THE LETTER TO EPHESUS

If one major source of John’s struggle to maintain hope in the coming of the reign of Christ was the dominance and power of the Roman Empire, another was the condition of the congregations of believers scattered across Asia Minor. Toward the end of the first century, these churches faced enormous pressures, internally from traveling preachers who advocated some kind of compromise with Roman idolatry and externally in the shape of growing social and political pressures to ascribe honor to both Christ and Caesar.

These pressures are evident throughout the seven letters to the churches which, taken as a whole, suggest that the condition of the Christian movement gave John much cause for concern. The believing community in the great port city of Ephesus features prominently in the history of early Christianity1 and the message sent to it now indicates that it had remained firm in its defense of the truth but had forsaken its ‘first love’ (v 4, AV). This seems to refer to the failure of love within the believing community, a problem which exactly mirrors the concern which troubled Paul with regard to the Corinthian church. The Ephesian believers may have been known personally to John, so this warning concerning a loveless orthodoxy would have affected him deeply. The same problem has, alas, persisted across the ages and ‘we too may be tempted to set so much store on our correct theology and proper process of church government that we risk forgetting that a church without love is already dead’.2

According to John’s gospel, Jesus was ‘full of grace and truth’.3 How can we retain both these qualities and avoid focusing on one to the detriment of the other?