After delivering letter number four to Thyatira, a courier carrying the seven messages John wrote to the churches would have traveled some twenty-five miles to the southwest through the fertile Hermus valley in order to reach Sardis, the next church on John's list. Nearing the city, the messenger would have been greeted by the impressive sight of Sardis dominating the area from her seemingly impregnable perch 1,500 feet above the valley floor.
As the capital city of the great province of Lydia, Sardis controlled the flourishing trade through the Hermus valley. Gold, found in the alluvial silt of the river that flowed through the valley, increased the city's wealth and prestige.
Yet the traveler today finds little to remind him of Sardis' former greatness. A small, poverty-stricken village of crudely constructed shacks huddles around an outdoor hand pump at the valley's end. The great cliffs, upon which mighty Sardis once stood, are almost non-existent—eroded by the wind, rain, and frost of passing years. How ever, some ruins remain to front the ancient mound, including relics of the great temple of Artemis, or Diana, which supposedly protected the city in the days of its glory. Alexander the Great began construction of the 160-by-200-foot edifice, but it was never completed. Only two of the seventy-eight original columns, each sixty-five feet tall, remain upright; thirteen others are still some what intact.
In the time of Croesus, who ruled Sardis as the political center of Asia Minor, the city became proverbial for luxury and opulence because of the fabulous riches of her ruler. Here gold and silver were first made into coins.
After conquering the restless Greek states, Croesus grew arrogant with power. When he learned of the con quests of Cyrus to the east, he became anxious to check the Persian advance. In planning his campaign against Cyrus, Croesus recalled advice given him a few years earlier by Solon, an Athenian law giver, warning him of overconfidence. Accordingly, he consulted the "sacred oracles" of Delphi in order to take every possible precaution. The oracles told him, "If you cross the river Halys you will destroy a great empire." Encouraged, Croesus crossed the Halys, met Cyrus in battle and destroyed an empire—his own. Defeated, Croesus re tired to his mountain fortress, deter mined to regroup his forces and retrieve his fortunes the following year.
But Cyrus, following up his victory, soon besieged the fortress city, which, confident in her natural strength, prepared to outlast the invaders. The historian Herodotus relates how on the fourteenth day of the siege Cyrus offered a reward to the first soldier who would mount the wall. One of his men had seen a Lydian warrior descend the rock upon which Sardis was built in order to retrieve a helmet and then return by a very precipitous and scarcely visible route. The defenders left this path unguarded because they did not believe anyone could climb it, but the Persian soldier was able to scale the heights. Others followed, and Sardis was taken by surprise.
As the victors led Croesus to execution, they heard him sigh, "Solon, Solon, Solon!" When asked by Cyrus what he meant, Croesus told of the Athenian's warning against overconfidence. Cyrus then bade that his life be spared as a symbol to posterity of the precarious nature of prosperity.
We see at once the appropriateness of the warning contained in the letter to the church of Sardis: "Be watchful. ... If therefore thou shall not watch, I will come on thee as a thief" (Rev. 3:2, 3). Cyrus took Sardis by surprise in 547 B. c. Three hundred and thirty-three years later, in 214 B.C., Sardis was at war with Antiochus the Great. Again the city was captured by the enterprise of a soldier who found a way up the seemingly impregnable cliffs. The lesson of the past had not been learned. Again overconfident, the city had failed to watch!
The message to Sardis pronounced, "Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead" (verse 1). Sardis had a great history. But already in John's day she was dead. Tacitus relates that in A.D. 26, when various cities contended for the honor of being selected as the site for the second temple dedicated to the emperor, long orations were given on the past glory of Sardis. Those church members receiving John's letter no doubt would have recalled many a fact of history as they read the reproach against the church that had a name that it lived but was dead.
The letter to Sardis is strikingly appropriate to the post-Reformation period of the church, a period fittingly described as "the age of dead orthodoxy." Appropriate dates suggested for the Sardis period are from the close of the Council of Trent in 1563 to the beginning of the great religious awakening in 1734.
Instead of continuing its work of restoration, the Reformation committed the great error of submitting the church to the protection and support of civil authorities. Although separating from the established church, Protestants became subject to the state. In so doing, the church was forced to compromise some of the basic tenets of evangelical Protestantism, and to protect her creeds in endless controversies.
This greatly contributed to spiritual deterioration. Church life largely be came little more than form and ceremony; preaching centered on promoting right thinking, with little regard for the condition of the heart. According to Newman, the church historian, personal conversion, even in the case of ministers of the gospel, seems not to have been expected.
Truly it could be said of the church in the Sardis period, "Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead."
But, as in every period of the church, there were faithful ones in Sardis. God declared, "Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with me in white: for they are worthy" (verse 4).
During this time a third force was at work, in addition to both Rome and the established churches of the Reformation. Known as the Radical Reformation, it advocated the principle of a free church in a free state. Unlike the re formers who aimed at merely reforming the church, the Radical Reformers rejected halfway measures and urged a complete return to the apostolic faith of the New Testament.
This attitude led them to reject as unscriptural such practices as infant baptism; thus they were nicknamed "Ana baptists," meaning "rebaptizers." Ecclesiastical law declared rebaptism to be heresy, and persecution inevitably resulted. Many thus persecuted sought refuge in the Netherlands, which became a model of toleration and freedom. The religious liberty found in Holland later became the heritage of the Baptists, who in 1612 established their first church in England despite severe persecution. Among the Baptist dissenters in England was John Bunyan, who in 1660 was cast into Bedford prison for conducting a religious meeting without permission from the state church. While there he wrote the immortal Pilgrim's Progress. (For further information on the Anabaptist movement, see the preceding article by V. Norskov Olsen, and also the articles by him appearing in the July and September, 1978, issues of MINISTRY.)
The hallmark of the Radical Re formers was their zeal for New Testament Christianity and their emphasis on complete freedom for each believer to worship God according to his own con science. In 1636 Roger Williams introduced full religious freedom in the colony of Rhode Island. The Quakers under William Penn carried out the same principle in Pennsylvania. Foremost among the Anabaptists of Holland were the Mennonites, among whom were the first Germans to make the long voyage to America.
History testifies that the basic principles of American democracy had their roots, not in the established churches of the Reformation, but in the so-called "sects" of the third force, or Radical Reformation. Through these groups the true spirit of the evangelical reformation was preserved and advanced.
To the overcomers of Sardis, God promised, "He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment; and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father, and before his angels" (verse 5).
