Chapter 2 — Not a Word of Praise from Jesus!

It appears that we are better pleased with ourselves than Christ is with us. But if His truth hurts, it also heals.

“Unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans, write …” (Revelation 3:14, KJV). For many decades we have assumed that the message is addressed to the church at large. But surprisingly, the message is addressed to its leadership. We leaders have often erred in passing the message on to the laity, berating them, and blaming them for holding up the finishing of God’s work.

If the message is addressed primarily to individuals in the church, we have some serious problems. Seventh-day Adventists have been dying for nearly 150 years. In practically all these funerals, we have expressed the confident hope that the deceased will arise in the first resurrection, something impossible without their personal, individual repentance.

Therefore, if Christ’s call to repent has been addressed primarily to individuals, it has already been largely heeded, for we must assume that many of these faithful saints did repent in preparation for death. In that case, the Laodicean message becomes virtually a dead letter. We can expect little if any further result except continued personal repentance as has prevailed for well over a century. This is how the great bulk of our people, especially youth, now view the message.

Although each of us must apply individually and personally any counsel in the messages to the seven churches, this call to “repent” is specifically addressed to more than individuals. And when we begin to understand to whom it is addressed, the content of the message itself also takes on a more arresting significance.

The appeal in Revelation 3:20 (“if any man hear my voice”) contains a significant Greek word, tis, which primarily means “a certain one,” not just “any one.” For example, it was not just “any man” who “fled away … naked” at the betrayal of Jesus as told in Mark 14:51, 52. The word tis is used and is translated as “a certain young man.” In the Laodicean message, it would obviously refer to the “angel” as the certain one to whom the message is addressed. Unquestionably, Jesus quotes the Song of Solomon in His appeal, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock” (5:2, LXX). The “certain one” who must hear is His beloved, the church. The Lord appoints leadership to role models and examples. Christ said of Himself, “For their sakes I sanctify Myself” (John 17:19).

“I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. … So then, because you are lukewarm … I will spew you out of My mouth” (Revelation 3:16). We could superficially conclude that because the “angel” is undeniably “lukewarm,” automatically Christ has kept His promise and has rejected us. This assumption is based on the KJV and some other translations. It has posed a serious problem to some sincere church members and caused them to despair of the organized church ever becoming truly reconciled to Christ.

But the original language includes a key word, mello, that means, “I am about to spit you out” (NIV). It becomes clear in Revelation 10:4, where John says he was “about to write” what “the seven thunders had uttered,” but he did not write, for “a voice from heaven” forbade him. Jesus stands poised, on the brink of vomiting us out. What He actually says in vivid modern language is, “You make Me so sick at My stomach that I feel like throwing up!”

This is a normal human phenomenon in extreme emotional disgust. A wife in East Germany read her newly released STASI file (the Communist Secret Police). She found to her horror that during years of pretended loyal fidelity her husband had been secretly informing on her to the dreaded police. Her involuntary reaction: she went to the bathroom and vomited. Unpleasant as it may appear to us, Jesus tells us that this is how He feels, not about us, but about our cherished lukewarmness. This does not mean that He does not love us, or that He is not faithful to us. (The German lady also loved her husband!)

Why Does Jesus Feel This Way?

Why doesn’t He say something good about us? Is He too severe? Any president of a company, board chairman, or military officer, knows that he must praise his subordinates in order for them to do their best. The human leadership of the remnant church is surely the finest group of people in the world! Wouldn’t it be wise of Christ to say at least something nice about us, how diligent we are, how clever we are, what we have achieved after our 150 years of trying so hard? But He doesn’t.

For sure, He is not trying to discourage us. He simply wants us to face reality, so that we can correct the problem and prepare to hear Him at last say “Well done!” when the commendation will mean something.

His answer, explaining why He feels like throwing up, helps us understand the reality of our situation. We haven’t realized it, but it’s devastating. The next vision of Revelation introduces Him as a “Lamb as though it had been slain” before whom the hosts of Heaven and the “twenty-four elders” bow in heartfelt worship, singing an anthem of total devotion:

“You were slain,
And have redeemed us to God by Your blood
Out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation,
And have made us kings and priests to our God”
(Revelation 5:6, 9).

All Heaven understands and appreciate what it cost Him to redeem us, how He went even to hell, how He tasted the equivalent of our second death, to save us. They sense the “width and length and depth and height” of that “love of Christ which passes knowledge.” In contrast, “the angel” of the church of the Laodiceans, living in the concentrated light of six thousand years of Good News revelation is not deeply moved. When we should feel the same degree of appreciation, our little shriveled-up hearts are half-frozen. “You are lukewarm,” Jesus says.

