Revelation: Part 8

Revelation 3. Chapters 2 and 3 are letters to seven churches that Jesus himself selected. And we asked the question, why did he choose these seven? There were hundreds of churches.

And it became clear later on that not only did these letters have practical instructions for ministers, how to deal with practical problems that would be and actually these seven letters cover most of the problems that can be encountered in the Church during the whole Church age. But later on they found that these letters were not only written to certain churches because of their characteristics, but they’re even put in a certain order because of their characteristics. And they actually give each one of these letters gives succinctly the characteristics of seven stages of Church history. And we come to the last stage of Church history tonight.

The Church of Laodicea. And that is in Revelation 3:14. Now, Revelation 3:14 is an introduction to Laodicea. The characteristic of the Church of Laodicea, which most theologians agree that study this that this age became dominant about the beginning of 1900s, in 1900.

And this will be the chief characteristic of the Church until the Rapture. So we’re in the last stage of Church history. So the chief dominant characteristic is compromise and apostasy. Now, we’re talking about the Church as a whole.

We’re talking about the Church, the visible Church, as a whole. All right. Now, there’s a certain order that each one of these letters have, so we’ll go through this. The destination is first.

It says, and to the angelos, literally, in this case, it is the messenger. And to the messenger of the Church in Laodicea write. And then there is a description of the characteristics of Christ as it is in each letter that most apply to the greatest need of this Church. So it says about Jesus here, the amen, the faithful and true witness, and the beginning of the creation of God, says this.

Now, it’s interesting. A little description about the Church of Laodicea. Laodicea was a very wealthy banking center. It was about 60 miles east of Ephesus, and it was known for a medical school.

They had a medical school there and they were famous for developing a certain eye ointment that helped eye disease. And as you know, in fact, if you go to the Middle East, it seems like they have more trouble with eye disease than any place in the world. It’s a terrible thing. I can imagine what it must have been back in ancient times when there were not the available doctors and medicines that we have today.

But they were famous for developing an eye ointment that was probably very helpful. Anyway, that fit in and helps us understand what is said here. Jesus says he describes himself as the amen. Amen in Hebrew.

You know what that means? We close prayers with that. Amen. I believe.

And Jesus describes himself as the one who believes, and he means by this he believes the whole revelation of God. And this is what the Church of this age really needs to believe is the word revealed by God. And so he says, remember, I am the one when I walk these dusty streets, I stepped out of eternity into time, and I voluntarily laid aside temporarily the use of my divine powers and became a man, and when I walked as a man on this earth, I believed every moment the revelation of God. And he’s saying, by contrast, this Church doesn’t, and it’s its greatest need.

And then he says, he’s also the faithful and true witness. This is a reminder that only those who are faithful to Christ and bear witness to the person of Christ, who he really is, and his purpose are truly part of God’s family. And then he reminds them also. He said in verse 14 again, the beginning of the creation of God, says.

The beginning of the creation of God says. He’s the one who created everything. If you’ve been following this, and especially if you have my book, there’s a new world coming, which goes paragraph by paragraph through the book of Revelation. It’s a great aid for this study, you will notice that something is wrong here with the order of the letter because between the description of Christ and the analysis, there usually was what?

Commendation. But to this Church, zero commendation. Nothing to commend. And he says in his analysis, and believe me, this is the chief characteristic of the visible Church of today.

He says, I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I would that you were cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. Those are stern words. In other words, the visible organizations of churches today predominantly are going through the motions, but there’s no fervor for God.

And in most of them, they’re not bold enough to come right out and say, we don’t believe. But they go through the motions. And he continues to analyze. In verse 17, because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing.”

And he said, this would be the predominant attitude of the Church. You say, I’m rich and I become wealthy and I have need of nothing. You know, the sad thing today, if I want to give you a psychological test, Church. What’s the first thing that came to mind?

A building with a steeple on it. Right? Right. Because that’s what people think the Church is.

That’s not the Church. That’s where the Church meets. Remember the illustration I gave you before? Many of you haven’t heard that illustration, so I’ll say it again because it left an indelible teaching on my memory.

