The churches of Christ today are facing the very same spiritual atmosphere that the churches in the first century were experiencing. There appears to be three options we can take in an increasingly hostile, anti-Christian environment: 1.) We can compromise. That’s what John warns most of the churches in Revelation not to do. 2.) We can stand firm in the faith and continue evangelizing despite what our culture might do to us. That, obviously, is the right option and the choice that John and Jesus want the churches in Asia Minor and us to make. The third option is the option that the church of Christ in Ephesus chose to do, for which they were rebuked by John. Let’s look at it more closely.
The church in Ephesus was composed of real people with real needs, real interests, real talents, and real concerns. They had skills. They made things out of pottery, wood, bronze, leather. They needed to sell these things in order to make money to support their families. The problem was – trade guilds were associated with pagan gods. If you were part of a trade guild, you had to attend the banquets held in honor of these gods and eat the meat that had been sacrificed to these gods and engage in other practices, like offering sacrifices of wine and incense, that most Christians would understand to be idolatry. But not to be a part of these trade guilds would hamstring your efforts to make a living and would be considered unpatriotic.
Christians in Ephesus then would be tempted through economic considerations as well as persecution by local officials to compromise their faith. It even seems that in Smyrna, Jews were making those very compromises. That would have put even more pressure on Christians to compromise and conform. So the third option, which it seems the church in Ephesus chose, was not to compromise (with the “Nicolaitans,” 2:6), but instead, to turn inward, to keep themselves “sanitized.” They had to keep the faith! The problem was, in the interest of keeping the faith, they had turned away from sharing that very faith with the unbelieving world around them.
That’s the other extreme that we cannot afford to do. We cannot decide that keeping the local congregation strong and faithful is so important that we turn inward and stop sharing the gospel with others and stop taking the Gospel to the whole world.
Revelation 2:1 pictures Jesus as walking among the churches of Christ and her members and He holds their lamp in His hands. There were good things to say about them.
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So, in verse 5, John and Jesus warn us to see to it that we do not fall into the same danger as the Ephesians. Remember and do the first deeds. If your zeal for evangelism has grown cold, rekindle that fire. Share the gospel with others. Jesus warns the church in Ephesus that if they don’t shine their light among men, He will, Himself, remove that very lampstand. If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.
Finally, in verse 7, Jesus encourages Christians that if you and I will listen to what the Holy Spirit says and (1:3), heed the things written in the Gospel, written by the Holy Spirit, we will be rewarded and blessed. In the words of John to the Christians in Ephesus, if we stay faithful and overcome the temptation to turn inward (to stay pure and faithful and spend all our resources on that and forget about evangelizing), we will be allowed to “eat of the tree of life which is in the Paradise of God.” We will be allowed access to the tree of life, to have eternal life (the message of the metaphor), in the presence of God. What a great reward that should motivate us to persevere.
Compromise? No. Evangelize? Yes. “Sanitize”? Yes. We can do both.
–Paul Holland
