The Seven Churches of the Book of Revelation - learning from the Blue Letter Bible

Someone introduced the Blue Letter Bible this week at the home church. I have heard of the Red Letter Bible but never the Blue Letter Bible. Red letter edition Bibles are those in which words spoken by Jesus, commonly only while he was on the Earth, are printed in red ink. Whereas the Blue Letter Bible, according to its web-site: "Back in 1996, in the early days of the World Wide Web and when the Blue Letter Bible first came out, hyperlinks were pretty much always blue in color. Our vision has always been to provide free Bible study software in which the Bible is the center of the experience with study resources that link off of every word in the Bible. With hundreds of thousands of links that were all blue, we decided to call it the Blue Letter Bible as a play on the more commonly referenced red-letter editions of Scripture." is more than the Blue Letter Bible in print, which just looks like a good Study Bible with lots of references and commentaries included in the pages of the bible passages themselves. The Blue Letter Bible is actually an online bible study resource site. I don't own a copy of the paper Blue Letter Bible so I decided to study Revelation 2 (the chapter I read this morning) using the Blue Letter Bible as a resource.

Now just as a background to Revelation chapters 2 and 3: In Revelation, on the Greek island of Patmos, Jesus Christ instructs his servant John of Patmos, through an angelic intermediary, to: "Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches: to Ephesus, and to Smyrna, and to Pergamos, and to Thyatira, and to Sardis, and to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea." (Wikipedia). I had  written a blog about the Seven Churches last year.

So I started by going to the Blue Letter Bible site. I picked the NIV translation and Revelation 2 and hit Search:

I clicked the blue link of Rev 2:1 and it took me to:

The landing page was the Interlinear (side by side translation of the original Greek) with another blue link to Strong's Bible Dictionary of almost every word! Now I wanted to understand the word angel (aggelos in Greek) to see what it meant and how it was used throughout the scripture (just before that I clicked the little speaker icon and heard what the Greek word sounded like!). So I clicked on G32 under the column Strong's and got this:

So the meaning of aggelos is "a messenger, envoy, one who is sent, an angel, a messenger from God". When I scrolled down the page it showed the 176 occurrences of the root word aggelos in scripture (not just the English word angel, because it was sometimes translated as messenger, as in Luke 7:27 concerning John the Baptist). So aggelos does not always mean a spiritual being. It can also mean a messenger. This is helpful as I used to think that the angels to the Seven Churches were like their Guardian Angels - spiritual beings. But I can now accept the idea that it may have been messengers sent from these churches to visit John and brought John's messages back to these churches to admonish and encourage them.

I can likewise make a phrase search (the blue link PHR) like "to the angel" and find 15 references. I can go on and on...

The Blue Letter Bible is a great reference but it is lacking in the more devotional style explanation and application. For example I was hoping to find something more on this verse "Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first." (Revelation 2:4) and didn't really get much.

As I reflect on the church in Ephesus (Revelation 2:1-7), what was it that gave the church it's ability to endure hardship and persecution? And yet at some point the church was no longer doing it for their first love - Jesus. I have been voluntering at the Refugee Clinic and have encountered some difficulties, related to personality, future vision, concern re sustainability etc. And yet, without always going back to my first love, Jesus, to whom and for whom I am serving, then I am doing nothing of real value. The chapter of love in 1 Corinthians 13 is a great reminder:

"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing."
(1 Corinthians 13:1-3)

Lord, help me never to forget your love for me. As I serve others help me to serve them with the love you have given me so that I will not rely on my own strength, but yours!