The same objection raised against the Epistle to the Colossians is raised against these letters. With the Epistle to Timothy, the objection I already discussed—that Gnosticism is dated too early—is pressed even harder. But the further objection, that these letters assume a Church organization that did not exist until after Paul’s death, bears on them as pastoral letters, and touches far less the letters addressed to the various societies in Italy, Greece, or Asia.
The subject is interesting, and I would be neglecting the purpose of these lectures if I passed it by. There is good ground for saying that the nature of the Church in the Apostle’s day should not be inferred from what we read of it even at the start of the second century. For example, it would be a great mistake to think the Roman Empire’s feeling toward Christians under its worst rulers in the first period was as hostile as under its best rulers later. Nero treated Christians no more cruelly than his other subjects; he persecuted them at all only by accident, impulse, or temporary convenience. Trajan persecuted them on principle, from the very policy that made him kind to his subjects generally. That vast difference presupposes others. Since it was the Church’s organization in the great cities that alarmed intelligent rulers like Trajan or Marcus Aurelius, there is ample excuse for supposing such organization was lacking earlier. And this view is strengthened by noting how little the canonical epistles say of what later seemed the most conspicuous feature of Christian society. “The names of bishops, presbyters, or deacons occur here and there in the letters to the Churches, but their appearance seems accidental; the doctrine and even the practice of the epistle seem hardly affected by whether they are present or absent. So it is easy to suppose they were inserted later, when they were felt indispensable to the Church’s existence. And where they do come forward prominently, in these letters, is that not a reason to suspect those letters are spurious?”
If the conclusion we reached about the Epistle to the Thessalonians is right, we must certainly expect the Church to stand out much more substantially in the coming age, after the great crisis Paul speaks of, than before. Consider that crisis and the reason is plain. The national organization the Jew regarded as sacred and divine—the world’s central organization—was to be shaken and broken up. The expectation was that the Church would emerge from this wreck as the root of a new human community. Only in that form would it be the fully developed society of which Pentecost’s society was the germ; only then could the world the Cæsars ruled feel it as a rival kingdom. Before that, Romans still saw it as one of the Jewish sects, as the hostile Jews always sought to represent it. How did it seem to the Church’s own members, teachers, and Apostles? We have seen this cannot be answered simply; the answer emerges gradually in different aspects. James and Peter were anxious to recognize the old Jewish organization, to speak of the twelve tribes, to make their countrymen aware of their peculiar calling, to present Christ as the son of David come to gather them though scattered among the Gentiles. These Apostles of the circumcision were of course reluctant to seem to be setting up a society; they wished only to witness for the true Lord of the society they belonged to and gloried in. Still they were a body of witnesses. They needed ministers; deacons were chosen to meet a new necessity; the apostles held the office Christ gave them; the reviving family character of the old Jewish commonwealth suggested the position of the Elders. When an ecclesia of Jews and Gentiles grew up in cities Paul visited, all the various functions and gifts appeared, as in the Epistles to Corinth and Ephesus, and were traced to the one Lord and one Spirit. Everything necessary to a body politic was found in each. And Paul carefully reminded each that it was a divine society called out by God, not one he had built or could organize. Here, as at Jerusalem, we hear of the Elder and the Deacon—but their existence is assumed, with no formal account of their creation. They unfolded like trees or flowers, not inserted by any plan or paper constitution. The other name, “Overseers,” so important later, appears with no formality in these Epistles; the name is full of meaning, but the meaning is not drawn out. We feel we are in an order—but an order set within another it is not yet able to displace, one that, until God decrees its end, is dear and venerable to the Apostle of the Gentiles as to the Apostles of the circumcision.
My conclusion is this. There is nothing in the Epistles to the Churches, and I think we shall find nothing in the pastoral Epistles, that anticipates the complete, expanded society we meet after the Apostles have left the earth. But there are all the seeds and preparations for that developed order—just as we found at Colosse the seeds of the various later forms of Gnosticism. The pastoral Epistles carry us one step further than the Ecclesiastical Epistles in the history of the Church’s constitution. But it is just the step made necessary by what we read there, the step that makes the facts of the second century not incredible or unintelligible.
First Epistle to Timothy
It is generally agreed that Overseer and Elder are not carefully distinguished in Acts or in the Ecclesiastical Epistles. But when someone is left to watch over a Church’s affairs, we feel at once that the first name suits his function and the second clearly does not. Without assuming that “Elder” necessarily implied age, we may take it that a young man like Timothy would not have borne that name in a Church he belonged to locally. And the opening of this Epistle gives the clearest support for my remark that the Church’s offices evolved by a divine law, not by an artificial rule.
