Early in the last book of the Bible, the apostle John saw a vision of seven golden lampstands, in the midst of which was one “like a son of man”, the glorified Jesus Christ. He told John to write down the things he had seen in a book, and to send that book to seven Asian churches: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. Then he told the apostle plainly that these seven lampstands in his vision represented those seven churches.
That book John wrote at the Lord’s command was Revelation.
That makes Revelation the only book of the Bible we know about for which there were at one point seven original manuscripts, presumably mostly identical. For all its unusual characteristics, Revelation has one of the best-attested manuscript traditions in all of scripture.
Anyway, we may assume each of the seven churches received its copy in due course. Unlike many letters written in the first century, we have its contents to read today.
Three Ways of Reading the Letters
How should we read the letters to the seven churches? There are three main views to consider:
1/ Seven Existing Churches
These were actual churches operating simultaneously during the late first century when John wrote. You can’t send a letter to anyone or anything that has yet to come into existence. It was not “save what you write for a future day when these churches will exist”, but rather “send it to the seven churches”, meaning they were carrying on doing what churches do as John was seeing his vision.
Moreover, we can confirm at least two of these churches existed (and speculate about a third) from the book of Acts and the writings of the apostle Paul. The Ephesians got their own letter from him a few decades earlier. Thyatira appears in Acts 16 as the home city of Lydia, a convert of Paul in the city of Philippi. It is reasonable to conclude Lydia went home at some point and took the gospel with her, resulting in the establishment of a church there. Paul also mentions the church at Laodicea four times in his letter to Colossae, and it appears he even wrote them a letter now lost to us. Thus, it is evident the church in Laodicea was already well established prior to the writing of Colossians in AD60-61.
Other New Testament writers do not mention the remaining four churches, but this should not surprise us if we have a timeline for the NT that is even close to accurate. The final chapter of Acts represents the end of our canonical NT historical record. That takes us to somewhere between AD60 and 62. Revelation is generally thought to have been written over thirty years later, though Preterists early-date it to AD69 or 70 in order to jibe with their eschatological system. Both scenarios allow plenty of time to have established churches in these other four cities by the time John wrote.
When we get to the content of the letters in chapters 2 and 3, we will find each church had an established track record the Lord either praises or corrects. So then, the first level on which we can read the seven letters is quite literal. These things happened, and the Lord had something to say about them.
2/ Seven Types of Churches
Both the Lord Jesus and the writers of the NT gave thought to the needs of potential future generations of believers. Thus, some interpreters suggest the seven churches represent basic types of churches that have always existed throughout the Church Age.
Of course, we cannot realistically expect any given local church to behave in exactly the same way as the believers in, say, Sardis or Thyatira in every respect. They are not “types” in that sense. Rather, we might say the various problems each of the seven churches experienced and the good qualities some of them exhibited were common ones that the Lord found it useful to address. We can often see ourselves mirrored by one or more of them.
3/ Seven Eras of the Church
Some commentators suggest the seven churches foreshadow seven successive periods in church history. According to this line of thought, Ephesus would be the apostolic church (AD33-100); Smyrna, the era of the early church martyrs (AD100-300 or so); Pergamum, the compromised church of Constantine (AD300-600); Thyatira, the catholicized, corrupted church (AD600-1500); Sardis, the dead church that gave rise to the Reformation (AD1500-1700); Philadelphia, the church of the Great Awakening (AD1700-1900); and Laodicea, the modern, lukewarm, “Churchian” church (AD1900-today) [all dates approximate]. Naturally, different commentators hold different views about the beginnings and ends of each era, and characterize them differently.
While the schema has some superficial appeal, its broad-brush approach renders it almost completely useless. The Lord Jesus was assessing the condition of local churches at the micro level, to the point where he actually names individuals both noble and less so (“Antipas my faithful witness”, “that woman Jezebel”). The prophetic interpretation of the churches is a macro-level assessment of Christendom in its entirety. Applying the Lord’s analyses at the global level, as the commentators have done, often admits of millions of exceptions in any given generation.
If the rebukes to Thyatira are supposed to apply to the Roman Catholics of the Middle Ages, why did the Lord have nothing to say to comparable numbers of Eastern Orthodox who lived and worshiped in the same timeframe? They surely had their problems too, but they were different problems. If Philadelphia speaks of the Reformation, presumably it speaks exclusively to Protestants. Where is the direction to faithful Catholics of the period? There must have been millions who did not fully agree with their leadership, but stayed officially Catholic. Again, we may reasonably say a Laodicean spirit characterizes many Western churches today, but surely not the millions of persecuted Christians of the Third World, many of whom are being martyred for their faith.
Personally, I question whether the Lord intended us to interpret these letters prophetically.
How to Read Them
So then, how should we read these letters? I find them most useful as a sort of checklist. Nothing we experience in our local congregations is ever really a new problem. It’s all been done before, and the word of God addresses it. All these problems once existed in local churches simultaneously, and we can learn from every one of them simultaneously. “He who has an ear” will do that.
The names of these ancient cities sound exotic. We may imagine these churches representing every corner of the known world of the day. When you actually look them up on a map like this one and pan out, you quickly realize they were all in the west end of modern-day Turkey, and all relatively close together. [The AI-generated map above was not terribly precise, but it gives the general idea.] Their spiritual problems not only existed simultaneously, they also existed within of a few thousand square miles of one another.
Decimation Doesn’t Cover It
We might also note that today there are fewer than 400,000 recognized Christians today in a nation of over 92,000,000, making believers roughly 0.3% of the Turkish population. That suggests the local churches the Lord Jesus addressed in the late first century through John were never expected to persist as a continuous testimony throughout the Church Age. That may seem sad to us, but it’s not the way our Lord elected to build his church. Local testimonies come and go. Turkey received its witness in its day. If it looks like the Lord eventually shook the dust off his feet and took the gospel elsewhere, perhaps that may be the case.
What the letters show us is the wild variety of tactics Satan is prepared to use to stop the Lord Jesus from building his church as he promised, and the tremendous capacity we human beings have for messing up a good thing on our own. Taken together, the seven letters give us a strong indication what sort of corporate behavior pleases the Lord, and what sort will earn a rebuke from the one who has “eyes like a flame of fire”. When he commends, he is inordinately generous by my standards. When he corrects, he misses nothing, and the potential for the removal of a lampstand is always on the table.
I Know
Moreover, let us always remember the Lord knows. He sees those who take his name as we really are, not the more comforting view we often have of ourselves. He says, “I know” nine times in seven letters. We should not miss that.
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