1 Timothy 4:1-5

Friends, welcome back.
We are continuing through 1 Timothy,
about halfway through the book,
really, as we begin Chapter 4 today.
Probably,
you know, we’ll see.
We may not make a lot of
progress today in terms of the number of verses,
because there’s some important stuff we move into today.
So,
as we continue through this,
Paul is providing for Timothy a measure of caution,
somewhat encouragement, though today is maybe a little bit more of what to watch out for.
So, let’s go ahead.
We’ll get into this,
and then we’ll talk it through.
“Now the Spirit expressly says that in the later times some will renounce the faith.”
Let’s stop there, Michael.
Not very far into this,
but this brings up an interesting thing.
And if you’ve done much Bible study,
and then particularly in the New Testament,
this is a theme that you’ve run into.
The church is really formed.
The Christian church begins its life
under this heavy expectation that time is short.
People very much expected that as Jesus had been
ascended and called people to faith,
that as Paul and others are doing that work as disciples,
that the aftermath, the end of that, was coming soon.
This sort of, the theological jargon word
is eschatology.
That means the end things.
And there is this eschatological expectation that
hangs over most of the New Testament.
Just this deep assumption that time is short,
that the clock is ticking,
and that any moment now Jesus is going to be coming back and God is
going to remake the heavens and earth
in the way that they should be in the new covenant of
Jesus Christ.
We see this in lots of places,
but when Paul makes this reference,
now the Spirit expressly says that in the later times some will renounce their faith.
This is the conversation we’re having, and I just want you to be aware of the background so that you see where it’s coming from.
Yeah, I think that we have a very interesting relationship with texts like this,
ideas like this,
because whereas the early church is living in a moment of time when they are
speaking with the awareness that there are some alive who saw the resurrected Christ,
that they live in a moment in time in which
those who heard Jesus’s teaching,
some who were physically healed
by Jesus were still active in telling their stories.
And so for them,
as they’re imagining what is going to happen,
they return to Jesus’s teaching about the end times,
about the coming of this new kingdom,
and they naturally and completely understandably fixate that marker right in front
of them, this idea that he’s coming back soon just as he was taken away.
And so as they lived
out their faith with that awareness,
they did so with this kind of belief that every action
mattered, that what they did today could literally be the last opportunity that they had to do it.
And it
fostered a kind of passion,
a kind of drive,
which of course we saw as the gospel
spread like wildfire, as Christian went neighbor and then went to the next town and to the next
town, shared this faith.
He’s coming back quickly,
you know, you need to be aware.
We as Christians now who live now thousands of years later,
live with the awareness that that boundary was farther
than they could have possibly imagined.
And I think it does shape how we come to a text like this.
Mind you,
within every generation of the faith,
for thousands of years there have been those who
have said this is the time,
the marker is right here,
is right in front of us.
Sometimes that’s driven the church to a kind of a reformation or kind of revitalization of our spiritual fervor.
And other times, just to be blunt,
it’s been incredibly disastrous.
It’s been destructive.
There have been those who have
claimed the last times and then used it for their own ends.
They either tricked people or they misled people.
So we as modern interpreters coming to this,
seeking to hear God’s word for us within it and also being mindful of what it may have meant to
those who received this letter initially.
We need to hold these things in tension,
both the reality of their experience and now what God has revealed to us in the passing of time.
And I think both of
these claims are important.
We shouldn’t forsake either of those realities.
We should seek to hold
on to that passion,
but also we should have some measured wisdom that recognizes that a text like
this, when it talks about the last times,
has a little bit more in mind than even what the
original hearers were thinking.
Yeah, and that expectation in the early church really has flavored
the character of Christianity in some sense, Michael.
I mean, as you point out
that in every generation of Christians,
there has been a significant portion of our faith,
our family of faith,
who have said,
“This is it.
This is it.
This is it.” And of course,
as of yet, they’ve never been correct, but
they’ve written books.
They’ve drawn up charts.
They’ve
reinterpreted biblical passages.
They’ve done all that under this idea.
