27: World News & Prophecy – Introduction to Revelation 2

[Darris McNeely] We're going to take a bit of time here as we go into chapters 2 and 3 of the book of Revelation because these are two very important chapters dealing with messages to seven congregations of the church in the first century in Asia Minor. You have a map on our board. Those of you that are watching at home, this will be put up, should be on the post-production period of our class here. But this shows the setting for the churches that receive a message from Christ here in the book of Revelation. Now, you may recall that as we end at chapter 1, we found that the book of Revelation essentially is to be read in all of these churches.

The message comes from Christ. In verse 11 of chapter 1, I’ll just go back and review that. Christ says,< “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last,” ;and “What you see, write in a book and send it to the seven churches which are in Asia: to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamos, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea” ;(Revelation 1:11).

And that’s the entire book. And then at verse 19, Christ says, “Write the things which you have seen,” ;this is again to John, who is on the island of Patmos receiving this revelation, “and the things which are, and the things which will take place after this. The mystery of the seven stars which you saw in My right hand, and the seven golden lampstands: the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands which you saw are the seven churches” ;(Revelation 1:19–20).

I'm going to go back to this slide right here and show you essentially what a lampstand would have looked like as it's being referred to here in the text. And of course Christ says He is the one who walks among the seven golden lampstands.

And each of these lampstands is to symbolize the church. And there would have been a light on the top of each one of these. And so the symbolism carries into any number of different directions. One very obvious one, if you would recall from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus said to His disciples and therefore to the church that “You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14). And so that would be something to carry into this symbolism right here. As a lampstand standing alone here represents each of these seven congregations that are receiving the message of the book of Revelation from Christ at this time. And a light would be upon that.

And symbolizing the importance of their example as the people of God, as disciples in whom the Spirit of God dwells and representing that. And so this is the setting that we covered in the first couple of classes dealing with the book of Revelation and the whole message. And you might just note something here, verse 19.

He says, “Write the things which you have seen.” He's saying that to John, and John will see a lot of fantastic images and visions as the book unfolds. And He says, “And the things which are, and the things which will take place after this” (Revelation 1:19). You may recall in my opening lecture of the class here, I talked about understanding the book of Revelation in both a linear perspective, but also kind of a multidimensional perspective with these events folding back over one another.

And that the fact that they are given by the living Christ who is standing in the midst of these seven lampstands, the resurrected Christ, who is dwelling in eternity. And this is the vision that John sees. And that gives us a very, very big perspective on which to understand and look at what we will see read about in the book of Revelation as things that are present tense.

And we'll talk about that as we go through the messages to the seven churches especially, and the things which are to take place after this. Again, showing the progression of unfolding world events that are depicted in these seals and these images that we're going to look at as the story flow of the book of Revelation is open portraying events primarily at the end of the age and the day of the Lord. And so this is given from Christ who is directing all of this from the time of the first century, but also at our present time.

And so one of the things that we should remember is that you and I are reading the book of Revelation here in, this is January 2025 when this class is being held. And we're looking at this book that was written 2,000 years ago, and we're looking at it to understand events today, but also events that have transpired within that 2,000 year period as we look at the prophecies of the book of Revelation.

But at the end of the discussion, you and I look at it at this point in time, this is where we are. And this is then how we must seek to understand the book. Just as those in the churches in Ephesus and Smyrna and all the others heard the book read to them in their day in the mid-90s A.D., they only had their perspective at that point in time, remember? And think about that. They didn't have our viewpoint, which we look back and we see a lot of time and events and we lay that into an interpretive study of the book of Revelation. They didn't have that. They didn't have that. But they had the book and they had to understand the book from their point of view in that point of antiquity, the 95-96-97 A.D. And yet that teaching was for them just as it is for us. So keep that in mind. That's an important point of biblical understanding and interpretation. As we look at the scriptures, we've talked in other classes about a proper hermeneutic or interpretive approach to the Bible. And one of those is understand what it meant to the original audience, the original audience, those who first heard it. That's part of the interpretation. Now, you and I are, as I said, we're hearing it, reading it, seeking to understand it from a modern perspective, 2025. And so we have to take a lot of other things into account while at the same time looking at this from that perspective. So with that in mind, then, let's go back here to the map and just orient ourselves again in time.

