He Who Has an Ear to Hear: The Congregational Mosaic

If we only ever view these seven letters as historical curiosities—interesting fragments of the past—then we rob ourselves of their greatest value.

These are messages from the resurrected Son of God, delivered to real Christians living real lives. Each congregation was solemnly charged with the same responsibility: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (Revelation 2:7, 11, 17, 29; 3:6, 13, 22).

No message was intended for a single congregation in isolation. Understanding those congregations can help us better understand the overall messages, but we must never forget that the messages are for us.

Two millennia later, God’s Spirit still has something to say to His Church, and if our place within that Church means anything to us, then we must listen.

The order of the seven churches appears to correspond to an established delivery route that a messenger could have traveled to share the contents of Revelation with God’s people in Asia Minor. Those Christians would have all heard the entire book of Revelation—not just the few verses addressed to their congregation.

Every follower of Jesus Christ—from those who gathered to hear these words for the first time two millennia ago, all the way to those of us reading them today—each of us is commanded to hear. To listen.

And ultimately, to act and obey.

So. What have we heard on this Journey?

As we look back on the nine readings exploring these seven ancient congregations, we’re going to use a different lens. This time, rather than focusing on what Christ’s words meant to each individual congregation—what they were struggling with, where they were succeeding—we’re going to take all those pieces and assemble a mosaic.

Seven churches received a glimpse of the majesty and character of Jesus Christ. What does it look like when we put all those glimpses together? What happens when we put together all the warnings, all the encouragements, all the promises to the overcomers?

What we get is a bigger picture—a beautiful picture of the Savior who loves us, what He expects to see in our lives, what He refuses to accept in our lives, and what God has in store for us if we refuse to compromise with the pervasive influence of Satan the devil.

Thus says the LORD

In Reading 2, we saw how each letter opened with an antiquated Greek phrase that gave the divine proclamation extra weight and gravitas. It was the same phrase used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament whenever a prophet brought a message from God:

“Thus says the LORD.”

In Revelation, these seven “thus says” introductions offer us seven different perspectives of Jesus Christ, the “KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS” (Revelation 19:16). Taken together, these seven views paint us an awe-inspiring portrait of our Savior and Redeemer, who is “able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25).

Here’s the portrait:

• In the letter to Ephesus, we see “He who holds the seven stars in His right hand, who walks in the midst of the seven golden lampstands” (Revelation 2:1).
• In the letter to Smyrna, we see “the First and the Last, who was dead, and came to life” (verse 8).
• In the letter to Pergamos, we see “He who has the sharp two-edged sword” (verse 12).
• In the letter to Thyatira, we see “the Son of God, who has eyes like a flame of fire, and His feet like fine brass” (verse 18).
• In the letter to Sardis, we see “He who has the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars” (Revelation 3:1).
• In the letter to Philadelphia, we see “He who is holy, He who is true, ‘He who has the key of David, He who opens and no one shuts, and shuts and no one opens’” (verse 7).
• In the letter to Laodicea, we see “the Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God” (verse 14).

This portrait draws from and complements the vision of Christ that John received at the beginning of Revelation: “I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the seven lampstands One like the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the feet and girded about the chest with a golden band. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and His eyes like a flame of fire; His feet were like fine brass, as if refined in a furnace, and His voice as the sound of many waters; He had in His right hand seven stars, out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance was like the sun shining in its strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. But He laid His right hand on me, saying to me, ‘Do not be afraid; I am the First and the Last. I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of Death’” (Revelation 1:12-18).

This is Jesus, in all His glory—or at least as much of His glory as our tiny human minds can comprehend. He came to earth as a man, but this is no mortal we’re being shown.

The face of Jesus Christ shines like the sun. He radiates light—eyes like a flame of fire, feet that shine like flashing brass, wearing a golden sash, with hair as brilliant as snow. In His hand He holds the seven stars of the churches, and His voice thunders like the roar of a waterfall.

Everything about Him is brightness and majesty and splendor. This is the divine Being who has something to say to His churches.

And He knows those congregations—better than anyone else ever could. Better than the congregations know themselves.

He is not a God who stands at a distance. He walks in the midst of the lampstands, He holds the stars, His fiery eyes search deeper than any human can see, “piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow,” allowing Him to be “a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).

He is not fooled by facades and pretense—He is the holy One, the true One, the Amen, the Faithful and True Witness. He sees the truth and speaks it; He is honest, just and undefiled by wickedness.

From this perfect and unclouded perspective, He wields all authority and power. He is the First and the Last, the ruler of all God’s creation, wielding the sharp two-edged sword, carrying the key of David alongside the keys of Hades and Death. Nothing He shuts can be opened, nothing He opens can be shut—and He is holding open a door for us.

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” asked the apostle Paul. “Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” (Romans 8:35).

And the answers are “no one” and “no.”

No force in heaven above or earth below—“neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (verses 38-39, ESV).

Nothing.

Not even death. Death already tried to cut us off from Christ.

Death failed.

God the Father “raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it” (Acts 2:24, ESV).

Jesus is the One who lives and was dead and will continue living forever.

