You can listen to this sermon at The Gospel Coalition.
Pullquote
We have much cause for alarm, as well, of course, as for gratitude. The last 40 years have been years of enormous evangelical advance. The last 40 or 50 years have seen a complete change. But the question in my mind is, are those people who have been evangelical ministers and engaged in evangelical ministry, are those churches that have been known as evangelical churches, are they now going to continue as such? That’s the question.
Comment
The Pastorals are a particular favorite with Lucas, and I think it is because his focus is and always has been Evangelical preaching and teaching that provokes Christians to carry the Gospel out into the world. The church gathers on the Lord’s Day, in order to scatter into our communities and the world, on mission during the week. In paraphrasing Paul in this sermon, our brother is clearly speaking from his own heart in a way that brings the state of the first-century churches of Ephesus forward into our own day:
If they shared my outlook for the salvation of all men in Christ, and if they wanted to teach the law, then what they would be doing would be to go out into the pagan world and tell them the law of God and show them how it condemned them. In other words, they wouldn’t be fooling around with a small coterie of believers weaving genealogies and myths out of the law for their own mutual satisfaction. They’d be bursting out of the house churches onto the highway and telling people this is the law of God. And if it is the law of God, then woe betide you unless you turn to Christ.
It’s also worth pointing out here that Dick Lucas has a very sharp wit, though he sees humor as a distraction in preaching, so that, even when he’s getting a few laughs, he quickly pivots back to the text at hand. One of his pet peeves with commentators and Bible translators/editors is the labeling of Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus as a kind of manual of church order or worship. He lampoons that notion in this sermon:
You will know if you read the NEB version of the Bible, that it says simply over them, church order. And many commentators, in fact the majority of modern commentators, not the older ones, head up chapter 2 that we’re going to do next week simply with instructions for public worship. How anybody could read chapter two and imagine that that is an adequate heading for it is just one of those great puzzles. It only goes to show that our traditions and frameworks go on despite what is written here. I can’t imagine anything more likely to kill any interest in the pastoral epistles than to say that they are instructions in church order. We have a book that is in St. Helens called Diocesan Regulations. I think that apart from Elizabeth, our secretary, I am the only person who knows where it is. I’ve never noticed that young staff at St. Helens make a beeline for it and regard it as one of the most important books in our library. It is, in fact, unbelievably dull. And though no doubt a diocese needs regulations, I can say, I think, without fear of contradiction, that regular reading of our diocesan regulations would never lead to the renewal of the Church.
Transcription
Well, let’s turn then to 1 Timothy as we begin our long journey through this important first pastoral epistle. Let me say something about the purpose of these meetings that we have now, regularly in the autumn for ministers, Christian workers. These meetings do not have as their purpose and end simply Bible study. Our end for everything in the Proclamation Trust is the renewal and restoration of the churches. I want to make that abundantly plain, lest we lose the end in the means. We all know that renewal and restoration of the churches comes by the power of the Holy Spirit. We ought to know that by now, at any rate. I remember very many years ago, when I was a young Christian, sending for the Catholic Inquiry course, which was then advertised regularly in the daily papers, And I was most intrigued as a young Christian convert to discover that when the Catholic Church sends you, the Roman Catholic Church sends you, an inquiry course of 15 lessons, there is not one on the Holy Spirit, or there wasn’t. That may have changed by now. For, of course, very obvious historical and theological reasons. That it tends to be God the Father, God the Son, and then the Holy Church to guide you and teach you. One of the reasons I think that the charismatic movement has meant so much in the Catholic Church in bringing new life to so many people is just because there was that great big blank. And they needed to know, as we all need to know, about God the Holy Spirit. If renewal and restoration of the churches depends upon the power of God’s Spirit, it also depends on the power of God’s Word. And I don’t think I need to say in a PT conference that no divorce is possible between these two. The idea that the Spirit and the Word could live separately is, of course, an absurdity, both theologically and practically. No apartheid or no separate development is permissible. So we want to emphasize that very much, that this restoration that we all long for of the churches in our country is possible by God’s Spirit and God’s Word together. Now, the Proclamation Trust has been going in an informal way for about seven years, in a formal way for about two years, and I think I can say that I’ve stepped up a good deal of experience with ministers in these conferences. And I have an uncomfortable sense that there we know a good deal about the power of the Spirit, we know comparatively a little about the power and use of the Word of God. We seem, even in evangelical circles, to have lost some of the art of wielding the sword of the Spirit. I think it would be fair to say about the preaching of my youth that evangelical preaching nourished the individual because it was largely devotional preaching, but it did not succeed in changing the church. Now that surely is the aim of our course. What we want is so to be able to preach letters like Timothy that it not only nourishes and sustains