Basics of the New Testament - Lesson 7

In this lesson, we’re going to look at the last five of Paul’s letters. And the first are the two letters he wrote to the church of Thessalonica, 1 and 2 Thessalonians. And what I like about these letters is this church is relatively young, and I’m always interested to know what does Paul have to say to young churches. And one of the things he’s encouraging them to do is to persevere in the midst of persecution. That’s how you know this is a true church. And again, it’s a young church, they’ve just become Christians, and they were already living their Christian lives in contrast to the world, and as such, they’re being persecuted. That’s a healthy church. And so there’s stuff here about persecution stuff. There’s instructions and encouragement about persecution.

The perhaps unique thing in 1 and 2 Thessalonians is the teaching on eschatology. Now, eschatology is just a study of what’s going to happen at the end of time. And apparently what was going on in the church of Thessalonica was that people had said that Jesus has already returned. It was a spiritual return of some sort. And they were claiming that Paul said it, or here was a letter that Paul wrote saying it. And he wants to address that concern, because the Thessalonians need to know that they didn’t miss Jesus coming back. And it basically says Jesus is not coming back until two things happen. One, there’s the great apostasy, the great rebellion, the great falling away from the church, which is going to happen at the end of time. The church is going to be diminished, but the remnant, the true church, will persevere. And there’s going to be a character called the “man of lawlessness,” or later on he’s called the “Antichrist,” who’s going to lead, with the power of Satan, is going to lead this attack on the church to try and destroy it.

And I want to read just a couple of things. In 2 Thessalonians 2:3, “Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come,” (Jesus’s return), “until the rebellion occurs,” (that’s the great apostasy), “and the man of lawlessness, the Antichrist, is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshipped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” Okay, that’s the sign. That’s the sign that we’re looking at an Antichrist. And as John’s going to say in one of his letters, there’s lots of Antichrists, but there’s going to be one big Antichrist at the end of time, and he’s going to declare himself to be God, and he’s going to force people to worship him. And we learn a lot more about this, the mark of the beast and whatnot, in the Book of Revelation. So, Jesus isn’t going to come back again until the great apostasy, the great falling away from the church, and this Antichrist, the man of lawlessness, is revealed.

Now, here’s one of my favorite verses and it comes to this. That is, it’s going to be really tempting to be fearful, that the government and the Antichrist is going to be so powerful and so strong, that you say, “How can I resist him?” But look at verse 8, “So, then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming.” That’s so great. And all this fear and this power, and then all that Jesus has to do is show up, and with the breath of his mouth will destroy all that is evil. I mean, that should be reassuring, right? “And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming.”

The main thing that you need to know, other than that fact, is eschatology is ethical. I know there’s a lot of people who want to look at, you know, dates and times, and Jesus clearly says, “You do not know the exact time when I’m going to come back again. I don’t even know it. That’s God the Father’s decision,” and yet there are people out there doing podcasts and writing books saying they know when Jesus comes back again. Well, Jesus says “Nobody knows, only God the Father.” But the point is not to try to get dates and times. The point of the time is to be ready. So, I like to say that eschatology is ethical. The whole point is to know that it’s going to get worse. We’re going to be persecuted. Jesus is going to win in the end. And so, the call is for us to be faithful, to persevere in our relationship with Jesus Christ. That’s what eschatology is primarily about, that we win and they lose. So, keep that in mind. Okay, 1 and 2 Thessalonians.

The last three we’re going to look at are lumped under the title of the Pastorals. And the idea is these are letters to Timothy and Titus, who are pastors in churches in Ephesus and in Crete. There could not be a worse title for these three books. Timothy was sent to Ephesus not as a pastor, but as an apostolic delegate. He came in with Paul’s authority to clean up the mess. Titus was a missionary going to Crete. And in 2 Timothy, it has nothing to do with the Ephesian church. It only has to do with Paul. I think Timothy was Paul’s best friend. And we’ll talk about it in a second, but Paul wanted to encourage him. Now, I’m a little biased towards this because I spent 14 years of my life writing the commentary on the Pastorals. But anyway, Pastorals is the worst title, but it’s never going to go away. So, the Pastoral Epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus.

