Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadJames Nisbet Commentary - Revelation 2:8 - 2:8
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
‘And unto the angel of the Church in Smyrna write.’
Rev_2:8
I. There are some lives which are singularly free from trouble, pain, adversity, sorrow.—The bright sunshine is upon them—not indeed always and invariably, but as a general rule. To this glad and joyous company life is full of interest and happiness, well worth the living. Their faces are not furrowed with care nor drawn with pain. They have no need to be anxious for the morrow, for their future seems to be as safe from the worst assaults of misfortune as their past has been. They do not feel the heavy oppression which comes with the sense that there is some gap which can never be filled, some loss which can never be made good, some sorrow which can never be comforted. ‘Happy souls! their praises flow’—for there have never come to them any of the bodily or mental sufferings which so often check praise, which at times appear to render it impossible, which almost forbid it as unreasonable. Perchance, now and again, they are aware of some faint whisper of foreboding, but it is scarcely heard for the loud and confident tones of actual experience.
II. But there are others!—There are those upon whom the storm has descended, whose faces are cut and bleeding with the cruel hail, who are worn and weary with the roughness and severity of life’s path. Yes, there are those to whom has come the full bitterness of bereavement; or those upon whom poverty has laid its heavy hand. If trouble has visited us—or whenever it visits us—how shall we accept it?
III. There are two main considerations which may enable us to bear with submissiveness and patience whatever Providence sends or permits Satan to send.
(a) Let us remember Who it was that—in the suggestive words of an inspired writer—‘learned obedience’—‘though He was a Son, yet learned He obedience’—‘by the things which He suffered.’ So we too may and ought to ‘grow in grace’ and in conformity to the will of our Heavenly Father by the divers pains and penalties with which we are for a while afflicted.
(b) Let us strengthen ourselves with the reflection that the trials of our individual lives, like those of the first Christians in Smyrna, have their appointed and not far-distant end. The thought of the brevity of life, which is to some full of heaviness and suggestive of dissatisfaction, is welcome and full of hope to others.
Rev. the Hon. W. E. Bowen.