Verses 1-21
Chapter 6
6:1-2 Let all those
who are slaves under the yoke hold their own masters to be worthy of all
respect, in order that no one may have an opportunity to speak evil of
the name of God and the Christian teaching. If they have masters who are
believers, let them not try to take advantage of them because they are
brothers, but rather let them render even better service, because those
who lay claim to that service are believers and beloved.
Beneath the surface of this passage there are certain supremely
important Christian principles for everyday life and work.
The Christian slave was in a peculiarly difficult position. If
he was the slave of a heathen master, he might very easily make it clear
that he regarded his master as bound for perdition and himself as the
heir of salvation. His Christianity might well give him a feeling of
intolerant superiority which would create an impossible situation. On
the other hand, if his master was a Christian, the slave might be
tempted to take advantage of the relationship and to trade upon it,
using it as an excuse for producing inefficient work in the expectation
of escaping all punishment. He might think that the fact that both he
and his master were Christians entitled him to all kinds of special
consideration. There was an obvious problem here. We must note two
general things.
(i) In those early days the Church did not emerge as the
would-be destroyer of slavery by violent and sudden means. And it was
wise. There were something like 60,000,000 slaves in the Roman Empire.
Simply because of their numbers they were always regarded as potential
enemies. If ever there was a slave revolt it was put down with merciless
force, because the Roman Empire could not afford to allow the slaves to
rise. If a slave ran away and was caught, he was either executed or
branded on the forehead with the letter F, which stood for fugitivus,
which means runaway. There was indeed a Roman law which stated that if a
master was murdered all his slaves could be examined under torture, and
could indeed be put to death in a body. E. K. Simpson wisely writes:
"Christianity's spiritual campaign would have been fatally compromised
by stirring the smouldering embers of class-hatred into a devouring
flame, or opening an asylum for runaway slaves in its bosom."
For the Church to have encouraged slaves to revolt against their
masters would have been fatal. It would simply have caused civil war,
mass murder, and the complete discredit of the Church. What happened was
that as the centuries went on Christianity so permeated civilization
that in the end the slaves were freed voluntarily and not by force. Here
is a tremendous lesson. It is the proof that neither men nor the world
nor society can be reformed by force and by legislation. The reform must
come through the slow penetration of the Spirit of Christ into the
human situation. Things have to happen in God's time, not in ours. In
the end the slow way is the sure way, and the way of violence always
defeats itself.
(ii) There is here the further truth, that "spiritual equality
does not efface civil distinctions." It is a continual danger that a man
may unconsciously regard his Christianity as an excuse for slackness
and inefficiency. Because he and his master are both Christians, he may
expect to be treated with special consideration. But the fact that both
master and man are Christian does not release the employee from doing a
good day's work and earning his wage. The Christian is under the same
obligation to submit to discipline and to earn his pay as any other man.
What then is the duty of the Christian slave as the Pastorals
see it? It is to be a good slave. If he is not, if he is slack and
careless, if he is disobedient and insolent, he merely supplies the
world with ammunition to criticize the Church. The Christian workman
must commend his Christianity by being a better workman than other
people. In particular, his work will be done in a new spirit. He will
not now think of himself as being unwillingly compelled to work; he will
think of himself as rendering service to his master, to God and to his
fellow-men. His aim will be, not to see how little can be forced out of
him, but how much he can willingly do. As George Herbert had it:
"A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine."
6:3-5 If any man
offers a different kind of teaching, and does not apply himself to sound
words (it is the words of our Lord Jesus Christ I mean) and to godly
teaching, he has become inflated with pride. He is a man of no
understanding; rather he has a diseased addiction to subtle speculations
and battles of words, which can be only a source of envy, strife, the
exchange of insults, evil suspicions, continual altercations of men
whose minds are corrupt and who are destitute of the truth, men whose
belief is that religion is a means of making gain.
