Category Archives: Sermons

With Our Own Petard

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(Proverbs 24:10-12, Isaiah 52:3-6; Romans 2)

Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4. Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius the usurper king, has ordered Hamlet to England in the company of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; he has given them a sealed letter to convey to the king of England with instructions to have Hamlet killed. Hamlet will later find that letter and rewrite it so that it contains instructions to have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed instead. Before his departure, however, he says this to his mother:

I must to England—you know that. . . .

There’s letters sealed and my two schoolfellows—
Whom I will trust as I will adders fanged—
They bear the mandate, they must sweep my way
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work.

He’s using military language here, describing the situation in terms of siege warfare; he doesn’t know what exactly is going on, but he clearly understands that the king intends to use them to make sure Hamlet never makes it back to Denmark.

He continues:

For ’tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard, and’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon.

The enginer is the maker of “engines”—which is to say, devices such as bombs; a petard was a type of bomb, a shaped charge used in attacking fortifications. Hamlet knows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will be armed in some way to destroy him; he intends to outwit them and turn the plan against them, so that they will be “hoist with their own petard”—blown into the air by their own bomb. Not that it’s really their plan, but no matter—they’re serving Claudius in his intrigues, rather than seeing him truly enough to resist him, so they’re guilty too. That the judgment they bear should be turned against them is poetic justice.

You can see where I’m going with this. There’s a similar dynamic here in Romans 2 as Paul turns to address the Jews in the church. In chapter 1 he’s made it clear that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only path to salvation available to anyone, whether Jew or Gentile, and that all people are under the wrath of God for their ungodliness and unrighteousness; but as he unpacks that, he does so in terms which seem to indict only the Gentiles, because their idolatry and wickedness are obvious to anyone who knows the Scriptures. (Indeed, they were obvious to many in that time who didn’t.)

The danger here is the assumption, which was already becoming common among Jews at that time, that the wrath of God against unrighteousness didn’t apply to them because they were his chosen people. One of the books of the Apocrypha, for instance, the Wisdom of Solomon, has a multi-chapter diatribe about the sin and idolatry of the Gentiles, a lot like Romans 1 only longer; and then comes this: “But you, our God, are kind and true, patient, and ruling all things in mercy. For even if we sin we are yours, knowing your power; but we will not sin, because we know that you acknowledge us as yours.” You get the idea—because we’re God’s chosen people and have his law, even if we sin, it doesn’t really count as sin, and God won’t judge us.

Obviously, Paul can’t let that stand; but by laying out his argument as he does, he turns that attitude back against any Jews who take that approach. They think their special status exempts them from condemnation, but he says, no: it actually holds them to a higher standard. If they have responded to the previous passage with a spirit of judgment, cheering Paul on as he condemns “those bad people out there,” he slams their judgment back in their face, bringing their self-righteous verdict down on their own heads. The bomb they thought was for the Gentiles blows up right beneath their feet.

The principle here is that you’re judged on the basis of what you know; it’s the same idea we see in James 3:1 where he says, “Not many of you should seek to become teachers, for you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.” Paul makes it clear in Romans 1 that the Gentiles are responsible for refusing to believe what they could have known about God from his creation. Here, he points out that while the Gentiles don’t have the written law of God, they do have some sense of his moral law, which influences their behavior—and that they will be judged for doing what they know to be wrong, even without written notice from God to that effect.

And if that’s so, then how much more will the judgment of God fall on those who do have his word, who have been clearly told who God is and what he requires? Having the law of God, hearing the law of God, is only a benefit if you do the law of God. If you don’t, Paul tells them, then you are all the more guilty for having his law, because you know all the more clearly how wrong you are. The idea that knowing God’s law somehow means that you can get away without keeping it is completely backwards.

Let me borrow an illustration here from the preacher and writer Francis Chan—you might have heard this before. Imagine I tell Lydia to go clean her room. (She’s actually quite self-motivated on that, but imagine.) She goes up and closes the door, and an hour or two later she comes back down and says, “Dad, I memorized what you said. You said, ‘Go clean your room.’ I can say it in Greek—Πηγαίνετε καθαρός το δωμάτιό σας. I’m going to e-mail a couple of my friends, and we’re going to get together and study what it would mean for me to clean my room, and what that might look like.” Am I going to be impressed? Is that what I had in mind when I told her to clean her room? No, it isn’t—she hasn’t done what I told her, and that was the whole point.

All well and good then to condemn the Gentiles as envious, quarrelsome, insolent, boastful, prone to gossip, foolish, heartless, and all the rest—but Paul’s Jewish readers are guilty of all those things too, and they shouldn’t be. As a consequence, far from being the witness to God they were supposed to be, they have become one more reason for many Gentiles to reject God. They should not expect to escape judgment for that merely because they’re Jewish. Indeed, Paul says, the only thing that matters is the reality of our hearts—not that we have God’s word, but that his Spirit is at work in our lives training us to do God’s word.

So then, is Paul slamming the Jews because he thinks they could have kept God’s law well enough? No, of course not. Rather, he’s hammering the argument home that to rely on the law for salvation is foolish, because the law cannot make you good enough to be saved—it can only make you more guilty for being bad. He’s driving them to a point where they will realize that their need for something more is every bit as deep and desperate as the Gentiles’ need, to prepare them for the conclusion of chapter 3: that the righteousness of God can only be found through faith in Jesus Christ, even if you’re a law-abiding Jew. Yes, he’s already said that, and yes, he’s writing to a church, so they probably all nodded agreement—but he doesn’t want them just to know this in their heads, he wants them to know it in their guts.

Them—and us. The Jews had grown so used to being God’s chosen people that many of them took him, and their own righteousness, for granted; and that attitude had carried into the church. It was easy for them to focus on the immorality and idolatry of their culture, which was blatant and disgusting, and easy to feel superior as a consequence. When that mindset takes hold, grace becomes something other people need—those people who aren’t up to our standard yet; from there, it’s a short step to demanding they measure up, and grace goes out the window.

It’s a universal temptation for the righteous, to self-righteousness—the delusion that we are righteous in ourselves rather than in Christ, and only by his grace. But as Paul shows us, if we forget that we need God’s grace as badly as anyone, if we let ourselves grow self-righteous and judgmental in spirit, then we will end up hoist with our own petard just as surely as old Wile E., condemned by our own verdict. Judgment begins with the house of God, after all. We just need to keep looking back to Jesus and the gospel of grace, which is the power of God for salvation to all who believe.

