2 Timothy 3:1-9

Hello friends,
yeah, welcome back.
Hey, welcome back as we continue through 2nd Timothy.
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I think, Michael, moving into the third chapter today.
This is an interesting…
So a little bit of change of pace.
Yesterday,
we saw this appeal to kind of leadership and an encouragement for Timothy, leadership.
I don’t want to say…
My God, I don’t want to say we go negative.
I’m not putting that on Paul,
but I will say that I think Paul turns
his thoughts to some more difficult things and some more…
Some of the more unfortunate moments
in church community as he kind of
focuses here on
some of what happens in the world, particularly
those that are…
I wouldn’t just say outside the church,
I would say maybe opposed to the church.
Is that fair?
I would say that this letter has had embedded in it arguments against people.
I think that now Paul’s going to turn with a specific attention to that negative aspect
that he’s been arguing against maybe between the lines a little bit.
Yeah, so let’s look at it.
I’ll read a couple of verses here and then we’ll try to sort some
of this out.
Let’s start, verse 1, chapter 3.
“You must understand this,
that in the last days,
distressing times will come.
For people will be lovers of themselves,
lovers of money,
boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents,
ungrateful, unholy,
inhuman,
implacable,
slanders,
prolificates,
brutes,
haters of good,
treacherous, reckless,
swollen with conceit,
lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God,
holding to the outward form of godliness,
but denying its power,
avoid them.”
Now,
this is a huge list and we could spend a great deal of time unpacking these words.
Several of them are very interesting.
I think what Paul, I think,
in large measure is saying
here to Timothy is it would be nice if the church were a place immune from the ills of the world.
It would be nice if our garden didn’t need to be weeded,
if weeds didn’t grow in it and we only produced fruit.
However,
the reality is that the problems of the world,
the sins of the world,
and the church overlap and those things work their way in.
And so he’s saying,
and we should probably start,
Michael, by mentioning this last day’s business.
I think you’ve heard us say things like this before.
It is the inherent assumption of most
of the New Testament that the time is short.
They really use language of church as urgent kind of language.
Whether that means that they actually expect
the imminent return of Christ,
which is certainly true in many parts of the Bible,
in other parts they say we don’t know,
it may be a while,
but the idea is to function as if
we expect that momentarily.
And so there is that character of the New Testament and I think we certainly see it here.
Now,
I don’t want to insinuate in any way that
this is less important if we don’t
have that same sense because clearly 2,000 years later,
we don’t want to be dismissive of this
passage because it wasn’t “the last days.” We want to say the last days means every day before Jesus gets here,
whether that’s
a month, whether that’s a week,
whether that is a hundred years, a thousand.
We are in the last days as we wait for Jesus and to put
a time limit on that is problematic.
But as we move toward this,
there is that kind of biblical sense that as we approach
those last days, or at least in this season of waiting,
things sometimes get worse rather than better.
I’m trying to find words,
Clint,
for that habit or maybe tradition is not the right word,
but the church does have a pretty long-standing practice at this point of at least a substantial
group of contemporary Christians coming to a text like this and saying,
“We are the last days.” That
is certainly true today.
There are certainly many Christians who feel and would argue very passionately
that we’re in the last days.
And I would take no argument with that group.
What I would say is
that there is historical precedent of that happening every generation of the Christian
church since this letter has been written,
has interpreted and found themselves in the last days.
And to your point,
I think it’s just worth noting right from the start,
wouldn’t it be nice if the
church could live in the world without porous boundaries,
where everything was clear,
where us and them was defined,
where what is gospel is known and shared by all and what isn’t gospel is
known and shared by all.
That would be wonderful.
But no Christian has had that experience.
It’s always been a fight between the world and it doing what the world does.
I think we mentioned
this numerous times.
Paul really never sounds surprised that the world does worldly things.
That’s not shocking to Paul.
But what we do see is Paul becoming incredibly incisive.
I would even say in some cases very discerning and very careful to point out when that worldliness finds its way
into the life of the church.
And if I can just again,
to put this list up,
you can survey this.
What’s striking to me about this list,
Clint, is that it begins to tick off not just the stuff
that would be clear.
Well, that’s obviously world stuff,
right?
That’s blatantly simple.
But the stuff that is easier to hide in our hearts,
like look at lovers of money,
right?
That conviction,
that money is a value that we have that is beyond some of our other values or lovers of pleasure
rather than lovers of God.
This is so deeply personal that I think when one looks at the
list like this, it’s easy to see that,
yes, Paul is certainly and most likely thinking of particular
people as he makes these critiques.
But simultaneously, he’s making a list that has
stood the test of time.
The church inherits a list like this, Clint,
and we can see ourselves in it.
So I wouldn’t be distracted by verse one.
I guess that’s my counsel.