The circumstances of life in the ancient world presented the
false teacher with an opportunity which he was not slow to take. On the
Christian side, the Church was full of wandering prophets, whose very
way of life gave them a certain prestige. The Christian service was much
more informal than it is now. Anyone who felt he had a message was free
to give it; and the door was wide open to men who were out to propagate
a false and misleading message. On the heathen side, there were men
called sophists (compare Greek #4680),
wise men, who made it their business, so to speak, to sell philosophy.
They had two lines. They claimed for a fee to be able to teach men to
argue cleverly; they were the men who with their smooth tongues and
their adroit minds were skilled in "making the worse appear the better
reason." They had turned philosophy into a way of becoming rich. Their
other line was to give demonstrations of public speaking. The Greek had
always been fascinated by the spoken word; he loved an orator; and these
wandering sophists went from town to town, giving their oratorical
demonstrations. They went in for advertising on an intensive scale and
even went the length of delivering by hand personal invitations to their
displays. The most famous of them drew people literally by the thousand
to their lectures; they were in their day the equivalent of the modern
pop star. Philostratus tells us that Adrian, one of the most famous of
them, had such a popular power that, when his messenger appeared with
the news that he was to speak, even the senate and the circus emptied,
and the whole population flocked to the Athenaeum to hear him. They had
three great faults.
Their speeches were quite unreal. They would offer to speak on
any subject, however remote and recondite and unlikely, that any member
of the audience might propose. This is the kind of question they would
argue; it is an actual example. A man goes into the citadel of a town to
kill a tyrant who has been grinding down the people; not finding the
tyrant, he kills the tyrant's son; the tyrant comes in and sees his dead
son with the sword in his body, and in his grief kills himself; the man
then claims the reward for killing the tyrant and liberating the
people; should he receive it?
Their thirst was for applause. Competition between them was a
bitter and a cut-throat affair. Plutarch tells of a travelling sophist
called Niger who came to a town in Galatia where a prominent orator
resided. A competition was immediately arranged. Niger had to compete or
lose his reputation. He was suffering from a fishbone in his throat and
had difficulty in speaking; but for the sake of prestige he had to go
on. Inflammation set in soon after, and in the end he died. Dio
Chrysostom paints a picture of a public place in Corinth with all the
different kinds of competitors in full blast: "You might hear many poor
wretches of sophists shouting and abusing each other, and their
disciples, as they call them, squabbling, and many writers of books
reading their stupid compositions, and many poets singing their poems,
and many jugglers exhibiting their marvels, and many soothsayers giving
the meaning of prodigies, and a thousand rhetoricians twisting lawsuits,
and no small number of traders driving their several trades." There you
have just that interchange of insults, that envy and strife, that
constant wordy altercation of men with decadent minds that the writer of
the Pastorals deplores. "A sophist," wrote Philostratus, "is put out in
an extempore speech by a serious-looking audience and tardy praise and
no clapping." "They are all agape," said Dio Chrysostom, "for the murmur
of the crowd.... Like men walking in the dark they move always in the
direction of the clapping and the shouting." Lucian writes: "If your
friends see you breaking down, let them pay the price of the suppers you
give them by stretching out their arms and giving you a chance of
thinking of something to say in the intervals between the rounds of
applause." The ancient world well knew just the kind of false teacher
who was invading the Church.
Their thirst was for praise, and their criterion was numbers.
Epictetus has some vivid pictures of the sophist talking to his
disciples after his performance. "'Well, what did you think of me
today?' 'Upon my life, sir, I thought you were admirable.' 'What did you
think of my best passage?' 'Which was that?' 'Where I described Pan and
the Nymphs.' 'Oh, it was excessively well done.'" "'A much larger
audience today, I think,' says the sophist. 'Yes, much larger,' responds
the disciple. 'Five hundred, I should guess.' 'O, nonsense! It could
not have been less than a thousand.' 'Why, that is more than Dio ever
had. I wonder why it was? They appreciated what I said, too.' 'Beauty,
sir, can move a stone.'" These performing sophists were "the pets of
society." They became senators, governors, ambassadors. When they died
monuments were erected to them, with inscriptions such as, "The Queen of
Cities to the King of Eloquence."
