“John to the seven churches which are in Asia….” (Revelation 1:4).
Did you know if you take the seventh letter from the 7th chapter of each book of the Bible, it forms a secret message? I didn’t either. But it’s no weirder than some of the schemes people come up with to make Scripture say more than it was intended.
The cults are notorious for finding secret messages in Scripture.
God’s faithful children must be careful not to fall for such schemes and not to try to read hidden messages into God’s Word.
His Word is sufficient.
I’ve been studying the first three chapters of Revelation, for the umpteenth time in my life. There is so much here.
This introduction to the entire book of Revelation opens with seven letters from the ascended reigning Lord Jesus to the seven churches of Asia Minor. The cities were real, the churches were genuine, and the messages are solid. And yet, over the years, that was not good enough for some of the Lord’s expositors.
Surely there is more there, they said. And proceeded to insert things never found in Scripture and I believe, never intended by the Author.
For reasons only the Spirit of God can discern, some enterprising teachers decided that these seven letters actually represented seven ages of the Church through the centuries. And yet, there is not a word in Scripture–not one–indicating God had this in mind.
According to this so-called pattern, it all began with the Ephesus age which had lost its first love, it continued with the Smyrna age which was a time of persecution, and so forth. And guess what age we are in now? That would be the Laodicean age, of course, since everyone knows that our generation is the culmination of everything the Lord had in mind, that we are the apex of His hopes and dreams and prophecies, that all the world has been waiting for you and me to arrive on the scene.
That, as much as anything, is what makes me reject this interpretation of those seven letters as seven ages of the church: We are the final age. We respond: “Oh yeah? Who said? What if the Lord has planned another thousand years before His return? What will those poor people of the future do without a church age of their own?” I can hear them now: “Poor us! We had hoped to have a special term for the church in our time, but the church in the 20th-21st centuries fulfilled it.
Forgive my rant here. The more I read and study of Revelation, the more convinced I am that this final Book of the Bible has been the victim of a host of unhealthy teachers with their kooky interpretations. I definitely do not want to encourage people who do not have patience with God’s Word the way it was given and who keep reading into it their own thoughts.
The book Revelation: Four Views, Steve Gregg, editor, outlines this problematic interpretation for us…