The passage: “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.”—1 Timothy i. 15.
If someone who knew the outline of St. Paul’s history heard these words for the first time and was told they were his, he would likely guess wrong about when they were spoken. He would suppose such an elementary statement must belong to some early sermon to heathens who had never heard the Gospel, and the closing phrase would seem to fix it soon after Paul’s own conversion — natural words for a man newly opened to grace, still remembering that he had lately been binding believers, to cry out, “Of all sinners I am chief.” Would he not be startled to learn instead that this was written, with great solemnity, to a man raised from childhood on the Scriptures, trained for years under Paul himself, judged fit to govern a church needing more varied gifts than almost any other? Would the surprise not deepen on learning it was Paul the aged — scourged, imprisoned, often near death for the Gospel, carrying daily the care of all the churches — who counted his own sin greater than that of the openly disobedient and ungodly he had just named, the very people for whom he said the Law was made?
I. I want to take up this last point first, brethren. How are we to understand Paul calling himself chief of sinners? What right had he to say it? If he had that right, can anyone else claim it too? How can we use these words today without some sense of dishonesty?
Dismiss at once the thought that Paul was displaying to Timothy a kind of graceful humility. No humility is graceful unless it is grounded in truth, and this is the last quality that should ever be faked. Airs of lowliness betray a man who does not know himself and is angling for credit for being better than he is. Paul was utterly free of this. He proclaims his powers as an apostle without hesitation; he boasts, when it serves, of what God called him to do and suffer; he speaks of himself as plainly as he would of anyone else — announcing without shrinking that he had labored more abundantly than all the other apostles.
Nor should we say he called himself chief merely from a sudden vivid memory of his days as a persecutor. He certainly did remember that — the context shows the memory was present as he wrote to Timothy.
But we know from how he describes that history that he did not think himself worse than other persecutors simply for being more zealous. His zeal was a heavenly quality, not a devilish one. The same energy that drove him to seek warrants against believers in Damascus later carried him to Macedonia at the Spirit’s call, made him preach in season and out, and let him resist his friends’ pleas because he was ready not just to be bound but to die for Christ’s name. He was not chief of sinners for having pursued a wrong conviction more forcefully than others did.
Nor do the words, taken literally, mean he was speaking mainly of the past. Saying “I am first” tells Timothy this was his present state of mind, not a charge against his old crimes. Whatever he learned the day his eyes were opened on the Damascus road had only deepened and grown within him since. What was true then he believed still truer now — his grasp of it had grown more vivid, not less.
Some have suggested the Greek word rendered “chief” does not mean quite that — that it marks Paul as an example of mercy shown to sinners rather than a comparison with others. I am willing to use “first” instead of “chief.” But this change will not do all that its proposers hope. Paul still speaks as representing the whole class of sinners, not just those who have received forgiveness. Still, the change helps, because “chief” suggests he is weighing his crimes against other men’s — which was not his point at all. He tells the Philippians he was, as to the righteousness of the Law, blameless. In this very letter he lists murderers of fathers and mothers and other flagrant offenders as those the Law was made for. The Law rightly punished plain, visible wrongs. Paul had enforced that Law zealously and had never once fallen under even its mildest censure.
But, as he says elsewhere, it is the Law that brings the knowledge of sin. It forbids acts, and in doing so it wakens a man to see the disposition in him to commit them — a will at war with the Lawgiver’s will even while he outwardly submits. This is a wholly different discovery, one no code can touch. How can law punish an alienated heart, or reach the doer to make him a new man?
Here Paul found himself “first” — in a fearful sense, alone. He had no way to measure how far others had strayed from God’s loving mind; the Law only told him, “You have done it.” Gradually he saw the Law was merely echoing outwardly what a living voice said within: the Spirit of God convicting him of sin, showing him he had cut himself off from the true Lord and source of righteousness and life — speaking to him not as one of a crowd but directly, to him first. He knew other men’s sins only through his own, could measure their departure from the true standard only by his; and the more he felt the pull of that divine attraction, the more he felt the strength of his own inclination to resist it, and the more he credited any rightness in himself to that influence alone. So he could say, with total sincerity, “I am first among sinners — more love has been shown to me than to anyone I know, so my resistance has been greater; if the light has overcome me, the struggle against it in me has been fiercer than I dare say it has been in others.”