And it is a tension
for the church that we should remain expectant.
We should remain passionate,
but we should temper
that with a kind of patience and a kind of humility that understands that while we wait,
there is work to be done.
And so I just want to bring you up to speed on that broader conversation
as we enter this passage.
So let’s go back to it.
Now,
the Spirit expressly says that in later times,
some will renounce the faith.
And I think, Michael, this is interesting.
How will they renounce the faith?
By paying attention to deceitful spirits and teaching of demons
through the hypocrisy of liars
whose consciences are seared with a hot iron.
Now,
let’s stop there for a minute.
This pretty strong language.
So they are renouncing the faith.
They are falling away from the faith.
They are turning their back on the faith because they’re
deceived because there are forces of evil leading them in wrong directions through the hypocrisy
of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron.
In other words,
nothing can penetrate their
conscience.
It’s scar tissue.
It’s cauterized.
Nothing. They don’t have any shame.
They don’t have any reservation.
They are hypocrites and liars who use their deceit
for their own purposes to promote themselves.
And I don’t think this is probably shocking language,
though it is strong.
I don’t think it’s surprising that Paul has very pointed things to say about them.
And as for the individuals themselves,
maybe this is along the lines of what we expect.
I don’t want to give this away.
I would just invite you for a moment to consider with a kind
of injunctive like this, a very strong,
really shot across the bow.
What do you think Paul’s
going to follow this with?
As someone who has,
you know,
maybe you’ve gone with us through Romans.
Maybe you spent some time with us in Corinthians as people who have
tried to take very seriously the words of the New Testament and many of them written by Paul.
Where do we think he might go?
On one hand,
clearly we know that anyone who is going to
insist upon our own works as a justification for our faith,
we’ve seen Paul react very
strongly to something like that in the past.
Anyone who Paul sees as being a outside voice,
someone who is telling others about expectations that they might have upon them,
that Paul believes in grace in Jesus Christ is no longer a reality.
That gets Paul really worked up.
What I think is interesting is we’ve seen themes like this over and over and over again in other letters.
People saying,
you know,
you have to do this or you can’t do this.
And that is what it
means to be Christian.
That critique very painfully,
if I’m going to be honest with you,
applies very regularly today.
The number of Christians who make the same kind of claim,
if you do this thing,
you need to eat this to be Christian or you need to not watch these movies
to be Christian or we just,
I think as humans are tempted to make the list of inclusion and say,
well, if you fit the list, then you’re Christian.
Paul,
I think historically responds very,
very reactively to that.
This idea that we have here,
that they’re the hypocrisy of liars.
That is an unbelievably charged phrase because how often does religious leadership,
when it’s gone wrong,
tell folks, this is what you have to do.
But in the honest truth,
it really is for the
sake of benefiting someone other than that person.
It’s not really motivated by the faith itself, but it’s hypocritical.
Here we see that charge being leveled.
And I think it’ll be interesting
to see here as we move forward,
exactly what Paul is going to get after them about.
But the strong language, I think,
does get our imagination going as to what’s happening here.
So I suspect, Michael, along those lines, if we asked people,
if we surveyed people of faith,
Christian people, and said, okay,
imagine what is happening when a group of people
who are lying hypocrites teaching evil practices,
what do you think they’re coming up with?
And I think,
by and large,
the answer would lean toward,
they must be throwing out all the rules.
They must be saying,
anything goes.
They must be saying,
it doesn’t matter if you do this,
and you don’t have to do that,
and you can do whatever you want.
I think we would instinctively
imagine that they were changing,
that they were loosening the boundaries.
And what’s fascinating is in Paul’s context,
I think we’ll make a good case
that is surprisingly just the opposite.
So let’s read, what are they doing?
They forbid marriage
and demand abstinence from foods,
which God created to be received with thanksgiving
by those who believe and know the truth.
“For everything created by God is good,
nothing is to be rejected,
provided it is received with thanksgiving,
for it is sanctified
by God’s word and by prayer.” Now,
we’ve seen a little of this in some of Paul’s other letters
in this study and beyond,
but look at what Paul is so incensed about.
