Alright, welcome back.
Thanks for joining us today on Tuesday as we continue through
the first chapter of 1 Timothy.
Some difficult verses today,
not to understand, but in regard to some of the implication that has caused the church to struggle with these verses.
Some very specific things that we’ll talk about.
And I will warn you ahead of time,
we’re not going to get bogged down there.
There have been endless conversations spun out of these
words, and we will talk about that.
But we are going to focus more on the meaning of what Paul
is trying to say here.
Just a quick recap,
remember that Paul has said to Timothy,
“There are people who are missing the mark.
They want to be teachers of the law,
but they don’t understand, and they’re teaching something that isn’t in keeping with what I’ve taught you.”
And so, we had this preface yesterday, verse 8,
“We know that the law is good if it’s used
legitimately.” It actually says,
the text literally says,
“We know that the law is good if it’s lawful.”
In other words, if it’s according, if it’s right.
So, then we jump in
verse 9,
“This means
understanding that the law is laid down not for the innocent,
but for the lawless and the disobedient.”
So, let’s stop there, Michael.
This is vintage Paul,
and I’m sorry to keep bringing
up Romans, but Romans is the foundation for how we understand what Paul understands the law to be.
So, here Paul said, “Look,
if you want to teach the law,
the first thing you have to understand
about the law is it’s for lawbreakers.
It’s not a secret code.
It’s not a mystery to figure out.
It is plain.
It is simple.
It is understandable.
And it is for people who have broken it.
The law functions to call us guilty.
The purpose of the law is to show us our sinfulness.
That’s its only purpose,
to lead us to Christ.
The law cannot save us.
The law cannot deliver us.
What the law can do is judge us guilty so that we stand convicted and ready to receive the mercy of Jesus Christ.
And as such,
Paul is going to give us here a very deep list of what he considers
to be some of the more egregious sins that Timothy and the community in Ephesus
can witness.
And the church,
Michael, check me here if I get
caught up.
The church has been
very concerned, almost obsessed recently, with the things on this list.
And it’s not that they’re unimportant.
But what Paul is saying is, “Listen,
you law teachers have to understand,
if you want to make the law,
if you want to make that your thing,
then you stand on the wrong side
of the fence.
You stand with the law breakers.
You stand using the law for something that it isn’t
intended to do, and thereby you break it and you put yourself in the wrong category.”
Yeah, so we are very much engaging with the depth of Paul’s thought here.
And I agree with you,
Clint, that we’ve got to be careful to not cross-reference too much.
But just to make your point
here very briefly, I do want to throw up.
This is Romans chapter 7.
And this really makes the case
that you were just trying to make here.
When Paul asks, “Is the law sin?” He says, “By no means.
If it hadn’t been for the law,
I wouldn’t have known what sin is.”
And he talks about using
covetousness as an example.
If the law hadn’t said,
“Don’t do this,” then I wouldn’t have known.
But then he even goes on to say that sin seizes an opportunity in that commandment,
and it produces covetousness.
Paul makes another step just to say it’s not just awareness or knowledge.
There’s a real sense in which the law itself drives human nature forward further into to the lawlessness.
And of course, Paul later turns in the book of Romans to make the case
that the purpose of the law was never to bring salvation.
That, by the way,
was for Paul a
belief that came post-Meeting Jesus Christ.
It is likely prior to his encounter with the Living Lord
that he would have thought much differently about the law.
He would have thought of the law as a gift unto itself.
But in meeting Christ and seeing the way that he fulfills the law,
Paul is able to
come back and say,
“No, that the law actually has this reverse way of driving us deeper into
sinfulness.
It is the grace of Jesus Christ we receive by faith.” This is,
of course, the central Protestant reading of Romans that we really discover this historical kind of understanding
of Christ’s work in the world.
So now,
all of that said,
sorry for all that background.
Now to jump back to Timothy.
We’re talking here about those who remember our conversation yesterday.
Go back if you weren’t with us.
In that conversation, we dealt with this reality that there are some
who are looking for the secret decoder ring,
that they’re trying to piece together scripture to come
up with new insight, new revelation.
We believe,
at least scholars make the case, that they’re likely,
they have Jewish experience.
If they’re not Jewish themselves,
they likely know some of
the Old Testament, the laws within.
But they also seem to be somewhat drawn to a kind of Hellenistic or even,
we might call,
philosophical kind of religion,
where it’s a lot of head and not very much practice.
And so then we shouldn’t be surprised as readers.
All of that is background.
We as readers shouldn’t be surprised now when Paul begins to turn the attention to the very
actions of the people who are professing to have all of this spiritual or mental knowledge.
And he’s going to use the case of the division between the two,
that in the case where there’s a life
lived that is disparate or separated from God’s best plan,
and that person is simultaneously
claiming to have special access to God’s plan,
that that is a schism that needs a dress,
that that’s a kind of hypocrisy that needs to be noted,
that it is the defining marker of what is a false
teacher in the midst of the Christian church.