Identity Idolatry

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(Genesis 1:26-27, Jeremiah 2:9-13; Romans 1:16-32)

In addressing this passage from Romans, we should probably begin by clearing the decks: this passage is not about homosexual activity. It addresses homosexual activity, but that’s neither the focus of the passage nor its purpose. The focus is Paul’s explanation of how and why this world is broken; homosexual sex is just a symptom.

What we need to see, if indeed Romans is a theological retelling of salvation history, is that what we have beginning in verse 18 is the Creation and the Fall. That’s why Paul draws so intentionally on the language of Genesis. He’s laying out the universal disaster of human sin in order to make it clear that salvation comes through Christ alone. For him, the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in the church is a major concern, especially as it seems to have become a problem in Rome, and so his key point to this is that Jews and Gentiles stand on equal footing before God. Thus in verse 16 he declares that the gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” There is a distinction, but no separation.

And thus Paul says in verse 18 that the wrath of God is revealed—it’s shown to be active, it’s seen in operation, unfolding in human history—against all human ungodliness and unrighteousness. This isn’t just Gentiles, or even uniquely true of the Gentiles, as he’ll make clear in chapters 2-3. No one is innocent; all are guilty.

Now, when we think about sin, we tend to think about sins—we focus on particular acts, and argue about how bad they are, and maybe try to get something taken off the list. Paul goes below the surface to the root of our sin: idolatry, the choice to worship something other than God. Even for those who don’t have the Scriptures, there is enough reason to acknowledge and worship God just in this world that he has made; we do not fail to worship God out of ignorance. When the sinful heart comes up against the truth of God’s existence and his character—and the idea that such a God would have the right to expect things of us and to make demands of us—it suppresses that truth. The root impulse of sin is the desire to be the sole rulers of our own lives, and thus to acknowledge no god that we haven’t chosen for ourselves, on our own terms. All the people and goals and desires that mean more to us than God are expressions of the central desire of our sinful nature: to be first in our own lives, to bow to no authority but our own.

There’s an old saying that the man who represents himself has a fool for a lawyer; it’s also said that he has a fool for a client, and both things are true. How much more, then, is he a fool who has himself for a god? As we’ve seen, if we turn away from the one who spoke the world into being, we become spiritually deaf; if we reject the one who said, “Let there be light,” and there was light, we are blinded by the darkness of our hearts; if we refuse to accept the one who is Truth and is the source of all wisdom, there is nothing left for us but lies and folly. And against the terrors of the world, there is left no defense, and no option but to worship them in hopes of somehow appeasing them.

If we alienate ourselves from the one who made us, we cannot know who we are; if we must be gods to ourselves, we cannot be truly human to ourselves, and thus we cannot truly know what it means to be human. In this, I think, is one of the subtlest forms of idolatry, and one which is increasingly coming out into the open and taking center stage in our culture: the idolatry of identity. We worship the right to decide for ourselves who we are, to determine for ourselves what defines us. Anything connected to that becomes an inalienable right, because it’s part of who we are; no question or challenge is allowed.

That, of course, is why Romans 1 is so controversial in Western culture. I lived five years in Canada; if I chose to preach on this passage there, I could be accused of a hate crime and put on trial by one of their Human Rights Commissions, so-called. Why? For being “anti-gay,” or whatever terminology they might use. For attacking people for their “sexual identity.” There’s the key word: identity. The desire is definitive.

This isn’t just about sex, though; we see it all over the place. Our culture likes to redefine sins as diseases—thus, for instance, a disobedient child who throws a temper tantrum anytime he’s told “no” isn’t a kid who needs to be disciplined so he learns to grow up, he has ODD (oppositional defiant disorder). He’s not a sinner, he’s just sick. This is a trick we use to avoid admitting that we’re sinful, but it does more than that—it gives us an identity in our sin. This approach teaches us to name ourselves by our besetting sins, and allow them to define us. Which, honestly, is pretty twisted.

Beyond that, think of how we tell people who we are. We identify ourselves by our work—I am a pastor—or by our relationships—I am Sara’s husband, I am Lydia’s father (and Rebekah’s, and Bronwyn’s, and Iain’s). We identify ourselves by our country—I am an American—and our political party. We identify ourselves by our gender, and many of us identify ourselves by our heritage, including that aspect which we wrongly call “race.” We identify ourselves by where we went to school—IU or Purdue? All these “I am” statements are statements of identity—they are all examples of us defining ourselves outside of who we are in Christ. That doesn’t mean all of them are therefore idolatrous, as if it were somehow morally different for me to say “I am a pastor” versus “I pastor a church”; but they often are.

I’ve certainly known men and women who found their primary identity in being married—or in being single, whether they considered that positive or negative. I’ve known more than a few people who truly defined themselves by their political party. I’ve seen folks who were so concerned about what it meant to be a man or a woman that they considered that to be the primary fact about themselves. And yes, there are those who think that who they want to sleep with is absolutely essential to their inmost being.

Now, obviously, some of these are more central to who we are than others. We are created male and female by God, and so this is a fundamental part of who we are, far more profound than whether you voted for Nixon in ’72 or Kerry in ’04. Regardless, if we belong to Christ, that is our primary identity; that is what defines us above all other things. Everything else—even that we are male and female, which is a reality God created before the Fall, when we were still perfect—everything else is secondary. If we find our identity first in any of these things rather than in Christ, that is idolatry.

Anything that we think is essential to who we are (and thus to our well-being) is something we will defend against anyone and anything that seems to threaten it—even God. If I find my identity in being a pastor, my ministry won’t be the ministry of Christ, it will be all about me. If your idea of what it means to be a man or a woman—because that’s really where the identity issue lies, in our interpretation of that fact—if that is most important to you, everything else will be distorted or denied to fit that. And, yes, to anyone who believes their sexual desires are who they are, any suggestion that those desires might not be in accordance with the will of God is going to feel like a rejection of them as people and a vicious attack on their very souls.

Even so, if we’re going to preach the gospel clearly to our culture, we have to begin where Paul begins, here and in Acts: by exposing, naming, and confronting its idols. We have to help people see that what they take for freedom is really slavery, and that they aren’t really who they think they are—they were created to be more, in Jesus Christ.

