April 25, 2014

SMYRNA: CHRIST’S CLAIM AND CHRIST’S DEMAND

Revelation 2:8—11 (contd)

WE have seen that the church at Smyrna was battling with difficulties and threatened with worse to come. In view of that, the letter to Smyrna opens with two resounding titles of Christ which tell what he can offer to those who may be confronted with a situation such as the one that faced the Christians at Smyrna.
(1) Christ is the first and the last. In the Old Testament, that is a title belonging to God. ‘I am the first,’ Isaiah heard God say, ‘and I am the last’ (Isaiah 44:6, 48:12). This title has two aspects. To Christians, it is a tremendous promise. Come what may, from the first day of life to the last, the risen Christ is with us. Of whom then shall we be afraid?
But, to the general population of Smyrna, it was a warning. They loved their city, calling it the first in Asia, and they were all striving as individuals to be one better than their neighbours. The risen Christ said: ‘I am the first and the last.’ Here is the death of human pride. Beside the glory of Christ, all human titles are of no importance and all human claims become ridiculous. When Julian, the Roman emperor, had failed in his attempt to banish Christianity and bring back the old gods, and when he was meeting his death in the attempt, he said: ‘To shoulder Christ from out the topmost niche was not for me.’ He recognized that he could not remove Christ from his true place above all others.
(2) Christ is the one who was dead and is alive again. The tenses of the verb are of prime importance. The Greek for was is genomenos, which means became. It describes what we might call a passing phase. Christ became dead; it was an episode through which he passed. In Greek, the verb which the Authorized Version translates as is alive is not a present tense but an aorist, which describes one action completed in the past. The right translation is came to life again (as in the Revised Standard Version), and the reference is to the event of the resurrection. The risen Christ is the one who experienced death and came to life again in the triumphant event of the resurrection, and who is alive for evermore. Here again, there are two aspects.
(a) The risen Christ is one who has experienced the worst that life could do to him. He had died in the agony of the cross. No matter what happened to the Christians of Smyrna, Jesus Christ had been through it. Jesus Christ can help because he knows what life is like at its worst and has experienced even the bitterness of death.
(b) The risen Christ has conquered the worst that life can do. He triumphed over pain and over death; and he offers us through himself the way to victorious living.
In this passage there is also a demand, and the demand is for loyalty, loyal even when death is the price to be paid. Loyalty was a quality of which the people of Smyrna knew something, for their city had flung in its lot with Rome when Rome’s greatness was only a far-off possibility, and had never wavered from it in its allegiance, in fair weather and in foul. If all the other noble qualities of life were placed in the balance against it, loyalty would outweigh them all. It was the writer Robert Louis Stevenson’s prayer that ‘in all the chances of fortune, and down to the gates of death’ we should be ‘loyal and loving to one another’.

Barclay, W. (2004). The Revelation of John, Volume 1 (3rd ed. fully rev. and updated). The New Daily Study Bible (90—92). Louisville, KY; London: Westminster John Knox Press.

On this day…

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• Purpose Driven Consulting – 2025
• Numbers 12 – 2024
• Numbers 11 – 2024
• Acts 9:31 – 2011
• Psalm 41:11-12 – 2011
• Nahum 1:3 – 2009