Verses 1-17
Chapter 3
3:1 You must realize this--that in the last days difficult times will set in.
The early Church lived in an age when the time was waxing late;
they expected the Second Coming at any moment. Christianity was cradled
in Judaism and very naturally thought largely in Jewish terms and
pictures. Jewish thought had one basic conception. The Jews divided all
time into this present age and the age to come. This present age was
altogether evil; and the age to come would be the golden age of God. In
between there was The Day of the Lord, a day when God would personally
intervene and shatter the world in order to remake it. That Day of the
Lord was to be preceded by a time of terror, when evil would gather
itself for its final assault and the world would be shaken to its moral
and physical foundations. It is in terms of these last days that Paul is
thinking in this passage.
He says that in them difficult times would set in. Difficult is the Greek word chalepos (Greek #5467). It is the normal Greek word for difficult, but it has certain usage's which explain its meaning here. It is used in Matthew 8:28
to describe the two Gergesene demoniacs who met Jesus among the tombs.
They were violent and dangerous. It is used in Plutarch to describe what
we would call an ugly wound. It is used by ancient writers on astrology
to describe what we would call a threatening conjunction of the
heavenly bodies. There is the idea of menace and of danger in this word.
In the last days there would come times which would menace the very
existence of the Christian Church and of goodness itself, a kind of last
tremendous assault of evil before its final defeat.
In the Jewish pictures of these last terrible times we get
exactly the same kind of picture as we get here. There would come a kind
of terrible flowering of evil, when the moral foundations seemed to be
shaken. In the Testament of Issachar, one of the books written between
the Old and the New Testaments, we get a picture like this:
"Know ye, therefore, my children, that in the last times
Your sons will forsake singleness
And will cleave unto insatiable desire;
And leaving guilelessness, will draw near to malice;
And forsaking the commandments of the Lord,
They will cleave unto Beliar.
And leaving husbandry,
They will follow after their own wicked devices,
And they shall be dispersed among the Gentiles,
And shall serve their enemies."
(Testament of Issachar, 6: 1-2).
In 2Baruch we get an even more vivid picture of the moral chaos of these last times:
"And honour shall be turned into shame,
And strength humiliated into contempt,
And probity destroyed,
And beauty shall become ugliness ...
And envy shall rise in those who had not thought ought of
themselves,
And passion shall seize him that is peaceful,
And many shall be stirred up in anger to injure many;
And they shall rouse up armies in order to shed blood,
And in the end they shall perish together with them." (2Baruch 27).
In this picture which Paul draws he is thinking in terms
familiar to the Jews. There was to be a final show-down with the forces
of evil.
Nowadays we have to restate these old pictures in modern terms.
They were never meant to be anything else but visions; we do violence to
Jewish and to early Christian thought if we take them with a crude
literalness. But they do enshrine the permanent truth that some time
there must come the consummation when evil meets God in head-on
collision and there comes the final triumph of God.
3:2-5 For men will
live a life that is centred in self; they will be lovers of money,
braggarts, arrogant, lovers of insult, disobedient to their parents,
thankless, regardless even of the ultimate decencies of life, without
human affection, implacable in hatred, revelling in slander,
ungovernable in their passions, savage, not knowing what the love of
good is, treacherous, headlong in word and action, inflated with pride,
lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. They will maintain the
outward form of religion, but they will deny its power. Avoid such
people.
Here is one of the most terrible pictures in the New Testament
of what a godless world would be like, with the terrible qualities of
godlessness set out in a ghastly series. Let us look at them one by one.
It is no accident that the first of these qualities will be a
life that is centred in self. The adjective used is philautos (Greek #5367),
which means self-loving. Love of self is the basic sin, from which all
others flow. The moment a man makes his own will the centre of life,
divine and human relationships are destroyed, obedience to God and
charity to men both become impossible. The essence of Christianity is
not the enthronement but the obliteration of self.
Men would become lovers of money (philarguros, Greek #5366).
