THE AMEN

The Laodicean church was not doing well. Tepid, where they should be passionate, self-satisfied, instead of repentant, and preoccupied while the Master stood outside the door, they needed the help that only heaven could give. They lacked tested treasures, clean clothing, and eye salve.

Peter explains the first. ‘That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ’, 1 Pet. 1. 7. Faith is based not on wishful thinking, but on the revealed promises of the word, vv. 8-13. It was the ‘Spirit of Christ’ which was in the prophets who wrote these promises!

It is for this reason that the One knocking at the Laodiceans’ door introduces Himself as ‘the Amen’. ‘For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen’, 2 Cor. 1. 20. The Lord Jesus is the sum of the promises of God: God ‘hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ’, Eph. 1.3. In other words, the gold - indeed, that which surpasses pure gold - is the value of the promise of the indwelling Christ invested in the believers and purified through trials. ‘Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature’, 2 Pet. 1. 4.

The Saviour also introduces Himself as ‘the faithful and true witness’ because the Laodiceans needed to be wearing white raiment. This clothing represents not so much the perfect righteousness of God given as a gift through Christ, 2 Cor. 5. 21, as it does Christ’s faithful witness in the heart and outworked in the life: ‘fine linen, clean and bright, ... is the righteous acts of the saints’, Rev. 19. 8, NKJV.

Similarly, the Lord calls Himself ‘the beginning of the creation of God’ because these believers needed a fresh vision of Him in a particular way. They - and we - need to see Him as the One who stoops to make clay and anoints blind eyes, creating devoted hearts that can’t take their eyes off Him, for ‘Since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind’, John 9. 32.