The charge to continue in the gospel
Chapter 3
The Charge to Continue in the Gospel
As he lies in his cell, a prisoner of the Lord, Paul is still preoccupied with the future of the gospel. His mind dwells now on the evil of the times, now on the diffidence of Timothy. Timothy is so weak, and the opposition so strong. It seems anomalous that such a man should be called in such a situation to contend for the truth. So the apostle begins with a vivid sketch of the contemporary scene, and against this background summons Timothy—in spite of the almost universal declension from God and in spite of his own temperamental infirmity—to continue faithful to what he has learned.
1. Facing Times of Stress (verses 1, 2a)
Why does Paul introduce this chapter with such an emphatic command to Timothy to ‘understand this’? After all, the existence of active opposition to the gospel was evident. Paul himself had been arrested, chained and imprisoned because of his own loyalty to it (1:11, 12; 2:9). Everybody in Asia had repudiated him, as Timothy was well aware (1:15). And earlier in the letter the apostle has urged his young friend not to be ashamed of the gospel, but to take his share of suffering as Christ’s good soldier; has reminded him that he must endure with Christ if he hopes one day to reign with him; and has warned him that behind the ‘word-battles’, ‘godless chatter’ and ‘stupid and senseless controversies’ spread by false teachers there lurks the evil figure of the devil himself (1:8; 2:3, 11–12, 14, 16, 23, 26). So why does the apostle enjoin Timothy to understand what he already knows? Surely because he wants to emphasize that opposition to the truth is not a passing situation, but a permanent characteristic of the age. Perhaps he fears that Timothy will be over-optimistic, hoping that if he lies low for a while, the storm will pass. But Paul gives him no such hope. We too should ‘understand this’, and be quite clear about the perils and troubles which will beset us if we stand firm in the truth of the gospel.
Next, Paul refers to ‘the last days’. It may seem natural to apply this term to a future epoch, to the days immediately preceding the end when Christ returns. But biblical usage will not allow us to do this. For it is the conviction of the New Testament authors that the new age (promised in the Old Testament) arrived with Jesus Christ, and that therefore with his coming the old age had begun to pass away and the last days had dawned. Thus Peter on the Day of Pentecost quoted Joel’s prophecy that ‘in the last days’ God would pour out his Spirit upon all flesh, and declared that this prophecy had now been fulfilled. ‘This is what was spoken by the prophet Joel,’ he said. In other words, ‘the last days’ to which the prophecy referred had come (Acts 2:14–17). Similarly, the Letter to the Hebrews begins with an assertion that the God who had spoken of old to the fathers through the prophets had ‘in these last days’ spoken to us through his Son (1:1, 2). This being so, we are living in the last days. They were ushered in by Jesus Christ, God’s Son.
What follows in 2 Timothy 3, therefore, is a description of the present, not the future. Paul depicts the whole period elapsing between the first and second comings of Christ. ‘Under the last days he includes the universal condition of the Christian Church.’1 This not only follows from the way in which the expression ‘the last days’ is used in the New Testament. It is also plain from the fact that what Paul gives Timothy here is not predictions about some future epoch which he will not himself live to see, but instructions relating to his present ministry, including (for example) the command to ‘avoid’ certain people (5).2 Timothy is already living in ‘the last days’ to which Paul is referring. And so are we. They may get worse in the future (13), but even now the times are bad and perilous.
In these last days, Paul adds, ‘there will come times of stress’. What Timothy is to understand about the last days is not that they are uniformly, continuously evil, but that they will include ‘perilous seasons’ (AV). Church history confirms that this has been so. As the vessel of the Christian church put out to sea, it was not to expect a smooth untroubled passage; it has been buffeted by storms and tempests and even hurricanes.
These seasons Paul denotes as ‘times of stress’. The Greek adjective chalepos means basically ‘hard’ or ‘difficult’, and implies either ‘hard to bear’ (for example, in the case of physical or mental pain) or ‘hard to deal with, violent, dangerous’ (AG), ‘menacing’.3 The word was used in classical Greek both of dangerous wild animals and of the raging sea. Its only other New Testament occurrence is in the story of the two Gadarene demoniacs who were as savage and untamed as wild beasts and whom Matthew describes as ‘so fierce (chalepos) that no one could pass that way’ (Mt. 8:28). This gives us an idea of the kind of seasons which the church must expect in the last days. They will be both painful and perilous, hard to endure and hard to cope with.
Paul goes on immediately to tell us why this is so: For men will be … It is important to grasp that it is men who are responsible for the menacing seasons which the church has to bear, fallen men, evil men, men whose nature is perverted, whose behaviour is self-centred and godless, whose mind is hostile to God and his law (cf. Rom. 8:7), and who spread evil, heresy and dead religion in the church.
Before we study in detail Paul’s characterization of these men, we need to absorb his words of introduction. First, we are living in the last days, he says; Christ brought them with him when he came. Secondly, these days will include seasons of peril and stress. Thirdly, they will be the result of the activities of bad men. Fourthly, we are to understand this, to be quite clear about it, and so to be prepared.
