Dennis Tuuri

# Revelation 3:14-22 – The Letter to the Church of Laodicea

Please stand as we read Revelation 3:14-22.

“And to the angel of the church of the Laodiceans, write these things, says the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God. I know your works that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of my mouth.

“Because you say, ‘I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,’ and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, that you may be rich, and white garments that you may be clothed that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed and anoint your eyes with eye salve that you may see. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten.

“Therefore, be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him and dine with him and he with me. To him who overcomes, I will grant to sit with me on my throne, as I also overcame and sat down with my Father on His throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you that this book is unlike any other book. It must be spiritually discerned. Your Holy Spirit must indeed open our ears to this book and write its words upon our heart. We pray then, Lord God, that the Spirit would illuminate our understanding with his brightness and his light that we would understand this text. That you would, Lord God, reform our lives through the work of the Spirit, now as we understand it and into this week as we obey it. We thank you, Lord God, for your word and we thank you that it is a vital part of what we do every Lord’s day—that word shines upon us, judges us, and also heals us. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

I wanted to begin by explaining this tie that I have on. I spoke to a young man this last week—well, I don’t know how young he is really, younger than me I’m sure—about our church, and I was explaining to him that one thing he might find a little different is that we do believe in what some have called command performance worship. We’re here to worship God. Our worship service is not geared to entertainment. It’s geared to the worship of God. And it may seem a little inappropriate, and it has to me most of the time, to consider wearing this kind of tie. But you know, I am trying today to explain a little bit of our worship service, as well as, in the context of the text of course, in the sermon made a few explanatory remarks.

At the offering, we always have printed in the order of worship the admonition from Romans 12:1-2: “Be not conformed to this world, be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” And this offering we give of ourselves and all that we are to God is central to worship—covenant renewal worship that we have here. And so that word I’ve preached through before. That word where it says don’t be conformed to the world sort of means a comic book sort of impression of the world around you. In other words, you used to have stuff called Silly Putty, and it doesn’t work so good. I—we bought, one of my boys bought—my son bought some Silly Putty this year for Christmas, but it didn’t seem to work on the funny pages.

You used to be able to take Silly Putty, put it on the funny pages, take it off, and then make an impression on a piece of paper of that comic book image. Well, that’s kind of what it means when it says don’t be conformed, okay, to the world around you—the world being a fallen man’s ideas. Because they’re like don’t be a cookie cutter image of what you see around you. Don’t be conformed to that world. That’s going to be our temptation.

But be transformed, which is a whole different word and infers the reality of the person and work of Christ—that he is reality and the rest of it just sort of a comic book image. So you know, the world round about us that is apart from Christ really is kind of like a comic book image of what life should be in the reality of submission to Jesus Christ.

This particular comic book image that I refer to in my tie refers to a university. What’s the matter with you? And the reason why I’ve got this particular one on is that the scriptures give us an evaluation of culture. It tells us what’s the matter with the comic book image we see round about us. And it says, for instance, in this letter to the Laodiceans that you know, the Laodicean church was being compromised to the world round about it. And the world round about it was wrong in terms of their basic system of valuation.

Laodicea was known for banking and commerce. It was known for money. It was known for black wool and these beautiful garments that they could make with this black glossy wool material. And they were known for Phrygian powder, which was stuff that was used to make eye salve to cure eye problems. Okay. So they thought that was what they were about—their science and health, their economy, their system of fashion. The way clothes, you know, clothes don’t just cover up nakedness. Clothes express glory. That’s what God intended them for. And their system of glory, as well as their system of covering nakedness, was wrong because it wasn’t in Christ. It was a you know, cookie cutter comic book sort of image.

And the church at Laodicea was like that. And so God, in evaluating the church, evaluates the culture that they’re supposed to take over—that they’re supposed to, not by force of arms or by politics, but through the preaching of the gospel—that they’re supposed to supplant. That might be a better word—so evaluate it.

And we had yesterday a rather incredible comic strip played out in our nation’s history. For the first time ever, a president was deposed—not taken out of office, but subject to giving a deposition in a law case, a civil case against him. Never happened to a sitting president before. And if you know the nature of that case, you know that it was not a good thing. I mean, in one sense, it’s good that an average citizen in the United States can go to law against the president, the ruler of, you know, the free people of the world, as some would say. I mean, this would not happen in a lot of dictatorial countries. The woman would be dead or bought off or something else. So you can look at that side of it.

