(Rev. 2; 3)
(Continued from page 79)
The failure of the church in responsibility having become so complete in Thyatira, it is plain that the Lord's judgment on her when in that condition forms the virtual termination of her history as under trial. Of course He is able at any time to establish a measure of restoration; but that only, far from interfering with the fact of such judgment being pronounced, is in fact presumptive evidence of previous failure and judgment on it. What we see here is not only that in her actions “the King” has been virtually dethroned, but also that the Lord applies to her the “judgment of works,” which, as we know from Rev. 21:13, expresses the close of His dealings with men when these are in question. I turn back therefore to notice how plainly the Lord lays bare the source of action in that which has departed from Him and show s that at once, when He is given up, Satan has obtained a foot-hold. No sooner has departure been marked in Ephesus than in Smyrna we find the church subject to the efforts of the power of Satan (Rev. 2:10); and when, heedless of the warning which so solemn a fact should have conveyed to her, she persisted still in a course of declension, we find her under the dominion of Satan, dwelling where he has his throne. (Chap. 2:18.) Still more awful and solemn, but the inevitable consequence of continued unfaithfulness, we see that in Thyatira she had descended to the depths of Satan (chap. 2:24); and it is thus the Lord would warn us of the sure but dreadful result of the heart's departure from Him as its object and from His love as its motive.
(5) Sardis. We cannot measure the patience of the Lord, nor can we ever predict of Him that He has exhausted the resources of His grace in His dealings with men. When He announces that the day of grace is to have an end, or that it has run to its close and judgment must take its place, than is the occasion for the obedience of faith in us, and we can but bow and own that it is right that it should be so. But He has shown us in His dealings with men that it is His prerogative (while maintaining all the time a perfect balance between right and wrong, good and evil, so that men dare not presume upon His grace with impunity, still when men have completely failed and broken down in faithfulness to Him) to place them anew in circumstances in which it is possible for them to walk in obedience to His revealed will, even though this is done in view of the actual failure which has taken place, and which has to all appearance rendered it impossible for His mind to be carried out.
He has never thoroughly reinstated any established order of His dealing with men precisely and as fully as it was set up at its commencement after it had once gone to ruin in man's hand; but He has wrought in restoration, which does not set aside the results of failure, but which alters these circumstances of His people which are the consequences of failure, in such a degree as that it becomes possible for men to walk in the spirit of His chosen path for them even when surrounded by these. We are slow to estimate aright the value and significance of this gracious dealing of God; but as we think of it, we must admire the perfect wisdom and adore the blessed grace which could open up such a path of divine blessing to those who had, as it were, already sinned against it, even making their sin the occasion and the means (in some sense) of His acting, and yet never weakening the sense of His divine judgment against their sin—wonderfully combining grace and holiness.
And the blessedness flowing from this dealing is great, for it is the means of a much more full and intimate revelation of God Himself to the heart than even the normal condition from which failure had taken place could be. In that condition there is of course the consciousness of being set in the current of God's mind as to the world, and the blessings of the position are naturally before the soul; but here everything is gone, but the soul finds to its intense joy that even in spite of its failure God remains faithful as ever! It is evident that in such a condition the soul who would remain faithful to Him must be cast in very real dependence upon God, seeking to act directly and exclusively under His eye (for all question of testimony to the world is over), and having Him directly before the heart, for the sad evidences of failure are there and if the eye wanders from Him it must see them, and then one readily believes it is useless to seek to be faithful when, in its integrity, the position of His people is ruined.
All this the Lord has shown us in figure in His dealings with His ancient people, and (now that we have the key to it) we can say that we have the lessons of “restoration” taught us very completely in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah with the concurrent prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah. And they are blessed lessons! The goodness and mercy of the Lord (“His mercy endureth forever!") were brought home afresh to the hearts of His people so that they could trust Him—and well might they trust Him!—fully who had wrought for His people when all had gone from their bands. When they had Him thus before them, as counting wholly on His goodness and mercy, faith saw no difficulties, let adversaries without or within rage or plot as they might. But when faith in God grew faint, then a little was enough to turn them aside and to stop their service to Him, and the enemy quickly used the opportunity given him, and they were forbidden to serve. Even this prohibition was as nothing however when faith revived, but it was during their period of unbelief and therefore of failure that the Lord addressed to them the words of Haggai and Zechariah, in which He sought to recall their hearts to Himself as the object which they had forgotten, and to teach them of His power and grace, both of which He was ready to use for them.
