Why the Age of Missionaries was NOT the Philadelphian Church Era

The popular and indeed prevailing view among Christians today is that we presently reside in the Laodicean church era, implying that the Philadelphian age has passed.

In turn, that means there must exist a popular narrative explaining what the Philadelphian church era actually was, with the so-called age of the missionaries (ca mid 1800s – late 1800s) constituting the received wisdom on the matter.

That would make the Philadelphian church age the second briefest of all seven, the shortest being Smyrna’s ten years (the “ten days” of Revelation 2:10) that the church horribly suffered during the cruel, sanguinary Diocletianic Persecution from February 303 until February 313’s Edict of Milan issued by Constantine that totally transformed the early church’s standing within the Roman Empire.

Cementing the notion of the age of the missionaries as the Philadelphian era is the near universal view that today we must be residing in the Laodicean church age because all signs appear to suggest Christ’s return is imminent in addition to which many professing believers seem to be lukewarm in their professions.

However, I submit that because most of those who claim to be Christian today have a weak if not outright false soteriology that has strayed far from the Reformation’s rediscovery of the Apostolic church’s doctrines of sovereign grace and instead are comprised either wholly or very substantially of Arminian, that is, Pelagian teachings, their view of the spiritual condition of the age of the missionaries is skewed.

Hence I say that so far from being a wonderful time of revivalism, gospel missions, outreach into far flung corners of the world and the exaltation of Christ as Lord and Saviour, it was a time in which the soul-destroying doctrines of counterfeit Protestantism, namely, Counter-Reformation Arminianism, metastasised throughout the body of the professing church, having been given a stratospheric boost by John Wesley in the 1700s and a century later successfully vectored into American Protestantism by D.L. Moody, among others, doing great damage to the doctrines of the sovereignty of God.

With that came innovations in worship that were alien to the Reformation so that “strange incense” to the Lord (Leviticus 10:1) surged in popularity in the form of manmade hymns rather than the exclusive psalmody of God’s own inspired hymnbook, and in the form of the same kind of musical accompaniment that was associated with Romanism; this era also saw a proliferation of soloists like Ira D. Sankey entertaining audiences.

Even the Lord’s Table became polluted, with a symbol-of-the-symbol replacing the God-ordained symbol that was and is the alcoholic wine of communion. This was, of course, undertaken out of a misplaced zeal arising from the temperance movement that eschewed alcohol consumption on the basis that it was the essence of the sin of drunkenness (which it is, but only so far as eating food is the essence of the sin of gluttony).

Eschatologically, gone was the historicist model of the Reformation and in came the futurism of the Jesuits Lacunza and Ribera, deflecting attention away from the Papacy as the man of sin and the Antichurch as the Whore of Babylon, and causing countless numbers of Protestants to begin expecting a super-politician Antichrist and some even identifying America itself as Babylon, a view surprisingly popular in American evangelical circles today.

The floodgates opened further with a proliferation of new sects with bizarre ideas about bible prophecy (e.g. the Seventh Day Adventists, who hold that Lord’s Day observance is the Mark of the Beast), as well as rehashed incarnations of the charismatic heresies plaguing the early church, and a revival of abominable Christologies, especially unitarianism.

Naturally such a suite of departures from “the morning star” given to Sardis at its opening, i.e., the illustrious visitation from Christ that was the Reformation itself, was and remains worthy of great indignation and condemnation from Christ and yet... in His letter to the angel of the church at Philadelphia in Revelation 3:7-13, not one word of censure is uttered.

However, very firm words of rebuke are directed at another church era for turning away from that which it “first received and heard”, and that era is Sardis itself, the same Sardis that has a name that it liveth, but is dead (Revelation 3:1).

Now Sardis, which began with a Reformation that almost immediately started to become watered down, is (a) under condemnation from the Lord for forgetting that which it first received and heard, i.e. the Reformation and (b) is to be followed by a wholly blameless and praiseworthy era (Philadelphia).

It thus follows that Philadelphia constitutes not just a wholesale return to the gains of the Reformation, but a more matured and consolidated form of it, built on the doctrines of sovereign grace alone with zero toleration of the Arminianism that has contaminated the soteriological waters.

In other words, from the perspective of the present day (mid 2025), Philadelphia is still future and begins with what the English Puritan theologian Thomas Goodwin predicted would be a Second Reformation1, and that in turn means that we must be still living through the Sardis church era.

That being the case, we cannot be in Laodicea just yet and therefore Christ’s return is not imminent after all.

But wait.

Are we not experiencing end times events today?

Well, yes and no.

For one thing, the latter days began in the Apostolic era two millennia ago (Acts 2:16-17), not in the past few decades as most people seem to believe.