But the other side, of course, is that it’s a shame to our country to have the sort of things that were discussed yesterday that deposition, which will become part of a public record in May, assuming that there’s no settlement of that case. I’m talking about the Paula Jones versus President Clinton case.

My wife’s mother was a godly woman. She died—I don’t know, I think around thirteen years ago. And you know, at that time I noticed on the radio, after that there became more and more references, explicit references, to various parts of the human anatomy that there were not explicit references to in the public media before that time. And I often thought, you know, Chris’s mother would have been just shocked if she would have turned on the radio or TV and heard the kind of talk that we’ve had the last ten or fifteen years because of sexually transmitted diseases, because of all kinds of reasons.

And I’ve thought about that as an evaluation of the slide of the culture in terms of its becoming a ridiculous comic strip image. And then if you think of what happened yesterday, that we’re now not just talking about private parts of the anatomy of men and women but of the president’s distinguishing characteristics, this is a shame to our country. It looks good on the outside like the Laodicean church and the Laodicean culture thought they were rich, but they were walking in shame. And our country walks in shame today.

And the scriptures give us an evaluation then of that comic book image that our world represents. And so the time is made to kind of sum that up by way of picture. There’s a movie made a few years back, and at the beginning of this movie there’s a couple of FBI agents and they’re getting briefed by their superior about a case. And it’s not the sort of briefing you normally expect in a movie. Their boss has brought this woman in a red dress with him, and she comes out looking like this, kind of blinking her eyes, and she’s got a hand in her pocket in this red dress and she’s stomping back and forth like this. And so they see this, and then the two detectives drive off, and the one says to the other one, “What was that all about?” He says, “Well, I’ll tell you what it was. Do you remember her sour face?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that means the local authorities are not going to work with us.” “Did you see how she had her hand in her pocket?” “Yeah.” “Well, that means that the local authorities will conceal things from us.” “Did you notice the dress was altered?” “Yeah, I noticed a different color thread was altered to fit her.” “Well, that’s FBI code for drugs are going to be involved in this case.”

And on and on and on and on. She presented in a visual image rather, in about thirty seconds, a whole bunch of data to analyze the case. And the book of Revelation—particularly these seven letters—can be sort of seen that way. They’re not visual images. They’re words, but they’re written in such a way that they got to be unpacked. And when we unpack it, it evaluates our lives and tells us that we don’t want to be like this cookie cutter image, this comic book world that we see. Our country as a result of has been shamed so greatly this last day, but rather we want to be transformed through the context of Christ.

So that’s kind of an explanation for what we’re trying to do, what God wants us to do in worship and specifically in a very specific sense today.

Now, this is the seventh letter. That was way of introduction. So now we move to the outline. This is the seventh of the seven letters. And we’ve said that these seven letters reprise or refer back to the original creation week. And if that’s true, then we would expect this church to have references back to the Sabbath day.

And so this we’re asserting is that this epistle to the Laodiceans—the church in Laodicea—has reference to the creation of the Sabbath.

Now, you know, I say what was created on the seventh day? The Sabbath—what wasn’t really created. It was a day of rest. But God established the Sabbath day on that seventh day. It was instituted on the seventh day.

Now, what was the Sabbath day to be? Well, the Sabbath day was to be the day when God would come and meet with Adam and Eve and commune with them in a particular way. And so, and I think there’s reasons to believe that part of that is enthronement as well—that they’re given over some degree more of rule through their communion with God. And we’ll talk about that in a minute. But of course, that didn’t happen.

What happened was on that first Sabbath day, the Lord comes to be with Adam and Eve, but they’ve sinned. They’ve fallen. And so they hide themselves from God and they try to cover up their shame with fig leaves. And their mistake—Eve had seen the fruit and discerned that it was good and pleasant, good and able to make one wise, and it was going to be good to it—it was good to look at. And so her eyes are radically involved in her failure to judge and discern the situation correctly.

And they end up having to cover themselves up as God comes to meet with them. And they don’t get the kind of fellowship with God that they’re supposed to have. And I think that’s what this Laodicean church is representing to us.