We must remember that Timothy's work lay in Ephesus, perhaps the
greatest market in the ancient world. In those days trade tended to flow
down river valleys; Ephesus was at the mouth of the River Cayster, and
commanded the trade of one of the richest hinterlands in all Asia Minor.
At Ephesus some of the greatest roads in the world met. There was the
great trade route from the Euphrates valley which came by way of Colosse
and Laodicea and poured the wealth of the east into the lap of Ephesus.
There was the road from north Asia Minor and from Galatia which came in
via Sardis. There was the road from the south which centred the trade
of the Maeander valley in Ephesus. Ephesus was called "The
Treasure-house of the ancient world," "The Vanity Fair of Asia Minor."
It has been pointed out that the writer of Revelation may well have been
thinking of Ephesus when he wrote that haunting passage which describes
the merchandise of men: "The cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls,
fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all
articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble,
cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour
and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves, that is,
human souls" (Revelation 18:12-13).
Ephesus was the town of a prosperous, materialistic civilization; it
was the kind of town where a man could so easily lose his soul.
There is peril when men assess prosperity by material things. It
is to be remembered that a man may lose his soul far more easily in
prosperity than in adversity; and he is on the way to losing his soul
when he assesses the value of life by the number of things which he
possesses.
In these terrible days men would be braggarts and arrogant. In Greek
writings these two words often went together; and they are both
picturesque.
Braggart has an interesting derivation. It is the word alazon (Greek #213) and was derived from the ale, which means a wandering about. Originally the alazon (Greek #213) was a wandering quack. Plutarch uses the word to describe a quack doctor. The alazon (Greek #213)
was a mountebank who wandered the country with medicines and spells and
methods of exorcism which, he claimed, were panaceas for all diseases.
We can still see this kind of man in fairs and market-places shouting
the virtues of a patent medicine which will act like magic. Then the
word went on to widen its meaning until it meant any braggart.
The Greek moralists wrote much about this word. The Platonic Definitions defined the corresponding noun (alazoneia, Greek #212) as: "The claim to good things which a man does not really possess." Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, 7: 2) defined the alazon (Greek #213)
as "the man who pretends to creditable qualities that he does not
possess, or possesses in a lesser degree than he makes out." Xenophon
tells us how Cyrus, the Persian king, defined the alazon (Greek #213): "The name alazon (Greek #213)
seems to apply to those who pretend that they are richer than they are
or braver than they are, and to those who promise to do what they cannot
do, and that, too, when it is evident that they do this only for the
sake of getting something or making some gain" (Xenophon: Cyropoedia, 2,
2, 12). Xenophon in the Memorabilia tells how Socrates utterly
condemned such impostors. Socrates skid that they were to be found in
every walk of life but were worst of all in politics. "Much the greatest
rogue of all is the man who has gulled his city into the belief that he
is fit to direct it."
The world is full of these braggarts to this day; the clever
know-all's who deceive people into thinking that they are wise, the
politicians who claim that their parties have a program which will bring
in the Utopia and that they alone are born to be leaders of men, the
people who crowd the advertisement columns with claims to give beauty,
knowledge or health by their system, the people in the Church who have a
kind of ostentatious goodness.
Closely allied with the braggart, but--as we shall see--even worse, is the man who is arrogant. The word is huperephanos (Greek #5244). It is derived from two Greek words which mean to show oneself above. The man who is huperephanos (Greek #5244),
said Theophrastus, has a kind of contempt for everyone except himself.
He is the man who is guilty of the "sin of the high heart." He is the
man whom God resists, for it is repeatedly said in scripture, that God
receives the humble but resists the man who is proud, huperephanos (Greek #5244) (James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5; Proverbs 3:24). Theophylact called this kind of pride akropolis (compare Greek #206 and Greek #4172) kakon (Greek #2556), the citadel of evils.