The Apostle is traveling from Ephesus to Macedonia. He sees at Ephesus certain people introducing strange doctrines, giving heed to fables and endless genealogies that stir up disputes. He wants Timothy to stay and warn these men of the harm they may cause. Here at once, in a particular case, we see how the need of a Christian overseer might arise. From this starting point we may learn by degrees what other duties fall to him and what else his office implies.
The phrase “interminable genealogies” is thought to carry us a step further into the history of Gnosticism than the Epistle to the Colossians did. The descent of the various æons and their spiritual relationships are so prominent in the second-century heresies that we assume these must be meant. The opinion seems not unreasonable, but Paul’s surrounding language obliges us to qualify it. These genealogists were clearly Jews who set great store by the law. If they owed anything to Persian or Greek teaching, it was wholly subordinate to what they took from the Hebrew sages. So I think we should read the words by what we know of Jewish notions about angels and archangels rather than by the Gnostics in Tertullian or Irenæus. We may hereafter need to reckon with the Jewish element in Gnosticism much more than some modern historians allow. At all events, the men Paul set Timothy to control substituted law for Gospel, and thereby, as Paul says, “hindered that which is the true end and issue of the commandment, love out of a pure heart, and a good conscience, and faith unfeigned.”
The words we translate “godly edifying which is in faith” are made a little harder by Lachmann, who reads οἰκονομίαν (stewardship) rather than οἰκοδομίαν (building). But either reading—Lachmann’s perhaps even more—hints at the character of Timothy’s office, borne out by the rest of the letter. Preserving the Church’s order and all that made for true fellowship among its members was to be his first and special aim. He was to understand distinctions in order to preserve unity; to keep notions from replacing belief and action; and for that end to detect what is true in each notion, so that the assumption and exclusiveness that made it false could be rejected. The great opposition of Law and Gospel supplies the test at once. “The law is good, if a man use it lawfully.” But the Law exists to restrain and condemn crimes that oppose the healthful Gospel of the glory of God, with which Paul felt entrusted. To put the mere prohibition of evil in place of the power that delivers from it, the righteousness of letters in place of the righteousness of a Person, the righteousness that merely condemns the sinner in place of the righteousness that saves him out of sin—that destroys the life of the Church and of the individual alike. Whoever truly watches over one will also protect the other.
Then, after asserting this great theological principle Timothy is always to keep in view, comes one of those passages of personal feeling and thanksgiving that seem at first to break the argument but in fact bring out its meaning better than the plainest logic could. He thanks Christ, who enabled him for the ministry into which He put him, having judged him faithful—him who was before a blasphemer, persecutor, and injurious. Why do these words come in here rather than elsewhere? Why speak of receiving mercy because he did it ignorantly in unbelief, of grace abounding with faith and love, of the saying more fitted for a young convert than a bishop—“Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am first”? Because in this way he shows most strikingly how the Law could not raise a man who kept its precepts most diligently out of the most evil habits of mind, into which he fell through his very zeal for the Law’s authority; because he would show the Gospel doing for him what the Law could not; because he would proclaim to all sinners the blessings he felt he had a claim to only as a sinner. So the words that follow gain full force: “on this account I found mercy, that in me first Christ Jesus might show forth all longsuffering for a pattern to them that should hereafter believe on Him unto life eternal.” He himself is the sign, to the hardest legalist and the most corrupt Gentile alike, of the power in Christ to raise them out of both conditions and bring them to that eternal life men crave and find in Him. And perhaps it is not over-refinement to think that in “eternal life,” and in the doxology that follows—“to the King of the Æons, the incorruptible, unseen, only God, honor and glory for the æons out of æons, Amen”—there is a silent allusion to the opinions beginning to attach to these words, and a striking testimony against them, since Paul draws all thought away from periods and from spiritual beings to the one original ground of both. However that may be, Timothy’s commission clearly rests on this Gospel and its relation to the law, as made necessary by the confused teaching of Rabbinical speculators and allegorists. The words “according to the prophecies which went before on thee”—or rather that were pointing toward thee—seem to say clearly that Paul was not choosing his delegate arbitrarily but conforming to indications that, in every man’s case if he will look, declare what he is meant for, and that an Apostle could only regard as divine. I cannot explain the words “in them” in the next sentence; perhaps they mean Timothy should wage his warfare remembering those warnings and foretellings of his calling, needing them when his belief in it grew weak. In any case, the words mean his life, in himself and in the Church, could be nothing but a fight, and that the fight would be won if he put on the armor of faith and of a good conscience—one, he hints, being necessary to keep the other safe. He had seen a tendency to separate them growing in the Church: Hymenæus and Alexander had failed to keep a clear conscience, and so their faith ran aground and was shipwrecked. He had delivered them to Satan—the same formula, doubtless with the same meaning, as with the Corinthian offender—not to shut them out of the kingdom, but to teach them not to blaspheme.
