Seven Deadly Spirits

The Message of Revelation's Letters for Today's Church

Daniels, T. Scott

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781441205056
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

T. Scott Daniels, pastor of a Los Angeles megachurch, contends that corporate bodies like churches form an individual spiritual personality of sorts. Cultural influences can impact the collective spirit or attitude of a congregation, either hindering it from becoming all God intends it to be or setting it free to glorify God. In this practical work, Daniels examines the nature of the seven representative "angels" of the churches addressed in Revelation to show how congregations can escape the principalities and powers that hold them captive. The book encourages working pastors, church leaders, and ministry students to consider a systems approach to church leadership--one that takes seriously the powers at work within local congregations--and offers suggestions for transformation.

1

Ephesus

The Spirit of Boundary Keeping

“To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: . . . I know that you cannot tolerate evildoers. . . . But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.”

My first opportunity to preach after I graduated from college was at a youth camp in the Northwest. I was responsible for speaking ten times over six days. I accepted the invitation knowing I had only two sermons from college in my files. I outlined a series on the life of King David that I thought would work well, but I was still missing a “hook.” During my senior year of college a special speaker had come for a week-long revival, and at the beginning of each service he had read a different children’s book as a way of introducing the message. The books were repetitive and funny and drew even a culturally cool college crowd into the moment, so I decided I would borrow his idea and use a children’s book as a lead-in to each of my camp messages.

I spent nearly a day and a half at the local bookstore searching through book after book for funny, repetitive stories that would in some way or another tie in with the life of David. One of my favorite children’s authors is Robert Munsch, well known for his book I’ll Love You Forever. Like Forever, most of Munsch’s books are repetitive, quirky in their humor, and meaningful. Several of the books I chose to use were authored by him, including one titled Thomas’ Snowsuit. The book is about a young boy named Thomas who lives in Minnesota, where children often need to wear snowsuits. Thomas’s mother buys him a brown snowsuit that he refuses to wear because he believes it is too ugly. Each time she tries to get him to wear it he says, “NOOO!” Thomas and his mother get into a huge wrestling match, but the mother finally succeeds in getting Thomas into his snowsuit, and he heads to school.

When it is time for recess at school, the teacher asks Thomas to please put on his snowsuit. Thomas says, “NOOO!” Again she asks, but Thomas says, “NOOO!” Thomas and the teacher then get into a wrestling match, but rather than ending up in his snowsuit, Thomas ends up in the teacher’s dress and the teacher ends up wearing nothing but her underwear. The principal of the school gets involved, but rather than helping the situation, he increases the chaos by repeatedly adding another person to the wrestling match. Each character alternately winds up either in another person’s clothing or in his or her underwear. Finally, some friends call Thomas to come outside and play. Immediately he jumps into his snowsuit and heads out for recess, leaving the teacher in the principal’s suit and the principal in the teacher’s dress. The book ends with the principal moving to Arizona where children do not wear snowsuits.

I planned to use the book to introduce the Wednesday night message on the rebellious life of David’s son Absalom and how his life became not only a stumbling block to others but also ultimately destructive to himself. Before the service, I noticed that a very conservative-looking family, who had not been part of the camp during the week, had come to visit that evening. I found out later that they had brought their daughter to be part of the mid-week service and hear the guest speaker but that they had not allowed her to be part of the camp because the camp leaders were allowing the teenage boys and girls to swim together in the lake.

The beginning of the message was going well. I was reading Thomas’ Snowsuit and the teens were saying “NOOO!” in unison with Thomas each time he refused to put on his snowsuit. When I got to the part where the teacher and Thomas end up for a time in their underwear, I noticed that someone was moving off to my left, but I paid little attention to them. I looked up from my book just in time to see the mother of the visiting family sprinting across the platform. In a fit of righteous indignation, she grabbed the book out of my hands and shouted, “That is quite enough!” Then she walked off with the book under her arm and headed for the exit.

I was obviously stunned and wasn’t quite sure how to go on. The only person more stunned than me was the camp director, who was sitting in the front row with his mouth open, not quite sure what had just happened. I broke the tension by saying, “I had planned to speak to you tonight about being a stumbling block, but apparently I have already been one. I suppose we should pray.” I don’t remember what I prayed, but I remember thinking, “I haven’t even had a ministry career yet, and I have already ruined it.” When I got done praying I tried to carry on with the message. I noticed that the camp director was no longer in his seat. I could see him through the glass doors in the back arguing with the woman who had taken my book. They were both very angry. Their heated argument continued until well after my message was over. When the service concluded, I went outside to try to make peace (and to try to get my book back). I apologized as genuinely as I knew how for offending her. Instead of accepting my apology, she began to accuse me of bringing pornography, illicit sexuality, and corruption into the house of God.

