Thinking in 3’s - Revelation 3:18 - Laodicea’s Shopping List

Thinking in 3’s - Revelation 3:18 - Laodicea’s Shopping List

Revelation chapters 2 and 3 contain a letter each to 7 churches in Asia Minor. The last of these is to Laodicea. We read there about being “lukewarm,” and Jesus’ statement that, “because you are neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”

Lukewarmness had become normal to the Laodiceans. They did not realize that their spiritual condition had deteriorated even as they had embraced self-sufficiency and were experiencing conditions of relative prosperity. “For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.” But in fact, in Jesus’ judgment (and, that’s the judgment that matters), they “are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.”

Jesus then advises them “to buy from me” three things: “gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see.” These, of course, are metaphors for spiritual truths. They were not to go and buy from a heavenly storehouse literal gold or garments or medicine. They needed to return to an appreciation and priority on spiritual prosperity, being clothed in righteousness, and clarity to see earthly things in heaven’s light. It appears, if we apply this passage to ourselves, that it is very easy for us all to drift away from these things, and into attitudes of self-sufficiency and comfortableness in our present situations.

The idea of buying things from Jesus does not sit well with our understanding of the Gospel. We receive the Gospel as a free gift. We do not purchase it ourselves. It was purchased for us by the blood of Christ. I think we can understand these words as we relate this passage to Isaiah 55, where the prophet says, “and he who has no money, come, but and eat!” It seems cruel, doesn’t it, to invite someone with no money to come and buy. But the next line solves the “problem” of the first line: “Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” It’s a strange kind of buying, where the goods are made available to those with empty hands. It reminds me of the line from the old hymn: “Nothing in my hand I bring; only to Thy cross I cling.”

We must remember that without this “refined gold,” we are impoverished. And further, any gold that we have been able to scrape together is dirty gold. Only God the kind of riches that we most deeply need, refined gold. Our best attempts at spiritual clothing are no better than Adam and Eve’s fig leaves in the darkened Garden. Our best efforts have to be discarded and replaced if we are to be properly clothed. The clothing that God supplied, both in the Garden, and in our salvation, involved a sacrifice. The l(L)amb died so that we could be clothed by Him. And Scripture repeatedly reminds us that, apart from God’s gracious illumination, we are unable to perceive the truths that are most important and vital to our understanding of God, and ourselves, and our predicament before Him, and the solution that is provided in Christ. 

And so for all these things - all things that are most necessary for salvation, but also for life lived in this world, the direction is the same: come to Jesus. Find in Him what you can find nowhere else. He is really the only One that you need on your shopping list.