We are, John had been in the city of Ephesus, and you will see that city right down here at this particular point. And my pointer will be kind of wiggling over that here, as you can make that out right here, when he had been exiled to the island of Patmos. So let's go to this larger blow-up here of that point and see that the island of Patmos is right down here. This was a kind of a penal island during the Roman period where prisoners were sent. John was a political prisoner, quite old at that time, but this is where he was exiled. And he was exiled under the reign of the Roman emperor named Domitian. And you'll need to kind of remember that name, Domitian. And he directed a period of persecution upon the church at this particular time. And this is where he was. Now, we see that in Revelation 2 and 3, there are seven churches mentioned. We've already listed them from chapter 1 verse 11. And these are seven congregations of the church that existed in the first century in Asia Minor, which is today the modern nation of Turkey. So that's what you're looking at. I will say up front here, in recent years, I've developed a deeper passion for the study of these seven churches. I've always had that from my earliest studies in the book of Revelation. I mentioned at the beginning here of the class that this was probably the first big in-depth Bible study that I had in my youth in the church on a Wednesday night Bible studies in my home congregation in Missouri back when I was a teenager. And we went through verse by verse the book of Revelation. And the study of these seven churches and the messages to these seven churches has always been an interest to me. But in recent years, I kind of have gone into a deeper dive because back in 2021, now about four years ago, I made a trip to Turkey to visit these congregations. There are the sites of these congregations. You can go to the sites of each one of them. They all have different names today. Arabic names, Turkish names, because they're all cities located in larger cities in western Turkey. I went there on a study tour, and I've made two trips back. So I've made a total of three trips in about four years to Turkey. And I'm getting ready to make my fourth trip here in a few months, a couple of months, and taking a group of UCG, United Church of God members to Turkey to visit. This time, we're going to see just five of the seven churches. I've taken the last tour I did. We went to all seven congregate sites and other sites. But for the sake of this particular tour, we're only going to go to five of the seven churches. Why? Well, it's because at two of the locations, there's nothing to see, nothing from the ancient period other than a few rocks and some pillars that are thrown up. And you're in the middle of a city, a modern city. And I've elected to take that time and put it to some other sites that deal with the time of the first century New Testament period on this particular trip. So we're doing a five of the seven church tour here in a couple of months, and everybody seems to be happy with that. But I have been to all seven of them. It's quite an industry today, tourist industry in Turkey. Within the Christian world, there is a great deal of interest in the study of the seven messages and the sites there in Turkey.

Tour group that I work with, they have groups coming all the time. There are conferences that are held. My first trip was at a conference of about a hundred people from all over the world that came to hear lectures and see the sites of the seven churches. We've actually had Feast of Tabernacles sites in Turkey to visit the seven churches. I think we'll probably have another one in the future as well. And so the church has done this several times. And my study comments will be reflective of my visits there, as well as the study into the text and what that has. So I'm going to take a bit of time to do this over this class and probably the next two to get through this. I think it's an important chunk of time to devote to the seven churches and what we have. So with that, let me set a little bit more of the background.

These are seven congregations. They were not the only seven congregations in the time of the first century AD. There were other churches of God in that region, multiple, many churches of God's. Why only these seven mentioned? The text does not tell us. One conclusion you might reach, which is, I think, a logical inference is that the characteristics of the locations, the history, and what was taking place in the congregations in the first century, Christ, the head of the church, knew, would represent conditions, germane to the church, then all the other congregations, as well as throughout time. I think that's one inference that we have to take from that. We do know from internal evidence in the New Testament that there were other congregations. We have, there's two other cities that are mentioned here. If you look at the city of Laodicea right here, just to the north of it there is a city called Heropolis. You see that in kind of a lesser type. And then to the south there is a location here of Colossae. You know the book of Colossians was written to a church right here in the city of Colossae. And so in the environs of Laodicea, where there was a church, there were two other churches, Heropolis and Colossae. These are actually mentioned in Scripture. And they would have probably been taken care of by the same pastor or group of ministers as they were. You can stand in Laodicea on the site of the ancient Laodicea. And you can look north and see Heropolis about seven or eight miles to the north on a clear day. And if you look south, you can see the mountains above Colossae and near that location of where that city was located. They were that close.