No wonder our superficial professions of love and devotion are nauseating to Him. He gave everything for us! When He compares the extent of His sacrificial devotion with the meagerness of our heart-response, He is acutely embarrassed before the watching universe. Is it hard for us to imagine how painful this is for Him?

Let Us See Reality as Heaven Sees It

Here we stand on the verge of the final crisis when our spiritual maturity should be so far greater than it is. Yet our childish indifference hurts Him. Peter’s cowardly denial of Him at His trial was easier for Him to bear than our mild and calculating devotion in such a time as this.

Arnold Wallenkampf comments incisively on the nauseating aspects of the “group-think” mentality that was so common among Seventh-day Adventist leaders and ministers a century ago and still is so today:

The main fault for the rejection of the 1888 message lay not with the people at large but with the ministers.

This startling disclosure must be seriously considered by each person in our church today who is a Seventh-day Adventist minister or a teacher or a leader in any capacity (What Every Adventist Should Know About 1888, page 90).

Many of the delegates to the Minneapolis conference became accomplices in the sin of rejecting the message of righteousness by faith, through action according to the laws of group dynamics. Since many of their respected and beloved leaders rejected the message at Minneapolis they followed these leaders in rejecting it … what we today call groupthink. …

It is not a pleasant thought, but nevertheless it is true that at the Minneapolis Conference leaders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church reenacted the role of the Jewish leaders in the day of Jesus. During Christ’s ministry on earth the Jewish people were preponderantly favorable to Him. It was the Jewish leaders who later urged them to demand His crucifixion. At the Minneapolis conference in 1888 it was the leading brethren who spearheaded the opposition against the message (Ibid., pages 45-47).

But What Has This to Do With Us Today?

Jesus does not say that it was the ancient Jews’ rejection and crucifixion of Him that makes Him want to vomit. What bothers Him is that the “angel” of the church on the stage of history in the final act of the great drama, knowing the history of the Jews, should repeat it while warmly professing to love Him. We can appreciate His nausea if we consider how sickening it is to see any adult acting out the naive fantasies of a child.

He says that we “say, I am rich, and I have been enriched, and I have need of nothing” (Revelation 3:17, Greek). We don’t say this verbally, but He correctly hears the language of the heart:

The lips may express a poverty of soul that the heart does not acknowledge. While speaking to God of poverty of spirit, the heart may be swelling with the conceit of its own superior humility and exalted righteousness (Christ’s Object Lessons, page 159).

Yet we are naive about our true state in full view of the universe. Even in the eyes of thoughtful non-Adventists we pose a pathetic sight. The literal Greek sharpens the impact by inserting a little article ho, which means the one: “You don’t know that of all the seven churches you are the one that is outstandingly wretched, and the one who is miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked” (verse 17).

No one of us as a mere individual is worthy of this distinction on the stage of world history! Christ must be addressing us as a corporate body.

There is Hope for Us

The Lord would not spend the remainder of the chapter telling us how to respond if He had already finally rejected us. We make Him sick at His stomach, but He pleads with us to relieve His pain. This message to Laodicea is the most critically sensitive and urgent in Scripture. The success of the entire plan of salvation depends upon its final hour; and Laodicea’s problem is bound up with that crisis.

Jesus says, “I counsel you to buy of me gold tried in the fire” (verse 18). In addressing the Seventh-day Adventist denomination and in particular its leadership, He tells us that the first thing we need is … not more works, more activity, more strategies and programs. He told us in verse 15, “I know your works.” Our works are already feverishly intense. Peter identifies the “gold tried in the fire” as the essential ingredient in believing the gospel—the faith itself, which always precedes any works of genuine righteousness (1 Peter 1:7).

In other words, Jesus tells us that what we first need is what we have long confidently claimed that we already possess—the knowledge and experience of righteousness by faith. But what we have moves us only to lukewarmness. It is the true understanding that causes the hosts of Heaven to serve so ardently “the Lamb who was slain.” They are totally moved by the very heart of the message—“Christ and Him crucified,” a motivation that shames us for our petty obsession with our own eternal security. Christ’s diagnosis strikes at the root of our leadership pride.

The Subtlety of Our Spiritual Pride

Until the publication of Wallenkampf’s book in 1988, our denominational press generally maintained that we were “enriched” at the time our leadership supposedly accepted the beginning of the loud cry message a century ago.¹ In recent years we have begun to take an abrupt about-face, and now the truth is openly recognized that “we” did not accept it.² This new candor is phenomenal and refreshing.

But surely Christ doesn’t tell us now that we still need that “gold” of genuine faith? Yes, He says that in order for us to heal Him of His painful nausea we need the “gold” of genuine faith, and furthermore we need to buy it—that is, pay something in exchange for it.