The Greeks were intoxicated with the spoken word. Among them, if
a man could speak, his fortune was made. It was against a background
like that that the Church was growing up; and it is little wonder that
this type of teacher invaded it. The Church gave him a new area in which
to exercise his meretricious gifts and to gain a tinsel prestige and a
not unprofitable following.
Here in this passage are set out the characteristics of the false teacher.
(i) His first characteristic is conceit. His desire is not to
display Christ, but to display himself There are still preachers and
teachers who are more concerned to gain a following for themselves than
for Jesus Christ, more concerned to press their own views than to bring
to men the word of God. In a lecture on his old teacher A. B. Bruce, W.
M. Macgregor said: "One of our own Highland ministers tells how he had
been puzzled by seeing Bruce again and again during lectures take up a
scrap of paper, look at it and then proceed. One day he caught at the
chance of seeing what this paper contained, and discovered on it an
indication of the words: 'O, send out thy light and thy truth,' and thus
he realized with awe that into his classroom the professor brought the
majesty and the hopefulness of worship." The great teacher does not
offer men his own farthing candle of illumination; he offers them the
light and the truth of God.
(ii) His concern is with abstruse and recondite speculations.
There is a kind of Christianity which is more concerned with argument
than with life. To be a member of a discussion circle or a Bible study
group and spend enjoyable hours in talk about doctrines does not
necessarily make a Christian. J. S. Whale in his book Christian Doctrine
has certain scathing things to say about this pleasant intellectualism:
"We have as Valentine said of Thurio, 'an exchequer of words, but no
other treasure.' Instead of putting off our shoes from our feet because
the place whereon we stand is holy ground, we are taking nice
photographs of the Burning Bush from suitable angles: we are chatting
about theories of the Atonement with our feet on the mantelpiece,
instead of kneeling down before the wounds of Christ." As Luther had it:
"He who merely studies the commandments of God (mandata Dei) is not
greatly moved. But he who listens to God commanding (Deum mandantem),
how can he fail to be terrified by majesty so great?" As Melanchthon had
it: "To know Christ is not to speculate about the mode of his
Incarnation, but to know his saving benefits." Gregory of Nyssa drew a
revealing picture of Constantinople in his day: "Constantinople is full
of mechanics and slaves, who are all of them profound theologians,
preaching in the shops and the streets. If you want a man to change a
piece of silver, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father;
if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the
Son is inferior to the Father; and if you enquire whether the bath is
ready, the answer is that the Son is made out of nothing." Subtle
argumentation and glib theological statements do not make a Christian.
That kind of thing may well be nothing other than a mode of escape from
the challenge of Christian living.
(iii) The false teacher is a disturber of the peace. He is
instinctively competitive; he is suspicious of all who differ from him;
when he cannot win in an argument he hurls insults at his opponent's
theological position, and even at his character; in any argument the
accent of his voice is bitterness and not love. He has never learned to
speak the truth in love. The source of his bitterness is the exaltation
of self; for his tendency is to regard any difference from or any
criticism of his views as a personal insult.
(iv) The false teacher commercializes religion. He is out for
profit. He looks on his teaching and preaching, not as a vocation, but
as a career. One thing is certain--there is no place for careerists in
the ministry of any Church. The Pastorals are quite clear that the
labourer is worthy of his hire; but the motive of his work must be
public service and not private gain. His passion is, not to get, but to
spend and be spent in the service of Christ and of his fellow-men.
6:6-8 And in truth
godliness with contentment is great gain. We brought nothing into the
world, and it is quite clear that we cannot take anything out of it
either; but if we have food and shelter, we shall be content with them.
The word here used for contentment is autarkeia (0841). This
was one of the great watchwords of the Stoic philosophers. By it they
meant a complete self-sufficiency. They meant a frame of mind which was
completely independent of all outward things, and which carried the
secret of happiness within itself.
Contentment never comes from the possession of external things. As George Herbert wrote:
"For he that needs five thousand pounds to live
Is full as poor as he that needs but five."