Not Ashamed

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(Habakkuk 2:1-4; Romans 1:1-17)

This will be an interesting sermon series for me—something of a voyage of discovery. This past January, up at Calvin, I heard N. T. Wright talk about baptism in the light of Romans 6, and he argued that Romans 6-8 is a theological retelling of the story of the Exodus. Which made a lot of sense to me, and got me thinking that maybe he didn’t go far enough with his idea; maybe all of Romans, or at least much of it, is a theological retelling of the whole story of Israel—and thus of our story as the people of God.

It’s an attractive idea, I think, both because it helps make sense of some things in the structure of the book and because it addresses the biggest question I’ve always had about Romans: why was it written? Why did Paul just decide one day to sit down and write a theology textbook to a church he’d never visited? If it isn’t just a theology textbook, if there’s a deeper purpose to it, then that makes more sense to me. The only way to work out this idea and see how true it might be is actually to go through and write the sermons and see how it works.

If I’m right, then the purpose of Romans is not just to tell us what the church should believe, but to give us an overarching vision of what the church ought to be—what we ought to be on about as the people of God, what life as a follower of Christ should look like, and what the ministry of Christ ought to be about. We saw this Christmas that a key idea in Matthew’s gospel is that the life of Christ recapitulates the history of Israel; in Romans, I think, we have Paul doing by his teaching what Jesus did by his life and his example. The life of Christ is the model for the life of the people of God, because we his people have been given his life; Romans unpacks that for us and helps us to understand it. Paul wants us to understand what it means for us to live in and by the life of Christ and the power of his Holy Spirit as his redeemed people.

We see this in Paul’s introduction, which we read this morning. His description of himself normally takes up just a line or two in his letters; here it’s six verses long and basically a thumbnail sketch of his mission and message. His thanksgiving for them is briefer than usual, because this is a church he doesn’t know—it quickly shifts into a statement of his desire to visit them, culminating in the declaration, “I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.”

And here’s the interesting thing: we see the theme of this letter in verses 16-17—and yeah, there’s a lot there, and we’re not going to unpack it all this morning—but these two verses are grammatically subordinate to verse 15. 15 is the main sentence, 16-17 function as a causal clause. We know this sort of thing—it’s like when I tell my wife, “I’m going to the store because we’re out of milk.” She doesn’t need me to tell her we’re out of milk, she already knows that; what she needs to know is that I’m taking the car keys. I tell her “we’re out of milk” so that she knows why.

It’s the same deal here. This has given some scholars heartburn—how can this be the main point of the letter if it isn’t even the main point of the sentence?—but I think it’s really quite important. He says this, he lays out the heart of his message, for a specific reason: to explain why he’s eager to preach the gospel to them. This is why he preaches, this is why he ministers, this is what his ministry is all about. Paul is in it for the gospel, driven by the gospel, inspired by the gospel, powered by the gospel, guided by the gospel—and nothing else. This is what he does, and all he does, and he wants the same thing to be true of them as the church.

This is the vision, nothing more and nothing less. Notice, I’m not saying it’s Paul’s vision. It is, in a sense; we can talk about this as Paul’s vision for the church, or my vision for the church, in the sense of being captured by this vision. But it isn’t his vision in the sense that it began with him or belongs to him. If it were, it would be merely a human vision, and no merely human vision can build the church. As Andrew Purves of Pittsburgh Seminary says, no human ministry can redeem anyone; only the ministry of Christ is redemptive. Human vision may build a large, successful organization—it often does—but it won’t be the church, because it will only be a human organization. What we need is the vision of Christ for the church, which shines through Paul here.

The vision is that the church should be people of the gospel, all about the gospel, first, last, and always. We should be a people who recognize our absolute dependence on Jesus Christ—that we are not in the least righteous by our own power, but only through faith in him; that we depend completely on his righteousness, for our own attempts are worth nothing. We are called to be a people of grace, who humbly acknowledge before God and each other our need for grace—that we sin, that we fail, that we fall short, that we let others down, inevitably—we cannot be satisfactory people in our own strength.

We will always fall short of even what we consider “reasonable” expectations, because we are limited, fallible, and still struggling with our sin; we need grace, and so we need to show grace to others. We need to tell each other and to tell the world that the good news of Jesus isn’t “Work harder,” though to be sure we all have things on which we need to keep working; rather, the good news is that we are saved by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ, and he is sufficient for us. He has redeemed us by his power, and he is transforming us by his power, making us righteous according to his will. We need to give him our best, not because it means we’ll get the result we want—we might not—but simply because it’s our best and it’s what God asks of us. The rest is up to him.

The key is, the power of salvation isn’t ours, it’s God’s, and his power and his righteousness are far beyond anything we can manage; this is why Paul declares, “I am not ashamed of the gospel.” We usually read this as an individual statement, and it is; Paul is an evangelist because he understands that only in the gospel is the power of God for salvation that brings true life. Indeed, this is the only motivation for evangelism that really bears fruit for the long term, if we are captured by the glory and goodness of Jesus Christ and our salvation in him—if we are full to overflowing with his love, and with gratitude for all he has done for us, then we will tell others naturally, every chance we get, the same way that those who are in love are always talking about their beloved. That’s what fills their hearts and their thoughts, and so that’s what fills their speech as well. In the same way, if we would be effective in telling others about Jesus, we must begin by looking to him ourselves and delighting in his presence.

That said, what Paul is saying here is about more than just our individual witness, it’s also about how we live together as the church. It’s about putting the gospel front and center in everything we do and refusing to be about anything else. We lose sight of this because the church has become organizationalized. It’s become all about the organization, thinking like an organization—and an organization exists first and foremost to keep itself in existence, and then if it can, to get bigger, so as to give itself more resources to stay in existence. The church in this country has a bad habit of thinking and evaluating itself in those terms, and so it becomes all about the numbers and how you attract people; and you do that through programs and worship style and stuff you can advertise.

Now, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with programs, and certainly everyone has a style, but there are a couple bad assumptions here. The first is that the church is supposed to be successful on organizational terms, which means strength in numbers; the second is that we have to be the ones to make that happen, and we have to use the same techniques the world does. When we get into that mindset, we end up ashamed of the gospel, because the gospel doesn’t fit the marketing paradigm; we put the stuff front and center that goes over well with the test audience. Paul is calling us to something different: to fix our eyes firmly on Jesus, to proclaim the gospel in every way we can find to do it—which is where our programs come in, to give us different ways and opportunities to proclaim the gospel—and let God worry about the rest.

