The church at Ephesus had tested those who had pretended to be apostles and found them to be impostors, but one has to wonder how such people could ever have gotten to a position within the church, where it became important to understand their motives. Paul spoke of people who had followed up on his ministry in Galatia in order to undo the work he had done there for the sake of the Gospel. He said they were “false brethren brought in unawares, who came in secretly to spy out our liberty, which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage” (Galatians 2:4). He later described such folks as false apostles, deceitful workers who sought to be seen as ministers of righteousness (2Corinthians 11:13, 15). Their purpose was to divide the flock into parties or sects through flattering words and an appearance of the love for the truth (cf. Romans 16:17-18).
Jude, also, claimed this sort secretly crept into the Body of Christ (Jude 1:4), preaching false doctrines that turned the grace of God into a state characterized by lustful behavior. This doesn’t mean that they “preached” lawless behavior. On the contrary, they preached obedience to the law, which in effect denies the lordship of Jesus (Jude 1:4). Jesus cannot be our Lord, if the Law is our lord. Preaching law, according to Paul, excites lustful behavior, because the sin principle in man uses the commandment to produce all kinds of lustful thoughts (Romans 7:8), which ultimately results in sinful behavior and spiritual death, even though the law was intended for good (Romans 7:10-11). Preaching law, therefore, denies the word of God and Jesus as Savior (Jude 1:4). WWJD is the acronym by which we should live. This, not law, embraces the lordship of Jesus. He, not law, is our only Master (Jude 1:4), but these false apostles speak evil of things, concerning which they are ignorant, because they have never practiced submission only to Jesus (Jude 1:10).
In Revelation 2:3 Jesus sums up what he had just told the church at Ephesus, namely, that he is aware that they have persisted in their steadfastness, enduring many things for the sake of his name, and they have not grown weary in doing so.
The word patience (G5281), which is used by Jesus to describe the church’s behavior, often implies persecution, as it does in Luke 21:19. There the faithful are betrayed by parents, brethren and friends for the sake of the Gospel. In fact, they are hated by all men, simply because they embrace the name of Jesus (Luke 21:16-17). For all intents and purposes, this is exactly how we should understand Jesus’ praise of the church at Ephesus in Revelation 2:3.
Although the church at Ephesus seemed to be doing well, they did have a serious problem. They left their first love (Revelation 2:4), but what does this mean? Paul had an interesting comment in his first letter to Timothy. Remember, Paul left Timothy at Ephesus to confront those who were teaching something different from what they had been taught (1Timothy 1:3). Paul told Timothy that the end of his ministry to the church was love, sincerity and a good conscience (1Timothy 1:5), but some had strayed from Paul’s manner and had turned aside to preach useless speculations (Vulgate).[1] They fancied themselves to be teachers of the law, but they neither knew the end of their own words nor the aptness of the confident conclusions they drew (1Timothy 1:6). What does this mean?
It would be difficult to draw certain conclusions about the 1st century AD preachers who strayed from Paul’s manner, but, if we look at those who preach speculatively today, we would find ourselves in the midst of some of the most prominent preachers and authors of books in modern history. Men love to speculate about when Jesus is coming or where our nation is heading, but they neither know what they are talking about nor the harm the do by drawing such confident conclusions, as those conclusions pertain to what they say should soon occur.
Because they are so prominent in the church, and because they have such a great following, it appears as though they speak for all of us, so all believers appear to the ignorant and nothing more than ‘star gazers,’ whose only message is an empty jangling about a future that never occurs as we predict. Our words have become weak and worthless, because of the baseless message preached by these speculators. What suffers is the Gospel, because they have made the word of God of no effect among the people, who listen to the gobbledygook of these imposters. They are quick to point out how the Gospel has lost ground over the years, and that the world is spiraling into a deep pit of unrighteousness, but they fail to grasp their own responsibility for this trend, which is helped along by their own long list of failed speculations. Their works have weakened the effect of the Gospel upon our world.
If this is an accurate picture of what speculation about the future has done to the Gospel in our day, perhaps something similar was going on during the 1st century AD. I find it interesting that, in his second epistle, Peter mentions scoffers who defamed the Gospel by asking where was the promise of Jesus’ coming (2Peter 3:3-4). It seems that something was going on in Peter’s day, only a few years prior to God’s judgment upon the Jewish nation, that made the scoffers message more powerful than it should have been. Perhaps, it was a powerful argument made against the Gospel, because the first century AD had it own speculators who taught Jesus would return on this day or that, or perhaps openly pointing to whom they thought was the Beast, his number or the “man of sin”, leaving a long list of failed predictions / speculations. Thus, these failed works would have strengthened the argument of the scoffer who preached doubt, namely, that Jesus would return at all. Our first love ought to be preaching the Gospel, because it is the power of God reaching out to save the world (Romans 1:16), empty speculations weaken the power of God that reaches out to the world in love.
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[1] “There are some who have missed this mark, branching off into vain speculations; who now claim to be expounding the law, without understanding the meaning of their own words, or the subject on which they pronounce so positively.” (1 Timothy 1:6-7 – emphasis mine)
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