There is much more to the story, but thankfully my career in ministry wasn’t destroyed (and I did get my book back). There are many thoughts—not all of them holy—that come to mind when I think of that night, but one thing I can never quite get over was the sense of responsibility that woman felt for being a boundary keeper for what she deemed appropriate and inappropriate in the house of God. I was later told several stories from sympathetic people who attended church regularly with her about the kind of chaos she created for her pastor and youth pastor as she consistently made herself the righteous judge of people’s dress, behavior, and theology.

Certainly this woman represents an extreme, but nearly every day in the church and in Christian institutions, brokenness happens between brothers and sisters in Christ as judgments are made against one another. A pastor is forced to resign for speaking out against the war in Iraq. Drive-time radio is filled with messages regarding God’s “righteous sentence” on areas torn apart by natural disaster. A congregation makes the prime-time news for becoming a human blockade at a local abortion clinic. A well-known academic society expels a handful of longtime members for not strictly adhering to a particular doctrinal tenet of the organization. The board of trustees votes to remove a seminary president supporting the ordination of women. A leading spokesperson for evangelicalism equates Christianity with one particular political party over another. The contract of a science professor at a Christian college is not renewed because she explores with her students the possibility of theistic evolution. A well-known and long-standing denomination is divided into multiple camps over the question of homosexuality.

The events above are meant to be hypothetical, yet most of us can recognize in our various Christian traditions moments when the pursuit of truth has turned into an angry, divisive, and hurtful dispute. Almost all of us are aware of moments when the ideological lines that form the boundaries of the church become the battlefronts for ugly interpersonal quarrels. The church in every era faces the continual challenge of warding off theological and philosophical attacks from within and without, while at the same time trying to maintain a posture of love and acceptance toward one another and the world— including our enemies.

A Culture of Change

Ephesus was a significant city economically, politically, and religiously. Located on four water passages, Ephesus was an important city for trade and culture. The population of Ephesus is estimated to have been between four hundred thousand and five hundred thousand at the time of John’s writing, making it the largest city in Roman Asia and one of the largest cities of its day. The members of the church at Ephesus would have understood well the challenges of living out the faith in an urban context. Because of its size and significance, it is not surprising that John would begin his discourse to the seven churches with a letter to the church in Ephesus. “To the Christians . . . Ephesus stood for Asia, Asia was Ephesus.”1

The church in Ephesus was birthed by Paul and left for a time under the care of Priscilla and Aquila. Later Paul would return to Ephesus for two and a half years to use the city as his home base. In Acts 19:23–41 we are told that Paul had to flee the city because of a dispute that began between the apostle and the artisans of the city whose livelihood depended on the sale of silver shrines of Artemis.

The temple built to the Greek goddess Artemis, who was known to the Romans as Diana, was central to the culture and religious atmosphere of Ephesus. Ephesus contained many of the great temples in Asia Minor, and the temple of Artemis was likely the pagan temple used the longest into the Christian era. The temple was 425 feet long, 220 feet in width, and 60 feet high.2 Although we tend to think of the ancient temples and their idols as marble white in color, this temple was painted with bright colors and decorated with inlaid stone at the time it was in use. The statues of the gods or goddesses were painted to resemble enormous lifelike beings. Artemis was usually depicted either with many breasts or beside a deer and honored as the goddess of fertility, childbirth, and hunting.

Ephesus was one of the major centers for the emperor cult and the worship of the goddess Roma—the spiritual embodiment of the empire itself. One of the chief ways Rome honored its subject cities for their loyalty was to give the city permission and resources to build a temple to the emperors. Ephesus was bestowed this honor four times.3

Scholars often describe Ephesus as a city of change because it had a long history of political turmoil and because the very topography of the region was constantly in flux. Today, due to the continual buildup of silt in the harbor, the first-century port town of Ephesus sits five miles inland. As water turned to land, “the city followed the sea, and changed from place to place to maintain its importance as the only [harbor] of the valley.”4

In a city filled with detestable pagan practices and powerful cultic ceremonies and shaken by the rapid changes of culture and landscape, how would the church survive? How would the Christians in Ephesus remain immovable in faith while standing on the literally shifting sands of their city? How would the Ephesian church stand for what was right in their constantly changing environment?