So, what’s going on? Well, in 1 Timothy, Paul has sent Timothy to Ephesus. Paul was in Ephesus longer than any other city that we know of. And so, what you have in Ephesus is a problem of an older church, not a younger church like you have in Thessalonica, but an older church. And the problem primarily is one of leadership. And if you’re into leadership, most of your verses come out of 1 Timothy, chapter 3, chapter 5, and then some in Titus 1. So, what Paul wants to do is—say, “We’ve got all these false teachers. They’re creating havoc. They’re in positions of authority in the church. Don’t be like them. Your elders should not be like them.” And so, Paul has three sets of criteria. First, his character. In fact, almost all of his instructions have to do with character, the kind of person that an elder has to be. And this is one of the problems in modern education is that we teach people to parse Greek and Hebrew. I hope you learned to parse Greek and Hebrew. It’s a good thing to know and to do exegesis. But there’s very little emphasis on character. Paul, on the other hand, it’s almost all about character, the kind of person that he is.

And there’s another class on Biblical Training, the Biblical Basis of Leadership, where I’m going to go through each of these qualities and talk about, well, what does it really mean? This is the kind of person that needs to be an elder. But it’s character. An elder has to be able to teach, and in Titus 1, they’re going to add in, he must be devoted to the truth, able to teach it, and able to refute false teaching. So, that’s the second qualification for a leader. 

And the third is you have to be a proven manager of people. And this should be visible in your home, your relationship with your spouse, your relationship with your kids. So often in the church today, we appoint businessmen and businesswomen to be elders in the church. And that’s not what Paul is talking about. It doesn’t matter if you can run a business and make a profit. What matters is, do you know how to work with people? So, Paul lays down these three guidelines for leaders in the church.

There also is another class, by the way, called the Elder Position Paper. And it goes through a lot of these verses on leadership and talks about the debatable points. For example, an elder can’t be a drunkard, doesn’t take any interpretation. We know what that means. But there’s a statement that an elder’s children have to be faithful. Well, what does that mean? Do they have to be faithful in the sense they have Christian faith, that they’re Christians? Or by faithful, does it mean they’re good kids? It can go both directions. The arguments are pretty—six of one, half a dozen of the other. But that’s what I’m dealing with in the Elder Position Paper. So, if you want more stuff on leadership, I encourage you to go there.

Titus would have been the next letter written. Now, you remember, in Acts 28, we leave Paul in prison in Rome. We believe that Paul was exonerated. He was released. And then, among other things, he had a missionary journey to Crete, and he took Titus with him. And so, again, what you have are instructions in Titus that are especially relevant to a young church. And Paul starts right off with leadership. There’s supposed to be leadership in the church. This idea that we’re all kind of a democracy, it’s anywhere in the Bible. There’s supposed to be leaders. There’s supposed to be structures. We are to submit to our leaders, which is why it’s so important to train leaders properly. But there’s some of that discussion.

But what really excites me in Titus is the two great passages on salvation. If you want to share your faith and tell people what salvation is, boy, these are verses to go to. In Titus 2, starting at verse 11, here’s what Paul writes, “For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people.” So, salvation is through Christ, through God. It’s being offered to all people. “…it teaches you to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age.” In other words, Christianity isn’t just about entering into a relationship with God. It’s about living in a relationship with God. And there’s covenantal guidelines for how we are to live godly lives. Verse 13, “While we wait for the blessed hope – the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” And by the way, that is the strongest affirmation of the deity of Christ in the Bible. And the reason it is an issue with Greek, and it’s non-debatable, there’s no question what Paul is saying here. “Our great God and Savior is Jesus Christ.” Again, I can’t go into the Greek, but it’s the strongest affirmation of the divinity of Christ. Jesus Christ is our great God, and he is our Savior.

