In my most recent previous post on SBC Today, I discussed “The Unique Authority of the Local Congregations.” In the text of the original post itself, I mentioned my own uneasiness with Christ’s conferral of so much heavenly authority behind the actions of the local, gathered, covenanted church. In the ensuing comment thread, we discussed whether this local churchly authority could possibly supersede the authority of the New Testament or otherwise empower human believers to employ heavenly power to thwart heavenly aims.
One safeguard against such an unimaginably terrible state of affairs is found, I believe in The Revelation of Jesus Christ to John:
Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking with me. And having turned I saw seven golden lampstands; and in the middle of the lampstands I saw one like a son of man. . . (Revelation 1:12-13a)
. . . the seven lampstands are the seven churches. (Revelation 1:20b)
To the angel of the church in Ephesus: The One who holds the seven stars in His right hand, the One who walks among the seven golden lampstands, says this: . . .
“But I have this against you, that you have left your first love.
“Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place—unless you repent.” (Revelation 2:1, 4-5)
We need not speculate as to what the “lampstand” imagery symbolizes, for Christ settled the matter clearly enough. Each lampstand was a church. What is a church? It is a local assembly of agreeing believers. To speculate beyond the text, we might imagine that Christ chose the imagery of a lampstand to conjure up in our minds the function of the church as a station charged with spreading light into and against darkness.
Each lampstand has a star. These stars are “the angels of the seven churches,” and each star belongs discretely to a particular church, such that Jesus could later speak of “the angel of the church at Ephesus.” The Greek word ??????? sometimes is transliterated “angel” to describe a non-human spiritual messenger from God and is sometimes merely translated “messenger” to describe a messenger from God who may be either human or non-human. Which is the appropriate rendering of the word here?
The preponderance of translations go ahead and place the word “angel” into the text rather than “messenger,” although most interpreters do not believe that Christ is referring here to non-human creatures. I am not privy to any deliberations that various translation committees have conducted regarding this decision, but I can give reasons why I believe that it is a good idea to use the word “angel.” First, the default treatment of this word is to represent it as “angel” in an English text. There ought to be very good reason to do something otherwise, and in this case the reason is not good enough. Second, even the rendering “messenger” probably requires explanation. Is it any more difficult to explain that “angel here really means. . .” than it is to explain that “messenger here really means. . .”?
The predominant interpretation, after all, does not regard these “messengers” as being one-time emissaries or couriers to these congregations. Rather, it is commonplace to find Christians interpreting the “stars” as a representative of an elder, an overseer, a pastor of each of these local congregations. The reasons for this are not so much textual as they are contextual. It is not untenable to imagine that God might assign a non-human spiritual being to serve as a messenger to and protector of each local congregation. It is, however, strange to imagine how the Beloved Apostle functions as any sort of a useful intermediary to convey messages from God to angels. These mini-epistles make more sense to us if God is having John to deliver a prophetic message to the pastors of these congregations, who presumably will in turn deliver the divine message to the congregations themselves.
If this is true—if “the angel of the church in Ephesus” can reasonably be understood to mean “the elder-messenger of the church in Ephesus”—then these texts provide an important counter-point to the suggestion that churches with a single elder are somehow ipso facto defective churches or that, in churches with multiple elders, there is no such thing as a primary elder. Some individual is being here designated as “THE angel of the church in Ephesus (and likewise throughout all seven churches).”
So, this is a message from Christ to the local congregation in Ephesus (and nothing whatsoever requires us to conclude that they could not or did not all regularly convene in a single assembly), likely conveyed to them by the primary elder of that congregation.
From Christ to the star (pastor) to the lampstand (congregation).
What is the message? It appears in a heavily abridged form above. Christ commended the church for many things. They worked hard. They persevered. They kept a pure regenerate church membership, renouncing both false members and false teachers alike.
They were a hateful church, and Christ commended them for that. They hated the Nicolaitans, whom most analysts imagine to have been some defective offshoot of Christianity. There is no record of whether other believers attacked the Ephesian church for being unnecessarily critical of others who claimed the name of Christ or alleged that their attitude (which, after all, Scripture honestly proclaims to be hatred!) was beneath the dignity of Christ. We only have a record of Christ’s opinion, and He declared that he delighted in the Ephesian hatred, and even shared it Himself.
Jesus does not feel sorry for error and those who promote it. He does not want to have encounter group meetings with them. Jesus did not recommend the building of a bridge. Jesus did not search for the Nicolaitan “Person of Peace.” Jesus declared that He hates such people, that the Ephesian church hated such people, and the we ought to hate such people as well if we would be obedient to Him. These are the plain words of Christ Himself.