the individual, but actually changes the very direction in which our churches are going in this country. Now, I know that that is the aim of the vast majority of you who join us. We’re very thankful that about 100 people have signed up, and we hope that you will be able to come regularly to join with us. I have an uncomfortable feeling, however, that the people who really need to hear me say what I’m saying by way of introduction and to come to courses like this are precisely those who don’t come. So this introductory word is spoken not so much to you as to them. I very much hope that you will join us in this work. One of the things that has pleased me very much in a recent visit overseas is that some of the men who have been touched by previous PT conferences are already gathering friends in Christian ministry together to study the Bible. And surely that’s the very best way in which what we stand for can spread most quickly. So welcome to you. Welcome to Alistair. He’s not here, actually. He won’t be here until after lunch. But I want to acknowledge Alistair as my guru when I started a year ago to study this chapter. I discovered that Alistair, who is a very old friend, was reading for a doctorate in the pastoral epistles, and particularly their authorship and message, relevance to the Church today. I think it’s going to be a very important piece of work when it comes out. I found him especially illuminating on the raison d’etre of these letters, that he’ll be talking about there after lunch today. Also on the authorship, which he’ll be dealing with in November, where he has got some brilliant and very new things to say, and also on the ministry patterns of the pastoral epistles, which are, I think, tremendously important for us to understand today, and clearly point to the pastoral epistles being written long before AD 90, because these ministry patterns are so early. It was Alistair who introduced me to Gordon Fee’s commentary. This is, we’ve just heard now, being reprinted, but it’s being reprinted, I believe, for the NIV version. It started as a commentary on the Good News version. It’s certainly the best of the newer commentaries on the pastoral epistles. This is like gold. I’m afraid I can’t lend it to you. But directly copies do come later. I think in November or early December we’ll pass them on. Let me finish by saying that the Proclamation Trust is not responsible for every suggestion that Alistair Campbell makes. Having seen his notes this afternoon, I’m bound to say that. Nor is it responsible for every comment that I make. I think every institution has to say that, doesn’t it? The sacks of mail that I had after the Evangelical Ministry Assembly asking me if I put a dot and a comma to everything that was said means that I think we shall have to write that on our writing paper in future. Well, now, what are these letters? What is 1 Timothy? One of Fee’s strong points in his commentary is that he handles very plainly the idea that the pastoral epistles, and 1 Timothy in particular, are manuals of church order. You will know if you read the NEB version of the Bible, that it says simply over them, church order. And many commentators, in fact the majority of modern commentators, not the older ones, head up chapter 2 that we’re going to do next week simply with instructions for public worship. How anybody could read chapter two and imagine that that is an adequate heading for it is just one of those great puzzles. It only goes to show that our traditions and frameworks go on despite what is written here. I can’t imagine anything more likely to kill any interest in the pastoral epistles than to say that they are instructions in church order. We have a book that is in West St. Helens called Diocesan Regulations. I think that apart from Elizabeth, our secretary, I am the only person who knows where it is. I’ve never noticed that young staff at St. Helens make a beeline for it and regard it as one of the most important books in our library. It is, in fact, unbelievably dull. And though no doubt a diocese needs regulations, I can say, I think, without fear of contradiction, that regular reading of our diocesan regulations would never lead to the renewal of the Church. Allow me, therefore, to read, at the risk of wearying you, some words from a much older liberal commentator of fifty years ago, Scott, about this matter. From this, it has been generally inferred that the epistles were meant to form a manual of Church order, similar to others which have come down to us from the early centuries. It is held that Paul himself, or an unknown teacher after his death, devised a constitution for the Church. He set up a hierarchy of officials and prescribed the rules which were to guide them in their various functions. This view, however, is not borne out by closer examination of the epistles. In 2 Timothy, the question of organization is hardly touched on. In 1 Timothy, it is only discussed in two passages, which may possibly be added the section on widows in chapter 5. Thus, all that is said of organization is comprised in something like a tenth part of the epistles. And even in this, there is nothing that properly can be called church order. He has nothing to say about the ecclesiastical duties which people will be required to perform. They receive no instructions as to the conduct of worship. the administration of sacraments, the management of finance, the extension of Christian work, all the relations with civil authorities, and so on at very great length. And he finishes by saying, It may be concluded then that the epistles contain nothing which can be called church legislation. To which all the people replied, Amen. Well, it’s important, isn’t it, to dispose of that. One of the chief benefits of these commentary is that he disposes of that and therefore makes it possible to come to these letters asking the right questions of them. What are they about if they’re not about church order? Well, 2 Timothy expresses Paul’s concern over a favorite son. I think we all know that. The hardness of Christian ministry is the concern of 2 Timothy. The question in 2 Timothy is quite simple. Will Timothy complete the course? A new book that I picked up in America starts like this. American pastors are abandoning their posts left and right and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationery and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sunday. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of 20 centuries. That’s a fairly staggering beginning for a small book, isn’t it? That is the concern of 2 Timothy. It is whether evangelical pastors, before they get to the final flag, will have abandoned the evangelical ministry. That’s Paul’s concern in writing to Timothy, a concern over a favorite son. His concern in 1 Timothy is concern over a favorite church. It is the church in Ephesus. If its beginnings are slightly shrouded in mystery, probably deriving its life from Priscilla and Aquila, it is nonetheless, of course, a Pauline church. In Acts chapter 18 and Acts chapter 19, we’re told of the long years, two and three years, that Paul spent in this provincial capital and religious center. And as you know, in his great warning to the Ephesian elders in chapter 20, he warns them there, especially in verse 30, that the moment his back is turned on this church, on which he gave so much love and work and care, the moment his back is turned, teachers from amongst our own number will arise leading astray the flock of God. The concern, then, of 1 Timothy is not for a favorite son, as in 2 Timothy, a very personal letter, but over a favorite church, which, as you know, was at the center of most of the evangelism in that part of Asia for many years. Now, I want to say that I think today both these concerns should be ours if we are in evangelical ministry. We have much cause for alarm, as well, of course, as for gratitude. The last 40 years have been years of enormous evangelical advance. The last 40 or 50 years have seen a complete change. But the question in my mind is, are those people who have been evangelical ministers and engaged in evangelical ministry, are those churches that have been known as evangelical churches, are they now going to continue as such? That’s the question. What is so interesting and so alarming in 1 Timothy and in the New Testament is how quickly in the early days strong causes and strong ministries declined. The Galatian churches. How quickly, says Paul, you have left behind God and the gospel. The Ephesian house churches that we’re concerned with here in 1 Timothy, the same story of very rapid decline after apostolic standards had been established. Then what about Hebrews that we did a year or two back? How quickly, we are told there, the people of Israel coming out of Egypt, gloriously saved by Moses, coming through the waters of baptism with him, fed and nourished by God in the wilderness, how quickly they were overthrown by idolatry and immorality. Now, this is the concern that made me feel that this series was so important. You know, what we’re going to be considering this autumn is not just one Timothy, it’s the whole matter of evangelical apostasy and decline. How is it that we can grow so fast and so strongly, and then suddenly find that all the gears have been turned into the reverse? Now, the pastoral epistles have a great deal to say about this danger of apostasy, of turning back from enormous privileges. And the very fact that they do, being Paul’s last word to the churches, is surely enough to give you an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of your stomach, isn’t it? I mean, at the end of his ministry, when he has done such great things, that God has planted churches everywhere, that he should be so concerned over a favorite son and a favorite church, well, it brings us right down to earth, doesn’t it? So that we don’t presume on our victories and our attainments and our achievements in recent years. The language of apostasy, of wandering, of turning away, is very much the language of the pastoral epistles. Just glance at this, chapter 1, verse 6. Certain persons have wandered away. Chapter 119. Certain people have repudiated conscience. Chapter 4, verse 1. These are just at random. Some will depart from the faith. These were the keenest people. Chapter 5, verse 15. Some have already strayed after Satan. Chapter 6, verse 10. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith. The craving after money. Yes, materialism in the North American church and materialism here may have a lot to answer for in the next 10 and 15 years. Chapter 6, verse 21. By professing it, some have wandered away, lost the way as regards the faith. Now that’s what I’m talking about, and I want to make it absolutely plain that that is my aim in this course. Maybe you will call me a Jeremiah. I think it’s quite an honorable thing to be called. I am actually very thankful for the great evangelical advances in this country. When you look back 60 years, it is amazing. Nevertheless, I think that times are changing, and I think we badly need the message of 1 and 2 Timothy. It is this that has kept me at my desk with 1 Timothy in the last year. Not that I want simply to expound a book, but that I’m concerned as to what is happening amongst evangelicals today. It seems to me that evangelical people and leaders, evangelical movements that had great names and churches, are in danger of wandering away and losing their foundations. I don’t think that’s being pessimistic. I think it’s being realistic. And it’s for that reason that these letters were given by God in His providence through the work of the Holy Spirit to us today. Well, now it’s time to start chapter 1. I aim to cover chapter 1 today. It may not look like it at the moment, inevitably rather a lot by way of introduction, but I do want to do that so that we can get on to chapter 2 next week and so on and make real progress. And we’ll start with the first two verses, and I’m going to cut out everything here except a very simple statement. I’ll read them. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope. To Timothy, my true child in the faith, grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. All I’m going to say about this is that this shows that 1 Timothy is a public letter as well as a personal one. That is, it is apostolic as well as affectionate. Now the personal side is here, though it’s far, far more, of course, in 2 Timothy, where it’s almost all personal. His concern for Timothy, however, breaks out, particularly in chapters 4 to 6, where Paul is concerned with his youth, his heavy responsibilities, his own personal salvation, as well as his stomach. However, the devastating beginning of Calvin to his own commentary goes like this. In my view, this epistle was written more for the sake of others than for Timothy himself, and those who carefully consider the whole matter will agree with me. So there. Well, I think Calvin is probably right, and at the end of seven or eight weeks together, you and I will agree with him. It is primarily that his eye is on the church at Ephesus. It is a public letter. It is a very stern letter, at times extremely severe. There is no thanksgiving in it, rather like the Galatian epistle, if you cut out verse 12 onwards, which we’ll look at after copy. And it is full of the most emphatic apostolic charges. 1.3, 5.21, 6.14. In other words, this introduction makes it quite plain that though a father is speaking to his son, an apostle is speaking to the churches. And he is commanding the churches to submit to him through his delegate. He is asking for their obedience. And, brothers and sisters, he still does. Now, the wider church has paid very little attention to the pastoral epistles in the last two or three generations. This whole matter of the authorship, of course, has caused a great deal of that. We can’t get away, by the way, from the influence of liberalism. I think that some conservatives think that by surrounding themselves and cocooning themselves, we can keep ourselves pure. No, no, these things seep in. The very fact that our churches too do not take the pastoral epistles as seriously as they ought means that we’ve caught the disease. How is the church to be ruled? How are the churches to be ruled? Well, if we don’t follow the New Testament pattern and allow the apostles to rule the churches through their writings, then I want to warn you, especially you younger men, that very different powers will rule the churches. And some of the house churches will find themselves ruled by modern apostles. I can’t say that I envy them. Those of you who are younger in the Church of England, hopefully I shall be retired by then, will be ruled by the Synod. I don’t envy you. You see, in the end, churches are going to be ruled by somebody in days of chaos. Who are we going to be ruled by? The New Testament answer is that we’re to be ruled by the apostles, the apostles of the New Testament. That is that through an exposition and explanation of these letters, the church learns to submit to what the apostles have to say. I find it very interesting in my recent trip overseas to find that people who do not sit under a regular strong ministry are the very people, even though they’re keen Christians and you’ve known them for a long time, they’re the people who are most confused about the present problems. You see, they think that because they’ve been Christians for many years, it doesn’t so much matter that they’re not sitting under a biblical ministry. But in fact, it leads to a great deal of confusion and sometimes lack of submission. So this introduction, then, is from an apostle. It is a public letter to be read out. And there are going to be some very pink faces when it is read out in the church at Ephesus. It is read out in order to give Timothy the authority he needs to bring Paul’s word of command and charge to the consciences and minds of the Christians. Now let’s go to verses 3 to 7. We’re going to spend most of our time on that before coffee. As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to occupy themselves with myths and endless genealogies which promote speculations rather than the divine training that is in faith. Whereas the aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith. Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make session. As we start this paragraph, am I right in supposing that you can all hear me? I think we can all just see enough. More is going to be done about the lighting. It’s also important to know that we can hear each other. Can you hear? Right, that’s fine. I know I’m getting rather like an express train. I will settle down. It’s partly nerves at wondering whether I’m ever going to get to the end of the first chapter by lunchtime, but we’re doing well at the moment. Take heart. Now, Paul goes straight to the point. It’s all business, as Gordon Fee says about this little letter. And he starts by telling Timothy to stop certain persons. These certain persons are almost certainly not invaders. Almost certainly, as Acts 20 tells us, these are erring elders from within the house churches in Ephesus. I’m assuming, incidentally, that there’s not just one large congregation, but many congregations. It’s these who are the troublemakers, aided and abetted by certain well-to-do women. Now, it is for that reason that these letters spend so much time on the choice of elders and the problem of women with too much money and too much time on their hands. If you want to catch up on that, I do urge you to listen to the tapes I did at the EMA, because we covered some of that ground, and it may not be possible to cover it again. It seems to me extraordinary to look at what is said about the widows and the elders in 1 Timothy, as there it is simply a standard piece of teaching for us today, and not first bed it down in the crisis that was going on in Ephesus. A crisis that centered upon certain men and certain women. Certain women who are nourishing and supporting, as women often do, elders who need their comfort, their hospitality, and so on, and supporting and comforting these elders who are causing all the problems. Now, as usual, the heretics are not named, nor is there heresy. I take that to be a