1 Timothy 1

1 Timothy 1:1-20

Notes. Division 1. (1 Timothy 1:1-20.)Grace the one necessity for all blessing. It is most instructive to see, while at the same time very simple to understand, how the apostle begins his exhortations with regard to godliness by an insistence upon that grace which is the only power that breaks the dominion of sin, and on the maintenance of the truth as to God Himself revealed as a Saviour-God towards men. This alone brings in the light in which we are to walk, and which manifests things in their true character. Holiness, or piety, is always a “holiness of truth.” God Himself and our relation to Him must be established fully before we can talk of any duties to one another. It was when man slipped away from God Himself that of necessity all else was disordered, the very beasts of the field rose up against man, and the first man born into the world was the murderer of his brother.

1. Paul speaks of himself, then, as an apostle of Jesus Christ according to the commandment of God our Saviour. How beautiful the urgency of this is! One might think it would suffice to know the blessedness of salvation to make it an absolute necessity to set it forth to others; but this is not enough for Him who is revealed in Christ as the Saviour-God; and He must thus thrust out His laborers into the fields which await the seed of the gospel -that precious seed from which all real fruit for Him is to be produced. Paul insists, therefore, here also upon his apostleship. He is not a mere messenger, but a messenger with fullest authority.

God would have the truth of these things certified to man with all the assurance that He can give it, and thus, as we know, the miracles which attended the proclamation of the gospel at the outset were designed to call earnest attention to the testimony going forth. Timothy is himself an example of how God would have these things constantly maintained, as he is himself urged by the apostle to communicate the things which he has heard from him, among many witnesses, to faithful or believing men who shall be able to teach others also. “Faithful” and “believing” are the same word in the Greek, and all faithfulness is, in fact, a question simply of believing. Faith and faithfulness are root and stem in all living godliness. Thus the apostle addresses Timothy as his true child in faith. With him there was, of course, no apostleship. The testimony is to be left now to the responsibility of ordinary men to maintain it.

The sowing of the seed is the simple way by which other seed is to be produced for fresh sowing. Timothy is in his character, as in his name, a true product of the apostle’s gospel. He is one who “honors God,” who maintains what is His due amongst men. In feebleness this might be, indeed. We find in Timothy himself one with whom there was a special sense of inherent weakness. He needs to be exhorted to be strong; he needs to be told that the Spirit that we have received is not a spirit of cowardice, but of power and of love and of a sound mind; but with a true heart all these difficulties are overcome, and there is ever, according to the apostle’s greeting here, “grace, mercy and peace from God our Father and Christ,” the One we serve. Mercy, as has been often noticed, is specially added here, where an individual is addressed; and is it not according to the character of things which is coming in, that it should be now, in the close of Paul’s epistles, the individual that is thus specially addressed? Individuality is needed surely to be preserved at all times, but how distinctly does that individuality need to be insisted on when the mass are going astray! Conscience is individual, never of a body as such; and it always leads to individual action, although where the Spirit of God is, there will be the action together, of course, of those who are guided by the Spirit. The apostle urges him to remember that he had besought him to abide in Ephesus for the express purpose of charging some that they taught no other doctrine. The danger of this is plainly intimated; and in Paul’s address, as we find it in the Acts, to the Ephesian elders, it is fully realized. Thus already the tendencies are manifest which were so soon to have such terrible development. It was all in the germ at present, but there is, alas, a kind of life in these germs of evil which leads to development of their own kind, just as faith of necessity will develop itself upon the other hand. That which he warns of here is the giving heed to fables and endless genealogies: things which, whatever they might be, did not spring out of the truth which God was declaring, and which thus brought in all the uncertainty that of necessity attaches to what is of man. These endless genealogies might be of very different kinds from the genealogies of the law upon which men might still build themselves, or the genealogies of heathenism such as afterwards manifested themselves mystically in the teachings of Gnosticism.