The second chapter opens with hints about a Church’s order. Nothing is more worth noting than Paul’s first exhortation on this subject: “I exhort then first of all that there be made petitions, supplications, thanksgivings for all men.” The Church’s order is founded on these prayers. The man left expressly at Ephesus to guard against strange doctrines is told “first of all” to see that prayers are made for all men. If his aim were only to block Gnosticism, no diviner means could be conceived, for Gnosticism is by nature separating and exclusive, busy dividing the initiate from the ordinary Christian and man. But since Paul’s zeal against the innovators was wholly subordinate to asserting the Gospel and the divine kingdom, we can assign no lower ground for this command than that he saw common united prayer for all men as the very expression of the Church’s mind, the sign of its calling, the means of its triumphs. He adds, “for kings and all those in authority, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all piety and reverence.” But lest this be mistaken for the ground of the prayer—lest Christians think they pray for Nero to disarm his hostility or to escape his cruelties—he adds at once, “For this is good and acceptable in the sight of our Saviour God, who willeth all men to be saved, and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” A startling assertion whose strangeness we can hardly grasp. You are to pray for all men, even the worst tyrant; because it is not proper in men’s eyes but good and acceptable to God, who hates mere appearances, since He wills that all men be saved and come to know the truth. He must mean that the prayers, and so the life, of a Church—which depends on and is realized in its prayers—are possible only while it acknowledges a Will to good, a Will to salvation deeper than anything Christians can imagine, so deep that we must suppose the whole world, and the very worst man in it, an object of God’s care, and therefore a fit object for the care of those whose wills seek to conform to His. And lest this Will be thought other than the one Paul preached, he adds: “there is one God, one Mediator also of God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, He that hath given Himself a ransom for all”—the testimony to be made in its own times—“unto which have I been appointed a herald and an apostle. I say truth, I do not lie, a teacher of nations in faith and truth.” That Will that all men be saved is the Will revealed in the one Mediator Jesus Christ. When we call Him a Mediator or a ransom, we mean this or we mean nothing. He is a ransom for all or for none. If anyone is excluded, the Incarnation and Sacrifice mean nothing; there is no Gospel from heaven to earth. So Paul speaks vehemently—as those who know his style know he does only when some great point is at stake, a matter of life and death. He swears he is no liar but a truth-speaker when he says this Gospel, so contrary to men’s narrow notions, so outrageous to the pride of Jews and Christians, is the good news entrusted to him, and that if he may not say it, he is no teacher of the Gentiles at all. Such language is not new to us; we have found it in every Epistle. But here it comes out more broadly than almost anywhere, because he would have Timothy understand that unless he sets this as the ground of the Ephesian Church’s life, he fails in his office and is no true overseer.
Then he shows this united prayer as what keeps the men and women of the Church in their proper relation—uniting them in Christ, yet teaching them their divine, original distinction, and the subordination due from the weaker to the stronger. He wills that the men pray everywhere, “lifting up holy hands without wrath and disputation”—for these are their special temptations, rising as readily in the Church as in the world, from theology as from business, and cured only by the awe and fellowship of prayer. He wills the women to join too, avoiding the outward vanities of dress that are their special temptation, which interfere with humble, reverent prayer, and from which such prayer and its higher graces are the deliverance. But the woman might have another weakness—not from her own sex, but from ambition to be like the man. She was to pray with the man; there they were one and equal. But he was to teach and she to learn; quietness was her ornament. Adam was formed first, then Eve; the woman was deceived; the man fell by yielding to her. Yet the promise of a child, which was the first woman’s deliverance, shall be a deliverance and blessing to all who follow her, if they remain in faith, love, and holiness, with modesty.
