REVELATION 3 - LAODICEA
REVELATION 3 - LAODICEA
Christ is everything to Philadelphia, but He has no place in Laodicea. The presentation of Himself is encouragement and stimulus to Philadelphia, but to Laodicea it is rebuke. Philadelphia is the product of a spiritual ministry of Christ become formative [p. 64] through self-judgment and the exercises of intelligent affection. This gives the knowledge of Christ in His relation to the assembly and to all things, and of the assembly in its relation to Christ. But Laodicea is marked by indifference to Christ, and self-sufficiency. It is the closing phase of church history, and its characteristics are widely discernible today. So that it is most important to apprehend Christ as He presents Himself to this assembly. It is what the Spirit would bring before the christian profession in a special way at the present time.
He is “the Amen” — the establishment and confirmation of every divine thought and purpose. There can be no development, no advance upon Christ; He is God’s last word. All the Fulness of the Godhead dwells in Him bodily, and the saints are filled full in Him. We must remember that the Colossian epistle was to be “read also in the assembly of Laodiceans” (Colossians 4: 16). That epistle, if engrafted in the souls of the saints, would have preserved them — and will preserve us — from the state into which Laodicea fell. The test and exposure of every corrupting influence is that it is “not according to Christ” (Colossians 2: 8). And in the new man “Christ is everything and in all” (Colossians 3: 11). All departure is really a turning away from Christ. When people first admit the principles of the world — legality, philosophy, etc. — the enemy persuades them that they are getting something additional to Christ; it is a bitter lesson for a soul to learn, that for the sake of worthless things it has really given up Christ. To add anything to “the Amen” is really to lose Him.
It is the time of witness now, and everything that God is witnessing is embodied in Christ. A risen and glorified Man is “the faithful and true witness”. The fact that He is in heaven witnesses that He died here, and His death witnesses the total ruin, and setting aside in judgment, of man after the flesh. But the fact that HE died is the perfect and blessed witness of the love of God.
“Love that on death’s dark vale
Its sweetest odours spread;
Where sin o’er all seemed to prevail,
Redemption’s glory shed”. (235:4)
Now Man is in the presence of God for God’s delight, according to His eternal purpose. God’s thought for man, and the full measure of His grace to men, are set forth in a glorified Man in heaven. He is preached as glad tidings — the faithful and true Witness of what is in the heart and mind of God. God would have us to pass over from all our ruin and condemnation in Adam to the blessedness and acceptance of the glorified Man! All true witness — whether individual or assembly witness — is presenting in testimony what He is. The church should have been faithful and true, the continuation of Christ here in witness. She has utterly failed, but Christ abides faithful, and the ministry of Christ brings hearts back to Him as the true Witness of God, and of all that has value before God. It is to be preserved in witness, and an assembly that fails to do so will inevitably be utterly rejected — spued out of His mouth as nauseous to Him.
He is “[p. 70] the beginning of the creation of God”. It changes the whole outlook of the soul when Christ is seen to be the Beginning of God’s creation. It is not that Christ comes in subsequently to remedy what [p. 66] has failed, but He is the starting-point of all that God has ever done or will do. He was the Beginning of the creation of Genesis 1 — the One from whom all derived being, and it came into existence that it might be the sphere of His glory. Whatever element appeared in God’s ways — promise, sacrifice, resurrection, government, the kingdom in Israel or in mystery, the church, the world to come, eternal purposes unfolded — Christ was “the beginning” of all. Nor do we understand any part of it until we see this. If He is “the beginning of the creation of God” it involves that all that follows must take character from Him. And eventually everything will disappear from the creation of God that does not take character from Christ. The Colossian epistle presents Him as “the beginning” in relation to “the body, the assembly” (Colossians 1: 18), as “firstborn from among the dead”, the One who will have “the first place in all things”. What a setting forth of Christ is this to an assembly like Laodicea which gives Him no place!
A lukewarm state is nauseous to the Lord. It is neither the “cold” of no profession at all, nor the “hot” of hearts that truly love Him, and that love one another with a pure heart fervently. It is a state that unites boastful profession with real indifference to Christ, and in which there is not a single thing that has divine or spiritual value. Lukewarmness is a special feature of the closing phase of church history, and it is a danger against which we ever need to watch and pray. We have to discern and judge what is Laodicean in ourselves. It is possible to have intelligence of Scripture, and a large measure of outward correctness, without that heat of spiritual desire and affection which is agreeable to the Lord.