2. The Evil Men are Described (verses 2–9)
The rest of this first paragraph of chapter 3 is devoted to a thorough portrayal of these men. In particular, Paul delineates their moral conduct (2–4), their religious observance (5) and their proselytizing zeal (6–9).
a. Their moral conduct (verses 2–4)
In these three verses the apostle employs no fewer than nineteen expressions by which to describe the wicked men who are responsible for the ‘times of stress’. It might perhaps be a little tedious to analyse the portrait too minutely and to define each term separately. But notice at once the first and the last phrases used. The first says that they are ‘lovers of self’ (philautoi) and the last (4) that they are not, as they should be, ‘lovers of God’ (philotheoi). Indeed four of the nineteen expressions are compounded with ‘love’ (phil-), suggesting that what is fundamentally wrong with these people is that their love is misdirected. Instead of being first and foremost ‘lovers of God’, they are ‘lovers of self’, ‘lovers of money’ (NEB: ‘men will love nothing but money and self’) and ‘lovers of pleasure’ (4).
In between these four come fifteen other expressions, which are almost entirely descriptive of the breakdown of men’s relations with each other.
The first three enlarge on the meaning of self-love. People who love themselves best become ‘proud’, ‘arrogant’ and ‘abusive’. The first word means ‘braggarts’ or ‘swashbucklers’ (alazones), and the second ‘haughty’ or ‘disdainful’ (hyperēphanoi) which leads naturally to the third ‘slanderous’ (blasphēmoi), because inevitably those who have an exaggerated opinion of themselves look down with contempt upon others and speak evil of them.
The next five words may conveniently be grouped together. For they seem to refer to family life, and especially to the attitude which some young people adopt towards their parents. The Greek words are all negative in form and begin with the prefix a-, like our English words beginning un- or dis-, as if to stress the tragic absence of qualities which nature alone would lead one to expect. The first two are ‘disobedient to their parents’, whom Scripture says children are to honour and—at least during their minority—obey, and ‘ungrateful’, devoid of even an elementary appreciation. The next word is translated ‘unholy’ (anosioi), for hosios normally means ‘devout’ or ‘pious’ towards God. But like the similar adjective eusebēs (‘reverent’) it was sometimes used in classical Greek of filial respect. The context suggests that this may be the allusion here. ‘Inhuman’ (astorgoi) is rendered by JBP ‘utterly lacking in … normal human affections’ and by RSV in Romans 1:31 ‘heartless’, because it is part of the natural, created order that parents and children should love each other. The last word of this group of five is ‘implacable’ (aspondoi) and is translated by AG ‘irreconcilable’. It describes a situation in which people (maybe the reference is still primarily to young people) are so much in revolt that they are not even willing to come to the conference table to negotiate. In an ideal society the relationship of children to their parents should be marked by obedience, gratitude, respect, affection and reasonableness. In ‘times of stress’ all five are lacking.
The remaining seven words of the catalogue are obviously wider than the family. The first is ‘slanderers’ (diaboloi, literally ‘devils’), translated ‘backbiters’ by E. K. Simpson and ‘scandalmongers’ in NEB. They are guilty of the sin of speaking evil against others, especially behind their back. They are also ‘profligates’ (akrateis), ‘ungovernable’ (SIMPSON) or lacking in self-control, ‘fierce’ (anēmeroi) or ‘untamed’ (AG), and ‘haters of good’ (aphilagathoi) or ‘strangers to all goodness’ (NEB). Finally, they are ‘treacherous’ (a word used in Luke 6:16 of the traitor Judas), ‘reckless’ (entirely thoughtless in word and deed) and ‘swollen with conceit’ or ‘puffed up’ (connoting ‘self-importance, bumptiousness’4). Thus we are back to the basic evil with which the hideous list began, namely pride.
And all this unsocial, anti-social behaviour—this disobedient, ungrateful, disrespectful, inhuman attitude to parents, together with this absence of restraint, loyalty, prudence and humility—is the inevitable consequence of a godless self-centredness. Archbishop Trench, commenting on the meaning of philautos, ‘selfish’, mentions an unnamed Puritan divine who ‘likens the selfish man to the hedgehog which, rolling itself up in a ball, presents only sharp spines to those without, keeping at the same time all the soft and warm wool for itself within’.5 If a man is ‘proud’, ‘arrogant’ and ‘swollen with conceit’, of course he will never sacrifice himself to serve others. God’s order, as plainly declared in his moral law, is that we love him first (with all our heart, soul, mind and strength), our neighbour next and our self last. If we reverse the order of the first and third, putting self first and God last, our neighbour in the middle is bound to suffer.
So the root of the trouble in ‘times of stress’ is that men are ‘utterly self-centred’ (JBP), ‘lovers of self’ (philautoi), ‘an Aristotelian term … for inordinate self-love’.6
Only the gospel offers a radical solution to this problem. For only the gospel promises a new birth or new creation, which involves being turned inside out, from self to unself, a real reorientation of mind and conduct, and which makes us fundamentally God-centred instead of self-centred. Then, when God is first and self is last, we love the world God loves and seek to give and serve like him.
b. Their religious observance (verse 5)
It may be a shock to discover that people such as these, who lack the common decencies of civilized society let alone of God’s law, can also be religious. But it is true. In the history of mankind, although this is a shameful thing to confess, religion and morality have been more often divorced than married. Certainly Scripture bears an unwavering testimony to this fact. The great ethical prophets of the 7th and 8th centuries bc fulminated against Israel and Judah on this score. Amos was the first, exposing the anomaly that in the reign of Jeroboam II there was a boom in religion and in injustice simultaneously. Israelite worshippers ‘lay themselves down beside every altar upon garments taken in pledge’, he cried; ‘and in the house of their God they drink the wine of those who have been fined (sc. unjustly)’ (Am. 2:8). In other words, in the very performance of their religious duties they were making use of garments and wine to which they had no moral right. Their immorality had actually invaded their religious observance.