God tells them, you know, you got to buy clothes from me, not from the Laodiceans, not from the fig leaves. You have to be clothed with my righteousness and I’m going to cover up your shame. And you need eye salve so you can see and discern correctly because Eve didn’t see right and Adam wasn’t doing his job right either. So they didn’t get that kind of Sabbath day communion with God.

But the Laodicean church, if it repents, will receive just that. But the amazing thing about this epistle—each of these epistles, I’ve said this about, I guess, but as you meditate on these epistles to these churches, these letters—they’re amazing synopses in various ways. And this one is amazing for its incredible denunciation of this church. And yet the Savior is saying that he’s giving this denunciation out of love for them.

And not only that, but they’re so terrible. But if they are zealous and repent and see Christ, he’ll come into them. He’ll knock at the door. He’ll come in and commune with them on that Sabbath day of communion and fellowship and eating. But not just that, he says, “Also, I’ll give to him who overcomes with me to sit down with me on my throne as I sat down on my Father’s throne.”

Now, that’s amazing too, because he’s not saying that you know, you just get to have fellowship with me. He says enthronement. Your Sabbath day will be a day of union and communion with Christ and will also be a day of enthronement because that’s who Jesus is. He’s king.

Now, turn to Isaiah 58, if you will. It’s one of the classic texts on the Sabbath, and it’s one that in this church’s origin, we considered a lot, talked about this text a lot. And I think for many, many weeks—years maybe even—we used to very often begin worship with verses 13 and 14.

Now I want to read verses 6 through 13 and 14 to sort of set the context a little bit. Okay.

Isaiah 58:6—”Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry and that thou bring the poor that are cast out into a house when thou seest the naked that thou cover him, and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh.

“So he says, ‘Keep Sabbath, keep it right, understand that it has significance in the world run about you.’ And then he says, ‘Then’—and I might say, ‘Then and only then’—’then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily, and thy righteousness shall go before thee. The glory of the Lord shall be thy rearward.’

That doesn’t mean reward if you’ve got a King James version. It means the glory is in front of you. The righteousness is in front. The glory of the Lord will be your back covering, your rearward. Okay? And remember, as they march into the promised land, for instance, you know, God is before them and God is behind them guarding them from attack from behind, going before.

So that’s what it is, and that’s what our vision is today. Isaiah is not written to people in the wilderness. They’ve already made it into the land. But God is always in that sense going before us and behind us.

“Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer. Thou shalt cry, and he shall say, ‘Here I am. If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke to putting forth the finger and speaking vanity emptily, not bearing Christian witness, and if you draw out your soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul, then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day, and the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones.

“And thou shalt be like a watered garden. See, not a wilderness anymore. Back to the garden. And like a spring of water whose daughters fail not. And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places. Thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations. Thou shalt be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of paths to dwell in.’ Okay, that’s what we want, right? We want to transform. We want to reconstruct. We want to rebuild. We want to make a Christian culture once more. We want to see that for our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren.

How do we do it? By Sabbath day observance. Correctly seeing its relationship to the world.

Verse 13: ‘If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord honorable, and shalt honor him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words.’

So if you obey Sabbath, delighting in it, what will happen then? ‘Shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord, and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.’ What do you get? You get to be fed with the heritage of Jacob, your father, but you get to ride on the high places of the earth. Enthronement. You’re riding with the King of Kings. You’re in the high places. You’re in governing places now.

So Sabbath day enthronement is about communion and union with Christ and eating with him. But it is also about enthronement. And so this text from Laodicea concludes in that way that we’ve talked about.

Okay. Creation week is reprised. Secondly, these seven letters reprise or restate history through AD 70.

Now remember we said that the last letter talked about the restoration. Okay? So Israel goes into the promised land. They sin. They get kicked out of the promised land. They get divided first north and south. They get taken into captivity. The Old Testament, right? You all know about that.

And then what we don’t know about so much, we sort of get a little blurry here, is that they don’t stay in captivity until Jesus comes. Obviously, they’re back in the land. How’d that happen? Well, through Nehemiah and that whole process, God has this tremendous revival, if you want to look at it that way. Go on amongst a portion of the people in captivity and they repent and God restores them to the land. And he doesn’t just restore a few of them. That’s the way it starts, but they become very significant worldwide—all over the world there are gentile God-fearers because of the evangelism that happens properly in the restoration period after they come out of captivity.