Possibly none of us are as “hot” as we might be. We may well pray, as we sometimes do: -
“O kindle within us a holy desire,
Like that which was found in Thy people of old,
Who tasted Thy love, and whose hearts were on fire,
While they waited, in patience, Thy face to behold”. (194:4)
“Because thou sayest, I am rich, and am grown rich; and have need of nothing, and knowest not that thou art the wretched and the miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked”. She speaks of herself and not of Christ — a sure sign of spiritual decay, And she claims to be rich — to have acquired wealth — so as to be self-sufficient. It is her own estimate of her endowments and resources, but an altogether mistaken one. She may be rich in the intellectual culture of her ministers, and their ability to decide which part of Scripture is inspired and which not, or whether any of it is! Rich, too, in the architectural beauty of the buildings in which her congregations gather, and in the attractiveness of her services, and in her ability to present what meets the tastes of natural men, and gives her influence over them. But what has she spiritually? Judged by every standard of spiritual value she is “the wretched and the miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked”. Such is the Lord’s estimate of this assembly. She has not Christ; He is outside.
But He gives her counsel. “I counsel thee to buy of me gold purified by fire, that thou mayest be rich”. To buy of Him is a personal transaction with Christ. All of true value must be acquired and possessed through exercise, and from Christ alone. “Gold purified by fire” would be all that is of God in Christ,
[p. 68] made available for men through sin having been judged in the sufferings and death of Christ. This is true riches, and a solid ground of boasting. (See 1 Corinthians 1: 30, 31.) Paul in Philippians 3 is an example of one who was set to buy “gold purified by fire”. He had parted with all that was once his trust and boast, as in flesh, that he might acquire CHRIST as his gain, and might be “found in him, not having my righteousness which would be on the principle of law, but that which is by faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God through faith”.
“White garments that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness may not be made manifest”, speak of the moral characteristics of Christ as that with which the saints are to be invested. The vain-glorious pretensions of the flesh are spiritually “nakedness” and “shame”. But the fruit of the Spirit of Christ being possessed is that lust and pride and self-sufficiency are judged, and such qualities as obedience, meekness, lowliness, kindness, longsuffering, come into evidence. These are “white garments”; they are the moral features of the heavenly Man as they come out in the circumstances of the saints on earth. Clothing is that in which we appear before others. They are the fruit of Christ being in the saints.
Then the power of spiritual perception is a great necessity. So He counsels Laodicea to acquire “eye-salve to anoint thine eyes, that thou mayest see”. Ananias was sent to Saul “that thou mightest see, and be filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 9: 17). He was henceforth to see things in an entirely new way — to have the vision of the Spirit, if we may so say. In Laodicea there is boasting is the abilities of [p. 69] the human mind; its competency to judge of things is assumed and gloried in; but the Holy Spirit is ignored. There is no spiritual perception save by the Spirit. John says to the “little children” in the family of God, “Ye have the unction from the holy one, and ye know all things ... and yourselves, the unction which ye have received from him abides in you, and ye have not need that any one should teach you; but as the same unction teaches you as to all things, and is true and is not a lie, and even as it has taught you, ye shall abide in him” (1 John 2: 20, 27). This anointing is indeed “eye-salve”, and none but the Lord can supply it.
It is very striking that the Lord should speak of His love to such an assembly as Laodicea. “I rebuke and discipline as many as I love; be zealous therefore and repent”. He speaks as a Lover still, but it is love that cannot be complacent; things are such that His love can only be active in the way of rebuke and discipline. It is a solicitude over the assembly in its last stage of failure similar to that which yearned over Jerusalem in its last day (Matthew 23: 37, 38). Happy are those who discern His rebuke and discipline! Amid boastings and self-sufficiency they discover that all is really wretchedness, misery, poverty, blindness, and nakedness. Intellectual culture, modern thought with its unblushing infidelity, the bringing Christianity into line with all man’s ideas of progress and world-improvement, are wretched and comfortless things indeed to a conscience that has learned under the rebuke and discipline of divine love that man after the flesh is an utter moral ruin, or to a heart that has got the feeblest conception of Christ as “the Amen, the faithful and true witness,
the beginning of the creation of God”. They are worthless because they are not Christ, and they exclude Him. In Laodicea the door is closed, not upon philosophy and vain deceit, the teaching of men, or the elements of the world, but upon CHRIST. He is outside.