After laying down these fundamental principles about the Church, Paul turns to the office of its guardian. Most who read the description of a Christian overseer or bishop in the third chapter have been somewhat startled that the ideal is not loftier, that the qualities named are mostly what one would ask of an ordinary superintendent of a village or city, not the transcendent spiritual qualities we imagine belonged to a ruler in Apostolic times. Much is to be learnt from this. Had Paul been setting up an order separated from the world, pursuing objects the world had no part in, this commonplace morality—forbidding a ruler to be “a striker, given to much wine, greedy of filthy lucre”—would have been passed over or assumed, and only the marks of the abstracted, spiritual man dwelt on. But since he believed he spoke of a society God, not he, was setting up in the world, one meant to explain what human society is, to be light and salt, he would rather assume the inward spiritual qualities implied in its very nature and its relation to the invisible God, and would show its ruler how in his own person he might display that simple, broad, manly character the world honors but cannot produce—how in daily life he might prove there is another life than the animal one, another end than money, a power to restrain passion not in those who cultivate indifference but in those full of burning zeal. Probably a closer look at Church history would show that keeping this gracious, orderly, humane bearing amid the provocations and degrading influences of society has been harder, rarer, mightier, bringing less honor to man and more glory to God, than maintaining the separate ascetic devotion often set up against it. Some, like Bernard, were called to that other service, and deserve all admiration and love. Between the dangers of the two positions there may be little to choose, and whoever rushes into either without a vocation may bitterly repent it. But it must be a great mistake, against Paul’s teaching, to hold that he who can order God’s household and keep in it the character of a Christian family is not bearing as true a witness for the kingdom as those who retire from men and leave the impression that heaven is for solitaries, not for society. If people read the Epistles literally, without importing their own notions, it would be almost needless to add that Paul does not merely permit but commands that Overseers be taken from those already husbands and fathers. I see no way to avoid this inference; and the further we read in Church history, the more we find its explanation in the nature and temptations of the office.
Those who have accepted the maxim of three orders in the Church without weighing it are puzzled to find no mention of the presbyter here, Paul passing straight from overseer to deacon. I stress this precisely because I value the presbyter’s office highly, and because I do not think the usual objections hold against the view that his office in the developed Church is the flowering of the Jewish priest’s office. I welcome the omission here as proof that, while the Jewish polity stood and sacrifices were offered daily in the Temple, his office—though it existed in the Church, with a far more domestic character than the Jewish office it was translated from—had not yet acquired its full meaning, and had more to do with the Church’s discipline than its worship. This confirms remarks I made on the Epistle to the Hebrews, to which I shall return when I connect that Epistle with the Epistles to the Gentile-city churches. I must note that the allusions to deacons are in the same spirit as those on overseers. All show a Divine order, but one that, because divine, is also human and natural—natural as opposed to artificial. The deacon is to be tested before admission, and a chief test is that he be the husband of one wife, ruling his children and house well. His wife too is part of the Church order; her gravity, sobriety, and freedom from gossip are signs of a divine calling. Here as throughout the New Testament, work or service is regarded not chiefly as a means to reward but as itself a reward. He who does a lesser work well may hope for a wider sphere; but to be discharged from work in this world or any other would be a penalty, not a prize.
The famous passage in the sixteenth verse of the third chapter has caused endless dispute—on one side, surely needless. Those who feel the Bible from first to last sets forth God’s manifestation in Christ can hardly care whether the word θεός (God) stands here. If it does not, perhaps they may connect it with “the living God” in verse 15, treating what comes between as parenthetical; or connect it, against grammar, with “mystery,” though then the masculine needs explaining; or understand “Christ,” the relative used oddly for the demonstrative. In no way can the doctrine depend on this passage. In every way it must witness to some divine mystery that “was manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, received up into glory.” Since such language is monstrous except of a person, those who believe the mystery at all will identify it with a person. Far more important than this word-fighting is Paul’s assertion that the Church is a Church of the living God, and that the truth on which it stands and which it upholds is the union of flesh and spirit, visible and invisible, human and divine.
The reference right after to those who in later times would fall from the faith explains, I think, the teaching Paul dreaded at Ephesus and how he wanted Timothy to counter it. Some may think the doctrines he names—forbidding marriage, commanding abstinence from meats—do not deserve such strong language or signal a coming apostasy. But taken with all he has been saying, and especially these last words, one sees that whatever despised human relationships or led men to think the earth unredeemed was in fact a denial that Christ was manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, received into glory—a denial of the Gospel entrusted to Paul, destroying the very meaning and life of the Church, which exists to witness the reconciling of heaven and earth. Such a revolt also denied the great truth the Jewish people were set apart to proclaim, indeed every truth implied in civil polity among the nations. If every creature of God is not good, if we may not thank God for it, if it is not made holy by His word and prayer—the evil being not in things but in our selfish appropriation of them—then the earth is the devil’s property, and Christ’s baptism, temptation, and agony have not taken it from his hands. All Paul’s exhortations, showing that a truly heavenly society must be a truly earthly one, that there is no inward spiritual root from which the fruits of common social morality do not spring, had been striking at these errors. He now bids Timothy openly denounce them as profane, old wives’ fables. But to do so effectively he must exercise himself in real piety, which holds the promise of the life that now is and the life to come. Paul is not here preaching the doctrine he held devoutly as a Pharisee and renounced when God revealed His Son in him—that men are paid for piety by prizes in this world and a larger reversion in the next. His piety was itself the entering into a divine life, now and hereafter. He exercised himself, and bade Timothy do so, in faith and trust in a God “who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those who trust in Him.” For this he labored and agonized, hoping in the living God, this Saviour of all; and to keep that hope he had to fight principalities and powers in high places. It was the cause of all the hatred of those who cast out his name as evil.