The difference between the braggart and the man who is arrogant
is this. The braggart is a swaggering creature, who tries to bluster his
way into power and eminence. No one can possibly mistake him. But the
sin of the man who is arrogant is in his heart. He might even seem to be
humble; but in his secret heart there is contempt for everyone else. He
nourishes an all-consuming, all-pervading pride; and in his heart there
is a little altar where he bows down before himself.
These twin qualities of the braggart and the arrogant man inevitably result in love of insult (blasphemia, Greek #988).
Blasphemia is the word which is transliterated into English as
blasphemy. In English we usually associate it with insult against God,
but in Greek it means insult against man and God alike. Pride always
begets insult. It begets disregard of God, thinking that it does not
need him and that it knows better than he. It begets a contempt of men
which can issue in hurting actions and in wounding words. The Jewish
Rabbis ranked high in the list of sins what they called the sin of
insult. The insult which comes from anger is bad but it is forgivable,
for it is launched in the heat of the moment; but the cold insult which
comes from arrogant pride is an ugly and an unforgivable thing.
Men will be disobedient to their parents. The ancient
world set duty to parents very high. The oldest Greek laws disfranchised
the man who struck his parents; to strike a father was in Roman law as
bad as murder; in the Jewish law honour for father and mother comes high
in the list of the Ten Commandments. It is the sign of a supremely
decadent civilization when youth loses all respect for age and fails to
recognize the unpayable debt and the basic duty it owes to those who
gave it life.
Men will be thankless (acharistos, Greek #884).
They will refuse to recognize the debt they owe both to God and to men.
The strange characteristic of ingratitude is that it is the most
hurting of all sins because it is the blindest. Lear's words remain
true:
"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child!"
It is the sign of a man of honour that he pays his debts; and
for every man there is a debt to God and there are debts to his
fellow-men, which he must remember and repay.
Men will refuse to recognize even the ultimate decencies of life. The Greek word is that men will become anosios (Greek #462).
Anosios does not so much mean that men will break the written laws; it
means that they will offend against the unwritten laws which are part
and parcel of the essence of life. To the Greek it was anosios (Greek #462) to refuse burial to the dead; it was anosios (Greek #462) for a brother to marry a sister, or a son a mother. The man who is anosios (Greek #462)
offends against the fundamental decencies of life. Such offence can and
does happen yet. The man who is mastered by his lower passions will
gratify them in the most shameless way, as the streets of any great city
will show when the night is late. The man who has exhausted the normal
pleasures of life and still unsated, will seek his thrill in pleasures
which are abnormal.
Men will be without human affection (astorgos, Greek #794).
Storge is the word used especially of family love, the love of child
for parent and parent for child. If there is no human affection, the
family cannot exist. In the terrible times men will be so set on self
that even the closest ties will be nothing to them.
Men will be implacable in their hatreds (aspondos, Greek #786). Sponde is the word for a truce or an agreement. Aspondos (Greek #786)
can mean two things. It can mean that a man is so bitter in his hatred
that he will never come to terms with the man with whom he has
quarrelled. Or it can mean that a man is so dishonourable that he breaks
the terms of the agreement he has made. In either case the word
describes a certain harshness of mind which separates a man from his
fellow-men in unrelenting bitterness. It may be that, since we are only
human, we cannot live entirely without differences with our fellow-men,
but to perpetuate these differences is one of the worst--and also one of
the commonest--of all sins. When we are tempted to do so, we should
hear again the voice of our blessed Lord saying on the Cross: "Father,
forgive them."
In these terrible days men will be slanderers. The Greek for slanderer is diabolos (Greek #1228)
which is precisely the English word devil. The devil is the patron
saint of all slanderers and of all slanderers he is chief. There is a
sense in which slander is the most cruel of all sins. If a man's goods
are stolen, he can set to and build up his fortunes again; but if his
good name is taken away, irreparable damage has been done. It is one
thing to start an evil and untrue report on its malicious way; it is
entirely another thing to stop it. As Shakespeare had it:
"Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands:
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed."