Isaiah deplored the same thing in Judah. Through him God addressed his people thus:
‘Your new moons and your appointed feasts
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me,
I am weary of bearing them.
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.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings
from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
correct oppression;
defend the fatherless,
plead for the widow’ (Is. 1:14–17).
The Lord Jesus had to utter a very similar complaint against the Pharisees, the ultra-religious people of his day: ‘you cleanse the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of extortion and rapacity’ (Mt. 23:25). That is, they were meticulous in ensuring the ceremonial purity of their vessels, while what they ate and drank from their clean vessels had been acquired by unclean greed and dishonesty.
Still the same malady was rife among the people Paul is describing. They preserved the outward ‘form of religion’ but were ‘denying the power of it’ (5). They evidently attended the worship services of the church. They sang the hymns, said the ‘amen’ to the prayers and put their money in the offering-plate. They looked and sounded egregiously pious. But it was form without power, outward show without inward reality, religion without morals, faith without works.
True religion combines form and power. It is not external form without power. Nor, on the other hand, does it emphasize moral power in such a way as to despise or dispense with proper external forms. It combines them. It fosters a worship which is essentially ‘spiritual’, arising from the heart, but which expresses itself through public, corporate services, and which also issues in moral behaviour. Otherwise, it is not only valueless; it is actually an abomination to the Lord.
No wonder Paul adds: ‘avoid such people’. Not that he was to avoid all contact with sinners, for Jesus himself had been ‘the friend of publicans and sinners’, and if Timothy were to shun association with them he would have to go right out of the world (cf. 1 Cor. 5:9–12). Paul means rather that within the church, for he has been giving a description of ‘a kind of heathen Christianity’,7 Timothy was to have nothing to do with what might be called ‘religious sinners’. Indeed, one could go further. Anybody whom the Book of Common Prayer terms ‘an open and notorious evil liver’ should be disciplined, and, if he remains unrepentant, excommunicated (cf. 1 Cor. 5:5, 13).
c. Their proselytizing zeal (verses 6–9)
It is indeed astonishing that the kind of people the apostle has been describing, filled with godless self-love and malice, should not only profess religion, but include some who actively propagate it. Yet such was the case.
It seems probable that their proselytizing zeal is portrayed as a military operation. The verb translated ‘capture’ (aichmalōtizō) properly means to take prisoner in war, although AG add that ‘the figure may fade’ so that the word comes to signify ‘carry away = mislead, deceive’. At all events, their method was not direct and open, but furtive, secretive, cunning. They were sneaks. Using no doubt the back door rather than the front, these tradesmen of heresy would insinuate themselves into private homes or ‘households’. Choosing a time when the menfolk were out (presumably at work), they concentrated their attention on ‘weak women’. This expedient, comments Bishop Ellicott, was ‘as old as the fall of man’,8 for the serpent first deceived Eve. It was also employed by the Gnostics, and has been the regular ploy of religious commercial travellers right up to and including the Jehovah’s Witnesses of our own day.
The women chosen as victims Paul refers to by the word gynaikaria, ‘little women’, a term of contempt for women who were idle, silly and weak. Their weakness was double. First, they were morally weak, ‘burdened with sins and swayed by various impulses’. Their sins were to them both a burden and a tyrant, and the false teachers, worming their way into their home, played upon their feelings of guilt and of infirmity. Secondly, they were intellectually weak, unstable, credulous, gullible. They were the kind of women who would ‘listen to anybody’, while at the same time they could ‘never arrive at a knowledge of the truth’. Constitutionally incapable of reaching any settled convictions, they were like little boats tossed hither and thither by a storm (cf. Eph. 4:14). In such a state of mental confusion, people will listen to any teacher, however specious. ‘It was no love of truth that impelled them to learn,’ however, ‘but only a morbid love of novelty.’9 Such women, weak in character and intellect, are an easy prey for door-to-door religious salesmen.
As an example of spurious teachers Paul now mentions ‘Jannes and Jambres’, the names (according to Jewish tradition) of the two chief magicians in Pharaoh’s court. They are not named in the Old Testament text, although one of the Targums inserts their names in Exodus 7:11 which reads: ‘Then Pharaoh summoned the wise men and the sorcerers; and they also, the magicians of Egypt, did the same (sc. miracles) by their secret arts.’
The implication of what Paul writes here is extremely important, although it does not lie on the surface. He draws a historical parallel between Jannes and Jambres who had opposed Moses centuries previously and ‘these men’ (the false teachers of his own day) who also oppose the truth. Jannes and Jambres were magicians; the false teachers also were ‘impostors’ and ‘deceivers’ (13). Perhaps they too went in for magic of some kind, for when the Ephesians who had ‘practised magic arts’ were converted, they had brought their books and publicly burned them (Acts 19:18, 19). What is remarkable about this analogy, however, is not just that the Asian false teachers are likened to the Egyptian magicians but that Paul is thereby likening himself to Moses! For Moses was the greatest figure of the Old Testament. No prophet arose like him in Israel, we are told, either in his knowledge of God (‘whom the Lord knew face to face’) or in the signs and wonders he did to authenticate the revelation of God (Dt. 34:10, 11). ‘See,’ the Lord had said to him, ‘I make you as God to Pharaoh … You shall speak all that I command you’ (Ex. 7:1, 2). So for forty years Moses spoke God’s word and gave God’s law to the people.