Boundary Keeping

The Revelator praises the Christians in Ephesus for their works, their toil, and their patient endurance (Rev. 2:2). Standing up against a pagan culture, false prophets, leadership instability, and the powerful lure of the empire, the Christians diligently worked and persevered by using what we might describe as strong filters for orthodoxy. Participation in a vibrant city of travel and commerce had to have meant that the church was continually confronted with itinerant teachers and philosophers claiming to be apostles and prophets. In the eyes of the Revelator, the Ephesian church had distinguished itself by “its insight into the true character of those who came to it with the appearance of Apostles. . . . But the Ephesian Church tested them all; and when they were false, unerringly detected them and unhesitatingly rejected them.”5 In his letter to the Ephesian church, the apostolic father and bishop, Ignatius, writes that the believers in Ephesus, “all live in accordance with the truth and that no heresy has found a home among [them]. Indeed, [they] do not so much as listen to anyone unless he speaks truthfully about Jesus Christ.”6

In particular, John praises the church for their hatred of the works of the Nicolaitans (2:6). The nature of the Nicolaitan heresy, mentioned here and also in the letter to Pergamum (2:15), has been much debated. It appears that this sect lasted only a short time and primarily practiced a form of idolatry and immorality disguised as a deep spirituality. It is likely that the Nicolaitans made peace with the surrounding culture by participating in the cultic practices, such as eating meat sacrificed to idols and engaging in the sexual practices of the pagan temples.7 It is possible that these forms of pagan practice were excused or even promoted by the Nicolaitans because they viewed these rituals as meaningless or empty, because the gods before whom these acts were committed were nothing. Or more deeply disturbing, the Nicolaitans might have viewed these pagan practices as deepening the spiritual sensitivity of those who participated in them.8 Either way, John praises the Ephesian church for guarding its theological boundaries and recognizing that these practices are unacceptable for the Christian life.

Loss of Love

Yet in the midst of being praised for their persistence in keeping the faith, the Ephesian Christians are rebuked for abandoning “the love [they] had at first” (2:4). In their zeal for moral purity, they have lost the centrality of love. The question readers of this letter have to wrestle with is this: is there a connection between this church’s hypersensitivity to moral purity and its lost first love? Is the Ephesian zeal for watching the boundaries of the community also the cause of their lost compassion? Can a community so focus on maintaining the orthodoxy of its theology that it loses its ability to love? Most commentators on Revelation seem to think that there is an important connection between the Ephesian church’s heightened boundary keeping and the loss of their primary commission and passion: to make disciples of all peoples. As Robert Mounce writes, “Every virtue carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. It seems probable that desire for sound teaching and the resulting forthright action taken to exclude all impostors had created a climate of suspicion in which love within the believing community could no longer exist.”9 Or as William Barclay states, “It may be that a hard, censorious, critical, fault-finding, stern self-righteousness had banished the spirit of love. . . . Strict orthodoxy can cost too much, if it has to be bought at the price of love.”10 Justo Gonzalez puts it this way: “Christians who are rightly concerned about the purity of faith and doctrine can become so obsessed by that concern that they begin looking at each other askance, and love is set aside. Or-thodoxy becomes the hallmark of ‘true faith,’ and love seems to be of secondary importance.”11

When John writes to the Ephesian church, “you have abandoned the love you had at first” (2:4), he is certainly including the love they have for God, but he seems to be emphasizing the love they were to continue to share with one another. Our love for God and our love for one another are deeply connected. Brokenness in our love for God inevitably leads to the shattering of our love for our neighbor. Love for others is the primary mark of Christian discipleship, but at Ephesus, hatred of heresy and closely guarding the boundaries of the faith had allowed the radiant light of love for God and one another to fade.

The result of a church becoming so preoccupied with defining doctrinal boundaries that they lose the divine spark of love that drew believers to faith in Christ is what Earl Palmer refers to as “The Ephesus Syndrome.”12 Few if any of us who are believers accepted Christ into our lives because we were doctrinally argued into the church. It was the love of God demonstrated in the life of the Spirit-filled body of Christ that wooed us into relationship with the Father. Unfortunately for the Ephesian church, in the pursuit of protecting its boundaries, it risked losing the very force that gave it life.

Ungenerous Orthodoxy

More than ever, today’s church is confronted with the issues of rapid change. On the one hand, the pressures of an ever-changing culture mean that the church must constantly be vigilant to guard its life and keep its boundaries; but on the other hand, as the church has confronted change it has become a battlefield over worship, politics, and theology....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: To the Angel, Write . .
• 1. Ephesus: The Spirit of Boundary Keeping
• 2. Smyrna: The Spirit of Consumerism
• 3. Pergamum: The Spirit of Accommodation
• 4. Thyatira: The Spirit of Privatized Faith
• 5. Sardis: The Spirit of Apathetic Faith
• 6. Philadelphia: The Spirit of Fear
• 7. Laodicea: The Spirit of Self-Sufficiency
• 8. The Ears to Hear
• Notes