The exhortations that follow concern Church-order and government, and will be best understood by those of longest experience, even in a commercial western city rather than Ephesus, in the nineteenth century rather than the first. Timothy is told to let no one despise his youth, to remember the gift in him given through prophecy with the laying on of the presbytery’s hands. Having this gift, he can be a pattern of the believers in word, conduct, love, faith, purity. He can give himself to reading, exhortation, instruction, dwelling in these things so that his progress becomes plain to all. He is to exhort older men as fathers, younger as brothers, older women as mothers, younger as sisters, with all purity. He is to respect the true widow, but not provide for widows who have children or descendants to care for them; to let those care for their own is acceptable to God. There were to be no “Corbans” in the Christian Church: anyone who did not care for his own house, especially his relations, had denied the faith and was worse than an infidel. Timothy was not to respect people zealous for the Church’s work who neglected their own. For this reason younger widows were not generally to be used for Church service; they were apt to be idle triflers and gossips. Better for the younger women—even, from the context, the younger widows—to marry, bear children, and rule their households. Elders who had presided well (here we have the name, and a not very distinct allusion to a special kind of government) should be held worthy of double honor—meaning, I think, some financial provision as well as respect, for he quotes, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn.”
Then the discipline of offenders is touched on. No charge against an elder is to be heard except before two or three witnesses. Offenders are to be rebuked openly before all, that the rest may fear. Timothy is solemnly charged to remember these rules. He stands in the presence of God, of Jesus Christ, and the elect angels; how dare he let prejudice or partiality enter his decisions? Here again the Church’s spiritual principle—that men are actually brought into God’s presence and the invisible world—becomes the security for ordinary human justice. And it cannot be repeated too often: whenever churches or churchmen forget or disbelieve their high calling and God’s continual judgment of their hearts, they become far more unjust, partial, and unprincipled than states or statesmen at their worst. They become corrupters of states, or, while statesmen keep any sense of moral duty, they draw down righteous reproof and bitter contempt. So we should pray to fall into the hands of any court rather than a religious one, unless it is truly possessed by the truth Paul here presses so gravely on the bishop of Ephesus. Timothy is further told not to lay hands suddenly on anyone, however eager to send out laborers, lest he share in other men’s sins—their false teaching and bad example becoming his. He is to keep himself pure, and careful of his body’s health as of his spirit’s. How the next passage connects with this I cannot say, nor its exact meaning. It might suggest that all bodily weaknesses are in some sense signs of inward evils, yet that those in whom such weaknesses show are no worse off than those whose evils stay hidden; there is the same righteous judgment, the same revealing to the man of what he is. This might comfort Timothy, whose bodily weaknesses perhaps discouraged him and, hindering his activity, seemed sentences of God. Both good and evil deeds, Paul seems to say, come out into view before the day when all secrets are revealed; and since what makes manifest is light, we are to receive such discoveries as from Him who is light. I do not affirm this is Paul’s meaning, but I have found no other that fits as naturally here.
Then arose the questions that constantly troubled the early Church about master and slave. I will return to this with the Epistle to Philemon. Here the principle of Divine order—ultimately the great principle of civil freedom—is asserted. Let the Christian slave show all respect and honor to the heathen master, out of reverence for God’s name and doctrine. Let him honor the Christian master all the more because they are brothers. Then their services become mutual, benefits given and returned, and what was a bondage becomes a relation.
