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Revelation (Part 4)

Revelation 2:8–11

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the End Times from Revelation 2:11–8


We give you thanks, Lord God, that Christ Jesus said, “I will build my church,” whether in the first century or today. He still walks, as it were, amongst the golden candlesticks, and his eye examines, and he commends and rebukes. It is written, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the church.” Grant that we may so hear this evening we ask. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Tonight we’re going to go through the other six churches in Revelation 2–3. Probably, for those of you who have been Christians for some time, if you’ve heard sermons on the book of Revelation at all, you’ve heard them on the first three chapters, but by the end of tonight we’ll have finished the first three chapters, and after that, the chances that you’ve heard very much on the book of Revelation are relatively small, unless you come from a certain heritage. But we will look at these verses tonight. First, then, to the church in Smyrna. Chapter 2, verses 8 and following.

“To the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These are the words of him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again. I know your afflictions and your poverty—yet you are rich! I know the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer.

I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. He who overcomes will not be hurt at all by the second death.”

If you will recall from last week, the way Jesus is introduced in each of these seven churches draws, in part, from the way he is presented in the vision in chapter 1, but what element of that vision is drawn is related to the individual church. Last week we saw, for example, with respect to the church in Ephesus, Christ is presented as the one who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands. That is, he’s the one who is evaluating, examining the churches.

In this particular case, he has an examination of peculiar interest to make with respect to the church in Ephesus. It’s a church that perseveres and is strong on many fronts but is now operating out of a die-hard commitment rather than out of any sort of love. Here in Smyrna, “These are the words of him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again.” This is one of only two churches in the seven about which nothing negative is said.

Interestingly enough, although I’m sure it doesn’t have to be that way, both of the churches about which nothing negative is said happen to be small churches facing certain persecution and not at all sure of themselves. Contrast Ephesus, which is a substantial church, which is strong on many points, or Laodicea, which is wealthy and full of self-esteem and confidence, yet some of the harshest things are said about that church. We’ll reflect on that a little later.

In each case, too, I suggested last week (we shall see it now clearly this week) that the church involved mirrors in some way its own town, which is not too surprising. Whether we like it or not, we’re part of our culture and our history and our heritage, even as we’re also part of the church. Those things do touch us, for good and evil. Part of Christian responsibility is to know what parts of that history and heritage and culture we should be taking up and which part we should be disavowing and even confronting.

So it’s worth knowing something about Smyrna. Smyrna was settled early by the Greeks. It faced successive waves of invasion. It was located about 40 miles north of Ephesus. It has a harbor on the Hermes River. It’s fertile. It was a trading center. It is the important city of Izmir today, which is a major city indeed. Even then it was a very commercial city with many Jews in it. It was destroyed almost entirely in the sixth century BC. I’ll say something about that. Then it was rebuilt about 280 BC just after the time of Alexander the Great.

So it was a city that had died and then come back to life again. Jesus presents himself as the First and the Last, who died and came back to life again. One suspects that the church itself, which is facing poverty and slander and overt persecution, as we can see in the text (we’ll come to those passages in a moment), wondered at times if it was going to die. Jesus introduces himself as the one who is sovereign. He is the First and the Last. He’s at the beginning, and he controls everything. He’s at the end, and he’s the sovereign Judge.

He faced persecution and died and came back to life again, as did this very city. If anybody should know that apparent death is not the last word it should be the Smyrnaeans. This was also one of the centers of the cult of emperor worship. I said a little bit about that last day, and I want to say more about it today so we can understand it properly. It’s going to crop up again and again in these letters, so I may as well stop now to say something.

After Augustus Caesar died, right at the beginning of the first century, the Roman Senate voted that he should be reified, that he should be viewed henceforth as having been promoted to some sort of godlike status, whereupon it was appropriate to worship the emperor from that point. When you get to Caligula, who was as mad as a hatter, in the 30s, he proclaimed himself a god to the Senate. He came in and said to the Senate, “I have been apotheosized. I am a god.” He declared it as good news.

Because he was mad and a bit of a butcher, nobody in the Senate laughed. On top of all of that, he declared his horse apotheosized as well, so both he and his horse were gods from that point on. Nobody in the Senate had the power, the chutzpah, to say, “Hey, come off it, Charlie,” or Caligula, as the case may be, and defrock him on the spot, as it were, or the like. At the end of the day, Caligula was still head of the armed forces.

