Titus 1

Titus 1:1-16

Division 1. (Titus 1:1-16.)The truth according to godliness. The connection of truth with godliness, that is, the inseparability of the two, is that which is first insisted on. The character of the relation itself comes afterwards.

1. The truth is emphasized at the very start. Paul speaks of himself as a “bondman of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God’s elect and the acknowledgment of the truth which is after godliness.” The opening words, as usual, give us thus the key to the epistle. The election of God is that which is the final dependence of the soul, that is, the will of God in love which goes out after its objects; a will which, surely, nothing can oppose, which must be characterized by His own nature, which alone, therefore, can give the limits of it. God cannot lie, God cannot repent; and in every manifestation of His will we find the activity of a nature which is love, and is so as much as anywhere in the refusal of the evil itself, which is the destruction of everything. It is not an arbitrary thing on God’s part, that He ordains the judgment of evil, which is the necessary contradiction of His whole nature, and of all, therefore, that can possibly be for blessing.

Love is in this way intolerant, of necessity. Tolerance here could not be love.

God has His own way in grace of meeting souls in the deepest need that can be, but grace itself is never apart from the destruction of evil. Thus, there is that by which this grace of God works. If God saves, it is by “sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth.” There is no other way. Man has everywhere received and drunk in the lie of the devil. By that lie, if it is not refused, he is destroyed. All the corruption that is in the world has come in through it. Thus, then, there must be the acknowledgment of the truth which is after godliness. For this, the apostle is set.

He is the minister of it, his confidence being that “hope of eternal life which God who cannot lie promised before the age-times.” We see, as in Timothy so here, the going back to the beginning. Whatever may have come in since, God’s purpose as revealed there abides. Whatever the delay and the need of patience, yet the end is certain. These “age-times,” we have already seen, are practically the dispensations, the different steps by which God has worked out and developed what was in His mind, and made way for the full truth, which is now manifested. That long preparation of the world for that in which alone lies all blessing for man is a lesson most serious in its nature as to what man is, while it has reference also, no doubt, to the manifestation of things before the principalities and powers, the creatures of God outside of humanity, but who, nevertheless, are personally interested in all that in which God reveals Himself. How deep this interest is we have now, and can have, probably, but little knowledge; yet we have glimpses of it scattered all through the word of God.

The earth, with all the littleness which infidelity, with its feigned humility, has pointed out to us, has, nevertheless, been the theatre of that with which God has connected the manifestation of His glory as nowhere else, and the very littleness of man himself, as well as the evil condition in which he is found, has part in the manifestation. The time of full revelation is now come.

This is the very season of God appointed for it; and how much, if we entered into this, might we reckon upon therefore, if indeed the knowledge of God Himself is that which in a practical sense is our very life itself. “For this is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.” How little have we entered into the character of the present dispensation! How little have our hearts grasped of this desire of God to communicate His mind to us, and to bring us thus into fellowship with Himself -no longer as those to whom He speaks as servants merely, and who are to move obedient to His will, but as unto children, those brethren among whom Christ Himself takes His place as the First-born, and to whom, as unto friends, He becomes the revealer of the Father’s counsels. If we knew this aright, what interest would it give to every part of Scripture, to His thoughts with regard to His people Israel, and, back of them, to that display of Himself in nature, to which Scripture is the key! How wonderful to be those upon whom, thus, the ends of the ages are come, and to whom the stores that have been accumulated all along the line of revelation become the treasury of faith! This is His word, to which Paul was devoted -not simply His gospel, though the gospel must be the beginning everywhere, necessarily, and at once introduces the soul that has received it into the very heart of divine revelation. But the Word itself goes far beyond what we commonly call this, and is nothing less than that which is not merely to bring us out of sin into holiness, but to qualify us for that place with Christ to which infinite grace has destined us. How little we realize what the body of Christ means in this way, that body in which the Spirit dwells as never before, in order to give us capacity for the reception of these communications! When will we awake to realize and answer to this grace of God? Again, we find the apostle insisting upon the character of God as a Saviour-God, a commandment from whom is just that which manifests the energy of a love which imperatively requires the fulfilment of its counsels. He is writing to Titus, his true child, as he declares, even as Timothy was -his child according to the faith which he had been the instrument used of God in communicating to him. To him he wishes grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus the Saviour. This individuality which the epistle emphasizes, as we have seen also with the epistles to Timothy, is that which, while it comes out in the most distinct way in the ruin of the Church which has come in, yet was always an absolute necessity. The soul must be for itself before God. We are not saved in the multitude, but saved individually; and in all our life, the more simply we have to do with God Himself, for ourselves, as if there were none other, the more fitted we shall be for fellowship with others, and to serve the ends for which God has united us together. 2. Titus had been left in Crete distinctly to complete the order of the assembly there, and to appoint elders in every city. The characters required in an elder are stated much as in Timothy, especially the family character, as one may say; for the elder is to be a father in the local assembly. Thus, he must be “the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of excess, or unruly.” For the character of his children he is thus distinctly accounted as responsible. As an overseer, he is to be blameless as a steward of God, with nothing that would show a lack of government in his own spirit, “not headstrong, not passionate, not given to wine, no striker, no seeker of base gain.” On the other hand, not merely of a negative character, but “hospitable, a lover of good, discreet, righteous, pious;” himself “holding fast the faithful word according to the doctrine taught, so as to be able both to exhort with sound teaching and convict the gainsayers.” The circumstances in Crete were of special exigency, and we see in them how, wherever the soul is not fully with God, the natural character necessarily comes up. One of their own, a prophet of themselves, had characterized the Cretans as “always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies” (or, “slothful gluttons”). This did not hinder the grace of God in its work amongst them; for, as we know, it is the glory of God’s grace that it can avail for the chief of sinners; but it showed the character in which the evil, if it were suffered to come out, would display itself. Thus, among the Cretans there were many vain speakers and deceivers, the circumcision having specially this character, through the constant opposition which we have found legality was always manifesting to the truth of God, and the plausible cover of previous revelation under which it sheltered itself. It was imperative that the mouths of such should be stopped, as those who subverted whole houses, teaching things which ought not to be, and always with that character which is so naturally and necessarily displayed among those who are not satisfied with that which alone can satisfy. The corruption which is in the world is through lust, and at the bottom of all this plausible perversion of that which had been given of God there was a spirit coveting that which it counted gain.

There was need, therefore, of sharp reproof in these cases -above all, that they might be sound in the faith, the very spring of godliness, as we have seen the epistle declares it. Judaism, astray from the purpose of God with regard to it, was only resulting in fables and commandments of men turning from the truth. The liberty that existed in Christ was denied by it. Rules for outward conduct had supplanted that purity of heart which alone made all things pure, while to the defiled and unbelieving there was really no line of separation at all; to them nothing was pure, even the mind and conscience being defiled. With all this there was the profession of the knowledge of God, while in works they denied Him. We see how the knowledge of God should necessarily result in works accordant -how it will, in fact, necessarily do this, or it is not true knowledge.