Identifying Modern Laodicea
Two of the Church Eras addressed in Revelation 2 & 3 have been described in various ways and at various times. A surprising array of deductions have been put forth to establish the credibility of one Organization over Another. Have we been as Clear-thinking as we should have been in our Presumptions?
A number of evangelical churches recognize that the messages to the seven churches in Revelation’s 2nd and 3rd chapters present a student of the Bible with more than one insightful consideration. First there is the obvious historical application of the messages to each of those seven actual congregations, second is the typical application where any church in any age (or any individual) could exhibit any of these seven characteristics. But it’s a third consideration that’s the most controversial, that these represent seven successive Church Eras extending in order through the entire Church Age.
Not an Exclusive Teaching
It was as a pre-teen in an evangelical Baptist Church in the mid-1950’s that I was first made aware of the idea of ‘church eras’. However, their series of ‘successive’ church identities and key developments that marked the transitions from one era to the next differed considerably from those that I later heard described by the Worldwide Church of God a few years later. The evangelical genre recognizes various developments within the protestant movement, where the Church of God excludes from its lineage those denominations that embraced various apostate teachings from Catholic or Protestant theology. Not the least of which is a rejection of Commandment-keeping and a Sabbath- keeping tradition which has existed from the earliest days to the present. Others include the immortal soul and the triune Godhead concept.