Don’t,
whether or not you find the last day’s language compelling in your own faith story right now,
whether you join that historical sort of continuum of come soon,
Lord Jesus,
I think what’s important is for us
to be reflective and recognize we continue to need to follow the imperative,
the thing that Paul tells us to do.
This is the end of verse five.
Avoid them,
right?
Avoid those who come looking
for the outward form of godliness,
but deny its power.
That, Clint, I think is the thing that we
can hold on to.
And it’s, I hope, the thing that we can emphasize in the conversation on a text like this.
Michael, you’ve made this point on other episodes,
and I think it’s worth repeating.
I think it is exactly where this passage takes us.
It is easy to read this list and think that
Paul’s concern is keeping the world out of the church.
Now,
by world we mean the sinfulness of the world, worldliness.
And yes,
Paul has that concern,
but I would argue that his primary
intention here is to keep the world
out of our hearts.
And I think it is easy to think he’s
pointing here outside the community,
except listen carefully to this last part,
holding to the outward
form of godliness, but denying its power.
And I think the clue there is Paul’s talking about hypocrisy.
Paul is talking about people who are insiders and look faithful, but internally
have not yet dealt with these sinfulness in their lives.
You know, they’re arrogant.
They’re slanderers.
They say bad things about people.
They hate what’s good.
They don’t celebrate for other people.
It’s easy to read this and think that Paul’s pointing fingers at a broken world.
But as you’ve said many times,
Paul is really uninterested in the world.
Paul assumes the world will be the world.
What Paul is doing here is pointing fingers at believers
who live like they’re still in the world rather than in Jesus Christ.
And as we’ve seen him say
similar things,
avoid them.
You know, don’t follow them.
And maybe it helps if we continue here.
I don’t know if you have anything.
Let’s just jump on,
because I do think this helps a little bit.
Avoid them.
For among them are those who make their way into the households and captivate silly
women overwhelmed by their sins and swayed by all kinds of desires who are always being instructed
and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth.
As Janus and Jambres opposed Moses,
so these people corrupt mind and counterfeit faith and oppose the truth.
But they will not
make much progress, because as is the case of those two men,
their folly will become plain to
everyone.
So you can look up Janus and Jambres.
They’re two people that kind of argue with Moses
in an Exodus story.
It may be helpful background.
I don’t think it’s necessary.
This other business about people who go in and lead others astray, especially here
unwise women,
silly,
might be a rough translation,
but those who are not careful.
Remember in 1 Timothy,
way back if you were with us,
we talked about one of the issues of this community.
You might remember all the conversation Paul had about widows,
what to do with widows,
what to do with young widows.
It seems to be the case,
guessing at what we look at here,
that there were some of these traveling teachers
who were making their way into the homes of
widows, both to take advantage of them financially and to kind of
sort of move forward some of these wrong ideas that Paul has warned about.
And this seems to literally be happening in the community.
And so Paul is pointing his finger at
these people and saying,
“They love money.
They have the wrong motivations.
They have the outward.
They look like godliness,
but they’re corrupt inside.
They’re wrong inside, and they’re leading others astray.” And I think where that helps me,
Michael, is to understand maybe the harshness of
some of these words and the passion of some of these words.
Paul genuinely believes that there
are hypocrites who are using the church for their own ends,
and in doing so,
they are disrupting, potentially destroying the faith of others in Jesus Christ.
And if you want to get into a fight with Paul,
that’s the fastest way to do it.
He is always going to come hard against that kind of thing.
This, Clint, is I think maybe among the best examples we’ve had in a while of a moment
as we study the Scriptures where we have now walked onto ground that is incontrovertibly
specific.
It would, I think, be impossible to argue here that there’s not a particular
circumstance in mind.
Maybe that comes a little bit from a pastor’s interpretation when that’s
sort of part of your experience.
But I’ll just tell you,
with almost near-dangerous 100% certainty,
I feel confident that this text is written with a story,
with names attached,
with real leadership issues at hand.
Yeah, 100%.
You could read the front part of this list as general advice to everyone.
The second part of this passage,
it has names and addresses attached to it.
I mean, this is happening in this place.
This is not general,
“Everybody should know this for all times.” This is,
“Hey, knock this off and don’t have anything to do with that person,
that person, and that person.” Right.
So let’s just sit there for a second.
If that’s true,
then we should be very,
very careful as modern interpreters thousands of
years later to come and to take some of the words we’ve now seen offered about and towards women,
particularly as Paul speaks to this young religious leader,
and to suspect that that should be, by definition,
ruling words for every congregation in all times and all places.
It would, in fact, be a sign of some great hubris to think that Paul would write this exact thing to every congregation,
that he would write this to the congregation in Rome,
as opposed to the congregation in
Ephesus.