We must come to understand, yes we must, how these concepts fit in with Jesus’ own statements about lost coins and lost sheep and lost sons. We must understand how this can be related to Christ’s pronouncements of His love for all of the world. But what we cannot do is pretend that these sentiments are not in the Bible when they are indeed there and are presented as coming from the lips of Jesus just as much as are the words in John 3. The congregation had “loosed” or “bound” or whatever with regard to the Nicolaitans, and Jesus inveighed the authority of heaven alongside them, just as He had promised in Matthew 18.
The hatred in the hearts of the Ephesians was a good and healthy thing, according to Christ. What was unhealthy was the nature of their love, or rather their lack of a specific love. The Ephesian church had infamously “left [their] first love,” and like Jesus’ “keys of the kingdom” utterance we are left once again without much help in understanding what, particularly, that first love was and how, particularly, a church might go about leaving it.
But we do have a good description of the consequences. Apart from a positive response to perhaps the first-ever “Come to Jesus meeting,” Christ has declared that He “will remove [their] lampstand out of its place—unless [they] repent.”
Ahh. . . the removal of the lampstand from its place. The place of the lampstands in the original vision was in the midst of the presence of Christ. Matthew 18 promised to the church two things: the authority of heaven and the intensive presence of Christ. The removal of the lampstand is, I believe, Christ’s warning that He might revoke from a congregation His own presence and authority.
From early in the Christian story, leaders of the church have sought to quantify and qualify what makes a valid church. The earliest formulation centered around four attributes: The true church is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. Later people came to speak of the rightful ministry of the Word and the rightful observation of the sacraments. None of these complete tests can one neatly derive from a textual basis.
I assert instead that a true church is defined as an agreed and gathered assembly of believers who enjoy the intensive presence and authority of Christ as He promised. This definition enjoys the benefit of being neatly derived from the passages that I have discussed in these blog posts. It concurrently suffers from the malaise of being practically impossible for human believers to measure with any high degree of reliability.
I’m entirely comfortable with saying that the vast preponderance of local congregations of the Roman Catholic Church or the Episcopal Church or the United Church of Christ, for example, are no longer churches by this definition. But how would I prove my point? I don’t know (not that the other marks of the church are easily verifiable themselves, but they are more so than this one). I’m content to categorize a false church with a pornographic image and declare that I know one when I see one, but my statement will not satisfy everyone.
In any event, it behooves me to return to the main point. Christ may have promised his intensive presence and the authority of heaven to His churches, but He has not promised that any congregation will always enjoy those blessings regardless of what they do. To the contrary, Christ has plainly warned at least one congregation (the Ephesian church) that they were in danger of losing those blessings. Are they alone in all these centuries of Christianity? You’ll never convince me that they are.
In 1 Timothy 5, Paul commended the public rebuke of errant elders. The rebuke was to take place publicly for the express purpose of scaring the other elders into being mindful of their own behavior (look it up). Public warnings and public execution of disciplinary sentence have a deterrent effect, according to the Word of God.
Christ warned and rebuked the Ephesian church publicly. He threatened them with the invalidation of their existence as churches (at least in the way that Heaven views such things). Does that warning scare you? Does it scare me? Maybe it ought to.
Bart: I don’t know if you consider this a worthwhile difference, but I went through 12 different bible translations, and none of them state that the Ephesian church or Jesus hated the Nicolaitans, but rather their deeds or works.
Brother Bart,
I think any warning of this sort should get our attention, since it is our Father that disciplines and restores His children. The Apostle John was also clear in his first epistle that we do not fear God in the perfect love of Christ. So we should not fear punishment, but we should return to our first love Jesus Christ in order to reverence Him and do the things He has commanded us to do at first. But we must be careful to recognize that this warning does not evoke fright, nor is it a scare tactic on the part of our Savior. It is though a consequence and reality of disobedience, where Christ takes our hand as loving discipline to return to those things that are important in the life of the church. To think that God strikes fear,…the fear of punishment, is antithetical to what the Father has expressed to us at ….
1 John 4:15-19 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. (16) We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. (17) By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. (18) There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. (19) We love, because He first loved us.
You have no doubt provided the essence of the warning very well,…and any church that is not returning to Christ and the things that were done at first,…should fear God. And at the same time recognize that it is not a fear of fright or scare tactics evoking punishment (since Christ took the entire punishment), but a fear of reverence and awe of the Lord and His work in this world through His bride the church.
Excellent post.
