LAODICEA The Chameleon church Revelation 3v14-22.
The chameleon is a species of lizard with the ability to adapt to different environments by changing colour; whilst this is very practical for the lizard, when it is translated into spiritual life, it is something that brings only nausea to the Lord. God hates mixture and requires singleness of heart and mind in His people. We will look at the church in five ways.
- 1. The character of Christ presented.
- 2. The condition of the church.
- 3. The counsel to the church.
- 4. The call to the individual.
- 5. The compensation for victory.
The character of Christ presented.
"These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God." Revelation 3v14. The scope of these three titles is astonishing and when put together they are saying in effect, He began all things, He will end all things, and when He was on this earth, He was the faithful and true witness. The title "Amen" presents Him as the One who will have the last word in everything. It was used in the Old Testament as a liturgical formula (referring to procedures in religious gatherings) in which people accepted the validity of an oath and its consequences. It is akin to the use of the phrase "verily, verily" which occurs in John's gospel over twenty times to affirm the validity of Jesus words and His works and all that was involved with it. He alone will have the final say, He alone will judge everything in perfection, and is therefore the object of all in existence. This is in consequence of His faithful testimony to God, and His true testimony to men while He was here on this earth. We can be sure that what He said was true and in a world where trust in the words of men is at an all time low, He is One on whom we can depend with our everything. This is not surprising because He is described as "the beginning of the creation of God," The word "arche"..... first in time, first in rank, He is the origin of all created things and as the origin, He is the head of all created things. He created all things with a very definite purpose and that purpose will be fulfilled when all of creation in heaven and on earth will say Amen. Paul describes Him in Colossians chapter 1v15 as "the firstborn of all creation." There is no limit to that; things in heaven, things on earth, things visible, things invisible. He designed it, He constructed it, He sustains it, and He will inherit it in a condition which God intended from the very beginning.
This glorious presentation of Christ is in contra distinction to the character of the church at Laodicea. He was the true witness, they were anything but true. He was the faithful witness, they were anything but faithful. They even deceived themselves "thou sayest.....thou knowest not." They lived in a fog, totally ignorant of their condition. Words are cheap and their falsehoods and deceits are exposed by the living truth. He turned their own ideas about themselves upside down. Thinking they were rich, He called them poor; thinking they were wise He said they were blind, thinking they were well presented as people doing good He exposes them as naked before the eyes of an all seeing God. At the very heart of the problem was self satisfaction. We have "need of nothing" was their cry and as becomes clear they didn't even need the Lord, because they were operating without Him. They had descended to the basic level of man independent of God, the same sin that has dogged mankind from the very beginning has made its way into the church. This is why Moses wrote Genesis chapter 1. In a chapter which portrays the wonders of creation as it happened, Moses draws attention to the Creator rather than the things created. Reared in the cradle of Egyptian idolatry, where the sun god Ra was worshipped, and almost every animal and planet had been made into a god, Moses writes to tell us all that this very earth on which we live and these very heavens which surround us were brought into being by God, the only true God. The word used "Elohim" is the plural of "Eloah" the supreme object of worship. Nine times over in the chapter is recorded "and God said", verse 3, verse 6, verse 9, verse 11, verse 14, verse 20, verse 24, verse 26, verse 29 . He spoke the vast universe into being! Other phrases in the chapter are God saw, God divided, God called, God made, God set, God created, God blessed. Why so many references to God in the first chapter of the bible? He is bringing before us the one object of worship, the one devotion of our hearts to tell us that occupation with lesser things is unworthy of our existence. The fundamental sin of the world is idolatry, putting lesser things in our hearts; worshipping created things instead of the Creator. There is not an atom in the universe that He did not create, the purpose of which was to bring the whole creation to his feet and primary occupation with created things is nothing short of idolatry. This sin had entered the church at Laodicea. They lived for material things, they replaced the Creator with created things and the evidence is that He was standing at the door of the church because he was outside. Just as at His birth, there was " no room for Him in the inn," now in the exalted glory there is no room for Him in the church. Such a church has lost its way completely, has forgotten the whole purpose of its existence. Sadly this condition is multiplied, particularly in the western world.
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