Many men and women, who would never dream of stealing, think
nothing--even find pleasure--in passing on a story which ruins someone
else's good name, without even trying to find out whether or not it is
true. There is slander enough in many a church to make the recording
angel weep as he records it.
Men will be ungovernable in their desires (akrates, Greek #193). The Greek verb kratein (Greek #2902)
means to control. A man can reach a stage when, so far from controlling
it, he can become a slave to some habit or desire. That is the
inevitable way to ruin, for no man can master anything unless he first
masters himself.
Men will be savage. The word is anemeros (Greek #434)
and would be more fittingly applied to a wild beast than to a human
being. It denotes a savagery which has neither sensitiveness nor
sympathy. Men can be savage in rebuke and savage in pitiless action.
Even a dog may be sorry when he has hurt his master, but there are
people who, in their treatment of others, can be lost to human sympathy
and feeling.
In these last terrible days men will come to have no love for good things or good persons (aphilagathos, Greek #865).
There can come a time in a man's life when the company of good people
and the presence of good things is simply an embarrassment. He who feeds
his mind on cheap literature can in the end find nothing in the great
masterpieces. His mental palate loses its taste. A man has sunk far when
he finds even the presence of good people something which he would only
wish to avoid.
Men will be treacherous. The Greek word (prodotes, Greek #4273)
means nothing less than a traitor. We must remember that this was
written just at the beginning of the years of persecution, when it was
becoming a crime to be a Christian. At this particular time in the
ordinary matters of politics one of the curses of Rome was the existence
of informers (delatores, compare Greek #1213).
Things were so bad that Tacitus could say: "He who had no foe was
betrayed by his friend." There were those who would revenge themselves
on an enemy by informing against him. What Paul is thinking of here is
more than faithlessness in friendship--although that in all truth is
wounding enough--he is thinking of those who to pay back an old score
would inform against the Christians to the Roman government.
Men would be headlong in words and action. The word is propetes (Greek #4312),
precipitate. It describes the man who is swept on by passion and
impulse to such an extent that he is totally unable to think sensibly.
Far more harm is done from want of thought than almost anything else.
Many and many a time we would be saved from hurting ourselves and from
wounding other people, if we would only stop to think.
Men will be inflated with conceit (tetuphomenos, Greek #5187).
The word is almost exactly the English swelled-headed. They will be
inflated with a sense of their own importance. There are still Church
dignitaries whose main thought is their own dignity; but the Christian
is the follower of him who was meek and lowly in heart.
They will be lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Here
we come back to where we started; such men place their own wishes in the
centre of life. They worship self instead of God.
The final condemnation of these people is that they retain the
outward form of religion but deny its power. That is to say, they go
through all the correct movements and maintain all the external forms of
religion; but they know nothing of Christianity as a dynamic power
which changes the lives of men. It is said that, after hearing an
evangelical sermon, Lord Melbourne once remarked: "Things have come to a
pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private
life." It may well be that the greatest handicap to Christianity is not
the scarlet sinner but the sleek devotee of an unimpeachable orthodoxy
and a dignified convention, who is horrified when it is suggested that
real religion is a dynamic power which changes a man's personal life.
3:6-7 For from among
these there come those who enter into houses, and take captive foolish
women, laden with sins and driven by varied desires, ready to listen to
any teacher but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.
The Christian emancipation of women inevitably brought its
problems. We have already seen how secluded the life of the respectable
Greek woman was, how she was brought up under the strictest supervision,
how she was not allowed "to see anything, to hear anything, or to ask
any questions," how she never appeared, even on a shopping expedition,
alone on the streets, how she was never allowed even to appear at a
public meeting. Christianity changed all that and a new set of problems
arose. It was only to be expected that certain women would not know how
to use their new liberty. There were false teachers who were quick to
take advantage of that.
