Generally I would believe....over the centuries....when a nation is on the very brink....a nation with a strong Christian history....the typical pastor would enter his pulpit with an extreme solemnity and soberness....maybe even with prayers of mortification. I think that is what it was like in England during World War II....and other European nations.
Today....with America on the brink....a nation with a very strong Christian history....the very typical pastor will enter his pulpit with a twinkle in his eye...and a smile from ear to ear.
In the former instance there is a rider on a white horse...."On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lord's." (Revelation 19:16) In the midst of the concern and the worry....the congregation knows and is reminded that their king has already secured victory....only it will be in his timing. That king is Jesus Christ.
In the latter....it is a different rider on a white horse....and on his hat is written....Make America Great Again....and his victory has a date attached to it....thirty days from now!
In the early to mid-1930s in Germany...after the despised Weimar Republic was done away with....most of the men in the pulpits also had that twinkle in their eye and with a smile from ear to ear....because Germany was going to be great again....but just as with us today....there were a smaller number of pulpits with pastors who in great solemnity cried out to God for mercy....and warned their congregations.
Laodicea was a city in the right place and at the right time. It was very wealthy....and very artsy....and there were a lot of Jews....formerly from Babylon....that lived there. The city had two amphitheaters....and the ruins of one remind me a lot of the Colosseum on Los angeles. There was another odd quirk about the city....when the Roman persecutions came....the people of the empire were told that they had to worship the Roman emperor as a living god....or they were persecuted even unto death if they did not....well the persecution seemed lax at Laodicea because it almost seemed a lost cause to the emperor with so many Jews and Christians there. That is my take anyway on reading about this.
It that was the case....then the church at Laodicea was not only rich....in what was considered by Rome a 'free city'....and so involved with all the entertainments available....that it must have thought that God had just really blessed it....and that they were doing just fine as a church! That is indeed the case today in our megachurch culture....where they have enough money to build these great and beautiful churches....with state-of-the-art everything....and where the world may be crumbling around them but they have their free and happy little communities of their own.
Those were believers in the Laodicean church of Revelation....for Jesus said to them...."Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline. So be zealous and repent"....(Rev: 3:19)....and were given a stern a warning as you could get if they did not...."I will spit you out of My mouth" (Rev: 3:19.)
Those seven letters to seven churches in one way or another address all of us. I may not be lukewarm....but there are enough other condemnations in those letters for me. My hope is that we might come to see our gross guilt....not only in the hope that we put in politics....a hope that surpasses our hope in the return of Christ....but our hope in a man who is the antithesis of everything that we are told to be.
Trump seems to be doing away with his old reliable....we are one....glorious nation under God....(which we most definitely are not)....and replacing it with America's Golden Age to come. The good old days are not coming back folks....Jesus is coming back! Each and every one of us might want to read again....and reread and reread and reread....and meditate upon....and plead with God for wisdom....those seven letters to seven churches in Revelation two and three....to see where we might be....and repent accordingly.