Contentment comes from an inward attitude to life. In the Third
part of Henry the Sixth, Shakespeare draws a picture of the king
wandering in the country places unknown. He meets two gamekeepers and
tells them that he is a king. One of them asks him:
"But, if thou be a king, where is thy crown?" And the king gives a great answer:
"My crown is in my heart, not on my head;
Not deck'd with diamonds and Indian stones,
Nor to be seen; my crown is call'd content--
A crown it is that seldom kings enjoy."
Long ago the Greek philosophers had gripped the right end of
the matter. Epicurus said of himself: "To whom little is not enough
nothing is enough. Give me a barley cake and a glass of water and I am
ready to rival Zeus for happiness." And when someone asked him for the
secret of happiness, his answer was: "Add not to a man's possessions but
take away from his desires."
The great men have always been content with little. One of the
sayings of the Jewish Rabbis was: "Who is rich? He that is contented
with his lot." Walter Lock quotes the kind of training on which a Jewish
Rabbi engaged and the kind of life he lived: "This is the path of the
Law. A morsel with salt shalt thou eat, thou shalt drink also water by
measure, and shalt sleep upon the ground and live a life of trouble
while thou toilest in the Law. If thou doest this, happy shalt thou be,
and it shall be well with thee --, happy shalt thou be in this world and
it shall be well with thee in the world to come." The Rabbi had to
learn to be content with enough. E. F. Brown quotes a passage from the
great preacher Lacordaire: "The rock of our present day is that no one
knows how to live upon little. The great men of antiquity were generally
poor.... It always seems to me that the retrenchment of useless
expenditure, the laying aside of what one may call the relatively
necessary, is the high road to Christian disentanglement of heart, just
as it was to that of ancient vigour. The mind that has learned to
appreciate the moral beauty of life, both as regards God and men, can
scarcely be greatly moved by any outward reverse of fortune; and what
our age wants most is the sight of a man, who might possess everything,
being yet willingly contented with little. For my own part, humanly
speaking, I wish for nothing. A great soul in a small house is the idea
which has touched me more than any other."
It is not that Christianity pleads for poverty. There is no
special virtue in being poor, or in having a constant struggle to make
ends meet. But it does plead for two things.
It pleads for the realization that it is never in the power of
things to bring happiness. E. K. Simpson says: "Many a millionaire,
after choking his soul with gold-dust, has died from melancholia."
Happiness always comes from personal relationships. All the things in
the world will not make a man happy if he knows neither friendship nor
love. The Christian knows that the secret of happiness lies, not in
things, but in people.
It pleads for concentration upon the things which are permanent.
We brought nothing into the world and we cannot take anything out of
it. The wise men of every age and faith have known this. "You cannot,"
said Seneca, "take anything more out of the world than you brought into
it." The poet of the Greek anthology had it: "Naked I set foot on the
earth; naked I shall go below the earth." The Spanish proverb grimly
puts it: "There are no pockets in a shroud." E. K. Simpson comments:
"Whatever a man amasses by the way is in the nature of luggage, no part
of his truest personality, but something he leaves behind at the
toll-bar of death."
Two things alone a man can take to God. He can, and must, take
himself; and therefore his great task is to build up a self he can take
without shame to God. He can, and must, take that relationship with God
into which he has entered in the days of his life. We have already seen
that the secret of happiness lies in personal relationships, and the
greatest of all personal relationships is the relationship to God. And
the supreme thing that a man can take with him is the utter conviction
that he goes to One who is the friend and lover of his soul.
Content comes when we escape the servitude to things, when we
find our wealth in the love and the fellowship of men, and when we
realize that our most precious possession is our friendship with God,
made possible through Jesus Christ.
6:9-10 Those who wish
to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many senseless and
harmful desires for the forbidden things, desires which swamp men in a
sea of ruin and total loss in time and in eternity. For the love of
money is a root from which all evils spring; and some, in their reaching
out after it, have been sadly led astray, and have transfixed
themselves with many pains.
Here is one of the most misquoted sayings in the Bible.
