Douglas Wilson“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16:11)
“Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.” (Rev. 3:10).
The saints in Philadelphia had remained faithful during trial up to this point, the Lord promised to deliver them from a future trial, the kind of trial that was going to come upon the entire world. The word translated temptation here can be rendered either as temptation or trial, and when the Lord adds that He is going to “try them that dwell upon the earth,” He is using the same root in a verb form. This is going to be a time of testing, a time of trial, and the church at Philadelphia wouldn’t have to deal with it. The reason they wouldn’t have to deal with it is because they already passed their test.
The word they kept was the word of the Lord’s patience, which means they had gone through something that had called for patience. When they were being tried, the world was not being tried, and when the world received its great test, the church at Philadelphia would not.
The exhortation is an odd combination of “hold on” and “repent.” If you had held on to this point, what is the need for repentance? If you need to repent, shouldn’t the charge be to grab on? The solution to this is to remember that this is a letter to a congregation that was both dead and virtually dead. There were many who needed to grab on, and a small number who needed to hold on. In that kind of situation, where you have a basic identity shared with those who are far away from God, the charge is to repent. We might describe this as vicarious repentance. Those in Sardis who had not defiled their garments were repenting on behalf of those who had.