Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters! Tonight, we’re going to wrap up the introductions Jesus gives to the seven churches of himself with the church at Laodicea. First, I do ask for your prayers in my continued Christlikeness as I come up with more and more that I need to work on. Second, I ask for your prayers for my financial situation. Third, I ask for prayers in the last area that I choose to not discuss. For now, let’s go to the text of Revelation 3:14. This time, we’ll be using the NASB.
14“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: The Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God, says this:
First, Jesus is the amen. Amen is a word that we say at the end of our prayers with the idea of “so be it.” Naturally, we should hope that we are praying good prayers then because if we do not want something to be, we should not declare “so be it.”
What does that have to do with God? The answer lies in asking what is being amened. Jesus is essentially the amen of God. What God is, Jesus is, so when God’s nature is being described, Jesus is the amen of that description. This is along the same lines of Jesus being the image of God and the exact representation of his being.
It also fits in with Jesus being faithful and true. This is a description that would belong to YHWH in the Old Testament. As we said last night, in describing Jesus as true. YHWH was true in the sense that he was the one who kept the covenant with the people of God. Jesus is following that and he is the one who keeps his covenant with the people of God, this time seen as those who have placed faith in him.
What about him being the beginning of the creation of God? This is why I chose to go with the NASB this time as the NIV has him as the ruler of God’s creation, which would certainly go against the way groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses use this verse. For them, to say that Jesus is the beginning of God’s creation means that Jesus was the beginning in that he was the first one that God created.
However, the Greek word in this case is arche, which can indeed mean beginning, but it can also carry the idea of origin and is consistent with what we’ve seen elsewhere. Jesus, as God’s Wisdom, would be the source of the creation of God.
The message to the church then would have been to see Jesus as the source of all that is, which is a good message for a church that prided itself on the wealth that it had. Today, we should consider this in our own churches. The church I attend is a small church that doesn’t have much financially, but if we have Jesus, we are better off. On the other hand, if there is a megachurch that has much in the area of glitter and gold, but does not have Jesus, they are a deprived church.
Of course, being in a small church does not mean one is in a church that has Christ no more than being in a big church means one is in a church that does not have Christ. Each church must be examined on its own and readers should make sure they are in a church that does hold to the truth of who Jesus is.
Tomorrow, we shall start to see what takes place in the throne room of Heaven.
Support Deeper Waters on Patreon!