Now, as I said, there’s a high priest that should have been there. Zadok, who is a descendant of Aaron. All priests had to come from Aaron, but the high priest was the only one who could make sacrifices on the Day of Atonement. Any priest could work any other sacrifice day, but on the Day of Atonement—the great day, the important day, the removal of sin from the land—only the high priest could do that work. And only a high priest from the line of Zadok, a hereditary priesthood.

Well, because of the political situation involved, there was a guy named Jason who said, “I want to be a high priest.” And he cut a deal with the Greek ruler of Israel at the time. And the Greek ruler said, “Okay, you a descendant of Zadok, you’re out of here and Jason is in.” So they opposed him by force and he goes into hiding and he has a son.

So what’s going on beginning about 175 BC is the people of God really rebel against him and it’s kind of pictured by way of their rejection of God’s high priest and then setting up their own. Now Jason was a priest but he wasn’t of the line of Zadok. See that? After him it gets even worse because after him a guy takes over, has him killed, another Jew working in consort with another leader, and he isn’t even a priest, and now he’s high priest up there offering sacrifices.

From 175 roughly BC up until the time of our Savior, there is not a priest of Zadok sitting as high priest, and no sacrifices are going on yearly on the Day of Atonement that are acceptable to God. So later on in the book of Revelation you’ll see God throwing all this blood on the nation because the blood’s still on their heads. All the blood they offered up wasn’t acceptable because it wasn’t through Zadok’s line.

Now, you know about the Maccabees a little bit, right? You know, they’re kind of good guys. They were guerrilla warfare and they come in, they conquer back the land. And that’s true. But what you may not know about the Maccabees is that they had the opportunity to restore this Zadokite priest’s son who would have been the proper high priest. And they said, “No, we’ve got the country back ourselves. We’re going to be high priest. We’re not going to bring him back.” Terrible. And that whole situation stayed that way until Rome conquered them and then the Herods were put in place and they decided who’d be high priest and again it was a political appointment.

So it’s kind of like you know we know about the constitution being turned on its head in our country. Well here the law of God relative to the sacrificial system—which was so central to everything else—had been put on its head by the Israelites because their rebellion against God. They didn’t want his high priest ruin over them. You see?

Now I’ll tell you one more little thing about this history to show you how bad it was. The Pharisees and Sadducees that we read about in Jesus’s time kind of had their origins in this period of time. And the Maccabees, their high priests, are kind of like the Sadducees. They were like the guys that were the Sadducee line. And one thing that happens here in this period of time is that the Sadducees don’t like the Pharisees. The Pharisees are conservatives. The Sadducees are like the liberals, Democrats and Republicans—neither of them really godly.

But the Sadducees, they’re ticked off at this one high priest. He’s ticked off at the Pharisees. And he brings in—now this is not, you know, a foreign oppressor. This is a member of the church, you look at it that way. In fact, it’s the Pope, look at it that way. He calls. He has his people round up and arrest 600 Pharisee leaders and he crucifies them in the midst of a garden party. They’re dying up there.

And then he has them bring in their wives and children of these 600 Pharisees and he kills them. As these guys are dying on the crucifixion devices he produced, they’re seeing their own children and wives killed by the high priest of Israel. See?

So when it says in the scriptures that this abomination that causes desolation occurred, what it’s talking about, it seems, is this abominable state of Israel and particularly the insertion of high priests who are rebels against God. And God isn’t there anymore. He packs up and moves out. It makes the temple desolate because he’s gone.

Okay. Now, so what all of which is to say that I think this seventh letter refers to that period of time. They had that great revival, but then apostasy, and that apostasy leads up to the coming of our Savior. And then all of this—all this old creation—is brought to an end through the work of our Savior.

Now, it’s interesting if you see this correlation to the Pharisees and Sadducees. Turn to Matthew 23. And I know it’s a little bit out of sync, but understand that this letter to the church at Laodicea, their primary sin is hypocrisy and self-deception. They’re hypocrites. They say they’re rich, but they’re naked. They think they can see great, they’re blind. They think they are rich, they’re poor, they think they’re clothed beautifully, they’re actually naked before God.

