This is something that has been cooking inside me for some time, and I have been trying to figure out where, when, and how to let it out. Many of you who have followed me know I am actively engaged in apologetics and defending the faith. I’ve been at this for over 20 years, and one thing I am so grateful for is being at a church that understands the value of defending the faith but also is learning when to reel it in. I moved to my current church nearly four years ago, and I am very glad for the change. I had something stirring in me at my previous place that had I remained there much longer, it may have erupted in a not-good way. God pulled me out in part to rescue me from staying in that environment. Where I am now, the sermons have been doing an excellent job at putting a leash on me and pulling me back to keep me from going too far with certain things.
One of them is regarding apologetics. When I moved to my current church, we were in a state of making sure we were on sound doctrine. We have not departed from that, but we saw something in us that we didn’t like: deadness. We had intellectualism, but it was dead. It was stone-cold and had no life in it. And we saw it and didn’t like it, and so we have been shifting, not away from sound orthodox and quality doctrine or even the rigidness of the doctrine, but away from “intellectualism.” One post I was going to write was regarding Ecclesiastes on this topic: Meaningless! Meaningless! I was going to write about the futility of modern evangelistic methods and even modern preaching, including the good stuff. I’m still going to write on that but with a different emphasis and angle.
It is important to know our Bible and to be able to explain our faith, but I have seen a very unhealthy trend in evangelical circles and especially in academics of trying to explain the supernatural with the natural. There are times when I will get on the scientists on my side for this, trying too hard to explain evidence when there really isn’t a need to. Especially with evidence that doesn’t have any weight to begin with. For example, I applaud the work that the “R.A.T.E.” Team did in analyzing and critiquing the radiometric dating methods on their own merit and showcasing the discrepancies in the system. However, I do not agree with their conclusions that there must be a way to account for billions of years into a 6000-year time frame when the studies showed legitimate reasons that the billions of years weren’t real figures we have to account for, to begin with.
But it gets worse. There are very famous apologists for the faith: William Lane Craig, Frank Turek, Charlie Campbell, Greg Koukul, now popular Cliffe Knechtel, Charlie Cambell, Josh McDowell, Sean McDowell, and many others. Some are better than others, and some have produced some excellent works for why Christianity is true. Some others, not so much. I’m not going to get into that here. My concern is the drive for intellectualism, the attempt to make Christianity acceptable on an intellectual level, and the idolizing of these scholars as being the chief authority instead of God Himself. While God did indeed leave very powerful evidence that would compel even the halfway-thinking person, such that no one has any excuses, the problem I am seeing is the “appeal to the academic.” This is where Christianity isn’t true because the Bible (the ultimate authority on every topic it speaks on) says so but because scholarship shows it to be true. And when the scholarship shows it, many of them don’t turn to the Bible as having the authority but keep with the scholarship. I say this having written a book titled Ten Reasons to Believe the Bible, and the more I think about this, the more I almost question my approach to that book. God still left the evidence I show in my book, so any rational person can follow that to the truth, but there must come a point when we realize the Bible does have everything we need.
What is lacking in evangelism is that we just have “rationalism.” We make intellectual arguments that can showcase that the Bible is true, and yes, many people have been converted that way. But one thing I like about Josh McDowell’s testimony is that he did his research and realized the Bible was true after attempting to refute it. However, that isn’t what converted him. What converted him was the love of the saints that he never got at home or at school, especially at home with a drunk father and suffering at the hands of a homosexual pedophile for seven years. He was dealing with his anger and pride, and when he saw true, genuine love from among the believers, that is what pushed him over. He still needed the intellectual part, which made him see the love, but it was the supernatural love of God that won him to Christ.
We are missing the supernatural element. We have abandoned God’s method of evangelism. God has chosen the weak things of this world to share the truth. He uses the uneducated. He uses the poor. He uses preaching. Now God has also used the educated, and he has used the rich, and he has used eloquence, but very rarely, and only when said people have given up that very skill to surrender to Christ for Him to use.
The worst of it all is the total lack of Christ in so many people’s evangelistic and apologetic efforts when He is only brought up as a footnote. Listen to the testimonies of “I am Second” – there is no “second” of self in many of those because it’s all about them. After listening to those testimonies, after listening to our apologists today, who walks away knowing or hearing anything about Jesus? Isn’t Christ supposed to be our message? Isn’t He supposed to be central to everything? Then why aren’t we making Him central?
Eric Ludy described how his sister brought him to a correct understanding of evangelism. When we evangelize, we need to be like the servant of Abraham who went to get Rebecca to be a bride for Isaac. The servant spent very little time talking about himself. He spent his time talking about Isaac. And when we finish with someone, they should not be thinking about us; they should be thinking about Jesus. While we can appeal to how Jesus deals with sin and such, the real appeal should be what spending eternity in heaven with Him should be like and what that relationship is. Instead, we just think it’s about getting to paradise or out of Hell, and God beyond that is an afterthought. That is not how evangelism should be. That is making converts, and we are called to make disciples and to teach them how to follow Christ. And with that message is the most difficult part of it all: the denial of self and everything you once knew.
We need to get back to doing things God’s way. We need to stop thinking we have to “figure out a way to reach them.” We need to do what God said and let God deal with the results. No, God’s methods are not going to be popular. They are intended not to be. They are intended to show that God is the one doing the work, not you; you are just a tool He is using, not the star of the show. Once you do your part, you get out of the way. We need to stop thinking we actually have control over these things. We don’t, and every time we try, we end up being the fool.
Let me remind all of us: there is a true academic study, and there are useless academics. What the world teaches is only a counterfeit of the true study of God and how to use the mind of Christ to learn and study things. There is nothing wrong with learning history, science, or math, but studying Christ and using what God has given us to learn more about Christ is everything.
I am writing a book on Proverbs 3:5, and I’m leaning towards doing a series to give you a preview of the book. We have got to learn to stop trying to do things our way and according to man’s “best practices” and start doing things “God’s way” once again, especially with evangelism and apologetics.
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In our day and age of intellectualism and our desire to pick apart and dissect every detail of anything academically, it is very easy to get sidetracked and chase rabbits while forgetting where we are and where we are going. While the ability to properly read, understand, and unpack a verse gives the reader life, let us not forget that all these verses and all these passages have a point and purpose together. For the next two posts, I am going to describe several of the central key messages of the Bible holistically to help us keep our thinking and our studies in line. This will set up my next series on the ten fields of systematic theology that theologians use to describe the ten major subjects and themes of the Bible.
As we celebrate Christmas this weekend, we should have a heightened awareness of Christ and His coming. The overall central message of the Bible is Jesus. As Eric Ludy teaches, the Bible is the Word of God in text form. Jesus is the Word of God in living flesh. One of his sermons that I often go back and listen to again is called “Christophany,” which is about making Jesus the center of all our theology and Bible and living discussions and studies. In the sermon, Ludy shares a hypothetical dialogue between a new preacher and his old mentor. The new preacher did an excellent job at dissecting the text with great analogies and good application, but the old preacher said it was a poor sermon. Why? Because even though the text did not explicitly have Christ in it, the preacher did not make a connect to Christ. Every text has such a road to Christ and the preacher’s job, or the reader’s job, is to find that road and go to Him.
I emphasize on origins a lot, but it really is not about whether the earth is 6000 years old. The age is merely a label that encompasses everything that comes with it. There are some old earth creation apologists who publicly state that Jesus is more important than origins. While that sounds good on paper, and while no one would disagree with such statement on the surface, this is actually a false teaching in how it is used. It is correct in that studying origins is pointless unless it points to Christ, but it is dead wrong to suggest that you can believe whatever you want regarding origins “as long as you believe in Christ.” Why? Because if you get origins wrong, you get Jesus wrong. If the earth is billions of years old, that means within all those rock layers are millions of dead things, including humans, that well precede any notion of Adam. That puts human death before sin, and that right there completely eliminates the Gospel. The atheists know this. Yet our theologians cannot see it. And we wonder why our churches are so impotent today: our leading men don’t believe our own text. Why are we letting those men lead us? Why are we putting men who openly question the clarity and meaning of the opening chapters of the Bible in the spotlight as our representatives?