He has indeed to say to them (in Hag. 1:2-11), “Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, saying, This people say, The time is not come, the time that the Lord's house should be built. Then came the word of the Lord by Haggai the prophet saying, Is it time for you, O ye, to dwell in your ceiled houses and this house lie waste? Now therefore, thus saith the Lord of hosts, Consider your ways.” But His object and desire is that they should be perfect before Him and so He encourages them by saying, “Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel, saith the Lord; and be strong, O Joshua the eon of Josedech, the high priest; and be strong, all ye people of the land, saith the Lord, and work: for I am with you, saith the Lord of hosts according to the word that I covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt so my Spirit remaineth among you; fear ye not.” (Hag. 2:4, 5.)
Now apart from the general moral resemblance between the circumstances of the remnant of Ezra and Nehemiah and those of Sardis given in the word of Revelation (iii. 3): “remember how thou hast received and heard,” in view of the lessons of failure and judgment taught by the epistle to Thyatira, we find the same striking analogy, which we have been tracing in the other Epistles, existing here between the words of the message to the remnant and those of that to the church in its Sardis condition. We find also, as formerly, that it is in what is said to the church that the true spiritual condition is revealed and the root of failure laid bare.
The Lord could point in Haggai to the external conduct of His people, and tell them too “to consider their ways,” because the temple was lying unfinished while they were busy building their own houses; but it is in the Epistle to Sardis that we find the spring touched, “I have not found thy works perfect before God” (chap. 3:2), and we are shown that the root is the eye off the Lord and the work not being done for Him. So too as to the condition, “thou hast a name that thou limit and art dead” (chap. 3:1); which has its figure in that which the Lord allowed to fall upon the Israelites, even though they were in their own land and nominally serving Him. (See Hag. 1:6, 9-11; 2:17.) These outward calamities witnessed that Israel was really disowned by God, although the presence of the remnant in Canaan and the work in which they were professedly engaged had another voice; but it cannot be a question of external position merely in the case of the church,—the Lord deals with her spiritual condition, and, so for her it is a matter of life or death as before Him.
The character in which the Lord appears to Sardis (chap. 3:1) also speaks to the heart of the solemn question Which is raised for us (settled as to the church as a professing witness for God) by the Sardis condition. The restored remnant were faithless towards God, it is true, but they knew Him as He had declared Himself to them “according to that word that He covenanted with them when they came out of Egypt” (see Ex. 23:20-25), to which by Haggai He seeks to turn them back, saying, “So my Spirit remaineth among you: fear ye not.” (Hag. 2:5.) But the church has to do with no mere angel or representative of God in her path, blessed as it is to have such a pledge of God's faithfulness and power, but with Him who possesses the fullness of divine power and divine supremacy over all rule or subordinate authority— “Him that hath the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars.” Has she walked, nay, are we walking, in the faith of present connection with this One? To be in any degree faithless towards Him in the path is so far to drop into the current of the world, the eye getting turned to its arrangements and the heart, unconsciously at first perhaps, ascribing to them the place of importance.
It is not to “keep himself unspotted from the world” (James 1:27) nor to be one of those “few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments.” (Rev. 3:4, 5.) In His rewards the Lord turns us back to the picture of His grace given in Zech. 3 and we learn to see in Joshua the high priest, who stood, clad in filthy garments as the representative of God's people in their sins, before the angel of the Lord, a type of Him who took that place in all the dreadful reality of sin's blackness and Satan's malice which attached to it for us, in order that in blessed grace He might be able to say, “They shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy,” and “he that overcometh the same shall be clothed in white raiment.”
He has, too, a solemn word to show us by comparison with Ezra 2:62, 63, the full character of the issue which is decided by the test applied to the church. Of old those who had faithfully kept apart from connection with the world which was disowned by God found their place in “the register of those that were reckoned by genealogy,” while those not found there were excluded from the place of honor among men. But an earthly muster roll, high though the privileges be of those whose names are inscribed in it, is but a feeble type of that divine register in which He preserves the name of the overcomer, just as no possible acknowledgment before men on earth can compare with what He puts before our hearts in His word of reward, “I will not, blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels.”
Blessed Lord! Thy grace and Thy power are devoted to Thy people, and they are enough. Keep our hearts in true dependence upon Thee!