I was a young believer, I was very excited, just about every time the doors would open at berechah Church in houston, Texas, and reverend colonel bob thieme would teach, I’d be there. And there was a Friday night Bible class he taught for young people, and we were all in there all excited, and we’d be going through every verse and so forth, and there was a woman there that was in from the mission field, and you could tell because she had no makeup on and her hair was in a bun. Now, thank God not every missionary’s like that, but she sat there with a sour look on her face, and I was wondering why because all of us were so excited and we were growing in the Lord and we were learning and everything. And finally, she raised her hand and she said, brother thieme, did you know that some of these young people are desecrating this sanctuary because they’re chewing gum?

And he looked, I’ll never forget, he looked over the pulpit at her like that, and he said, madam, the churches are chewing the gum.

And I’ll never forget that. The sanctuary is you. You’re the temple of the Holy Spirit if you know God, if you’ve received the gift of pardon Jesus died to give you. But that’s been lost.

It’s a characteristic of this age. And as he says, you say I’m rich and I become wealthy and I have need of nothing. Now, just think about that for a moment. Let me run through a few things that I happen to know.

To most, the Church is now buildings and organizations, and the larger and more ornate the Church building is, the greater the Church it is, right? And the bigger the organization is, oh, you know that’s a great powerful Church. Nuh-uh. Not in God’s sight.

Now, you can have a pretty Church building and it doesn’t mean necessarily that there are people that are wrong and there’s nothing wrong with having a nice Church building to meet in. The problem, though, I’ve been in many where the emphasis is on building bigger and bigger and better and more ornate things. And that’s what he means here. You say you’re rich and you’ve become wealthy.

Wealth is not an evidence of faith, but the problem is today, that’s been confused. There’s a movement that has swept through the Church lately called the prosperity Gospel. Heard of that? And the positive confession movement.

This is the curse of the latest age. And how did the Church get in the condition that it’s in? Well, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, there began to be a vast change take place in the seminaries of the major denominations. It started in Germany.

It was called a higher critical school. And what they did is they began to question the verbal inspiration of the Bible. And most of these guys went, the problem is, will the state-sponsored Church and the state-sponsored seminary, if a man wanted to get a doctorate, well, that was a good way to get a free doctorate because he would go to seminary and the state would pay for it. Now, the state is not going to check to see whether you’re born again or not.

And so a lot of brilliant young german men went into seminary, and what does an unbeliever who has no insight into anything spiritual, what does he write about in a doctoral dissertation? Well, they started with a bright intelligent man can make a convincing argument about anything if you give him his basic premises. So they began to question everything about the Bible. So they started what was later to be called liberalism, and another name for it was neo orthodoxy, new orthodoxy, which is neither new nor is it orthodox.

But this began to sweep from Europe into seminaries in America, as well. And this, beginning with the seminaries, of course, Satan knows where to start strategically. You start with the leaders. And as this crept into the major denominations, this kind of thinking, the spiritual level of the Church began to plummet.

And today, I don’t care what Church you go to, you’d better check out whether the man preaching up there or the people teaching in that Church really believe that this is the verbally inspired Word of God. Because when you lose that, you’ve lost everything. Now, when I say this, I realize this is an english translation of the Greek and Hebrew of the original, but it is a good translation. All of our english translations are good translations.

And yet, you’ve got to start with something that is verbally inspired from God or else it’s all a guessing game, and men can determine what’s of God and what’s not. Now, this is why when I went to seminary I majored in Greek and minored in Hebrew, and also spent much extra work in manuscript evidence. And I’ve been through all of the manuscript evidence that these, especially the Greek, that these Scriptures are founded on. And manuscript evidence is compiled this way: the scholars will take a manuscript that was found at a certain place at a certain time, okay.

Say they found one in alexandria and it’s about the fourth century. They find another one over in what was Antioch, and it was from about the third century. They find another one in the Sinai codex sinaiticus, was found at the monastery out there that’s at mount Sinai. And there are many manuscripts from different places and different times.

Now, why is that important? Well, what they – what the scholars do is they take these manuscripts written in different places at different times and compare them word for word. And after doing that, if I were to take the number of words in the whole Greek New Testament that are questionable, let’s say that we don’t know exactly what the original was because there’s not enough evidence for it, it would amount to about a half a page of words. And if we never knew exactly what those few words are, it wouldn’t change one iota of our faith or what we understand from the Scripture.