If Jesus is the center and the most important topic, then anything He says on the matter goes, right? Except that Jesus didn’t come into existence only about 2000 years ago. Jesus is the very Creator Himself. Don’t you think He’d know what He did? “Well, well, this is Jesus’ humanity speaking. He didn’t have His God-knowledge.” Is that your final answer? Because Jesus said He knew Abraham and that He was the I AM who met Moses at the burning bush. But let’s say Jesus’ “God-knowledge” was held back. How would Jesus answer any question about origins? “Have you not read in the Law of Moses that in six days, God created the heavens and the earth and the seas and all within them?” We have a very famous apologist who said if he could go back in time and talk to Jesus about origins, he not only would have to teach Jesus about Evolution, but that Jesus would be perfectly fine with it. My reaction to that was, “Blasphemy!” Not because he is wrong about origins, but because he is wrong about Jesus. He has the wrong image of Jesus as a result of his wrong image of origins.
There are other fields of theology in which Christ must be center. No. matter what we study, the center must be Christ. The end goal must be Christ and the One proclaimed in the end must be Christ.
Proclaiming Christ means proclaiming the Gospel. Now the Gospel is not merely the plan of salvation. It’s a big part of it, but the Gospel is so much more than that. The Gospel is not just how we sinned and rebelled and how Jesus came to save us. It is also about how we live our lives as saved people. So, the Gospel is for the believer, not just for the unbeliever. And the Gospel should be all about sharing Christ and who Jesus is.
One of my pet peeves today is the modern testimony. It is so self-centered and all about “me” and how Jesus makes my life better. While there are often mentions of “I once was a sinner and now am saved” and while there are mentions of how “Jesus saved me,” I have to ask: would anyone leaving that conversation know anything about Jesus? The answer is often no. Why? Because all they gave was self-centered message in which Jesus is a means of making life better. Jesus was presented as a means to an end, not the end of the means. We need to learn how to share our testimony so people walking away will be thinking about Jesus, not us. When Rebekah came to become Isaac’s bride, she was thinking about Isaac, not the servant who told her about him. The same should be true about us. We point to Christ and then get out of the way.
In our intellectual day and age, we are so focused on doctrine that we frequently miss Christ. I easily fall into this trap as well. I often fail to get to the Gospel when doing apologetics because I am so set on seeing the truth being proclaimed in that one area that I never get past it to where it all points too. This is one thing I so greatly appreciate about my church is that while we love and support the intellectual studies, we seek to do so out of humility and not pride. I have learned a lot, but I have a lot more to learn in putting it into practice.
Though He is the primary message, Jesus is not the only message in the Bible. There are others that go along with Him. You cannot have Jesus without having these other central messages as well. It is not enough to “just have Jesus,” because Jesus drew a rather thick line to what it means to be His disciple or not. You have to take all that comes with Him. That’s for next week.
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To be dead honest, I think to have to write a post about “how to read the Bible” shows just how far we have fallen both academically and intellectually. I will save the details for next week because I need to use this post to explain why such a post needs to be written. The way people try to read the Bible to get it to say something other than what it says really demonstrates both the pride of humanity and the determination to look religious while disbelieving the very text these people proclaim to believe. Intellectualism has truly become the prime idol of our nation today. It is in the universities and the churches. The liberals in secular schools of thought profess all this science and knowledge that is direct rebellion against God. And in the intellectual reformed circles, there is a level of pride that has not been seen in years. I am wired intellectually, yet what I am seeing around us today in the name of education is truly insulting to an actual education.
Mixed with all the hubris and pride of education, theories, ideas, etc. is a New Age mystic approach where everything is about feelings, emotions, and personal opinions. The deception we have going on today is actually a mix of these. But keep in mind, it’s not new. It’s the same recycled theories of Epicureans, Stoics, and other philosophies of ancient Greece/Rome. Different flavors and different colorings, but same core meal.
Along with this is an ever-present teaching that, “You cannot understand anything unless you have been properly educated.” In today’s world, you cannot understand “Evolution” unless you have been thoroughly trained in Evolution by universities and embrace it. Go online and present an argument against Evolution and someone, PhD or not, will give you the standard reply of, “You don’t understand Evolution.” I hear that so often I seriously have to wonder how many of them understand Evolution. I suspect the answer is few because they can only parrot what they were taught.
This is a problem with the Bible today, too. Some believe that no one can be a pastor unless he’s been to seminary and learned all the theories and man’s ideas about the Bible. No one can actually understand the Bible unless you speak fluent ancient Greek and Hebrew. No one can actually understand the Bible because it wasn’t written to a 21st century audience, but to a dumb, uneducated Ancient Near East audience, so in order to understand the Bible, you have to understand all the pagan cultures around Israel. While knowing your Greek and Hebrew and knowing the context in which the books were original written is very useful, can you not hear the pride in such arguments? I can.
In his book The Lost World of Genesis One, John Walton tries to paint a picture that Genesis 1 is a “temple inauguration text,” not a description of the creation of the natural world. When asked why no one else had seen that before, he defends his position by saying that the rest of church history didn’t have access to all the Ancient Near East documents we have today. There is such pride in thinking, “No one else understood this, but because of my education, I do.” I am immediately turned off by such thinking, and I hope you are too.
So let me make this simple: you don’t need ANY of that to be able to read the Bible, to understand the Bible, or to believe the Bible. God wrote the Bible to be timeless and simple enough that the uneducated layman can understand its primary messages. Yes, there are passages that are hard to understand. They do exist. But most of it is not difficult. Jesus does not require an “educated” faith; He calls for a child-like faith. The simplest and best approach to any passage we do not understand should be: “Father, this is your word. I don’t get it, but because it is your word, I receive and believe it. Help me in my unbelief.” Instead, what many do is come up with their intellectual theories and systems to try to explain both God and the passage to audiences to make them look smart. We have to get rid of such ideas.
The Bible is a very complex book because no scholar is ever going to exhaust the depths of it. But it is also a very simple book. A child can read it and get the main message. “But a child doesn’t have all the knowledge that we have,” says the skeptic. Yes, but a child also doesn’t have his brain washed with man’s ideologies either and is able to believe it with simple child-like faith. While I am an intellectual type, and while many people praise my ability to write and my ability to explain things, really what I have is that child-like faith. The Bible says it; I believe it. There’s nothing more to it. All I seek to do is showcase what is there for all to see. I don’t need anyone looking at me as some guru. I’m not a guru or an expert; I’m simply a proclaimer. I have no special knowledge that is not accessible to anyone else who simply believes God at His word.
But that said, the Bible is also a living document in the sense that its Author is still alive and still around. The Bible’s openness is towards believers with that childlike faith. To the intellectually proud and to the unbeliever, God is going to shut off understanding of His word and to them the Bible is just dead text. The real power and the life of Scripture comes from those who believe it and submit to it. Leonard Ravenhill said this:
One of these days some simple soul will pick up the Book of God, read it, and believe it. Then the rest of us will be embarrassed...
The fact beats ceaselessly into my brain these days that there is a world of difference between knowing the Word of God and knowing the God of the Word. Is it not true that with the coming round of Bible conferences we hear only old things repeated, and most likely come away without any increase of faith? Perhaps God never had such a set of unbelieving believers as this present crop of Christians. How humiliating!