Learning to See

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(Psalm 115:1-8; Luke 24:1-35)

The desire to feel superior to other people is one of the most basic, and base, of all human temptations. What we call racism is one expression of this, as is sexism; another is cultural chauvinism. The ancient Greeks, for instance, considered anyone who didn’t speak Greek inferior. We see prejudice related to economic and social class. Perhaps the most insidious form, however, is what C. S. Lewis dubbed “chronological snobbery”: the belief that our age is wiser and more enlightened than those that came before, and that we are better people just for living now rather than in some earlier time.

This attitude is deployed by many modern folk against the word of God, and particularly against the accounts of the Resurrection. You will hear it snidely suggested that people 2000 years ago were ignorant and gullible folks who believed in miracles because they were too dumb to know better, but that modern science has proven that miracles don’t happen. The assumption seems to be that the people of Jesus’ day would have found it much easier to believe he rose from the dead than we do, and thus that it wouldn’t have been hard to fool them. This assumption is completely ludicrous.

The fact of it is, the ancient world knew death far better than our clinical modern age, because they lived with it much more closely than we do; people didn’t die out of sight in big antiseptic buildings, they died in their homes, right in the middle of their communities—and when they died, they stayed dead. There were no resuscitations, and there was no life support; people didn’t wake up from comas, because if they didn’t eat and drink on their own, there was no way to keep them alive. Resurrection? They knew better. Dead was dead, and that was that.

We see this in Luke 24. No one sees the empty tomb and assumes that Jesus is alive again. The women see it and are at a loss for an explanation, until the angels show up and tell them Jesus has risen from the dead; they go back and tell the disciples, and most of the disciples dismiss them as a bunch of hysterical women.

And then we get this story that begins in verse 13, of two of the disciples walking back from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus. They’re talking about everything that has happened, trying to make sense of all of it—without much success—when Jesus comes up from behind. And here’s the reason this story has always fascinated me: they don’t recognize him. In fact, Luke tells us, they were kept from recognizing him.

Why? And kept by whom? The second question is easier to answer: this is probably what we call a divine passive, a way the Old Testament writers developed of saying that God did something without using the name of God, and thus avoiding any risk of using his name in vain. But why would God keep them from recognizing Jesus?

I can’t say for sure, but I think Luke suggests a reason. I think God kept them from recognizing Jesus because they weren’t ready to see him—it was because of the blindness of their hearts. He had to open their minds and hearts to understand him before their eyes could be opened to see him. And so, rather than declaring himself at the beginning, he leaves their eyes blind and begins to teach them from the word of God, showing them all the ways in which the Hebrew Scriptures pointed to him and prepared the way for his coming.

Why were their hearts blind? Because they were too much of the world. They had hoped Jesus was the Messiah, the one who would redeem Israel, but like everyone else, they understood that in worldly terms; and more than that, their faith was limited by the world’s horizon. Luke tells us that when Peter heard the news, he ran to the tomb and looked in, and went home amazed at what had happened; we know from John’s gospel that he went with Peter, that he also looked in the tomb, and that he came away believing the women’s report. But all Cleopas and his friend seem to have taken away from their stories is “they went to the tomb and it was empty, but they didn’t see Jesus.” Whether Jesus is in the tomb or not, they still believe he’s dead, because that’s the way the world works; that’s how things go, and the word of a few overly excitable women isn’t enough to convince them otherwise.

The reality here is the same that we talked about as we worked through the letters in Revelation: idolatry leaves us spiritually blind, deaf, and dumb. The nations worship things made by human hands, things which cannot see or hear, which cannot speak, or walk, or feel, and all who put their trust in those things become like them. If our attention is focused on this world and the things of this world, then we fail to understand that our God is in the heavens, and he does all that he pleases; we end up with a shrunken faith, confined and circumscribed by the limited possibilities of this world as we know it.

We end up, as you might say, with just another world religion. I don’t want to beat up on the word “religion” or pose some sort of false antithesis between religion and faith, but at the same time, Christianity is not religion the way anything else is. It isn’t about making our way to God or making the best of this world; those things definitely are religion, but they are not the gospel. It isn’t about being morally good people or finding fulfillment in life; those are good things, but they are not the gospel. It isn’t about making our country strong or building healthy families; those are certainly desirable things that tend to come when the church is strong, but they are not the gospel. They are not enough. They can give you a goal and a purpose through the ordinary times, but when you come up against the brute fact of death, they are silent.

Any religion that depends on life going well is going to fail you when you need it most; any religion that is primarily about making you happy is insufficient. Any faith you can accept without straining your sense of the possible, any faith that makes sense to you because it plays by the rules of this world, is ultimately no faith at all. I find it rather ironic when I see a church named “Emmaus” or “Emmaus Road,” not because I don’t understand, but because a lot of people have an Emmaus Road faith—it goes no farther than Cleopas’ faith did. It’s easy to see Christ when he looks like we expect, and when he does what we want him to do; but too often, when he departs from that, we can’t see him. Too often, if we’re honest, our churches don’t teach us to.

Which is a crying shame, because we have been given a mighty word to declare to the nations, a word to bring hope to the hopeless and deliverance to the captives, a word to make the blind see and the lame walk, a word even to raise the dead: we have been given to proclaim a God who is in the heavens and who does all that he pleases. All that he pleases, even beyond the limits of our feeble possibilities. We have been given the word that there is no failure that is final, no grief that cannot be healed, no enemy that cannot be overcome, no shame that cannot be restored, no sinner who cannot find forgiveness, because God has overcome every enemy and broken down every obstacle. We have been given the good news that in this world of sorrow and failure and pain and death, sorrow does not have the last word, and failure does not have the last word, and pain does not have the last word, and even death does not have the last word, because God has spoken the last word, and that word is: resurrection.

The task of the church is to clear out our ears so we can hear that, and to be the servants of God to one another to help each other learn to see—to see Christ, not as someone who lived a long time ago and said some interesting stuff, but as the one who is risen and is here among us now. The ministry of the church is to proclaim, over and over, at the top of our lungs, to all who come and anyone who will listen, that there is a resurrection. Christ is risen from the dead, and with him we are risen from the dead—we are no longer merely human, and we are no longer slaves to ourselves and our sin: sin has been defeated, and death itself has been put to death. Our lives are no longer up to us, and we do not have to figure out our own way through this world, because wherever we go, Jesus goes with us—even when we don’t recognize him. We only need to open our ears to hear him speaking to us, and let him open our eyes, that we may see.