Blessings,
Chris
Brother Bart,
I thought I would address another thought in your post as well,…since it is separate to the theme…yet I thought it to be an interesting inference. When you said….
“If this is true—if “the angel of the church in Ephesus” can reasonably be understood to mean “the elder-messenger of the church in Ephesus”—then these texts provide an important counter-point to the suggestion that churches with a single elder are somehow ipso facto defective churches or that, in churches with multiple elders, there is no such thing as a primary elder. Some individual is being here designated as “THE angel of the church in Ephesus (and likewise throughout all seven churches).”
I don’t believe that churches that have “one” Elder should be considered as “defective”, but quite the contrary they should be understood as “blessed”. Although it is “blessed” to have “a” God gifted instrument for the edification of the body, it should be noted that the Apostle Paul did not believe that the church should remain singular as he encourages the aspiration to oversee in the plural (if any man). So that the church will be “blessed” by many more God gifted instruments (Elders) for the work of ministry and the return to the things done at first. I do agree with you and this “primary elder” is seen even among the Apostles,…and some Elders will lead out and are gifted in matters of administration, yet their calling as an instrument in the congregations remains the same as any other Elder.
So yes, as the Apostle John is about delivering these messages,….there is no doubt that one man would step forward to receive and distribute the message in each of these churches.
Blessings,
Chris
Bart,
Bill is right on this one. I checked the Greek [even though the English is sufficient] and the “plain text” of Revelation 2:6 speaks of hating the Nicolaitan’s *works*.
Also, I think the HCSB gets it right that Revelation 2:4 is referring to the love the church at Ehesus had AT FIRST instead of some first love.
I think this church was good at “taking a stand” but had lost the free and spontaneous love for one another and Christ they once had. I think they became battle hardened. I also think this might be a fair description of what has happened to the SBC.
“Jesus does not feel sorry for error and those who promote it. He does not want to have encounter group meetings with them. Jesus did not recommend the building of a bridge. Jesus did not search for the Nicolaitan ‘Person of Peace.’ Jesus declared that He hates such people, that the Ephesian church hated such people…”
Bart, when you talkd abot “error”, are you talking about almost *any* error?
If one basically takes the position that we are to hate someone who promotes almost any error, then I find that frightening. I am far from someone who promotes the view that we should be on this “never ending la la land journey” of finding truth instead of arriving at truth. There ARE some things worth dying on a hill for.
However, if I am in error on something nonfundamental, then I surely hope someone will meet me WHERE I AM and help me instead of hating me.
God Bless,
Benji
The church in Ephesus [Revelation 2:1] had elders [Acts 20:17].
Here is one of the reasons why I believe the church in Ephesus left the love they had at first [instead of some first love].
After John states they had lost it [Rev. 2:4] he goes on to tell them to do the love prompted deeds–in connection with “first” langauge– [verse 5] and then later, I believe, contrasts the church in Ephesus with the church in Thyatira who had greater love prompted deeds later than they did at “first” [Rev. 2:19].
Gentlemen,
The point on the hatred of deeds rather than people is a textual point well taken. My bad. That’s what happens to me when I go out on excurses unrelated to the main point. It was only my point to indicate that God does express hatred for wicked people (which indeed He does in other portions of the Bible, both alongside and apart from expressions of hatred for their deeds). I believe that this passage does not intend to specify that God did not hate the Nicolaitans (whoever they were), but I am content to place tail between legs and concede that the text refers to the deeds of the Nicolaitans.
If you want those passages where God unambiguously declares his hatred for the people who perpetrate the deeds that He hates, I’ll oblige.
I’ve been calendaring all day with the staff for 2010. Now I need to go home to supper. I’ll try to catch up in a couple of hours. Thanks for your patience.
Who does God hate, Bart?
We need to be very careful here. We ALL do deeds God hates. Unless we can find exegetical support for God loving and hating the same people, I don’t know how we end up with anything other than God loving Christians and hating everyone else.
I also think there are certain things that remain solely within God’s prerogative and perhaps hating certain groups of people is one of them (if He does in fact hate certain groups of people). I’d just as soon not hate anyone. Hating sinful deeds is plenty hard enough.
I know that God hates sin and I am sure that Bart has some verses that show God hating people. I don’t have a concordance handy so I have not been able to look it up. I am interested to see Bart’s scriptures about God hating people.
I keep thinking about Romans 5:8, “God demonstrates His love for us in this: While we were still sinners Christ died for us.” Is Bart saying that Christ only loved and died for the elect and He hates everyone else?
Curious.
