Contented With God’s Future

 July 31 2022

Revelation 2:8-11

One of the things I like about summer is that this is the season of fairs and festivals. Just the other week, Jennifer and I went to a festival put on by our local Catholic Church. While we really went for the food, an added bonus is that I got to see classmates that I had graduated from high school with. It was great to reminisce with them about stories we remembered. We had a good laugh about our graduation because our valedictorian entitled her speech, “I Stand Alone”, which just caused all of us immature boys to come up with all kinds of reasons of why she was standing alone. Needless to say, her address was the most memorable one out of all the valedictorian speeches I have heard. Nowadays if I do have a chance watch a graduation ceremony, instead of honing in on the valedictorian speech I tend to now focus on the prayer that is usually given by some wholesome young man or woman. I pay attention to prayers like these because I feel that there will come a time when such crossing of the lines between church and state will no longer be tolerated which is a sad state of affairs. Yet, even so, it is still great to listen to the prayers of those who have achieved a great milestone in their life and with grateful hearts give thanks to God.

I had all of these thoughts running through my head this week as I pondered on our scripture verse from Revelation for this week. I wondered what would happen if at some graduation ceremony if some young person approached the podium to give the opening prayer and as they spoke they, at some point, asked God that as they went forward in life they might have the privilege of suffering trials and tribulations on account of their being known as being in a relationship with him. They would continue, by asking God that as they went out in the world that they might embrace a life of poverty and that the insults against God might be theirs as well. In Jesus name, Amen. Can you imagine the awkward silence after the audience would have heard such a prayer to God? I am pretty positive that such a prayer will never be offered up at a graduation ceremony but you never know. I  thought up such a scenario simply because I believe it is easy for us to miss just how radical the life of those who lived in Smyrna really was. Theirs was a life that was truly counter-cultural by todays standards, something that we can’t get the full impact unless we allow such a life to be the godly pursuit of say, one graduating from high school. Only then does it become apparent that this life that was lived by the faithful of Smyrna is not a life that is easily embraced by those of us who have been separated from them by thousands of years. Yet even so, Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever and he is the one who promises the crown of life to those who embrace the difficulties that come when one follows him.

As I have stated before, the book of Revelation is a book John was ordered to write down by the living Christ who had interrupted his worship one Sunday morning.  John was to take all that was revealed to him and write it down and send it off to the churches at Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. These seven churches represent different mindsets which either needed to be repented of or they had a mindset which should serve a model for the rest of the churches. The number of the churches, seven, a number signifying wholeness or completeness, tells us that what is being revealed to these churches is being written for every church, every expression of the body of Christ.

The criteria that is used to determine the right mindset is that those who belong to the churches of Christ are to understand that Jesus loves us and by his blood he has set us free to be a kingdom of priests. As priests to God we bear God’s name out into the world and we take our part of the world, all that God has given to us and we offer it all back to God.

It is never more important to understand these basic foundations of this letter than when we come to what the risen and exalted Christ has to say about the church at Smyrna. What makes this report so unusual is that within it there is no call for a change to be made, no correction of an error or a need to repent. No, Smyrna is one of two churches out of the seven who simply need to keep on doing what they’re doing. This probably sounds like music to our ears because it can be kind of unsettling to hear Christ reprimand the churches as he does but as we hear what Christ has to tell the church at Smyrna we find that his words still unsettle us. He tells the church at Smyrna that he knows of their affliction, the tribulation that was the result of their poverty and their being blasphemed by those who said they were Jews but in all actuality, were not Jews. All Jesus tells them is to not fear. No, he is not going to do anything to make their situation better, in fact, their situation is about to get worse.  To this news, Christ simply adds, “Be faithful and they would win the crown of life”. In other words, what Christ is telling them is that they are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing, so do not let their fear derail them now, but instead they are to continue to be faithful to what they believe.

This message that the living Christ gave to the church at Smyrna then, is that our faith is a faith which understands that if we are experiencing the affliction of poverty and the slander of our good name on account of God, we are right where we need to be. That seems rather odd, doesn’t it? Yet, if we know the teachings of Jesus, what is happening at Smyrna is not strange at all, but rather what they are going through is exactly the life that Jesus taught to his disciples that they should live. Listen carefully to what is found in the sixth chapter of the gospel of Luke where we are told that Jesus looked at his disciples and said, “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so did their fathers do so to the prophets.” Do you see how this teaching parallels what we are told is happening at the church at Smyrna? They are those who have taken this core teaching of Jesus to heart, they have faith that what he teaches them is true and they are living it out in real time.

Now, in order for us to embrace this life that the living Christ is commending to us, I believe that we have to understand this teaching at a deeper level. You see, it is not enough just to be poor because as Paul writes in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, “If I give away all that I have and I have not love, I have gained nothing.”So, yes, love has to be part of the equation. Perhaps to better grasp what is meant by this promise of Jesus that those who are poor are those who will be blessed with the kingdom of God, we ought to read further in this teaching of Luke. There we find Jesus teaching his disciples, “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you, when people speak well of you, for so did the fathers to the false prophets.” So, what becomes apparent is that Jesus has separated people into two categories, the poor and the rich. The poor are those willing to take what God has given to them and use that in the service of God because this is what it means to be priests, and when they are priests to God the kingdom of God is where they will be at. These are those who know that if they work with God they are assured that their reward is great in heaven. In other words, they are to be people who place their hopes in the future God is bringing forth, the future that is found in the promise of the kingdom of God. 