(6) Philadelphia. In the wisdom of God, the restoration of the remnant gave occasion to the presentation of Christ according to the promises, and when “the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son.” In the Gospels we see how His personal and testimony of His words and works, and the official glories were presented to men, as well as the evidences of His divine power, but in the main without avail; and we learn how completely in every detail of this blessed presentation He was rejected, by none so thoroughly as by those claiming to be God's chosen race, who showed their enmity to His name and His teaching very plainly by deliberately deciding “that if any man confessed that he was the Christ he should be put out of the synagogue.” (John 9) Looked at in its fullest light, there is no doubt that His rejection, and death, in which it was completed, decided the whole question of the nature of man—of the first Adam—bringing out the full character of Sin as enmity against God, but blessedly unfolding the glory of God, both absolute and in relation to sin; but short of this full result it is equally clear that in the first instance He was presented to man in his responsibility to do God's will, refusing evil and choosing the good, and of course it was as good in its highest form, because divine goodness in a world of sinners, that He was thus offered to the hearts of men. Alas! He was rejected, and so the bright day of millennial or kingdom glory which has been predicted by “the word of the Lord” had to be put aside until it will be introduced in a new order; but meantime, to reveal the heights and depths of grace, new blessings and privileges “which from the beginning of the world had been hid in God” are brought to light, unconnected with the world or its course, and known only to faith in association with a rejected but glorified Christ.
In the Epistle to Philadelphia it is manifest that the test is Christ Himself and the question raised in the history of the professing church is that of faithfulness or unfaithfulness to Him personally and in His present character as having already been rejected by the world. As before, when He was in the world, the rejecters have plenty of loud pretension; but their true character spiritually, as well as the day of their future humbling, is here revealed: “Behold I make them of the synagogue of Satan who say they are Jews and are not, but do lie; behold I will cause them to come and worship before thy feet and to know that I have loved thee.” (Rev. 3:9.) And here the Lord shows that His eye rests on and His heart is occupied with those who through grace are faithful to Him, for blessed be God these He finds, though as ever it is a little flock to whom He reveals Himself as the good Shepherd (as in John 10:4, 5, 9, 11) and as their means of access to liberty, and food, and strength. “Behold I have set before thee an open door, and no one can shut it: for thou hast a little strength and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name.” (Chap. 8.) In verse 7 a wonderful epitome of His personal glory is given—wonderful because in such few words so blessed an array of its features has been marshaled by the Holy Spirit. His nature as man according to Luke 1:35 is declared in “He that is holy;” His ministry, or the testimony of His words and works, in “He that is true” (see John 5-9); His Messiah glory in “He that hath the key of David” (see Luke 1:32, 33); and His divine power in “He that openeth and no one shutteth, and shutteth and no one openeth;” and thus the Lord shows us that all is open to the eye of faith and that nothing is needed on our part but that we should acknowledge Him. He does not forget that He asks us to do this during the time of His patient waiting in trying rejection by the world, which is if possible a more testing time than before the world's public refusal of Him, and He has a word to encourage our hearts in view of this. “Because thou hast kept the word of my patience,” He says, “I will also keep thee out of the hour of temptation which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth. Behold I come quickly; hold that fast which thou hast, that no one take thy crown.” (Chap. iii. 10, 11.) “Those that dwell on the earth,” finding all their interests and occupations in it, may go on in their fancied security thinking they are free to do as they like and that He and His people are of little account, but the Lord shows that He is the key to the future as well as to the present, and if our future is found in Himself, the world's must be in tribulation into which He and His will not enter.
To “him that overcomes,” who remains true to Him in what He is, despite the lies of Satan and of men who, even under the guise of religiousness, are His rejecters, He promises the highest character of millennial blessings, to which those prepared for the earthly people serve indeed as figures, although those spoken of here (chap. iii. 12) are as immeasurably higher than these of Israel as heaven is higher than earth. “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God; and he shall go no more out; and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem which cometh down out of heaven from my God and my new name.” And not the least precious part of this blessed appropriating of us for God, for His worship and service, is that which sets us in association with the glory of the perfectly obedient One, who, as the fit answer to His blessed course of obedient humiliation, has received at the hands of His God and ours a new and glorious “name which is above every name.” (Phil. 2:5-11.)
Has not He given us abundant cause to say and to sing,
“Jesus, thou art enough
“The mind and heart to fill"?
(To be continued)