Which now brings us, slowly but surely, to the issue of “hot,” “cold,” and “lukewarm.” Though this will most likely come as a great shock, these terms are most assuredly not employed as references to spiritual condition or relative spiritual fervor and a related general manner of living. Rather, they are used as geographical indicators. Though they are not indicators of spiritual temperatures, it is quite likely that they are being employed as a means of approbation and correction, based on an awareness of certain activities.
Though we are certainly in a position to tease out spiritual truths from the whole of Revelation and from the letters to the churches in particular, we must have a constant awareness, as we analyze the book and the letters, that they were directed to real churches in real cities at a specific time in history, all of which were facing real situations. It is in approaching the Scriptures in this way, knowing that the Scriptures are rooted within history as they tell us about our Creator and His purposes, that will then make those Scriptures so much more important and telling for us. In Revelation, though there is an employment of a significant amount of apocalyptic imagery, much like in the prophetic works of the Hebrew Scriptures, this apocalyptic imagery is primarily designed to reveal the spiritual truths and activities that are at work and at play in relation to material and physical happenings.
As humans, we are limited in our vision, and as Isaiah says, God’s ways and plans are not our ways and plans, nor are His thoughts and deeds our thoughts and deeds (Isaiah 55:9). There is something of a veil that limits our vision, keeping us from seeing what God sees. The purpose of apocalypse (revelation), is to remove that veil, which is the very definition of the word. For those that were receiving communications from God through the Hebrew prophets in the centuries before Christ, and for those in the first century that were receiving communications directly from Jesus through John the Revelator, this removal of the veil, in a world in which there were no separations between religious activities and so-called “secular” activities---no division between the sacred and the profane, the unveiling would be understood as God condescending to reveal the spiritual goings-on that were related to what was happening in the world around them. This is dreadfully important for our understanding of Revelation.
If we fall into the unwarranted trap of looking at Revelation as a guidebook to the events of the end of the world, thinking of “apocalyptic” in specific relation to “end times,” and therefore view Revelation as some type of magic decoder ring for discerning the events of history, then we will find ourselves thinking amiss, and doing so simply because we are not operating with correct definitions. Fortunately for us, this is easily correctable if we are willing to take the correction. When we take the correction, and through that correction find our thinking helpfully reshaped so that it comes to function in line with what apocalyptic language is meant to convey, Revelation becomes far more rich, far more understandable, far more instructive, far more useful, and far more awe-inspiring as we consider the patient love and faithfulness of our covenant God, and as we cast off self-centered, self-concerned, and self-absorbed ways of thinking, in submission to the message and rule of our Lord and King.
Let us remember that Paul and Peter, along with the Hebrews author and the author of the letters of John, all wrote letters to specific churches and individuals. Though these letters would become useful to the whole of the church, they were first directed to and dealt with places, people, and events. Knowing this, we should be restrained from treating John’s communications differently. Just because there is fantastic and difficult-to-understand imagery, that certainly doesn’t mean that we should dismiss John’s insistence that these letters, and this Revelation, are for the “seven churches that are in the province of Asia” (1:4a).
Returning to the words of temperature (hot, cold, lukewarm), having insisted that they serve as geographic indicators, we realize that they are something of a play on familiar words and of what is well-known about the area in which Laodicea is set. We should not be surprised to find Jesus, through the author, employing such a strategy. Even the Apostle Paul’s famous phrase of “from faith to faith,” or “ek pisteos eis pistin” (Romans 1:17), is lifted from what could be termed as the liturgy of the Caesar cult. In this, Paul takes a familiar term and applies it to what should be truly understood about Jesus, rather than Caesar. This is even more pronounced with the New Testament’s employment of the very word “gospel,” which was also in heavy and specific use within the Caesar cult, in application to the works of Caesar himself. So we see plays on words and the usage of familiar terms, re-worked and re-deployed for particular effect on a regular basis.
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