But now Paul dares to equate himself with Moses. For as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so the Asian false teachers were opposing the truth. What truth? Why, the truth taught by Paul and entrusted by Paul to Timothy (1:14), the apostolic faith, the sacred deposit, which Timothy was to guard and to transmit. Thus the apostle Paul, naturally and without any apparent hesitation, puts himself on a level with Moses as one who also taught God’s truth. Moses taught the law; Paul preached the gospel. But whether it was law or gospel, the teaching of Moses the prophet or Paul the apostle, it was God’s truth which men were opposing and rejecting.
So Paul rejects them as men who were ‘corrupt’ in their ‘mind’, despite their claim to gnōsis (knowledge), and ‘counterfeit’ (adokimoi, ‘tried and found wanting’) as to their ‘faith’. Moreover he is confident that such men ‘will not get very far’. They may themselves ‘go on from bad to worse’ (13). Their false teaching may also temporarily spread and ‘eat its way like gangrene’ (2:17). But its success will be limited and transient. How could Paul be so sure? Because ‘their folly will be plain to all, as was (or ‘came to be’ egeneto, an aorist) that of those two men’, Jannes and Jambres.
We sometimes get distressed in our day—rightly and understandably—by the false teachers who oppose the truth and trouble the church, especially by the sly and slippery methods of backdoor religious traders. But we need have no fear, even if a few weak people may be taken in, even if falsehood becomes fashionable. For there is something patently spurious about heresy, and something self-evidently true about the truth. Error may spread and be popular for a time. But it ‘will not get very far’. In the end it is bound to be exposed, and the truth is sure to be vindicated. This is a clear lesson of church history. Numerous heresies have arisen, and some have seemed likely to triumph. But today they are largely of antiquarian interest. God has preserved his truth in the church.
Having reached the end of the first paragraph of chapter 3, it should now be plain to us what these dangerous seasons are which occur spasmodically in ‘the last days’ in which we live, and how they arise. It is because in that part of God’s field (the world) in which God has sown wheat, the devil has also sown weeds.10 Changing the image, the devil has his ‘fifth column’, his secret agents, actually inside the church. As the Church of England’s Article XXVI puts it: ‘in the visible Church the evil (is) ever mingled with the good, and sometimes the evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments …’ Yes, inside the church, within the visible society of professing believers, there are men of immoral character and conduct, of purely external religiosity, of corrupt mind and counterfeit faith. They are lovers of self, money and pleasure rather than lovers of God and their fellows. They retain the form of religion but deny its power. They oppose the truth and seek to win the weak to their pernicious errors. Morally, religiously and intellectually they are perverse. It is a remarkably apt portrayal of the so-called ‘permissive society’, which genially tolerates every conceivable deviation from Christian standards of righteousness and truth, and whose ethos has crept into the church.
But Timothy is not to catch this infection, nor be carried away by this flood-tide, but to stand out boldly against the prevailing fashion.
3. Standing Firm in the Faith (verses 10–15)
In this paragraph Paul twice addresses Timothy with the same two little Greek monosyllables su de. They come at the beginning of verses 10 and 14 (like the su oun of 2:1) and should be translated ‘But as for you …’. In stark contrast to the contemporary decline in morals, empty show of religion and spread of false teaching Timothy is called to be different, and if necessary to stand alone.
Every Christian is called to be different from the world. ‘Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould’ (Rom. 12:2, JBP). Certainly the pressures upon us to conform are colossal, not only from the direct challenge to traditional beliefs and morals, but also—and more—from the insidious, pervasive atmosphere of secularism which even seeps into the church. Many give in, often without realizing what they are doing. But again and again the word of God addresses us, calling us not to be moved. We are not to be like a ‘reed shaken with the wind’, feebly bowing down before it from whatever direction it may blow. Rather, like a rock in a mountain torrent, we are to stand firm.
One might paraphrase the apostle’s double exhortation to Timothy in verses 10 to 14 like this: ‘But as for you, in spite of all the current false teaching, what you have been closely following is my doctrine and my way of life, together with my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions and sufferings … Wicked men and charlatans, deceiving others and themselves deceived, will still make their strange progress from bad to worse. But as for you, you are not to progress in any direction, least of all away from or beyond my teaching (for that would be declension, not advance). On the contrary, you are to stand firm, to continue and abide in what you learned and have believed, because you know from whom you learned it …’
Paul first reminds Timothy what he has been doing thus far: ‘you have observed’ or followed ‘my teaching’ (10). Then he exhorts him to continue in the same path: ‘continue in what you have learned’ (14). So verses 10 to 13 describe Timothy’s past loyalty to the apostle, and verses 14 to 17 urge him to remain loyal in the future. The two main verbs sum up the gist of the paragraph: ‘you have followed me faithfully up till now (10); so then continue to do so (14)’.