Irenaeus draws a vivid picture of the methods of just such a
teacher in his day. True, he is telling of something which happened
later than this, but the wretched story would be the same (Irenaeus:
Against Heresies, 1, 13, 3). There was a certain heretic called Marcus
who dealt in magic. "He devotes himself specially to women, and those
such as are well-bred, and elegantly attired, and of great wealth." He
tells such women that by his spells and incantations he can enable them
to prophesy. The woman protests that she has never done so and cannot do
so. He says: "Open thy mouth, speak whatsoever occurs to thee, and thou
shalt prophesy." The woman, thrilled to the heart, does so and is
deluded into thinking that she can prophesy. "She then makes the effort
to reward Marcus, not only by the gift of her possessions (in which way
he has collected a very large fortune), but also by yielding up to him
her person, desiring in every way to be united to him, that she may
become altogether one with him." The technique would be the same in the
days of Timothy as it was in the later days of Irenaeus.
There would be two ways in which these heretics in the days of
Timothy could exert an evil influence. We must remember that they were
Gnostics and that the basic principle of Gnosticism was that spirit was
altogether good and matter altogether evil. We have already seen that
that teaching issued in one of two things. The Gnostic heretics taught,
either that, since matter is altogether evil, a rigid asceticism must be
practiced and all the things of the body as far as possible eliminated,
or that it does not matter what we do with the body and its desires can
be indulged in to the limit because they do not matter. The Gnostic
insinuators would teach these doctrines to impressionable women. The
result would often be either that the woman broke off married
relationships with her husband in order to live the ascetic life, or
that she gave the lower instincts full play and abandoned herself to
promiscuous relationships. In either case home and family life were
destroyed.
It is still possible for a teacher to gain an undue and
unhealthy influence over others, especially when they are
impressionable.
It is Paul's charge that such people are "willing to learn from
anyone, and yet never able to come to a knowledge of the truth." E. F.
Brown has pointed out the danger of what he calls "intellectual
curiosity without moral earnestness." There is a type of person who is
eager to discuss every new theory, who is always to be found deeply
involved in the latest fashionable religious movement, but who is quite
unwilling to accept the day-to-day discipline--even drudgery--of living
the Christian life. No amount of intellectual curiosity can ever take
the place of moral earnestness. We are not meant to titillate our minds
with the latest intellectual crazes; we are meant to purify and
strengthen ourselves in the moral battle to live the Christian life.
3:8-9 In the same way
as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these also oppose the truth, men
whose minds are corrupt, and whose faith is counterfeit. But they will
not get much further, for their folly will be as clear to all as that of
those ancient impostors.
In the days between the Old and the New Testaments many Jewish
books were written which expanded the Old Testament stories. In certain
of these books Jannes and Jambres figured largely. These were the names
given to the court magicians of Pharaoh who opposed Moses and Aaron,
when Moses was leading the children of Israel out of their slavery in
Egypt. At first these magicians were able to match the wonders which
Moses and Aaron did, but in the end they were defeated and discredited.
In the Old Testament they are not named, but they are referred to in Exodus 7:11; Exodus 8:7; Exodus 9:11.
A whole collection of stories gathered round their names. They
were said to be the two servants who accompanied Balaam when he was
disobedient to God (Numbers 22:22); they were said to have been part of the great mixed multitude who accompanied the children of Israel out of Egypt (Exodus 12:38);
some said that they perished at the crossing of the Red Sea; other
stories said that it was Jannes and Jambres who were behind the making
of the golden calf and that they perished among those who were killed
for that sin (Exodus 32:28);
still other stories said that in the end they became proselytes to
Judaism. Amidst all the stories one fact stands out--Jannes and Jambres
became legendary figures typifying all those who opposed the purposes of
God and the work of his true leaders.
The Christian leader will never lack his opponents. There will
always be those who have their own twisted ideas of the Christian faith,
and who wish to win others to their mistaken beliefs. But of one thing
Paul was sure--the days of the deceivers were numbered. Their falsity
would be demonstrated and they would receive their appropriate reward.