The rich on the other hand, are those who take what God has given to them and they use it to create their own version of heaven in the here and now. Theirs is a life which believes that we can determine our own future using what God has given to us which is quite a bit different from working with God, using what he has given to us to overcome evil by doing good. The prophets that Jesus speaks of in this teaching always spoke of the future that God is bringing about and the reason that they were persecuted is that this future was vastly different from the future that the people of God desired to create out of what God had given to them. You see, the anger, the hatred , the reviling that happens when people encounter those who believe in the great future God is bringing about, occurs because such a life means that God is not going to have anything to do with any plans or schemes of anyone no matter how great those plans or schemes might be. God simply will not be manipulated into being some sort of guarantee for anybody’s dreams or visions; it just does not work that way.

We see the certainty of this in the life of God’s own people, the Jews, which are mentioned in Christ’s report of the church at Smyrna. We are told that the people of the church at Smyrna were blasphemed by those who say they are Jews but are not because they are in reality a synagogue of Satan. Now, many commentators take exception to such a description of this Jewish congregation in Smyrna but Jesus himself says something very similar as is recorded in the eighth chapter of the gospel of John. There we find Jesus addressing a group of Pharisees who claimed that Abraham was their father. This was thought to be the mark of a person who was truly of the people of Israel, that they could call Abraham their ancestor. They were as was said to the church at Smyrna, those who considered themselves Jews but alas they were not because as Jesus told them that if they were Abraham’s children they would be doing the works that Abraham did. Instead, these who thought they were Jews, sought to kill Jesus who told them the truth that he had heard from God, his Father.” It is important to understand that what Abraham did, is as we are told in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, lived by faith in the land of promise, living in tents, because he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God. Abraham believed in the future that God was bringing to fruition. This is what the true children of Abraham are to believe but as Jesus discovered in this group of Pharisees, this belief was missing. Again from the eighth chapter of John, we hear Jesus tell them that their real father, far from being Abraham , or even God, was instead the devil himself. They were those who could not bear to hear the word that Jesus spoke therefore their true father, Jesus tells them, is the devil, and their will was to do their father’s desires. Jesus goes on to say that the devil was a murderer from the beginning, and he has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him.” So, Jesus is here saying much the same as what he has said to the church at Smyrna, that these who called themselves Jews, children of Abraham, were in fact a synagogue of Satan. They were people caught up in the lie of Satan, that he first spoke in the garden to our fore parents which is that they should eat of the forbidden fruit and when they did their eyes would be opened, they would be like God and they would know good and evil.  The opening of their eyes was that they now were aware of not just the present but also the future. They became like God in that they became those who thought they could create a future, something once reserved for God, alone. The future they would create would end up being a future that separated them from being part of the future that God has for them so that in the end, they became a people without a future at all, a people who were without God, and a people who were, ultimately, without life.

The future that this synagogue in Smyrna desired is a future where one day the people of Israel would once again become the nation of Israel. They looked for the day when they would go to Jerusalem and fight against the Romans so that they might at last be free from the rule of the Gentiles. Surely their God would be with them in this fight, wouldn’t he? Imagine their surprise, maybe even their disgust, when along come those who claimed that the long awaited Messiah desired by the Jews had indeed come and that instead of winning a mighty battle to win back Jerusalem, he instead is killed upon a cross in that same city. All seemed to be in doubt about his claims to be the true Messiah until three days later this one walked out of the grave. These followers of this Messiah named Jesus believed that the true way of God is the way of the cross, the way where good triumphs over evil, this is the way of the future God has for us. It isn’t hard to see why we are told that these followers of Jesus were blasphemed because the God they believed in was a radically different God from those who believed that we can carve out for ourselves any future we want, by any means possible and God will surely bless our efforts. On discovery of this truth, people quite naturally get angry and since they can’t lash out at God they lash out at those who are united with him.

So, it is no surprise that the living Christ tells the church that they must suffer, that for some of them, there would be time in prison. The living Christ tells those at Smyrna that when some of them were thrown into prison it was so that they might be tested for ten days. Now, what might not be apparent is that this number of days points us back to the first chapter of the book of Daniel. There we find that Daniel had decided that he would not defile himself by eating the king’s food, or with the wine that the king drank. So, the king’s servants were worried that by refusing the king’s provisions, Daniel and his friends would end up looking different from all of the rest of the kings servants which would end up upsetting the king. Daniel then suggested that they do a trial where he and his friends would eat nothing but vegetables and water for ten days and at the end of that time the king’s servants could check and see how they looked. Well, God blessed Daniel and his friends and they did not suffer at all but were in better appearance than everyone else. Once we hear this story, then we have to ask ourselves just what is it that we are to take away from it? What helps us figure out the significance of this story of Daniel to the life of the church at Smyrna is knowing that the Jews at this time were protected from persecution through a decree of Caesar, the Roman king. The followers of Christ, though, because they were so radically different in the way they acted from the Jews did not receive this protection. So, what the living Christ is, in a way, saying is that these devoted followers of his, is that they were to be like Daniel and his friends and they should seek to not defile themselves by seeking a way out of their suffering through the provision of the king. They should in their suffering discover the power of the future that God was bringing about and know that the certainty of that future was already theirs in that prison. They should, in their time of testing, find that when they trust God to bring about the future then they can be assured that God is with them mightily in the present. Like Daniel, those in prison would find themselves stronger in their faith in the true king of all. This is why they could be assured that they should have no fear of the second death, the death for those have been judged and found to have no future in the future that will one day be the ever present eternal life with God. On that day, the one who is the first and the last, our risen Lord he will have the last word! To him be the glory! Amen!