Foolishness to the Lost

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(Zechariah 9:9-17; Mark 11:1-11, 1 Corinthians 1:18-31)

April Fool’s Day isn’t usually seen as a Christian holiday, but it probably ought to be. We think of this as a day when people make fools of each other, but it’s also a good day to think about the ways we make fools of ourselves, and how foolish our conventional “wisdom” often is. Take the case of Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express. We take overnight delivery for granted, but when he proposed the idea in a paper for a class at Yale, the professor gave him a C, telling him it was interesting but couldn’t be done. Fortunately, Smith proved him wrong. Or consider David Sarnoff; when he first suggested to his bosses at RCA that radio could be a moneymaker, he was told, “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?” When he arranged the first commercial radio broadcast in 1921, of the heavyweight championship match between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier, they found out; by 1924 RCA was selling over $80 million a year worth of radios.

The world is not as wise as it thinks it is, and sometimes you have to be willing to be a fool in order to get anywhere; and doubly willing if you would seek to follow Jesus. Paul makes this point forcefully to the Corinthians, who were trying to conform the message of the gospel to the conventional wisdom of their day; and he makes this point to us as well, because it’s a lesson we keep having to relearn. God will not defer to our judgment, and he will not submit to our expectations. The gospel is not wisdom on human terms: it is a contradiction to human wisdom.

This is the point where Palm Sunday and April Fool’s Day meet. Why did the crowds rejoice to see Jesus coming? Look at Zechariah 9: “Rejoice greatly . . . Shout aloud . . . Look, your king is coming, triumphant and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey.” And so he comes, and they respond from Psalm 118, which was used during the celebration of the Passover; it’s a victory psalm, and the last half describes the king’s triumphal procession through the gates of the city to the altar in the temple. The procession was to be marked with branches, and palm branches in particular were a symbol of victory. The crowds were praising Jesus as a conquering hero, as the heir of David come to take his throne and restore Israel to its rightful place among the nations.

They wanted a military and political messiah, a great liberator and conqueror, because they were still thinking of Israel’s destiny in political terms. They had read Zechariah, but missed his point: they got the king part, but failed to see the rest. There is nothing in this passage that speaks of Israel being established among the nations. The king arrives, not on a war horse, but on a donkey—a beast of burden, a working animal—and there is an immediate end to any sort of warfare, as he commands peace to the nations. Israel’s deliverance will be the work of God alone, accomplished by his power alone. This is not a political victory in view here, it’s something altogether different.

Jesus is indeed the conquering hero, the coming king of Israel, but not the way they expect. The crowds see Rome as their enemy and their salvation as political independence. Jesus came to give us a far greater salvation, from the power of sin and death—but while that made him the king they needed, he wasn’t the king they wanted. They wanted worldly success, political and military power, and Jesus refused. That’s why, just a few days after hailing him as king, the crowds would mock him as a fool: by their standards, he was. In the judgment of the world, God is a fool.

God’s foolishness begins with a crucified Messiah. We get used to this, as Easter goes by every year, but if you really stop to think about it, it’s crazy. As the New Testament scholar Gordon Fee put it, “No mere human, in his or her right mind or otherwise, would ever have dreamed up God’s scheme for redemption—through a crucified Messiah. It is too preposterous, too humiliating, for a God.” No self-respecting God would put himself through something like that—becoming human, sharing all the nasty parts of life, and then submitting to be tortured to death—and for what? For us? Surely it’s beneath his dignity. But God doesn’t let his dignity get in the way of his love for us.

If a crucified Messiah is God’s foolishness, then surely Jesus was God’s designated fool. We see him as a great wise man and a great teacher, but a lot of those around him thought he was at least a fool, if not worse. He just didn’t act like a normal person, and his teaching didn’t make sense. For Jews and Greeks alike, the idea that the God who created the universe would become human was impossible and scandalous; the idea that instead of establishing his power on Earth, that God would allow the authorities to execute him . . . well, that would have been utterly inconceivable. For all their disagreements, the Jewish and Greek worlds agreed on one thing: this Christian story was crazy.

And yet, it was through this crazy story that God saved the world. It wasn’t through any of our own work or our own wisdom, not even the best we could offer, that God saved us; in his own wisdom, God saw to that. Though this all looks foolish to the unaided eye, God’s foolishness outsmarts our wisdom. Christ’s crucifixion, the ultimate act of powerlessness, is the ultimate act of God’s power; his crucifixion, which is complete foolishness to those who are lost, is the ultimate act of his wisdom. We don’t have the choice to look for some wiser way, because there isn’t one; we can only trust God and be saved by his wise foolishness, or cling to our own wisdom and be lost.

We aren’t called to a Palm Sunday faith, that celebrates Jesus when he’s popular and we’re riding high and everything’s going well, then turns on him when he starts making people mad and the road starts to look rough. We’re called to the faith of Easter: a faith that understands that it was precisely by his defeat that Jesus conquered, that a shameful and scandalous execution was the moment of God’s greatest glory, and that it’s only by going through that death and coming out the other side that Jesus brought about our salvation. To the world, the idea that a triumphal procession would lead not to a throne, but to that, is pure foolishness; but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God for us, in which we glory.

The Lamb Who Was Slaughtered

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(Daniel 7:13-28; Revelation 5)

Each of the letters to the seven churches ends with two addresses: to the one who overcomes, and to him who has ears to hear. To the one who overcomes is a promise, and that promise varies with each letter; to him who has ears to hear is a command: listen, pay attention, hear what the Holy Spirit is saying. These are linked together—in the first three letters, the command is first, then the promise, while the last four reverse that order, ending with the command.

As we’ve noted before, the focus of the command is idolatry, which in all its forms is the great threat to the church in every age; this is the voice of the Spirit calling those who claim the name of Christ to give up the idols that would render them spiritually deaf, to hear what God is saying instead of only what they want to hear. As we saw last week, the vision of God on his throne supports and emphasizes that call by displaying the Ancient of Days in all his glory, so that we can see that truly, he alone is worthy of our worship, and thus see how foolish it is for us to chase after anyone or anything else.

Even if we understand that, though, it can be hard to hold to. The glory of God doesn’t seem to intrude on our daily lives much; we’re perfectly capable of going through an entire week without thinking about him—or wanting to—while the desires, demands, and pains of this world constantly demand our attention, even hopping and screaming in our face if they have to. We said last week that God’s promises to us have already been fulfilled, and we’ve seen over and over again that the promises of the world are undependable—but when the world is practically dumping its promises in our laps, our reflex is to go with what’s right in front of us. It seems counterintuitive, even counterproductive, to reject that for the sake of nothing but faith, just to trust that our self-denial will somehow be worth it. If we want to be blessed, why reject what seems to be a blessing?