Secondly, here are some major prophecies yet to be fulfilled that must precede the Lord’s return:

1. The Seven Last Plagues of Revelation 15-16, under the seventh of which item #2 below ensues.
2. The first Gog-Magog War of Ezekiel 38-39 (which lends its name to a second and final conflict described in Revelation 20:8 in the distant future which has no application to the present scene of time); this first Gog-Magog War is to instantly precipitate the Jewish Epiphany, in which a newly Messianic nation of Israel will be delivered from its attackers.
3. This implies the wholesale conversion of the Jews to Christ, a mere foreshadowing of which occurred during Christ’s ministry (see John Gill on John 19:37).
4. Their conversion is to prove a “life from the dead” development for the Gentile church (Romans 11:15). When will the Gentile church be more dead than in its Sardian state, where it has a name that it lives but is, by Christ’s own terms, “dead”? The conversion of the Jews therefore must occur when the church is still Sardian, but about to become Philadelphian.
5. The kingdom of Daniel 2:44 and 7:18,22 is to commence and gradually grow to fill the whole world, beginning by shattering ungodly government in the West (the continuum depicted in the image in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream) before proceeding to expand over time to fill the whole world with godly rulership. Ungodly government’s removal will create a power vacuum that must be filled by something else, and that something will be the godly exercising rule over their respective nations.
   
   This development will occur during the still-future Philadelphian church age which, along with Smyrna, was spared any criticism from Christ in His letters to the churches in Revelation 2-3. Accordingly, attempts at reconciling the age of the missionaries with Philadelphia is a grotesque abuse given that the missionary era saw Protestantism decay deeper into the soul-endangering waters of Arminianism, which is the present day heir of the early church’s contamination from Pelagianism, the bitter Wormwood of Revelation 8:11. The missionary age also saw many new types of strange incense offered to God in the form of innovations in worship that hitherto were the preserve of Popery and had no place in the Reformed religion. The Reformers would not recognise today’s Protestantism as Protestant at all!

So, if we are still in Sardis, surely it behoves us to look again at what Christ is saying to Sardis in Revelation 3.

And this is His message to Sardis summarised:

• Be watchful; this means take extra care and vigilance with respect to doctrine, the form of worship and the command to love one another.
• Strengthen the things that remain that are ready to die; this means we must jealously protect and contend for the key articles of sovereign grace, historicist eschatology, the Reformed way of worship (i.e. the Regulative Principle) and anything else that has been watered down to an almost total demise in the centuries since the Reformation through tolerating and then embracing the Arminian cancer.
• Hold fast; be immovable and compromise on NOTHING, not one inch, no matter the cost in terms of friendships or temporal gain. Possess and exercise the courage of our convictions!
• Remember that which was first received and heard (the Reformation, which was the first thing of Sardis); this means we must return to study the old writers, notably the English Puritans and the great volume of shamefully forgotten work of giants of exposition like John Gill. This must be done at the expense of the chaff produced by the vast majority of writers from the mid 1700s onwards.
• Repent; that is, be sorry from the heart for our turning away from the Reformation, seek God’s forgiveness for it and grace to return to the gains of the Reformation and to advance and refine them further, to remove any lingering artefacts of Antichurch contagion.

Sadly, however, that is merely what Sardis must do, but won’t do just yet.

How can we can we know this?

Because Sardis is experiencing the irremediable – until the appointed recovery time – slaying of its public witness in accordance with Revelation 11:7 at the behest of the beast from the bottomless pit of Revelation 17, which is the western powerbase under a hyper socialist, atheistic ideology mediated through hired-and-fired sock puppet prime ministers and presidents.

That is to say, Christ is visiting Sardis “like a thief” in four ways:

1. Eschatological blindness fell on Sardis in the mid 1800s, just as the dilution of the Reformation was reaching critical mass and the age of the missionaries was getting going. Revelation 10’s events, contained within the seven thunders John was forbidden from detailing, began in the 1840s just as the vast army of horsemen of Revelation 9 and the four Euphrates angels that had been loosed for an hour, day, month and year of prophetic time were finished (exactly 391 years and 15 days ¹ – from mid March 1453, when the Ottomans invaded Constantinople as a plague upon the eastern fork of the Antichurch which they dominated, until they agreed to stand down under the Edict of Toleration in late March 1844). Those seven thunders were major geopolitical events affecting both East and West (the “sea” and the “earth” of Revelation 8:5).² The church, for its newfound enthusiasm for bad eschatology (such as Scofield’s and Darby’s), was given over to eschatological fantasies and not permitted to perceive the content of those seven thunders until the time for Sardis to recover would be at hand, when “knowledge would increase”, as per Daniel 12:4.
2. The slaying of the church’s public witness through "hate speech" laws, which is naturally grievous and punitive to all true believers4.
3. The very near future coming limitations and hindrances on free participation in transactional engagements for all of us who will refuse the Mark, the Mark being any affirmation of support for the Image of the Beast, the Image in turn being the objects of worship of the beast system. In previous centuries, the Image was the articles of faith in the false religion (i.e. apostate Christianity of the western nations) and at times in Europe one could not freely transact without being a Papist, but in its superlative and final form the Image is all the pet projects of the atheistic, scarlet system that it demands we kowtow to, namely, LGBT, abortion, mass immigration, tolerating Islam, etc., so that the principled few will have poor social credit scores and find it harder to get along in society than the compliant masses will. I believe this is to be only a very short-term affliction, that it will not be a total exclusion from commerce (lest the church perish from the face of the earth), and that it will be tied to the digital IDs and digital currencies that are in the works for 2026-2028 in all the western nations, including Trump’s MAGA America, sad to say.
4. Collateral impacts from most of the seven last plagues of Revelation 16 which, as some of the old writers deduced, are to fall in the wake of the Lord’s public witness being silenced. I say most, because the second plague only applies to “the sea” (the East), where very few true believers reside.

