The Water Arrived Warm

Laodicea had money and no water.

The city sat on a plateau in the Lycus valley with no spring worth the name, so it piped water in from miles off through a stone line whose pipes, where they have been dug up, are still furred shut with lime. Six miles north, close enough to see, Hierapolis steamed with hot springs people travelled to sit in. East, under the mountain, Colossae had cold water off the heights. Laodicea had neither, and what reached the city arrived flat, chalky and warm.

They were not poor. When an earthquake levelled the place under Nero, Rome offered relief and Laodicea declined it, rebuilding out of its own treasury. That is the civic character the last of the seven letters is written to: a town that could rebuild itself from scratch and could not get a decent drink of water.

The letter opens by naming its author.

The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God's creation.

Revelation 3:14

Beginning is archē — origin, source, the point everything starts from, not the first item in a series. It is the word Paul used of Christ in a letter he told this town by name to read (Colossians 4:16):

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together... he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead.

Colossians 1:17-18

A generation earlier this congregation was handed a document saying everything holds together in Christ. Now Christ writes to them himself, and has to introduce himself again.

1. He asks them to be cold

I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm... I will spit you out of my mouth.

Revelation 3:15-16

The verb is emeō — vomit. And in the middle sits a wish the standard sermon on this text cannot absorb: would that you were cold. If cold meant spiritually dead, Christ has just told a church he would prefer them apostate. Both temperatures here are good. Hot water is what Hierapolis sold, cold water is what Colossae had, and each does something for a body. Tepid water only makes you gag.

The charge is not that they lack enthusiasm. It is that they are useless, and Jeremiah had already put that failure in the medium Laodicea struggled with:

My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.

Jeremiah 2:13

A hewn cistern is an achievement — labour, skill and stone — and worth nothing if it leaks. The complaint is not that Judah was lazy but that Judah built something which did not do the one thing it existed for. It still looks like a cistern. You find out at the bottom of a dry summer.

The honest complication is that the popular reading is not invented out of nothing. Scripture does prize heat:

Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.

Romans 12:11

Fervent is zeontes — boiling. Paul wants the church at a rolling temperature, so anyone preaching against lukewarmness has a verse to stand on. The trouble is that Paul offers one good temperature and Jesus offers two. The cure here cannot simply be more effort, because cold would have been accepted and cold is not more effort than tepid.

2. The inventory was wrong

For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realising that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked.

Revelation 3:17

Three claims, five contradictions. The hinge is not realising. They are not defending this position; they have never examined it. Sin you argue about is at least in view. These are books nobody has audited in years.

The sentence had been said before, in another kingdom, centuries earlier:

Ephraim has said, Ah, but I am rich; I have found wealth for myself.

Hosea 12:8

Different covenant, different language, same self-assessment. It is what prosperity says wherever it is comfortable.

Jesus had shown how such an audit ends:

Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry. But God said to him, Fool! This night your soul is required of you.

Luke 12:19-20

The mechanism is the point. The man is not corrected by a better argument. The valuation is performed by somebody else, and the figures turn out to have been wrong for the whole period he was happy with them.

But the charge is not wealth, and Deuteronomy will not let us make it one:

Beware lest you say in your heart, My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth... it is he who gives you power to get wealth.

Deuteronomy 8:17-18

Verse eighteen does not confiscate the money; it relocates the credit. Laodicea's balance was real and God is not against it. What no creature in any tax bracket can say truthfully is the last clause: I need nothing.

3. Buy from me

I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see.

Revelation 3:18

He has just called them poor and now sends them shopping. The three items are not random: gold to a banking town, garments to a valley famous for wool that was dark, eye salve to a district with a medical reputation. Each line hands Laodicea its own export back, as an import, from someone outside the walls.

The economics are deliberately impossible, and old:

Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

Isaiah 55:1

That is not a contradiction God failed to notice. It is aimed at the assumption underneath the word buy — that you arrive as a customer with leverage. You bring nothing and receive everything, but you must come and ask, which is the one move a self-funded city has trained out of itself.

The goods are not what they look like either. Gold refined by fire comes through the furnace or not at all, so nobody orders it from a catalogue and has it delivered intact. The garments are handed over already made, which is pointed in a town that was very good at weaving. Neither can be manufactured locally.

Then the salve, and the hardest sentence attached to it:

For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind... If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, We see, your guilt remains.

John 9:39-41

The ointment is only ever sold to people who will say they cannot see, which is precisely the sentence Laodicea has announced it does not need. The cure is in stock and the price is the confession, in a church that has costed itself as needing nothing.

4. He is outside

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

Revelation 3:20

This verse usually turns up on evangelistic literature, addressed to someone who has never believed. Read where it stands, the address is a church — the paragraph closes with let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. Christ is not outside the sinner here. He is outside the congregation that meets in his name, knocking on a door he owns. That is a worse picture than the tract's.

The line before it borrows an older one:

Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent.

Revelation 3:19

My son, do not despise the Lord's discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the Lord reproves him whom he loves.

Proverbs 3:11-12

Laodicea is the only one of the seven letters with no commendation in it, and the only one where he stops to say whom I love. The harshness is not the opposite of the affection; it is the form the affection had to take.

What Christ asks for at the door is dinner. The last time Luke sat him at a table with people who could not see:

When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it... And their eyes were opened, and they recognised him.

Luke 24:30-31

The eye salve and the meal turn out to be one prescription. Sight did not come from the explanation on the road, though he gave them one for seven miles. It came at a table.

The complication is the pronoun. If anyone hears is singular, sitting inside a letter to a whole congregation. He does not promise to repair Laodicea; he promises to come in to whoever opens. So it is possible to eat with Christ in a church that never answers the door, and possible to sit in that church for years without hearing the knock.

The offer at the end

The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne.

Revelation 3:21

That is said to the worst church of the seven, and nothing has been withdrawn. The mouthful spat out in verse sixteen is offered the throne in verse twenty-one, and the qualification is not improvement. It is opening a door.

So the week's work is not to generate heat. It is to find the sentence. Somewhere in your life is something you have stopped praying about, not because it failed but because it is fine: the marriage that works, the money that covers it, the job you are good at. That is where I need nothing lives, unsaid. Name one and pray about it this week as though it were in trouble.

Then be quiet long enough to hear a knock. He is at the door at dinner time, waiting to be asked in by people who own the building.