Verses 1-15
Chapter 2
2:1-7 So then the
first thing I urge you to do is to offer your requests, your prayers,
your petitions, your thanksgivings for all men. Pray for kings and for
all who are in authority, that they may enjoy a life that is tranquil
and undisturbed, and that they may act in all godliness and reverence.
That is the fine way to live, the way which meets with the approval of
God, our Saviour, who wishes all men to be saved, and to come to a full
knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one Mediator, between
God and man, the man Jesus Christ, who gave himself a ransom for all. It
was thus he bore his witness to God in his own good times, a witness to
which I have been appointed a herald and an envoy (I am speaking the
truth: I do not lie), a teacher to the Gentiles, a teacher whose message
is based on faith and truth.
Before we study this passage in detail we must note one thing
which shines out from it in a way that no one can fail to see. Few
passages in the New Testament so stress the universality of the gospel.
Prayer is to be made for all men; God is the Saviour who wishes all men
to be saved; Jesus gave his life a ransom for all. As Walter Lock
writes: "God's will to save is as wide as his will to create."
This is a note which sounds in the New Testament again and again. Through Christ God was reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:18-19). God so loved the world that he gave his Son (John 3:16). It was Jesus' confidence that, if he was lifted up on his Cross, soon or late he would draw all men to him (John 12:32).
E. F. Brown calls this passage "the charter of missionary work."
He says that it is the proof that all men are capax dei, capable of
receiving God. They may be lost, but they can be found; they may be
ignorant, but they can be enlightened; they may be sinners, but they can
be saved. George Wishart, the forerunner of John Knox, writes in his
translation of the First Swiss Confession: "The end and intent of the
Scripture is to declare that God is benevolent and friendly-minded to
mankind; and that he hath declared that kindness in and through Jesus
Christ, his only Son; the which kindness is received by faith." That is
why prayer must be made for all. God wants all men, and so, therefore,
must his Church.
(i) The gospel includes high and low. Both the Emperor in his
power and the slave in his helplessness were included in the sweep of
the gospel. Both the philosopher in his wisdom and the simple man in his
ignorance need the grace and truth that the gospel can bring. Within
the gospel there are no class distinctions. King and commoner, rich and
poor, aristocrat and peasant, master and man are all included in its
limitless embrace.
(ii) The gospel includes good and bad. A strange malady has
sometimes afflicted the Church in modern times, causing it to insist
that a man be respectable before he is allowed in, and to took askance
at sinners who seek entry to its doors. But the New Testament is clear
that the Church exists, not only to edify the good, but to welcome and
save the sinner. C. T. Studd used to repeat four lines of doggerel:
"Some want to live within the sound
Of Church or Chapel bell;
I want to run a rescue shop
Within a yard of hell."
One of the great saints of modern times, and indeed of all
time, was Toyohiko Kagawa. It was to Shinkawa that he went to find men
and women for Christ and he lived there in the filthiest and most
depraved slums in the world. W. J. Smart describes the situation: "His
neighbours were unregistered prostitutes, thieves who boasted of their
power to outwit all the police in the city, and murderers who were not
only proud of their murder record but always ready to add to their local
prestige by committing another. All the people, whether sick, or
feeble-minded or criminal, lived in conditions of abysmal misery, in
streets slippery with filth, where rats crawled out of open sewers to
die. The air was always filled with stench. An idiot girl who lived next
door to Kagawa had vile pictures painted on her back to decoy lustful
men to her den. Everywhere human bodies rotted with syphilis." Kagawa
wanted people like that, and so does Jesus Christ, for he wants all men,
good and bad alike.
(iii) The gospel embraces Christian and non-Christian. Prayer is
to be made for all men. The Emperors and rulers for whom this letter
bids us pray were not Christians; they were in fact hostile to the
Church; and yet they were to be borne to the throne of grace by the
prayers of the Church. For the true Christian there is no such thing as
an enemy in all this world. None is outside his prayers, for none is
outside the love of Christ, and none is outside the purpose of God, who
wishes all men to be saved.