Scripture does not say that money is the root of all evil; it says that
the love of money is the root of all evil. This is a truth of which the
great classical thinkers were as conscious as the Christian teachers.
"Love of money," said Democritus, "is the metropolis of all evils."
Seneca speaks of "the desire for that which does not belong to us, from
which every evil of the mind springs." "The love of money," said
Phocylides, "is the mother of all evils." Philo spoke of "love of money
which is the starting-place of the greatest transgressions of the Law."
Athenaeus quotes a saying: "The belly's pleasure is the beginning and
root of all evil."
Money in itself is neither good nor bad; but the love of it may
lead to evil. With it a man may selfishly serve his own desires; with it
he may answer the cry of his neighbours need. With it he may facilitate
the path of wrong-doing; with it he may make it easier for someone else
to live as God meant him to do. Money is not itself an evil, but it is a
great responsibility. It is powerful to good and powerful to evil. What
then are the special dangers involved in the love of money?
(i) The desire for money tends to be a thirst which is
insatiable. There was a Roman proverbial saying that wealth is like
sea-water; so far from quenching a man's thirst, it intensifies it. The
more he gets, the more he wants.
(ii) The desire for wealth is founded on an illusion. It is
founded on the desire for security; but wealth cannot buy security. It
cannot buy health, nor real love; and it cannot preserve from sorrow and
from death. The security which is founded on material things is
foredoomed to failure.
(iii) The desire for money tends to make a man selfish. If he is
driven by the desire for wealth, it is nothing to him that someone has
to lose in order that he may gain. The desire for wealth fixes a man's
thoughts upon himself, and others become merely means or obstacles in
the path to his own enrichment. True, that need not happen; but in fact
it often does.
(iv) Although the desire for wealth is based on the desire for
security, it ends in nothing but anxiety. The more a man has to keep,
the more he has to lose and, the tendency is for him to be haunted by
the risk of loss. There is an old fable about a peasant who rendered a
great service to a king who rewarded him with a gift of much money. For a
time the man was thrilled, but the day came when he begged the king to
take back his gift, for into his life had entered the hitherto unknown
worry that he might lose what he had. John Bunyan was right:
"He that is down needs fear no fall,
He that is low, no pride;
He that is humble ever shall
Have God to be his guide.
I am content with what I have,
Little be it or much;
And, Lord, contentment still I crave,
Because Thou savest such.
Fullness to such a burden is
That go on pilgrimage;
Here little, and hereafter bliss,
Is best from age to age."
(v) The love of money may easily lead a man into wrong ways of
getting it, and therefore, in the end, into pain and remorse. That is
true even physically. He may so drive his body in his passion to get,
that he ruins his health. He may discover too late what damage his
desire has done to others and be saddled with remorse.
To seek to be independent and prudently to provide for the
future is a Christian duty; but to make the love of money the
driving-force of life cannot ever be anything other than the most
perilous of sins.
6:11-16 But you, O man
of God, flee from these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith,
love, endurance, gentleness. Fight the good fight of faith; lay hold on
eternal life, to which you are called, now that you have witnessed a
noble profession of your faith in the presence of many witnesses. I
charge you in the sight of God, who makes all things alive, and in the
sight of Christ Jesus, who, in the days of Pontius Pilate, witnessed his
noble confession, that you keep the commandment, that you should be
without spot and without blame, until the day when our Lord Jesus Christ
appears, that appearance which in his own good times the blessed and
only Potentate, the King of kings, and the Lord of lords will show, he
who alone possesses immortality, he who dwells in the light that no man
can approach, he whom no man has seen or ever can see, to whom be honour
and everlasting power. Amen.
The letter comes to an end with a tremendous challenge to
Timothy, a challenge all the greater because of the deliberate sonorous
nobility of the words in which it is clothed.
Right at the outset Timothy is put upon his mettle. He is
addressed as man of God. That is one of the great Old Testament titles.