So whereas the modern church,
and Clint, this is to your point,
where the modern church has
often turned to a text like verses 9 through 11,
and we’ve looked to it as a list of what does Paul think are sins,
it is likely that Paul was far
more interested in this is evidence of the false teaching that these are offering,
which may seem like a subtle distinction,
but I think is essential when you’re reading Timothy.
Yeah, so before we need to get into this list,
but before we do two observations,
keep in mind that Paul is writing not to sinners.
Paul is not writing to the lawbreakers.
If he were,
this would be a different kind of letter.
Paul is writing to Timothy.
He’s explaining something to Timothy about these people
that are misusing the law.
And he says the first thing they need to understand is the law is laid
down, not for the innocent.
If you don’t speed,
it doesn’t matter what the penalty for speeding is.
If you don’t run the stop sign,
it doesn’t matter what the fine is for rolling through a stop sign.
The law is intended for those who break it.
And having made that statement,
he now makes that case with some of what he considers to be the most obvious and in some ways most destructive,
a few of these.
And we will unpack this list,
but let me read it for you.
“For the law is not laid down for the innocent,
but for the lawless and disobedient,
for the godless and sinful,
for the unholy and profane,
for those who kill their father or mother, for murderers,
fornicators,
sodomites,
kidnappers,
liars,
perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God
of the blessed God which he entrusted to me.” So,
a couple of language things here as we get into this.
Most of these are relatively self-explanatory.
There is some conversation about the word kidnappers.
There’s a theory that Paul means slave traders.
It’s a little bit uncharacteristic of
Paul to attack a cultural institution like slavery,
but he could have in mind a particularly
vile form of it in Ephesus.
That’s possible.
Also,
and no word, I think, on this list in the last 30
years, Michael has received more attention than the one translated sodomites,
also sometimes translated homosexual.
In the Greek,
this is a reference to the dominant partner in a male-male relationship.
Now, there have been endless arguments in the last several decades about whether
Paul means homosexuality as we understand it,
whether the ancient world understood
homosexuality as we understand it,
whether he’s arguing about a certain act,
possibly even a rape
or a temple prostitution situation.
Those are out there,
and for our purposes,
we’re going to leave
that.
If you’re interested in those arguments,
come and talk to us.
We have plethora of books.
We can point you toward articles.
We can point you toward commentaries.
That word, and whether or not Paul is condemning homosexuality across the board,
has received the vast majority of
the attention of this text.
And it’s not an unimportant question,
but what it does is it
misses the fact that this is listed alongside a list of other observations of where people go
wrong and break the liars,
perjurers,
and whatever else is contrary,
right?
So the idea that you would
lift up one thing as especially important or egregious in a list that it is designed to get
you to the place where you recognize everything that is contrary to the gospel has,
I think, been somewhat counterproductive.
I understand it.
The Bible doesn’t use that word,
but only a few places,
and so it obviously,
in the midst of our conversations about sexuality,
has gotten a lot of attention.
But I don’t think it serves the purposes of understanding the letter itself
or what Paul is doing in this part of the letter to lift up one thing and try and treat this as
an on-ramp to that conversation.
That’s not our purpose here.
Yeah, so I think some of the words here that are most helpful in setting this list apart are at the very beginning.
Remember, the laws lay down not for the innocent,
but then these words,
but for the lawless and the disobedient,
for the godless and the sinful,
for the unholy
and
profane.
If you were a teacher of the law,
maybe the greatest insult would be to be called
profane.
The idea that you were godless,
that you were in the teaching of the law,
not even participating in the faith itself,
but that you had worked your way outside of the entire circle
of the gospel.
When Paul enters into this argument and he offers us this list of what he would consider infractions,
in the moment of doing so,
we must, as the reader,
remember that he has people
in mind, and if not people with particular names,
he certainly has a group of people in mind who he
believes are threatening the very life and faithfulness of a congregation.
When it comes to his duty,
his responsibility as an apostle,
Paul takes very seriously any threat to the body.
I think it’s fair to read here how quickly we get to something like,
not just a murderer,
Clint, a murderer of your mother or father,
someone within your very circle.
When Paul reaches for that,
he’s clearly reaching for an exemplar of the worst.
Now,
we come to a text like this, and we do,
we fixate on a particular word that has relevance in our own cultural milieu and conversation.
It seems to us that verse 10 is essential to understanding what it means to be a Christian today.
I would argue that while we write books and why we debate that,
why we’re trying to find
a foothold forward in those very contemporary conversations,
we do often lose the force of what’s happening here.
I do think, Clint, you’re right to point us out that fundamentally,
Paul wants us,
see verse 11,
to look to anything that would conform to the glorious gospel.
And
you and I should at that juncture ask,
well, what is the glorious gospel,
Paul?
We shouldn’t take for granted that we know what this is.
And we should also recognize that that adjective
describing the gospel is intended as the reader to pull us forward towards it.
And we’re not supposed to get caught in the minefield.
We would naturally, as the reader,
not want to be included
with these lists of the evidences of sin.
We would want to be drawn forward into this glorious gospel.
So it may sound like a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand.
And I certainly hope,
and Clint, I hope you would agree,
that I don’t think it is.
On one hand, it’s important to say,
yes, we recognize here that Paul is making a case that there are some examples that come to mind
for him of ways in which the gospel has not been heard.
