Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen
Believers cannot totally and finally fall away from the grace
which they have received; but they may fall into sin, and from a
degree of grace, and the exercise of it, as these first and pure
churches did, from some degree of their love to God, and Christ,
and one another; and therefore are called upon to remember, mind,
and observe from what degree of it they were fallen; in order to
bring them under a conviction and acknowledgment of their evil,
and a sense of their present state, and to quicken their desires
after a restoration to their former one:
and repent;
of their coldness and lukewarmness, of the remissness of their
love, and of those evils which brought it upon them:
and do the first works;
of faith and love, with the like zeal and fervour, which will
show the repentance to be sincere and genuine; so the Arabic
version reads, "and exercise the former works, to wit, charity"
or "love". The Jews have a saying F2,
``if a man repents, do not say to him, "remember" (Mynwvarx Kyvem) , "thy first works";''which they seem to understand of evil works; but former good works are to be remembered and done, to show the truth of repentance for evil ones.
Or else I will come unto thee quickly;
not in a spiritual way, to pay a love visit, nor in a judicial
way, to take vengeance or inflict punishment, but in a
providential way, to rebuke and chastise:
and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except
thou
repent;
or thee out of the candlestick, the pastor from the church,
either by persecution or by death; or else the church, and church
state itself, signified by a candlestick; (See Gill on
Revelation 1:12); and may design a shaking and an
unsettling of it, which is sometimes done by violent
persecutions, and by false teachers and their doctrines, and by
the divisions and contentions of saints among themselves; and by
the former particularly was there a change made in the state of
this apostolic church, when it passed into the Smyrnean one,
which was a period of great persecution and distress; for this
cannot be understood of the total removing of the church state
itself quickly, no, not of Ephesus itself; for though there is
not now indeed, nor has there been for many hundred years, a
church of Christ in that place, yet there was one till the times
of Constantine, when there was none in any of the other seven
cities, and a long time after; (See Gill on Acts
20:17); which shows, that this was not a commination or
threatening of divine vengence to that church literally, but to
the state of the church, which that represented; nor does it
intend the utter abolition of that church, for the apostolic
church still continued, though it ceased to be in the
circumstances it was before.