Look at what he’s so upset about.
They forbid marriage.
They demand abstinence from eating certain foods, which is
deeply Jewish in its background,
that idea at least.
And Paul’s anger is not that they are
tearing down the boundaries and letting anything go.
It’s that they are adding rules.
They are adding hurdles.
They are adding restrictions and requirements to what Paul sees as the free gift of grace.
And I think it’s fascinating that this is what sets Paul off so much.
Obviously, Paul is never going to teach you can do whatever you want.
That’s not the case.
But in this instance,
I think it is surprising that what makes Paul so infuriated is that they are trying to add
hoops to jump through for people of faith,
which in Paul’s mind,
not only don’t belong there,
but are the result of them misunderstanding the gospel,
and in his words,
pursuing or teaching evil instead of good.
Yeah, this is going to be a quick diversion from the text
right in front of
us.
But if you look at the other things that Paul has written,
he includes this phrase and this
common idea throughout all of them.
He interweaves this idea of being one body.
He talks about the community of faith.
For Paul,
I think when you start talking about the things that Christians should abstain from,
when you start talking about the food laws that Christians should follow,
for him, it really sets off this narrative that there should be a kind of separation
between Christians who practice these things and Christians who shouldn’t.
Paul says that should not be.
We know that Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles,
to those who are non-Jewish.
It seems very clear that Paul is insistent that we shouldn’t try to turn Gentiles into Jews.
That’s not the pathway to salvation.
Jesus Christ is the pathway to salvation and that he came for all people.
Paul is not interested in absorbing the differences that people have.
He’s not trying to,
like it sounds like these teachers are doing,
trying to say, “Hey, you need to stop doing these
Gentile things and you need to live a more pure, holy,
lawful life.” Instead,
Paul says, “No, everything.” I mean, he literally says this today,
“Everything created by God is good
provided its receipt with thanksgiving.” I mean,
that is a strong kind of theological statement that God made
it.
He made it for these people and for these people,
and it’s good in both contexts.
That’s the kind of, I think, very wise
and behind the scenes kind of older spiritual leader,
pastor, talking to a younger spiritual leader,
passing along this idea,
“Hey, let’s not get fixated on
this stuff.
Let’s not get fixated on the rules.
Let’s help people see that all things can be good
and blessed if they’re done in the right way and held in the right spirit.” Clint,
to be honest, and this is true in church today, still,
that kind of gray area living in community is hard
for everyone.
It’s hard to be human and to be part of a body that doesn’t exactly worship like
you or doesn’t exactly practice the faith in the same exact way that you do,
but yet Paul’s insistent that you shouldn’t keep adding restrictions to folks because it may not
even help them or the body be faithful in their pursuit of being disciples.
Yeah, Paul sees this as a very dangerous practice because what he understands it to mean, ultimately,
I think,
is that these teachers are trying to add something to the gospel of Jesus
Christ.
In other words,
that trusting and putting faith in Christ is good,
but it’s not enough.
It has to be coupled with these obedience to these other rules,
these sort of arbitrary practices.
And if you happen to be with us in our study of Romans or if you ever have the time to go back
and check that out, you understand
why this is so offensive to Paul because Paul understands that
Christ has fulfilled the law and therefore set us free from trying to earn our way into
God’s good favor by being good enough.
And having been set free,
Paul understands that saddling people with rules is actually turning around and going backwards.
It’s going back to
where we came from and not where we’re supposed to go in Jesus Christ.
And for Paul,
this is
the failure to trust the gospel.
It’s the failure to trust Jesus Christ.
It’s to try and add
something as if Jesus wasn’t complete
and his work wasn’t enough on its own.
And that’s just unacceptable.
It’s infuriating to Paul.
And you can hear that in the harshness of this language.
I mean, he’s calling these people evil,
lying hypocrites who’s conscious or seared with hot
iron because they’re trying to tell people don’t get married and don’t eat that certain kind of
food.
