The “little strength” of the Philadelphian state of the Christian community was now exhausted, at the end of the “little season" of ten years, during which the “fellow-servants and brethren” were being killed by Diocletian, Galerius, and Maximin, as foretold in the prediction of the Fifth Seal.
In the apostolical state of the Christian community the faith, hope, and love of the brethren was conspicuous and strong. But after the One Body had passed through the Ephesian, Smyrnean, Pergamian, Thyatiran, and Sardian, states, it was greatly enfeebled in all its primitive forces; so that when it was fairly established in the Philadelphian, its brightest examples, who had kept the word and had not denied the name of the Spirit, constituted but “a little strength” for the whole.
The state of things deplored by Cyprian was that which resulted in the Sardian, characterized by the Spirit as a death-state. By the generation of professors contemporary with it, it was not so considered.
The apostasy from “the truth as it is in Jesus" must have progressed very far when two such chiefs of the Roman Dragon, as the emperors Alexander and Philip, could be recognized as Christians.
This state of the Christian community is illustrated by the writings of Tertullian, Pantaenus, Clemens Alexandrinus, and the Alexandrian School of “Divinity.”
The representative writers of this state were particularly Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus.
Ignatius was an elder of the ecclesia at Antioch, but possessed of a fanatical desire for martyrdom, which was contrary to the instruction of the Lord Jesus, who said, “when they persecute you in one city, flee to another.” But instead of this, when the Emperor Trajan came to Antioch, about A.D. 107, in his way to the Parthian war, Ignatius voluntarily delivered himself up to Trajan, into whose presence he was introduced.
The spiritual condition of the ecclesias in this state of things may be learned from the writings of the apostles and others as extant in the New Testament. Their faith in the “things of the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ” was unmixed with Nikolaitanism, or “philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men, and the elements of the world;” and it worked by love and purified the heart— Gal.
Thus, having brought to a conclusion the particulars of the primary vision of the Apocalypse, and of the epistles, therein dictated by the
Lord Jesus the Spirit to the seven ecclesias of the Proconsular Asia, which we have found, as Mr. Elliot remarks in his apology for not undertaking the exposition of them, “of matter sufficient in itself to constitute a volume”—I shall proceed to consider briefly, the import of the seven moral sketches of these seven ecclesias.