americans have near-total freedom to practice, publicize, and proselytize for their respective faiths—or non-faiths, as the case may be. No one, to my knowledge, rots in an American jail because he or she is a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, or atheist.
 
The same freedom of religion does not obtain for many Christians around the world. Nina Shea marks the disparity with these words:
 
Millions of American Christians pray in their churches each week, oblivious to the fact that Christians in many parts of the world suffer brutal torture, arrest, imprisonment, and even death—their homes and communities laid waste—for no other reason than that they are Christians. The shocking untold story of our time is that more Christians have died this century simply for being Christians than in the first nineteen centuries after the birth of Christ. [Think about that!] They have been persecuted and martyred before an unknowing, indifferent world and a largely silent Christian community. And as their suffering intensifies, our silence becomes more stark.[i]
 
John’s Apocalypse is not silent about the persecution of believers. Rather, for John, Jesus is a martyred Christ and his followers form a martyr’s church. Revelation 1:5 and 3:14 describe Jesus as “the faithful witness.” (“Witness” translates the Greek word martys, from which we get the English word martyr.) Antipas, the Pergameme martyr mentioned in 2:13 is also a “faithful witness.” We share Christ’s title, it seems, when we share his fate—the cross.
 
These days, we ask ourselves. “What would Jesus do?” But as John Howard Yoder points out, “there is no general concept of living like Jesus in the New Testament.” He goes on to argue, “There is thus but one realm in which the concept of imitation holds…. This is at the point of the concrete social meaning of the cross in its relation to enmity and power. Servanthood replaces dominion, forgiveness absorbs hostility. Thus—and only thus—are we bound by New Testament thought to ‘be like Jesus.’”[ii]
 
Like Jesus, the church at Smyrna faced persecution and death (Rev. 2:8–11). And like Jesus, the Smyrnans were promised “the crown of life” for enduring those horrible realities (verse 10; cf. Heb. 12:1–2). Although they did not seek suffering, they were willing to endure it for Christ’s sake.
 
Why? Because of love. John thus correlates love and suffering as the church’s first two marks. Indeed, they are inseparable, for as John Stott notes, “A willingness to suffer for Christ proves the genuineness of our love for him.”[iii]
 
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[i] Nina Shea, In the Lion’s Den: A Shocking Account of Perseuction and Martyrdom of Christians Today and How We Should Respond (Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 1997), 1; emphasis added.
[ii] John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 130, 131.
[iii] Stott, The Incomparable Christ, 178.

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The First Mark: Love (Revelation 2:1-7)

Monday, June 16th, 2008
As Christians, we know who we are: sinners who need to repent. But who should we be? According to John Stott, Jesus’ letters to the seven churches describe “seven marks of the ideal church”: love, suffering, truth, holiness, sincerity, mission, and wholeheartedness.[i] Let us take a closer look at each, beginning with love.
 
Love is perhaps the most indiscriminately used word in the English language. The statements “I love God,” “I love my children,” and “I love chalupas at Taco Bell” use the same words to describe radically different affections. After all, if you love God and chalupas in the same way, either God means too little to you or chalupas too much.
 
The Greeks have an advantage over us English-speaking folks, for they employ four words for love: storge, philia, eros, and agape. Storge describes familial affection. Philia describes friendship. Eros describes not merely sexual (i.e., erotic) love, but any love that is directed toward an object of high value. (Love of a beautiful woman, a fast car, and chalupas are all erotic insofar as the lover holds them in high value—which just goes to show that erotic love is not necessarily rational. I mean, really—chalupas?) Finally, there is agape, a word that under Christian influence came to describe selfless love.
 
Jesus uses the word agape in his letter to the Ephesian church (Rev. 2:1–7, see verse 4). Unfortunately, the Ephesians have “abandoned the love you had at first.” What does this mean? Love, we might answer, has both an objective and a subjective side. Objectively, love is associated with “right beliefs” (orthodoxy) and “right deeds” (orthopraxy). “Love does no wrong to its neighbor,” Paul writes: “therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom. 13:10).
 
