Revelation 2:2

2. I know His omniscient eyes… as a flame of fire, (Revelation 1:14,) blaze into the deepest recesses of their hearts and into all the deeds of their daily life.

Thy As the epistles are addressed each to the angel, it is remarkable how uniformly throughout the second person singular thy, thou, and thee are used. It might at first seem as if the missives from Patmos passed over the heads of the congregation and hit the angel only. Yet we think that no such misconception took place. The letters were to the Churches, (Revelation 1:4; Revelation 1:11,) and each Church in its unity knew that the angel and the Church were so one that his fault was their fault, his excellence theirs. And it was no divergency to address plurally you and the rest, as in Revelation 2:24. If the bishops were here addressed, it is certain that bishops were first appointed as the bulwarks of the faith, to preserve the pure, unmingled apostolic tradition, to guard the books of the growing canon of the New Testament, and to repel the entrance of errors and demoralizations. Hence to the bishop belonged a high responsibility. He was praised or blamed as his Church was faultless or faulty. With a similar charge in the second person singular does St. Paul address Timothy. He must see that the true gospel tradition be preserved against all heresies. (1 Timothy 5:1-20, where see our notes.) He is responsible for the trial and suitableness of the elders, and for their careful ordination, 1 Timothy 5:17-22. And we may add, that in the narrative given by St.

Clement of St. John and the young man of Ephesus, the apostle holds the bishop to the same sharp responsibility, in the second person singular, as he exhibits here.

Thy works Both good and bad, both external and internal, of the hand and of the heart. But it is of the good he first speaks, namely, labour or activity, and patience or firm persistence passively.

Canst not bear Carry as a burden. They had both a holy patience and a holy impatience.

Tried them… apostles Who claimed to be commissioned by Christ to dictate doctrines to the Church, and so to be apostles. The Ephesians had ample means for trying by the then extant gospels of the four evangelists, by St. Paul’s warnings in Acts xx, and in his epistle to their own Church and to other Churches.

Liars One of St. John’s severe terms, arising from his deep conception of the evil of falsifying Christianity at its fountain, and so sending down a false religion to the future ages.