But there were congregations in other communities throughout Asia Minor. When did they and how did they begin? How did these churches spring up? Here's the basic probability. In the book of Acts, which we will get to in due time in chapter 19, Acts chapter 19, we read of the Apostle Paul spending three years in the city of Ephesus right here in kind of the middle of it right here. He took up residency there. He taught from a school that he rented, a school called the School of Tyranus. And there he trained disciples, kind of like we're doing here with ABC. He probably had a classroom maybe smaller than what we have here at ABC. And out of it, every day, he taught. It's what we're told in the book of Acts. Those disciples likely went out and came from that entire region in this map here of Western Asia Minor. And they likely went back to Laodicea, Colossae, Pergamum, and they took the message of the gospel themselves. Now it's also possible that Paul traveled through that area, though the book of Acts doesn't tell us that.

And it's again possible that he went to some of those places himself during that three-year period. But also, it's also highly likely that the people that he trained went out and they took the gospel and churches started up. And a church of 15, 30, 40 or so would have been in these locations. Again, don't think of them as multi-hundred-member congregations. They were probably much smaller than that, about the size of the congregations that some of you come from. And they would have been house churches in that they would have been meeting in the house of a member, probably a wealthier member who had a big enough home to invite everybody in on the Sabbath. That's kind of the setting of a lot of these churches here. So out of what would have been many other sites, these seven are chosen by Christ. Now, I want to make a point here. Hold your place in Revelation 2. If you will, turn back to the book of Ephesians. It's important that we understand this as we get into the message to these church congregations to understand that the message, as we've already seen from chapter 1, comes from Christ. And Christ is the head of the church, which is His body. And we're told that back in the book of Ephesians at chapter 1.

And let’s just jump to verse 22, Ephesians chapter 1 verse 22, where it says, “He put all things under His feet”—and “He” here is the Father. And “His” would be referring to Christ. Okay. And so the Father put all things under Christ’s feet and gave Him, Christ, to be “head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:22–23).

So Ephesians 1:22 and verse 23—very important verses to understand in terms of defining what the church is. The church is a spiritual body. I don’t think—I know we haven’t got to that doctrine yet. I’m supposed to teach that one this semester. But the church, composed of individuals who are members of the body of Christ in particular, that’s what the church is. It is a spiritual body, even though we corporately call ourselves the United Church of God and International Association. We’re organized on a set of legal bylaws and a constitution to define how we run the operation and the business of the church and define it and what it is.

At the end of all of that discussion, the church is a spiritual body.

;And any of us who've been baptized into the church have been told that we were not baptized into a denomination of men, but into the body of Christ. Okay? So remember that from what was intoned over you at your baptism. I remember that quite well because we're baptized into a spiritual body, ultimately. We may attend with the United Church of God and claim that membership, and I do, and I'm glad to be here. But ultimately, I am a member of the spiritual body of Christ, and Christ is the head. So with that, as you turn back to Revelation, and we look at these messages from Christ to His church, we're looking at some very important information coming from the living Christ, the resurrected, glorified Christ. This is who John is seeing in this vision. And so as we then look at these seven congregations and the characteristics of each one that are brought out in the message, and then the message and what Jesus says to each congregation, how do we interpret that? What is the proper way, what is the best way to interpret these seven messages and these seven churches? I want to spend a minute talking about that because that's important too here at the outset of our study.

As I said a bit ago, today, right now, there's a great deal of interest in the Christian, American evangelical world in these seven churches. You could find on the internet multiple presentations on these seven churches by various ministries, and you can also find some very well done documentaries on this. I've seen a couple in recent years myself that were done by media teams that went to Turkey, went to all these locations, interviewed scholarly experts, and their presentations are very helpful. They bring out a lot of the history and a lot of the story there. And there's probably some that are being made even as we speak. We actually taped the last tour I did over there. We brought Jamie Schreiber along with his camera, and we did a lot of taping with the idea of doing some type of documentary ourselves. We haven't done that yet. Got back and time and materials hasn't allowed that to happen.