But why doesn’t He give it to us? He insists that we exchange for the genuine our helpless views of righteousness by faith which have nurtured our lukewarmness. We are caught in an obvious contradiction, claiming that we adequately understand and preach righteousness by faith, when its proper fruits have been too sadly lacking. This is attested by the pervasive lukewarmness of the church. As lukewarmness is a mixture of cold and hot water, so our spiritual problem is a mixture of legalism and a poorly understood gospel.

A good dinner of wholesome food is ruined by even a slight mixture of arsenic. We have reached the point in world history where even a little legalism mixed with our “gospel” has become lethal. The confusion of past ages is no longer good enough for today. Believing the pure unadulterated gospel (in the Biblical sense) is wholly incompatible with any lukewarmness. The presence of lukewarmness betrays an underlying or subliminal legalism, a recognition that we as leaders are embarrassed to acknowledge.

We have thought that we possess the essentials of that “most precious message.” What we have done is to import Evangelical ideas from popular churches who have no understanding of the unique truth of the cleansing of the sanctuary:

As the Jews crucified Jesus, so the nominal churches had crucified these messages, and therefore they have no knowledge of the way into the most holy [place], and they can not be benefited by the intercession of Jesus there. Like the Jews, who offered their useless sacrifices, they offer up their useless prayers to the apartment which Jesus has left; and Satan, pleased with the deception, assumes a religious character, and leads the minds of these professed Christians to himself, working with his power, his signs and lying wonders, to fasten them in his snare (Early Writings, page 261).

This gradual process of absorption has accelerated for decades. We can never obtain the genuine, says Jesus, until we are humble and honest enough to give up, to exchange, the counterfeit to “buy” the genuine.

It is at this point that Christ meets resistance from us. Almost invariably we pastors, evangelists, administrators, theologians, leaders, teachers and independent ministries, will protest that we have no lack of understanding. Conservative “historic Adventists” and arch-liberals alike make the same boast from their antithetical positions. Group-think loyalty forces us to insist that we do understand, thus we “have need of nothing.” Feeling competent, we cannot “hunger and thirst after righteousness [by faith]” because we are already full.³ We need only a louder voice, more clever ways to “market” what we already understand.

The Heart of the Problem

The issue is not whether we understand and preach the popular version of righteousness by faith as do the Sunday-keeping Evangelical churches. We can do that for a thousand years and still fail to give the unique message the Lord has “commanded” us to give.⁴ God has not called us to ecumenism. Rather, what have we done with the advanced light that Ellen White said was “the beginning” of the loud cry and the latter rain?⁵

If it is true that we have powerfully proclaimed righteousness by faith for decades, why haven’t we turned the world upside down as the apostles did? If genuine righteousness by faith is the light that will lighten the earth with glory (Revelation 18:1-4), why haven’t we lightened the earth with it? And why are we losing so large a percentage of our own youth in North America?

Could it be that we are actually making the proud claim that Christ charges on us in His Laodicean message? His diagnosis is on target. The Lord’s servant has often said that when we do “buy” the “gold-tried-in-the-fire” kind of righteousness by faith, the gospel commission will be speedily finished like fire going in the stubble.6 That hasn’t really happened yet—not with 900 million Muslims and nearly a billion Hindus still unreached, plus many millions more professed Christians and others.

Here we come to the great continental divide in Adventism. At this point we turn to one side or the other. Either Jesus is wrong when He says we are “poor” and “wretched” and we are “rich” as we claim; or we are indeed “poor” and He has put His finger on our most sensitive plague spot of leadership pride. His words were a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense to the leaders of the ancient Jews; are they that to us as well?

Something Else That’s Not “Free”

Christ makes even clearer that we must give up something, pay something, when He specifies the second purchase that we must “buy” from Him—“white garments that you may be clothed, that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed” (verse 18). Addressing the angel of the church, He makes clear that it is as a denomination that we appear in this shameful condition. The remedy He urges upon us involves the basic principle of corporate guilt and repentance:

1. We cannot “buy” this robe of Christ’s righteousness to put on 99% or less; we need it 100%. Righteousness is never in any way innate; never our own. All that we have of ourselves is unrighteousness. In other words, except for the grace of Christ, we are no better than any other people. If we had no Saviour, we would be stark “naked.” The sins of others would be our sins, but for His grace.
2. The realization of this truth humbles our pride in the dust. There is no way for us to obtain that special robe of His righteousness unless we first become conscious of our spiritual nakedness and are willing to exchange our false ideas for the truth, which alone can cover our shame.

The impact of His call does seem extreme. Are we not a prosperous, well-respected denomination of some six million members with great institutions? Do we not claim to be one of the fastest-growing churches in the world? Why doesn’t Christ appropriately praise us according to our achievements?