Obviously it was ordained that Sardis has to experience all of these things, since some of these events have started and, as usual when Christ issues a contingent threat to His people for their disobedience, that threat comes to be fulfilled because they invariably ignore it.

Then there is Revelation 16:15, in which the Lord interjects with a direct word to His church on the eve of the horrendous events set up under the sixth of the Seven Last Plagues:

"Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame." (Revelation 16:15)

Note the language used there in Christ's eve-of-Armageddon interjection in Revelation 16:

Coming as a thief. Watching. Keeping garments clean.

Those are Sardian terms, as the following excerpt from His letter to Sardis back in Revelation 3 shows:

"Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast, and repent. If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee. Thou hast a few names in Sardis which have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with me in white: for they are worthy" (Revelation 3:3-4)

And this of course ties in with the chronology the old writers predicted, namely, that Revelation 16’s plagues must occur during the Sardis church era and be triggered by the slaying of the two witnesses of Revelation 11, i.e., the silencing of the Lord’s public witness in the West.

Revelation 16:15’s interjection is the second time Christ tells Sardis to get its house in order, but whereas the first time His command was largely ignored (bar the “few names” of Rev 3:4), this time it will be generally heeded with great sobriety and fastidiousness in a fashion that will separate the sheep who will keep their garments from the goats who can’t.

But far more than that, this time, being on the eve of Armageddon, the last great war to befall humanity in profane history, it will coincide with the Jewish Epiphany of Romans 11:15 and the restoration of the Lord’s public witness and its immediate elevation to political power in the West’s pre-eminent country, the United States of America (“one tenth part of the great city” Revelation 11:13), triggering the great geopolitical earthquake that will see the West split into three factions, with terrifying judgment falling on the cities of the nations (Revelation 16:19) with the “great hail” (the worst war in human history) of Revelation 16:21 which is one and the same as the fire sent on Magog (Russia as corporate head of the nations of the East, including China) and on “them that dwell carelessly in the isles”5 (the liberal hotbeds of the West) of Ezekiel 39:6.

It might seem amiss that the glorious Philadelphian church age should begin in the midst of such terrible conflagration, but it is not without a sense of tremendous violence and geopolitical upheaval that Nebuchadnezzar’s dream’s image is dashed in its toes and feet that, together, symbolise the modern West, and shattered into dust by the stone cut out without hands that bit-by-bit, little-by-little, shall grow into a mountain filling the whole world, supplanting one ungodly government after another with righteous rule in what the old writers said would be Christ’s spiritual reign, “the brightness of His coming”, that will in short order see the removal of the man of sin when the western governments, under godly control, destroy the Antichurch (Revelation 17:16) to the dismay of the distant Papist lands (Revelation 18:10) in Latin America and elsewhere far removed from the heartlands of the West.

In closing, we are still in Sardis, albeit near its end.

The Philadelphian era is therefore at hand and for that reason Satan is going berserk in a last-gasp attempt at causing as much mayhem and misery to mankind as he can before he has his wings clipped irrevocably.

Hopefully that explains why humanity is now plumbing new depths of sin, why the devil has declared war on white males in the Anglo West (amidst whom the Kingdom of Daniel 2 + 7 begins), why the liberal media in America is scaremongering about Christian nationalism and why the nations are in a pre-war build-up frenzy (as per Joel 3:9-21).

And so the church today is not Laodicean or lukewarm; rather, it is what Christ says it is: Sardian and dead (for all intents and purposes), despite having a name for being alive and vibrant with its praise services, its gospel missions, etc.

The only remedy for Sardis is to repent in accordance with Christ’s message to it in Revelation 3 and yes, that will happen, but only at the appointed time, which will be just as the Great River Euphrates become dried up to make way for the Kings of the East³ in Revelation 16:12.

In the meantime, we should strive to keep the garments of our testimony clean, walking in holiness of conversation, in watchfulness and in jealous defence of God’s cause and truth, that we might be counted among the few names in Sardis of Revelation 3:4 whose walks are pleasing to Him.