So thereafter, although he was mad.… Those of you who saw the I, Claudius series on television on PBS a number of years ago, Caligula is presented as pretty mad there too, and that’s just about the way he was. So far as the records go, they got him pretty accurately. Thereafter, although his successors weren’t all as mad as he, nevertheless it became part of the heritage. If you’re going to get reified after death, why not have the advantages before death? At that point, therefore, loyalty to the emperor became bound up with acknowledging that the emperor was god.

Now the Roman Empire had a number of ways of keeping peace. One of the ways they did it was to arrange “god swaps.” Earlier empires had moved people out of their land. Do you remember how Israel was transported? A lot of nations at the time were transported. One of the reasons was because many of these nations tied their local gods, their fortunes, their religion, and their politics to the land. If you moved the people out of their land, you were separating them from some of their land gods and tribal gods.

So it became part of the policy of the Persian Empire, the Medo-Persian Empire, the Chaldean Empire, to transport people, especially really obnoxious, rebellious-type people. They moved them elsewhere. They moved their little vassal states around. This tended, therefore, to break the nexus between land, heritage, and religion. Once you break that nexus, people are a lot less likely to revolt.

Well, the Romans had another way of doing it. What they did was insist on god swaps. That is to say, they insisted that the local people whom they had just captured, whom they had just made a vassal state, adopt some of the gods in the Roman pantheon of gods. Meanwhile, the Romans themselves adopted some of the local gods. They swapped gods.

That meant, therefore, that the local people who might be tempted to rebel against Rome couldn’t pray to their local gods anymore in the hope that somehow they would take on the Romans and win, because those gods were also being prayed to by Rome. Meanwhile, they were demanded to worship some of the Roman gods as well. Thus, the breakdown of people, god, and land was accomplished by swapping gods.

There was one exception to all of that, and that was the Jews. From the Roman perspective, the Jews were such an obstreperous people, so completely perverse in their sullen refusal to acknowledge any god other than theirs, who couldn’t even be seen.… Many Romans suspected that basically the Jews were atheists, because, after all, they couldn’t point to their God.

So they had made an exception in their case. They did not demand that the Jews accept any of the Roman gods, and of course the Romans couldn’t accept the Jewish God because they couldn’t put him in the pantheon. They couldn’t set up an image and say, “This is the Jewish God, and we worship him too.”

As long as Christians, therefore, were perceived to be a subset of Jews by the Romans, they would not face persecution if they did not offer incense to the Roman emperor. In other words, the Jews were the only people in the entire empire who did not have to offer incense to the emperor. What was a minor religious assignation of worship to an emperor was, in the Roman mind, a question of fidelity, of loyal citizenship, and the Jews were exempted from that kind of oath.

As long as the Christians were perceived by Romans to be a kind of denomination of Jews, they were safe from imperial persecution. That’s why when you read the book of Acts, all the earliest persecution against Christians wasn’t from the Romans. It was synagogue persecution. It was in-house stuff. All the earliest persecution against the Christians was from the Jews.

But as the Christians became more numerous and then became more Gentilic, as you had more and more non-Jews, Gentiles, becoming Christians, the easiest way the Jews had to oppose the Christians was to tip off the Romans that these people weren’t Jews. Then eventually the power of Rome descended on the Christians.

In many cases, this was merely local stuff. The first major Roman persecution of Jews, so far as our records go, was from Nero in the mid-60s, and it was not empire-wide. It was local. It may have been touched off, at least in part.… As tradition goes (it’s hard to prove), he may have started a lot of the fires in Rome that burned down a lot of Rome.

He may have been an arsonist through his troops, because he may have been trying to divert attention from his losses militarily, the mess he was making of the empire fiscal arena. What you do is get everybody all upset with what’s going on. Then he blamed the Jews and the Christians for the fires. In any case, hundreds and hundreds of both Jews and Christians were crucified under Nero, and others were thrown to the lions, and so on. Probably both Paul and Peter were martyred under Nero.

It wasn’t an empire-wide persecution. It was Rome-based. By the end of the first century, however, you were beginning to get more extensive persecutions. Then there were cycles of persecution becoming imperial policy from about Trajan on, on and off, about 125 or so, that just decimated Christian ranks in some places, yet the church continued to grow and continued to grow until there was a complete reversal of this by the conversion, real or otherwise, of Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century just after AD 300.