They’re hypocrites. They don’t do what they’re supposed to be doing or what they say they’re going to do. Well, in Matthew 23, we have the eight curses upon the Pharisees from the lips of our Savior. And these correlate to the Beatitudes, you know, there’s eight blessings and eight curses.

Well, these curses, look at the way they begin in verse 13: “Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. You shut about the kingdom.” Verse 14: “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. You devour our widow’s house.” Verse 15: “Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.” Verse 16: “Woe unto you ye blind guides, which say, ‘Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing. But whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor. Ye fools and blind. For which is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold?’ And whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is nothing, you say? But whosoever swears by the gift that’s upon it, He is guilty. Ye fools and blind. For whether is greater the gift or the altar that sanctified the gift?

“Who so therefore shall swear by the altar swearth by it and by all things thereon? And who so shall swear by the temple swearth by it, and by him that dwelleth therein. And he that shall swear by heaven swearth by the throne of God, and by him that siteth thereon.”

And then in verse 23, woe to you hypocrites, you blind guides. In verse 24, in verse 25, woe to you hypocrites. And again in verse 26 that are blind. Verse 27, woe to you hypocrites. You appear beautiful. You are likened to whited sepulchres which indeed appear beautiful but outside but they are within full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. You are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

And then in verse 29, woe to you hypocrites.

So what’s the point? Couple points. One: over and over and over again, the Pharisees in that period in which they represent essentially are judged as hypocrites. And then sprinkled in there and right at the center of those eight is their blindness as blind guides. And why are they blind? Because they assert that the gold is more important than the temple.

Okay? Well, what were the Laodiceans doing? They said, “We’re rich. We’ve got a lot of money.” But money is a reflection of the value of Jesus, and they didn’t have Jesus as their value system. They had gold as the value system. Idolatry is focusing on the reflection of the image and greatness of God instead of on what it should point us to, which is God.

So he tells them here. Jesus does that. The temple is really He who sits in the temple. It’s Jesus, and he’s the one you should say it’s important in relationship to. Oh’s, but you’re saying it’s the gold that’s important, and you’re saying it’s the thing on the altar, not Jesus. Okay.

So their hypocrisy had its roots in a false value system that said ultimately it’s not God, the person of God, that’s the important thing, but what God has given us by way of pictures of who he is—gold, food, clothing, you see.

Well, that’s what happened to Laodiceans, and that’s what can happen to us. And in fact, that is what’s happened to us as a culture. This culture thinks it’s being prosperous when it’s got money. And in fact, it is dead poor in relationship to Jesus Christ. And this culture thinks it has glory and power when it’s known as the head of the free world, when in actuality it’s naked.

Bob Dylan wrote a song years ago, “Even the president of the United States sometimes must stand naked.” I think he was talking about Nixon. I don’t know. But if you think of the progression of that thought to what happened yesterday in deposition, you see what God is writing. You know the wicked witch of the east writes up there, Dorothy, “Go home.” Well, God is writing up there in really big letters, “America, you’re naked. Your president is naked. You’re not clothed with Christ’s righteousness. You’re not rich with the gold that is the person of Jesus Christ. Okay? And you’re not seeing with Christ’s wisdom and eyesight. You’re seeing with your own wisdom and discretion. You don’t have good science. You don’t have good health because you haven’t sought Christ as the great physician. You see?

Now, that’s what this is. That’s that comic book image out there. It was the comic book image of our Savior’s time, the Pharisees being represented. It’s what we have today. And it is surely what we shall become apart from the grace of God and apart from us being zealous continually to serve the Lord Jesus Christ and to seek him as the basis for our value system and our judgments, our determinations, our science, our economy, and everything that we do and say.

Okay. So this represented, returning to the outline, that last period of Old Testament history leading up to the coming of the Savior from about 200 or 175 BC up to the time of Jesus Christ.

Now, we’ve also said that these represent there’s correlations. You look at these seven letters, they kind of outline the whole book. And if you turn to chapter 22, Revelation chapter 22, you’ll see a little bit of this. The contention is that this last letter has references to the entrance into the holy city of God in Revelation 21 and 22, which I think is the establishment of the church fully. It’s not talking end times stuff here in the sense of when Christ finally returns and sets up, does away with the totally with the age in which we live.

