James Jordan notes the connection between Jesus’ warning to the church at Laodicea and Yahweh’s promise to Noah after the flood. Jesus warns the church that is “neither hot nor cold” that they will be spewed from His mouth (Revelation 3:15-16). In Genesis 8, Yahweh promises not to curse the ground again, adding that while earth remains sowing and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will not cease.
These four pairs, as Jordan points out, are parallel and are arranged chiastically:
Sowing, cold, winter, and night line up on one side, while harvest, heat, summer, and day line up on the other. The chiasm is evident in the fact that the order is reversed in the second pair:
A. Sowing and harvest
B. Cold and Heat
B’. Summer (corresponding with harvest and heat) and Winter (sowing and cold)
A’. Day (corresponding with harvest and heat) and night (sowing and cold)
When we take this back to Revelation, it suggests two things. First, against the background of the promise to Noah, the message to the Laodiceans can be seen to anticipate the final vision of Revelation, where sun and moon, day and night, and the whole pattern of the Noahic creation is transfigured into the eternal day of the new heavens and earth. Second, this background helps us see the specific sin of the Laodiceans. Cold and heat correspond to night and day, sowing and harvest, winter and summer. In covenantal terms, the old covenant was the covenant of night, sowing, winter, cold, while the new covenant is hot, day, harvest, summer. The lukewarmness of the Laodiceans is their unwillingness to choose day or night. The day has come, but they won’t walk fully in the day; but they aren’t exactly walking in the darkness either. They are like the Jews of Elijah’s day, hesitating between Baal and Yahweh. They are a crepuscular church, a church of dawn or dusk, straddling the divide between Judaism and Christ. Jesus finds this indecision unpalatable, and vomits them out.
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