It is a title given to Moses. Deuteronomy 33:1 speaks of "Moses, the man of God." The title of Psalms 90:1-17
is, "A Prayer of Moses the man of God." It is a title of the prophets
and the messengers of God. God's messenger to Eli is a man of God (1 Samuel 2:27). Samuel is described as a man of God (1 Samuel 9:6). Shemaiah, God's messenger to Rehoboam, is a man of God (1 Kings 12:22). John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress calls Great-Grace "God's Champion."
Here is a title of honour. When the charge is given to Timothy,
he is not reminded of his own weakness and sin, which might well have
reduced him to pessimistic despair; rather he is challenged by the
honour which is his, of being God's man. It is the Christian way, not to
depress a man by branding him as a lost and helpless sinner, but rather
to uplift him by summoning him to be what he has got it in him to be.
The Christian way is not to fling a man's humiliating past in his face,
but to set before him the splendour of his potential future. The very
fact that Timothy was addressed as "Man of God" would make him square
his shoulders and throw his head back as one who has received his
commission from the King.
The virtues and noble qualities set before Timothy are not just
heaped haphazardly together. There is an order in them. First, there
comes "righteousness," dikaiosune (Greek #1343).
This is defined as "giving both to men and to God their due." It is the
most comprehensive of the virtues; the righteous man is he who does his
duty to God and to his fellow-men.
Second, there comes a group of three virtues which look towards God. Godliness, eusebeia (Greek #2150), is the reverence of the man who never ceases to be aware that all life is lived in the presence of God. Faith, pistis (Greek #4102),
here means fidelity, and is the virtue of the man who, through all the
chances and the changes of life, down even to the gates of death, is
loyal to God. Love, agape (Greek #26), is the virtue of the man who, even if he tried, could not forget what God has done for him nor the love of God to men.
Third, there comes the virtue which looks to the conduct of life. It is hupomone (Greek #5281), The King James Version translates this patience; but hupomone (Greek #5281)
never means the spirit which sits with folded hands and simply bears
things, letting the experiences of life flow like a tide over it. It is
victorious endurance. "It is unswerving constancy to faith and piety in
spite of adversity and suffering." It is the virtue which does not so
much accept the experiences of life as conquers them.
Fourthly, there comes the virtue which looks to men. The Greek
word is paupatheia. It is translated gentleness but is really
untranslatable. It describes the spirit which never blazes into anger
for its own wrongs but can be devastatingly angry for the wrongs of
others. It describes the spirit which knows how to forgive and yet knows
how to wage the battle of righteousness. It describes the spirit which
walks at once in humility and yet in pride of its high calling from God.
It describes the virtue by which at all times a man is enabled rightly
to treat his fellow-men and rightly to regard himself.
As Timothy is challenged to the task of the future, he is inspired with the memories of the past.
(i) He is to remember his baptism and the vows he took there. In
the circumstances of the early Church, baptism was inevitably adult
baptism, for men were coming straight from heathenism to Christ. It was
confession of faith and witness to all men that the baptised person had
taken Jesus Christ as Saviour, Master and Lord. The earliest of all
Christian confessions was the simple creed: "Jesus Christ is Lord" (Romans 10:9; Philippians 2:11).
But it has been suggested that behind these words to Timothy lies a
confession of faith which said: "I believe in God the Almighty, Creator
of heaven and earth, and in Christ Jesus who suffered under Pontius
Pilate and will return to judge; I believe in the Resurrection from the
dead and in the life immortal." It may well have been a creed like that
to which Timothy gave his allegiance. So, then, first of all, he is
reminded that he is a man who has given his pledge. The Christian is
first and foremost a man who has pledged himself to Jesus Christ.
(ii) He is to remember that he has made the same confession of
his faith as Jesus did. When Jesus stood before Pilate, Pilate said:
"Are you the King of the Jews?" and Jesus answered: "You have said so" (Luke 23:3).
Jesus had witnessed that he was a King; and Timothy always had
witnessed to the lordship of Christ. When the Christian confesses his
faith, he does what his Master has already done; when he suffers for his
faith, he undergoes what his Master has already undergone. When we are
engaged on some great enterprise, we can say: "Brothers, we are treading
where the saints have trod," but when we confess our faith before men,
we can say even more; we can say: "I stand with Christ"; and surely this
must lift up our hearts and inspire our lives.