Many Christians in the seven churches faced either the possibility or the certainty of death because of their faithful obedience to Jesus Christ. Many Christians throughout time have faced the same thing—as will many Christians who live during the events of the Great Tribulation prophesied in Revelation.

But death couldn’t hold Jesus. Death could not separate Him from us, and it cannot separate us from Him. Quite the opposite—through death, Jesus was able to “destroy [render powerless] him who had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14).

Satan looms menacingly behind the seven churches of Revelation, but the truth is, his power is shattered. He can’t undo what Jesus has already done, and he can’t stop what Jesus is in the process of doing. Our Savior has already trampled the serpent, and He invites us to join in the victory.

This is the Son of God who commands us to hear what He has to say.

A portrait of the overcomer

When we take a step back and view the seven churches as seven pieces of the same puzzle, what we get is a snapshot of what it looks like to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

We don’t all face the same exact problems in the same exact environment.

In these two chapters of Revelation, we see seven different congregations facing a variety of challenges. Some Christians are succeeding. Some are failing.

Most are somewhere in between.

Maybe that’s where you are too.

As we read through these seven letters, we can’t afford to forget that these are seven letters to God’s people.

They are not perfect. Some of them are so close to the edge that they’re in real danger of losing everything that matters. And yet each letter is still specifically addressed to a church—an ekklēsia or assembly of God’s called and chosen people.

God is not quick to write off His people. Even in the spiritually dead congregation of Sardis or the wildly delusional congregation of Laodicea, Jesus comes with a stern warning that ultimately ends in a message of hope for those willing to overcome.

And that’s the other thing we can’t afford to forget.

From Ephesus to Laodicea, Jesus Christ comes to His people with the same expectation:

Overcome.

Conquer.

Emerge from this spiritual battle as victors.

Just being God’s people isn’t good enough. There has to be forward momentum. There has to be effort. There has to be change and improvement. And the Church has to be doing the work Jesus Christ directs in preaching the gospel of the Kingdom of God (Matthew 24:14; Mark 16:15).

Jesus told a parable about a fig tree that went years without producing fruit. It took up space and used up resources without doing anything useful. And while the vinedresser and the owner of the vineyard were ultimately patient with the tree, giving it every opportunity to succeed, the parable ends with a reminder that God’s patience is not an invitation to drag our feet:

“Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure. Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down” (Luke 13:8-9, ESV).

No matter the trial, no matter the environment, God the Father and Jesus Christ are looking for us to produce fruit. And fruit is what we get when we are living God’s way of life, tied into His Spirit, allowing Him to take our human nature and reshape it more and more in His image:

“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). As mere human beings, it’s beyond our ability to excel perfectly in all these things, at all times. But these traits perfectly describe who God is—and who He wants to help us become.

There are warnings here about what that looks like—and what it doesn’t look like.

• The Ephesians show us the danger of becoming divorced from the love that we had at first—of allowing our love for God and our brethren to melt away.
• The members in Pergamos show us the danger of not protecting the truth—of allowing destructive teachings to gain a foothold within the congregation.
• The brethren in Thyatira show us the danger of making room for those same destructive teachings to put down roots and even flourish—of allowing pagan practices to take on a Christian veneer and pose as acceptable before God.
• The members in Sardis show us the danger of falling asleep at the wheel—of allowing ourselves to look the part while remaining spiritually hollow and disconnected from God.
• The Laodiceans show us the danger of going one step further and convincing ourselves that we’re self-sufficient—of allowing ourselves to see God’s blessings as signs of our own spiritual uprightness, slowly edging God out of the picture altogether.

And yet . . .

• The Ephesians were praised for their hard labor and patient endurance, coupled with a refusal to tolerate wickedness and impostors.
• The members in Smyrna were praised for their spiritual wealth in spite of crushing poverty and persecution.
• The brethren in Pergamos were praised for refusing to deny the name of Christ, even when their lives were on the line.
• The members in Thyatira were praised for growing in love, faith, service and patient endurance.
• The Philadelphians were praised for remaining faithful despite having relatively little strength.

The congregations that received a mixture of both praise and censure are a reminder that real life can be complicated and messy.

The members in Thyatira, for example, were allowing a false prophetess to spread heresy while integrating herself into a congregation of God’s people—but they had also been growing in key spiritual areas. The failure didn’t cancel out the success—but at the same time, the failure couldn’t be allowed to continue. Christ was coming to deal with Jezebel, and anyone who refused to repent and step away would share in her punishment.

The bad things need to go. The good things need to stay. Trying to hang onto both will destroy us.

By looking at all of the seven churches, we get a clearer picture of what God expects from His people.

The word for “patient endurance” (hypomonē, Strong’s #G5281) shows up four times in these two chapters. This kind of patience isn’t just about biding our time and twiddling our thumbs—it’s about enduring the trials and difficulties that exist between us and the thing we’re waiting for.

Christians must be prepared to endure—to stand strong against the onslaughts of Satan the devil. In these letters, we see Satan launching both internal and external attacks against God’s people.

While the Ephesians are busy guarding against heresy, they step away from their first love.