But we got a lot of footage of that, took a drone over there and whatever, and so that hasn't been done. But my point is there's a great deal of interest in these congregations and in these messages. The interpretation of these seven messages have been varied as well down through the ages and the study of them. I have a number of books on my shelf, some new, some old, that go into the story and the study of these churches as well. One of the oldest ones is written by a man, an Englishman named William Ramsey. Sir William Ramsey. He wrote his book about the turn of the 1900s after traveling over to this region and visiting all the locations of these congregations. He wrote a book called The Message to the Seven Churches. I have an original copy of that one on my shelf. In more recent times, there have been any number of other scholarly studies of these seven congregations as well. I've read a few of those and looked at them. Some have good information, some go very deep into the Greek language to understand what is being said here and have that available for us. So I've studied, like I said, I've done a pretty deep dive into this through the years to seek to understand it here.

There's... when you sort it all through, there are essentially three different ways to interpret the messages to the seven churches or ways that they have been interpreted through the decades by scholars, denominations, biblical commentaries. And each one is an interesting one to look at. There's... you know, in terms of our study, let me list what they are. First is to look at each of these seven messages as a message to each congregation, Ephesus to Laodicea, in the first century setting, which it was. No question about that. This is what we're reading, a real-time message to each one of those, and looking at it in that point of view. And as I mentioned earlier, that's a starting point for a proper study of the text to begin to draw out the meaning there. And so that's one view there.

Another point of view of the seven churches is that each of these messages can apply to the Church throughout all the ages—from the time of the first century to the end of the age. Understand this, and this is an important point from Scripture: Christ said, "I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18).

Now, one level of understanding of what Jesus said is that the Church would always be in existence—that the Church would never die. He said, "I will build My church" (Matthew 16:18), which He did. And we've read about that in the book of Acts, especially in chapter 2, on the Day of Pentecost, where we read about the beginning of the Church there. We're going through that story in the book of Acts, and it's Christ who built the Church. As we've read, He is the Head of the Church, and it is His body. It is a spiritual organism. That Church has never died—it has always existed in some form or another.

Now, in the first century, we have seven, and actually more than seven, congregations defined in the New Testament.

In the church today, we look at our history and our time. Some of you know a little bit about that history. We in the United Church of God, formed about 30 years ago, coming out of the Worldwide Church of God period. And the doctrinal heresy that disrupted and dissolved, essentially, that parent body of your families and myself, my family. And we can know a modern history of our roots, of our origins. And we can go back 100 years or less. We can study where Herbert Armstrong came among the Church of God's Seventh Day, learned about the Sabbath. First, his wife learned about the Sabbath from a member of that church, Church of God's Seventh Day. He thought that she was nuts and tried to disprove her. And in the process, becoming convinced of the Sabbath, and that's what began his study into the Scriptures. But he came among, and was a part of, that Church of God's Seventh Day, which still exists. They still are a legal corporate entity. We've had communication through the years with individuals from that body. They keep the Sabbath. They don't keep the Holy Days. They didn't at that time, as I believe. But anyway, that was part of the modern story.

And we can go back further. In fact, we can trace elements of Sabbath-keeping, truth-keeping peoples from the time of the first century to today. And we can know that the church has never died out. It's been very, very small at various times and places. And sorting and sifting through the histories of various groupings of people in the 1500s and the 900s AD, etc., can be quite a challenge. And I've done that, or at least looked at some of the probably secondary tertiary sources. We don't have, I don't know that we have primary sources from a lot of them, in one case it's a little bit vague, but we can, you can trace this story.

Let me tell you how I've approached this. In the wake of the heresies in the Worldwide Church of God in 1995, as I said, I've always had an interest in studying church history. I saw the truth completely disrupted, thrown out the window, the Sabbath, Holy Days, etc. But I knew one thing from my studies that that was not the first time we'd ever gone through that, or the church had ever experienced that. I knew enough of church history to know that same thing happened in the first century. And so I pulled out my books and went to the encyclopedias and started doing my own study going back again, just to understand what were the arguments in the first century that did away with the Sabbath, the Holy Days, the teaching about the Millennium, etc. All the ones that we hold in our fundamentals. And how did that get, that faith once delivered, how did that get trashed and thrown out?

You can trace a lot of that story. You can see the arguments that came into the church. The Sabbath was done away with by the church at Rome very late in the first century AD. Scholars have unearthed enough evidence to show that. That was probably one of the first that went by the wayside. And I began to look at that and I realized that you can look at various groupings of people down through time that held parts of the truth. They may have kept the Sabbath. They may have kept the Passover on the 14th day of the first month and they didn't keep Easter. And you can see that. You can determine that. And you have to ask yourself, am I looking at the church? Am I reading a scrap out of history about people that we would have a spiritual kinship with? Possibly, in some cases, quite likely.