It can be easy to wonder if God really knows what he’s asking of us—or even to conclude that he can’t really be serious about it. Sure, the Bible seems to say that I’m not allowed to do this thing that I deeply want to do; sure, it seems to say that I’m supposed to trust him even when all my hopes are dashed, or when everyone is turning against me, when my spouse or my child has died or my career is in ruins; but that’s just not reasonable. This is just too hard, it’s not fair, it hurts too much, it’s more than I can take. God can’t possibly expect me to bear this.

And then we see what God means by overcoming. The verb here is nikao—the noun form is nike; we pronounce it “Nike” and put a swoosh on it. It’s the name of the winged Greek goddess of victory, who’s usually shown as a conventionally triumphant figure. God gives us a very different picture, and a very different kind of victory. The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David who has conquered, is a slaughtered Lamb—but a Lamb who, even though slaughtered, is standing. Not still standing, but standing once again. This is the victory of God, and this is how Jesus conquered. It’s because he allowed himself to be slaughtered that he was able to ransom a people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation; this is why he is praised as the victor who is worthy to receive all honor and glory and blessing.

This is not, I think, a new concept for anyone here; I don’t imagine it’s anything you haven’t heard before. If you’ve been around here very long, you’ve certainly heard me say it more than once. But where it’s hard to translate this into our lives is that when we talk about following Christ, this is where Christ leads.

Our default position is to look at big, successful people and think that God is blessing them, and to see big, successful churches and assume that they’re winning lots of victories for Jesus—and that is no doubt true in some cases; but it isn’t necessarily so. If God gives us a relatively easy time of it in life and a fairly comfortable turn, that might be pleasant, but it isn’t necessarily all that much of a blessing in the long run. Jesus didn’t have a brilliantly successful career, as the world judges these things, and many of those whom he has used most powerfully—from the apostle Paul to Adoniram Judson—have lived lives that are far more appealing to read about than to live through; and their struggles and their trials were the blood and bone of the victories Jesus won through them.

That’s just how it is with great accomplishments and great victories. I forget who it was who said that adventures are a lot more fun at a distance, but that’s very true. A great victory requires a great battle, a great struggle, just like a gold-medal routine at the Olympics requires a high degree of difficulty. If we face a trial, a temptation, a grief, an adversary, that is just too great for us, that doesn’t mean we’re in the wrong battle or it’s time to give up; if Christ has led us to that point, then it just means that he’s on about winning a greater victory in us than we can see or understand. And what is impossible with us is possible with God.

Now, it’s important to stress that this doesn’t mean what we think it means. Victory doesn’t necessarily mean that we will accomplish what we’re trying to accomplish, or that we’ll see the results we hope to see. The victory of Jesus certainly didn’t look like a victory to anyone else that dark Friday afternoon. Victory doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll resist that temptation every time, and thereby bring that particular sin to an end in our lives. We certainly have to keep trying; Paul tells us in Romans 8 to put sin to death in our bodies. But if I’m right about 2 Corinthians 12—and my thanks to Kent Denlinger and Marva Dawn for helping me see this—then the thorn in the flesh Paul is talking about there is a temptation to which he keeps falling, and a sin which he keeps practicing. He begs God to free him from it, and what answer does he get? “My grace is sufficient for you, because power is ended in weakness.” The Greek there doesn’t say “my power,” and I don’t think that’s what he means. Rather, the point is that Paul’s weakness has shown him the limits of his own power, and his struggle with sin is forcing him to rely totally on the grace of God. And you know, that’s a victory too, and a worthy one, even if it isn’t what we’re normally looking for.

All we can do is try to follow Jesus as best as we can, and trust him for the rest. Trust him in our temptation, that he is making us a way through it. Trust him in our struggles and trials, that he has allowed them to come to us and is using them for his good purpose. Trust him in our grief and our fear, that he’s with us, holding us and holding us up, and that he understands what we’re going through. Indeed, trust him that whatever we face, he does know what he’s asking of us, and that we don’t have to give up: he’s with us making our way through—he is our way through—and if we just hang on to him above all others, that is the victory, and he’ll take care of the rest. We don’t worship a God who stares at our struggles and pain in blank incomprehension; we worship a Lord who knows them all, because he shared them with us, to the bitterest of all bitter ends. Worthy, worthy, worthy above all others is the Lamb who was slaughtered. Amen.

The End Is Worship

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(Daniel 2:27-29, Daniel 7:9-10; Revelation 4:1-11)

The biggest mistake people make in dealing with Revelation, I think, comes right here: we get to chapter 4 and we hit the “reset” button. It’s understandable, since from this point on, it’s a different book from what we’ve seen in chapters 2-3; the difference is so pronounced that we don’t see how those chapters fit with the rest of the book, so we tend to treat them as disconnected. We have the introduction, then we have these seven letters just sitting there by themselves, and then with chapter 4, the real book starts.

That’s unfortunate, because the whole book is addressed to the seven churches in Asia—the visions of chapters 4-22 just as much as the vision and letters of chapters 1-3—and the letters are very much connected to the visions that follow. We see Daniel talking about what will happen in the last days, and the angel telling John, “I will show you what must take place after this,” and it’s easy to jump to thinking about the future; but the thing about the vision of the statue in Daniel 2 is that it begins with Daniel’s present time. The statue has a head of gold, and that head is Nebuchadnezzar himself. In the same way, the use of that language in Revelation 4 does not refer to something purely future: it is a future that has already begun. As we’ve seen before, the last days aren’t off in the future somewhere—we’re in them right now, and have been ever since the Son of God became the Son of Man.

This means that the fulfillment of God’s promises to us is also not off in the future somewhere. It usually seems like that, because though the kingdom of God is already come, it’s not yet here; the victory is already won, but the enemy has not yet stopped fighting. All things have been placed in subjection under Jesus’ feet, yet at present we do not see all things subject to him; we see Jesus, but as yet we see him mostly as the suffering Servant and the crucified Savior, not as the Lord of glory revealed in Revelation 1. But though we do not now fully experience the victory of God in Christ, his victory is no less complete for all that, and what he has promised us is already ours, even if we have not yet received it. The promises made in chapters 2-3 to those who overcome have already been kept; they are as certain as the sunrise.