general New Testament norm. I don’t think, there are one or two heretics named later on, as you know, but I don’t think that it is God’s purpose that we should spend long years ferreting around to find the precise nature of these very early heresies. All the early heresies just are very like the modern ones. It’s the principles that matter. And the principles are very clearly spelled out. We’re going to look at some of the characteristics of this teaching that was going on in Ephesus so soon after Paul had left. And I think that scripture is quite sufficient to tell us all we need to know of the kind of teaching that blocks evangelism. Before we examine these people, however, more carefully, one thing stands out and must be mentioned. These heterodidascoloi, that is, these teachers of different teaching, verse 3, are nomodidascoloi, verse 7, doctors or teachers of the law. Combining these two words is the essential clue we have to have as we start. They were teachers of different doctrine, that is, they were teachers of the law. Now, to say by now, of course, that they were teaching something different is sufficient, because by the time the parcels are written, indeed very early on in the New Testament period, the basic New Testament pattern is established to which people are asked to submit. To preach anything different from that healthy pattern is to be, by definition, heretical. But it looks as though there is a Jewish element here, Not the same Jewish element that demanded circumcision in Galatians, but a Jewish element that perhaps rather naturally, as it looked back, was anxious to be eminent in expounding the law of God, the Old Testament. A great many modern commentators in the last 50 years delve into the rabbinical use of the Old Testament to try to throw light on verse 4, the myths and the endless genealogies. And it does seem from people like Scott that there was a great deal of the use of allegory when teaching the Old Testament and the expansion of Old Testament genealogies into fictional histories. Apparently, and I know very little about this, much of the popular teaching in the synagogue was rather like that. Well, the church has sometimes been like that too, hasn’t it? Some of the early brethren, you’ll remember, having reestablished the truth as they did through men like Jay and Darby, then fell away into the most absurd allegorisms. It’s almost as though when people get tired of the plain meaning of Scripture, they start to play around with it. But it seems to me that we need to follow that up this morning. You may like to follow that in your own study. I hope many of you are not going to sit here simply receiving the pastoral epistles, 1 Timothy, but going out from here to teach it to some group or groups at home. I don’t think there’s any other way to come to grips with 1 Timothy but to teach it. But it seems to me, therefore, that the essential point that is being made in verses 3 to 7 is that the law is not the gospel. Forgive me for saying something so obvious, but it is very important. Instead of preaching the gospel, the glorious gospel of the blessed God, that was the healthy doctrine that Paul had brought to Ephesus, they were now teaching law. Now actually, if you leave gospel ground, where else do you go? Because law, of course, stands, doesn’t it, for the whole category of religion, Legalism, religious observances, what we must do to please God. It seems to me that the church always does descend from gospel to law in one shape or other. It needn’t concern us specifically how this was happening in Ephesus. It’s been happening all down the history of the church. So this is the essential thing about these teachers of different doctrine. They were teachers of law. I’m going to mention another essential thing a little later, but I’m going to leave it out for a moment. First, from the hints that are given in verses 4, 5, 6, and 7, I want to say something about the origin, the characteristics, and the results of this teaching. First, origins. How did it all begin? Well, it’s said very plainly in verse 6, isn’t it? Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered into vain discussion. Swerving from what? Swerving from the love that issues from a pure heart, a good conscience, and unfeigned faith. Now that’s exactly what is said in verse 19. The problem with Hymenius and Alexander was they rejected conscience. How had this apostasy begun? How could a generation that knew the gospel have swerved so quickly from it? I do hope you see that this is an extraordinary question. You just couldn’t have imagined it. How could people leave such high ground to go to such low ground so soon when the apostle is still alive and likely to knock at the front door any moment? You’d have thought shame would have kept them from it. The answer is very simple. They had rejected conscience. had ceased to live for Christ. Scott says, more often than we know, error has its roots in moral rather than intellectual causes. Now those of you who studied theology at the university or at a college or school in touch with the university, you will recognize that very well. You will know that the students who stood firm for a biblical theology and maintained their faith were those who maintained their conscience and their walk with God. Was that not right? And when a student failed to maintain his walk with God, he was open not only to the temptations of the world of flesh and the devil, but he was open to liberal and destructive theology as well. Do you not remember that quite plainly? We lost the battle not simply in the head, but in the heart. I can remember vivid examples of that, not only with people who were sitting listening to lectures with me at Cambridge, but with lecturers. Men who could have looked back to days in their student experience when they were full of the Spirit and the Gospel, but no longer. That’s how this kind of thing begins. It begins at a very deep level when we tamper with the heart and the conscience and it becomes no longer pure. Now don’t let’s pillory other people like American evangelists. We