a. The past (verses 10–13)
Timothy’s position is explained in terms of a certain ‘following’ of Paul. The verb parakoloutheō can be used literally, of following a person as he goes somewhere and of walking in his footsteps. But it is not so used in the New Testament. Its figurative use can refer either to an intellectual following, much as we say to a person who is explaining something to us ‘I follow you’, or to a real commitment of mind and life as when we say of somebody ‘he’s a follower of So-and-so’. AG define these two meanings as to ‘follow with the mind, understand, make one’s own’ and to ‘follow faithfully, follow as a rule’. Luke uses the verb more or less in the former sense, when he tells Theophilus of his painstaking historical investigations. He has ‘followed all things closely for some time past’, he writes (Lk. 1:3). But Paul seems to use the verb in the other and more committed sense in his letters to Timothy. In the first letter he has urged Timothy to nourish himself on ‘the good doctrine which you have followed’, that is, embraced. So surely the verb has the same meaning here in the second letter. Paul is reminding Timothy not simply that he has ‘fully known’ (AV) or ‘observed’ (RSV) his doctrine and conduct, as if he were merely an impartial student or a detached observer, but that he has become a dedicated disciple of the apostle’s. No doubt he had begun by taking pains to grasp the meaning of Paul’s instruction. But then he went further. He made it his own, believed it, absorbed it, lived by it. Similarly, he doubtless began by watching the apostle’s manner of life, but then he went on to imitate it. Because Paul knew himself as an apostle to be following Christ, he did not hesitate to invite others to follow himself: ‘Be imitators of me,’ he wrote, ‘as I am of Christ’ (1 Cor. 11:1; cf. 1 Thes. 1:6). He even made himself the standard by which truth could be distinguished from falsehood: ‘Brethren, join in imitating me, and mark those who so live as you have an example in us’ (Phil. 3:17). Thus, in both belief and practice, in ‘teaching’ and ‘conduct’ (10), Timothy became and remained Paul’s faithful follower. He had ‘followed step by step’ (NEB).
The contrast with the first paragraph of this chapter is obvious. The men described there were following their own inclinations (they were lovers of self, money and pleasure), and their pathetic converts had been carried away by their own impulses. Timothy, on the other hand, has followed an altogether different standard, namely the teaching and the example of Christ’s apostle Paul. So Paul goes on to list the characteristics of his life, in contrast to that of the self-lovers whom he has characterized in verses 2–5. The emphatic words are the personal pronouns and possessive adjectives. They bring out the contrast clearly: ‘For men will be lovers of self … They will be and do this and that. But as for you, Timothy, you (as distinct from them) have followed me, my teaching, my conduct, etc.’
Why, however, does Paul give us in verses 10 and 11 this catalogue of his virtues and sufferings? Is it not more than a little immodest, even conceited, that the apostle should put himself forward like this? Perhaps it is understandable that he should mention his ‘teaching’, but why go on to blow his own trumpet about his faith and love, his purpose and conduct, his sufferings and his endurance? Is it not rather unseemly that he should boast like this?
No, Paul is not boasting. He has reasons quite other than exhibitionism for drawing attention to himself. He mentions his teaching first, and then goes on to supply two objective evidences of the genuineness of his teaching, namely the life he lived and the sufferings he endured. Indeed, these are good (though not infallible) general tests of a person’s sincerity, and even of the truth or falsehood of his system. Is he so convinced of his position that he both practises what he preaches and is prepared to suffer for it? Have his beliefs made him a better man, even in the face of opposition? Paul could answer both questions affirmatively. The false teachers lived lives of self-indulgence, and it would be quite out of character to expect them to be willing to suffer for their views; they were altogether too soft and easygoing for that. The apostle Paul, however, lived a consistent life of righteousness, self-control, faith and love, and remained steadfast to his principles through many and grievous persecutions.
