Biblion Bible Commentary
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Laodicea: Neither Cold nor Hot
Revelation 3:14-18
14 “To the angel of the assembly in Laodicea write: “The Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, the Beginning of God’s creation, says these things: · WEB
The wealthy church is the only one with no commendation at all, its self-audit is inverted word for word, and the counsel is to buy from the one seller it never consulted.
To the angel of the assembly in Laodicea write: The Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, the Beginning of God's creation, says these things.
To the church of comfortable self-deception comes the one witness who cannot be deceived and will not flatter: the Amen — truth's own last word — the Faithful and True Witness Revelation 1:5, and the Beginning of God's creation: the origin and ruler of the creation Colossians 1:18, addressing a church about to be told it possesses nothing.
Laodicea alone of the seven receives no commendation. Not persecution, not heresy, not a Jezebel — nothing to fight is the finding; the church is simply lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold Revelation 3:16. The city knew its own water: neighbors had hot springs prized for healing and cold water prized for drinking; Laodicea's supply arrived tepid by aqueduct — useful for neither, the mouthful a traveler spits. I will vomit you out of my mouth — the book's most visceral sentence, and its target is not wickedness but tepidity: a church that neither heals nor refreshes, religious enough to be inoculated against religion.
The cause is diagnosed as an accounting error, and the two audits are set side by side, word against word: because you say, 'I am rich, and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing' — banking center, textile wealth, the self-made boast — and don't know that you are the wretched one, miserable, poor, blind, and naked Revelation 3:17.
And don't know — the exact opposite of the letters' sevenfold I know. Smyrna was poor and rich Revelation 2:9; Laodicea is rich and destitute, and only one of the two churches knows its own balance.
Then the counsel, and its courtesy is the mercy of it: I counsel you to buy from me Revelation 3:18 — the seller the consumer church never consulted, offering its three famous products in the only versions that are real: gold refined by fire — faith proved in the furnace 1 Peter 1:7 — for the banking town; white garments to cover the shame of nakedness — for the city of black wool; eye salve to anoint your eyes, that you may see — for the home of the famous eye medicine. The purchase price from the destitute is the exchange Scripture's market always runs: without money and without price Isaiah 55:1 — everything on the counter, for the one payment of admitted need.
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