know very well that to maintain a pure heart and a good conscience is going to be a battle for every minister in this time in which we live. And I just want to say that to those of you who are younger, that we older ones know the battle and that if we don’t say so, we ought to say it more often. And that battle is your battle. The battle for purity and a good conscience is the battle for evangelical truth. You can’t have the one without the other. That’s how it began. What characterizes this teaching? Well, I spent a long time meditating on this. It obviously was tremendously impressive, wasn’t it? These speculations, these discussions, and so on. And yet what he says in verse 7 is rather devastating. They didn’t know what they were talking about. It was empty. The discussions were vain. And he says precisely the same in chapter 6, verse 20, when he says that, I’m sorry, chapter 6, verse 4, he is puffed up with conceit, he knows nothing. Now, what seems to be here is that what characterized this teaching was very impressive claims, but actually empty sounds and empty speech. I think this is to be applied in every generation in different ways. I think that you can apply this to liberal theology in the 20th century, which is often tremendously impressive and has, if you like, a great many PhDs after its name, but when you’ve added it all up and heard it from the pulpit, there’s nothing there. Calvin, of course, naturally saw in this the scholastic theology of his own day. We see today, he says, with what pride and haughtiness the schools of the Sorbonne prate about their decisions. But on what subjects? Those that are completely hidden from the minds of men and that have never been clarified by any word of Scripture or any revelation. They have greater confidence in their imagined purgatory than in the resurrection of the dead and for their fabrications about the intercessions of the saints. Unless we accept them as gospel, they cry out that the whole of religion is being overthrown. And so on. He waxes very eloquent about the fact that these people are talking about things that simply don’t exist. It’s empty. That’s very vivid, I think. Here are these people who are claiming now to be impressive teachers, but when I actually ask what is there, there’s nothing. I remember when I was first ordained, I was at Seven X Parish Church, and I remember that when we used to have the November 11th service around the village cross, that I won’t say what church he came from, but one of the younger ministers of the town was the far the better preacher of anybody in the town, and he was always called upon to preach the sermon by the minister’s fraternal, if they could possibly get him. I vividly remember a most brilliant sermon out there in the fog of November the 11th, with many, many people from the town there. This superb sermon was built up, tremendously impressive. And I was living with an elderly Christian lady at the time who was giving me hospitality and so on, and a room. She was a great, great dear and a great Christian saint and warrior, but perhaps not a brilliant theologian. And she said to me as she poured me a cup of tea later in the afternoon, Dick, could you please tell me what that sermon was about? And I said, Mrs. Hudson, that sermon was about nothing. Oh, yes, she said, I think I realized that. you see the moment you’d finish this magnificent oration and you looked at it and you pricked it with a pin there was nothing there now that’s a fairly familiar syndrome isn’t it it happens in liberal theology it happened in the medieval papacy it happens today a great deal of very impressive talk a great deal of speculation a great deal of discussion but actually it’s empty Where did it begin? It began in lives that were already moving off track in terms of obedience to God. And it was characterized by a spiritual vacuum, an emptiness. Something that could not nourish the soul or change the church. Thirdly, what were the consequences? Well, the consequences were quite disastrous. Verse 4, the word speculations means controversies. It led to controversies, disagreements, and division in the churches. It led, chapter 2, verse 8, to men, the Christian men, quarreling with one another. It led, verse 4 of chapter 6, to disputes about words which produce envy, dissension, slander, base suspicion, and wrangling. All instead of what? All instead of, verse 5, chapter 1, the aim of our charge is love that is serious from a pure heart. Instead of that divine training, there was endless debate and discussion and division. That was the consequences in the local congregation. Here then is the rub. They were not gospel men now, so as a consequence they were not doing gospel work. If you want to boil it right down, what they left was basically faith, end of verse 4, and love, verse 5. These two little words, by the way, very precious little words, popped in frequently in the pastoral epistles. They didn’t go the way of faith, that is, the way of revealed truth, which is received by faith, and issues in new lives of love. They didn’t go the way of faith and love because they themselves had ceased to be men of faith and love. In contrast, of course, to the great verse about the apostle, we shall reach later this morning, verse 14, when the grace of our Lord, like a wave, overflowed with faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. Isn’t that marvelous? Here is the apostle Paul, full of unbelief and full of hatred. And the waves, the billows of the grace of God overwhelm him. And when he stands up, instead of unbelief, there is faith. And instead of hatred, there is love. That’s the change. Now, this is not happening with these elders at Ephesus. They’re not men of faith and love. So what is the painful contrast, really, here in this early paragraph? I think it’s the contrast between religious talk and divine training. Religious talk is speculative theology. Divine training comes from what I call stewardship theology, because as you know, the word for divine plan here or divine training could mean stewardship. Now there’s all