Four different words for prayer are grouped together. It is
true that they are not to be sharply distinguished; nevertheless each
has something to tell us of the way of prayer.
(i) The first is deesis (Greek #1162),
which we have translated request. It is not exclusively a religious
word; it can be used of a request made either to a fellow-man or to God.
But its fundamental idea is a sense of need. No one will make a request
unless a sense of need has already wakened a desire. Prayer begins with
a sense of need. It begins with the conviction that we cannot deal with
life ourselves. That sense of human weakness is the basis of all
approach to God.
"Let not conscience make you linger,
Nor of fitness fondly dream;
All the fitness he requireth
Is to feel your need of him."
(ii) The second is proseuche (Greek #4335), which we have translated prayer. The basic difference between deesis (Greek #1162) and proseuche (Greek #4335) is that deesis (Greek #1162) may be addressed either to man or God, but proseuche (Greek #4335)
is never used of anything else but approach to God. There are certain
needs which only God can satisfy. There is a strength which he alone can
give; a forgiveness which he alone can grant; a certainty which he
alone can bestow. It may well be that our weakness haunts us because we
so often take our needs to the wrong place.
(iii) The third is enteuxis (Greek #1783),
which we have translated petition. Of the three words this is the most
interesting. It has a most interesting history. It is the noun from the
verb entugchanein (Greek #1793).
This originally meant simply to meet, or to fall in with a person; it
went on to mean to hold intimate conversation with a person; then it
acquired a special meaning and meant to enter into a king's presence and
to submit a petition to him. That tells us much about prayer. It tells
us that the way to God stands open and that we have the right to bring
our petitions to one who is a king.
"Thou art coming to a King;
Large petitions with thee bring;
For his grace and power are such,
None can ever ask too much."
It is impossible to ask too great a boon from this King.
(iv) The fourth is eucharistia (Greek #2169),
which we have translated thanksgiving. Prayer does not mean only asking
God for things; it also means thanking God for things. For too many of
us prayer is an exercise in complaint, when it should be an exercise in
thanksgiving. Epictetus, not a Christian but a Stoic philosopher, used
to say: "What can I, who am a little old lame man, do, except give
praise to God?" We have the right to bring our needs to God; but we have
also the duty of bringing our thanksgivings to him.
This passage distinctly commands prayer for kings and emperors and
all who are set in authority. This was a cardinal principle of communal
Christian prayer. Emperors might be persecutors and those in authority
might be determined to stamp out Christianity. But the Christian Church
never, even in the times of bitterest persecution, ceased to pray for
them.
It is extraordinary to trace how all through its early days,
those days of bitter persecution, the Church regarded it as an absolute
duty to pray for the Emperor and his subordinate kings and governors.
"Fear God," said Peter. "Honour the Emperor" (1 Peter 2:17),
and we must remember that that Emperor was none other than Nero, that
monster of cruelty. Tertullian insists that for the Emperor the
Christian pray for "long life, secure dominion, a safe home, a faithful
senate, a righteous people, and a world at peace" (Apology 30). "We pray
for our rulers," he wrote, "for the state of the world, for the peace
of all things and for the postponement of the end" (Apology 39). He
writes: "The Christian is the enemy of no man, least of all of the
Emperor, for we know that, since he has been appointed by God, it is
necessary that we should love him, and reverence him, and honour him,
and desire his safety, together with that of the whole Roman Empire.
Therefore we sacrifice for the safety of the Emperor" (Ad Scapulam 2).
Cyprian, writing to Demetrianus, speaks of the Christian Church as
"sacrificing and placating God night and day for your peace and safety"
(Ad Demetrianum 20). In A.D. 311 the Emperor Galerius actually asked for
the prayers of the Christians, and promised them mercy and indulgence
if they prayed for the state. Tatian writes: "Does the Emperor order us
to pay tribute? We willingly offer it. Does the ruler order us to render
service or servitude? We acknowledge our servitude. But a man must be
honoured as befits a man but only God is to be reverenced" (Apology 4).