~Leonard Ravenhill, Why Revival Tarries, page 71
While God can use the intellectual, He does not require them. Only one of the Apostles was an intellectual – Paul, and he was the last one chosen. Paul also knew where academia belonged – to be subservient to simply preaching the Word, if not discarded. Paul never came with eloquence of speech but through the foolish method of preaching. Today, we have apologists who are very eloquent, and some have declared that their mission is to “remove any intellectual barriers between an unbeliever and the Gospel.” There is a valuable place for that, but what it has become is a pure intellectual game that ultimately has no power. I love apologetics and I love being able to defend and proclaim the faith in a rational way, but something is drastically missing and a lot of it is a total lack of belief in the power of God to actually do the work through His word and instead relying on man’s wisdom and man’s intellect. Do we really believe the Bible or not? And how can we believe it if we have forgotten how to read? Next week, I’ll go into how to read the Bible. It will be simple, straightforward, and easy to understand.
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This is my 20th and final post in this series on apologetics, my longest series for Worldview Warriors. After finishing my study on 2 Timothy 2:24-26 and the verses immediately surrounding that passage, last week I addressed those who likely won’t get saved. But that raises a question: what if they did get saved? Would that not change our mindset in how we approach people? Would that not affect our motivation in evangelism and witnessing to others?
Looking back at writing about how a “servant of the Lord” should be regarding witnessing and doing apologetics, the times where I truly was my best in carrying out the character traits and behaviors of not quarreling, being gentle, being able to teach, and being both patient and humble are when I really wanted to see someone get saved. I would still be firm with them when I needed to, but where these things are displayed the most is when my motivation is to see said person get saved. So, guess what that means when these characteristics are not present? It means I’m not thinking about their soul as I ought. Sure, I talk about the condition of their soul if they are not walking with Christ and not living for Christ, but it’s purely in a fact-driven mindset. One thing I am telling myself more and more is to stop with the head-to-head facts only but to really start praying for the soul of that person, and even more so that God would change my attitude towards those I fear are not saved. We must protect the sheep from the wolves, but what if that wolf were to get saved?
As I am writing this post, my personal devotions have put me through 1 Timothy 1, and I just got through verses 12-17 where Paul identifies himself as a former blasphemer, persecutor, and violent, all against Christ. But he did so in ignorance. He didn’t know Whom he was persecuting or even why. Then he met Christ. Paul identified himself as the worst of all sinners. It may be difficult to tell if he was just seeing the weight of his own sin or really was the worst of all sinners, however when you intentionally go up against Christ and His followers, you are pretty high on the ‘worst sinner’ list. Yet Paul was saved. He even declared that his salvation was for the purpose of being an example of what the saving work of the cross does. If Paul could be saved, then there is hope for anyone to be saved. It was told that when William Booth went to evangelize with the Salvation Army, he taught his people to hunt down the worst sinner of the neighborhood. Why? Because if that guy got saved, then the rest would be easy pickings in comparison.
What if Richard Dawkins got saved? What if the Muslim acolytes got saved? What if the town drunkard got saved? What if the child porn producer got saved? You know what your city’s sins are. Here in El Paso, we are known for three major sins: drinking/drugs, sex/adult clubs, and the occult. What if the owner of the sex clubs got saved? What if the cartel leader got saved? What if a coven leader got saved? Would that not turn El Paso upside down? Would that not wreak havoc upon the “normalcy” of such wickedness? What an opportunity for the kingdom of God to take action!
If people were to see the truth, come to their senses, and break free from the deceptions of the enemy, they would be powerful tools in the hands of the Lord. However, while it is great to think along those lines, there is the current reality. The lost are still lost, and the lost are still being used by the enemy to send themselves and as many as they can to the path of destruction. So, while we can talk with them and hope for the best of them, we still have to keep them at arm’s length. Why? Because they carry with them baggage you do not want in your circles. Still be gentle, still be kind, still be acquaintances, but they are still an enemy in their sin.
When dealing with someone in the church, one of the commands often made in church discipline (which sometimes needs to be enacted immediately, but often it a later step in church discipline) is to cut off fellowship. That doesn’t mean you never talk with them, but you can’t go about business as though there is nothing going on. Paul is not being mean here; he has a purpose for it. It’s so they learn not to blaspheme the name of God. The end goal is restoration. Paul told the Thessalonian church that the purpose of loving them is to that they may be holy. We don’t love for love’s sake; we love for God’s sake, so that the person may be made holy in the sight of God. That means dealing with sin. The idea is when the discipline has done its work, then you can restore that person, hopefully with a much stronger relationship than before. However, any such relationship should never be restored without clear indications of repentance. Otherwise, we invite an Absalom into the church.
David invited Absalom back into Jerusalem after the murder of Amnon, but there was no repentance. As a result, David was caught off guard when Absalom through a coup that nearly succeeded. David longed for Absalom to be restored. He had dreams of him being saved. He hoped for the best, but he failed to face the current reality that his son was a lost man with a severe anger problem. As long as Absalom was unrepentant and refused to do things God’s way, the only safe place for him was to be kept away from everyone else. Despite this, David never treated Absalom as an enemy. Paul even tells the Thessalonian church that when we discipline and need to force people out for a season, we are not to have fellowship with them during that season of discipline, but we are not to treat them as an enemy either. This advice should only apply to dealing with believers in the church. It does not apply to those outside the church whose goal is to undermine us.
If we have the mindset of “What if they got saved?” then our engagement will be about the Gospel and how God can save them. This applies to those in the church as well. Even though the born-again believer is indeed born again, there is always something more specific that we need saving from. We still need to be saved. What if we got saved from our lying, our cheating, our unjustified anger, our envy, our pride, our addictions to drugs, drinking, porn, or anything else? We believers still need to be saved.
I had a few other thoughts I wanted to address on this series, but as I wrote this up, I felt that the series was done. I really hope you enjoyed this five-month journey with me through 2 Timothy 2 and in the context of apologetics. Next week’s post will be on Christmas Eve and I’ll write about why Jesus came.
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Last week, I looked at the preceding verses that introduce 2 Timothy 2:24-26. This week, we will look at the verses immediately following this passage:
But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!
~2 Timothy 3:1-5
The servant of the Lord must not quarrel and must be patient, gentle, and able to teach, so that those who oppose us may be granted repentance, that they may know the truth, come to their senses, and so they may be freed from the devil and his control of them. However, we must do so knowing that in our time, the days will grow more and more evil. Men will do all sorts of wickedness. But take notice in verse 5 that Paul really isn’t referring to the heathen. He’s referring to those in the church. These men will proclaim and boast a form of godliness, but they are going to deny the genuine. They will boast a counterfeit faith that makes them look good, but it won’t come at the cost of their sinful lifestyles.
Paul is warning Timothy that many of those whom he will try to preach to are going to oppose him and not listen. These people are not just sinful people who do their own pet sins, but they have a particular means of deception described in verses 6-9. They go through the churches and look for women, usually widows or single mothers, and use the command towards hospitality to take advantage of them. They come in as a good person who can help these women and then use the problems they face as blackmail and guilt trips, seducing them into their control and blaming them for their previous problems, all the while tricking them into thinking they are the solution to them. They are narcissists, and it would not be unjust to call such people sociopaths. Their agenda is to get power and to corrupt the church.
John warned Gaius of such a man: Diotrephes. Much of this I am getting from John MacArthur’s sermon on this text in 3 John. Diotrephes was a church leader, but he did not get there by genuine spirituality. He was someone who had an agenda and sought both power and pre-eminence. He didn’t need the head-pastorate position because then the spotlight would be on him. But he had a position of influence where he could direct all the affairs of the church, ultimately kick out any potential threat (those who spoke the truth), and prevent anyone who could bring truth from coming in. These are the kinds of people who proclaim a form of godliness, but they have an agenda; that agenda is self and self’s glorification.
