“And a servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth, and that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him to do his will.”
~2 Timothy 2:24-26
Last week, I introduced this passage. Today, I want to emphasize the characteristics of the lost according to this passage. One of my great struggles in being an intellectually wired person is that I often operate in a way that through intellectual means, I can win someone over to the truth. There are people who have come to Christ that way, including Josh McDowell and Voddie Baucham. However, behind the scenes, there was something else going on. God was going a supernatural work that wasn’t going to happen through intellectual means alone. God was delivering them. But from what?
Verses 25-26 state that these people do not know the truth, they are not thinking clearly, and they have been taken captive by the devil to do his will. This is a critical thing for us to understand. In the many testimonies I have heard of people going into or out of a false teaching, I have noticed two things: those who leave the truth and go to something else all but invariably do so through education or ‘enlightenment.’ But those who come out of any of the false ideas and land in the truth tend to describe the process in terms of deliverance, freedom, or a fog being lifted. I have stated this numerous times in showcasing why the Bible must be true, but I haven’t truly let that fact sink into me, because it shows something serious: that this is a spiritual issue, not a mere intellectual discussion. This observation is seen among most if not all false teachings. Those who went into them do so because of education or enlightenment. Those who come out do so with clear minds and speak in terms of deliverance.
Paul describes four aspects of a person in doctrinal error. I will quickly address each here but then delve much deeper into them in the next few posts.
1) They do not know the truth – not merely on a factual basis but on a complete worldview basis. They do not have the correct standard by which to test any statement for validity. Paul calls for us to treat these people gently so that God may grant them repentance so that they may know the truth. If God has to grant them repentance so they may know the truth, that means they don’t have the truth now. No one believes what they believe if they know it is a lie, unless the truth is so repulsive to them that they refuse to go there. Those in doctrinal error do believe they are right. They deceive themselves with all sorts of stories of how they are right So we must, in humility, correct them so they may see the truth. You will see two responses to this: total embracing of the truth or virulent rejection of it. Far better that someone reject the truth knowing what they are rejecting than to embrace a falsehood thinking it’s true.
2) They are not thinking straight. Paul says here those who believe lies are corrected, come to repentance, and will come to their senses. If you look at our culture today, we are looking at pure and total insanity. We are seeing precisely what Paul meant in Romans 1 about God handing people over to a “reprobate” or “depraved” mind. Paul calls for us to correct and teach those in error so that they may come to repentance and as a result have their minds cleared so they can think straight. But this is a biggie: this is a gift from God, not something they can conjure up on their own. This is why Christians and non-Christians keep talking past each other. We literally do not think with the same dictionaries and vocabulary. And Christians who have not had their thinking renewed yet because they are still holding onto the world’s ideas won’t hear it either. I keep having battles with other Christians and they simply cannot think clearly at all about certain topics. Hey, there may be topics where I can’t think clearly either because in that field, my mind hasn’t been renewed yet. Let’s not forget about Paul in this case either. He persecuted the earliest Christians. But why? Paul said he was stubborn, arrogant, and ignorant. He was an intellectual that you would never be able to reason through. Yet through a supernatural encounter with the risen Christ, he came to his senses.
3) They are caught in the snare of the devil. This is hunting terminology. Let me make clear that Satan cannot force anyone to believe his lies; he can only set up traps for them. But we so easily walk into them. We choose to take the bait and that hook is there, entrapping us and binding us. Most of the time, we have no idea we’ve been trapped. The same is true about many people. They don’t even know they have been trapped, so they deserve our pity and our desire that they be freed from it.
4) They have been taken captive to do the devil’s will. This is the dirtiest part of the devil’s tactics. He’s not merely interested in getting us to sin against God; he wants us to lead others to do so as well. This is the hard part for the apologist. We MUST confront and call out false teachers Yet, these false teachers are trapped by the devil’s lies and have been enlisted as “slave labor” if you could call it that to do his bidding. But remember, this ties back to the other three points. They THINK they are free, and they think they are doing their own thing. Again, look at what we see going on today. Just one example: many young adults are in great favor of socialist ideas – these adults who have never worked a day in their life and had everything given to them. When you listen to them argue their points, they can’t think at all. I get students all the time who cannot think at all as a result of being in “the system.” It’s sad. I do what I can to teach them how to think, but one year with me is only going to rescue a few, not many. They cannot think straight and as a result, they have made good puppets for the devil to manipulate and control as he sees fit.
The job of the apologist is to share the truth with kindness, gentleness, and correction so that God may grant them repentance. With that repentance comes a total change of mind, a worldview change. This statement from David Wilkerson keeps convicting me: “Some would rather see people dead than saved.” That mere mindset is a trap of the enemy and if we are thinking along these lines (yes, that includes me), then we need this verse applied to us. We need that God might grant us repentance so that we may know the truth and come back to our senses as well. Next week, I’ll explore what this repentance should look like followed by how the lost are lost. We’ll look at the lack of truth, spiritual insanity, and the traps/enslavements of the devil. After that, we’ll explore the first part of this passage and the surrounding context.
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1 comments:
Thank you.
Amen
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