The letter to the church in Ephesus

The church in Ephesus looks, on the surface, like a model church. But appearances are deceptive, and Jesus delivers a devastating judgment on them anyway.

Historical background

Ephesus’ large port was the gateway into Asia Minor, making the city one of the largest and most important in the Roman Empire. The Temple of Artemis, one of the ancient world’s great wonders, also made it a major tourist destination. Yet even at its height the harbor was already silting up and needed constant, expensive dredging — a losing battle that would eventually strangle the port in later centuries. It’s a fitting backdrop for a church that looked as prosperous as ever while quietly losing what sustained it.

This economic center was home to a large Jewish diaspora community — Jews living outside Israel — whose civic and religious rights were repeatedly contested by the city’s Greek population and had to be defended before Roman authorities. Of the seven churches addressed in Revelation, this one was probably the largest.

Jesus’ view

Jesus introduces himself here as the one who holds the stars and walks among the lampstands, picking up the key image already established in chapter 1: believers are meant to be a light, and to depend on him for it. This church needs to take that image to heart, or it risks losing its calling altogether.

Before Jesus addresses the problem, though, he pours out real praise:

• He knows their deeds, their hard work, and their perseverance. Ephesus already had a track record of standing firm against pagan pressure — decades earlier, opposition to Paul’s preaching had triggered a citywide riot over the cult of Artemis. Their hard work and perseverance most directly concerns testing false apostles, but it fits a city where standing for the gospel had a real cost.
• They have tested those who claim to be apostles and found them false, and they hate the practices of the Nicolaitans — a group whose teaching apparently encouraged compromise with pagan practice, and who will reappear as a live threat in the letters to Pergamon and Thyatira.
• They are enduring hardship for the sake of Jesus’ name — hardship that, by the time John wrote, likely included pressure from Ephesus’ new status as a neokoros (temple warden) city of the imperial cult, having built a temple to the Flavian emperors around AD 89-90, not just the older Artemis conflict.

The problem

Yet they have gotten one thing badly wrong: they have lost their first love. What does that actually mean? Is “first love” simply the romantic rush of first meeting Jesus, when you’d have done anything for him? No — it runs far deeper than that.

Matthew 24:12 pairs two things together: for many, love will grow cold, even as the gospel is preached to all nations as a witness. What does “witness” actually mean here? In the New Testament, a “witness” (Greek martys) is someone testifying to what they’ve personally seen — the same root that later gave us “martyr,” someone whose testimony was sealed with their own life. The point stands: witness flows out of real, lived experience, not secondhand repetition.

So which love has Ephesus lost — love for Jesus, for one another, or for the world? All three, because each one depends on the others:¹

• Without love for Jesus, there is no real care for the brothers and sisters, nor for the world.
• Without love for one another, love for the world fades — the world sees how Christians treat each other (John 13:35; 17:21) — and it blocks love for Jesus, since no one can love God and hate a brother (1 John 4:20).
• Without love for the world, the church loses its purpose: it turns inward, and loses sight of Jesus and of why the brothers and sisters are gathered at all.

Jesus himself joined love for God and love for neighbour into one command (Mark 12:29–31). When one of these loves grows cold, the others cool with it — and witness, which is love going out to the world, goes cold too.

Ephesus may look like an established, mature church, since it has developed real strategies for handling spiritual challenges. But it has likely forgotten why it does any of this in the first place, and has ended up focused on itself rather than on setting things right.

The solution

If Ephesus wants to mature into a church God can actually use, it has to rebuild the intimate relationship with God it has lost — the relationship pictured by eating from the tree of life in the Garden of Eden. To encourage them toward that end, they are given a promise: the right to eat from the tree of life, in the paradise of God — an image picked up again at the very end of the book, in the tree of life beside the river flowing from God's throne in the New Jerusalem.

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