Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the Gospel in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope, To Timothy my true son in the faith: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain men not to teach false doctrines any longer, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies.
These promote controversy rather than God’s work—which is by faith. The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Some have wandered away from these and turned to meaningless talk. They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm.
We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. We also know that law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for adulterers and perverts, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.
I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength, that he considered me faithful, appointing me to his service. Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief. The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.
Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen.
Timothy, my son, I give you this instruction in keeping with the prophecies once made about you, so that by following them you may fight the good fight, holding on to faith and a good conscience. Some have rejected these and so have shipwrecked their faith. Among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme.”
This is the Word of the Lord.
I have sometimes said that different segments of confessional evangelicalism prove more susceptible to certain heresies than to others. For example, some in the Reformed heritage are tempted toward theonomy. This is not something that tempts Arminians. Some in the Arminian heritage are tempted toward Open Theism. This is not something that tempts Reformed people.
Similarly, you could argue that the people most likely to be tempted by the so-called new perspective on Paul (though it’s actually a bundle of different perspectives with some commonalities) tend to be those who think pretty deeply about justification and related matters. They have some problems integrating with certain elements, and find this a new way forward and a new way out. With a small dose of the love of the innovative and the like, away we go!
Whereas those who have very few doctrinal predilections of precision and the like are, by and large, not tempted by this sort of thing. It just passes them by. Interestingly enough, those who are tempted by the more extreme elements in the emergent church movement tend to be those who have come from, to use McLaren’s expression, the most conservative twig of the most conservative branch of evangelicalism.
Then they find themselves so far removed from the culture they don’t have a clue how to communicate with anybody, so they jump on a vine and do a big pendulum swing over here. Thus, they react against something. Whereas if you find churches that are already well able to converse with a broader culture while still maintaining their biblical and theological roots, the temptation toward the emergent movement is, in my experience, minimal.
Moreover, there are some sweeping culture pressures that attract many who should know better. This is true in every generation. In our generation, there is a very strong pull exerted toward many people right across the whole spectrum of evangelicalism toward some new definitions of tolerance. They are pulled toward certain flirtation with pluralism that makes Christ important and supreme in some relevant sense.
We keep our minds open, we say, to how many other people might be converted by whatever means and so forth, so that somehow exclusivism sounds too narrow, right-wing, ignorant, and bigoted and is, therefore, slightly embarrassing. We should at least keep our mouths quiet about it and not provoke people to wroth. Somehow or other, the exclusiveness of the gospel gets watered down.
It has always been so. From the inauguration of the new covenant on until today, continuing on until Christ’s return, there have been, there are, and there will be false teachings. On the one hand, one can fall into the error of the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 10–13. They are so open-minded and generous toward those with another Jesus, as Paul refers to them, that quite frankly, they put up with outright idiocies. They think that somehow it reflects their Christian magnanimity.
On the other hand, there can be people like Diotrephes, for whom the whole game finally becomes an excuse in power and control, such that eventually you can exclude the apostles themselves, so tight are you! The Pastoral Epistles provide us with profound insight on guarding the gospel. What the apostle calls in verse 11 the glorious gospel of the blessed God.
Isn’t that a wonderful expression? The glorious gospel of the blessed God. How to guard the gospel while confronting and refuting those who would diminish it or destroy it or marginalize it. The Pastoral Epistles include a whole lot of other themes, and we’ll stumble across quite a few of them before we’re done, but this element of necessary and appropriate confrontation lies right at the very heart of these three short letters.
Even the opening lines make this clear. In some ways, of course, the greeting is standard. A “me to you” greeting. That’s the way letters were introduced, and Paul has a certain, almost formulaic approach. Yet his words never descend to the level of the merely formulaic. He always introduces small changes or emphases that anticipate what the letter is going to be about. He also says here, “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the command of God.”
At the level of brute fact, surely Timothy doesn’t have to be reminded of this. I mean, by now, Timothy surely holds that to be true. Yet it is a truth that is necessarily important whenever there is controversy. That is, essentially you return to the apostolic deposit, to the apostolic gospel. Moreover, if Timothy (there are some hints in the letter that this is so) will be responsible for reading this letter to the larger church, then it’s not only important for Timothy to be reminded of the apostolic deposit, but for the larger church as well.
One remembers, indeed, that the apostle Paul elsewhere when he is involved in controversy is quick to stress his apostolic status. When he writes to the Philippians and everything is fairly smooth, that’s not what he appeals to, but when he writes to the Galatians, he not only insists that he’s an apostle but he’s been appointed by God himself, not through any agency, human or otherwise. He wants it to be clear that his apostolic status is ordained finally by the risen Christ.
“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God.” Next come two expressions that he uses nowhere else except in the Pastoral Epistles. “By the command of God our Savior.” That’s found only in the Pastoral Epistles. “And of Christ Jesus our hope.” Not a common way of talking about things.
My guess is that both of these expressions anticipate where his argument is going. We’ll see how in a little while. “God our Savior” reminds us that what we’re talking about here is not God in some merely abstract or theoretical sense, but the God who brings salvation. What is that issue? Finally, is salvation itself! The false teaching finally takes people away from what he has just introduced as this gospel, this glorious gospel of our blessed God.