These plain practical exhortations Paul calls healthy words, the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, the doctrine according to godliness. Those who set themselves against this teaching, who have a more refined Christianity, he treats with little ceremony. Such men are puffed up, have no real knowledge, and love controversies and word-fights, from which spring envy, strife, evil suspicions, the busy quarrels of men corrupted in reason and estranged from truth, who suppose godliness a means of gain. He dwells on this charge, feeling he has touched the very root of the evil. In that rich trading city, trade notions were sure to mingle with Christian thought. In his allusions to bonded goods and the seal, Paul had shown how trade could be turned to spiritual profit—but it could as easily be turned the opposite way, infecting all visions of the spiritual world and rendering them useless for reforming the visible one. The fine Gnostic speculators were really trading speculators, teaching men how to get a greater return for their sacrifices than others, how by certain trains of thought or outward rules to increase their happiness here or hereafter. Paul admits godliness is great gain when joined with contentment; the poorest man with food and clothing has an infinite treasure, for though we bring nothing into the world and take nothing out, we may have God as our eternal portion. “But those who will be rich fall into a temptation and a snare, and many foolish and mischievous lusts, which drown men in ruin and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil, through aiming at which some have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” The reader knows these words. But has he weighed them alongside the warnings against false teachers just before, and the whole letter? Has he seen that the love of money is the root of all evil not only because it draws men from the spiritual world, but because it makes that world a mere collection of prizes to be seized, so that selfishness becomes the law of heaven as of earth?
“But thou, O man of God, fly these things,” he goes on; “pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, gentleness.” These are the true prizes of the kingdom, the treasures brought near to men, which Paul calls his dear son to claim for himself and his brethren. “Fight the good fight of faith”—believe earnestly that these are God’s own nature, given to you in Christ. “Lay hold of eternal life”—the life of a spirit, of a man, opposed to that of an animal, of time or sense—for you were called to it and confessed the good confession that it is yours before many witnesses. And you are not the first: “Christ Jesus witnessed it before Pontius Pilate. Therefore I call upon you, as in His sight and the sight of God who quickens the dead, to keep the commandment spotless until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ, which He will make in His own time, who is the blessed and only ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone hath immortality, who dwells in light inaccessible, whom no man hath seen or can see, to whom be honor and eternal power. Amen.”
Here, as in every such rapturous passage of Paul, the practical aim is never for a moment forgotten. He is still applying a direct remedy to a gross evil. This declaration of the heavenly wealth laid up in God, belonging to the spirit of man, ends in the exhortation it should never be parted from: “The rich in this world command not to have proud thoughts, nor to hope in the uncertainty of wealth, but in the God who giveth us all things richly for enjoyment; to do good, to be rich in noble works, ready to give and share, treasuring up for themselves a good foundation for the future, that they may have hold of that which is truly life.” Here is the proper earthly sequel to his vision of heavenly things.
And the whole letter is wound up with an exhortation to Timothy himself that shows its perfect unity, and how the purpose Paul set at the start stayed with him to the end: “O Timothy, preserve the trust given thee, turning away from the profane empty talkings and oppositions of what is falsely called knowledge, which some professing have gone astray about the faith.”
Second Epistle to Timothy
The second Epistle to Timothy is somewhat more personal than the first—personal about both writer and receiver. But all its indications about the Church of Ephesus are like those we have already noticed; only Paul’s sense of the evils from the false teaching he denounced is keener and more plainly expressed.
The passage from verse three to verse fifteen of the first chapter seems to show there had been great discouragement in Timothy, and perhaps the timidity that discouragement breeds. As always, Paul first dwells on the tokens of faith and earnestness Timothy had shown, and strengthens him by the example of his mother and grandmother, before hinting at his weaknesses. But neither early zeal nor others’ lessons could sustain his position at Ephesus. Paul reminds him of the gift of God in him by the laying on of his hands, and that he has received a Spirit—not of cowardice, but of power, love, and a sound mind. Assured of that mighty Helper, he can bid Timothy “not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of himself His bondsman, but be a fellow-sufferer in the Gospel by the strength of God, who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to His own purpose and grace given us in Christ Jesus before the world began, and now manifested through the appearing of our Saviour Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.” I think we have never felt the force of these words, or how their parts relate—why speak of a purpose before time, a manifestation in time, a calling and salvation that do not depend on men’s acts but originate them, of the death Christ destroyed, the life and immortality He brought to light—until we connect them with the feebleness and despondency of a minister of the Gospel, and see how the loss of any clause would rob him of something he needed to keep from utter hopelessness. Then comes, as always, Paul’s own experience and sympathy: he too is a herald, apostle, and teacher of this Gospel like Timothy, a sufferer for it, with every temptation to be ashamed of it. “But he knows in whom he has believed, and is persuaded He is able to keep that trust against that day.” Let Timothy keep before him the wholesome words heard from Paul, interpreting them by the faith and love in Christ Jesus, and keep the goodly trust committed to him by the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in them both.
