Listen! I am standing at the door and knocking! If anyone hears My voice and opens the door I will come into his home and share a meal with him, and he with Me. – Revelation 3:20 (NET)
This verse, reported by the Apostle John to have been spoken to him by the risen Jesus during the course of a dictation of seven letters to seven churches within Asia Minor, is most certainly an oft-quoted verse. When we read this or hear this, our first response is that which he have been conditioned to have through the evangelistic preaching of the choice of an eternity in either heaven or hell. The mental image that is conjured, by the aid of centuries of Christian art, has Jesus standing at the door of our hearts, asking for us to open the door so that He might come in to our hearts, so that we might be “saved.” In this sense, being “saved,” in popular understanding, means being able to go to heaven when we die rather than going to hell, and it carries with it the connotation that we now must live according to a pattern of moral precepts that will constitute holiness for us.
Furthermore, the artwork associated with this passage invariably shows a door that lacks any type of door knob or handle on the outside, and this is taken to mean that the door must be opened from the inside, because Jesus will not be forcing open the door of our hearts in order to establish His presence there. Of course, the mental image becomes quite anachronistic as the words and thoughts that ring in modern ears and minds as we imagine the type of door knobs with which we are familiar, complete with their variety of self-contained locking and security mechanisms, would have been completely unknown to the Apostle or to the church to which these words were directed.
Is this verse to be understood in the context of salvation? That is, is it to be understood within the evangelistic sense of saying a “sinner’s prayer” and inviting Jesus to come into one’s heart? In consideration of the fact that such thinking would be completely foreign to a church that would have no idea what is meant by a sinner’s prayer (apart from the prayers to be found in 1 Kings 8 and 2 Chronicles 7), and the fact that the church in that day did not think in terms of Jesus coming into the heart so as to provide a purely spiritual salvation related to a purely spiritual eternity, the answer would have to be “no.” Beyond that, we need only look at the context that is provided by the verse. It is not an isolated statement. It is found inside a letter to a church. Jesus has said to John, “To the angel of the church in Laodicea write the following” (3:14a).
A letter to a church is not a letter to a building, but rather, a letter to a body of believers. With that, let us emphasize that it is a letter to believers, and those believers comprise the body of a congregation that is a part of the larger body of the church, which is the visible body and representation of Christ in the world. When that is understood, the idea that these words can be lifted out of their context as some type of offer to somebody that does not know Christ becomes an absurdity. To use common, religious terminology, these words about standing at the door and knocking are not directed to somebody that is not “saved.” These words of knocking and the need to open, as pointed out, are to a church. That means that they are directed to those that have already confessed an allegiance to the Gospel message of Jesus as the crucified, resurrected, and ascended Lord of all.
Additionally, these words are penned along with other quite searching and impactful words. Jesus says, “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot!” (3:15) Naturally, we immediately translate these words into the contemporary context by which we have been programmed. Therefore, when we hear Jesus say “cold,” we immediately connect that with living a certain way, with that way of living generally associated with somebody that is not going to church, not reading their Bible, not “on fire” for Jesus (whatever that means), not speaking in tongues, not singing as loud as they can in church, not lifting up their hands, not going out and “winning souls,” and for all practical purposes, engaging in activities that we so easily and lazily label as “sin.” By this, of course, is meant somebody that is participating in worldly pleasures of various sorts, rather than living a life of self-denial and sacrifice in a “crucifixion of their flesh” (with these terms defined as avoiding certain activities, rather than understanding them in their true nature of entering into the suffering of others in a way that disregards self-interest). Quite naturally then, “hot” is the opposite of cold, and presumably there is somebody in a position of authority that can, somehow and some way, determine one’s spiritual state as being hot or cold, and either condemn, cajole, or congratulate, based on a thoroughly subjective analysis of that which they see. This analysis then, will be based on their own subjective interpretation of what it means to be either hot or cold, which is a completely and thoroughly untenable position, and cannot possibly be derived from Scripture, nor from what Scripture tells us about God.
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