I could talk about why that is, but just understand that there’s still a division in chapters 21 and 22 between heaven and earth. When Jesus finally returns, that division will be done away with. And there’s still evangelism going on in chapter 22. The Spirit says come. Well, when Jesus finally returns, no more evangelism. So it’s not talking about that. It’s talking about now. It’s talking about AD 70. And it’s talking about the age in which we live.

And if you look at chapter 22, the first couple of verses, what does it say?

“And he showed me a pure river of water of life clear as crystal proceeding out of the throne of God and the Lamb.” Throne room. See, enthronement, that’s where it is. It’s talking about. That’s where that water comes from. “In the midst of the streets of it, and on either side of the river was there the tree of life, which bear twelve manner of fruits and yields her fruit every month and the leaves of the trees were for the healing of the nations.”

Well, you see the correlations. It’s Sabbath day and enthronement time, and it’s union and communion with the One who sits on there. It’s eating the fruit like Jesus going to come in and eat with us. Lord’s day service communion. And it’s also that fruit is in the context of this entrance into the city of God, which is the throne of God, where he reigns from.

See, there’s even reference to the leaves of the nations here. The leaves that for the healing of the nations. Okay.

So it represents chapters 21 and 22. And then, four—we’re getting into a little more detail of the text now. It tells us how to one another one another and in the context—I’m sorry, four is the church discipline. Very briefly we’ve said that there are stages of discipline that are represented. And we said that the letter of the church at Ephesus and the letter of the church at Laodicea are the bookends for the seven churches, right? One and seven. And they’re both the same in that they’re both unified but compromised.

In other words, in the middle three—remember he says, “You guys are okay, but you got those Balaamites,” or “You’re okay, but you got those Jezebel-ites.” Sardis, you’re almost not okay. You got a few people left, but then a lot of you guys have really gone off the deep end. They were divided churches, those middle three.

But in Ephesus and Laodicea, he doesn’t say you got two groups there. He says, “You’re united, all right, which is a good thing, but you’re compromised. You’re sinning.” The whole church, you know, were hypocrites. The whole church were involved in self-deception. The whole church thought they were rich, but they were actually naked. Okay, so that’s addressed in that way, and it has that correlation to Ephesus.

Okay, now let’s get to the specific individual points of the text then, that we’ll go through now, the actual verses in a little more of a systematic way. I know I’ve referred to a bunch of them already, but now in systematic way.

We read that first of all, Christ is a measure—who he is. Christ the measure. Verse 14: “And to the angel of the church of the Laodiceans.” Right? And by the way, Laodicea means people justice. So their emphasis is on people, not God. It’s a picture again of their improper value system, their improper sight. People justice.

“These things says the Amen, the faithful and true witness, and he is the beginning or origin of the creation of God.”

Briefly, let’s unpack this. You know, it’s like that dancer again. These things mean things that the scriptures tell us about. We need to think through them a little bit. When we say amen today, unfortunately, we tend to use the term amen or it can be used as “it makes me feel good, preacher. Yeah, Amen. Yeah, you bet. That’s good. Like it.” But that’s not what amen means in the Bible.

Next week we’re going to engage in our annual anti-abortion Day of the Lord worship service. And at the beginning of that, we always read some of the curses from God’s law. And the congregation is asked to respond with their amen to the curse. And that comes right out of the Bible. And the Bible says that amen is an affirmation that surely these things will happen.

Amen. And in the book of Revelation, it means bet on it. It is sure. It will absolutely happen. Jesus is the guarantor of the covenant. These things will take place, church. So when we say amen next week, it’s not that if we don’t say amen, it’s not going to happen to us. We’re saying we know that’s true. We know if you move the landmark, move the boundary stone, going to be cursed by God. Amen. That is surely going to happen if you do that stuff. That’s what amen means.

Okay? So Jesus says at the very first of Laodiceans, “You listen because I’m not saying this might happen. This is what surely will happen if particular conditions are met.”