These are the kinds of people who do not tolerate sound doctrine. Paul continues to warn about them later in 2 Timothy 4:3-4. These people will sound educated, but they will not hear truth, especially sin-piercing truth. But they will always be seeking truth, or rather knowledge. One of the key features of the Gnostics, whom Paul and the other Apostles faced in the early church, is the cult’s namesake: “Gnosis” or knowledge. These people search and seek knowledge but not truth. Paul dealt with these people directly in Athens when he went to preach on Mars Hill. The philosophers of his time loved to talk about all the newest theories, which is why Paul intrigued them. They thought he was crazy and brought him in for entertainment purposes, but weren’t exactly expecting what they got. They want to learn. They want knowledge. But they don’t want truth. I can’t think of a greater moment of this on display than with Bill Nye in his debate with Ken Ham in 2014. Nye mocked Creationists for stopping research when they found their answer and said we have to be always on the look for new answers. That is 2 Timothy 3:7 in a nutshell. If we found the answer, why should we keep looking? Solve that problem and move on to the next one.
In all their attempts to find knowledge and in all their attempts to silence the truth, they will fail. We don’t just serve a saving and merciful God; we serve a sovereign God who controls all circumstances. As the sinful heart is in such rebellion against God, we have to remember that we cannot pierce it. Only God can. There is no heart too strong for God to pierce. Just ask Paul himself. He was the worst of them all. He was the least savable person, yet God chose him and made him the best example of a Christian for all of us (besides Christ Himself). Remember that repentance is not merely a work we can do (not saving work, but action), not only is it a fruit of God’s work in our lives, but it is first and foremost a gift. So, it is not our job to convert the person. We can only operate with the standard forms of persuasion: logic, ethics, or pathology. But this can at best only reason someone into the faith. Anyone who is reasoned into the faith can be reasoned out. That’s one thing that I am shying away from in Christian apologetics in general – an over-reliance on logic and reasoning. We need them; don’t misread me on this. But logic etc. won’t save anyone. It takes the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit to do that. Our job is simply to preach the Word as given and let God take care of the results.
Jesus knows rejection better than any of us. He had 20,000+ people see His previous miracles and had just witnessed Him doing the feeding of the 5000, so Jesus took them to task and challenged their motives. When they began to get offended, Jesus didn’t back up and soften His tone. He only upped it even harder. They all left Him, and Jesus turned back to His disciples to see if they wanted to go, too. But Jesus said all this not with nonchalant apathy. Rather He likely said it with tears. He knew the crowds were uncommitted; He knew they just wanted the show and the free food. He knew they weren’t willing to give up what was needed to follow Him. And it grieved Him. But He did not let that grief stop Him nor let it get in the way of His message. Instead, He relied on the fact that the ones who would be saved were those His Father had chosen and let the rest walk away. When people don’t want to listen to us, we want to make sure they leave knowing what it is they are rejecting, but we don’t need them wasting our time either. At the same time, what if that person were to be saved? Would that not change our mindset? I’ll address that next week.
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I have spent 12 weeks on just three verses of 2 Timothy 2:24-26, and that has been an incredible study. I have been convicted, and I’ve been putting these concepts into practice – not often successful but practicing. During the summer, as I was getting this series put together, I took a short overnight personal retreat to get away and spend time with the Lord. I preached to myself over this passage, and I began to look at the surrounding context in greater detail. It really opened up even further. I won’t cover that in as great detail as I did these three verses, but there is too much to simply pass on. For today, I’m going to look at the immediately preceding verse:
“But refuse foolish and ignorant speculations, knowing they produce quarrels.”
~2 Timothy 2:23
Even before this verse, Paul described separation from the world and former passions. He had warned against two false teachers by name who were leading people astray. He prepares Timothy for how a servant of the Lord should be by showing what the servant does not do. The servant of the Lord is not going to tolerate foolish and ignorant speculations. We are to avoid entertaining and engaging foolish banter, and there is a LOT of that going on in our world today.
Before I get into some examples, let me make things clear: this verse is not talking about any so-called “in-house debate.” This verse is not talking about whatever WE would like to make secondary issues. This is talking about things that are pure speculation, cannot be demonstrated nor validated, and, in nearly all cases, come from a position that questions the clarity of Scripture. We are not merely to not give such speculations any hospitality, we are to refuse them. We are to put them down and not give them a voice.
Jesus gives an example of these pointless speculations when He battled with the Sadducees. (John MacArthur pointed out some of these details.) The Sadducees had the political power with Rome in those days, but they were also more theologically liberal than the Pharisees. They only believed in the Torah (the first five books of our Bible) as being Scriptural, and they denied the possibility of bodily resurrection. They gave Jesus a hypothetical situation of a woman who lost seven husbands, never giving any a son, and they asked him whose husband she would have in the resurrection. They rejected the idea of the resurrection, so they were trying to make mockery of it while attempting to make Jesus look foolish. Jesus refused to answer the question because they did not know Scripture, all the while boasting to be the masters of it. Jesus refused such foolish questions by showing the ignorance behind it all. After putting the Sadducees to shame in their own game, no one dared to challenge Jesus any further.
There are several big things to notice in these “questions.” 1) They are out of ignorance, which comes from not knowing nor understanding Scripture. 2) They are foolish. They are not thought through. They are only designed as a trap and to poke holes, but they themselves are not sound. When the objection cannot stand, that which it objects to remains standing. 3) They come from a mindset or worldview that has the intention of questioning or challenging the Biblical position. They nearly always have a “Has God indeed said?” tone, even when they quote or reference Scripture.
One example is when the young earth creation group is asked, “Could there have been animal death before Adam’s sin?” Sometimes they phrase it with “What would happen if Adam stepped on an ant if no animals died?” They usually follow this by suggesting Adam had to have seen animal death in order for God’s warning against eating of the tree to have weight. This is one of those questions. 1) It has a false foundation that that man could not know anything other than through experience. 2) It requires the presupposition of old earth ideas, and thus commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent. 3) There is absolutely nothing in Scripture that indicates this is an option. 4) It denies the spiritual weight of substitutional atonement. Let’s explore these in more detail.
1) The belief system of those who make this claim can be summarized with “Science is king.” Everything is subjective to personal experience. If “science” says it, it must be true. This is a foolish position because every single person saying this does not believe nor practice their own worldview. They believe all sorts of things that they never experienced and that no one else experienced either. Yet here, they have all experienced and seen animal death, therefore everyone else must have experienced animal death. The problem is that before Adam sinned, the world did not operate as it does now. The Creation wasn’t cursed yet.
2) The old earth idea presupposed in this claim is “the present is key to the past.” They not only presume that experience is all Adam would have known, but they also presume that what they experience now is what Adam experienced. This is unfounded as well, as the Bible describes two catastrophic changes to how the world operates with the curse due to sin and then with the destruction of the flood. The present is never the key to the past. Actually, the past is the key to the present.
3) This is an argument from silence. Why would anyone even think of this question unless they were trying to make room for a different model? It is pure speculation, and it has the tone of “Has God indeed said?” There were no predator acts prior to sin and no reason to think animals died according to Scripture. Where is the reason coming from? Deep Time mythology.
4) This is the big one. This question, unwittingly or not, denies the substitutional atonement of Christ. Every old earth model has human death before sin just by looking at their own claims about geology and the fossil records. Death was the penalty for sin. If animal death, and especially human death, preceded sin, then God’s killing of an animal to provide skins for Adam and Eve would have no weight. The old earthers use this to say that God’s warning would have no weight without experience, but that experience takes away the weight of the need for substitutional atonement, not to mention that it denies divine revelation to Adam. If animals died prior to sin, then Adam would have seen the animal death as normal. He never would have taught Cain and Abel what a true sacrifice was (which Abel obeyed, but Cain did not). And then, there would be no accurate snapshot of what Christ would do.
Keep in mind, what God established in the Old Testament are pictures of what Christ would do. You can look at Christ and look back to see what God intended with all these pictures and types. But you cannot get the picture wrong, look forward, and get Christ. Many people unwittingly accept the old earth models while proclaiming the name of Christ, but they fail to see that these very models actually deny Christ and deny the work of the cross. This is why I am so passionate about origins. If we are to preach Christ and Christ crucified, then we better have the correct model of origins – the one God gave us. The wrong creation model showcases the wrong Creator. If you have the wrong creator, you have the wrong savior. You can’t just say the name of Jesus and get a pass. Many false religions use the name of Jesus, and Jesus himself warned against the counterfeits that would show up. Only the Jesus of the Bible saves. Only the Creator who created as He said He did is the one who saves as He said He did. This is not a secondary issue.