But fundamentally,
when you’re looking at
two verses and you miss everything that’s come before and all that’s going to come after,
you may have over-invested in the micro to miss the macro point that Paul’s making,
that ultimately the law itself can’t be trusted.
It’s only the gospel who is Jesus Christ who can
lead us forward into salvation.
Yeah. I think if you back up,
Michael, and you just think,
okay, what is Paul saying in this list?
And again,
I’m not saying that it’s not helpful to
have conversations about some of the particular words.
You know, Paul says what he says.
And we can argue about what he means by that or what it means that he says it.
And that’s a church
argument.
The church has to weigh in on those things and sort those things.
What does it mean
in the 21st century?
How do we understand what the Greeks heard in the word fornicator?
How do we understand what kidnapped slave trader meant?
How do we understand
what
this word for homosexual meant and means to us?
That’s all well and good.
That’s important.
But think behind that to what Paul is saying.
Paul is saying that for each of these people,
for each of the people in this category,
many of whom, as you said, Michael, he may have certain names in mind,
they need the law to point them to Jesus Christ.
The law is laid down
for the
dot,
dot,
dot,
dot, for the sinner, for this kind of sinner and that kind of sinner and that kind
of sinner and that the law is laid down
for whatever is contrary to the sound teaching
that conforms to the glorious gospel.
Now, we’ve said it before,
but why would Paul say this?
Because the purpose of the law is to point sinners to Jesus Christ.
It is really that simple.
And yes,
what kind of sinners and is it interesting that Paul thinks these kind
of sinners are most representative?
Yes, that’s instructive.
Yes, that’s important.
Yes, that’s a conversation that needs to be had.
But behind all that is the simple
approach of Paul to say whatever kind of sinner you can think of,
the law is for all of them
in order to point
us in the direction of conforming to the gospel,
to take whatever doesn’t conform to the gospel of Jesus Christ and move it towards conforming to the gospel of Jesus
Christ.
That is the essence here.
That is the point.
That is the purpose of the law.
And anyone who teaches different, remember,
connect this conversation with yesterday’s,
anyone who teaches different in Paul’s words doesn’t understand what they’re saying.
They don’t
understand the law and they don’t know what they’re teaching because they’re taking it in a wrong way,
including using the law as a club to judge.
It would be our caution on this side of it.
And I think it
is important, I think, Michael, to remind ourselves that Paul doesn’t take
the time to expand on any of these and point out why they’re on the list because that’s not what
he’s trying to do.
He’s not trying to draw attention to the sin.
He’s trying to draw attention
to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And we should carefully follow him as we read it in order to
understand and not be those who are guilty of just what he said yesterday,
not understanding the law.
So the real downside of the model that we have here where we study the Scripture day by day,
especially here in Timothy,
some smaller chunks, is that you miss some of the larger arc.
And we’re going to get to this,
and I’m not going to expound upon this more,
but it is worth noting for today’s conversation.
This is verse 15.
So this is four verses later.
We’re looking at a handful of sentences.
So this is within the same brushstroke.
Paul says,
“Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners,
of whom I am the foremost.” Now,
we should, in a couple days,
have this list in mind
when Paul calls himself the foremost of
sinners.
That is a striking statement.
We should not underestimate the extent to which Paul takes seriously the violence that he’s done against the church,
the name and notoriety that he earned,
and the grace that for him is a reflection of that
conversion, that 90-degree turn,
that life or 180-degree turn,
that life-shaping, changing reality of Jesus Christ for Paul is greater than all of that sin.
When Paul speaks of sin and the way in
which the law calls it out,
he is not setting himself apart from it.
He’s not pointing over to
the corner of the room and saying,
“Them, those people are sinful.” He counts himself in that
number, and that is the source from which he understands the radical grace of Jesus Christ.
I only emphasize that to say this.
The danger of the church taking lists that Paul makes,
and then beginning to turn them into ecclesial rules without further theological work,
and that work does need to happen,
but the simple step
from, “Well, Paul said it in a list,
so therefore it should be this,” completely discounts the kind of leadership that Paul demonstrates in his
correspondence with these churches,
and I think it fundamentally misses the humility of a man who
understands how radically he stands in need of grace,
how powerful and condemning the law is,
and yet how it pales in comparison to the
very sight of Jesus Christ who is the Savior.
So that is the force I think that Paul brings to the argument,
and as long as we can keep that
force in our conversation,
then where our interpretation leads us I think will be as
faithful as we can be.
Right, which is exactly his critique of these people who are misusing
the law is that they stand above it,
that they think they understand it in some secret way,
that they have parsed the secret meanings of it instead of being judged by it and pointed
back to Jesus Christ.
They consider that they understand it,
not that they are judged by it,
and I think to see—that’s helpful,
Michael—to see Paul put himself under the law is, I think,
helpful to understand why he would think that those who aren’t doing that are dangerous to the church.
Thanks for being with us in what is,
I think, instrumental and also challenging reading.
We hope that you’ll join us tomorrow as we continue on with our study here through First Timothy.
Thanks everyone!