Theophilus of Antioch writes: "The honour that I will give the Emperor
is all the greater, because I will not worship him, but I will pray for
him. I will worship no one but the true and real God, for I know that
the Emperor was appointed by him.... Those give real honour to the
Emperor who are well-disposed to him, who obey him, and who pray for
him" (Apology 1: 11). Justin Martyr writes: "We worship God alone, but
in all other things we gladly serve you, acknowledging kings and rulers
of men, and praying that they may be found to have pure reason with
kingly power" (Apology 1: 14,17).
The greatest of all the prayers for the Emperor is in Clement of
Rome's First Letter to the Church at Corinth which was written about
A.D. 90 when the savagery of Domitian was still fresh in men's minds:
"Thou, Lord and Master, hast given our rulers and governors the power of
sovereignty through thine excellent and unspeakable might, that we,
knowing the glory and honour which thou hast given them, may submit
ourselves unto them, in nothing resisting thy will. Grant unto them,
therefore, O Lord, health, peace, concord, stability, that they may
administer the government which thou hast given them without failure.
For thou, O heavenly Master, King of the Ages, givest to the sons of men
glory and honour and power over all things that are upon the earth. Do
thou, Lord, direct their counsel according to that which is good and
well-pleasing in thy sight, that, administering the power which thou
hast given them in peace and gentleness with godliness, they may obtain
thy favour. O thou, who alone art able to do these things, and things
far more exceeding good than these for us, we praise thee through the
High Priest and Guardian of our souls, Jesus Christ, through whom be the
glory and the majesty unto thee both now and for all generations, and
for ever and ever. Amen" (1 Clement 61).
The Church always regarded it as a bounden duty to pray for
those set in authority over the kingdoms of the earth; and brought even
its persecutors before the throne of grace.
The Church prayed for certain things for those in authority.
(i) It prayed for "a life that is tranquil and undisturbed."
That was the prayer for freedom from war, from rebellion and from
anything which would disturb the peace of the realm. That is the good
citizen's prayer for his country.
(ii) But the Church prayed for much more than that. It prayed
for "a life that is lived in godliness and reverence." Here we are
confronted with two great words which are keynotes of the Pastoral
Epistles and describe qualities which not only the ruler but every
Christian must covet.
First, there is godliness, eusebeia (Greek #2150).
This is one of the great and almost untranslatable Greek words. It
describes reverence both towards God and man. It describes that attitude
of mind which respects man and honours God. Eusebius defined it as
"reverence towards the one and only God, and the kind of life that he
would wish us to lead." To the Greek, the great example of eusebeia (Greek #2150)
was Socrates whom Xenophon describes in the following terms: "So pious
and devoutly religious that he would take no step apart from the will of
heaven; so just and upright that he never did even a trifling injury to
any living soul; so self-controlled, so temperate, that he never at any
time chose the sweeter in place of the bitter; so sensible and wise and
prudent that in distinguishing the better from the worse he never
erred" (Xenophon: Memorabilia, 4, 8, 11). Eusebeia (Greek #2150)
comes very near to that great Latin word pietas, which Warde Fowler
describes thus: "The quality known to the Romans as pietas rises, in
spite of trial and danger, superior to the enticements of individual
passion and selfish ease. Aeneas' pietas became a sense of duty to the
will of the gods, as well as to his father, his son and his people; and
this duty never leaves him." Clearly eusebeia (Greek #2150)
is a tremendous thing. It never forgets the reverence due to God; it
never forgets the rights due to men; it never forgets the respect due to
self. It describes the character of the man who never fails God, man or
himself.
Second, there is reverence, semnotes (Greek #4587). Here again we are in the realm of the untranslatable. The corresponding adjective semnos (Greek #4586) is constantly applied to the gods. R. C. Trench says that the man who is semnos (Greek #4586)
"has on him a grace and a dignity, not lent by earth." He says that he
is one who "without demanding it challenges and inspires reverence."