3. He is not talking about achievements. The problem of our “nakedness” is our lack of understanding the gospel itself. This is where the charge hits the raw nerve of denominational self-esteem and arouses our indignation. If we can deflect the point of Christ’s words by insisting that He is speaking only to us as individuals, we can always duck out. We can assume that it is some other individual who is spiritually “naked” while corporately we are well-dressed. It is only when we understand “the angel” to be the corporate leadership of the church that we begin to squirm most uncomfortably. Our pleasant sense of being denominationally well-clothed is rudely dissipated.
4. Consider for example the plight of another body of professed Christians—the Mormons. Their theological “garments” have been their trust in the divine inspiration of Joseph Smith and his writing of the Book of Mormon. But plain evidence for all the world to see indicates that the foundation of their “faith” is a monstrous fraud. In proportion to their knowledge of those facts and their intellectual honesty, imagine their corporate shame!

In our case, our problem is not our “27 doctrines” or our history. Their general validity is unquestioned. Our corporate nakedness is our want of the one truth that alone can make those “27” meaningful—“the message of Christ’s righteousness” which the Lord tried to give us a century ago. That message would lighten the earth with glory if we “had” it:

Justification by faith in Christ will be made manifest in transformation of character. This is the sign to the world of the truth of the doctrines we profess (Ellen G. White 1888 Materials, page 1532).

One interest will prevail, one subject will swallow up every other,—CHRIST OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS (Review and Herald Extra, December 23, 1890).

How long can we go on proudly insisting that we have the genuine article?

In the case of the Mormons, as a corporate body they probably do not care about their theological and historical predicament because (and we speak kindly) they are not a people who were raised up by the truth of the third angel’s message. They do not profess to stand before the world as those who “keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.” Nor do they have a keen sense of spiritual conscience as Ellen White’s writings have imbued in us. If the Mormons can sustain their community socially and economically, they will probably be content corporately to go on without that “white garment” of Christ’s righteousness to cover their historical and theological shame.

5. But we cannot do so, for we possess a corporate conscience devoted above all else to truth. This church was raised up by sheer force of the word of truth. Praise the Lord; our conscience will inevitably be aroused by Christ’s “straight testimony.” Especially in North America, the cradle of Adventism, where our “nakedness” is becoming increasingly apparent, we will sooner or later be forced by reality to face what Christ says.
6. The realization of a shared corporate guilt saves us from the pitfall of a holier-than-thou fantasy. No one of us can criticize another; we partake together of the fault for which Jesus rebukes us.

When We Can “See” Our Nakedness We Will Naturally Have Discernment

The third item Jesus specifies is the “eyesalve, that you may see” (verse 18). The Lord tells us to anoint our eyes with the eyesalve He offers. Once we “buy” the “gold” and the “white garments,” our vision will automatically be clarified. We will begin to see ourselves as the watching universe sees us and as thoughtful people see us (who we say are still in “Babylon”). The picture is clearly more than the need merely of individuals.

What is at stake is the image of the Seventh-day Adventist Church at view in current world history. Our divine destiny requires us to make a far greater impact on world thinking. That impact of the future will not be our charitable “works,” in which others will always far out-do us. It will be the Good News content of our message. It will be a distinct, unique presentation of righteousness by faith—in a message that goes far beyond the message by the same name of the popular churches. Once we learn to “see,” we shall immediately discern the contrasts between what we have assumed is righteousness by faith and what is the genuine “third angel’s message in verity” that Ellen White recognized is implicit in the actual concepts of the loud cry message.

Christ now gives us the only direct command in His message: “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Therefore be zealous and repent” (verse 19). Our sinful nature instinctively recoils against this kind of love—the chastening kind. We must therefore not be surprised that Christ’s serious call to repentance meets with resentment from those whom He loves and resistance from those who love not the truth.

But He assures us that He loves us with close, intimate family love (philo, He says) which justifies rebuke and chastening and makes it possible for us to endure. Ellen White’s life-ministry is an example. The Spirit of Prophecy has never flattered us! Neither does “the testimony of Jesus,” its Author.

There is ample reason to search further for the meaning of that all-important command of the True Witness, “Repent.”

Notes for Chapter 2:

1. Examples: The Fruitage of Spiritual Gifts, by L. H. Christian, 1947; Captains of the Host, by A. W. Spalding, 1949; Through Crisis to Victory, by A. V. Olson, 1966; Movement of Destiny, by L. E. Froom, 1971; The Lonely Years, by A. L.White, 1984.
2. See for example the February 1988 issue of Ministry; What Every Adventist Should Know About 1888, by Arnold Wallenkampf; From 1888 to Apostasy by George Knight, and Angry Saints, by the same author.
3. Note that there is only one kind of righteousness that Jesus says it is “blessed” to “hunger” for—the kind that is by faith (Matthew 5:6).
4. Compare Testimonies to Ministers, pages 91, 92.
5. See Review and Herald, November 22, 1892.
6. See Selected Messages, Book One, page 118.