If we are right in saying that this was written toward the end of the first century.… It’s hard to be absolutely sure, but if it was, then what we’ll discover is that a number of these towns in the seven-churches region were very much involved in worshiping emperors, dead or alive. Cities vied for the privilege of becoming neokoros; that is, for the privilege of building a temple to an emperor. One of these cities, we’ll see, twice became neokoros.

For a city that had that as part of its heritage, that built up a temple to an emperor, temple worship was really serious, just as some cities are really keen on a particular football team, and if you start going around making nasty remarks about a football team in that particular city, you can be in big trouble, at least in some circles.

You don’t go up to Green Bay and start cheering Chicago. It’s a good way to commit suicide. You don’t do things like that. Well, this was much more than sports enthusiasm. It was religion and fidelity to state. The link between state and religion was so tight most people couldn’t separate them in their minds.

So Christians trying to be good citizens, trying to obey the apostle Paul’s injunctions to honor the king and pay your taxes and keep peace with all men so much as it’s possible, and so on.… None of that counted if you didn’t offer your little bit of incense on demand to the emperor. That was viewed as treason. So Christians began to face persecution for the most idiotic reasons, but that’s the kind of thing they had to face. That went right through this whole period.

“I know your afflictions and your poverty—yet you are rich!” Isn’t that a wonderful way of addressing them? It’s a way of saying that poverty and wealth can be measured on different axes. If you’re purely materialistic, then poverty and wealth just have to be measured in terms of dollars or shekels or yen or whatever it is that is your particular patch. There is no other index.

But if you really believe what Jesus says about laying up treasures in heaven, where neither rust nor moth corrupt and where thieves do not break through and steal, then it’s quite possible to be very poor in some ways here and very rich in other ways. One doesn’t travel very far in parts of the so-called Third World without coming across Christians who are wonderfully spiritually minded, very godly, sometimes very informed biblically, very evangelistic, very self-denying, who have nothing by Western standards.

Now it doesn’t mean, of course, that every person who has money is necessarily carnal and everybody who’s poor is necessarily godly. That doesn’t follow either. There can be all kinds of godliness with hatred and rebellion and squalor and lust and dirt and all the rest, and there can be all kinds of relative wealth with tremendous generosity and self-denial. One does find it. It’s not common, but one does find it.

This church, then, is assured, on the one hand, that God knows their afflictions and their poverty. In other words, he recognizes it. He understands it. He takes that into account as he weighs them. He knows where they are, but he reminds them that on another axis they are singularly rich. Moreover, he knows.… When he says, “I know,” it’s as if he’s saying, “I know and I understand.”

You know, when somebody loses a mother or a father and someone who has just lost his or her mother or father comes and puts the arm on the shoulder and says, “Listen, I know what you’re going through,” there’s comfort there, because there is sort of a self-identification. It’s not merely, “Hey, I could list the 15 characteristics of people going through your kind of grief.” It’s not that kind of knowledge.

It’s not that God is saying, “Hey, I’m omniscient. I know what you’re going through. You can’t fool me.” That’s not what is meant by this. It’s an arm around the shoulders, saying, “Listen, I understand.” Even in these sorts of things you have to keep things in a certain perspective. There are other axes in which you are extremely rich, he says.

“Moreover, I know the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.” Now there was a large Jewish community there, and sometimes the Jews were the allies of Christians on some issues. Whether this was overt persecution from a synagogue amongst Christians who were still trying to be involved in the synagogue …? Do you recall that Paul says in 2 Corinthians, chapter 11, that three times he received the “40 lashes minus one”? That was a synagogue beating.

When he was beaten with rods, that was a Roman beating, but the 39 lashes was a synagogue beating. The reason he put up with it rather than saying, “If you won’t hear me, I’ll go elsewhere,” is because his policy was still to try to win in the synagogues. He still tried to go in there and witness and testify. Eventually when they threw him out he went to Gentiles, but Romans says again and again and again, “My policy was to the Jews first and also to the Greeks.” He kept trying, even though it cost him those successive beatings.

Therefore, it may conceivably be synagogue persecution here, but I suspect not. I suspect that these people are saying, “We are the true synagogue; we are the true Israel,” and saying to the Romans, “And these people are not. They’re Gentiles, and they have no exemption under the imperial policy. Therefore, from your perspective, if you persecute them, that’s your business. We’re the synagogue; they’re not.”

