1 Timothy 1:6-8

Alright,
welcome back.
Thanks for starting a week with us as we continue slowly through 1 Timothy and today will likely
not be an exception,
probably just a couple verses today.
Remember that Paul has reached out to Timothy.
Timothy is in leadership of some sort in a community church and again I think helpful
to realize that what that means is that Timothy is essentially a liaison between Paul and
the leaders of the various house churches.
We believe in Ephesus is where this is happening and Paul began pretty hot out of the gate
telling Timothy that he needed to rein some people in or at least
instructing him that certain people needed to kind of dial it back and we continue with that today.
Again very likely though they’re not named at this point,
very likely that Timothy and
Paul probably know who they are talking about but we continue in a kind of generic way today.
We are in
verse 6 as Paul instructs Timothy,
“Some people have deviated from these and
turned to meaningless talk.”
And we can stop there Michael.
Again we pointed out in the intro to this letter that
scholars are clear, it’s clear that something’s happening, it’s clear that there’s a body of
doctrine being taught that
it’s out of keeping with what Paul has taught.
He doesn’t feel good about it, he opposes it,
he doesn’t believe that it should be taught.
But nowhere in the letter does it lay out exactly what that is and so we have to make
these inferences.
We saw late last week this reference in verse 4 to genealogies and speculations and so there’s
some idea that that may have been included.
And here he says people have deviated from the true teaching,
the instructions of good
conscience and sincere faith in the verse prior and they’ve changed to meaningless talk,
meaningless without meaning, empty.
They’re saying things that don’t have value and Paul is concerned obviously that this
is going to have a negative impact on church.
Yeah I think that’s a really helpful way to start.
I’m going to back us up one verse just to get a little context here from what would
have been yesterday’s reading so if you miss that feel free to jump back and hear that out as well.
But I think my commentator makes a point that’s really helpful here at the beginning of verse
5.
You notice where it says the aim of such instruction?
I think that’s helpful as we move here to verse 6 because fundamentally when we turn
to Paul’s gospel or his telling of the gospel, his teaching,
he is doing so in a very dynamic way.
Paul is not a legalist in the sense that he lays out all of the steps and expects everyone
to simply follow each step verbatim.
He certainly has expectations,
I don’t want you to misunderstand me,
he does have an
idea of what a rightly ordered Christian community should look like but for Paul that is always
reaching back to the goal,
to this higher order which is the gospel,
this vision for Paul that flows directly from who Jesus Christ is therefore shapes the life of those who
not only believe in him but have been transformed into his image.
So this is where our verse today begins to really take force because here he’s talking
about these who have deviated away from this teaching,
away from this dynamic goal.
Instead of being set on being those who embody the goodness of the faith,
those who look like Jesus and what they do and say,
they have as we’ve seen here turned to meaningless
talk.
They’ve looked to those things that are really not applicable to life and
scholars have teased out a little bit,
maybe we’ll share in this conversation a little bit later,
some of the portrait of what some of this meaningless talk may have looked like and they draw that
from some of the other statements here in this book and then in 2 Timothy as well but
the point for now I think suffices to say is whenever Paul encounters someone
who has made knowledge or has made the law a substitute for that dynamic and higher goal of reflecting
who Jesus is in the present world,
in your own context,
in your own time,
amongst your own people,
amongst your own complexities of life.
Paul thinks all of that matters and so the point here that he’s making about these opposing
leaders is that they’ve given into esoteric thought,
they’ve given up their essential
connection to the gospel for meaningless words and when they did that,
then Clint, we are to know that they’ve deviated from the core of what the gospel is.
Yeah, and I think Michael,
it’s important that we understand Paul has an interesting
relationship with rules.
Having been a Pharisee,
Paul has a deep background in law.
I mean theologically,
biblically,
he lived that life and yet when it comes to rules within the faith,
he has a kind of loose relationship in some ways.
He can certainly talk law with people who want to do that.
He can affirm that the law is good as he does in Romans but he can also say,
look, if the food doesn’t offend your conscience,
eat it and if one day seems better to you than
another, observe it and especially those of you who are with us in Romans,
this idea of protecting those who have a different outlook and it’s easy to read this.
In fact,
probably as early as tomorrow,
we’re going to see Paul give what looks like some
rigid rules and I think in the midst of that,
that’s kind of the reputation that Paul gets
which it’s helpful to realize Paul always has in mind what is best for the church and
Timothy is a living example of that.
You may not remember this but in the introduction of this book,
we pointed out that Timothy
is Greek.
His father’s a Gentile,
his mother becomes Christian,
his grandmother becomes Christian
but Timothy is Greek.
He is a Gentile
and yet in the book of Acts,
we’re told that Paul wanting to take Timothy
with him to go back to where he was going to meet with Jewish Christians has Timothy circumcised.
Now Paul has made it very clear that he doesn’t believe circumcision is essential.
In fact,
he goes so far in one letter to say,
just stay as you were.
If you’re circumcised when you come into the faith,
good for you.
If you’re not,
that’s fine too.