I've got a book on my shelf about the Sabbath that shows how people in the 1500s in Eastern Europe, when the Bible first came into their hands in their own language, they began to read the Bible for the first time.
And as they read through it, one of the first things they came to realize was the Sabbath should be kept. And they started keeping the Sabbath, teaching it to other people, and in a community in Eastern Europe, in the mountains, in the dark areas of those places, groups of disciples sprung up keeping God’s Sabbath and other things. Were they remnants of the Church? Possibly. We don’t know everything about every part of their teaching. I conclude that God knows. And I think that’s the most important thing. And from Scripture, God says, you know, “I will be with you even until the end of the age.” And that’s a promise that we can hold to.

One of the things that I concluded from that study then, and still hold today, is that it’s easier to trace the truth from the time of the book of Acts in the first century to today and find where people kept the Sabbath, where people kept the 14th-day Passover and even the Holy Days, or began to believe in the idea of a literal 1,000-year reign on the earth. My mother actually was taught that, and she was in the Methodist Church. All right? She was taught that as a young girl from her Methodist relatives that there would be a literal 1,000-year reign on the earth. Now, she was going to church on Sunday and keeping Christmas at the time, but there was a scrap of truth that some read in the Bible and believed.

So it’s easier to trace truth than to always have an unbroken line through the ages of what we would look at as the church. Understand that the church that you’ve grown up in and what you’re learning about here at ABC with a body of belief, 20 fundamentals of belief, well-defined, observed, many other teachings that we have—that’s not always the church through the ages very likely. Having that full body of knowledge, there was a great deal restored in the period of the Worldwide Church of God under Mr. Armstrong. No question about that. And we appreciate that, and that’s one of the reasons for the existence of the United Church of God.

So truth, true teaching, true doctrine has, you know, gone through the ages and the spiritual body of Christ has always existed, but Christ says that He knows those who are His. And wherever people who are, let’s say, a Sabbath keeper in the 1580s in what would be today Romania or Hungary in Eastern Europe who had a copy of the Bible in their own language—and if they read Revelation 2 and 3—what would they draw from it? Think about that. 1500s, early 1600s. What would they have drawn from this message?

Well, they would have drawn something, and we’re going to read what, you know, they would have had an admonition to overcome, to come out of sin, to not get entangled with idolatry. They would have come to that. And so what do we read? And then how do we understand it? Well, we’re going to look at the text, and we’re going to draw that understanding as well.

So my point here is the second matter is that each message can apply to the church through the ages, various times. And so there’s something that each church can learn, as we would today. Now there’s a third area of interpretation about these seven churches that has been held for many, many years, and that is that each church—Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos—represents a distinct time period of the church from the first century to the end of the age, a distinct time period.

Some have called it eras. You could call it divisions. That is that the message to the church at Ephesus was a message representing the church of the apostolic age, the time of Paul, the time that we’re reading about in the book of Acts. And the message to the church at Laodicea, to go all the way to the end, would be a distinct message for the church at the end of the age. And the other five intervening would represent messages to churches at various distinct periods down through history.

Now that is another level of interpretation that has been held by many different groups of people—the Seventh-day Adventists. The Scofield Bible taught that in its early editions as well. I was taught that as part of the Radio Worldwide Church of God in my youth. And that was a view that was held by the Church and with a distinct emphasis upon the message to the church at Philadelphia, which we’ll talk about more in-depth when we come to that particular message as well.

And so those three ways have been largely held to look at and to interpret the message to the churches. How do we look at this today and its relevance for us today in the United Church of God? I want to just briefly here in a few minutes lay a foundation for that because we have a statement in our booklet on the Book of Revelation Unveiled that I’ll go to here in a minute.

I want to make a comment that I mentioned that I’ve had a long study of this. Back in the mid-1980s, I audited a class on church history that was given at Ambassador College in Pasadena at the time by a faculty member at that time. And he did his whole series on church history, which was very good. I learned a lot in that.

But he mentioned at the beginning of his presentation that he had talked to Herbert Armstrong about how to approach Revelation 2 and 3 and the messages to the churches as he was going through the whole story of church history, which involved a whole lot of extra material like the Reformation and Simon Magus and all that we don’t get into here in this particular class.

