Letter To Laodicea Analysis

Letter to the Church at Laodicea Unlike in the letter to the church at Ephesus, in this letter Christ gives no praise to the church. To understand why one must understand the history of Laodicea. The Seleucid King Antiochus 2 found Laodicea, during the third century BC. The city was the richest in the region and connected Ephesus to the western region of the Asia Minor. The city was well known for its industry, banking and textile, which contributed to its wealth. Unlike in Ephesus there was a large community of Jews, which lived in the city and seemed to have been inflicted with some of the ill behavior that their Christian counterparts possessed. Worth stated “Just as John speaks censorious word of the Christian population, rabbis spoke similarly stern rebukes of the wealth and luxuriousness of the Jewish community” (Worth 213). It would seem
In this description we see another connection to the Old Testament, “These OT allusions are used to indicate that Christ is the true Israel and the divine ‘Amen, the faithful and true witness’ to his own resurrection as ‘the beginning of the new creation of God’, in inaugurated fulfillment of the Isaianic new creation prophecies” (Beale 297). Once this connection is made then John shifts to Christ’s complaint pertaining to the Laodicea church. He claims they are lukewarm and “the church in Laodicea ay have seemed notably successful to the outside observer, and was itself blind to its own spiritual ineffectiveness” (Hemer190). This shows that the judgment was not passed on the Laodicea church for being unenthusiastic but instead due to their work. They a poor in their work of enduring and resistant witness, due to allowance of secular practices to seep into their religious belief system. Christ repeatedly labels the city as things that contradict what the city is, for instance he calls the city