Brother Alan,
I believe Romans 9:13 is a passage that we all have trouble making a clean exegesis of.
Blessings,
Tim
Alan,
Psalm 5:5,”…Thou hatest all workers of iniquity.” That’s one verse that pops into my mind at the moment. The context is clearly God hating sinners.
How does God love sinners, and yet, hate them at the same time? Sort of a paradox, aint it? But, He does.
If you’ve ever dealt with a drunk, who is a member of your family; then you might understand. Hating them, and loving them would be a good way to put it.
David
God can do what He wants. Who are we supposed to hate?
If you’ve ever dealt with a drunk, who is a member of your family; then you might understand. Hating them, and loving them would be a good way to put it.
BINGO!
I do not hate my brother for who he is, but what he has become. Sin, not circumstances, has made him do the most nefarious deeds. His actions betray the little boy I still remember. His actions also tear the heart out of my parents and cause them to age quicker. However, I love him b/c I know he loves me. We are human and act like humans; both saved and lost. Imagine how God will feel when the Great White Throne Judgment comes along. That is what causes me to continuously witness to him and not give the enemy any satisfaction..
Sorry for being away so long. I’ll now try to catch up entirely.
With regard to God hating: Allow me to make it clear that this is in no way the central plank of my theology. Nevertheless, we find both statements of God’s own hatred and the approbation of human hatred in many places in the Bible. Being people of the Book, we’ve got to make room for that in our theologies. God forbid that that “making room” should involve the displacement of God’s love from our theologies.
David has given us Psalm 5:5. You’ll find similar language in Psalm 11:5. Some will debate who is the “I” (i.e., who is speaking) in Hosea 9:15, but I’ll side with the many commentators ranging from John Calvin to Douglas Stuart who see YHWH rather than Hosea as the speaker in 9:15 (Hosea had broken into God’s statements in verse 14, but only for one verse, I think). And then there’s God’s declaration in Malachi 1:2-3, which is repeated in Romans 9:13, that God has hated Esau and loved Jacob.
I believe that God loves everyone—the entire world—but that when the love of God is spurned finally (known only to God, I suppose), and when people purpose to thwart God’s plans, sometimes the Bible presents God as One who hates.
As for whether people ought ever to hate, I give you 2 Chronicles 19:2, in which Jehu rebuked Jehoshaphat for the offense of loving people who hated the Lord. Psalm 26:5 and Psalm 31:6 speak approvingly of hating “the assembly of evildoers” and “those who regard vain idols.” Psalm 119:113 similarly speaks of hating “those who are double-minded.” Psalm 139:21 speaks of the virtue of hating those who hate the Lord, whom the Psalmist hates” with the utmost hatred; They have become my enemies.” And, of course, our enemies are precisely the ones whom Jesus has commanded us to love!
And then there is the most famously poetic in this age: As the Pete Seeger’s song reminds us, Ecclesiastes 3:8 famously says that there is “a time to hate” that goes alongside the time to love.
I personally question how neatly we can slice between loving the sinner and hating the sin. It is nice rhetoric; it is difficult to apply with any confident precision. Hell makes very little sense as an expression of hating the sin but loving the sinner, as well.
I’m perfectly willing to say that I don’t understand it all. My point is not to try to convince people to build their theologies entirely or even primarily on the hatred of God, nor to displace the love of God. I acknowledged in the OP that this doctrine of God’s hate must be mixed in somehow with the greater and more glorious doctrine of God’s love.
However, if passages like these that speak of God hating actions and hating those who perform them are passages that cannot be fit into your theology anywhere, then something is wrong with your theology.
With this particular passage, it would be helpful if we knew more than absolutely nothing about who the Nicolaitans were and what hateful thing they were advocating.
Finally, I was in no way suggesting that all error merits the hatred of God and of God’s people. However, to try to put application to this in an easy example, if I were to stumble upon Auschwitz, I believe that the godly and Christian thing to do is to hate Auschwitz and to hate the guy responsible for Auschwitz. Furthermore, I believe that God hates him. Ditto for the Neronian persecution. The early church, from all that I can tell, hated Nero. One early Christian sentiment was the hope that Heaven would include a sort of observation deck from which one could look down and watch people like Nero roasting in the fires of perdition.
We are given permission to hate NOBODY who is a Christian believer. We are told that, if we do so, the love of God does not abide in us. Nor do I believe that we ought to hate every unbeliever. But there are some egregious examples, at least, for which our hatred, inasmuch as it mirrors the hatred of God, is a virtue. I hate Osama bin Laden, for example. I do not hate all Muslims. I do hate him.
