First Love Series

Ephesus: Rekindling Your First Love

7 Church’s In Revelation Series

CCCAG 8-4-24

-Scripture- Rev 2:1-7

Overview-

We just completed a series that discussed the 7 blessings found in the book of Revelation.

Now we are going to stay in Revelation for the next several weeks and look at the 7 Churches mentioned by Jesus at the beginning of this book.

Let me give some background and show you where these 7 churches were located in the ancient world.

Location of 7 church’s

? Slide 1- overview of where they existed

? Slide 2- Zoom in to modern Turkey

? - created a natural trade route. Ships could land in Smyrna or Ephesus, and traders would make an approx. 700 mile circle to the other cities in this picture, and leave from the other port and vice versa. Just for some perspective- Imagine if you created a circle route around the borders of Wisconsin from Eau Claire to the Illinois border, and between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi and that is the land area we are talking about.

So that’s the location of these church’s.

Now….how should we interpret this part of scripture?

Over the last 2000 years, commentators and theologians have assigned quite a few interpretations and written a lot of opinions about these churches. There are three major opinions that explain what these church’s mean to us today in 2024:

The first one is that

1. They are representations of ages- time periods in which the church worldwide has gone through and is going through right now. It’s sometimes cross-referenced with Romans 1:18-32 or 2 Tim 3 which

describes how cultures/nations and people will go through a moral and spiritual slide away from God and into destruction.

In this view, these churches in Revelation 2 & 3 represent various periods in church history that will occur spanning the time from Acts chapter 2 until the rapture. In fact, many today say we are either in the age of the church of Philadelphia or Laodicea.

I’m maybe 20% in this camp….I think it has some bearing, but most of how I believe these should be seen is in the next point.

2. These represent church’s in the first century that the Apostle John was pastoring and giving apostolic oversight to. They are included in Revelation to show the church the different problems and pitfalls that church’s will face in history, and are meant to serve as both a warning and an encouragement to future generations of Christians.

That’s pretty much my view of them.

The 3rd major interpretation of Chapter 2-3 in Revelation is

3. These refer only to the church’s mentioned, and has nothing to do with today. I reject that-

I don’t see The Holy Spirit would not have moved John to include this narrative in this book so that we in 2024 if it’s truths were not timeless to all Christians.

Revelation as a book is too important to us as Christians to waste time on a dead history lesson at it’s beginning.

In fact, Revelation is unique in the bible is that it has a warning written in it’s last chapter that says don’t deviate, add, or subtract from the words of the prophecy of this book. No other book in the bible says this about itself.

Not Genesis

Not the Gospels

Not Paul’s letters

Not even the OT prophets

Only Revelation has this warning. Every word of it is meant to bring us instruction, counsel, warning, and blessing.

That’s why we are going through both of these series.

Barring any major occurrence, The next 7 Sundays that I’m speaking will be spent here.

So let’s start off with the first church mentioned- Ephesus.

As you saw on the map, Ephesus was one of the cities that Paul visited during his 2nd Missionary Journey. He founded a church there, pastored it, and gave apostolic oversight to it, even writing a letter to it helping to give it foundation and address some of the issues there.

That letter of course is the book of Ephesians.

Ephesus was one of the busiest commercial cities in the world of it’s time. It was the location of one of the seven wonders of the world- the Temple of Artemis known for its incredible size, beauty, and sculptures representing the Greek pantheon of gods. Artemis, was the Greek god of the hunt, who was synonymous with Diana in the Roman pantheon,

Ephesus was a very rich city, and even by our standards today a very liberal one in its social circles. Many of the moral problems that are coming into existence in our culture today existed then.

Yes, they were actually worse than what we are today. That’s why when so many people say how modern and how enlightened we’ve become because we allow so much liberty to people to express “who they really are”- these people are deluded, have no knowledge of history, and refuse to accept truth.