Aristotle was the great ethical teacher of the Greeks. He had a way of
describing every virtue as the mean between two extremes. On the one
side there was an extreme of excess and on the other an extreme of
defect, and in between there was the mean, the happy medium, in which
virtue lay. Aristotle says that semnotes (Greek #4587) is the mean between areskeia (Greek #699), subservience, and authadeia (Greek #829), arrogance. It may be said that for the man who is semnos (Greek #4586)
all life is one act of worship; all life is lived in the presence of
God; he moves through the world, as it has been put, as if it was the
temple of the living God. He never forgets the holiness of God or the
dignity of man.
These two great qualities are regal qualities which every man must covet and for which every man must pray.
Paul concludes with a statement of the greatest truths of the Christian faith.
(i) There is one God. We are not living in a world such as the
Gnostics produced with their theories of two gods, hostile to each
other. We are not living in a world such as the heathen produced with
their horde of gods, often in competition with one another. Missionaries
tell us that one of the greatest reliefs which Christianity brings to
the heathen is the conviction that there is only one God. They live for
ever terrified of the gods and it is an emancipation to discover that
there is one God only whose name is Father and whose nature is Love.
(ii) There is one Mediator. Even the Jews would have said that
there are many mediators between God and man. A mediator is one who
stands between two parties and acts as go-between. To the Jews the
angels were mediators. The Testament of Dan (Daniel 6:2)
has it: "Draw near unto God, and unto the angel who intercedes for you,
for he is a mediator between God and man." To the Greeks there were all
kinds of mediators. Plutarch said it was an insult to God to conceive
that he was in any way directly involved in the world; he was involved
in the world only through angels and demons and demigods who were, so to
speak, his liaison officers.
Neither in Jewish nor in Greek thought had a man direct access
to God. But, through Jesus Christ, the Christian has direct that access,
with nothing to bar the way between. Further, there is only one
Mediator. E. F. Brown tells us that that is, for instance, what the
Hindus find so hard to believe. They say: "Your religion is good for
you, and ours for us." But unless there is one God and one Mediator
there can be no such thing as the brotherhood of man. If there are many
gods and many mediators competing for their allegiance and their love,
religion becomes something which divides men instead of uniting them. It
is because there is one God and one Mediator that men are brethren one
of another.
Paul goes on to call Jesus the one who gave his life a ransom
for all. That simply means that it cost God the life and death of his
Son to bring men back to himself. There was a man who lost a son in the
war. He had lived a most careless and even a godless life; but his son's
death brought him face to face with God as never before. He became a
changed man. One day he was standing before the local war memorial,
looking at his son's name upon it. And very gently he said: "I guess he
had to go down to lift me up." That is what Jesus did; it cost his life
and death to tell men of the love of God and to bring men home to him.
Then Paul claims to himself four offices.
(i) He is a herald of the story of Jesus Christ. A herald is a
man who makes a statement and who says: "This is true." He is a man who
brings a proclamation that is not his own, but which comes from the
king.
(ii) He is a witness to the story of Christ. A witness is a man
who says: "This is true, and I know it" and says also "It works." He is a
man who tells, not only the story of Christ, but also the story of what
Christ has done for him.
(iii) He is an envoy. An envoy is one whose duty is to commend
his country in a foreign land. An envoy in the Christian sense is
therefore one who commends the story of Christ to others. He wishes to
communicate that story to others, so that it will mean as much to them
as it does to him.
(iv) He is a teacher. The herald is the person who proclaims the
facts; the witness is the person who proclaims the power of the facts;
the envoy is the person who commends the facts; the teacher is the
person who leads men into the meaning of the facts. It is not enough to
know that Christ lived and died; we must think out what that meant. A
man must not only feel the wonder of the story of Christ; he must think
out its meaning for himself and for the world.