(iii) He is to remember that Christ comes again. He is to
remember that his life and work must be made fit for him to see. The
Christian is not working to satisfy men; he is working to satisfy
Christ. The question he must always ask himself is not: "Is this good
enough to pass the judgment of men?" but: "Is it good enough to win the
approval of Christ?"
(iv) Above all he is to remember God. And what a memory that is!
He is to remember the One who is King of every king and Lord of every
lord; the One who possesses the gift of life eternal to give to men; the
One whose holiness and majesty are such that no man can ever dare look
upon them. The Christian must ever remember God and say: "If God be for
us, who can be against us?"
6:17-19 Charge those
who are rich in this world's goods not to be proud, and not set their
hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God who gives them all things
richly to enjoy. Charge them to do good; to find their wealth in noble
deeds; to be ready to share all that they have; to be men who never
forget that they are members of a fellowship; to lay up for themselves
the treasure of a fine foundation for the world to come. that they may
lay hold on real life.
Sometimes we think of the early Church as composed entirely of
poor people and slaves. Here we see that even as early as this it had
its wealthy members. They are not condemned for being wealthy nor told
to give all their wealth away; but they are told what not to do and what
to do with it.
Their riches must not make them proud. They must not think
themselves better than other people because they have more money than
they. Nothing in this world gives any man the right to look down on
another, least of all the possession of wealth. They must not set their
hopes on wealth. In the chances and the changes of life a man may be
wealthy today and a pauper tomorrow; and it is folly to set one's hopes
on what can so easily be lost.
They are told that they must use their wealth to do good; that
they must ever be ready to share; and that they must remember that the
Christian is a member of a fellowship. And they are told that such wise
use of wealth will build for them a good foundation in the world to
come. As someone put it: "What I kept, I lost; what I gave I have."
There is a famous Jewish Rabbinic story. A man called Monobaz
had inherited great wealth, but he was a good, a kindly and a generous
man. In time of famine he gave away all his wealth to help the poor. His
brothers came to him and said: "Your fathers laid up treasure, and
added to the treasure that they had inherited from their fathers, and
are you going to waste it all?" He answered: "My fathers laid up
treasure below: I have laid it up above. My fathers laid up treasure of
Mammon: I have laid up treasure of souls. My fathers laid up treasure
for this world: I have laid up treasure for the world to come."
Every time we could give and do not give lessens the wealth laid
up for us in the world to come; every time we give increases the riches
laid up for us when this life comes to an end.
The teaching of the Christian ethic is, not that wealth is a
sin, but that it is a very great responsibility. If a man's wealth
ministers to nothing but his own pride and enriches no one but himself,
it becomes his ruination, because it impoverishes his soul. But if he
uses it to bring help and comfort to others, in becoming poorer, he
really becomes richer. In time and in eternity "it is more blessed to
give than to receive."
6:20-21 O Timothy,
guard the trust that has been entrusted to you. Avoid irreligious empty
talking; and the paradoxes of that knowledge which has no right to be
called knowledge, which some have professed, and by so doing have missed
the target of the faith.
Grace be with you.
It may well be that the name Timothy is here used in the fullness of its meaning. It comes from two words, timan (Greek #5091), to honour, and theos (Greek #2316),
God and literally means he who honours God. It may well be that this
concluding passage begins by reminding Timothy of his name and urging
him to be true to it.
The passage talks of the trust that has been entrusted to him. The Greek word for trust is paratheke (Greek #3866),
which literally means a deposit. It is the word for money deposited
with a banker or with a friend. When such money was in time demanded
back, it was a sacred duty to hand it back entire. Sometimes children
were called a paratheke (Greek #3866), a sacred trust. If the gods gave a man a child, it was his duty to present that child trained and equipped to the gods.
The Christian faith is like that, something which we received
from our forefathers, and which we must pass on to our children. E. F.