We must avoid foolish and ignorant speculations and banter. We must refuse it and not give such ideas a platform. However, even if we do so with the love, gentleness, patience, and humility that Paul calls for, we must be aware that there are many who won’t listen to anything we say no matter how “nice” we are. That’s for next week.
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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
A servant of the Lord must be patient and humble. If I had a struggle in my debates and my stance for truth, it would be patience with those who believe and teach error. My patience in “tolerating” error is very short, and as a result, my tendency is to get into quarrels and to struggle with being gentle. I frequently have to remind myself of these four traps: they don’t know the truth (or don’t recognize it), they are not thinking straight, they are ensnared by the devil, or they are being puppeteered into doing his bidding. Jesus said of his executioners, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Jesus was the perfect model of patience.
Eric Ludy gave me a very unique approach to looking at patience. It’s not “sit and wait.” It’s actually more “tensile strength combined with resilience.” It’s the ability to be stretched out and revert back to “normal” without getting bent out of shape. In engineering, an object has a limit to how far it can be stretched or compressed before that stress becomes permanent. Press it further and it can shatter. A resilient material is able to revert back to its original shape after a stress load. If there is one thing that “bends me out of shape,” it’s hearing false teachings. I have always been a rule follower, and the breaking of rules offends me. God has taken that gifting and directed it towards His teachings, so I do not tolerate error. I often get accused of being unkind towards those who disagree with me, however it actually has nothing to do with me. I don’t hold a lot of weight on my own opinions. I do have them, but I don’t give them a lot of weight. I give the Word of God the weight. And many times, it tells me I am wrong. Patience is the ability to hear error and revert back to your normal position without losing your cool.
The key to such resilience is humility. A lot of people don’t fully understand humility, and I can’t say I have it mastered. As of writing this, I had recently had my “church membership interview” with one of our elders (I think this is a good idea as we want to make sure those who are officially part of the church congregation be vetted), and he made a comment that when he first met me, he saw a spirit of humility in me. Now some of those who have engaged with me on-line would beg to differ. As I have reflected over my conversations, I can definitely see times where I have been proud and arrogant. I also see times where the accusations of pride and arrogance are ultimately nothing more than, “I know what I am talking about, how dare you question me?”
My pastor is preaching through the book of Exodus, and he’s made a big issue of the need for humble church leaders. Humility is not a lowly “woe is me.” It is most certainly not, “I really don’t know, so I won’t make a formal stand.” Those people are always questioning the clarity and integrity of Scripture, often boasting that no one in 2000+ years has figured out what God actually meant until they did. That is as much arrogance and pride as those who arrogantly boast about their position. My pastor’s description of humility is being beaten, crushed, and broken. It is having YOU driven out of you. It is God grinding you to powder. It is thinking nothing of yourself and relying wholly upon Christ.
Moses could say he was the humblest man, because he was the man most broken and most dependent upon God to get him through. He had no delusions of grandeur from the moment he fled Egypt after killing an Egyptian. He resisted God’s calling, knowing he could not do it in his own strength. As he grew and began leading Israel, the more and more he depended upon God for his strength. As a servant of the Lord, Moses needed to be humbled before he could be used. James warns us that pride goes before a fall, but God lifts up the humble.
Paris Reidhead counseled a pastor who had a good-sized church and a radio/TV program, but he lacked the Holy Spirit’s power. He told the pastor that all he wanted was power for the program he had already established in his own flesh. Reidhead described it as driving up with a new Cadillac and telling the station clerk to fill her up with the highest octane you got. Reidhead told him before God would do anything for him, he would not have to sit in the back seat, letting Jesus drive, but rather he would have to give the keys to Jesus, let him fill up the car with whatever gas he wanted to, climb into the trunk, and slam the lid, telling Jesus to drive. True Christianity is not us doing things for God; it is God working in and through us. We are just in for the ride.
A servant of the Lord must be patient and humble. If we are not patient and if we are not humble, then God will work around us and may pass us by. He won’t let us share His glory. I have four books published now, and I have already had reports that several of them are already changing lives. I now have on record that one of them has even saved a marriage, and I didn’t even write about marriage in it. I am going to say plainly that this was not me. I can take no credit for any of that. Yes, I wrote them; but it was God who directed that, and it was God who spoke to the reader and changed their lives. I was merely a tool in God’s hands. For the longest time, I have never wanted to be broken by the Lord. I have prayed I would rather be moldable for God to form me than for Him to have to break me. I am no longer convinced by the validity of such a prayer. This series by my pastor is teaching me what humble leadership should look like, and it’s having a very good effect on me. God has me at this church for more than this and I’m glad to be here where God has me.
This concludes my study on this passage directly. However, as I studied this passage, the context surrounding it must also be examined. Stay tuned.
This forum is meant to foster discussion and allow for differing viewpoints to be explored with equal and respectful consideration. All comments are moderated and any foul language or threatening/abusive comments will not be approved. Users who engage in threatening or abusive comments which are physically harmful in nature will be reported to the authorities.
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
A servant of the Lord must be able to teach. Voddie Baucham addresses an absurdity in the church today. According to Baucham, in the average American church, any form of teaching or instructing or guiding is relegated to the preacher, not the layman. His examples: when the next generation asks to be discipled and asks those who have been Christians for 20, 30, 40 years, the response tends to be “I’m no preacher.” Then when a young man gets that fire and studies church history, reads his Bible, prays, that church will say “You must be called to preach,” rather than use that as the model for what ANY Christian should be doing. He then compares Christianity to any field or career to showcase how anyone who does a job for 20, 30, 40 years should be able to teach a newbie how to do the job, and yet in Christianity this idea is rejected. It’s ludicrous to allow such mediocrity in the church.
There is too high view of credentials in society today (see this article by Biblical Creationist “Piltdown Superman” about this issue) and not enough training of the congregant on how to train and disciple just their own family. Show me the church that actually teaches their fathers how to train their children in spiritual things. Where is it? The church I attend did it this spring, and it’s the only one I can think of. Most churches instead tell parents, even the staff, that their kids need to be in youth group. I’m not against having ministries towards youth, but I am against having a church “ministry” usurp and steal the duties of parents.
The servant of the Lord has to be able to teach. He has to be able to show others what he believes and why he believes it. This is not a command to pastors and apologists and scientists. This is a command to ALL believers. We must be ready to give an answer for the hope we have. We must also make disciples of all nations. How can we make disciples if we don’t even know our own doctrine? I’m not attacking those with that simple child-like faith but never had the academic drive to study all the theories and such. Some of those are more genuine believers the highly educated ones. There are some laymen in the church who couldn’t spell “aseity” (God’s self-existence) or “omnipotence” (all-powerfulness), let alone teach it, but they have a far more genuine faith in Christ than even I do. But those with that genuine faith believe nothing contradictory to what the proper systematic theologies teach. My dad is an example of that. He is one of the least academically inclined people I know. He is a hands-on guy, but he has a simple trust in God. He knows enough to smell heresy though not enough to refute it, but sometimes that’s all you need. My dad is not an academic, and he has a low view of himself being able to teach, but those around him have all said he is a great teacher.
If we are to be able to correct those in error, we have to know the truth to correct them to that. I tend to point toward a perfect standard. I know far and well that I don’t meet it. But how could I know that I don’t meet it? The answer is simple: I know what perfect is supposed to be like. I am a teacher. How do my students know if they got an exam correct? They compare it to the rubric. I know what the rubric is for life. How? I’ve read the Bible and believe the record. And by believing it, I know I fall short of that standard.