2:8-15 So, then, it is
my wish that men should pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands, with no
anger in their hearts and no doubts in their minds. Even so it is my
wish that women should modestly and wisely adorn themselves in seemly
dress. This adornment should not consist in braided hair, and ornaments
of gold, and pearls, but--as befits women who profess to reverence
God--they should adorn themselves with good works. Let a woman learn in
silence and with all submission. I do not allow a woman to teach or to
dictate to a man. Rather, it is my advice that she should be silent. For
Adam was formed first, and then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the
woman was deceived, and so became guilty of transgression. But women
will be saved through child-bearing, if they continue in faith and love,
and if they wisely walk the road that leads to holiness.
The early Church took over the Jewish attitude of prayer, which
was to pray standing, with hands outstretched and the palms upwards.
Later Tertullian was to say that this depicted the attitude of Jesus
upon the Cross.
The Jews had always known about the barriers which kept a man's
prayers from God. Isaiah heard God say to the people: "When you spread
forth your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make
many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood" (Isaiah 1:15). Here, too, certain things are demanded.
(i) He who prays must stretch forth holy hands. He must hold up
to God hands which do not touch the forbidden things. This does not mean
for one moment that the sinner is debarred from God; but it does mean
that there is no reality in the prayers of the man who then goes out to
soil his hands with forbidden things, as if he had never prayed. It is
not thinking of the man who is helplessly in the grip of some passion
and desperately fighting against it, bitterly conscious of his failure.
It is thinking of the man whose prayers are a sheer formality.
(ii) He who prays must have no anger in his heart. It has been
said that "forgiveness is indivisible." Human and divine forgiveness go
hand in hand. Again and again Jesus stresses the fact that we cannot
hope to receive the forgiveness of God so long as we are at enmity with
our fellow-men. "So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and
there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your
gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother,
and then come and offer your gift" (Matthew 5:23-24). "If you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses" (Matthew 6:15).
Jesus tells how the unforgiving servant himself found no forgiveness,
and ends: "So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if
you do not forgive your brother from your heart" (Matthew 18:35). To be forgiven, we must be forgiving. The Didache (compare Greek #1322),
the earliest Christian book on public worship, which dates from about
A.D. 100, has it: "Let no one who has a quarrel with his neighbour come
to us, until they are reconciled." The bitterness in a man's heart is a
barrier which hinders his prayers from reaching God.
(iii) He who prays must have no doubts in his mind. This phrase can mean two things. The word used is dialogismos (Greek #1261),
which can mean both an argument and a doubt. If we take it in the sense
of argument, it simply repeats what has gone before and restates the
fact that bitterness and quarrels and venomous debates are a hindrance
to prayer. It is better to take it in the sense of doubt. Before prayer
is answered there must be belief that God will answer. If a man prays
pessimistically and with no real belief that it is any use, his prayer
falls wingless to the ground. Before a man can be cured, he must believe
that he can be cured; before a man can lay hold on the grace of God, he
must believe in that grace. We must take our prayers to God in the
complete confidence that he hears and answers prayer.
The second part of this passage deals with the place of women in the
Church. It cannot be read out of its historical context, for it springs
entirely from the situation in which it was written.
(i) It was written against a Jewish background. No nation ever
gave a bigger place to women in home and in family things than the Jews
did; but officially the position of a woman was very low. In Jewish law
she was not a person but a thing; she was entirely at the disposal of
her father or of her husband. She was forbidden to learn the law; to
instruct a woman in the law was to cast pearls before swine. Women had
no part in the synagogue service; they were shut apart in a section of
the synagogue, or in a gallery, where they could not be seen. A man came
to the synagogue to learn; but, at the most, a woman came to hear. In
the synagogue the lesson from Scripture was read by members of the
congregation; but not by women, for that would have been to lessen "the
honour of the congregation." It was absolutely forbidden for a woman to
teach in a school; she might not even teach the youngest children. A
woman was exempt from the stated demands of the Law. It was not
obligatory on her to attend the sacred feasts and festivals. Women,
slaves and children were classed together. In the Jewish morning prayer a
man thanked God that God had not made him "a Gentile, a slave or a
woman." In the Sayings of the Fathers Rabbi Jose ben Johanan is quoted
as saying: "'Let thy house be opened wide, and let the poor be thy
household, and talk not much with a woman.' Hence the wise have said:
'Everyone that talketh much with a woman causes evil to himself, and
desists from the works of the Law, and his end is that he inherits
Gehenna.'" A strict Rabbi would never greet a woman on the street, not
even his own wife or daughter or mother or sister. It was said of woman:
"Her work is to send her children to the synagogue; to attend to
domestic concerns; to leave her husband free to study in the schools; to
keep house for him until he returns."