That’s emphasized, I think, by chapters 4-5, because this vision picks up the promises made in the last two letters, to Philadelphia and Laodicea. To Philadelphia, Christ says that the one who overcomes will be made “a pillar in the temple of my God”; the promise to Laodicea is that “to the one 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.” Here, we have a vision of God on his throne in his temple—we have a picture of what the fulfillment of those promises will look like.

In that, these two chapters are the closing argument for the letters to the seven churches, even as they also introduce the visions and events of the rest of the book. Remember, the common theme running through those letters is the danger of idolatry. The threat of Caesar worship, which was rising as Domitian increasingly expected to be praised as a god, is one main form; another is the temptation of the trade guilds, which organized their activities around pagan worship services. Indeed, even the opposition of the synagogues fits with this, in that they believed Christians should turn away from worshiping Christ and back to the Jewish law. Idolatry in all its forms is the principal concern here; that’s why each of the letters ends, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches,” because idol worship closes our ears to the Spirit’s voice.

This vision is the ultimate response to the idols of the nations, and especially to pitiful Domitian, who demanded to be addressed as “lord and god,” because it makes it crystal clear that there is only one Lord and God, and he’s not Caesar. He’s not the President of the United States, or any other human leader, as deluded as our leaders and rulers may sometimes be. Whatever glory and power any human being might manage, it is as nothing in comparison to the indescribable glory and power of God—and I do mean indescribable; when John says, “around the throne was a rainbow that resembled an emerald,” you know he’s grasping at straws. He’s seeing something like nothing human eyes have ever seen, and he’s trying to find some sort of words for it, and we’ll never really know what he means until the day comes that we see it with our own eyes.

The glory and power of God dwarf the highest of human glories and the greatest of earthly powers; and more than that, God outlasts every one of them. In the world as we know it, all good things must come to an end, and all human powers are fleeting. Empires rise, and then they fall, and there’s often not much time in between; what goes up must come down, for no one can defy gravity—or entropy—forever. If this world lasts long enough, America will be no different; soon or late, from within or without, our country, too, will fail. It is the way of all flesh. But God is the one who lives forever and ever—and the life that he has, he has given to us, so that we may live with him forever and ever, laying all our glories and honors and powers at his feet in worship.

That’s the key, that’s the end, that’s the goal, that’s the purpose of it all: to worship him. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what forms us as the church, that’s what shapes us, that’s what gives us our focus and direction. That’s why those seven letters were written, to encourage the churches to be faithful in their worship, or to return to faithfulness; that’s why they’re followed by this vision of God on his throne in his temple, that they may see and understand how much greater and how much more worthy of worship is the Lord of all creation than all the little tin gods they’re being tempted and pressured to worship.

And so it is for us as well. Worship is not the only thing we do, but it is the cen-ter, which gives purpose and dimension and meaning to everything else we do. There’s a lot of talk in the church these days about the importance of being missional, of understanding ourselves as God’s missionaries to our own culture, and I agree with much of it; but when they say that mission is primary, they go too far. As John Piper put it, “Mission exists because worship does not”: our mission is to reach out to those who do not worship God, to draw them in to his worship, and to build them up—to build all of us up together—as worshipers of the Lord of the universe. Our worship is not in the service of anything else, nor of anyone but God; our mission, in all its forms, is in the service of worship.

Buying the Hype

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(Isaiah 43:8-13; Colossians 1:15-20, Revelation 3:14-22)

You’ve probably been told that the problem with the Laodiceans is that they were spiritually lukewarm, when God wants us to be on fire for Jesus. Better even to be cold than to be lukewarm, because then at least you know you have a problem. This interpretation is so common, even Christian pop music has made use of it—you may remember Steve Camp’s song “Living in Laodicea.” The thing is, though, however important it may be to warn people of the dangers of spiritual lukewarmness, it’s not what this letter is about.

Most of all the letters, to understand what’s going on here, we need to understand the city. We noted several weeks ago that Ephesus was the hub where three of the most important trade routes in the Roman Empire came together, and that one of them was the route from Rome east to Baghdad. That route didn’t go up the Cayster River, on which Ephesus sat, but up the valley of the Maeander to its tributary the Lycus, and then up the Lycus valley. The three main cities of the Lycus valley were Colossae, Hierapolis, and Laodicea, with Laodicea the most important. The route from Ephesus ran right through the city, crossing with a major north-south route between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea; this made it significant both for trade and, as it happened, for banking.

That’s not the only reason the city was rich and important, though. It was a major center in the ancient world for the treatment of eye and ear problems. It was known both for its doctors, as it was the site of a famous school of ophthalmology, and also for its medicines; the city produced ointments that were applied to the eyes and ears to treat poor eyesight and hearing, which were sold all over the Greco-Roman world. As well, the city was a major producer of wool. Hierapolis and Colossae were as well, but Laodicea surpassed them both, because the sheep of Laodicea were highly prized for their exceptionally soft, glossy black wool.

This was a wealthy city; it was also a city which was notorious for the arrogance of its people and their sense of self-sufficiency. For instance, we’ve talked about the earthquakes that devastated some of these cities, and their dependence on Roman aid in rebuilding; when a major one struck Laodicea in 60 AD, they defiantly refused any aid, and proudly rebuilt their city out of their own resources. They were rich enough to do it; they were also arrogant enough, because they saw themselves as a city of kings.

The story there goes back to 40 BC, when the Parthians invaded the Anatolian peninsula; they met with complete success until they hit Laodicea, where Zeno and his son Polemo resolutely shut the doors of the city and held it against them until the Roman army arrived to drive the Parthians back. The Romans rewarded their family for their loyal and successful defense of the city by making Polemo king of Pontus and allowing him to marry into the imperial family. It was the beginning of a dynasty; his son Zeno became king of Armenia, and his daughter Tryphaena became queen of Thrace and the mother of three kings. The branch of the family that remained in Laodicea were never kings of anything, but they acted as if they were, and the rest of the city followed suit.

Given this, it’s really not surprising that the church in Laodicea had the same sort of attitude. The culture of their city was patriotic to the point of being chauvinistic—they were rich, they didn’t need anyone else, they were better than everyone else—and the Christians in Laodicea had bought into that. They’d bought the hype, they’d bought the line their culture was selling, and they fit right in. You’ll notice there’s no hint of persecution in this letter; that’s because what the Laodiceans really worshiped was their own wonderfulness, and the church didn’t challenge that at all. Indeed, they were right there at that altar with all their neighbors.