One cause of Timothy’s depression appears next. There had been a general falling-away from Paul among his disciples in Asia, two especially named. Paul trembles and hopes for another—Onesiphorus—who had often stood by him bravely in Rome and Ephesus. But whatever others do, he begs his own son to be strong in the grace in Christ Jesus, and to commit to faithful men, able to teach others, the words heard from him. Timothy must remember he is Christ’s soldier, to suffer with his Captain; to please Him he must not entangle himself in worldly business that would hinder his warfare. Or let him think of himself as a wrestler—no crown unless he wrestles by the rules; or as a husbandman, who ought himself to share the fruit he ripens. These parables he must lay to heart, and God will give him understanding of their meaning. Let him always keep in mind Paul’s Gospel—of Jesus Christ, of David’s seed, risen from the dead—or rather keep Him in mind. Then he would understand why the servant suffers as a criminal, since the Master so suffered; that God’s word is not bound though the speaker is in bonds; and the great reward of suffering. Paul suffered for the elect, that they too might gain salvation in Christ with eternal glory. The word may be trusted: fellow-suffering is the way to fellow-life. If we endure with Him we shall share His kingdom; if we deny Him He will deny us; but our faithlessness will not make Him unfaithful, for He cannot deny Himself.
These great maxims for the Christian minister himself he was also to witness, as in Christ’s sight, to others. Paul begs him again to have nothing to do with word-fighting, but to present himself as an approved workman to God. Not that words are not sacred: he had a word of truth to divide rightly, not to set one part against another. Those who used words otherwise cultivated impiety; their words became vain talk, indeed cancers destroying life instead of feeding it. For instance, Hymenæus and Philetus had become gossips and arguers about the resurrection, and, perverting Paul’s own words, taught there was no future resurrection.
But this did not weaken God’s foundation. There were two great practical rules for them: “God knoweth them that are His,” and “Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.” The first would keep them from judging others; the second would tell them their own privilege and duty. Timothy need not be discouraged to find in God’s house, as in any great house, vessels precious and worthless, for honorable and dishonorable uses. Each must see that he is purified from what is base, a vessel fit for honor, useful to the Master, ready for every good work. Let Timothy avoid the youthful lusts that corrupt, and pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart. Let him have as little as possible to do with foolish questions, even in argument, for they breed strife. And God’s servant should not be striving—this we may suspect was one of Timothy’s youthful faults—but gentle to all, ready to teach, patient, meekly instructing opponents, in hope that God may give them repentance and knowledge of the truth, and that they may escape the devil’s snare, having been led captive by him to do his will.
It is no part of Paul’s encouragement to tell Timothy he will meet no such opponents or that bright times are near. On the contrary, he says bad times are at hand. Even without his hints in other Epistles, we cannot doubt the “last days” here are days Timothy was beginning to experience and would experience more and more. The men who would be lovers of self and money, braggarts, proud, evil speakers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, having the form of godliness but denying its power, were men Timothy was to turn from. So graphically does Paul describe them that every age has rightly been sure they apply to itself. Always there have been religious teachers who “creep into houses and lead captive silly women, laden with sins, led about with divers lusts, ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth”—the trade of both Romish and Protestant deceivers, who find their most profitable converts among such women. But because the lesson is universal, it is no less true that it belonged specially to that time: everything Paul said was realized by his son in the Ephesian Church, and everything it foretold came to pass in that generation. It was Timothy who needed reminding of his country’s traditions about the magicians who withstood Moses, and assuring that the new enchanter would be foiled like the old; Timothy who needed reminding that his master and father had not crept into houses or courted popularity but had believed, loved, suffered, and been persecuted everywhere; Timothy who needed telling to abide in what he had learnt and to keep to the holy Scriptures he had known from childhood, able to make him wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesus; Timothy who needed telling that every inspired writing is also useful for instruction, conviction, restoration, and training in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, fitted for every good work.