(ii) It was written against a Greek background. The Greek
background made things doubly difficult. The place of women in Greek
religion was low. The Temple of Aphrodite in Corinth had a thousand
priestesses who were sacred prostitutes and every evening plied their
trade on the city streets. The Temple of Diana in Ephesus had its
hundreds of priestesses called the Melissae, which means the bees, whose
function was the same. The respectable Greek woman led a very confined
life. She lived in her own quarters into which no one but her husband
came. She did not even appear at meals. She never at any time appeared
on the street alone; she never went to any public assembly. The fact is
that if in a Greek town Christian women had taken an active and a
speaking part in its work, the Church would inevitably have gained the
reputation of being the resort of loose women.
Further, in Greek society there were women whose whole life
consisted in elaborate dressing and braiding of the hair. In Rome, Pliny
tells us of a bride, Lollia Paulina, whose bridal dress cost the
equivalent of 432,000 British pounds. Even the Greeks and the Romans
were shocked at the love of dress and of adornment which characterized
some of their women. The great Greek religions were called the Mystery
religions, and they had precisely the same regulations about dress as
Paul has here. There is an inscription which reads: "A consecrated woman
shall not have gold ornaments, nor rouge, nor face-whitening, nor a
head-band, nor braided hair, nor shoes, except those made of felt or of
the skins of sacrificed animals. "The early Church did not lay down
these regulations as in any sense permanent, but as things which were
necessary in the situation in which it found itself.
In any event there is much on the other side. In the old story
it was the woman who was created second and who fell to the seduction of
the serpent tempter; but it was Mary of Nazareth who bore and who
trained the child Jesus; it was Mary of Magdala who was first to see the
risen Lord; it was four women who of all the disciples stood by the
Cross. Priscilla with her husband Aquila was a valued teacher in the
early Church, who led Apollos to a knowledge of the truth (Acts 18:26). Euodia and Syntyche, in spite of their quarrel, were women who laboured in the gospel (Philippians 4:2-3). Philip, the evangelist, had four daughters who were prophetesses (Acts 21:9). The aged women were to teach (Titus 2:3). Paul held Lois and Eunice in the highest honour (2 Timothy 1:5), and there is many a woman's name held in honour in Romans 16:1-27 .
All the things in this chapter are mere temporary regulations to
meet a given situation. If we want Paul's permanent view on this
matter, we get it in Galatians 3:28
: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free,
there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
In Christ the differences of place and honour and function within the
Church are all wiped out.
And yet this passage ends with a real truth. Women, it says,
will be saved in child-bearing. There are two possible meanings here. It
is just possible that this is a reference to the fact that Mary, a
woman, was the mother of Jesus and that it means that women will be
saved--as all others will--by that supreme act of child-bearing. But it
is much more likely that the meaning is much simpler; and that it means
that women will find salvation, not in addressing meetings, but in
motherhood, which is their crown. Whatever else is true, a woman is
queen within her home.
We must not read this passage as a barrier to all women's
service within the Church, but in the light of its Jewish and its Greek
background. And we must look for Paul's permanent views in the passage
where he tells us that the differences are wiped out, and that men and
women, slaves and freemen, Jews and Gentiles, are all eligible to serve
Christ.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)