So who am I to teach someone else that which I can’t follow? That’s the joy of Christianity. God chooses the foolish things to shame the wise, the poor to shame the rich. Despite my academic nature, what I believe is outright foolish to the “educated” world. Many of my hecklers can tell very quickly that I am an educated and intelligent man, yet they are baffled that I can believe what I believe. Yet, according to this passage, my job as a servant of the Lord, as an ambassador who represents God, is that I am to correct them, teaching them with gentleness, patience, and humility so that God may grant them repentance. I know I fall short of this all the time, yet God still uses me.
Now a word of warning. There are many who are very gifted teachers but are not submitted to Christ. There is a steep warning for those who seek to be teachers and leaders in the church. Not many should seek that position because they are held to a higher standard. There are many who are charismatic and have an agenda to not only pervert the Gospel but corrupt the church. Second John warns us of these folks because one elect lady seems to have welcomed a false teacher into her home under the expectation of hospitality. We are NOT to welcome false teachers. The only reason I have a collection of bad books around is so I have first hand knowledge on how to refute them. I don’t get those books to “expand my horizons.” I get them to test them to see if the reports about them are valid or not. I’ve had some I thought were good that turned out to be not so good, often because they proclaim Christianity but have no Christ in them. We have to be able to teach Christ and point to the true Christ. There are many false Christs in this world, and we have to know who the true one is. Only the true Christ saves, not any Jesus we make up that suits our preferences.
The servant of the Lord needs to be able to teach. He must know the truth, speak only the truth, never adding nor taking anything away, giving the message as it was given. He must never waiver from the truth, and that frequently requires drawing a hard line. Truth doesn’t give you options for any other interpretation; you take it or leave it. If you take it, your life will be blessed (though not necessarily in terms of physical/temporal things). If you leave it, you will be under a curse. We must know the truth so that we can point people to the truth. I despise the notion of compromises where you temporarily embrace a false worldview, saying you agree with them, all so you can point them to the truth; how is that even sane? The Gospel requires man to completely abandon his previous way of thinking and lifestyle which is rooted in sin and take on the new life which is submission to Christ. We must be able to teach that change, and while we will never be perfect at this, we must be in practice of this in word and in deed. Next week we will look at patience.
This forum is meant to foster discussion and allow for differing viewpoints to be explored with equal and respectful consideration. All comments are moderated and any foul language or threatening/abusive comments will not be approved. Users who engage in threatening or abusive comments which are physically harmful in nature will be reported to the authorities.
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
A servant of the Lord must be gentle. This does not mean be a push-over. We must be strong in our position, unwavering, and unyielding, but at the same time, we need to direct that strength to be used properly. Eric Ludy in his sermon “Shepherding 101” addresses that we must have great strength for bashing wolves, but we must also be gentle when handling sheep. He also describes when he wrestles with his kids, he could very easily crush them, but he restrains himself.
The same concept is true when dealing with apologetics. Jesus is a perfect example of when to show your strength and also when to restrain it. How he handled the Pharisees is a prime example. When it was clear the Pharisees had no interest in hearing what Jesus had to say because they were so disturbed that Jesus would upset their status quo, Jesus was harsh on them. He put them back in their place immediately. However, when they came with questions or when they were simply shocked at how Jesus would handle a situation, He was still firm, but he was gentle with them. He still wanted them to repent and trust Him.
If it’s not obvious enough, this is a HARD thing to balance. One reason why Jesus was such a master at this was that He knew their hearts. He knew and understood their motives. We often don’t. It’s not easy to discern when to use the rod to bash wolves and when to guide and correct sheep. It doesn’t help when we have to face our flesh. “So why don’t we be gentle all the time so we don’t inadvertently bash a sheep?” The counterargument would be: “Why don’t we inspect everyone first, so we don’t let a wolf into the sheep pen?” Again, let me make clear: we are to be harsh to wolves, and gentle to sheep.
But what about the lost? Don’t forget what this passage says about the lost. They have four key characteristics: 1) they don’t know the truth, 2) they aren’t thinking straight, 3) they are trapped in the lies of the devil, and 4) they have been recruited to do the devil’s bidding. Why should we be gentle with these folks? They are lost; they don’t know any better. Few of them really want to be antagonistic against Christians and Christianity. It’s Satan and sin dominating them and controlling them like puppets. Sin is much more than going against God’s commands. It’s a brutal slave master and it controls you. They can’t help but be a slave to sin, and that sin defies God and anything that represents God with everything it has. And yes, that means they willingly choose insanity over admitting that God rules over them. They are willing participants in the sin, but they are not thinking straight or clearly. They think they know what they are doing, and they have concocted all sorts of reasons and explanations for why they are right, but man has a tendency to think logically to the wrong conclusion.
I don’t remember which sermon it came from, but David Wilkerson made this convicting statement: “You should never dare rebuke a brother or sister in Christ unless you have first spent time weeping in prayer over their wayward condition.” Don’t get me (or Wilkerson wrong). He does NOT say, “Don’t confront them.” He says you need to be praying for them.
Todd White is not someone I would ever recommend anyone listen to. He says a lot of false things and he is a genuine fraud (specifically his “leg lengthening” “ministry” that is nothing but an illusion). Last year, he “discovered” Charles Spurgeon and Ray Comfort and publicly “repented” of 16 years of never sharing the actual Gospel (law first, then grace). That received a lot of responses. One week later, he doubled up on everything he had been doing in the past (showing the idea of repentance meant nothing to him) in a very self-centered “how dare anyone question me?” message. Yet in that very narcissistic message, he said this (and I paraphrase): “If you truly think I am in error and going to Hell, why aren’t you praying for me?” He said that statement to those who WERE praying for him.
Being gentle does not mean you are a softie. It means you control your strength with purpose and intention so that God may grant them repentance. One thing I don’t like seeing in apologists (and I am no exception) is the tendency of merely trying to prove one’s point as being correct. While it is completely vital to have truth (without truth you have NOTHING else), there is much more to truth than “I’m right, you’re wrong.” The other problem I see with apologists is the fallacy on the other ditch. Those are the ones who are very charismatic and just likely playing nice, but they want to appease the believer and non-believer and teach something other than historical, Biblical Christianity (which includes the WHOLE council of Scripture, not merely the key passages). The latter are actually even deadlier than the former because the deadliest thing any person could believe is not “non-Christianity” but “almost Christianity.”
Proverbs 15:1 tells us a harsh word stirs up anger, but a gentle word will turn away wrath. Our goal is not to prove ourselves to be right, but to win souls. We are to be ambassadors, representing the Kingdom of God, calling for people to make peace with God. How can they make peace with God when those who represent God just show to be enemies of them? We aren’t to appease the lost and surrender any ground to them, however we must be gentle so they may see that God wants them to be at peace with Him. If they don’t make terms of peace, then they will experience the wrath of God. We want them to see that peace with God is the best position to have. Being gentle, even when they are not, will show character they can’t have otherwise. We must be brutally honest with the terms of peace, but we must also be gentle so that the lost may see their sin and their need for a Savior. But to be able to show them our message and the hope that comes with it, we need to be able to teach and to teach gently. That’s for next week.
This forum is meant to foster discussion and allow for differing viewpoints to be explored with equal and respectful consideration. All comments are moderated and any foul language or threatening/abusive comments will not be approved. Users who engage in threatening or abusive comments which are physically harmful in nature will be reported to the authorities.
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
A servant of the Lord must not quarrel. Quarreling within the church began pretty well as soon as the church began. The office of the deacon had to be established to quell the first church fight (because some believers were not being served compared to others). A council took place in Acts 15 for how to deal with Jewish Law and Gentile believers. In Corinth, sects were uniting based on following Paul, Peter, or Apollos. Church fights have been going on ever since. There are some battles that had to be fought and some that didn’t.
