Daily Devotional For January 31, 2025
To the angel of the church of . . . . write. Rev 2:1, 8, 12, 18; 3:1, 7, 14.
When I was a teen-ager there was a very popular television show called Star Trek. It was about the “Starship Enterprise,” an outer space battleship that roamed the galaxy defending the “Federation” against Klingons and other evil species. The ship’s captain was a normal human being named Kirk who expressed the typical range of emotions from elation at victory in battle to panic when everything was going wrong. His subordinate was Mr. Spock, a humanoid with pointed ears who came from the planet Vulkan and was totally devoid of emotion.
A running subplot in nearly every show was Captain Kirk losing his cool in a crisis and Mr. Spock interjecting in a dry tone of voice, “Captain, that is not very logical.” You see, unlike beings from “Vulkan” human beings have two major ways to assess any situation; one is reason and logic, the other is feeling. Emotions, of course, can be a major protective device for human beings, but they can also lead people to do silly and unproductive things, as the show often illustrated.
Western logic can be illustrated by the equation: A + B = C. Everything drives toward the conclusion. But the Hebrew logic of the Bible is different: A + B = A! Hebrew logic returns back on itself. It is like the notes on a piano. As you go up the musical scale (do, re, mi, etc.) you keep coming back to the same notes, but they are at a higher, more advanced level than before. In Western logic the emphasis is on the conclusion, in Hebrew logic the emphasis is on the center.
The seven churches seem to be structured along the lines of Hebrew logic, A-B-A. Two of the churches are not criticized by Jesus at all–Smyrna and Philadelphia (the second and the sixth); two seem to be in serious decline–Pergamus and Sardis (the third and the fifth); and two seem to have similar problems–Ephesus and Laodicea (the first and the last). The church in the middle seems to have two phases and the message is twice as long as any of the others–Thyatira.
The resulting structure is like a seven-branch lampstand with three branches on each side, one in the middle and pairs of branches meeting at the same point in the stem of the lampstand: Ephesus and Laodicea are at opposite ends of the candlestick; Smyrna and Philadelphia are the next level; Pergamus and Sardis, next; and Thyatira, the top.
God did not apply Western logic to the churches of Asia Minor. He cared so much for them that He met them where they were.
Lord, I’m so grateful to know that You can reach me at my level of understanding.