And yet for the sake of harmony,
for the sake of unity in the body,
not to offend anyone else’s conscience,
he has Timothy become circumcised so that others won’t be offended.
And I think what that does for us,
Michael, is it kind of helps us
understand that when Paul is giving these sort of guidelines and things that he expects the church to live up to,
it’s not about the law itself.
It’s always about how the community reflects the gospel and how the community reflects
to the world that they are of a different substance and standard because of Jesus Christ.
And I think sometimes that gets lost.
I agree completely.
In fact, I think a linchpin of
really Paul’s sort of offerings to the churches,
I think can be boiled down to the time when he instructed the church to really put no barrier between
you and others.
In other words,
don’t make your public life such that Christians stick out in a negative
way.
Be people who pay your taxes,
be honest, be moral and upright in your place of work,
in the economic marketplace,
be people who can be trusted.
For Paul,
we shouldn’t put stumbling blocks in front of the unbeliever.
They should be able to see in us a kind of transparent reflection of our own falsehoods.
We should be honest where we fail.
And we should also do our very best to live humble, upright,
peaceable lives.
And that I think we do miss.
We as the churches that Paul was writing to are tempted to fixate
on the letter of the
law.
What can I do and what can’t I do?
Right.
What’s infield and what’s what’s out of field.
And then when other people cross that line,
we like to by temptation throw judgment in their direction.
The reality is, though,
when Paul’s speaking very critically of these leaders,
he’s not doing so for the sake of judgment.
He’s not doing so for the sake of gossip for him when they cross the line away from living
a life of real faith in real time with real people.
And they began fixating on conspiracies and,
you know, your special decoder ring and all
these kinds of things that were tempting to them.
And then they in doing so put themselves over scripture or over the faith itself.
And they became the sole interpreters.
That’s where Paul gets upset.
And in fact,
you’re going to see as the letter goes on,
in many cases, he does get very practical.
He gives Timothy very practical instruction for both how he should conduct himself in
the church community and what he should do in different social circumstances for Paul.
These two things aren’t at odds.
It is living our daily life and doing so to the best of our ability to be the hands and
feet of Christ.
That is what we’re called to do to connect once again to this higher purpose.
These individuals,
it seems,
have given up some of that higher purpose for figuring it out themselves.
And that’s where Paul is going to vehemently disagree.
Yeah. Paul makes a really interesting statement about him.
I really like this.
Verse seven,
“Desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding
either what they are saying
or the things about which they make assertions.”
So Paul says, you know, they want to teach.
And maybe he even affirms that to some extent.
It’s not clear here because I think for Paul,
the idea of wanting to teach but not knowing
how to teach or what to teach is probably not acceptable.
But desiring to be teachers of the law,
they don’t understand either what they are saying
or the things that they’re talking about.
They don’t understand the law and they don’t understand the application they’re trying
to make to the law.
And if there’s a thing as a teacher you don’t want said about you,
it’s that you don’t know
what you’re talking about and you don’t understand the things that you’re trying to teach.
It reads fairly neutrally.
But this is harsh criticism.
They’re out there teaching and they don’t know what they’re talking about.
And they don’t know the subject matter.
They’re doing harm because they want to teach but they’re not qualified.
They want to be leaders but they’re not able.
They want to instruct others but they don’t understand it themselves.
And for Paul,
that makes them dangerous.
I think, you know, frankly speaking,
that makes them a danger to the Christian community
because they’re misleading people.
And again,
his appeal to Timothy,
they have to be stopped.
They have to be reigned in.
They have to be instructed before they could ever be ready to teach.
They would have to understand it themselves.
Yeah, and this is maybe another really clear example of why biblical scholarship over
hundreds and now thousands of years has somewhat struggled to get a clear grasp on Paul and his
relationship with the law.
If you’ve ever been in a Bible study,
certainly if you joined us for Romans,
you would know that Paul,
being a Pharisee, having real legal chops in the Jewish faith,
has a lot to say about the law.
And we would be
easy for us, at least, I think, to walk into a conversation and assume that
every time Paul’s talking about the law,
he’s talking about the same exact thing.
If you look at Romans,
it’s filled with this language about the law.
And of course, in the Protestant branch of the Christian family,
we often emphasize grace over
law.
We talk about how Paul makes that to be the chief image of what Jesus Christ has done
on our behalf.
But when we come here to this section and we start talking here about them being teachers
of the law,
you can see even in that phrase,
there’s a little bit of critique,
a little bit of bite.
Paul has all of these chops to talk about the law,
but these have taken the law in a direction it wasn’t
intended to go.
They have made the law an end unto itself.
And when they did that,
they took a good thing,
or what Paul would argue is at least a neutral thing,
and they have made that an end unto themselves.
And when that happens,
and this is critical,
whenever we take a thing that is orderly and
good and given to us by God,
and we make that a tool for self
-aggrandizement or
for
our own sake of pride or status,
when we turn it towards ourselves,
now we’ve taken what was
a gift and we turn it into a threat,
or rather we turn it into a weapon that both hurts our own souls.