Look at his behaviour first. Timothy had observed and tried to imitate Paul’s ‘conduct’ (agōgē, his whole demeanour and way of life), his ‘aim in life’ (the spiritual ambitions which motivated him and made life meaningful for him), his ‘faith’ (which perhaps here includes his fidelity), his ‘patience’ (makrothymia, tolerance or long-suffering towards aggravating people), his ‘love’ (towards both God and man, as opposed to the false teachers’ love for self, money and pleasure) and his ‘steadfastness’ (hypomonē, the patient endurance of trying circumstances, in distinction to makrothymia, the patient endurance of trying people). Indeed, since hypomonē (‘steadfastness’) is regularly in the New Testament the child of our Christian ‘hope’, our expectation of the Lord’s return and the glory to follow, we may detect within this list yet another example of Paul’s favourite triad of graces ‘faith, hope and love.’11
The reference to ‘steadfastness’ or ‘endurance’ naturally leads on to the ‘persecutions’ and the ‘sufferings’ which Paul had had to endure. In particular, he mentions the three Galatian cities Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, because Timothy was a citizen of Lystra and had possibly himself witnessed the occasion when the apostle had been stoned by a hostile mob, dragged out of the city and left in the gutter for dead, though from this and all other persecutions so far the Lord had rescued him. Perhaps Paul’s courage under persecution had even played a part in Timothy’s conversion, much as Stephen’s bravery in martyrdom had done in Paul’s. At all events, Timothy had ‘followed’ Paul’s persecutions, first watching them, and then discovering that he must himself share in them, for he could not be committed to Paul’s teaching and conduct without becoming involved in his sufferings also.12
In verse 12 Paul makes it clear that his experience was not unique. He sought to live ‘a godly life in Christ Jesus’, loving and serving God rather than himself, and he suffered for it. Timothy had found the same thing. For all Christian people who ‘in Christ Jesus’ (i.e. through union with him) ‘desire to live a godly life … will be persecuted’, and indeed are bound to suffer persecution. The godly arouse the antagonism of the worldly. It has always been so. It was so for Christ, and he said it would be for us: ‘If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, “A servant is not greater than his master.” If they have persecuted me, they will persecute you’ (Jn. 15:18–20; cf. 16:33). It is important to notice the situation in which Christ here told his followers to expect persecution. He envisaged that they would be both in the world (living among godless people) and at the same time ‘not of the world’ (living a godly life in Christ). Those who are in Christ but not in the world are not persecuted, because they do not come into contact and therefore into collision with their potential persecutors. Those who are in the world but not in Christ are also not persecuted, because the world sees nothing in them to persecute. The former escape persecution by withdrawal from the world, the latter by assimilation to it. It is only for those who are both in the world and in Christ simultaneously that persecution becomes inevitable. As Calvin comments, ‘it is in vain to try to detach Christ from his cross, and it is only natural that the world should hate Christ even in his members’.13
This inevitability of persecution is further explained in verse 13 by the continued activities of false teachers. Paul is quite outspoken about them. He dubs them ‘evil men’ and ‘impostors’. The latter word (goēs) means a ‘sorcerer, juggler’ and so in early Christian literature a ‘swindler, cheat’ (AG). The apostle does not credit them with sincerity; they are ‘charlatans’ (NEB). Such men ‘will go on from bad to worse’. The verb for ‘go on’ (prokoptō) properly means to ‘go forward, progress’, but here Paul uses it ironically, since the only advance they make is backwards, not forwards, ‘from bad to worse’. He appears to be referring not to their success as teachers, for he has said that ‘they will not get very far’ (9), but to their own personal deterioration, both intellectual and moral. They are ‘deceivers and deceived’. Alfred Plummer explains it well: ‘they begin by being seducers and end in being dupes, and the dupes (very often) of their own deceptions; for deceit commonly leads to self-deceit’.14
b. The future (verses 14, 15)
So far in this paragraph Paul has been describing himself, but doing so in relation to Timothy who has taken him as his guide. Timothy is seen to stand out in bold relief against the background of the prevalent evildoers and false teachers. For he has carefully ‘followed’ Paul and modelled himself on Paul’s teaching. Moreover, he has been right to do so, for Paul’s teaching has been amply confirmed by his godly life and by his many persecutions bravely borne. Now for the second time Paul begins a sentence ‘But as for you’ (su de), distinguishing Timothy from the ‘evil men and impostors’ he has just described. Previously he has contrasted their pursuit of their own inclinations with Timothy’s faithful following of apostolic doctrine and example. Now he draws another contrast: they ‘go on’ (though we have seen what a peculiar form their progress assumed), whereas Timothy is to ‘continue’ or abide in what he has learned and believed.
This kind of summons is not infrequently heard in the pages of the New Testament. It is specially relevant whenever innovators arise in the church, ‘radicals’ who claim to be progressive and who repudiate everything which savours of the traditional. It has perhaps never been more needed than today when men boast of inventing a ‘new Christianity’ with a ‘new theology’ and a ‘new morality’, all of which betoken a ‘new reformation’. To be sure, the church of every generation must seek to translate the faith into the contemporary idiom, to relate the unchanging word to the changing world. But a translation is a rendering of the same message into another language; it is not a fresh composition. Yet this is what some modern radicals are doing, setting forth concepts of God and of Christ which Jesus and his apostles would not have recognized as their own. In such a situation we may perhaps be forgiven if, borrowing the Lord’s own words, we say to them: ‘no one after drinking old wine desires new; for he says, “the old is better” ’ (Lk. 5:39, RSV mg.). The apostles themselves constantly warned their readers of newfangled ideas and called them back to the original apostolic message. Thus John declares that ‘anyone who goes ahead and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have God’ and exhorts his flock ‘let what you heard from the beginning abide in you’, for then they would ‘abide in the Son and in the Father’ (2 Jn. 9; 1 Jn. 2:24). Similarly here Paul enjoins Timothy to abide in what he has learned. In each of these verses the Greek verb is the same. Timothy had learned things and now firmly believed them. All right. Now he must continue in these things with steadfastness and not allow anyone to shift him from his ground.
The apostle now adds two reasons. His clear command to Timothy to abide, to cultivate stability in the truths he has learned, rests on two simple and plain arguments which he elaborates in verses 14b and 15. Timothy must continue in what he has learned, because he knows from whom he has learned it. The teaching was guaranteed by the teacher. And who was this? The Greek manuscripts have two readings, one making ‘whom’ plural and the other singular. The better attested is the plural (para tinōn), in which case the teachers referred to will include his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice (who had indeed taught him from his infancy; see 1:5; 3:15) as well as the apostle Paul. Commentators who weigh the manuscript evidence go no further than to say that this reading is ‘perhaps to be preferred’15 or is ‘probably correct’.16 They agree that the alternative (the singular para tinos) is also well attested, however, and this would refer to the apostle Paul alone. Although the external authority for this reading is slightly less strong, the internal evidence seems to me to be more strongly in its favour. That is to say, in the immediate context Paul has been placing emphasis on the fact that Timothy has closely followed his teaching (10). That Paul’s apostolic instruction was Timothy’s model is stressed by the emphatic ‘my’ and ‘me’ of verses 10 and 11.