Athanasius was a church leader who stood firm against the false teachings of Arius which nearly overtook the 4th century church. People think the Roman Catholic Church controlled and directed all of it, but apparently Constantine just wanted an answer to all of it and for the most part sided with Arius, not with Athanasius. Each of the church’s creeds were written primarily to clarify and affirm core doctrines which were under attack at the time (primarily around the deity of Christ and the Trinity). Confessions and catechisms were written to help protect the church from false teachings and to continue to codify the teachings that were already present. Whenever false teachings versus the integrity of Scripture are at hand, we MUST rise up and make a stand for what is true. The church has done this for 2000 years, to the point of shedding blood. Yet in the U.S., very few are making that stand (though they are there, and I’ve previously cited those I’ve found who do).
However, there are certain things that are not worth fighting over. We are not to fight every battle or die on every hill. However, many who believe error have used this to keep their pet doctrines from being scrutinized. The reason I make a big issue out of origins is not because of the interpretation of the word “yom” (meaning “day”). It’s over the authority of Scripture. If the “old earth side” could actually present their case as being from the Bible, not something from completely outside Scripture, I would consider origins to be a secondary issue. This is why I don’t make a huge issue out of Calvinism or Arminianism, because both sides showcase their position from Scripture.
Yet, there are speculations and quarrels that take place that never should take place. Did you know that the Pharisees and Sadducees had doctrinal debates about not merely whether the resurrection took place, but whether you wore clothes when you resurrected? We have worse debates today. One of the biggest church fights over meaningless issues is over traditional versus contemporary music styles. Voddie Baucham points out those two styles came about in the 1950s and 1970s respectively. I personally like the music style of the recent stuff, but I really don’t care for the songs themselves. But I’m not going to argue over musical style. That said, the music better actually be worship of God, because sadly, most of it is so doctrinally empty that to call it worship is rather insulting to God.
But why do we fight? In any church fight where the battle is not over the authority or integrity of Scripture and moral issues, the primary reason for such fights is simply pride. In the verse right before the passage quoted above, Paul tells Timothy to avoid foolish and ignorant speculations which lead to quarrels. I’ll look at those speculations later on in this series. Paul told the Roman church that the real source of division in the church is not those who make a stink about false teachings but those who bring in the false teachings. Paul specifically says they do not serve Christ but their own bellies, and with flattery they deceive the hearts of the simple. We must mark those people and avoid them, giving them no platform. We are to refuse false teachings but not use that as a cover for our own pride.
One of the easiest ways to avoid quarreling is to not get offended. Yes, we must stand for truth, but too often we get into fights because we are offended that someone has a different opinion than us. Two books help deal with this issue: John Bevere in The Bait of Satan and John Hyde in Praying Hyde, Apostle of Prayer. In Bevere’s book, he makes the claim that if you are focused on Christ, and not yourself or even others, you won’t get offended. If your goal is Christ, then you will fight for what Christ wants to fight for, but you won’t make an issue of anything He isn’t. John Hyde amazed me, because he never got offended about anything. He always treated every argument as a misunderstanding. As a result of that, he never got offended by what anyone said. He did not say this to blow off any errors he made. He said this as a means to avoid getting into an unnecessary fight. He fought his battles on his knees.
Back on post #5 in this series, I quoted John MacArthur saying we have to be willing to engage in conflict. There is a difference between engaging in conflict and being quarrelsome. It is hard to discern in the moment, but there is a difference. In the war for truth, we must be unwavering and unmovable; but when it comes to personal preferences, sometimes the self needs to be put aside. While some have made secondary issues into primary issues, others have made primary issues into secondary issues. One of the easiest tests we can use to discern which one is being done is to see where Scripture is held in that discussion. If the clarity, intention, and authority of Scripture are being questioned, then it’s a primary issue. If an outside opinion is being presented, does it line up with what is explicitly given in Scripture or at least not contradict it? This test is why I can accept “heliocentrism” but not “deep time” ideas. The former doesn’t force a change in anything Scripture says. The latter not only forces a change in Genesis but when fully carried out, it forces a change on the gospel itself.
Know when to fight, but also know when not to fight. Not every hill is worth dying on, but don’t let false teachers tell you which hills you should die on and which ones you shouldn’t. Let Christ make that call. Next week, we’ll look at being gentle.
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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
I have spent the last seven weeks primarily on the last half of this passage, and now we will come back to the first half. Those who are in opposition to the truth do not know the truth (or are in active rebellion against it), they are not thinking straight or clearly, they are trapped by the devil, and they are made to be his puppets. So, with this next set of posts, we will examine how the apologist should respond to this situation (something I have to do a LOT of practicing on) and how we should handle such people. Paul gives us several descriptions: 1) he is a servant of the Lord, 2), he must not quarrel, and 3) he is to be gentle, 4) able to teach, 5) patient, and 6). humble. Today, I will focus on the servant of the Lord. Who is such a person? What is the job description?
The Christian, specifically in the practice/office of proclaiming and defending the faith, is a servant of the Lord. He is not promoting his own agenda, and he is not building his own platform; he is doing the business of God. One of the things that really hit me as I have studied this passage is what it means to “bear the name of the Lord.” When you are in Christian circles, having grown up in them and always been around them, that is something you hear but often take for granted. I can testify to this.
We are ambassadors. We are people who legally represent God. This is what it means to pray “in the name of Jesus Christ.” We are to pray as though we have the authority Jesus has. Many people have certainly taken that to heart and then started proclaiming anything and everything they wanted. But there is a caveat to that authority that the Centurion understood. In order to have authority, the Centurion had to be under authority. He could see that in Jesus, which is why he had so much faith in Him. If we are to represent Jesus, speak in His name, and proclaim His message, we have to be under His rule. Jesus is the Sovereign King. He is the ruler of all rulers, King of all kings, and Lord of all lords already. But if we want His authority, we have to be under His authority.
We need to truly grasp what it means to represent God. The third commandment is to “not take the Lord’s name in vain.” I did a study on this earlier this year, along with the rest of the 10 Commandments, but this is a violation we commit far more frequently than we realize. This commandment is most known for addressing using God’s name as a curse word, but it also includes claiming His name and misusing it. Anytime we claim that we speak for God or represent God, and we do so in a way that does not give Him glory, is taking His name in vain. When someone takes a man-made idea in which God was never consulted, let alone build upon the foundation of Scripture, and then attributes it to God, that is taking the Lord’s name in vain.
This is what Ezekiel warned about with those who say “Thus says the Lord” when the Lord had not spoken. When someone invokes God’s name to say, “Don’t dare question me!” (such as, “Don’t touch the Lord’s anointed”) that is taking God’s name in vain. When we proclaim that we are defending God’s truth but showcase a spirit other than what Christ showed (i.e. doing as the “Sons of Thunder” did), it very well could be taking God’s name in vain. Any time we invoke God’s name and do not treat it or handle it with the honor and respect it deserves, we take it in vain. The servant of the Lord is to honor and treat the name of God with upmost dignity.
Eric Ludy preached a sermon that caught my attention about Abraham’s servant. He was sent to get a bride for Isaac. The big point he made was that the servant was to bring all the attention to be about Isaac and not himself. As servants of the Lord, we are not to proclaim ourselves. It’s not about us. Ludy has taught me this key point: When we are sharing our faith, by the time we walk away the person should be thinking about “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” If they are thinking about us, we didn’t do our job right. Think about sharing your testimony. Nearly every testimony I hear is about “us.” It’s about “me.” It’s MY story. As servants of the Lord, while we certainly are able to and should share about what God has done in our lives, our testimony should be about Christ. In the story, we are not the protagonist, the hero of the story, getting help from the wise mentor. In the story, we are the damsel in distress, needing rescue. The person we are sharing our faith with should be thinking about the Savior. The servant of the Lord represents Jesus and proclaims Jesus. We are mere messengers.