While the members in Pergamos and Thyatira are busy growing spiritually, they leave room for heresy to take root.

Satan is always looking for the cracks in our armor—for the weak spots in our defenses. He lured the members in Sardis into a spiritual coma, and he sold the Laodiceans the lie of self-sufficiency. And when those tactics don’t work, he can always resort to brute force—he hammered the brethren in Smyrna and Pergamos and Philadelphia with prolonged persecution and even death.

The “synagogue of Satan” makes repeated appearances in these letters, stirring up local authorities and public opinion against the Church of God, while the Nicolaitans and their philosophy of compromise seem determined to infect the Church from within.

Remember, by the early second century, Roman officials were actively executing Christians who refused to recant their faith and curse Christ. Pliny the Younger wrote to Emperor Trajan of his efforts to squash the fledgling religion:

“I interrogated them whether they were Christians; if they confessed it I repeated the question twice again, adding the threat of capital punishment; if they still persevered, I ordered them to be executed . . . Those who denied they were, or had ever been, Christians, who repeated after me an invocation to the gods, and offered adoration, with wine and frankincense, to your image, which I had ordered to be brought for that purpose, together with those of the gods, and who finally cursed Christ (none of which acts, it is said, those who are really Christians can be forced into performing) these I thought it proper to discharge” (Epistulae X.96).

And even when their lives weren’t on the line, rejecting the gods of the Roman world around them—refusing to participate in the communal sacrifices of trade guilds and general society—meant social ostracization and professional ruin.

It would have been so easy to just give up.

To stop fighting.

To stop trying.

But that’s not what overcomers do.

Overcomers endure.

When Satan starts applying pressure from within or without, overcomers plant their feet and, with God’s help, hold their ground. When Satan tries to lull them into a state of complacency or distraction, they refocus on God’s Word.

And when Jesus Christ tells them to repent and make a course correction, they do.

They reclaim their lost love by doing the first works.

They remain faithful in the face of tribulation.

They push back against false teachings and false teachers.

They refuse to compromise their spiritual life just to make their physical life easier.

They live the life God called them to live, in public and in private.

They draw on God’s strength when times get tough, not relying on their own.

They look to God for spiritual wealth, clothing and perspective.

And when they fail in these things—because they are human and they will fail—they repent and try again. They do this, over and over and over again, until either their physical lives end or Jesus Christ returns.

And when Jesus Christ returns . . . they will claim His promises.

To the one who overcomes

The same God who calls us to be overcomers—who lays out a road map showing us what to overcome and how—that same God also paints us a vivid picture of the future that’s waiting for us when we do overcome.

Every letter closes with the same two things: a promise to “him who overcomes” and a command to “hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”

The command is for all of us—but so are the promises. The individual promises don’t belong to individual congregations, but to every Christian—past, present and future.

Here is what Jesus promises to the one who overcomes:

• Access to the tree of life in the “Paradise of God” (Revelation 2:7).
• Immunity from the second death (verse 11).
• The hidden manna (verse 17).
• A white stone with a new name (verse 17).
• Power over the nations (verse 26).
• The morning star (verse 28).
• White garments (Revelation 3:5).
• A record in the Book of Life, to be announced before God and the angels (verse 5).
• Placement as a pillar in the temple of God (verse 12).
• An inscription with the names of God the Father, the New Jerusalem, and a new name[1] (verse 12).
• Becoming corulers on the throne of Christ (verse 21).

As we’ve seen throughout this Journey, Christ’s promises likely carried special meaning for the congregations receiving them. The Philadelphians with their little strength would have treasured the promise of becoming pillars in God’s temple, and the members in Smyrna facing prison and death would have found peace in the promise of protection from the second death.

But these promises aren’t any less valuable today.

Two millennia later, they still show us a future worth living for—and, if it comes to it, worth dying for.

We started this Journey by discussing the world of the seven churches, and we found that even though a lot has changed, many of the pressures and challenges Christians face haven’t changed. We still live in a world ruled by a fallen angel who wants to wear us down or just simply distract us until we give up on reaching the finish line. And he does not want the good news of Jesus’ return to continue being spread by God’s Church as Christ commissioned (Matthew 24:14).

Here, at the end of this Journey, the promises to the overcomers ought to shift our focus away from the world of the seven churches—away from our world—and look ahead to a time when this “present evil age” (Galatians 1:4) and its ruler will be a thing of the past.

The first heaven and the first earth—the existence we know—will one day pass away, to be replaced by “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1). And as the New Jerusalem descends to that new earth, a loud voice will cry out:

“Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (verses 3-4).

No more death.

No more sorrow.

No more crying.

No more pain.

And we—God’s Church—will serve as pillars in this new world, inscribed with the name of our God and His holy city, our new names forever preserved in the Book of Life, adorned in the shining white robes of righteousness that only the blood of Christ can provide for us, knowing that eternity awaits us as sons and daughters of God.

What the Church needed to hear two millennia ago, it still needs to hear today.

These messages—these visions of our Savior, these warnings about what Christianity should and shouldn’t be, these promises about the future that’s waiting for the one who listens and overcomes—these words are for you.

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”