I am the amen. This will happen. And then he says, “I am the faithful and true witness.” That is who he is. He is always the faithful and true witness. Now remember again here—we think witness means you have a witness about who Jesus is. And there’s certainly a degree of truth to that. But witness in its sense here brings us to mind of the need for all of us to give witness in a court of law. If we see facts of a particular kind happening, we have a requirement of witness.

And the witness that Jesus gives does correlate to the witness that he bears at the judicial court that he enters into in the book of Revelation. He’s in the court of God, and he is going to be a faithful witness. He’s going to say everything that he knows and he’s going to be truthful. He’s going to give witness. He’s going to testify about this church. And what he’s going to testify is that they’re bad and if they don’t shape up, they’re going to get vomited out of his mouth.

So he’s telling them, “Now get ready for what I’m going to say because it surely will happen and I surely will witness about this church to God the Father and things will occur. Okay.”

And then third he says—so that’s pretty scary stuff right? And we come every Lord’s day before the King of Kings who is the Amen. Now in 1 Corinthians it says that he is yea and amen to his people. All the blessings of God are yea and amen to us in Christ. But understand that if we rebel against Christ and if we don’t walk according to his value system, if we don’t seek Christ—seeking Christ, if we don’t do that—that all things to us will be cursed. Will be spit out—not spit—vomited out of Christ. Scary stuff.

He’s surely going to testify about you today. He looks at you. He’s here with us.

But the third thing he says is that he is the origin of the creation of God. Now, that’s a real statement of hope in the context here. Now he is asserting his crown rights. He owns creation. He brought it to pass. He’s the beginning or origin of creation. So he has rights over it. That is surely here. But see, he isn’t here to destroy. He’s here to create. His ultimate—ultimately Jesus doesn’t come to destroy people. He comes to continue to affect creation or recreation in him.

And it’s real important because when he comes to us—I mean, if you really get a glimpse of who it is we have to worship today—you get scared. You don’t just say that confession to sin, or pray it along with me while I’m praying it formally. You think, “Hypocrite! Boy, I say I love my wife. I didn’t treat her very good yesterday. I say I’m submissive to my husband.” Husband. “I didn’t submit to him with honor and love and respect and I’m supposed to obey my parents, but I didn’t. And I didn’t do it lots of times maybe this last week. And then what about your relationship to God? What about taking the word of God into your science and your technology and your economics and your recreation and everything else? How about the consecration of your Lord’s day, judging it by Isaiah 58?” Scary stuff.

But right away, Jesus also tells them that he comes to chasten us, that we might be and fulfill and work out the new creation that he has affected—who is the origin of creation. So he gives this three-fold designation that’s really quite important to us.

He goes on from there to tell us what he sees. And normally he says what he sees good about the church, but here he doesn’t have anything good to say about him. We’ve seen this a couple of times. And so we go right past that.

And what does he see bad about him? Well, as I said, then he sees hypocrisy, self-deception, and he sees a lack of value system that are out of sync with the covenant. Now, this is interesting stuff. It’s going to take a little bit of time. Hurry, hurry.

Okay, look in verse 15. “I know your works that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of my mouth.”

So what’s their problem? Well, he goes on to spell it out a little bit, but first he says, “You’re not cold and you’re not hot.” What does it mean? What does it mean?

Well, I’m going to tell you three views. And I’m not sure what it means. I think that the third one I’ll tell you is probably more on target. But some people say, okay, you got Laodicea and they were next to two cities, one on this side, one on this side. And this city over here was fed by waters that came down from the mountaintop and they were nice cold, refreshing water. But by the time it gets to Laodicea, it’s lukewarm. And that’s no fun to drink.

And the other city over here, it had nice hot water, and it really did. They were fed by a hot springs and you know those are medicinal and all that sort of stuff and they can heat your house. But by the time it got to Laodicea through the piping system it also was lukewarm.

So they’re saying that there’s a sense in which the Christian church is cold or hot in its witness to Christ. You know, you’re supposed to either be a refreshing coolness to some people, or you’re supposed to bring a healing and warmth to other people in our ministries. Okay. So Laodicea was complacent and wasn’t really involved in the culture in ministering Christ, the water of life in either a refreshing fashion or a healing fashion.