And in this case, maybe for Paul,
even one step beyond that,
we use it as a weapon against other people.
As these want to teach,
they are going to be misleading others who are teachable.
And that’s what makes Paul’s word to Timothy so essential is,
you know, Timothy, you need to stand in the gap.
We have to correct what is a misuse of the law for the sake of what would be the right
or good use of the law.
And here we think we learn a little something about some of the people that may be causing
trouble here in this community.
You know, it makes the most sense that these are people with a Jewish background.
Gentiles who come into the faith are not likely to be particularly interested in the law or teaching.
That’s not impossible, but it seems unlikely.
And so we begin to put a theory together that,
at least in this case,
it is likely Jewish Christians who are still holding some sense of the importance of the law.
But the clearest difference we can make it is,
and not to put Paul’s words in Paul’s mouth,
but he merely says this verbatim in other places.
Paul has zero interest in being a teacher of the law.
And the fact that they would call themselves that or that he would call them that is an insult,
because Paul’s only interest is teaching Jesus Christ.
He knows the law,
and he understands that the law points to Jesus.
So why would he teach the thing that’s of secondary importance?
He considers himself, as he’s already said,
an apostle of Christ Jesus.
He’s not a teacher of the law,
nor does he want to be,
nor does he want these people to be.
And let’s finish with one more verse here, verse 8.
“Now we know that the law is good if one uses it legitimately.”
And this, again, is a wonderful summary for Paul.
If you were with us in Romans,
or if you ever get a chance to read carefully through the
book of Romans, there’s a lot of law stuff in it,
and this undergirds nearly everything
that was said there.
The law is good.
Paul never argues that the law is bad.
He never argues that the law is abolished.
He never argues that Christians don’t need to pay attention to the law.
He simply argues that the law points us to Christ,
that its ultimate purpose is to show
us our sin so that we understand the need for God’s saving grace.
So he knows,
we know, he says,
the law is good.
The law has a good objective.
The law has a good purpose if one uses it legitimately.
And it’s clear by implication that he does not think these teachers of law
are using it legitimately.
He thinks they’re misusing it.
So you know that formula that you learn in math class when you’re in elementary school,
the A plus B equals C,
and you can rearrange that formula in lots of different ways to come
up with different answers.
That is the formula,
I think, when we come to a section of Scripture like this.
I have a commentator here who makes a case that a contemporary example of this kind of
meaningless talk is, and I’ll just read it to you,
are those who use the Bible primarily as
a launching pad for their intellectual fancies without acknowledging Scripture’s supreme obedience-commanding authority.
I find that really, really helpful.
You will have people who will come with their A plus B equals C theology.
They’ll go to Scripture,
and they’ll just start listing scriptural passages as if,
well, because this is true,
and this is true,
and this is true,
then this is also true.
And oftentimes, they pull from just radically different books,
and they pull half of a verse
here and a full verse there,
and they put together these wild ideas about,
well, if this happens, then this is going to happen,
or did you see this in the news?
And if you did,
then it means this.
It’s not to say that Christians shouldn’t be aware of what’s happening around us.
It is to say that whenever we come to the Scriptures and we treat them as if it is some
sort of tool that we can mold,
like if you can find the A and then the B,
then you’re going to
get to some kind of C that nobody else has got to,
or that’s not clear to anyone else.
That is the kind of reading of Scripture here that I think Paul is very clearly calling out.
It’s a kind of individualized,
self-centered, I would even say arrogant reading of Scripture,
where instead of us submitting to it and reading it together,
asking, “Hey, what are you here in
this text?
Is this clear to you?” If we’re unwilling to do that,
instead we find ourselves
constructing these elaborate, verbal castles,
then I think we find ourselves in the position
of Paul’s opponents here.
And the danger, of course, to a church community is that we might
even sow those seeds in the lives of others who don’t know better,
and those for whom they will
become interested and tempted by,
“Well, I wonder what secrets I can pull out?” And when that happens,
it becomes less about us submitting to the wisdom of Scripture,
and it becomes us dominating Scripture
with our idea and perspective.
And to whatever extent that’s happening here,
Paul clearly calls it out.
We’re not even eight verses into this first chapter,
and Paul has very clearly named the problem,
and so it’s worth being sensitive to.
Yeah, it’s interesting, again,
not to keep going back here, but in the context of talking about law,
Romans is the place you go.
If you were with us in the Roman study,
you would now expect Paul to jump into a chapter-long discussion
of what the legitimate use of the law is,
but this, remember, is a pastoral letter.
This is written to a person who is trying to lead a Christian community, and so instead,
Paul will go directly to the idea of appropriate behavior,
and interestingly enough, he’ll do so in a way that sort of throws under the bus these people who think they’re teaching the law.
He will include them in a list of pretty troubling descriptions,
some of which have caused a great
deal of conversation and consternation in the church,
and we’ll talk about that tomorrow and
try to unpack some of that for you.
Way to make a segue to tomorrow.
We are glad that you’re with us.