Of course, by saying that, they’re really claiming also to be the true Israel of God, the true heritage from the old covenant. They are trying to say that they are the ones who are in line with the old covenant texts. From a New Testament point of view, from a Christian perspective, what does that look like? Already in the Old Testament in Jeremiah and Deuteronomy God says, “Listen, the real circumcision is not circumcision of the flesh but the circumcision of the heart.”

Paul makes that very clear in Romans 2. He says at the end of the day what is really at stake is not merely the symbolic nature of the religion but that which changes the heart. Thus, there is a sense in which Jew or Christian who comes to acknowledge by faith Israel’s Messiah, Jesus, who has been promised by those prophets all through the line, stand in one kind of continuity with Israel. They are, thus, to use Paul’s language again in Romans 2.… “He is not a true Jew who is one outwardly but one inwardly.”

Now there are various axes in which you can make distinctions between Israel and the church. There are distinctions. There are passages that preserve distinctions, but there are other passages that make lines of continuity, and here I think it is the line of continuity that is presupposed, and what the exalted Christ is saying to this church …

“Look, it may be that these synagogues are claiming to be in the right inheritance of the Old Testament religion, but if they’ve missed the Messiah those Scriptures announced, if they deny him, if they have not understood the purpose of all of those sacrifices that have pointed to him, they’re not the real synagogue at all. They’re the synagogue of Satan. They’ve lost exactly what they should have had. I know the slander, then, of those who say they are Jews and are not …” They’re slandering these Christians who are claiming to be the true Jews in that sense. “… but they are, in fact, a synagogue of Satan.”

So what, then, does the exalted Christ say to them? First there is this word of comfort. “I know this, and I know that about you.” But now.… “Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life.” There are several things we should point out about this.

First, throughout the book of Revelation, you find an astonishing interplay between God’s sovereignty and the Devil’s activity. It’s not an interplay in which God does his bit, and then it’s the Devil’s turn and he does his bit, and then, like a game of chess, it’s God’s turn and he moves, and then it’s the Devil’s turn and he moves. It’s not that kind of interplay in which you have two finite actors doing their thing one at a time, taking turns, patiently waiting for the other.

Later on, it’ll become very clear, especially in chapters 12–14. The Devil is a horrible foe. He has all kinds of desperate tricks, but not for one moment does God relinquish his sovereignty. In this fallen and broken world, the Devil does things. He has to be opposed, and sometimes he has to be endured, but God is still on his throne.

So also here. From one vantage point, you can see that it’s the Devil who’s throwing them in prison. On the other hand, the fact that God sort of quietly sits there and announces what’s going to take place and how long it’ll be and the fact that they need to be strong and how it’s going to come out at the end shows that it’s not exactly as if he’s taken by surprise.

You have the same sort of thing in Paul. Do you remember how Paul’s thorn in the flesh in 2 Corinthians, chapter 12, is something that he found so repulsive and so shaming that he prayed in serious intercession three times that God would take it away? What does he call that? He calls it “a messenger of Satan to torment me, or to tempt me.” At the same time, he uses a form of expression in the Greek, “There was given me,” and it means by God, “a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan. And it was given to me so that I might learn not to boast.”

There’s no way that Satan gave it to him so that Paul would learn not to boast. Satan has no interest in giving Paul something so that Paul would learn not to boast. From Satan’s point of view, this was just miserable suffering that was designed to crack the man. From God’s point of view, using what Satan gave him in this fallen, broken world, it was something God used to teach him not to boast.

We could spend quite a lot of time trying to think through how that works out in Scripture, but it is a very common theme. It is important to acknowledge that Satan is a terrible, vicious foe. It is also important to insist that he does not have equivalent power to God. It is not as if there are two gods, one good and one bad, and this time Satan won. “Poor God. He sort of wasn’t bright enough this time around.” God is never presented like that.

It is a fallen, broken world, yes. Satan does have a great deal of sway, yes. But never, never, never does he make God contingent or secondary. That is the whole difference between a theistic universe and a dualistic universe. Theism is just the belief in one sovereign God. In a theistic universe, at the end of the day, God is God. In a dualistic universe, there are two powers of roughly equivalent potency. The whole Bible pictures a theistic universe, not a dualistic universe, which language we should avoid like the plague. That’s the first thing to say about this suffering.

The second thing to say about it is that people can be strengthened against persecution by knowing about it in advance. Here there is no sort of triumphalistic cloudiness. “Hey, we’re on the winning side. We’re going to win. Christians are victorious, happy people.” No, no, no. There can be a certain strength by saying, “Look, we are at this time and place in history where we are going to face persecution. Let us open our eyes to what it means and strengthen our minds and hearts before God. This is what we’re going through.”

