Charles Ellicott Commentary Revelation 3:17

"Because thou sayest, I am rich, and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art the wretched one and miserable and poor and blind and naked:" — Revelation 3:17 (ASV)

I am rich.—The verse means, more literally, Because you say, I am rich, and have grown rich, and in nothing have need, and do not know that you are the wretched (such is the emphasis) one, and the pitiable one, and beggarly, and blind, and naked. You are “the type, the embodiment of wretchedness.” The words should, I think, be taken as an amplification of the reason for their rejection. Christ was about to reject them for being in that tepid state which, beginning with self-satisfaction, led on to self-deception.

They were rich in worldly goods (unlike the Church in Smyrna), but their very wealth led them into a quiet, unaggressive kind of religion. They were also proud of their intellectual wealth. Self-complacent because of their comfortable worldly circumstances and puffed up with a vain philosophy, they learned to be satisfied with their spiritual state, to believe the best of themselves, and then to believe in themselves. Hypocrites they were, who did not know they were hypocrites. They thought themselves good; and this self-deception was their danger.

“For,” to use Professor Mozley’s words, “why should a man repent of his goodness? He may well repent, indeed, of his falsehood; but unhappily the falsehood of it is just the thing he does not see, and which he cannot see by the very law of his character. The Pharisee did not know he was a Pharisee. If he had known it, he would not have been a Pharisee. The victim of passion, then, may be converted—the gay, the thoughtless, or the ambitious; he whom human glory has intoxicated; he whom the show of life has ensnared; he whom the pleasures of sense have captivated—they may be converted, any of these; but who is to convert the hypocrite? He does not know he is a hypocrite; he cannot, by the very nature of his character; he must think himself sincere; and the more he is in the shackles of his own character, that is, the greater hypocrite he is, the more sincere he must think himself” (University Sermons, p. 34).