You know, iced tea is good and hot tea is good and iced coffee is good and hot coffee is good, but lukewarm coffee and lukewarm tea, you drink it and you spit it out of your mouth, right? So that’s kind of the image. Some people say, and I guess you could read that in here. If we’re indifferent about things of Christ in ministering to our culture, we are certainly in danger of being spewed out of the mouth of Christ.

He doesn’t save us just to sit around for forty years and wait for the rapture, or wait for our death, or wait for the collapse of the culture before we get doing anything. The conservative rapture, economic collapse. He didn’t want us to wait any stuff. We’re supposed to be ministering cold or hot, whatever it is in the context of our culture. So that’s certainly one acceptable interpretation or application of the text.

But there’s little in the text to tell us that’s what’s really going on. We’re looking at the city history.

And you know, it’s always best to try to look at the scriptures. Another thing people say is, “Well, if you were either hotly for me or you were either cold to the sense of being real opponents to me, that’s what I want you to be instead of lukewarm to me, indifferent to Christ.”

Well, you know, there’s some truth to that too. Now, you know, if you’ve witnessed to people, Bill’s done a lot of talking to people on the internet chat stuff, that kind of thing, you know that if people are just sort of uninterested in the whole thing, you’re not going to get very far. But sometimes with people who are really opposed to the gospel at the get-go, it’s because God is working on them and bringing them to conviction. So, you know, it could be that’s true of application, but it seems hard for me to believe that—even though good men have said it—because why would our Savior desire people to be actively opposed to him and his cause? I just I don’t see that.

Okay. The third option here is that what he’s referring to is Genesis 8. Now, this option, the only person I’ve ever heard say it, I’ll give you all the caveats right now, is James B. Jordan. And but that’s what I like about Mr. Jordan. I like the fact that he tries to find a biblical correlation to interpret what the scriptures are saying as opposed to a cultural one.

Now, let me just say by way of caveat again here that if you’re going to find one of these letters that it may be very appropriate for our Savior to use images that are part of their culture. It may be the Laodicean church because they were so engrossed in that culture in a non-Christian way. You know, they’re supposed to be replacing Laodicea, but Laodicea was replacing them is what was going on. You know, the value system, the commerce, the clothing, the Phrygian powder, the knowledge and discernment, the sciences that was coming into the church and influencing them instead of them going out and influencing the city.

And so in such a context, it may well be that our Savior would use the cultural surroundings of the day in terms of the banking system and all this stuff and the water coming down from the two cities to talk to them about their problems. But we do find in Genesis 8:22—actually, did I say 20? And Genesis 8 is of course after the flood. God has brought them through all of that.

And then he speaks to Noah. Noah lands and he builds an ark. In verse 20, the Lord smelled the sweet savor. Lord said, “I will not again curse the ground anymore for man’s sake, forasmuch as the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I again smite any more, anything living, anything living as I have done.”

So see the context for this is the Adamic world has been in a sense destroyed by God through the flood and then he’s got Noah and so he set up this new world, as it were. I mean it’s still the Adamic world but it’s a new picture of it and it’s kind of pictures what’s going to happen when Jesus comes in the book of Revelation, you know, everything is torn down. You know, the heavens are rolled up like a scroll, a picture of everything being torn down to be rebuilt in the person and work of Christ.

Okay. So there’s a correlation to this text in Revelation that way. But then very specifically, it says in verse 22 that this Adamic, this recreated Adamic world under Noah, okay, is going to be sustained while the earth remaineth: “Seed time and harvest and cold and heat, summer and winter and day and night shall not cease.”

Okay, so the way the covenant has been set up in Noah is in terms of these cycles, these seasons of seed time and harvest. Okay? Cold and heat, winter and summer. And so people are operating in the context of the covenant when they’re either sowing or reaping and when they’re either engaged in works that are cold or hot, or winter or summer.

Okay. So the idea here is that maybe what Jesus is saying to Laodicea is that you’re not doing how the covenant was designed for you to do. You’re not operating as a church in one season or the other, for instance, sowing or reaping. You’re not cold or hot. You’re not part of this thing. You’re out of sync with the covenant. You’re not my covenant people. You’re not manifesting this covenantal oscillation to the world.

And so because of that, I’m going to spew you out of my mouth. I’m going to vomit you out. Okay?

I don’t know which of those three is right.