Many have been the times when Christians have had to do exactly that. Christians, for example, in Ethiopia when Mussolini and his troops went in and the missionaries all fled.… They knew what they were in for. Many Christians, for example, in totalitarian regimes of left or right, as the totalitarian power demands absolute sway and begins to close things down, they know what they’re in for.

So the question eventually becomes supposing current societal trends continue in this country. Could there be persecution here? Of course there could. It would be over something relatively incidental, but it could happen. I was brought up in French Canada. In between 1950 and ‘52 my father was a Baptist church planter.

Baptist ministers alone between ‘50 and ‘52 spent eight years in jail. It was never for preaching the gospel, but that’s really what it was. It was for inciting to riot or disturbing the peace or whatever it was, but they still spent eight years of their lives behind bars. That’s all changed now, of course. But I could give you 20 scenarios in which it could happen here.

Who knows what the Lord will do? The Lord may give us revival here. There may be sufficient cutback of government power for fiscal or other reasons that things will fall apart on other grounds and there won’t be overt persecution, but it could happen, and if you start to see it happening, that is not the time to talk about triumphalism. That’s the time to strengthen the people of God, to talk about it, to face it. “What will happen if this happens? How will we handle it?” It is important to strengthen your hands and your hearts in that case toward what is coming.

“… suffer persecution for ten days.” In much of the Bible, names and numbers and this sort of thing are to be taken very strictly literally. For example, if you learn in John, chapter 21, that there are 153 fish, it’s because there was one more than 152 and one fewer than 154. Probably somebody said, “Boy, that’s a whale of a lot of fish in one net. I wonder how many are there?” and they counted them, and there were 153.

Or it may be that they needed to count them to divide them up fairly amongst the fisherpeople so they could share equally in the sales. So although there have been many, many, many very imaginative speculations about why there were 153, I suspect there were 153 because there were 153. But there are certain kinds of writing, not least apocalyptic, that use numbers symbolically. There aren’t many numbers in the book of Revelation that are not used symbolically.

Here you are loaded for bear with 3s, 4s, 10s, and 12s. Multiples of 10s; 10 to the third power, a thousand; 12 times 12, which is 144; and 12 times 12 times 10 times 10 times 10, which is 144,000, and so on. Some of the symbolism is as plain as a pikestaff. We’ll come to some of it later. Some of it is very disputed, and there are some people of more literalist persuasion who think it’s all exactly literal.

All I have to say is that apocalyptic as a genre of literature schematizes numbers constantly. It is one of the features of this kind of writing, and to be fair to that kind of writing, one should take it that way. The 10 days here, I suspect, is nothing more than a full period. That is, days.… It’s a fairly short period, but it’s 10, which is a number that regularly symbolizes completeness of one sort or alike. It’s a full period.

“Be faithful, even to the point of death.” That is, some who face persecution and prison and suffering will not be martyred, but some will. “Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life.” In other words, there is a choice to be made here between the life the world gives and the life God gives. You can deny the faith and have life now, or you can acknowledge the faith, face death now, and life then. Which is it going to be?

That’s a contrast that comes out again and again in the book of Revelation. A little later on, in chapters 13–14, you can have the mark of the Beast on you and face the wrath of God, the wrath of the Lamb, or you can have the mark of God on you and face the wrath of the Beast. Which one do you want? You’re going to face one of them. Which one do you want? So you get this kind of polarization. You can have the blessing of one and the wrath of the other, or the wrath of the one and the blessing of the other. Which do you want?

You get this point/counterpoint theme running through. Yes, you may face death, but then you get the crown of life. Great deal. It is looking at things from eternity’s perspective. The person who thinks this life is everything cannot make sense of the book of Revelation. There is no spirituality for a person in the book of Revelation who does not think in terms of eternity’s values. None.

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. He who overcomes will not be hurt at all by the second death.” Now in all of these letters, you get something like, “He who has an ear let him hear,” but what is to be heard varies from letter to letter, and the promise as it’s put varies from letter to letter.

Go back for a moment to Ephesus. Verse 7: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes …” That much is the same, but in the context of Ephesus, the overcoming must surely be the overcoming in the area where the church was weak. The overcoming there is not facing persecution, because the Ephesus church wasn’t facing persecution.