I mean, that’s shocking to us.
We expect, “Whoa, what did they do?” Did he tell them they
could have 25 wives?
No,
they are trying to take a step back toward legalism.
And for Paul,
I don’t think it is overstated,
Michael, to say in Paul’s context,
that may be the most dangerous
thing he can imagine.
Now,
it’s not that Paul doesn’t care about rules.
We’re going to see,
even in this chapter,
Paul does understand that following Jesus Christ means behaving in a certain way.
But Paul’s fear, I believe, is that when you begin to hang rules on people,
you fundamentally
detract from what he understands to be the core of the gospel.
And I think that we see that in
the sort of intensity that he expresses here.
I think that’s well said.
And if I can,
I’d like to insert maybe just a question mark here.
The question I want to ask is this.
Do you think it
is a happenstance?
Do you think it’s accidental that here Paul calls the Timothy and this church away
from, I’m going to bring this up again here,
against these hypocrisy of liars on the exact
heels of the very list that he gave about the character that Christian leaders should
have?
We just spent all of last week working through this very particular list.
To your point, Clay, clearly he’s not opposed to or he’s not allergic to the idea that Christians would have standards,
right?
We spent an entire week working through that material.
But when he references that,
he does so with the idea of describing what a Christian disciples character should be.
Not a show that they put on,
not a public face that lives in the middle of a church
while in public, but looks different at home,
right?
He got very personal with that description.
I think that has some impact when we get here and this charge against those hypocrites.
To remind us,
maybe the reason why Paul is spending that time talking to the leaders about
character is because of the danger of those within this congregation who Paul sees as being
hypocritical leaders, as those who are leading from a place of non-character,
a place of really
disruption,
seeking to turn the community in a different way.
Now we see why that first list was so important.
It may not be a checklist like we originally
thought.
It may rather be a description of this is the way it should be,
and therefore
it is a way
for us to see what we shouldn’t be as hypocritical liars leading people through these false teachings.
Yeah, I agree 100% Michael.
And again, keep in mind where we started in this chapter.
Paul does this in the umbrella of the
“later times” to remind Christians that all of our life
is a preparation for the coming of Jesus Christ,
the return of Christ.
And as they live in that expectation,
they live in the right way or the wrong way.
And he clearly points out that as a part
of that end time pressure,
that as a part of that buildup of a sort of pushback against the gospel,
there are those who are going to teach the wrong things.
And in this case,
it has to do with these issues.
And I think we now,
2000 years later, read this and say, “Well,
we don’t know what to make maybe of that later times language,” but there is certainly depth
in how Paul got there and why he got there.
But I think the takeaway for us is a reminder
that all of our life is to be lived in preparation for the end time,
whenever it is, whether it’s in our lifetime or not.
Now, the early church began very confident that it would
be in their lifetime.
And that has not proven to be the case.
But whenever it is,
we live in preparation in expectation of it.
And partly how we do that is by trusting Jesus,
not rules.
Not regulation.
And not teachers who demand them.
And I think Paul does us a service
in these few verses.
I think he really lines out some important things.
And I think
both in the context and outside the context,
these are remarkably modern in their own way as people
who, again,
encounter on a regular basis someone saying,
“Well, we know this to be true.
We know this to be…
We know this is the last generation.
We understand this.
We know you have to do it this
way.
We know you have to do it that way.” And I think Paul gives us a place to stand and say, “Yeah,
we should think that through more carefully.” You know,
you may not necessarily have to live to see Jesus return
to know that all of us will have an end time.
All of us will have a moment where whether we meet him in the sky or whether we are
buried to our forefathers
in the language of Genesis,
however it might be,
we’re living our life with the awareness that it is in Christ that ultimately we find our hope.
However, we will meet him and in whatever way we meet him.
Clint, I’d say what’s to come this week
may not be anybody’s favorite
Bible passages.
It may not be memorized,
but there’s some really
good stuff to come this week.
So thanks for being with us today,
and I look forward to continuing the conversation.
Thanks, everybody.