The history of the Christian Church teaches us that falsity
cannot live. It may flourish for a time, but when it is exposed to the
light of truth it is bound to shrivel and die. There is only one test
for falsity--"You will know them by their fruits." The best way to
overcome and to banish the false is to live in such a way that the
loveliness and the graciousness of the truth is plain for all to see.
The defeat of error depends not on skill in controversy but in the
demonstration in life of the more excellent way.
3:10-13 But you have
been my disciple in my teaching, my training, my aim in life, my faith,
my patience, my love, my endurance, my persecutions, my sufferings, in
what happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra, in the
persecutions which I underwent; and the Lord rescued me from them all.
And those who wish to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be
persecuted; while evil men and impostors will go from bad to worse,
deceived themselves and deceiving others.
Paul contrasts the conduct of Timothy, his loyal disciple, with
the conduct of the heretics who were doing their utmost to wreck the
Church. The word we have translated to be a disciple includes so much
that is beyond translation in any single English word. It is the Greek
parakolouthein (Greek #3877)
and literally means to follow alongside; but it is used with a
magnificent width of meaning. It means to follow a person physically, to
stick by him through thick and thin. It means to follow a person
mentally, to attend diligently to his teaching and fully to understand
the meaning of what he says. It means to follow a person spiritually,
not only to understand what he says, but also to carry out his ideas and
be the kind of person he wishes us to be. Parakolouthein (Greek #3877)
is indeed the word for the disciple, for it includes the unwavering
loyalty of the true comrade, the full understanding of the true scholar
and the complete obedience of the dedicated servant.
Paul goes on to list the things in which Timothy has been his
disciple; and the interest of that list is that it consists of the
strands out of which the life and work of an apostle are woven. In it we
find the duties, the qualities and the experiences of an apostle.
First, there are the duties of an apostle. There is teaching. No
man can teach what he does not know, and therefore before a man can
teach Christ to others he must know him himself. When Carlyle's father
was discussing the kind of minister his parish needed, he said: "What
this parish needs is a man who knows Christ other than at secondhand."
Real teaching is always born of real experience. There is training. The
Christian life does not consist only in knowing something; it consists
even more in being something. The task of the apostle is not only to
tell men the truth; it is also to help them do it. The true leader gives
training in living.
Second, there are the qualities of the apostle. First and
foremost he has an aim in life. Two men were talking of a great satirist
who had been filled with moral earnestness. "He kicked the world
about," said one, "as if it had been a football." "True," said the
other, "but he kicked it to a goal." As individuals, we should sometimes
ask ourselves: what is our aim in life? As teachers we should sometimes
ask ourselves: what am I trying to do with these people whom I teach?
Once Agesilaus, the Sparta king, was asked, "What shall we teach our
boys?" His answer was: "That which will be most useful to them when they
are men." Is it knowledge, or is it life, that we are trying to
transmit?
As members of the Church, we should sometimes ask ourselves,
what are we trying to do in it? It is not enough to be satisfied when a
church is humming like a dynamo and every night in the week has its own
crowded organization. We should be asking: what, if any, is the unifying
purpose which binds all this activity together? In all life there is
nothing so creative of really productive effort as a clear consciousness
of a purpose.
Paul goes on to other qualities of an apostle. There is faith,
complete belief that God's commands are binding and that his promises
are true. There is patience. The word here is makrothumia (Greek #3115);
and makrothumia, as the Greeks used it, usually meant patience with
people. It is the ability not to lose patience when people are foolish,
not to grow irritable when they seem unteachable. It is the ability to
accept the folly, the perversity, the blindness, the ingratitude of men
and still to remain gracious, and still to toil on. There is love. This
is God's attitude to men. It is the attitude which bears with everything
men can do and refuses to be either angry or embittered, and which will
never seek anything but their highest good. To love men is to forgive
them and care for them as God forgave and cares--and it is only he who
can enable us to do that.