the difference in the world between those two, isn’t it? Our theology is a stewardship theology. We have received it from God. It finds its origin in God. It doesn’t come from our minds. And we are stewards of it that it might build up people in love. Is that not the order? It’s stewardship theology. It comes from God through us to the people of God. Whereas these Ephesian elders dealt in speculative theology, which of course had its origins in the minds of men, and led not to love but to controversy and division. The contrast is complete. Now, you know, we ought not to see in these paragraphs little devils going around with tails and horns and hooves. The Apostle Paul uses devastating language to describe things that are actually under our noses every day of our lives. It’s very hard to realize that what is being said in verses 3 to 7 may represent many churches in your area, you see. We look at this language and we say, well, that can’t be true. of the people near me, or indeed of the church that I have come to. But it well may be. What is the theology of your church at home? Is it speculative theology or stewardship theology? Is it leading to questionings or love? Is it leading to division or training? In that word training, that’s the result, isn’t it, of the gospel. It trains men in godliness. Is yours a training spoof? Are young people and older people being trained in the ways of Christ? If not, you must be on the wrong track. This can come much, much closer to home than we think. Now let’s go on to verses 8 to 11, and we’re doing well from time. I want to finish before coffee at verse 11. So take a deep breath, pinch your neighbor who may have wandered, and come back to me. Now we know that the law is good, if anyone uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, immoral persons, sodomites, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the glorious gospel of the blessed God, with which I have been entrusted. Undeniably, this is a very difficult paragraph for us, because it doesn’t seem to be very Pauline. It doesn’t seem to have an apostolic view of the law. It seems to denigrate the law too far. For example, Scott, a great liberal commentator, but a very intelligent one. Incidentally, I don’t recommend liberal commentators to our own people at St. Helens, but I sometimes do recommend them at lectures like this. We sometimes find that our conservative commentators are rather sluggish and dull, don’t we? and they don’t stimulate us. It’s very important, I think, to read these brilliantly clever liberal commentators. They’re very, very intelligent. They’re always wrong, but they always stimulate you. And if you’re a slug like me on a Monday morning, you need stimulus. It’s only when you’ve seen the wrong view put really strongly that you’re likely to come to the right view equally strongly. So let’s have a look at Scott for a moment. Scott says that Paul, with his reverence for the law, could never have said it was not intended for the righteous man. Scott, therefore, thinks that the writer of the pastels has fallen into the trap of verse 7 that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And Scott says, from this paragraph alone, we can conclude that the letter of 1 Timothy was not from the hand of Paul. So that is a piece of dogmatism for you to have with your coffee. Well, I’m glad to face this because I have not actually read an answer that satisfies me in any conservative commentary, and I’m going to come up with an answer in a moment that satisfies me, but it may not satisfy you, and I want you to tell me. I think, actually, that we have to search this out in the context, and the moment we do that and get the right perspective for 1 Timothy, we begin to see what Paul really means. But let me just stop for a moment and get this perspective that I’ve not yet spelt out. The God of 1 Timothy is God our Savior, chapter 1, verse 1. The great desire of God our Savior, chapter 2, verse 3 and 4, is that all men may be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. The church, chapter 3, verse 16, is a pillar and bulwark of the truth committed to preaching the word to the nations, chapter 3, verse 16. Now, that’s the perspective of 1 Timothy. Anything more far removed from a document on church order that would be impossible to imagine. It took me about four months to clarify my mind on this. You’ve got to change your whole thinking about 1 Timothy. 1 Timothy’s great concern has got nothing whatever really to do with church order in the first place. All that comes in is because its great concern is with the evangelization of the world. This great center in Ephesus that was the beacon light on which missionaries went out into all that part of Asia Minor has lost its gospel. The point of teaching the truth of God, chapter 4, verse 16, is the salvation of all men, especially those who believe. The ministry of the church and the Christian leader in 1 Timothy is a gospel-saving ministry. This ministry, therefore, is for all men, chapter 4, verse 10. Right. So you get the impression as you read this that the pastor or minister or teacher of the pastoral epistles is a person who’s got his mind on the salvation of men both inside and outside the churches. And in fact, he’s really got his eye on those outside, which is why in these letters he has this persistent concern that the churches should behave in such a way that the outsider will be helped and not scandalized. Now, I think we make too neat a division there. We tend to talk about the teaching we give to a local congregation within sort of enclosed boundaries, and then the teaching we give when we have a special guest service, or we all gather up our courage and go out into the streets to preach the gospel. And I wonder if I can to break that down a bit as we go through 1 Timothy. One of the striking things about the young Martin Lloyd-Jones was that he was an evangelist, whether he was standing up in church or outside of church all the time. He never ceased in those early years, and all his life for that matter, to desire the salvation of