Finally, we certainly ought to be very free with our loving and very cautious with our hating. It would be so easy to miss Psalm 139:21-22 and start hating everyone who hates ME rather than hating everyone who hates the Lord. I believe that Jesus was trying to warn us against that in the Sermon on the Mount.
Chris,
Our church enjoys the blessing of multiple pastor/elders/overseers. We are presently up to 4. Each is truly a blessing. I agree with you:
1. A church with 1 elder is not defective.
2. The more elders God gives a church, the more blessed they are.
3. Where there are multiple elders, it is biblical for there to be a primary elder.
Benji,
I agree the the meaning of “first” has to do with time rather than with priority. Is that what you are saying? If so, I agree, and did not intend to say otherwise. Did I say otherwise?
I believe that Paul Kullman’s example is a good reconciliation of most of the passages dealing with the hate of God. The only real problem with it is God’s famous statement about Jacob and Esau. We’re not solving that one here tonight, I’ll go ahead and announce! But it is clearly a contrast between the loved and the hated such that it does not seem to be communicating that God both loved and hated Esau at the same time.
Difficult stuff. Very deep.
Bart,
You said “The Ephesian church had infamously ‘left [their] first love,’ and like Jesus’ ‘keys of the kingdom’ utterance we are left once again without much help in understanding what, particularly, that first love was and how, particularly, a church might go about leaving it.”
By talking about first love instead of the love they had at first, then I took what you were saying as referring to leaving their “supreme love”.
But I understand what you mean in comment #17. It’s no big deal.
God Bless,
Benji
Bart: How do you correlate hating people with Christ’s commands continually to love our enemies? That hate in our hearts is the same as murdering the person?
Then there is Galatians 5:19-21, 24.
It is true that there are verses that speak of God’s hate, but Jesus said pretty specifically that we are to love our enemies instead of (as opposed to in addition to) hating them.
Many Southern Baptists think our President is the enemy. Should we hate him?
This preacher thinks so.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/31/phoenix-pastor-draws-protests-telling-church-prays-obamas-death/
So, evidently, does Wiley Drake.
Many, many SBCers see homosexuality as one of the most egregious sins. Is Fred Phelps right then?
I honestly see no way of discerning any kind of line between people it is ok to hate and people it isn’t.
Brother Bart,
God’s hate and love are imbued with His attribute of righteousness. The book of Romans is the pinnacle of doctrine concerning His righteousness, demonstrating how God’s hate and love are perfect in His righteousness. Our flawed views of righteousness tend to skew even further our warped views of love and hate. Esau and Jacob were perfectly treated by God…..I think Joe’s statement to me several posts back, that these things are a paradox to us, not God; fits well.
Comment #16, well put,…primary Elders are ones that have certain leadership qualities that help them organize and encourage other Elders. It is also interesting how this can occur in the same local congregation as well.
Blessings,
Chris
I just think we need to be careful when comparing what we should do to what God does. We are not God. God can do these things and not sin, he cannot sin, everything he does is just and right.
Hate is a powerful and destructive thing in our sinful hands. It destroys the church(Universal and local). It does things that we can never mend. In scripture, for us I see hate as sin. Something I wouldn’t want to commend.
Benji,
I employed the phrase “first love” not so much as a matter of my choice as because the English translations phrase it that way.
I think we’re in agreement this far:
1. The Bible speaks about God hating and speaks favorably about people hating some people and some things.
2. The Bible speaks far more about the love of God and exalts it far above hate.
3. The Bible speaks about hate in many (really, most) contexts as a bad thing.
4. Language about God hating people and God approving of people hating people, although it appears in the Bible, makes us all a bit uncomfortable. Certainly it does for me.
However, we must each decide what we’re going to do with things that are undeniably in the Bible but that make us uncomfortable. Will we…
1. Pretend that those things aren’t there?
2. Explain those things away through hermeneutical gymnastics?
3. Allow God to speak for Himself, confess our inability to reconcile it all, and do our best to be obedient?
I choose #3.
I believe, for example, that we ought to hate Mohammed. Here is a man who, in rebellion against God, created a false religion that will be the particular pathway to Hell chosen by untold millions of people.
I notice now that the news includes a story about Steven Anderson and his horrible preaching and activism. Allow me to make clear that I do not hate President Obama and did not have him at all in mind when I authored this post. The Bible speaks of God hating, as I said above. However, the Bible clearly and decisively tells us that we must respect those who are in authority over us. Anderson is in sin for failing to abide by that biblical commandment.