Paul is so sure a time was near when Church members “would not bear sound teaching, but according to their own lusts would heap up teachers, having a restless itching to hear, but turning their ears from truth to fables,” that he uses one of his most solemn charges: Timothy is to “preach the word, be instant in season and out, reprove, rebuke, exhort, be sober in all things, suffer evil, do the work of an evangelist, fully fulfil his ministry.” There is one more reason for this. Paul thinks he has nearly finished his own fight; his race is almost won. He looks to a crown that, as always, is not a crown for righteousness but a crown of righteousness—the very thing he told the Philippians he was pursuing, which he now hopes fully to attain: to dwell wholly in God’s righteousness, forever delivered from his own. This crown he believes the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give him at His appearing—and give also, for how could he bear a selfish possession, to all who love that appearing. Even with this in view he craves human sympathy. He longs to see Timothy, mourns the loss of Demas, wishes for Mark (probably the John Mark over whom he had parted from Barnabas), and speaks sorrowfully, not bitterly, of his loneliness of earthly sympathy when he first defended himself before the Emperor. Among these notices of friends is an allusion to an enemy, Alexander the coppersmith, whom Timothy must beware. The seeming harshness of the parenthesis vanishes if we take Lachmann’s reading, “The Lord will reward him according to his works.” There is no real severity in wishing the law “whatsoever a man soweth that shall he reap” to be fulfilled in every case. If anything in Alexander was right and true, the righteous Judge would acknowledge it; what was false and opposed the truth in him or others, the same Judge would destroy. It was fitting that an Apostle who had fought the good fight and was about to be offered up should desire that in this and all things God’s will be done on earth as in heaven.
Epistle to Titus
The Church at Ephesus must always interest us more than the Church in Crete, of which Acts tells us nothing and later history very little. The Epistle to Titus gives a few unflattering hints about the islanders’ character, which here as elsewhere was reflected in the Church’s character. Even if we had only the one passage showing how carefully Paul studied every people he came to, and how sure he was that every national peculiarity would affect the faith and conduct of Christians and need watching by His ministers, the letter would be of great value—correcting many confused notions and interpreting the experience of pastor and missionary. There is a notion, constantly alternating with the practical discoveries that refute and embarrass it, that a man born from above has nothing to do with his own past or his people’s life, that he is moved into a wholly different state with no inherited temperament from his ancestors. So it should be carefully remembered that few letters speak so much of the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit as this very one, which quotes the Cretan prophet that his countrymen are “liars, evil beasts, slow bellies,” and makes that a reason for Titus to rebuke sharply—not the unbaptized, but the baptized.
The reasons for leaving Titus in Crete are not quite those for leaving Timothy in Ephesus. First, Titus is told to “set in order the things that are wanting, and establish presbyters in each city”—no such command was given Timothy. The difference seems to be that an island the size of Crete needed only one central overseer with a number of distinct city rulers looking up to him. Here is a further step in Church organization, though still nothing giving the presbyter his later character. The next difference is that the Cretan teachers needing control, though of the circumcision and given to Jewish fables and men’s commandments, seem far less Gnostic than those we heard of lately. Questionings, genealogies, and legal strifes are noted; but the context suggests the Judaizers were drenching the Church with idle legends and Rabbinical debates about trifles—things people in every age call religious because they touch places or persons in the Bible—rather than with the high-flown speculations that amused a more educated people. To these he refers when he says, “All things are pure to the pure; but to the defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure, but their mind and conscience are defiled.” A good meaning and use could be found in these fables, as in the Jewish rules; possibly Titus himself had found such profit and doubted whether to discourage them. But Paul, wholly manly and practical, had learnt to see the harm this trifling did—even when harmless and childish in itself—to a people who needed moral life and restoration, a power to make them right, true, orderly citizens and men.
I have called Paul’s mind practical and moral, and his object a moral society in Crete. Anyone reading honestly must see this: his wholesome doctrine aims to make old men sober, grave, reasonable; old women not slanderers or wine-bibbers; young women lovers of husbands and children; young men sober-minded; servants obedient, masters just; the overseer himself a pattern of uncorruptness, dignity, healthy speech, hospitality, love of goodness, justice, holiness, moderation. But all these great moral effects had no other origin than the saving “grace of God which had appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live temperately, righteously, and piously in this present age, awaiting the blessed hope and manifestation of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all iniquity and cleanse for Himself a peculiar people zealous of good works.” Thus the good news that God had shown His love and glory in Christ, who gave Himself to deliver men not from punishment but from sin, and would at last show His righteousness and glory as the great reward, was the only power by which Paul hoped to accomplish anything, for Crete or for the world.
And he has the same hope for Cretans as for himself. He has not called them hard names without being ready to call Paul harder. Though bred at Gamaliel’s feet and striving to keep all the law’s righteousness, he knew in himself an ignorance, disobedience, malice, and envy that put him at least on their level. “But when the goodness and philanthropy of our Saviour God appeared, not from works of righteousness we had done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, that being justified by His grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” This doctrine Paul declared trustworthy, and would have Titus very confident about it, that those who believed God might be careful to lead in good works. These things he sets, as good and useful, against the foolish questions and debates he wished to put down. A heretical man who persisted in raising such disputes was to be rejected after one or two rebukes; the overseer’s act would only ratify a sentence the man’s own conscience had already passed on him.