But how sweet to the heart that has learned to value Christ to hear Him say, “Behold, I stand at the door and am knocking; if any one hear my voice and open the door, I will come in unto him and sup with him, and he with me”! This is the Lord’s position and attitude today in relation to a profession which is characterized by the boastings of man in the flesh. He is still faithful to His own love; He still rebukes and disciplines in a thousand ways; and it is not simply that He knocks once or twice and retires, but He has placed Himself at the door and continues knocking, and He will do so until that moment when the catching up of the saints will involve the utter rejection by Him of Laodicea.
An opportunity is afforded still for any one to hear the Lord knocking and His voice. Where there is spiritual vitality it will respond; His rebuke and discipline will be recognized, His voice heard. The work of God in souls comes to light in that way. If any one desires to have His company, and opens the door, He says, “I will come in unto him and sup with him, and he with me”. The Lord would thus separate morally each responsive heart from an assembly that is rich without Him, and that does not want Him. The Lord sups with such an one; He enters sympathetically into all his exercises, and makes him conscious that he is thoroughly known, and that every spiritual desire in his heart that has Christ as [p. 71] its Object, or that has found its satisfaction in Christ, is fully and deeply appreciated by an Eternal Lover.
But there is more than this! “He with me”. The Lord delights to bring such a heart into the communion of all that He desires and cherishes. To sup with Him would indicate sharing His thoughts and interests in the intimacy and confidence which is the portion of a friend (John 15: 13 - 15). “All things which I have heard of my Father I have made known to you”. He loved to manifest the Father’s Name to the men which the Father gave Him out of the world. They were those of whom He could speak as “My brethren”, and to whom He could send the message, “I ascend to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God”. To sup with Him would surely be to be brought into the communion of what is in His heart in regard to the assembly which He loved, and for which He delivered Himself up. So that the individual supping with Christ would not remain individual as to the scope of his thoughts and affections, but would have his heart expanded into the width of the interests and affections of Christ.
John is very individual, but no one emphasizes more than John love to one another, love to the brethren, and the family links and affections of the children of God. The more we enjoy individual privilege in having the manifestation of Christ, and supping with Him, the more we shall value those spiritual links that bind us in holy affection to the brethren. We come individually into the light of what pertains to the saints collectively and corporately as the house and family of God, as the body of Christ, as the temple. The assembly is still here, and faith holds to this in spite of all the feebleness [p. 72] and scattering that have come in. So that individual faithfulness, and the enjoyment of individual privilege, can never lead to isolation or independency, but to the increased appreciation of every link which we can take up with our brethren that is in keeping with the truth of the assembly.
The promise to the overcomer in Laodicea is the only one which contains any reference to the Lord’s own pathway. “I also have overcome”. It is as though the Lord would retain Himself in a special way in the view of the overcomer. Almost His last word to His own before going to the cross was, “In the world ye have tribulation; but be of good courage; I have overcome the world” (John 16: 33). He never gave place to any principle that is found in operation in the world. When the ruler of the world came he found nothing in that Blessed One; there was no point of moral contact between Christ and the world.
It is as having been the Overcomer that He has sat down with His Father in His throne. He is not yet on His own throne; He is waiting for the moment when His foes will be made His footstool; but in the meantime He is with His Father in a place which bears witness to His Father’s appreciation of Him as the Overcomer. And in the coming day when He sits upon His own throne in the kingdom He will give to the overcomer to sit with Him. The world which Jesus overcame was the Jewish world — the world of profession and self-righteousness, but of unreality, where every divine witness was persecuted. It was in almost the last day of the nation’s history before the wrath came upon them to the uttermost. The overcomer in Laodicea is in the last day of the [p. 73] christian profession; he is surrounded by lukewarmness, boasting, and indifference to Christ. But Christ is to him “the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God”, and he has clear in his vision the coming kingdom. In that kingdom he will sit with Christ in His throne.