men. Now that is the, that’s the line in 1 Timothy. The man who is possessed with the Spirit of God in 1 Timothy is the man who is thinking of all men. Thus the concern of a man who follows Paul is that those outside might be saved. Now, Paul sees in the church of Ephesus that they’ve lost this spirit and they’ve become exclusive in their minds. And once you see this, the whole letter begins to take on a new color and a new shape. And once you see this, verses 8 to 11 falls into perfectly good order. What he’s saying is this. If these people, if these elders in Ephesus that I’ve left behind, if they shared my outlook, and if they wanted to be teachers of the law, what would they be doing? If they shared my outlook for the salvation of all men in Christ, and if they wanted to teach the law, then what they would be doing would be to go out into the pagan world and tell them the law of God and show them how it condemned them. In other words, they wouldn’t be fooling around with a small coterie of believers weaving genealogies and myths out of the law for their own mutual satisfaction. They’d be bursting out of the house churches onto the highway and telling people this is the law of God. And if it is the law of God, then woe betide you unless you turn to Christ. For, of course, Ephesus, like any other city, was full of the lawless and disobedient, the ungodly and sinners, the unholy and profane. Of course it was, just like the city of London. Even Woking. See, what has happened is that the mission field of these elders has become the church. What a fatal thing that is, isn’t it? I remember some young people at St. Helens getting taken up some years ago with one of these eccentric pieces of Christian teaching and spending their whole time trying to bully their Christian friends to think what they thought. They were all going off to a big rally at the Albert Hall. I remember saying to them, look, I may be coming along the road this evening, and if I see you tracting Christians, there’s going to be trouble between you and me. I hope I shall see you at the other side of the road, attracting non-Christians. That’s a very, very important distinction, isn’t it? When you start attracting Christians, you’ll be sure there’s something wrong with your pulse. If you come here in order to find a few of us out and to win us from your point of view, then I’m sorry you’ve come. That’s always a sign that things are beginning to go wrong. The mark of a person possessed by the spirit of the apostle, which is the spirit of God, is that he’s always concerned about the world. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. I say, what does he say? He says, the law must be given for the lawbreakers. This, of course, is a general statement that is always true, isn’t it? Law is always fundamentally for lawbreakers. That’s why we have traffic laws in the city, and especially, if you read your times this morning, finance laws for the city, because the city is becoming so dishonest. The main leader in the Times this morning rejoices on some victories in this regard. They managed to catch a few people. But I mean, you know, the amount of time and money that is spent by the Office of Fair Trading today, I should think it would be enough to keep all our churches going. Why do they have to spend all this money and have all these brilliant brains in it? Because of lawbreakers. Because you can’t trust people any longer. So this is always so, isn’t it? And he goes through the Decalogue here. These first three doublets simply refer to the first table of the law. And then he goes through the second table of the law. Murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers. That’s the commandment not to kill. That’s sorry, to honor your fallen mother. Then the manslairs, killing. Then the commandment against adultery, he illustrates with immorality and sodomy, talking there about male homosexuality. And then kidnappers, that is, of course, slave dealing. And then lying and perjuring, false witness, and so on. So he’s simply going through there the second table of the law. Now, if these people were gospel men in any sense, they are at liberty to teach the law, because gospel men will sometimes teach the law, but they will teach the law to the world to show them the need of a savior. What is paganism, according to these verses 1 to 11? Paganism is contrary to the law of God and contrary to the gospel of God. Notice that very important verse 11 at the end of the paragraph, which shows that the gospel and the law are cutting in the same direction. Teach the law to condemn men and teach them the gospel to cure them. That’s what he’s saying. So he said, if these elders were teaching the law properly, we should all be doing the same work. Negatively, it would be destroying sin. Positively, the gospel would be promoting love. Whereas, in fact, the teaching of the elders was fundamentally unhealthy. Far from reaching out to the world to tell the world that it was sick, it was making the people inside the church sick. Isn’t that extraordinary? Far from getting out where they were needed to tell people of the law of God and of their need of a Savior, these people were gathering little coteries of people around them and spoiling them. They were unhealthy men with unhealthy teaching which had unhealthy consequences. Well, I’ve had to do that more quickly than I wanted to but I hope that helps to hold it all together. Basically, if we put these two paragraphs together then what he is saying to Timothy is that he is to stop these teachers using the Old Testament law to divide the church. He is to restore proper preaching of the law and proper preaching of the glorious gospel of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted. Because that is the only way to health inside the church and outside the church. The same law and gospel that brings health to us will bring health to all men. And we’ll see a little bit more of that after coffee in verse 12 onwards. Now, Mike, will you come and tell us what we’re to do?
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