The wider context of the whole letter points the same way. In the first two chapters, the apostle has begged Timothy both to ‘follow the pattern of the sound words which you have heard from me’ (1:13) and then to entrust to others ‘what you have heard from me’ (2:2). It seems probable, therefore, that the phrase ‘knowing from whom you learned it’ in 3:14 also refers to what Timothy has heard from Paul. Besides, the apostle is apparently giving two reasons for Timothy’s continued loyalty; it is likely, therefore, that these will be distinct reasons and not both refer to his childhood education in the Scriptures.
In this case, the first ground of Timothy’s confidence, and the first reason why he should continue in what he has learned is that he has learned it from Paul. And he knows this Paul who has taught him. He has not only led him to Christ (1:2) and laid hands on him at his ordination (1:6), but he is also ‘an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God’ (1:1), to whom Christ had entrusted the deposit of the gospel (1:11, 12), who has likened himself to Moses in his teaching of the truth (3:8), whose doctrine and example Timothy has loyally followed thus far, and who has confirmed his teaching by his consistent life and his fortitude in persecution. Timothy was confident in Paul and his teaching authority, and we can share his confidence. Paul’s gospel is still authenticated to us by his apostolic authority.
Timothy has not only learned Paul’s gospel and known Paul’s authority. ‘From childhood’ he had been instructed in the Old Testament Scriptures presumably by his mother and grandmother, and he was therefore extremely familiar with them. He believed them to be divinely inspired, as Paul is about to say. So the second reason why he must abide in what he has learned from Paul is its harmony with these very Scriptures. This was Paul’s consistent claim. On trial before King Agrippa he had affirmed that he was teaching ‘nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would come to pass; that the Christ must suffer, and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to the people and to the Gentiles’ (Acts 26:22, 23). Similarly, at the beginning of his letter to the Romans he had described God’s gospel to which he was set apart as what God had ‘promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures’ (Rom. 1:2; cf. 3:21).
So then, the two reasons why Timothy should remain loyal to what he has come firmly to believe are that he has learned it both from Old Testament Scripture and from the apostle Paul. The same two grounds apply today. The gospel we believe is the biblical gospel, the gospel of the Old Testament and of the New Testament, vouched for by both the prophets of God and the apostles of Christ. And we must resolve ourselves to heed the exhortation which Paul addressed to Timothy and to abide in what we have learned because of this double authentication.
4. The Origin and Purpose of Scripture (verses 15b–17)
Two fundamental truths about Scripture are asserted here. The first concerns its origin (where it comes from) and the second its purpose (what it is intended for).
First, ‘All scripture is inspired by God’; it is God-breathed. Some scholars, as in NEB, have translated the opening words of verse 16: ‘every inspired Scripture has its use’. Such a rendering would place a double limitation on Scripture. It would suggest that not all Scripture is inspired, and that therefore not all Scripture is profitable, but only those parts which are inspired. Since the Greek sentence has no main verb, it is certainly legitimate, grammatically speaking, to supply the verb ‘is’ after, rather than before, the adjective ‘God-inspired’ and so translate ‘every God-inspired Scripture is profitable’. The argument against this construction, however, is that it does not do justice to the little word ‘and’ (kai) which comes between the two adjectives ‘God-inspired’ and ‘profitable’. This ‘and’ suggests that Paul is asserting two truths about Scripture, namely that it is both inspired and profitable, not merely one. For this reason we should render the sentence: ‘all Scripture is God-inspired and profitable’.
What does he mean by ‘all Scripture’? It seems to me not at all impossible that by this comprehensive expression he is including the two sources of Timothy’s knowledge just mentioned, namely ‘what you have learned’ (sc. from me) and ‘the sacred writings’. It is true that nowhere does the apostle explicitly call his Epistles ‘Scripture’. Nevertheless, on a number of occasions he gets very near it, and he certainly directs that his letters be read publicly in the Christian assemblies, no doubt alongside Old Testament readings (e.g. Col. 4:16; 1 Thes. 5:27). Several times he claims to be speaking in the name and with the authority of Christ (e.g. 2 Cor. 2:17; 13:3; Gal. 4:14), and calls his message ‘the word of God’ (e.g. 1 Thes. 2:13). Once he says that, in communicating to others what God has revealed to him, he uses ‘words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit’ (1 Cor. 2:13). This is a claim to inspiration, indeed to verbal inspiration, which is the distinctive characteristic of ‘Scripture’. Peter clearly regarded Paul’s letters as Scripture, for in referring to them he calls the Old Testament ‘the other scriptures’ (2 Pet. 3:16). In addition, it seems evident that Paul envisaged the possibility of a Christian supplement to the Old Testament because he could combine a quotation from Deuteronomy (25:4) with a saying of Jesus recorded by Luke (10:7) and call both alike ‘Scripture’ (1 Tim. 5:18).