The overcoming there was overcoming your emotional affective lethargy, your mere performance of duty, your sheer calloused lovelessness. Correspondingly, the promise that comes then is the right to eat of the Tree of Life, which is in the paradise of God; that is, living with God for all eternity as opposed to having your candlestick removed. The perfect joy, the wonderful delight, the fulfillment of all love in the paradise of God.

Here, however.… “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. He who overcomes will not be hurt at all by the second death.” Here the overcoming clearly is overcoming in the face of persecution, sticking it out even when it might cost you something. Whether it costs you a job or imprisonment or even death, you stick it out. That’s what overcoming means in that case.

It does not mean triumphant Christian living, whatever that means. Here it means sticking it out even if they shaft you, even if they take you to the scaffold. Then the reward promised, very interestingly, is “Well, you might have the one death all right, but not the second death. Which death would you prefer?” Do you see? It’s again this point/counterpoint sort of thing.

It recalls to mind what Jesus says in the Synoptic Gospels. He says, “Do not fear those who can kill the body and then can’t do anything more to you. Fear him, rather, who after having killed the body can cast body and soul into hell.” You have to decide who your real enemies are. You have to decide who wants your ultimate good. You have to decide what you’re really going to be afraid of.

So yes, you overcome in this case by dying. You overcome in this case by enduring even in the face of death, and your reward is not that you don’t die; it’s that you don’t die the second death, which is the only one that ultimately counts. Fifty billion years from now, nobody is going to worry too much about the first death. It’s the second death. Only that one will be seen to be severe.

But again, none of this works as an incentive to anything unless you’re living with eternity’s values in view, looking at things from a God’s-eye point of view. That’s how God views what is important. That’s how any Christian who thinks about it must view what is important. Questions, then, about Smyrna before we press on.

Female: [Inaudible]

Don Carson: It’s almost formulaic. Verse 7, likewise, “What the Spirit says to the churches, what the Spirit says to the churches,” and then again in verse 17, “What the Spirit says to the churches.” I think what is going on is it’s a way of saying the Spirit is talking to all of the churches, but exactly the lesson you learn from what the Spirit says is going to vary according to the particular location, experience, and history of the particular church. The Spirit does talk to the churches.

Female: [Inaudible]

Don: I suspect they got the whole thing as a book, the book of Revelation, but then as you read through.… Just as when you’re given a photograph of your class picture. Look at this photograph. Where does your eye go? So now you get something written to all of the churches in the whole valley system, and then.… Bang! You’re reading along and up comes, “Oh, Smyrna. What does it say to us?” That one becomes particularly pointed.

There are lessons in principle to learn from all of them, but there are peculiarly urgent lessons to learn where your name pops up, as it were. There are general lessons to learn from this that we’ll infer more clearly after we’ve been through more of the seven churches. You discover that the Spirit is talking to all of the churches. “Listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.”

But the peculiar lessons any one church must learn depend a bit on where that church is in experience or sin or victory or suffering or whatever. It’s always a classic mistake for the church to listen to the wrong thing. We’ll come to that a little farther on. Some churches just want to listen to what they want to listen to.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: What it means is that there would be no more church. At the end of chapter 2, the seven-branch candlestick is identified as the seven churches, so to remove the candlestick is a way of saying the church ceases to exist. The church will be destroyed. It’ll be judgment. How it’ll come …

Could it come just by everybody sort of dying away and the second generation there’s nothing left? Could it come by catastrophic persecution? How long it will take.… Nothing of that is said. The point that is made is a principial one. Namely, unless a church preserves its first love or loses it, repents, and goes back to its first love, sooner or later the candlestick is taken away.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Yes, but there are two. If the church is taken away, you no longer have a community of believers. The counterpoint to that is, ultimately, the fact that you are believers is demonstrated by entering into the Promised Land with all the joys that are found there. I think another point/counterpoint is bound up in the fact that they’ve lost their first love. That is, there’s a lack of joy, enthusiasm, and adoration in the whole thing. Well, if there’s one symbol that both Jews and Christians share that’s full of joy, love, and delight, it is paradise, eating of the Tree of Life.

So if their whole alleged Christian life is bound up here with lovelessness and mere duty so sooner or later they are exposed as not being real Christians at all, they don’t partake of that, but on the other hand, that which is genuine Christianity here is going to have some measure of joy, of love for the Lord God in it, and it’s consummated over there with paradise, eating from the Tree of Life. The one who overcomes in this area.… That’s the reward. That’s the fulfillment of it.