And he mentioned that Mr. Armstrong had told him at that time, do not emphasize the teaching about the distinct eras of the church. Refer to it, but don’t emphasize that, which he didn’t in his particular presentation. I have the transcript of those classes, and I recognize that that’s a bit anecdotal, but it’s a part of the, let’s say, oral history of the church.

Now fast forward to the United Church of God today. And how do we look at these messages? What do we say? Because we have a long history, and our literature can be unearthed on the internet as to virtually everything we said, taught about any particular teaching in the Radio Worldwide Church of God period.

When the booklet on Revelation was being written, and a manuscript had been delivered about 1999—this is four, five years into the history of the United Church of God—the Doctrine Committee of the Council, along with the Prophecy Subcommittee, which I was a member at that time, I was a member of the Prophecy Subcommittee, I was tasked to review the manuscript written by a long-time minister of the Church, Roger Foster, of the book of Revelation, which has become our current booklet on that topic.

And I’ve got all the voluminous notes and handouts and comments from many, many hours of deliberation that we did at that time. I’ve gone back through that in recent times just to recall what we said about Revelation as a whole, and there’s a lot of comment about, a lot of the teachings about Revelation, the beasts and the horns and the heads, that at that time we needed to sort through. What are we going to teach on this? What is going to be our teaching and our understanding?

And in particular, Revelation 2 and 3. And there was a lot of discussion, and the Doctrine Committee at that time largely held to the view that, I mentioned that Mr. Armstrong had said to this instructor at the time, don’t emphasize eras. And my documentation bears that out—that these three ways to interpret could be possibilities and ways to look at this message. Again, a multi-dimensional way.

But what we did was, what we settled on with the Doctrine Committee’s review and the Council’s approval at that time, is what is in the booklet right now. And it’s not a heavy exegesis of all seven of these messages, but it is a synopsis.

And we took a quote from a conservative commentator named John Walvoord. I’ll put the name on the board here. The quote is in the booklet.

John Walvoord has written—he’s deceased now—but he wrote a number of works on prophecy. And here’s what he said on Revelation, and particularly Revelation 2 and 3. This is what we put into our booklet:

“Many expositors believe that in addition to the obvious implication of these messages, the seven churches represent the chronological development of church history viewed spiritually. They note that Ephesus seems to be characteristic of the apostolic period in general, and that the progression of evil, climaxing in Laodicea, seems to indicate the final state of apostasy of the church. The order of the messages to the churches, that is, beginning with Ephesus, concluding with Laodicea, the order of the messages to the churches seems to be divinely selected to give prophetically the main movement of church history.”

We include more of this particular quote. I’m not going to go through all of it here, but it’s in our booklet that we have on the book of Revelation. I agree with this statement. I agreed with putting it in at the time, my part in the committee, and I feel that it’s a good position to be in because it helps us to look at all of the various methods and ways to interpret the message—first century application, something applying to all the churches at all time, and a prophetic spiritual flow from the time of the first century to the end of the age at Christ’s return. It allows for that, and I think that that’s what we all came to a consensus on, and the Doctrine Committee of the Council approved at that particular time.

A lot more could be said, but at the end of the discussion, as you and I start to study into it here, 2025, January 25, we’re not in the first century, we’re not in the 1500s, we’re not in 1945 or 1968 as we interpret these seven messages. We’re 2025. What do we learn? What do we learn?

Because at the end of the discussion, I think we have to look at each of the seven messages and ask ourselves, what do we learn for today? And I’ll show you that there’s a lot for us to learn from every one of the seven messages for our life today going forward, and especially as we face the times ahead of us prophesied in the book of Revelation of a world power called Babylon the Great to arise that will foist the deception upon the entire world.

And I think that what Christ has given in these seven messages to these seven congregations stands the test of time to the church throughout all time, and particularly for those of us upon whom the ends of the age have come, to paraphrase Peter, and that’s the approach that we will take as we delve into this.

So that’s a long introduction, but I thought that it would be necessary to lay that down. In our next class, we’ll start into the book of Revelation chapter 2 and the message to the church at Ephesus, keeping all of this in mind as our background and as our approach to looking at this.

So we’ll come back in the next class and begin with the message to the church at Ephesus.