That’s pretty good, isn’t it? God saw to it that we had the Word of God preserved. And the Church never determined which books were going to be in the Bible. Did you know that?

A lot of people think that A.D. 325, counsel of nicaea, they think that’s when the canon of the Scripture was finally decided on. No. These books were of the New Testament were received as inspired when they were written because it was the writers had proven that they were inspired by God by revelations from God and by prophecies that were made that were fulfilled, but also as they read them, the impact of these books was different than the impact of other books.

And furthermore, all of the books agreed with each other on doctrine and everything else. So all the Church did finally in 3:25 was to recognize what had been recognized all along. You understand the difference? They didn’t create a canon, they simply recognized and ratified the canon of Scripture.

Well, I’m going in to a little bit of detail because some of these pastors and theologians will try to give you some fancy footwork about how, well, we really don’t know this and we really don’t know that. But what if it’s not verbally inspired? The Holy Spirit can tell us. Well, my Bible tells me there are a lot more spirits than the Holy Spirit out there.

And I’ve come in contact with a few. You’ve got to try the spirits to see whether they’re of God or not because there are some spirits that will give you a – can really give you the warm fuzzies and you think, oh, man, this is really, aren’t we having a great spiritual time? Everything has to be proven by the Word of God. And so the Church began to decline as a whole.

Now, let’s see where Jesus goes with this. In Revelation 3, again, he says, again in verse 17, because you say, “I am rich, and I have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,” and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. That’s the Lord’s analysis of the Church in general today. Now, I thank God that there’s still churches like Philadelphia, there’s still churches like Smyrna, the suffering Church in sulphur.

In other words, there’s still believers here. But we’re talking about the predominant characteristic of the Church as a whole in the world. And when he says you’re wretched, God’s view of the performance of the Church, which is going through the motions in human strength, he states very clearly in Isaiah 64:6. He says, all of our good deeds are as filthy rags in God’s eyes.

If we’re just going through the motions in our own human strength and by our own human wisdom, we’re wretched. And that’s what he says. Miserable. And this emphasizes, when you’re not walking by faith in the power of the Holy Spirit, there’s no true inner peace nor is there any real hope when the chips are down.

And he says, pour. You say that you’re rich and wealthy? I say you’re poor. Why?

Because what man produces is poor. Wealth in God’s sight is not money, it’s not the size of a building or the beautiful ornamentation of it or the size of a television studio or whatever with gold gilt and everything. A Church that is not producing things in the Holy Spirit is poor no matter how much wealth is displayed. And he says you’re blind.

Jesus said to the leading theologian of his day, Nicodemus, he said, he actually – Jesus just jerked the rug right out from under his feet because he came and he was flattering and he said, teacher, we know that you’re a teacher sent from God. And actually he called him rabbi, gave him an honorary doctorate, and he said, we know that you must be a teacher sent from God for no one could do the things that you do unless God is with him. And Jesus just jerked the rug right out from under his feet. He said, truly I say to you, unless a man is born again, he cannot see the things of the Kingdom of God.

And that’s what it means here. You’re blind. Unless you’ve been born spiritually, you can’t understand the things of the spirit of God. And so Jesus says the Church of the last age, the last stage of the Church age, would be basically spiritually blind.

And then he says you’re naked. It’s interesting to see how in some places I’ve been, and I’ve been most places with Church, that people come in with the most elegant refinery, they look like they’re right out of the fashion design place.

And I’m sure that they would be startled to hear Jesus say, you’re naked.

Now, what does he mean by that? Self-righteousness does not clothe a person before God. Only the righteousness that comes from him.

If you have the guts to be a real revolutionary, come forward right now and accept Jesus Christ as your real revolutionary, and he’ll make a revolutionary that will change lives.

As I prepared for this week’s program, I was again struck by the speed with which events are moving into the scenario the prophets predicted for the end times. I believe we’re there. People on the street are talking about what all of these things mean. Folks that wouldn’t darken the door of a Church or pick up a Bible are now very curious.

This may be our greatest opportunity, maybe even our last opportunity, to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ before we’re silenced by political correctness. The message that God has given me is more important now than it’s ever been for the Church and for the nation.