Brown quotes a famous passage from St. Vincent of Lerins: "What is meant
by the deposit? (paratheke, Greek #3866).
That which is committed to thee, not that which is invented by thee;
that which thou hast received, not that which thou hast devised; a thing
not of wit, but of learning; not of private assumption, but of public
tradition; a thing brought to thee, not brought forth of thee; wherein
thou must not be an author, but a keeper; not a leader, but a follower.
Keep the deposit. Preserve the talent of the Catholic faith safe and
undiminished; let that which is committed to thee remain with thee, and
that deliver. Thou hast received gold, render gold."
A man does well to remember that his duty is not only to
himself, but also to his children and his children's children. If in our
day the Church were to become enfeebled; if the Christian ethic were to
be more and more submerged in the world; if the Christian faith were to
be twisted and distorted; it would not only be we who were the losers,
those of generations still to come would be robbed of something
infinitely precious. We are not only the possessors but also the
trustees of the faith. That which we have received, we must also hand
on.
Finally the Pastorals condemn those who, as the King James
Version has it, have given themselves to "the oppositions of science
falsely so-called." First, we must note that here the word science is
used in its original sense; it simply means knowledge (gnosis, Greek #1108). What is being condemned is a false intellectualism and a false stressing of human knowledge.
But what is meant by oppositions? The Greek word is antitheseis (Greek #477).
Very much later than this there was a heretic called Marcion who
produced a book called The Antitheseis in which he quoted Old Testament
texts and set beside them New Testament texts which contradicted them.
This might very well mean: "Don't waste your time seeking out
contradictions in Scripture. Use the Scriptures to live by and not to
argue about." But there are two meanings more probable than that.
(i) The word antithesis (Greek #477)
could mean a controversy; and this might mean: "Avoid controversies;
don't get yourself mixed up in useless and bitter arguments." This would
be a very relevant bit of advice to a Greek congregation in Ephesus.
The Greek had a passion for going to law. He would even go to law with
his own brother, just for the pleasure of it. This may well mean, "Don't
make the Church a battle-ground of theological arguments and debates.
Christianity is not something to argue about, but something to live by."
(ii) The word antithesis (Greek #477)
can mean a rival thesis. This is the most likely meaning, because it
suits Jew and Gentile alike. The scholastics in the later days used to
argue about questions like: "How many angels can stand on the point of a
needle?" The Jewish Rabbis would argue about hair-splitting points of
the law for hours and days and even years. The Greeks were the same,
only in a still more serious way. There was a school of Greek
philosophers, and a very influential school it was, called the
Academics. The Academics held that in the case of everything in the
realm of human thought, you could by logical argument arrive at
precisely opposite conclusions. They therefore concluded that there is
no such thing as absolute truth; that always there were two hypotheses
of equal weight. They went on to argue that, this being so, the wise man
will never make up his mind about anything but will hold himself for
ever in a state of suspended judgment. The effect was of course to
paralyse all action and to reduce men to complete uncertainty. So
Timothy is told: "Don't waste your time in subtle arguments; don't waste
your time in 'dialectical fencing.' Don't be too clever to be wise.
Listen rather to the unequivocal voice of God than to the subtle
disputations of over-clever minds."
So the letter draws to a close with a warning which our own
generation needs. Clever argument can never be made a substitute for
Christian action. The duty of the Christian is not to sit in a study and
weigh arguments but to live the Christian life in the dust and heat of
the world. In the end it is not intellectual cleverness, but conduct and
character which count.
Then comes the closing blessing--"Grace be with you." The letter ends with the beauty of the grace of God.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)
FURTHER READING
Timothy
D. Guthrie, The Pastoral Epistles (TC E)
W. Lock, The Pastoral Epistles (ICC G)
E. F. Scott, The Pastoral Epistles (MC E)
E. K. Simpson, The Pastoral Epistles
Abbreviations
CGT: Cambridge Greek Testament
ICC: International Critical Commentary
MC: Moffatt Commentary
TC: Tyndale Commentary
E: English Text
G: Greek Text
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)