To be such a servant, we must give a message that is what God gives. This is one of my pet peeves in “modern Christianity” today. So many people in churches have no real concept of the weight of their duty in evangelism. I have Old Earth Creationists tell me, “You won’t convince many geologists or scientists with those arguments.” My response to that is, “If you are concerned about their opinions, you are NOT concerned about Christ. It’s HIS opinion that matters, not the ‘experts’ of this world.” The whole Progressive Christian movement has taken what Old Earth started with (changing Genesis to accommodate “modern science”) and swung that door wide open. While OEC models purpose to change what “day” and “whole earth” mean to deny the clear 6-day creation and global flood descriptions, Progressive Christianity does the same thing with “virgin birth,” “holiness,” “salvation,” “sin,” etc., BOTH with the full intention of making the message “acceptable” to the target audience. While you may not always find Progressive Christianity in OEC circles, you can all but guarantee you will find OEC in Progressive Christian circles.
We have to completely ditch the idea of giving a message that appeals to the audience. The Gospel has NEVER been acceptable to the sinful world. No generation has ever been able to handle the sting of the Gospel. When we are proclaiming our message correctly, there can be only three responses and we see them in Acts 17 at Mars Hill: 1) they will mock and ridicule you (the majority response), 2) some are undecided and want to hear more, or 3) they will be converted. Response #2 always leads to #1 or #3. There is no neutral territory.
The servant of the Lord proclaims God’s message as God gave it. Never adds to it. Never takes away from it. Never sugar coats it. Never roughs it up either. He simply proclaims the message as God gave it. So, the duty of the servant of the Lord is to make sure he is listening and receiving God’s message clearly and correctly. That requires not reading your own ideas into the text but submitting to the text. It means that what God said goes, and no one is to tell you otherwise, Christian or not. Don’t mess around with God’s name or His message. Eve fell to the lie when she added to the Word of God. King Saul sealed his doom when he did not completely obey the Word of God. Ananias and Sapphira died for only telling a half-truth to God. You don’t mess around with these things. So, with this in mind, knowing what our job is and knowing what the lost are like, Paul tells us how the servant of the Lord should deliver the message of salvation to the lost.
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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
You are a slave to someone. You are a slave to sin and the devil, or you are a slave to Christ. Not many people like to hear this; there is a lot of kick-back to the notion that we are just pawns in a cosmic game of Chess between God and the devil. No matter what culture or religion you are, this is a fundamental question all mankind wrestles with. Look at many role-playing video games. A number of them depict the heroes defying their “fate,” and the “gods” that seek to control them so that they can live independently, ruling their own lives. But it sure is interesting how in many of these stories, even the heroes turn to someone to guide them. Even when you are making your own choices, you are serving someone. Those who are born-again are servants, or more accurately slaves, to Christ. Those who are in opposition to Christ are slaves to the devil and they do his will. See Romans 6 for more on this.
But this is not just a statement by Paul. Jesus drilled this point home hard in John 8. He told the Jews, who had proclaimed to believe in Him, that they were of their father, the devil, because they were doing his will. We only have two options: serving God or serving someone else. We are obedient to one of two masters: God or the devil. We will choose one or the other.
God makes His case crystal clear. Life or death. Hope or doom. Success or failure. Obey and you get the goodies, disobey and you don’t. It’s not hard, yet so many just refuse to listen. Go through Deuteronomy 28 and look at the promises for obedience and the curses for disobedience that Israel shouted to each other. It was an easy choice, and God’s laws are not burdensome. They were all about separation from the rest of the world and faith in the Savior that would come. It wasn’t that hard. Yet time and time again, Israel kept disobeying and breaking God’s laws. We can look at them and think: “Are you guys insane?” Actually, yes they were insane. Again, look at the passage at the top of this post. God would have to grant them repentance so they could come to their senses. But how are we different? How many times do we do something utterly stupid that looked good at the moment? We call it “foolishness.” We were not thinking clearly when we made that decision. And it is when we lose sight of the standard of truth, when we lose our ability to think rationally, that we fall for the traps of the Devil and then become his puppets, his slaves to do his bidding.
Brainwashing is part of this process, but the term “mind-control” is not out of the picture. Few Biblical accounts showcase the power of the control of the enemy over a person than Ahab and Jezebel. Ahab’s sins were bad enough, but the sin of marrying Jezebel topped them all. In fact, every time Ahab moved towards repentance, Jezebel was there to reel him in, and she controlled him. There is a saying that the man is the head of the family, but the woman is the neck that turns the head wherever she wants. This certainly was true of Ahab and Jezebel. I often wonder if Ahab would have repented and turned to God on Elijah’s call had he not married Jezebel. It was Jezebel who brought in Baal worship. It was she who went after the prophets of God. It was she who carried out Ahab’s wish and got Naboth murdered. Ahab was totally powerless against that woman. The same is true about any person dealing with a false teaching. In fact, Jezebel’s name became synonymous with “false teachings” come the fierce rebuke to Thyatira.
Whenever we face a false ideology, we have to remember that most of these people are not in it to be intentionally deceptive and wicked. They are in it because they were deceived and are enslaved to it. Eric Ludy “lent the pulpit” to Richard Wurmbrand in one sermon (that is, Ludy preached what Wurmbrand would have said through Wurmbrand’s writings). In that sermon, he discussed Wurmbrand’s dealings with Communism. Wurmbrand loved the Communist and hated Communism. That is NOT an easy thing to do. He longed for the people to be freed of the hatred that Communism brings upon people. But he described an account where a Communist was thrown into prison (for an unknown reason) and tortured like the other prisoners. The Communist began to think about what was happening to him. For Communism to torture Christians was good because Communism was good and Christians were hinderances to Communism. Yet for a Communist to torture a Communist is for no other reason that pleasure and that is unmitigated evil. And if this is unmitigated evil, there must be unmitigated good. The Communist became a Christian. God used the torture of Communism’s own system to break this man free from the control of the devil and set his mind free.
John Ramirez was a head honcho in the occult. He would describe how he was so close to Satan that they’d talk as though they were father and son. He knew everything about what was going on behind the scenes and could control people or kill people from a distance, yet the whole time he was being played. The first bit of light was a Christian concert in New York City, and I keep picturing David Wilkerson being that guy. It was something he couldn’t touch. Soon God gave John a vision of Hell, and John realized he had been betrayed by Satan and became a Christian. The powers involved in these deceptions are supernatural and they are POWERFUL.
It doesn’t matter what the false teaching is. The more I deal with Evolution and Deep Time, the more I see it’s a spiritual issue. No amount of reasoning, logic, and proper science is getting through. So I need to stop arguing those points because they cannot think. This is not an insult; they are enslaved by the devil. Whether they realize it or not, they are doing the devil’s work, not only by believing lies themselves, but by spreading them around. They are deceived people, but they are deceiving others in that deception. It could be argued that no one is greater deceived than Satan himself who still somehow thinks he is going to win in all this. I see this in Prosperity Gospel, Mormonism, New Age, Islam, Communism/Socialism, the LGBT movements, money, a position/title, a sport/hobby, and so on. It’s truly insanity. God has given them over to a depraved and reprobate mind. They have rejected the truth, they have lost their sanity, they are entrapped by the devil, and now they are doing his bidding, which is ultimately “Do whatever you want as long as it’s not God’s will.” This is why the LGBT can get along with Muslims, despite Islam teaching such actions deserves of beheading. They are all on the same side: the devil’s. Satan doesn’t care what false teaching you believe. He only cares that it’s not God. And he’ll take as many as he can to Hell with him in the process.
So that is the status of the unbeliever according to 2 Timothy 2:24-26. They are in opposition against God. They do not have the truth in them (though they know it intuitively, which is why they fight it). They do not think straight or clearly. They have been ensnared by the devil. They are being controlled and manipulated by him to do his will as mere puppets. So, what do we do about it? How do we engage them? Now that we know their plight, what should be our plan of action? Paul gives us that answer as well. As I continue this series, we’ll look at Paul’s answer in this passage and then look at the surrounding context to see what else we can pick up.
This forum is meant to foster discussion and allow for differing viewpoints to be explored with equal and respectful consideration. All comments are moderated and any foul language or threatening/abusive comments will not be approved. Users who engage in threatening or abusive comments which are physically harmful in nature will be reported to the authorities.
