Meditations

Openline program on moody radio on Aug 17, 2019:

Question from listener:

I have been doing a bible study in Revelation and they are going through the seven churches and the leader of the bible study sort of inferred something I haven’t researched or studied before, he was saying that the churches are not just the seven literal churches and they are not just spiritual significance for the churches, but possibly they foreshadow the seven different periods of church history, so I was wondering if you could expound on that a little bit and talk about that theory a bit.

Answer from Dr Michael Rydelnik:

There are some people who hold this view. I think that the structure of the book of Revelation. In Revelation 1, it says” Write the things which you have seen, the things which are, the things which shall be. The things which you have seen is chapter 1, the vision that John has seen of the Lord Jesus. Chapters 2 and 3, the things which are, so he’s writing, not prophecy there, he’s writing a description of the situation as it is with the seven churches of the book of Revelations and the things which shall be, that begins in chapter 4 and goes to the end of the book, which is the futuristic prediction of the book. And so, it seems to me that it would be a mistake to see the seven ages, I don’t know where Mike stands on this?

Dr Michael Vanlangningham:

I actually agree with you. As you read through the letters to the seven churches, I don’t see anywhere in it that in each of these individual letters where there’s an indication that John is writing and the Lord is telling him to write about different ages in historical periods of the church. As you read through that, I rather get the impression that he really is talking to the church in Ephesus or Laodicea or Sardis or whatever. That’s the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is you have churches like this throughout every period. Churches that were cold, churches that were being beat up and persecuted, churches who let Jesus back into their fellowship. So, you got that in every single age. It seems to it is not right hermeneutically or interpretively, you don’t really have keys that leads us to understand this as different eras of the church.