Revelation 2:2 Commentary and Bible Study

At the beginning of each letter Christ says, ‘I know thy works.’ I see clearly what is going on and what you are doing. What you do, Christ knows. What the church fails to do, he notes. In what spirit our labours are done, he knows. How we behave among ourselves in works of kindness and helpfulness, he sees. What we claim to be, he tests by our works.There is so much to commend this church. After the commendations there is the tremendous ‘but’ in the message to Ephesus and the statement that they have lost their first love, but sometimes the contrast between the things commended and the loss of love for Christ is exaggerated. People tend to really run over the virtues of this church in order to build up a dramatic effect: the great contrast. The lesson is drawn along these lines – you can seem to be a sincere Christian, you can be doing a great deal, and yet you can be really worthless because you have no love. It can be a sham; it can be false. I think that is an exaggerated and a wrong way of looking at the letter. The commendations are genuine. The things that this church was renowned for were real virtues and achievements, and they should not be minimised. Some go so far as to say, ‘The message of Christ to this church is particularly to commend them for their hostility towards evil people and false teachers, and yet they have no love so I can see what is going wrong. What is happening is this – they have become so negative, so critical and so hostile in a carping way; they are really very unpleasant people altogether and they have no love.’ That also I think is a wrong way of looking at the passage. The virtues of the church at Ephesus are very real and they do reflect the strong measure of love. What happened was a particular kind of love has gone missing. So we have to have balance as we come to the passage.We are saved by grace alone. We cannot be saved by works. We cannot approach God in our own good deeds, accomplishments; they are nothing to God. We are seen only as sinners, and we come depending on Christ and his atoning death. We come and we have salvation by grace through faith. But as believers, we are here to do works. They do not bring us any saving merit, but we must please God, the church is to do works. Now, the church at Ephesus is greatly approved. ‘Works’ is a strong word – toil, deeds, labour; even stronger, hard toil, painful toil. Then ‘thy patience’. It means perseverance, endurance. They were not five-minute wonders. They went on doing difficult things for the Lord. Ephesus was a really hard place to work, a highly pagan city, very wealthy, very affluent, self-satisfied, and here were the people of God seeking to win others. Perhaps they knew something of the atmosphere that we see in our cities in this country today – complete indifference, people satisfied with the things of this world. But it was even harder than it is for us today because they did not have religious liberty. If you were not one of those pagans serving the pagan gods, you were almost an outcast in society and you were severely disadvantaged. They worked with the gospel, and it was painful work, it was a difficult stand that they took. ‘And how thou canst not bear them which are evil.’ This is very significant. This is in the church, of course. The people who were evil outside the church were no doubt the object of their prayers and their witness and their concern. But within the membership of the church the congregation at Ephesus wanted the church to be glorifying to God. They wanted to keep the rules of Scripture. They knew that hypocrisy had no place in the church, and so they drew the line, and they drew it very firmly, and they exercised church discipline. Furthermore, ‘thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars.’ Now, there were many people circulating, going round the churches in those days, who made great claims that they were apostles or special teachers, and actually they were unconverted people. They saw opportunities in making these claims, and they went round to different churches and tried to convince them that they had an authentic message from God. But the people at Ephesus were very discerning, they preserved the truth; they would not listen to that. Some of the seven churches were taken in, but not Ephesus. When an apostle came, they asked, ‘Were you appointed by Christ personally?’ They knew that was one of the qualifications of an apostle. ‘Have you witnessed the resurrection? Or are you like Paul, have you seen Christ especially yourself?’, and maybe the phoney apostles made up some far-fetched story, but it was not convincing. ‘Can you heal the sick like other apostles? And genuinely?’ Maybe like some of today’s phoneys, they pretended to heal the sick, but those people at Ephesus were discerning enough to know that nothing had actually happened. ‘Does this man’s teaching match that of the other apostles and the Scriptures that we already have? Does it agree?’, and it didn’t. It had all sorts of novelties in it and strange things. So they rejected these people.