A study in the book of Revelation.
These lessons are covered over the course of two nights of instruction. We now turn our attention to the Church at Sardis, which is the fifth church that received an epistle from John. This lesson will be taught in two parts because the information is so vast. Sardis was one of the oldest cities in Asia Minor. It was a city of commerce that was noted for its carpet industry and was a very wealthy city. The first gold coins in the world came from there in about 600 BC. The patron deity was the goddess Cybele, who had a son named Midas, whose touch was said to turn everything to gold. Sardis was on a hill 1000 feet above a broad valley. This gave the people a false self-confidence about their security and people there lived in the glories of their past. They did not watch as they should have, and the city had been taken more than once by armies that scaled the tall cliffs surrounding her. Prophetic application of this church on earth is from 1517 AD until the Church is completed in the tribulation. This is the church of the reformation that began when Martin Luther broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. It includes most of the old mainline Protestant churches of our time. Interestingly, the name means “a remnant” or “those who have escaped.” This prophetically tells of the Great State Churches of the Reformation churches that escaped from Rome but eventually fell into cold, lifeless formalism.
