LECTURES ON THE SEVEN CHURCHES OF ASIA. LECTURE I. THE SEER. I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, what thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea."-REV. i. 9—11. It is my intention to lay before you plain and interesting sketches of sacred duties and responsibilities, as far as these can be gathered from the addresses of our Lord to the seven Churches of Asia. These addresses have little to do with what may gratify the taste of the cultivated, or please the imagination and excite the fancy of the intellectual; but if defective in these claims to popular sympathy, they are calculated to do much good to those who seek to know their duties and to understand how they shall best fulfil them, and to be made acquainted with their responsibilities as members of the visible Church, and living amid the means and B ordinances of grace. Profit is not always set in pleasure. If, therefore, you expect in my expositions of these Epistles to the seven Churches of Asia any flights or excursions calculated to gratify the curious, you will be disappointed; but if you expect and pray that I may be able to submit to you new and fresher views of great obligations, lofty responsibilities, and to imprint upon your hearts a deeper sense of gratitude, then, I trust, you will not be disappointed-I believe that the Spirit of God will bless what I say, to your good and to His glory. The epistles to these churches are really addressed to the Catholic or Universal Church-they are not prescriptions for a century, but for all succeeding agesduties not for a province, but duties for the world; encouragements, promises, and precious truths, which, like the Author of all, are the same in the first and in the last century, and operative in all latitudes, in all longitudes, in all climes; fitted to man for yesterday, to-day, and for ever. In this my preliminary lecture, I intend to submit, what I trust will not be altogether unprofitable, some facts in the biography and character of him who is here named as the author of the Apocalypse. I have not done so before: I wish that every stage of our progress, in examining God's holy word, may be from light to light; that all that is to be learned of God, his ways, and people, may be learned by us. I will therefore endeavour, as God may enable me, to throw some light upon the interesting biography of John, as far as that biography is unfolded to us, first in inspired, and next in ecclesiastical history. I need scarcely state, that all we read of John in the Bible is extremely meagre. It is the unique and beautiful characteristic of the Bible, that the human fades away before the divine; the Apostle is lost in the splendour of the Apostle's Lord; John is made to decrease, that the Saviour of John may increase more and more. It must surely strike every reader of the Bible, how completely and consistently throughout, the human is made subordinate to the divine; so that the apostle, and the angel, and the evangelist, and the prophet, shine in a glory not their own, but borrowed from Him whose glories they were commissioned to reflect, and from whose Spirit they derived all their inspiration and their guidance. Far be it from me this evening to preach John as if he were the Saviour. We are told that we are to follow the Apostles, but with limitations-" as far as they followed Christ." The great example is Jesus: subordinate ones, in their place useful and beautiful ones, are the Apostles and Evangelists who preached him. Let us therefore try if we can gather anything that will instruct, and cheer, and help us, in studying, as far as the Bible discovers it to us, the biography of John. It seems probable that he was born in Bethsaida, a small fishing village, and the same village of which Peter and Andrew and Philip were natives. There is something not accidental in this. Not a great metropolis was the birthplace of Christ the Lord; and little hamlets, and obscure villages and fishing-towns, were the birthplaces of those who were likest him, who were chosen by him, and whose names shall be heard whilst Christianity endures, and Christ is loved and known. This seems to be, in this respect, in keeping with all God's procedure: "He hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the mighty; and things that are not to bring to nought the things that are." It seems that the father of John was a fisherman; his brother was James, his mother Salomè. There is reason to believe that these were pious persons, and that in consistency with this they brought up John in the nurture and admonition of the Lord God of Israel. The name they gave him, John, which he himself here claims, "I John, who am your brother," is, literally translated, "the favour of God," or "favoured of God:" and when they gave that name, I doubt not they did so not without attaching any meaning to it; they gave it as the expression of the higher good they desired, or of the conviction they felt that John was a blessing given them from God; and probably from the first |