[Kevin]

Joel R. Beek:

The notion that these seven churches describe seven successive periods of Church history hardly needs refutation. To say nothing about the almost humorous—if it were not so deplorable—exegesis which, for example, makes the church at Sardis, which was dead, refer to the glorious age of the Reformation; it should be clear to every student of the Bible that there is not one atom of evidence in all the sacred writings which in any way corroborates this thoroughly arbitrary method of cutting up the history of the Church and assigning the resulting pieces to the respective epistles of Revelation 2 and 3.