Because of that, they were a dead church. They had no sense of their dependence on God, of their need for Christ, because they didn’t think they needed anybody at all. They probably kept praying, asking God to do things for them, but they had no sense that there was anything God could do for them that they couldn’t do for themselves if they wanted to. They couldn’t see past their material prosperity to their spiritual need, and it doesn’t appear it ever occurred to them to look; they were rich, so everything was going well, and what else did they need to know? They didn’t understand that all their money had made them spiritually bankrupt, or that all their medicines could do nothing to cure their blindness to the truth; they failed to realize that for all the fancy clothes they could make from their sheep, nothing they could do could make them white.

And so when Jesus says to them, “I know your works,” he describes them in extremely harsh terms, in language that would have hit home hard. You see, in the Lycus valley, water was a major problem. That might sound strange, since there was a river right there, but the river dried up in the summer, and when it was running its water was undrinkable from all the sediment it carried, almost milky with white mud. This is why Colossae was first settled—it was a defensible site which included a source of cold, pure water, in an area in which good drinking water was scarce. Interestingly, Hierapolis was also settled because of water—not cold water, but hot mineral springs which were valued for their medicinal purposes. (The water from these springs may have been one of the ingredients in the Laodicean eye salve.)

Laodicea, by contrast, was settled for reasons of trade, because it was a major crossroads. It had no water supply of its own; the nearest water source was several miles away, and that water was bad. It arrived at the city warm, and left thick mineral deposits in the stone aqueduct that carried it there. Straight out of the pipes, it was undrinkable—it would make you vomit; even in modern times, some who live in that area have had to let their water sit out in open jars before they could drink it. I’m not sure if it was just to cool the water, or if something in it actually had to oxidize first, but whatever the case, it’s been necessary to make the water even tolerable to drink.

The Laodicean church was just like their water. The cold water of Colossae was good for quenching thirst and refreshing the body. The hot water of Hierapolis was good for easing the muscles and healing aches and pains. The lukewarm water of Laodicea was good for neither, and just about worthless; the church there had become so impure that the same could be said of them. Christ essentially tells them, “You make me sick.”

So what do we take away from this? Above all else, one thing. After this vivid picture of the disaster of the Laodicean church, their complete spiritual calamity, we have verses 19-20: “Those whom I love, I rebuke and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.” Those whom I love. As little as they deserve it, he loves them anyway. He has spoken harshly to them because he loves them, and nothing less has any chance of cutting through their self-satisfied complacency; even as bad as they are, he hasn’t given up on them—he’s still calling them to repent. He’s still seeking to reconcile them to himself, and offering full restoration of fellowship with him, for in that culture, to share a meal together was to share life.

An Open Door

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(Isaiah 22:20-24; Revelation 3:7-13)

Before I begin, I should note that I’m assuming here a fair bit of historical information which is important in understanding this letter, but which I don’t have time to get into this morning. If you’re interested, there will be more posted on the sermon blog.

For now, let me just say that Philadelphia sat in a zone of high volcanic activity and suffered from frequent earthquakes; it had been devastated more than once, to the point of needing extensive aid from Rome, and twice the city had shown its gratitude by taking a new name in honor of Caesar. Even when there were no major earthquakes, there were enough little ones that the city was never truly rebuilt—the walls were always cracked and crumbling. But people stayed; the volcanic soil was very good for growing wine grapes, and most people actually lived outside the city, among the farms and vineyards. In ordinary times, the production of wine was enough to keep the economy going, if not strong. And then in 92 AD, Caesar Domitian ordered that half the vineyards in the provinces of the empire be cut down, which was a greater disaster for the city than any earthquake. Philadelphia had put its faith in Caesar; Caesar had proven faithless.

And so Christ addresses the believers here, a powerless church in a struggling city, as the one who is holy and faithful, who will never fail them. He is the only one who can say that. Psalm 146 says, “Put not your trust in princes, because they’re only human and they can’t save you”; we would say, “Put not your trust in politicians,” because they always promise more than they can deliver. We might also say, “Put not your trust in corporations,” as I know this week’s news from Zimmer has rattled a lot of people, and created some real anxiety; even good corporations exist for their own purposes, not for yours, and to expect them to put your agenda ahead of their own is simply not wise. Only Jesus deserves your full trust and confidence; he alone is always faithful.

Jesus praises the church in Philadelphia because in their weakness, they haven’t backed down or compromised their faith; they have continued to proclaim their faith in Christ and keep his word, no matter how unpopular that might have been. Their weakness hasn’t moved them to stop trusting Jesus, it’s moved them to greater trust—to depend utterly on him for everything they need. And so he says, “I have set before you an open door that no one can shut.” They may have little power, but it isn’t their power that matters; what matters is Christ’s power. They were being persecuted by the Jewish leaders in the city, who had shut them out of the synagogue, but Jesus has opened a greater door for them, into the kingdom of God; and he has opened other doors for them as well, opportunities for them to continue to bear witness to their faith.

Notes on the letter to Philadelphia

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  • Philadelphia appears to have been founded by Pergamum, perhaps at the time of their conquest of Lydia and Phrygia.
  • It was the gateway from the west into Phrygia; as such it was an important military point, and also a base for the spreading of Greek culture into Phrygia and Lydia.
  • The city was named in honor of the great love and loyalty between Eumenes II of Pergamum and Attalus II Philadelphus, his younger brother and successor.
  • After the earthquake of AD 17, the Caesar Tiberius canceled the city’s taxes for five years; Philadelphia took the name Neocaesarea in gratitude, and used that name for at least a couple decades.
  • This began a period of frequent earthquakes, which made it unsafe to be indoors. Strabo writes, “Philadelphia . . . has not even its walls secure, but they are daily shaken and split in some degree. The people continually pay attention to earth-tremors and plan their buildings with this factor in mind. . . . Different parts of the city are constantly suffering damage. That is why the actual town has few inhabitants, but the majority live as farmers in the countryside.”
  • During the reign of Vespasian, the father of Domitian, Philadelphia again took on another name: “Flavia,” in honor of the Flavian family to which Vespasian belonged. The reason is uncertain, but Vespasian was noted for his generosity to cities that suffered disasters.
  • The volcanic soil around Philadelphia was excellent for growing grapes, but not especially good for anything else; Strabo says nothing else grew there.
  • Though little is known about the synagogue in Philadelphia, it seems likely it was founded out of the large and prosperous Jewish community in Sardis.
  • The struggling church in its poor, half-ruined city is promised a secure place in the glorious, eternal city of God.