And then he gets back into ethics, “who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness, and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.” The whole point of God sending salvation was not so that we would only enter into a relationship with him. It was that we would live in relationship with him. We are a people that belong to him, and we are eager to do what is good. And there are people out there that separate out entering into relationship, which is mandatory, and living in relationship, which is optional. It’s not optional. The Bible couldn’t be any clearer on that, and it says it right there. That was God’s intention in saving us, is to give us a way to enter into a relationship and to live in relationship.

And the other is in chapter 3, right down there; he’s going to repeat himself. This is a young church. They have to have a healthy doctrine of salvation. And it says, “but when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us.” Why did he save us? Because we deserved it? No. He saved us because he loves us, and God is a kind God. “He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done” (there’s legalism), “but because of his mercy he saved us through the washing of rebirth and the renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.” You see the emptying and the filling imagery that we are washed in our rebirth, which happens to have been my doctoral dissertation, but that’s another thing; that we are cleansed as we are born again, and then we are renewed, we are filled back up by the work of the Holy Spirit.

So, as you talk to people about salvation, these two passages are fantastic passages that are complete in that they include not only entering into, but living within a relationship with Jesus Christ. I should say, remember, we don’t earn the right to enter into a relationship with God. We simply respond in faith. That is wholly the work of God. But living within a relationship with God, we cooperate with God. We don’t cooperate entering. We don’t cooperate with justification, but we do cooperate with God. He gives us the power; he gives us the guidelines, and then through the work of the Holy Spirit, our lives are changed so that we live godly lives. So, they are different, but they are related. Okay? All right. But great passages.

Okay, finally, 2 Timothy. So, what’s happened is that Paul got out of jail. He went to Crete; he was re-arrested. And when he was re-arrested, this time he knows he’s not going to get out. He knows he’s going to die. And like I said, I think Timothy was his best friend. And he longs to see Timothy before he dies. But he wants to encourage Timothy as well. And so, he writes this letter to try to get Timothy to come and see him. Paul was beheaded in AD 67. So, that’s where 66-67. This is an intensely personal letter, and that’s why I don’t like to mix it in with 1 Timothy and Titus. This is a totally different kind of letter, and it’s intensely personal, and it’s written to Timothy. It’s not written to a church.

And he wants to encourage him. In fact, when I teach this, I have the students look at every single way Paul is encouraging Timothy. Timothy’s getting beat up. The Ephesian church was really a mess, and he was just getting beat up emotionally and whatnot. And every single verse is a different kind of encouragement to persevere in the midst of trials. You know, we expect trials to come from outside of the church, but I think the greatest trials, the greatest persecutions come from within the church. That’s what Paul said to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20, that there will be wolves among you in sheep’s clothing. So, he wants to encourage Timothy. He wants to get him to persevere, encourage him to persevere.

But what we have are two really, really famous passages that I think are important. The first one is our view of Scripture. In 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul says, “All Scripture is God-breathed…” Every word that’s in our Bible comes from the very mouth of God. That’s the doctrine of inspiration, “…and is useful.” I wish Paul had said, “and is therefore useful,” but that’s the intent. “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God…” And the main servant Paul is thinking of is Timothy, but it’s to anyone, “the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work;” our primary passage on the inspiration of Scripture.

How did Paul end his life? This is, especially if you’re older, this is going to be really an encouragement to you. In 2 Timothy chapter 4, this is Paul’s evaluation of his life, “For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near.” So he knows he’s going to die. “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day. And not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.” Do you long for Christ’s appearing? Or are you so captivated by this world that you don’t even want to think about that? Well, the crown of righteousness is for people who long to live in a relationship with God and to look forward to someday when we can do that in heaven.

I can’t tell you the name of the scholar, but he’s a very, very famous New Testament scholar. He got dementia or Alzheimer’s. I forget which one it was. And I was talking to him right before it really started to take effect. And I said, “How are you feeling?” I said, you know, “I would think with your mind and all the writing that you’ve done…” (he’s an amazing scholar) “…the Lord is letting your mind go before the body. How are you feeling about that?” He says, “You know Bill, it’s been a good run. It’s been a good run.” Wow. That’s Paul’s estimation of his life. And maybe your estimation of your life, may be my estimation of my life. Run the race. Kept the faith.