Paul completes the story of the things in which Timothy has shared,
and must share, with him, by speaking of the experiences of an apostle;
and he prefaces that list of experiences by setting down the quality of
endurance. The Greek is hupomone (Greek #5281),
which means not a passive sitting down and bearing things but a
triumphant facing of them so that even out of evil there can come good.
It describes, not the spirit which accepts life, but the spirit which
masters it.
And that quality of conquering endurance is necessary, because
persecution is an essential part of the experience of an apostle. Paul
cites three instances when he had to suffer for Christ. He was driven
from Antioch in Pisidia (Acts 13:50); he had to flee from Iconium to avoid lynching (Acts 14:5-6); in Lystra he was stoned and left for dead (Acts 14:19).
It is true that these things happened before the young Timothy had
definitely entered on the Christian way, but they all happened in the
district of which he was a native; and he may well have been an
eyewitness of them. It may well be a proof of Timothy's courage and
consecration that he had seen very clearly what could happen to an
apostle and had yet not hesitated to cast in his lot with Paul.
It is Paul's conviction that the real follower of Christ cannot
escape persecution. When trouble fell on the Thessalonians, Paul wrote
to them: "When we were with you, we told you beforehand that we were to
suffer affliction; just as it has come to pass, and as you know" (1 Thessalonians 3:4).
It is as if he said to them: "You have been well warned." He returned
after the first missionary journey to visit the Churches he had founded,
"strengthening the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue
in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter
the kingdom of God" (Acts 14:22). The Kingdom had its price. And Jesus himself had said: "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake" (Matthew 5:10).
If anyone proposes to accept a set of standards quite different from
the world's, he is bound to encounter trouble. If anyone proposes to
introduce into his life a loyalty which surpasses all earthly loyalties,
there are bound to be clashes. And that is precisely what Christianity
demands that a man should do.
Persecution and hardships will come, but of two things Paul is sure.
He is sure that God will rescue the man who puts his faith in
him. He is sure that in the long run it is better to suffer with God and
the right than to prosper with men and the wrong. Certain of the
temporary persecution, he is equally certain of the ultimate glory.
He is sure that the ungodly man will go from bad to worse and
that there is literally no future for the man who refuses to accept the
way of God.
3:14-17 But as for
you, remain loyal to the things which you have learned, and in which
your belief has been confirmed, for you know from whom you learned them,
and you know that from childhood you have known the sacred writings
which are able to give you the wisdom that will bring you salvation
through the faith which is in Christ Jesus. All God-inspired scripture
is useful for teaching, for the conviction of error, for correction, and
for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete,
fully equipped for every good work.
Paul concludes this section with an appeal to Timothy to remain
loyal to all the teaching he had received. On his mother's side Timothy
was a Jew, although his father had been a Greek (Acts 16:1);
and it is clear that it was his mother who had brought him up. It was
the glory of the Jews that their children from their earliest days were
trained in the law. They claimed that their children learned the law
even from their swaddling clothes and drank it in with their mother's
milk. They claimed that the law was so imprinted on the heart and mind
of a Jewish child that he would sooner forget his own name than he would
forget it. So from his earliest childhood Timothy had known the sacred
writings. We must remember that the scripture of which Paul is writing
is the Old Testament; as yet the New Testament had not come into being.
If what be claims for scripture is true of the Old Testament, how much
truer it is of the still more precious words of the New.
We must note that Paul here makes a distinction. He speaks of
"all God-inspired scripture." The Gnostics had their own fanciful books;
the heretics all produced their own literature to support their claims.
Paul regarded these as man-made things; but the great books for a man's
soul were the God-inspired ones which tradition and the experience of
men had sanctified.
Let us then see what Paul says of the usefulness of scripture.