His definition of Scripture, of ‘all scripture’, is that it is ‘inspired by God’. The single Greek word theopneustos would be literally translated ‘God-breathed’ and indicates not that Scripture itself or its human authors were breathed into by God, but that Scripture was breathed or breathed out by God. ‘Inspiration’ is doubtless a convenient term to use, but ‘spiration’ or even ‘expiration’ would convey the meaning of the Greek adjective more accurately. Scripture is not to be thought of as already in existence when (subsequently) God breathed into it, but as itself brought into existence by the breath or Spirit of God. There is no ‘theory’ or explanation of inspiration here, for no reference is made to the human authors, who (Peter says) ‘moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God’ (2 Pet. 1:21). Nevertheless, it is clear from many passages that inspiration, however the process operated, did not destroy the individuality or the active cooperation of the human writers. All that is stated here is the fact of inspiration, that all Scripture is God-breathed. It originated in God’s mind and was communicated from God’s mouth by God’s breath or Spirit. It is therefore rightly termed ‘the Word of God’, for God spoke it. Indeed, as the prophets used to say, ‘the mouth of the Lord has spoken it’.
Secondly, Paul explains the purpose of Scripture: it is ‘profitable’. And this is precisely because it is inspired by God. Only its divine origin secures and explains its human profit. In order to show what this is, Paul uses two expressions. The first is in verse 15: ‘The sacred writings’, he says, ‘are able to instruct you for salvation.’ The Bible is essentially a handbook of salvation. Its over-arching purpose is to teach not facts of science (e.g. the nature of moon rock) which men can discover by their own empirical investigation, but facts of salvation, which no space exploration can discover but only God can reveal. The whole Bible unfolds the divine scheme of salvation—man’s creation in God’s image, his fall through disobedience into sin and under judgment, God’s continuing love for him in spite of his rebellion, God’s eternal plan to save him through his covenant of grace with a chosen people, culminating in Christ; the coming of Christ as the Saviour, who died to bear man’s sin, was raised from death, was exalted to heaven and sent the Holy Spirit; and man’s rescue first from guilt and alienation, then from bondage, and finally from mortality in his progressive experience of the liberty of God’s children. None of this would be known apart from the biblical revelation. ‘Scripture contains the perfect rule of a good and happy life.’17
More particularly, the Bible instructs for salvation ‘through faith in Christ Jesus’. So, since the Bible is a book of salvation, and since salvation is through Christ, the Bible focuses its attention upon Christ. The Old Testament foretells and foreshadows him in many and various ways; the Gospels tell the story of his birth and life, his words and works, his death and resurrection; the Acts describe what he continued to do and teach through his chosen apostles, especially in spreading the gospel and establishing the church from Jerusalem to Rome; the Epistles display the full glory of his person and work, and apply it to the life of the Christian and the church; while the Revelation depicts Christ sharing the throne of God now and coming soon to consummate his salvation and judgment. This comprehensive portraiture of Jesus Christ is intended to elicit our ‘faith’ in him, in order that by faith we may be saved.
Paul now goes on to show that the profit of Scripture relates to both creed and conduct (16b, 17). The false teachers divorced them; we must marry them. The NEB expresses the matter clearly. As for our creed, Scripture is profitable ‘for teaching the truth and refuting error’. As for our conduct, it is profitable ‘for reformation of manners and discipline in right living’. In each pair the negative and positive counterparts are combined. Do we hope, either in our own lives or in our teaching ministry, to overcome error and grow in truth, to overcome evil and grow in holiness? Then it is to Scripture that we must primarily turn, for Scripture is ‘profitable’ for these things.
Indeed, Scripture is the chief means which God employs to bring ‘the man of God’ to maturity. Who is intended by this expression is not explained. It may be a general term for every Christian, since the words themselves mean no more than ‘the man who belongs to God’ (NEB). On the other hand, it was an Old Testament title of respect applied to some of God’s spokesmen like Moses (Dt. 33:1), David (2 Ch. 8:14) and Elijah (1 Ki. 17:18), and Paul specifically addressed Timothy by this phrase in his first letter (6:11). It may therefore refer here to men called to positions of responsibility in the church, and especially to ministers whose task it is, under the authority of Scripture, to teach and refute, to reform and discipline. At all events, it is only by a diligent study of Scripture that the man of God may become ‘complete, equipped for every good work’.
Looking back over this chapter as a whole, we can appreciate the relevance of its message to our pluralist and permissive society. The ‘times of stress’ in which we seem to be living are very distressing. Sometimes one wonders if the world and the church have gone mad, so strange are their views, and so lax their standards. Some Christians are swept from their moorings by the floodtide of sin and error. Others go into hiding, as offering the best hope of survival, the only alternative to surrender. But neither of these is the Christian way. ‘But as for you,’ Paul says to us as he did to Timothy, ‘stand firm. Never mind if the pressure to conform is very strong. Never mind if you are young, inexperienced, timid and weak. Never mind if you find yourself alone in your witness. You have followed my teaching so far. Now continue in what you have come to believe. You know the biblical credentials of your faith. Scripture is God-breathed and profitable. Even in the midst of these grievous times in which evil men and impostors go on from bad to worse, it can make you complete and it can equip you for your work. Let the word of God make you a man of God! Remain loyal to it and it will lead you on into Christian maturity.’