“And of Christ Jesus our hope.” We will soon see that the errorists, the false teachers, have succumbed to some kind of over-inaugurated eschatology, over-realized eschatology. They think they’ve got so many of the final blessings that it doesn’t seem likely that they’re looking forward to very much anymore.
One way of correcting them is to point out how much is still coming. Yes, you’ve got to point out their error. They think the resurrection somehow is behind them. Just how they think that, we’ll come to in due course. One way of making this error clear is by talking about what still is to be anticipated. “Christ Jesus our hope,” which has not yet come in all of its fullness and glory. So this theme of anticipation returns again and again and again.
He writes and says, “To Timothy, my true son in the faith.” I’m sure you are as aware, as I am, that the son category in biblical times was very often a functional category. You’re the true son if you act like the father. You’re the true son of Abraham if you have Abraham’s faith. You’re the true son of God if you are a peacemaker the way God is a peacemaker.
You’re the true son of the Devil if you’re a liar, because he’s the liar from the beginning. Do you see? It’s a functional category. So for Paul to write to Timothy and say, “My true son in the faith” he is saying, “Timothy, Timothy, I view you as another me. So far as the gospel is concerned, in the faith, you’re my son. That’s the way I’m writing to you.”
Then in the following verses, after the greeting itself, “Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.” Paul develops this argument in two stages. First, there is confrontation and then there is encouragement, but the three topics that Paul treats under confrontation recur as mirror images under encouragement.
In other words, there’s confrontation, and under confrontation, three topics, and then encouragement, and in the three topics you get the mirror side of them; they’re flipped over and then put back in reverse order. So if you have A, B, and C then they come back as C prime, B prime, and A prime. It’s a kind of chiasm that controls all the rest of the chapter. When you see how this chapter is organized, the structure of it draws you right into the center, which is the gospel itself.
So first, then, the confrontation, verses 3–10. First within that is the charge to oppose the false teachers, verses 3–5. Now the main thrust of these verses is pretty clear. “I urge you to stay there so that you may command certain men not to teach false doctrines any longer.” The main thrust is that Timothy is to stay there and fight the good fight and confront this error that is promiscuous in the church in Ephesus.
Yet there are many details that flesh out the picture. In 3a, “I urged you when I went into Macedonia to stay there in Ephesus.” Apparently, at least on the most likely reconstruction of Paul’s movements, when Paul was released from prison in Rome (the imprisonment described in Acts 28) he and Timothy and Titus, along with whatever other traveling they did, at some point they traveled east, including a stop in Crete where they planted some churches and the like.
In due course, opposition broke out in Crete, so Titus was left there to sort it all out. Paul eventually writes to him in what we call our Epistle of Titus. Then Paul and Timothy stopped at Ephesus on their way back to Europe, back to Macedonia. There they found dangerous false teaching arising from some leaders who were abandoning the faith.
Two of them are actually named at the end of this chapter, Hymenaeus and Alexander. Timothy, then, was left to sort things out while Paul went on to Macedonia, hence his words here in 1:3. “I urged you when I went to Macedonia to stay there in Ephesus,” and so forth. The false teachers clearly were still, in some sense, integrally connected with the church; they were not outsiders.
That’s why Timothy can be told to command certain people these things. You see, they’re in some sense under the authority, at least ostensively, of the apostolic voice, of the church leaders themselves. They may be leaders in some sense, but how are you going to take on Paul and his emissary?
Moreover, in verses 19 and 20, regarding Hymenaeus and Alexander, this presupposes that the church discipline being imposed on them is applicable precisely because they are insiders. They are being cast out to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme precisely because they have been inside. Apparently too, some of these teachers have been pretty high up, maybe elders, which accounts for the fact that two chapters on, the apostle will start giving criteria for who should be elders.
This is also thoroughly in line with Paul’s address to the Ephesian elders recorded in Acts, chapter 20. He told them that this time would come, that false teachers would arise even from their own midst. So why should we be too surprised today when this happens? Don’t you get tired when one new round comes after another? I mean, good grief. When will we get to the end of this?
You just finished sorting out one heresy and a new one comes along. It was already there in the first churches, and it will be there till the very end. Part of apostolic responsibility is dealing with it. What can I say? We can’t duck it. Now what is the shape of this false teaching? You must not assume that what is wrong is Ephesus, which stands behind 1 and 2 Timothy, is exactly what stands wrong in Crete, which stands behind Titus.
Although there are some minor differences (we’ll stumble across them in due course), there are some big similarities. Let me suggest some of the most important elements. The false teachers claimed special knowledge, special insight, to the effect that the resurrection had already taken place.
For example, 2 Timothy, chapter 2, verses 17–18. “Regarding Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have wandered away from the truth, they say that the resurrection has already taken place and they destroy the faith of some.” They claim to have some special knowledge in this regard. First Timothy, chapter 6, verses 20 and following. “Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith.”