In fact, all that men can think of naturally is the derivation of one thing from another, as we see manifestly in the science of our own days. Where God is to come in they are at fault, and there tends to be the resistance of this need of God, and the substitution of natural laws and material developments in place of the Creator. We shall find in this epistle that in the apostasy of the last days, of which the apostle speaks, it is the Creator who is in the first place set aside. For the proper intelligence of God and of His ways there must be revelation. Here reason cannot lay the foundations, although it may be summoned to approve of the foundations laid. Here is where Scripture is of the first necessity for all the foundations of science, and because men have not faith, science becomes, for lack of a foundation, a mere “opposition of science falsely called such.” 2. But one pressing matter that faced Christianity now was the Judaism which had fallen away from God, and now, therefore, was in the hands of Satan everywhere to resist the truth. “The end of the commandment is love out of a pure heart, and a good conscience, and faith unfeigned.” Where the truth was not received, into soil like this thorns and thistles would spring up with it and choke it; and thus those could be already pointed out who had gone astray, “desiring to be teachers of law;” by that very fact revealing that they did not understand the law itself of which they spoke. True it was that it was of God, and of necessity had use, as everything that is of God must have; but the lawful use of the law they did not recognize -that its power was in condemnation, not in justification, and not even in the production of that holiness at which it aimed and which was its own character. Thus the law had not its application to a righteous person, but to “the lawless and insubordinate, to the ungodly and sinners, the unholy and profane” of every kind. It was, therefore, for the rooting up of thorns and weeds; but where the true seed was sown and the gospel of the glory of the blessed God was bringing forth fruit, how dangerous to introduce the plowshare! Law was intended to be the handmaid of grace.

It has, as a schoolmaster, its necessary lessons; but the schoolmaster is not always to abide, and the freedom of the Spirit of adoption the law never knew. Thus, as a first necessity for godliness, there must be the maintenance of the grace which alone could produce it, in contrast with the law. 3. The apostle still further insists upon his own case as being the eminent example of that grace which he was preaching; the messenger and the message corresponded fully. The message of most perfect grace came on the lips of the chief of sinners, whom grace had conquered to itself, and in whom it now found the means of assuring all that Christ Jesus had “come into the world to save sinners,” and that without exception. Thus he who was beforetime the persecutor of Christians was not saved to be kept in a corner, but, on the contrary, was needed as the special advertisement of that which God was doing, that no man might conceive himself too great a sinner for this grace. True it was that it was in the ignorance of unbelief that Saul the persecutor had lived and acted. This it was that alone enabled mercy to be shown him at all, for the gates of the city of refuge were open only to the unconscious manslayer, not to the deliberate murderer; and so those who were the deliberate rejecters of God’s grace in Christ had by that very fact placed themselves beyond the power of the revelation itself to reach them.

It had in a sense reached them, but only to manifest their incapacity for the reception of it altogether. Such was not Paul’s case, and the grace of the Lord was “exceeding abundant” towards him, “with faith and love which is in Christ Jesus.” Christ had been revealed to him not in vain, and now he could assure all men who would receive it that Christ Jesus had indeed “come into the world to save sinners,” and that he himself was the pattern of that grace that Christ was showing to all “who should hereafter believe on Him to life everlasting.” He breaks out with the praise that filled his heart to the One who through all time abides “the King of the ages, the incorruptible, invisible, only God, to whom be honor and glory to the ages of ages.” 4. But immediately there follows the recognition of danger. Even grace itself may be apparently received, while in fact turned into that which is most perfectly opposed to God, the true opposite of that which it imitates. Paul commits the charge of maintaining this truth of which he has been speaking, to his child Timotheus, one specially marked out before by prophecies, for his encouragement and exhortation in the warfare to which he was now called. Two things needed to be maintained together, “faith and a good conscience,” the recognition of the claims which faith itself made upon the soul. There were already to be seen wrecks resulting from the divorce of these two from one another.

The truth itself only maintains its place in connection with that exercise of conscience which testifies to God being before the soul. Already, Hymenaeus and Alexander were in this way blaspheming. Paul had, in his apostolic power, delivered them to Satan -put them into the hands of one who would use his power with them, as we have seen as to the offender among the Corinthians, for the destruction of the flesh, but that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. God’s grace would thus triumph in making the very enemy of souls in this way the instrument of their deliverance.