Now, in some ways, the Ephesians have the objective side of love down pat. They are, according to verses 3–4, hard working, patient, just, orthodox, and unceasing laborers for the cause of Christ. But they are still missing something, namely, the subjective side of love. As John Stott puts it, “It was no doubt at the time of their conversion that their love for [Christ] had been ardent and fresh, but now the fires had died down.”[ii]
 
In the eighteenth century, following on the heels of the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards asked, “What is the nature of true religion?” He answered, “True Religion, in great part, consists in Holy Affections.”[iii] Affections, what we might call emotions today, are the subjective side of Christian living. And the chief of our affections must be love. As Edwards put it, “The Scriptures place religion very much in the affection of love, in love to God and the Lord Jesus Christ, and love to the people of God, and to mankind.”[iv]
 
An ardent, on-fire love is what the Ephesians lack and need to regain. They have orthodoxy and orthopraxy. What they need is orthopathy, that is, “right passion.” And so, do we. For without such a love, we are nothing (1 Cor. 13:1–3).
 
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[i] Stott, The Incomparable Christ, 177.
[ii] Stott, The Incomparable Christ, 178.
[iii] Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections (Carlisle, PA: 1986; original, 1746), 15, 23.
[iv] Edwards, Religious Affections, 32.

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Church—Why Bother? (Revelation 2-3)

Friday, June 13th, 2008
Why bother joining a church filled with sinners who need to repent?
 
I regularly hear people say, in effect, “Jesus is just alright with me,” to quote the Doobie Brothers. Very few, on the other hand say the same thing about the church. As far as they are concerned, the church is corrupt. “Christ? Yes! Church? No!” They like their Jesus neat.
 
Now I understand this attitude quite well. In fact, I sympathize with it. Ever since the televangelist scandals of the late 1980s, I have been sensitive to the ways in which church leaders abuse their positions of power for personal gain. The recent scandals in the Roman Catholic priesthood drive home the same point with fresh relevance.
 
And yet, I do not see how a church’s all-too-obvious sins obviate our need to join one. After all, everyone one of us—clergy and laity, churched and unchurched—is a sinner who needs to repent. Groucho Marx once quipped that he would never join a country club that would accept him as a member. When people highlight the church’s faults as a reason not to join it, they are saying the same thing: “I would never join a congregation that would have a sinner like me as a member.” We often criticize the church’s hypocrisy. How quickly do we attack our own?
 
In his letters to the seven churches, Jesus Christ never argues for the importance of joining a church. He assumes its importance. So, permit me to make the argument for him. Why join a church filled with sinners who need to repent? Two reasons:
 
First, Jesus Christ came to earth to establish the church. Notice that each of the seven letters is addressed to “the angel [singular] of the church in Ephesus,” etc. (2:1, 8, 12, 18; 3:1, 7, 14). The recipient is singular, but the instructions are for all the church’s members. Jesus evidently thinks of those members as a collective entity. That is also why John refers to each church as a singular “lampstand” (1:13, 20) and the universal church as a singular “bride” (19:7; 21:2; 22:9, 17). Jesus’ intention was not merely to save souls one by one, but to make them all “a kingdom, priests to his God and Father” (1:5–6).
 
Second, we are responsible for one another. Cain asked God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9). His answer was no. God’s answer is always yes. Thus, for example, the church in Pergamum was responsible to correct its false teachers (2:14–16) and the church in Thyatira to guide its sexually immoral members to repentance (2:20–25). You see, as I already stated, we all are sinners who need to repent, and misery loves company. Being a sinner is a heavy burden, the weight of which can be borne if shared among friends. “Bear one another’s burdens,” Paul writes, “and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2).
 
So, why join a less-than-perfect church? Jesus wants us to. And we need to.
 
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