11.
Life for a Dying Church.
We are justified in concluding that such a condition as that of the Church at Sardis is not final and irreversible. The very fact that this letter came to that comm-unity indicates that it was possible to restore and revive. They were not so utterly dead as moribund, as is seen from the fact that in the next verse " ready to die " is the expression applied to some among them, or perhaps to some lingering works which still survived. They were at the point of death, with much of their spiritual life extinct, but here and there was a spark among the ashes, which His eye saw, and His breath could fan into a flame. To the people of a Church sunken in spiritual deadness and torpor, the lamp of faith waning and almost extinguished in their hearts, the Lord presents Himself as having the fulness of all spiritual gifts ; able therefore to revive, able to recover, able to bring back from the very gates of spiritual death, those who would employ the little last remaining strength
» H. Scott Holland.
126 A DEAD AND ALIVE CHURCH
which they still retained, in calling, even when thus " in extremis " upon Him.
1. We may assume that the name by which the Lord reveals Himself at the opening of this message, " He that hath the seven Spirits of God," had a special bearing upon the state of the Angel and the Church to whom the message was to be transmitted. The Spirit was thought of, to use the later terminology of the Church, as the " Giver of Life " and of all its sevenfold gifts ; the seven Spirits of God were but forms of that Divine life which He — one, yet manifold — imparted. These He, the Lord of the Churches, possessed and could call His own ; for thus it is that He can " quicken whom he will " : thus He can impart the Divine life, in all its marvellous variety, to those who stand in need of it.
^ Bengel suggests, and earlier commentators had anticipated the suggestion, that the name of the Angel of the Church in Sardis may have contained, some assertion of life ; which stood in miserable contradiction with the realities of death which the Lord beheld in him ; a name therefore which in his case was not the utterance of a truth, but a lie ; the name affirming and implying that he was alive, while in truth he was dead ; " Zosimos " would be such a name in Greek, " Vitalis" in Latin. Hengstenberg considers the suggestion not improbable, but it appears exceedingly improbable and far-fetched. The use of "name" as equivalent to fame, reputation, character, is as common in Greek as in English.!
2. Christ as the Giver of life is the thought which a dead or decaying Church like that of Sardis needs most. There is a Spirit which gives life, and Christ is the Lord of that Spirit. The whole fulness of the Divine energies is gathered in the Holy Spirit, and this is His chiefest work — to breathe into our deadness the breath of life. Many other blessed offices are His, and many other names belong to Him ; but highest of all is the name which ex- presses His mightiest work, " the Spirit of Life." . . . The " rush- ing mighty wind " is its best emblem — blowing where it listeth, unsustained, and free, visible only in its effects, and yet heard by every ear that is not deaf, sometimes soft and low, as the respira- tion of a sleeping child, sometimes loud and strong as the storm.
» R. C. Trench.
REVELATION iii. i 127
The very name " the Spirit " emphasizes that aspect of His work in which He is conceived of as the source of Hfe.
There is the antidote for a dead Church, a living Spirit in the sevenfold perfectness of His operations. He is the Spirit of con- solation, of adoption, of supplication, of holiness and wisdom, of power, and of love, and of a sound mind ; and into all our deadness there will come the life-breath which shall surely quicken it all. Here, and here only, is the hope of a dead Church, and here is the explanation of that which is unique in the history of Christianity as compared with all other religions — its power of self -recuperation, and, when it is apparently nearest extinction, the marvellous, the miraculous, way in which it flames up again because the Spirit of the Lord is poured forth. It brings into prominence not so much the existence and the operations of that Divine Spirit who vitalizes the Church as the continual energy and activity of the ascended Christ in bestowing that Spirit. He has the seven Spirits as He has all other attributes ; Himself in His earthly life being filled with its fulness, and it abiding with Him for ever. He has it to impart.
K " The Church is not a thing like the Athenaeum Club," he cried. " If the Athenaeum Club lost all its members, the Athen- aeum Club would dissolve and cease to exist. But when we belong to the Church we belong to something which is outside all of us: which is outside everything you talk about, outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but it does not belong to them. If we all fell dead suddenly, the Church would still somehow exist in God."i