I just think it’s very,
very important that we as interpreters realize that what we are
reading here is someone else’s letter written with the express purpose of putting Jesus Christ’s
center in the midst of a Christian community.
Obviously, there’s a situation here that needs
dealt with, and Paul is speaking very,
very appointedly to deal with that issue,
but I think that’s actually more helpful than not.
I think it’s helpful to see, in particular circumstances,
Christians do need to show up.
We need to have words.
We need to have discipline.
We need to have a real honest sense of what the gospel compels us to do,
but that comes with the
humility of recognizing that that’s not the same outcome in all places and in all times.
I just think there’s a kind of richness when you can read the Bible this way.
You can see what’s happening,
and there’s a beautiful kind of interpretive richness and tapestry to it,
and simultaneously there’s some freedom to recognize,
hey,
when Paul deals with individual people,
we should be looking
for the heart of what he’s dealing with.
That then helps us to translate the same in our own time and place.
I think for me,
Michael, it offers us two insights.
One is that sometimes in our own quest
to read the Scripture and hear a personal word in regards to my own faith,
it’s easy to look past the reality
that it was written for real people at a real time, that
these things come out of actual communities.
This is a snapshot of an early church struggling to be church and struggling
to be faithful, and of a young man named Timothy who has some responsibility in that context to
try and lead through the mess,
and another man named Paul who’s trying to help him do it.
And that kind of specificity,
I think, helps remind us that not only do we see or hopefully
hear a word to each of us for our own faith,
we see the history of what the faith meant in their
world to the best that we can understand it.
And I think that broadens how we understand Scripture.
I think it gives us a bigger sense.
The second thing I think this offers us is that in the
21st century sort of mainline world,
we can easily exchange the idea of being faithful with the idea of being nice.
American Christianity has
this temptation to think that what Christians are
called to be above everything else is nice.
And yes,
Christians are called to be kind,
Christians are called to be loving,
Christians are called to be compassionate and gentle.
But there is a time when the church has to say often to the people in it,
less so to the people
out of it, but most often to the people in it, that’s not okay.
That’s not the way that we
conduct ourselves in the name of Christ inside the body of Christ.
And we need to approach that conversation very humbly,
very thoughtfully,
very patiently.
But there is a time,
Michael, where Paul feels compelled to say,
what’s going on there has to stop.
It is not the way that the
church can live out its faith,
and we have to put an end to it.
And I think that’s been more of a
struggle in our particular branch of the church.
I think we wrestle with,
when is it time to do
that?
And how do we do it in a passionate,
but pastoral way?
That’s a tough balance.
Yeah, I think that’s well said.
I’m not even going to try to add to that.
I think I just got one
sort of maybe thing to tack on the end here,
Clint, and that is,
isn’t it interesting?
And maybe you didn’t even think about it,
but let me pull it up here.
Isn’t it interesting,
verse eight,
that
Paul is speaking to a majority,
I think we assume,
Gentile congregation,
these very specific names
that come from Exodus.
Just imagine the assumption behind it.
By the way, they’re not in Exodus
explicitly.
They come from the tradition of interpreting Exodus,
this Yanis and Yombras.
And what I think is fascinating in that,
Clint, is the assumption that Paul has about the biblical
literacy of this congregation.
It’s amazing how, in a sense,
Paul and Timothy are seeking to lead,
they’re sort of herding cats,
to be honest with you.
They’ve got Jews in the fellowship who know
their Bible and their Old Testament,
and that’s clear by a reference like this.
We,
many Protestants today are not going to know this reference without a study Bible,
and yet as he
writes this as an illustration or example,
it’s clear that they’re doing their very best to teach
the Old Testament in the context of this congregation so that it will be a useful tool.
Clearly,
things have always been hard.
But another weakness, I think, of the church, Clint,
and this interpretation on top of it,
I find it very striking that it’s clear that what we would call
the Old Testament, which was the Scriptures for the early church,
that they were in it,
that they cared about it,
that those characters were thought about and they were reflected on.
Here they’re even appearing as an illustration in church leadership.
I don’t know.
It’s just striking to me that clearly
the church is reading their Bible,
and we should be seeking in what we
do in our own faith development to do the same.
They didn’t have the New Testament,
and yet they were studying.
We do, so we should keep after it.
And also, Michael, that Paul assumes the repeated
pattern of within the community at any given time.
There may be people who
passionately stand
for a way that isn’t correct.
I mean, that there are disagreements,
and how we handle those
disagreements matter as it pertains all the way back to the Exodus story,
and as it continues in the New Testament,
and as we encounter it in our own experience.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
Friends, it’s Thursday.
Thanks for being with us for another couple days of study.
When we join you next week,
we’ll jump into verse 10 of chapter 3.
But until then, be blessed.
Have a great weekend.