If this was his reason for speaking so, it is no wonder he spoke this way even more strongly in his later years than in his earlier ones. It was not that his conscience grew more scrupulous with age, attaching guilt to things once thought indifferent — quite the reverse: he grew freer every day, able to eat or abstain, live as Jew or Gentile, as his Master’s cause required. Rather, the more he was possessed by the Spirit of God, the more he felt how near the Spirit of Evil lay to him; falsehood, malice, and selfishness — the essence of that Evil Spirit — seemed to him more dreadful than any of their outward forms. He felt himself in closer contact with the powers of darkness than his converts or the unconverted were, and knew that without a sustaining, ever-present grace he would fall into depths of evil none of them had ever sounded.
You might think his close, constant knowledge of the moral failures springing up in the churches he had founded would have turned his mind outward, proving that the wickedness he knew was around him, not within him. His busy labors surely spared him any morbid self-brooding, and confirmed — from his own spirit and God’s — that a man should not pore over his feelings to accuse or comfort himself. But do not imagine he thought better of himself as he learned of the Corinthians’ factions and immorality, or when the Galatians who once loved him turned on him for telling them the truth. I think instead that he recognized in himself the very evils that pained him in them — that he understood their heresy, carnality, and suspicion through the seeds of the same things in his own heart, and never condemned them without judging tendencies that might spring to life in him at any moment. The more fully he grasped his place as their minister and priest, the more he saw himself as first among sinners.
By this process, brethren, he was trained to a real humility, not a mock one. He sank lower in his own estimation than we ever sink in ours, because he saw more clearly the glory of his calling than we do; his knowledge of sin was more personal and more piercing because his belief in salvation from it was more exalted and complete. This is the second point I want to raise.
- The words “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” sound to us like a nursery commonplace — no less familiar to Timothy or to Paul. Why did they never grow stale for the aged apostle? Had he found some refined meaning in them beyond what children and simple people take from them? No — I think it was exactly their bearing on the humblest people on earth that gave them force for him. And I think it is exactly because we go hunting for refined meanings, substituting a theory or scheme of salvation for the plain belief the words express, that they have lost their force for us. A man who thought of himself first when he thought of sinners could not occupy himself with grand calculations about the amount of guilt the world had incurred, the punishment thereby deserved, or the satisfaction required to remove it. His question was too terrible for such reckonings. There was some deep hostility between his mind and the mind of his righteous Creator — could it be ended? Some bondage on his will — could it be broken? To this need comes the plain announcement: One has come from that righteous Being to make peace, to save sinners out of their sins. He might doubt long whether such good news could be true. He needed real freedom, real peace with God. Any claimed deliverer must pass the hardest test: could he do what none else had done, succeed where the Law and its sacrifices — which Paul held most sacred — had failed, and settle the very controversies they had stirred up? No archangel’s authority could force him to accept the Gospel; but the plainest man could bring it to his conscience with evidence he could not deny. And once he had said “It is true,” repeating that truth never grew flat or stale, for fresh rebellions kept threatening within him — sometimes the insurgents were already in arms, and he had to ask, “Am I with them?” — and the old tyrants that had bound him were not dead or even sleeping; his limbs sometimes seemed to miss their old chains.
Was that all? Was there no fuller light reaching him continually from the heaven to which the Son of God had ascended — no deeper grasp of what His coming had done than what he first received? There was. It lies in the plural word: sinners. His experience had been personal — he had known sin, and deliverance, in himself. But that sin was separation from his fellow men as well as from God, and that deliverance was reunion with them as well as with God. Christ had saved him, but had not come into the world only for him. Every man shared his need, and his same Helper. He could not separate himself from mankind. The saying is faithful and worthy of universal acceptance — worthy, as our Communion Service renders it, of being received by all — that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners from what kept them from being members of one human family, and to bind them into that family in Himself.
So the plain words hold the most and the most personal meaning together — we have not exhausted them; we have barely glimpsed their sense. That glimpse fades whenever we try to learn what sin is by watching and judging others, or imagine our need is escape from God’s judgment rather than escape from ourselves into reconciliation with Him. But if we become children in malice and grown men in understanding — not as a show before others, but in the secrecy of a letter to a friend or of our own hearts — confessing ourselves first among sinners because we confess ourselves to have received the fullest help toward righteousness, then these glimpses will brighten more and more toward the perfect day. Then the Communion service will truly interpret the words we prepare our communicants with. Then we will be sure that He who came to save sinners sustains them by His own pure sacrifice and calls them into fellowship with His Father and theirs. Then we will not doubt that Paul’s rapturous hope in today’s Epistle will be fulfilled — that not only we, but the whole unwilling creation that has suffered for man’s sin, will share the Deliverer’s glory when He appears without sin unto salvation.