Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

3:8-11
And I will clothe him with your tunic,
And tie your sash securely about him.
I will entrust him with your authority,
And he will become a father to the inhabitants
of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah.
Then I will set the key of the house of David
on his shoulder:
When he opens no one will shut,
When he shuts no one will open. (Isa. 22:21-22)
Christ is thus announcing that the officers of apostate
Israel are false stewards: they have been thrown out of
office, removed from all rightful authority, and replaced
by the One who is holy and true. The keepers of the
door at the synagogue had excommunicated the
Christians, declaring them to be apostates. In reality,
Christ says, it is you of the synagogue who are the
apostates; it is you who have been cast out of the
Covenant; and I have taken your place as the True
Steward, the Pastor and Overseer of the Covenant (cf.
1 Pet. 2:25).
8-9 And so the Lord can comfort these suffering
Christians who, on account of their faithful following
of Christ, have suffered wrongful excommunication
from the Covenant. I know your deeds, He assures
them. You have been shut out of the door by the
keyholders, but you must remember that I am the One
who has the key, and behold, I have put before you a
door which no one can shut. The Lord of the
Covenant Himself has admitted them to fellowship,
and has cast out those who pretend to hold the keys;
the faithful Christians have nothing to fear. The
church of Philadelphia has only a little power – it is
not prominent, stylish, or outwardly prosperous, in
contrast to the impressive, apparently “alive,” compromising
church at Sardis. Yet they have been faithful
with what they have been given (cf. Luke 19:26): You
. . . have kept My Word, and have not denied my
name.
Therefore, I will cause those of the synagogue of
Satan, who say that they are Jews, and are not, but lie
– behold, I will make them to come and bow down at
your feet, and to know that I have loved you. Again
the apostate Jews are revealed in their true identity: the
synagogue of Satan (cf. 2:9). Again, there is no such
thing as “orthodox” Judaism; there is no such thing as a
genuine belief in the Old Testament that is consistent
with a rejection of Jesus Christ as Lord and God. Those
who do not believe in Christ do not believe the Old
Testament either. The god of Judaism is the devil. The
Jew will not be recognized by God as one of His chosen
people until he abandons his demonic religion and
returns to the faith of his fathers – the faith which
embraces Jesus Christ and His Gospel. When Christrejecting
Jews claim to follow in the footsteps of
Abraham, Jesus says, they lie. And, although they
currently have the upper hand in Philadelphia, their
domination of the true covenant people will not last
long. Christ Himself will force them to come and bow
down at the Christians’ feet. In this statement is an
ironic reference to Isaiah 60:14, where God gives this
promise to the covenant people, who had been
persecuted by the heathen:
The sons of those who afflicted you will come bowing to you,
And all those who despised you will bow themselves
at the soles of your feet;
And they will call you the City of the LORD,
The Zion of the Holy One of Israel.
Those who falsely claim to be Jews are really in the
position of the persecuting heathen; and they will be
forced to acknowledge the covenantal status of the
Church as the inheritor of the promises to Abraham
and Moses. For the Church is the true Israel, and in
coming into the Church, these believers “have come to
Mount Zion and to the city of the living God” (Heb.
12:22). Apostate Israel has been pruned out of the tree
of life of the covenant people, while believers in Christ
from all nations have been grafted in (Rom. 11:7-24).
The only hope for those outside the covenant line,
regardless of their ethnic or religious heritage, is to
recognize Christ as the only Savior and Lord,
submitting themselves to Him. Unless and until the
Jews become grafted into the covenant line by God’s
grace, they will remain outside the people of God, and
will perish with the heathen. The Bible does hold out
the promise that the descendants of Abraham will
return to the faith of Jesus Christ (Rom. 11:12, 15, 23-
32). 9 But until they do, Scripture classes them with the
heathen (with one major difference, however: the
condemnation of the apostate Jew is much more severe
than that of the unenlightened pagan; see Rom. 2:1-
29).
10-11 Because the persecuted Christians of
Philadelphia had kept the word of perseverance, their
Lord promises in return to keep them from the hour of
testing. Note well: Christ is not promising to rapture
them or to take them away, but to keep them. In other
words, He is promising to preserve them in trial, to
keep them from falling (Jude 24). Although this is one
of the verses that dispensationalists have claimed for
support of the “pre-tribulation rapture” theory, on close
examination it actually reveals itself to be nothing of
the sort. In fact, it says nothing about the end of the
world or the Second Coming at all: The “hour of
testing” spoken of here is identified as that hour which
is about to come upon the whole world, to test those
who dwell upon the Land. It is speaking of the period
of tribulation which, in the experience of the firstcentury
readers, was about to come. Does it make sense
that Christ would promise the church in Philadelphia
protection from something that would happen
thousands of years later? “Be of good cheer, you faithful,
suffering Christians of first-century Asia Minor: I won’t
let those Soviet missiles and Killer Bees of the 20th
century get you!” When the Philadelphian Christians
were worried about more practical, immediate concerns
– official persecution, religious discrimination, social
9. See David Chilton, Paradise Restored: A Biblical Theology of Dominion (Ft. Worth, TX: Dominion Press, 1985), pp. 125ff.
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