(i) He says that the Scriptures give the wisdom which will bring
salvation. A. M. Chirgwin in The Bible in World Evangelism tells the
story of a ward sister in a children's hospital in England. She had been
finding life, as she herself said, futile and meaningless. She had
waded through book after book and laboured with philosophy after
philosophy in an attempt to find satisfaction. She had never tried the
Bible, for a friend had convinced her by subtle arguments that it could
not be true. One day a visitor came to the ward and left a supply of
gospels. The sister was persuaded to read a copy of St. John. "It shone
and glowed with truth," she said, "and my whole being responded to it.
The words that finally decided me were those in John 18:37
: 'For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to
bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my
voice.' So I listened to that voice, and heard the truth, and found my
Saviour."
Again and again Scripture has opened for men and women the way
to God. In simple fairness, no man seeking for the truth has any right
to neglect the reading of the Bible. A book with a record such as it has
cannot be disregarded. Even an unbeliever is acting unfairly unless he
tries to read it. The most amazing things may happen if he does, for
there is a saving wisdom here that is in no other book.
(ii) The Scriptures are of use in teaching. Only in the New
Testament have we any picture of Jesus, any account of his life and any
record of his teaching. For that very reason it is unanswerable that,
whatever a man might argue about the rest of the Bible, it is impossible
for the Church ever to do without the Gospels. It is perfectly true--as
we have so often said--that Christianity is not founded on a printed
book but on a living person. The fact remains that the only place in all
the world where we get a first-hand account of that person and of his
teaching is in the New Testament. That is why the church which has no
Bible Class is a church in whose work an essential element is missing.
(iii) The Scriptures are valuable for reproof. It is not meant
that the Scriptures are valuable for finding fault; what is meant is
that they are valuable for convincing a man of the error of his ways and
for pointing him on the right path. A. M. Chirgwin has story after
story of how the Scriptures came by chance into the hands of men and
changed their lives.
In Brazil Signor Antonio of Minas bought a New Testament which
he took home to burn. He went home and found the fire was out.
Deliberately he lit it. He flung the New Testament on it. It would not
burn. He opened out the pages to make it burn more easily. It opened at
the Sermon on the Mount. He glanced at it as he consigned it to the
flames. His mind was caught; he took it back. "He read on, forgetful of
time, through the hours of the night, and just as the dawn was breaking,
he stood up and declared, 'I believe'."
Vincente Quiroga of Chile found a few pages of a book washed up
on the seashore by a tidal wave following an earthquake. He read them
and never rested until he obtained the rest of the Bible. Not only did
he become a Christian; he devoted the rest of his life to the
distribution of the Scriptures in the forgotten villages of northern
Chile.
One dark night in a forest in Sicily a brigand held up a
colporteur at the point of a revolver. He was ordered to light a bonfire
and burn his books. He lit the fire, and then he asked if he might read
a little from each book before he dropped it in the flames. He read the
twenty-third psalm from one; the story of the Good Samaritan from
another; from another the Sermon on the Mount; from another 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
. At the end of each reading, the brigand said: "That's a good book; we
won't burn that one; give it to me." In the end not a book was burned;
the brigand left the colporteur and went off into the darkness with the
books. Years later that same brigand turned up again. This time he was a
Christian minister, and it was to the reading of the books that he
attributed his change.
It is beyond argument that the Scriptures can convict a man of his error and convince him of the power of Christ.
(iv) The Scriptures are of use for correction. The real meaning
of this is that all theories, all theologies, all ethics, are to be
tested against the Bible. If they contradict the teaching of the Bible,
they are to be refused. It is our duty to use our minds and set them
adventuring; but the test must ever be agreement with the teaching of
Jesus Christ as the Scriptures present it to us.
(v) Paul makes a final point. The study of the Scriptures trains
a man in righteousness until he is equipped for every good work. Here
is the essential conclusion. The study of the Scriptures must never be
selfish, never simply for the good of a man's own soul. Any conversion
which makes a man think of nothing but the fact that he has been saved
is no true conversion. He must study the Scriptures to make himself
useful to God and to his fellow-men. No man is saved unless he is on
fire to save his fellow-men.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)